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 Chapter 21, Open Ending
 My own ideas concerning the mechanics by which the Oversoul creates the UFO encounters
 might take the following form. Dimethyltryptamine, when smoked, snuffed, or injected,
 induces a brief and extremely intense psychedelic experience whose overwhelming sense of contact
 with the other is unparalleled. For the last decade or so, this extraordinary property of DMT
 has made it seem to many who sought a chemical basis for schizophrenia to be a likely candidate
 for the long-sought schizotoxin. Studies have proved inconclusive, however. DMT concentration
 has not been proven to differ significantly in schizophrenic and normal controls. Studies
 have established the presence of DMT in the human body; however, the origin and significance of the
 DMT is unknown. Although it may reflect endogenous synthesis, it could also result from diet,
 bacterial by-products, human laboratory error, or other sources. Bearing in mind the bizarre
 power of the DMT experience, its presence and unknown role in human metabolism, add one more
 fact, the strange aura of suggestibility that can precede the onset of the intense hallucination
 phase of the DMT experience. This period of suggestibility may last fifteen seconds to a
 minute, and is a time during which the assumptions which the experiment projects concerning the
 unusual shift of sensory input acquires enormous power. A few moments later, the power of the now
 numinous assumption overwhelms the consciousness of the observer with a scenario that, while
 totally bizarre and outre, nevertheless is somehow a complete psychological fulfillment of the
 expectations formed in the few minutes of transition that preceded the visionary engulfment.
 What I am proposing is that something like this happens during a UFO close encounter,
 and the cause may very well be something which must be partially sought in the human organism.
 Imagine a person wandering alone in unfamiliar country. Suddenly there is a hackle-raising sense
 of weirdness, then a feeling of numbness in the limbs, followed by a clearing of vision and a
 loud crackling sound. At this point the sense of strangeness within and without the body would
 trigger a fear reaction in most people. The fear reaction causes a rapid and automatic search for
 a culturally validated explanation of what is going on, and an explanation will always be found.
 It may range from "I am being bewitched by a demon" to "Surely it is a visitation of the
 Holy Mother" to "My God, it must be a UFO." In each case, the abandonment of the ego to a
 culturally prescribed explanation of the experience of the other causes the experience to
 exfoliate, exploit, and elaborate all the themes that the culture's current myth of the other
 entails. It is known that DMT binds preferentially to certain tissue when introduced into the human
 body. Is it not possible that we human beings are occasionally susceptible to a kind of visionary
 seizure, when for reasons of stress or diet these factors combine with psychodynamic factors to
 initiate a sudden dumping of accumulated DMT? Pheromones may play a part in this experience,
 and isolation may be its trigger. Whatever its cause, our conditioning as individuals causes the
 experience to plunge us into a numinous scenario that reflects the deepest concerns and yearnings
 of the current culture toward the other. In our own time this has given rise to the hope of
 friendly visiting extraterrestrials. As late as 1917, the miracle at Fatima was interpreted
 worldwide as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Today it would surely be hailed as an
 extraterrestrial contact. If my suggestion regarding DMT were found to be correct,
 it would provide insight into the way in which the cultural feedback thermostat
 explanation of UFOs put forth by Vallée and others actually works. Those people who experience
 the DMT seizure and are plunged into the current myth of the other actually return as apostles of
 that myth, able to clarify and refine it, and by those means to exert the tuning and control of
 historical development that may be the purpose of the agency behind the UFOs. Stress, generalized
 as an impending sense of historical crisis, may be the factor that induces the UFO close contact
 experience. As the historical crisis deepens, the number of contacts will increase until the
 atemporal portion of the mass psyche has affected enough individuals that there is actually a
 turning away from the stress-inducing course of action. How well is the superego able to play the
 role of God? Can it come in saucerian splendor to save the world from the flames at the end of time?
 Or can it only beckon and warn with visions and dire prophecy? These are questions that we might
 answer if we diligently explore the states of mind that DMT and psilocybin make available.
 Perhaps the UFO encounters involve nothing more than an autonomous and negative psychic complex
 able to emerge during the situation of unusual energy dynamics induced in the psyche by psilocybin.
 However, a different explanatory approach merges psyche and world by involving a continuum whose
 modalities bisect each other with equal ease. This is the approach which grants the phenomenological
 existence of the constructs seen in the stropharia trance and in UFO encounters.
 Indeed, the vast and dreamy world that we call imagination or the unconscious may merge
 imperceptibly into autonomously existing worlds we would call hyperdimensional,
 indicating the paradox of their simultaneous invisibility and their here-and-now-ness in the
 psilocybin trance with a presence that belies the term hallucination. Ahead of us lies the future,
 where we can expect the ingression of the alternative dimension to intensify. It is
 therefore important for us to have a sense of the powers in that other world and their shifting
 allegiances. In a traditional society, our exploration of these matters would be firmly
 embedded in the extant shamanic mythos concerning these forces. Techniques tried and true would be
 available to fortify our psychic constitution. Since we are members of a profane society whose
 relation to the unconscious is one of estrangement, we have no such consolation, no dispelling ritual
 or words of proven self-empowerment. By reason and intuition we must attempt to conquer the fears
 that attend journeys into the unknown. But reason and intuition need data with which to construct
 maps of reality. If we out-distance the inflow of fact, we move beyond the safety zone of the
 conjuring rod of intuition and reason. For these reasons we move slowly and steadily. We are human
 factors in a multivariable equation where the shift of unseen parameters can trigger large
 perturbations and resonances of unexpected types. Knowing this, and knowing how little we do know,
 we should be excused for this defense of caution when taking to ourselves the visions which the
 stropharia brings. Carl Jung's Mysterium Conjunctiones reminds us of the reality of the
 situation that ensues once the psyche is hooked into making the transference to the alchemical
 or saucerian goal. Jung, citing Gerhard Dohrn, stresses that "the materialization of the stone
 is only a prologue to the experience of the perfected self qua self in the state of
 illumination." Jung wrote, "Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to
 material ones, we are not in a position to say what this relationship consists or how it is possible
 at all. Precisely because the psyche and the physical are mutually dependent, it has often
 been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience."
 Of what does this relationship consist? My own hunch, and it is only a hunch,
 is that an explicitly spatial dimension of a co-dimension inclusive of our continuum
 allows a hologram of other realized forms of organization far distant to become visible at
 certain levels of quantum resonance in the synaptic field. These levels have been damped
 by selection in favor of more directly relevant lines of information relating to animal survival.
 Evolution does not reinforce selectively the ability of an organism to perceive at a distance,
 since such an ability has no selective advantage unless the information it conveys falls upon the
 receptors of an organism already sophisticated enough in its use of symbols to abstract concepts
 for later application in different contexts. Thus, these quantum resonances carrying intimations of
 events at a distance only begin to acquire genetic reinforcement once a species has
 already achieved sufficient sophistication to be called conscious and mind-possessing.
 The use of hallucinogens can be seen as an attempt at medical engineering which amplifies for
 inspection by consciousness the quantum resonance of the other parts of the spatial continuum
 holographically at hand. This experience is the vision which the UFOs and psilocybin impart,
 visions of strange planets, life forms, perspectives and societies, machines, ruins,
 landscapes, the hierophanies all unfold in the nuke stands that has all space standing in it
 like a frozen hologram. Thus, experimentation with hallucinogens by human beings and the rise
 in endogenously produced hallucinogens as one advances through the primate phylogeny
 could both be due to a slow focusing on the phenomenon of imagination, imagination being
 the deepening involvement of the species with things beheld but not actually existing in the
 present at hand. The conclusion such an idea makes necessary is that it is upon the ideological
 content of specific visions that empirical attention should center. What are the working
 details of the worlds whose presence impinges on ours so strongly? What of the beings sometimes
 confronted often furtively sensed who seem to have some existence in a world of their own revealed by
 the psilocybin and in UFO contacts? There may exist a vast communication network in the topological
 nature of things, a network that becomes a fact only for those species or individuals who will
 but have the intelligence enough to seek this vision. It will by them be found to be persistent
 in the nature of things. Alchemy thrives in a climate of such ideas. To validate the idea of
 the worth of the visions of worlds at a distance, one must emerge with some idea spawned by the
 visionary other but with a utility in the hearing now. The wave quantification of the I Ching is the
 only idea of this sort that I personally have glimpsed in completeness. It took years to elaborate
 and its relation to the here and now is still elusive. Fragmentary themes abound, symbiosis,
 saucer lens vehicles whose possessors navigate the higher topological oceans in our heads.
 All this could be transference and fancy. In the classical sense of the word, the experimenter
 with hallucinogens pursues gnosis, privileged knowledge concerning nature and vouchsafed by her
 in ecstasy.
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 The history of consciousness is the halting exploration of the once irrational images
 and processes met in dreams and trance. Such images become concepts and discoveries
 as information flows through the multiple continuum of being, seeking equilibrium,
 yet paradoxically carrying everywhere images of ways the flow toward entropy
 was locally reversed by this being or that society or phenomenon. We are immersed in a holographic
 ocean of places and ideas. We can understand this to whatever depth we are able. The ocean of images
 and the intricacy of their connections is infinite. It is perhaps why great genius proceeds by apparent
 leaps, because the revolutionary idea which inspires the genius comes upon one complete,
 entire by itself, from the ocean of mind. History is the story of the search for the intuitive leap
 that will reveal the very mechanism of that other dimension. The need for such a leap for humanity
 will grow as we exhaust complexity in all realms save the microphysical and the psychological.
 My own method has been immersion in the images and self-examination of the phenomenon of tryptamine
 hallucinogenesis. This means taking the stropharyosilocybin and pondering just what this all
 may mean, with confidence that as more people come to share this experience, time will deepen
 our understanding, if not answer all questions. For psilocybin argues that hallucinogens are
 windows into higher dimensions, that even as a cone can yield circle, ellipse, or parabola to an
 act of two-dimensional sectioning and yet remain intrinsically a cone, so reality is something that
 changes according to the angle of regarding. It argues that human beings are many forms over vast
 scales of time, that all life is unified at some level, and all intelligence in the universe are
 but facets of the mystery called humanness. In probing the other we shall always come back with
 images of ourselves, in probing ourselves we shall return with images of the other. In the phenomenon
 of being itself no less than in the phenomenon of the ufo encounters, we are merely privileged
 observers of a relationship between what is naively called the world and the transpersonal
 portion of the human psyche. How this relationship came to be and what its limitations are we cannot
 know until we gain access to the transpersonal and atemporal part of the psyche. Of what this
 consists we do not know and no hypothesis can be ruled out. My hunch is that if we could really
 comprehend death then we could understand the ufo, but that neither can be understood unless they are
 looked at in the light of the question what is humanness. I believe that the transpersonal
 component of the human psyche is not distinct from matter and that therefore it can literally do
 anything. It is not subject to the will of any individual, it has a will and an understanding
 that is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any one of the individuals who compose it
 as cells compose a body. It has a plan glimpsed by individuals only as vision or religious hierophany.
 Nevertheless the plan is unfolding. There will be many more ufo sightings, many more close contacts.
 Our belief systems are undergoing accelerated evolution via increased input from the other.
 Somewhere ahead of us there is a critical barrier where we will at last have enough
 data to obtain an integrating insight into the riddle of humanity's relation to the ufo.
 I believe that as this happens the childhood of our species will pass away and when this is done
 we will be free to use the staggering understanding that humankind and the ufo are one.
 We wish to express our grateful appreciation to the many friends who aided this project.
 In South America we were assisted by Michael Lasky, Erica Mietfeld, Sarah Hartley and by the
 Naval del Sur de Colombia whose vessels were often our only means of transportation.
 The Witoto people of La Charrera and the mission of La Charrera were most hospitable,
 the former providing invaluable access to local psychoactive parents.
 Special thanks to Geri Young for her flexibility. Thanks to Paul Herbert,
 Roy Tuffman and Will Noffke for putting Terrence on the air. Ernie Waugh,
 Chris Adam and Kat McKenna helped fine-tune the manuscript.
 We appreciate Faustin Bray for her focusing energy and for conceptualizing the talking book.
 Brian Wallace for his perseverance and both of them for their good taste.
 Finn again McKenna provides the mythology and mirror.
 We thank Clea McKenna for being very smart and funny. Thank the mushroom.
 Terrence is his own voice. Dennis plays himself. Kat remembers herself.
 Bertram Davies is Guzman and plays piano. Witoto speak Witoto.
 Philip Porter plays sitar and electric guitar. Roy Tuffman plays synthesizer.
 John Kluet provides laughing and aha. Chris Jackson does aha. Makeup by Theophrastus Vonage.
 Note, Para McKenna. Norbu Samgyal plays the Damien. Bilbo Bowen on drums.
 Jeffrey Lippner on bass and tabla. Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace play sarod, guitar, bells,
 glockenspiel, electronic effects, viola, percussion, ocarinas, zither, synthesizer,
 flute, shakuhachi, swinette, tambura, chimes, and perform the vocals.
 The songs are highly intellectual, who's ever doing it song, and fantasy.
 Lyrics by Brian Wallace. Arrangements by Nomad Band.
 Many effects were recorded on location throughout the world. Thank you, Terrence.
 Thank the book for being a vehicle. Thank the machinery. Thank the weather.
 Thank the ancestors. Thank the listeners. Thank your lucky stars.
 Helpful equipment was supplied by David Reichart and by Bananas at Large of San Rafael via Tim
 Fitz. The excerpt of "Theme for the Common Man" is from Columbia Records. Copeland conducts Copeland.
 Here's a light-hearted version of a partial bibliography or reading list for true hallucinations
 in alphabetical order, more or less. Burroughs, William and Ginsberg, Allen.
 The Yahé Letters, City Lights, Books, 1960. Take a stab.
 D. John, The Hieroglyphic Monad, translated by J. W. Hamilton Jones, London, 1947.
 DeLillo, Dawn, Rackner Star. Evans-Vence, W.E., The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.
 And then, of course, the famous article by S. Gosal, S. K. Dutta, A. K. Sanyal, and A. K.
 Bratacharya, "Arundo Donax, Gromina E, Phytochemical and Pharmacological Evaluation,"
 in the Journal of Medical Chemistry, Volume 12, 1969, page 480.
 Graves, Robert, The White Goddess, New York, 1948.
 Hordenburg, W.E., The Putumayo, The Devil's Paradise, London, 1912.
 Harner, Michael, The Sound of Rushing Water, Natural History, July, 1968.
 Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception.
 Joyce, James, Finnegan's Wake, London, 1939. Ulysses, ditto, slightly earlier.
 Yonch, Eric, The Self-Organizing Universe.
 Jung, Carl Gustav, Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky,
 and Mysterium Junior Dionys, New York, 1963.
 Leibniz, Wolfgang von, Monadology, in The Philosophical Works of Leibniz,
 by Duncan G. Martin, translator, New Haven, Tuttlemore House, and Taylor, 1890.
 Lewis, Wyndham, The Human Age.
 Ludlow, Fritz Hugh, The Hashish-Eater.
 Meier, Michael, Atalanta, Fugiennes.
 Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire, New York, 1963.
 Oss, O.T., and Onirik, O.N., Psilocybin, The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, Berkeley, 1975.
 Ponampurama and Cameron, Scientific Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Communication, Boston, 1974.
 The Works of Ilya Prigoshin.
 Pinchin, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow, New York, 1974.
 Rilke, Rainier, Maria, The Duino Illogies.
 Schultes, Richard Evans, Varola is an Orally Administered Hallucinogen,
 Botanical Museum Leaflets of Harvard University, Volume 22, No. 6.
 Stapleton, Olaf, The Star Maker.
 Templeton, Alex, The Serious Mystery.
 Valentine, Basel, The Triumphal Chariot of Antinomy.
 Vallee, Jacques, The Invisible College.
 And Messengers of Deception, The Complete Works of Gordon Watson.
 Wells, Herbert George, The Time Machine.
 Whiffen, Colonel Henry, Explorations of the Upper Amazon,
 Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality.
 Wilson, Robert Anton, Illuminatus.
 And I might add, VELUS by Philip K. Dick.
 Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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