[00:00:00 - 00:00:04] As I set out toward the river, I seemed to myself to be nearly weightless. [00:00:04 - 00:00:10] I felt reborn. I felt full of energy and bursting with good health and vitality. [00:00:10 - 00:00:17] Over a period of a few minutes, I had passed from weary disgruntled skeptic to ecstatic believer. [00:00:17 - 00:00:22] Looking back on it, I believe that for me this was the critical juncture. [00:00:22 - 00:00:28] Why did I not question Dennis more closely? Was I somehow self-hypnotized? [00:00:29 - 00:00:35] Did the unfamiliar setting, the restricted diet, strain, and expectations push me into a place [00:00:35 - 00:00:42] where I was unable to resist participation of a sort in the world of my brother's bizarre ideation? [00:00:42 - 00:00:47] Why was I unable to maintain my detached and skeptical viewpoint? [00:00:47 - 00:00:53] In some sense, this willing suspension of disbelief is the crux of the matter, [00:00:53 - 00:00:57] and I believe of many a close encounter situation. [00:00:58 - 00:01:03] The other plays with us and approaches us through the imagination, [00:01:03 - 00:01:09] and then a critical juncture is reached. To go beyond this juncture requires [00:01:09 - 00:01:14] abandonment of will and habit. At that moment, the world turns [00:01:14 - 00:01:22] lazily inside out, and what was hidden is revealed. A magical modality, a different epigenetic [00:01:22 - 00:01:30] landscape than one has known, a landscape become real. The UFO is a creature of this previously [00:01:30 - 00:01:39] invisible landscape. It is lord of the skies of the imagination, able to carry anyone with it [00:01:39 - 00:01:54] who will but play, and then let the play deepen and deepen. [00:01:54 - 00:02:05] [Music] [00:02:05 - 00:02:25] [Music] [00:02:25 - 00:02:32] As I walked along that perfect morning, no such soothingly objective thoughts came to me. [00:02:32 - 00:02:38] Instead, I assumed that my body was metabolizing its way toward the resurrection body that we had [00:02:38 - 00:02:44] expected to be part of the success of the experiment. I did not know what was happening [00:02:44 - 00:02:49] in the world or far away, but I did know that since the moment Dennis had pronounced the [00:02:49 - 00:02:56] experiment finished, I had felt an expanding and ever-increasing wave of energy and understanding [00:02:56 - 00:03:03] unfold through my being. As I walked along, what seemed to me then a profound realization [00:03:03 - 00:03:11] came over me. It was that we are all enlightened beings, that only our inability to see and feel [00:03:11 - 00:03:17] ourselves and others as we really are keeps us from shedding our guilt and seeing ourselves [00:03:17 - 00:03:24] as enlightened. I felt very good. I felt better than I had ever felt before, but I couldn't [00:03:24 - 00:03:32] believe what seemed to be happening. It was about a 10 or 15 minute walk to Dave and Vanessa's place. [00:03:32 - 00:03:38] By now, it was about 7 a.m. The sun was well up in the sky, and it was a beautiful day. [00:03:38 - 00:03:46] As I walked across the pasture, I would stop and say, "Dennis," and the response was instantaneous. [00:03:46 - 00:03:54] It was just like thought. It confused me. I kept stopping and doing this, sitting down on the grass. [00:03:54 - 00:03:59] "Is it all right? What is it? I don't know. I can't understand what it means." [00:03:59 - 00:04:23] I walked on toward the river. As I walked along, I did some experiments, I said. [00:04:24 - 00:04:32] "Terrence, Terrence, it was very much like talking to yourself." Then I said, "Dennis," and the thing [00:04:32 - 00:04:41] was instantly there, just ready to do business. Then I said, "McKenna, McKenna," and it was still [00:04:41 - 00:04:48] there. I realized that I couldn't reach it with my first name, but I could reach it with my last name. [00:04:49 - 00:04:58] I could not understand what was going on. I was pondering these kinds of things when I arrived [00:04:58 - 00:05:04] at the riverside house of Vanessa and Dave. They were still in their hammocks asleep, but crowded [00:05:04 - 00:05:11] around the door even this early in the morning were a group of Waidaiduitoto children. As I pushed my [00:05:11 - 00:05:19] way through them, my gaze fell on each, and I thought, "You are enlightened, and you, and you." [00:05:19 - 00:05:39] My arrival was the first event of the day for Dave and Vanessa. I told them that we had succeeded, [00:05:39 - 00:05:46] that success was not a condensed hyperobject, but a teaching. I asked them to dress and come with me. [00:05:46 - 00:05:51] While they were gathering their hammocks, they told me that during the darkest part of the night, [00:05:51 - 00:05:58] Dave had awakened, hysterical, in a state not unlike the condition induced in him by the electrical [00:05:58 - 00:06:04] storm the evening before. They had been very agitated during the night and could only attribute [00:06:04 - 00:06:09] this to what we had been doing. I was interested in all of this, but seemed to hear it as from a [00:06:09 - 00:06:17] long distance. I wanted to return to the forest and see what else would unfold. In my mind, I was [00:06:17 - 00:06:22] recalling something else Dennis had said a few minutes before in the pasture. He had said that [00:06:22 - 00:06:30] the demarcation between day and night, the dawn line, was now making a 24-hour sweep around the [00:06:30 - 00:06:36] world, a sweep that began at the dawn moment when the experiment at La Churrera was finished. [00:06:36 - 00:06:43] Throughout the world, traffic and factories were coming to a halt. People were standing around and [00:06:43 - 00:06:50] realizing that someone, somewhere, had broken through, that this was not a day like any other [00:06:50 - 00:06:56] day. Dave and Vanessa followed me back to the forest, grumbling a good part of the way. [00:06:57 - 00:07:03] When we had gone slightly past the place where I had parted from Dennis, we came upon something [00:07:03 - 00:07:11] which could not at first be fitted into any set of expectations. This was Dennis' Ruana and shirt [00:07:11 - 00:07:18] discarded in the middle of the path. Next came a pair of pants, and then further on, two sweat socks. [00:07:18 - 00:07:27] And, though I was to learn this only later, his glasses and his boots had also been hurled away. [00:07:28 - 00:07:35] Following this trail of cast-off garments led us back to the hut in the forest. There we found [00:07:35 - 00:07:43] Ev and Dennis, both naked and sitting on the floor of the hut, discussing and doing the "ask Dennis" [00:07:43 - 00:07:49] meditation. With the comment that you cannot receive a proper initiation unless you are naked, [00:07:49 - 00:07:55] Dennis insisted that we take off our clothes. Vanessa peeled and Dave and I followed her [00:07:55 - 00:08:02] example. The presence of the mushroom was there, and it seemed to be saying, "Take off your clothes! [00:08:02 - 00:08:11] Throw everything away! Everything is breaking! All objects are no good to you now! Throw everything [00:08:11 - 00:08:19] away! You do not need it anymore!" We all looked at each other, glossy pubic hair and secret genitals [00:08:19 - 00:08:27] now in the sunshine. I rolled a joint then. We sat in a circle and smoked. We told Dave and Vanessa [00:08:27 - 00:08:33] about the teaching and urged them to try it with varying degrees of success, since a voice in the [00:08:33 - 00:08:39] head is a very subjective thing. If one has it, there is no doubt. If one does not have it, it [00:08:39 - 00:08:46] seems a very murky thing. Everything was very amicable, except that Dennis was showing a tendency [00:08:46 - 00:08:53] to talk right through other people's comments as if they were not present. It was as though he were [00:08:53 - 00:08:59] on a different time track from the rest of us, since he really seemed unable to realize that [00:08:59 - 00:09:06] someone else was talking. We thought that it was logical to untie our hammocks from the house and [00:09:06 - 00:09:13] take nothing but our hammocks and go naked into the jungle, tie the hammocks in a tree, and then [00:09:13 - 00:09:19] get into these hammocks. We would then explore the mode, because clearly you could do more than ask [00:09:19 - 00:09:28] or answer questions. The door was standing open. God alone knew what one could do. I asked the thing [00:09:28 - 00:09:33] in my mind what should be done and had received instruction that we should visually meditate on [00:09:33 - 00:09:40] our lives and, starting from the present, trace back through our entire life, encountering and [00:09:40 - 00:09:47] setting things right with every sentient creature that we had ever wronged. When we reached the end [00:09:47 - 00:09:54] of this process, we would leave our bodies and be somehow free in the dimension of absolute [00:09:54 - 00:10:01] freedom that seemed so near. Lying in our hammocks, we set out to meditate our way to hyperspace. [00:10:01 - 00:10:08] I could see myself at La Churrera, then going down the trail to Alencanto, up the river to [00:10:08 - 00:10:14] Leguizamo, and back to Bogota, back to Canada. And at each point, I would meet the people that I had [00:10:14 - 00:10:22] lived my life with, and I would say, "We got it! I'm sorry, I hope I didn't offend you too much back [00:10:22 - 00:10:30] there in 3D. It's all over now, it's all over." I could see people. Immediately, I reached out for [00:10:30 - 00:10:36] all of them. I seemed to be able to reach them. "We're in the Amazon," I explained to each, [00:10:36 - 00:10:43] "and now we're going home, or some place." The vision had an utterly bizarre quality. [00:10:43 - 00:10:50] Tears welled up behind my closed eyelids. It was very peculiar. The voice of the teacher spoke in [00:10:50 - 00:10:58] my head, "You've found it. This is it. It's all over now. There is no more. Within a few hours, [00:10:58 - 00:11:03] the superstructure of human civilization is going to collapse, and your species is going to go to [00:11:03 - 00:11:11] Jupiter and then to the stars. A day of high adventure dawns for man at last." [00:11:11 - 00:11:13] [laughs] [00:11:14 - 00:11:17] [music] [00:11:17 - 00:11:21] [music] [00:11:21 - 00:11:25] [music] [00:11:25 - 00:11:28] [music] [00:11:28 - 00:11:32] [music] [00:11:32 - 00:11:36] [music] [00:12:02 - 00:12:07] At first, the images welling up behind closed eyes seemed to be deepening and growing more [00:12:07 - 00:12:14] intense, but after an hour, it was clear that they were actually fading. One by one, we pulled [00:12:14 - 00:12:19] ourselves out of the stupor that the morning heat and being in the hammock had induced. [00:12:19 - 00:12:25] We were talking and talking, analyzing and analyzing. Dennis seemed most out of it. Dave [00:12:25 - 00:12:32] and Vanessa uncertain that anything at all had really happened. It was distant, and I was feeling [00:12:32 - 00:12:39] definitely immersed in the surreal perception that had been mine since the chaotic opening of the day. [00:12:39 - 00:12:47] Something was wrong. Expectation was outrunning reality. Nothing had happened. It came out that [00:12:47 - 00:12:54] no one could hear Dennis in their mind except me. They were all actually wondering what was going on. [00:12:55 - 00:13:02] We had entered the next phase, which was a period of confusion for all. Dennis was disengaging from [00:13:02 - 00:13:08] reality. I would talk to him, and he didn't know anyone was speaking to him. He was still breaking [00:13:08 - 00:13:15] into conversations because he didn't know anyone else was speaking. A visit to the priest's outdoor [00:13:15 - 00:13:21] shower was suggested and seized upon since we were all filthy and covered with the grime of [00:13:21 - 00:13:27] fire tending. We gathered up our scattered clothing, and during this effort it came out that [00:13:27 - 00:13:35] Dennis had thrown his glasses away along with his boots and everything else. Disheveled and disoriented, [00:13:35 - 00:13:42] we set off, searching unsuccessfully for the lost pair of glasses as we retraced our path to the [00:13:42 - 00:13:50] mission. We were a group of people of many minds about the previous several hours, some assuming [00:13:50 - 00:13:55] that this was a day like any other, others assuming that this was the first day of the age at the end [00:13:55 - 00:14:02] of time. A group of Wittoto gazed at us as we passed and then roared with appreciative laughter. [00:14:02 - 00:14:09] "They know, they know what has been achieved," the voice in my head assured me. They were certainly [00:14:09 - 00:14:15] beaming and chortling about something. On we walked toward the mission and its shower in the [00:14:15 - 00:14:22] sunshine. Dennis would not stop talking. The consensus was building that we had a crisis on [00:14:22 - 00:14:29] our hands, but it wasn't yet out of control. We agreed that Yahweh is very peculiar and thought [00:14:29 - 00:14:35] that the passage of a few hours would smooth everything out. That was everyone's conclusion, [00:14:35 - 00:14:41] except Dennis and my own. It was no longer really possible to communicate with Dennis. [00:14:42 - 00:14:48] My conclusion was that something had happened, that he had done something, that some kind of [00:14:48 - 00:14:55] odd principle had been manipulated, but it wasn't as we thought it was, and so we were cast we knew [00:14:55 - 00:15:02] not where. I was calm. I was at least participating in the social situation. Even though there were [00:15:02 - 00:15:09] tears of joy streaming down my face, I wasn't out of touch with reality. I said, "We'll wait for [00:15:09 - 00:15:16] tomorrow. Dennis will come down." Everyone seemed to be finding their way back to their normal [00:15:16 - 00:15:24] psychic equilibrium, save Dennis and myself. I was burdened with odd but wonderfully expanded [00:15:24 - 00:15:31] perception, while his wandering ideas and wild eyes indicated that he was having some difficulty [00:15:31 - 00:15:37] in getting his feet on the ground. After our shower and on the way back to the forest, [00:15:37 - 00:15:43] I mentioned all of these things to him, but he replied in riddles and with mimicry of dead [00:15:43 - 00:15:49] relatives so that I could get nothing out of him. I continued to assume that a night's sleep would [00:15:49 - 00:15:55] set him right. I insisted that he rest in his hammock when we returned to the camp, which he [00:15:55 - 00:16:11] did, while the rest of us set things in order. [Dennis and Dennis speaking inaudibly] [00:16:12 - 00:16:21] [Dennis and Dennis speaking inaudibly] [00:16:21 - 00:16:31] [Dennis and Dennis speaking inaudibly] [00:16:31 - 00:16:33] Chapter 12 In the Vortex [00:16:35 - 00:16:41] It was decided that Vanessa and Dave would stay the night at our hut, so their two hammocks were [00:16:41 - 00:16:48] left hanging along with our three. It was a crowded situation. We dined well that evening, [00:16:48 - 00:16:54] and except for the occasional oblique or plain incomprehensible comment from Dennis, [00:16:54 - 00:17:00] the surface of things seemed to be restored. Vanessa's ankle remained bad, and much attention [00:17:00 - 00:17:07] was directed toward this difficulty, almost in tribute to its being so palpable in contrast to [00:17:07 - 00:17:15] most of what was going on. I felt utterly changed and made new, removed from everyone and content [00:17:15 - 00:17:21] to let events unfold as they would, assured by the new thing inside of me that however things [00:17:21 - 00:17:30] appeared, all was very, very well. The last rave of this long, amazing day came after dinner in [00:17:30 - 00:17:36] the firelight, when from his hammock, Dennis broke the silence to explain that this night in our [00:17:36 - 00:17:43] dreams, we would learn a series of things that would end with us severing our connection to our [00:17:43 - 00:17:50] bodies long before morning. We would reassemble in our perfected astral forms on the bridge of a [00:17:50 - 00:17:59] starship that was in geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above the Amazon basin. This was the second [00:17:59 - 00:18:05] of the self-limiting prophecies that had been made since the experiment. The first had been the effort [00:18:05 - 00:18:12] to meditate backward to one's birth attempted that morning. In retrospect, I now see that this [00:18:12 - 00:18:19] eschatological hysteria was one of the chief ways in which my thinking seemed radically different. [00:18:19 - 00:18:25] Over the next weeks and years, there would be many more of these self-testing prophecies, [00:18:26 - 00:18:32] many scenarios of the possible way the world might undergo eschatological transformation. [00:18:32 - 00:18:40] Four days from the experiment, five, seven, ten, sixteen, twenty-one, forty, sixty-four, [00:18:40 - 00:18:46] all were times awaited with hope and willful suspension of disbelief, and all came and went [00:18:46 - 00:18:55] with the eschatons still all pervading, still very elusive. The idea of a dimension-roving lens [00:18:55 - 00:19:04] vehicle once articulated was never far away. His statement was also the first appearance of the UFO [00:19:04 - 00:19:11] image in Dennis' thought since the experiment, a theme to be articulated in a thousand ways in the [00:19:11 - 00:19:21] days that were to follow. The equation "Lapis = Self = UFO" was the operating assumption of Dennis' [00:19:21 - 00:19:29] long voyage of self-discovery and return. With these images of death in sleep and rebirth inside [00:19:29 - 00:19:48] the starship ringing in our minds, we turned in, thoroughly exhausted. I stress that the hut was [00:19:48 - 00:19:54] crowded with hammocks strung from every available beam. It was difficult to move about without [00:19:54 - 00:19:59] communicating that to one's neighbors through the tugging and twisting of the many ropes. [00:19:59 - 00:20:07] We must have retired about ten o'clock. I slept soundly until sometime many hours later that I [00:20:07 - 00:20:13] took to be two or so. I rose to take the traditional middle-of-the-night piss that the [00:20:13 - 00:20:21] use of condensed milk induces in the explorer. I sat up in my hammock, struggled for matches, [00:20:21 - 00:20:28] and then lit a candle. In the silent night I heard the inrush of my own exclamation of amazement. [00:20:28 - 00:20:34] An intense triple-layered corona of light was shimmering out from the candle flame for a [00:20:34 - 00:20:41] distance of about four feet. It was an intense iridescent blue alternating with an equally pure [00:20:41 - 00:20:48] orange. I was immediately reminded of the aura of light that surrounds the body of the resurrected [00:20:48 - 00:20:55] Christ in the painting of that subject by Matthias Grünwald. I understood that he must have seen the [00:20:55 - 00:21:03] same thing that I was seeing now and later incorporated it into his resurrection. Simultaneously, [00:21:03 - 00:21:10] as though I was having a yet deeper thought, I somehow intuitively understood that the distortion [00:21:10 - 00:21:17] or polarizing of the light of the flame that I was seeing was an effect caused by the distortion [00:21:17 - 00:21:24] of psychic space-time induced by our experiment and the nearby presence of the lapis. This thought [00:21:24 - 00:21:30] was followed by another. Perhaps the temporal and spatial distance from the stone could be [00:21:30 - 00:21:36] gauged by the intensity of the colors in the aura of light around a simple candle. The distortion [00:21:36 - 00:21:45] from light from a candle to act as a detector of the philosopher's stone. I thought of Diogenes [00:21:45 - 00:21:51] prospecting for the good. Was that what he was doing? I thought of the phrase, "It is better to [00:21:51 - 00:21:59] light one candle than to curse the darkness," and I laughed. I awakened Eve and she sleepily confirmed [00:21:59 - 00:22:05] the colors around the candle, but it communicated nothing to her of what it communicated to me. [00:22:06 - 00:22:14] She rolled over and when I returned from going outside, she was snoring softly. As I climbed back [00:22:14 - 00:22:20] to my hammock, I counted heads and noticed that everyone was present and seemingly completely [00:22:20 - 00:22:29] asleep. I lay awake a long time thinking all seemed still. As breakfast unfolded the following [00:22:29 - 00:22:35] morning, the 6th of March, it became clear that the restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared [00:22:35 - 00:22:43] the night before had been anything but that. From Dennis, still disorganized with ample comments, [00:22:43 - 00:22:51] it emerged that he had or imagined he had a very active night. Closely questioned, it came out that [00:22:51 - 00:22:58] he was completely convinced that sometime during the night he had arisen and dressed and then had [00:22:58 - 00:23:03] a series of nocturnal adventures that involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering [00:23:03 - 00:23:11] immensity of the Choro over a mile away, then returning to climb and spend some time in a large [00:23:11 - 00:23:17] tree near the edge of a mission before making his way back across the pasture and returning to his [00:23:17 - 00:23:23] hammock strung among all the others. The thought of him wandering around during the night on those [00:23:23 - 00:23:31] trails without his glasses, falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy, perhaps howling and otherwise [00:23:31 - 00:23:38] paleolithicly comporting himself, was too much for me. It was a breach of the collective cool, [00:23:38 - 00:23:44] and even though I was 90% certain that it had never really happened, I was determined to eliminate [00:23:44 - 00:23:53] all possibility of such rambles in the future. Dennis' story was an amazing description of a [00:23:53 - 00:23:59] shamanic night journey. He said he had gone to the Choro and meditated in the mission cemetery we had [00:23:59 - 00:24:06] visited before. He had begun to return to camp when he confronted a particularly large, more [00:24:06 - 00:24:13] racist tree near where the path skirted the edge of the mission. On impulse he had climbed it, [00:24:13 - 00:24:19] not at all unaware that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of Siberian shamanic [00:24:19 - 00:24:26] journeying. As he climbed the tree he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, [00:24:26 - 00:24:32] and finally as he reached the highest point in his ascent, something which he called the vortex [00:24:32 - 00:24:39] opened ahead of him like a swirling enormous doorway into time. He could see the cyclopean [00:24:39 - 00:24:45] megaliths of Stonehenge, and beyond those ringed stones revolving at a different speed and at [00:24:45 - 00:24:52] higher plane, the outline of the pyramids, marble faceted and gleaming as they have not done since [00:24:52 - 00:24:59] the days of pharaonic Egypt, and yet further into the turbulent maw of the vortex he saw, [00:24:59 - 00:25:08] to mysteries ancient long before the advent of man, titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined [00:25:08 - 00:25:15] by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when [00:25:15 - 00:25:22] our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering abysses [00:25:22 - 00:25:30] touched with the cold of interstellar space and eon consuming time rushed down upon him. [00:25:30 - 00:25:36] He fainted and time, who can say how much time passed by him. [00:25:36 - 00:25:38] [Music] [00:25:38 - 00:25:40] [Music] [00:26:06 - 00:26:12] He next found himself in the pasture, a few hundred feet from his newly discovered axis mundi. [00:26:12 - 00:26:21] If he fell from the tree it did not seem to have hurt him. Amazement, exultation, fear and confusion [00:26:21 - 00:26:26] were all present in his thoughts. The continuum seemed to be shredding and ripping itself to [00:26:26 - 00:26:35] pieces before his eyes. Time and space swirling the artifacts of 20,000 years of human striving [00:26:35 - 00:26:42] into a vortex of apocalyptic contradictions. In that state of fear and exultation in the depth [00:26:42 - 00:26:50] of man's destiny among the stars, Dennis returned to our camp and noiselessly returned to his hammock [00:26:50 - 00:26:58] or awakened there from a dream of the same thing. 24 hours had passed since the attempt to hypercarbolate [00:26:58 - 00:27:06] human DNA. It was apparent that Dennis was not pulling out of the induced state of shamanic [00:27:06 - 00:27:13] excitement as quickly as we had anticipated. Two choices presented themselves to explain the [00:27:13 - 00:27:19] situation. The strain of the journey and the recent psilocybin tripping had contributed to [00:27:19 - 00:27:25] activate a shamanic archetype in Dennis that had been latent all along but which was now overt and [00:27:25 - 00:27:32] carrying a strong transference potential to which I was succumbing by being unable to recognize my [00:27:32 - 00:27:39] brother's condition as a potentially pathological state. This was the position that Vanessa and Dave [00:27:39 - 00:27:45] leaned toward and was the source of much of our difference of opinion on how to proceed. [00:27:45 - 00:27:52] A second explanation takes a biochemical rather than a psychological approach. It says that Dennis [00:27:52 - 00:27:59] had, through his unusual diet of drugs and the experiment he performed, inhibited some enzyme [00:27:59 - 00:28:05] system that would normally return one from the heights of a hallucinogenic trip but in this case [00:28:05 - 00:28:12] had somehow become inoperative. The most likely candidate for this would be the MAO, monoamine [00:28:12 - 00:28:20] oxidase system, which is responsible for rendering many hallucinogens into inoperative byproducts. [00:28:21 - 00:28:28] The phenomenon of irreversible MAO inhibition is known to occur with some drugs and is a condition [00:28:28 - 00:28:35] that takes nearly two weeks to correct itself. However, the compounds in banisteriopsis copy [00:28:35 - 00:28:43] are known to usually reverse their MAO inhibition in four to six hours. Nevertheless, as subsequent [00:28:43 - 00:28:50] events showed, this explanation is doubtless some part of the true story. After years of [00:28:50 - 00:28:56] thought, my own explanation continues to lean heavily on the second idea for an operational [00:28:56 - 00:29:04] explanation. I do not believe that Dennis was predisposed to an archetypal submergence. I believe [00:29:04 - 00:29:13] that he did, in a single moment, somehow bind all the MAO in his body and that his long derangement [00:29:13 - 00:29:20] was due to the lag time that was required to rebuild his MAO level from a complete and sudden [00:29:20 - 00:29:28] depletion. I believe that this sudden depletion was caused by his experiment and that vocally induced [00:29:28 - 00:29:35] resonance cancelling of the forces that normally operate in these molecules caused major changes in [00:29:35 - 00:29:44] his body chemistry. In short, I believe that he induced an irreversible MAO inhibition in his body [00:29:44 - 00:29:50] through the use of psilocybin and his voice and will. If this is true, then the implication for [00:29:50 - 00:29:58] humanity may be every bit as great as we in our inflated state of mind supposed, since it hints [00:29:58 - 00:30:06] at a means by which mankind might explore the parallel continuum whose interaction with our [00:30:06 - 00:30:13] own existence is signified by the visionary experience. It may well be the effect that as [00:30:13 - 00:30:20] the crack in a door that, once flung open, will lead us to all the worlds teeming in our dreams [00:30:20 - 00:30:29] and imaginations. It is an effect to be studied and learned from. Today, years after the experiment, [00:30:29 - 00:30:36] it still seems full of great promise. My continued interest in these matters is based on the personal [00:30:36 - 00:30:44] belief that some unusual and still unconfirmed effect was at work in our experiment, something [00:30:44 - 00:30:52] like the principle of resonance cancelling that Dennis was so intrigued by. Breakfast of the second [00:30:52 - 00:30:58] day following the experiment was closed with a hot discussion of whether Dennis had really gone to [00:30:58 - 00:31:05] the choro or only dreamed that he had done so. As the rhetoric exhausted itself, Vanessa drew me [00:31:05 - 00:31:11] away from the hut and walked along with me as I went to the spring for water. We were to have a [00:31:11 - 00:31:19] talk, the gist of which was that, since there were wide differences in diagnosis of what was going on, [00:31:19 - 00:31:25] so there were wide differences concerning what should be done. But since Dennis is your brother [00:31:25 - 00:31:31] and you have strong opinions on the subject, I will defer in favor of what you think should be [00:31:31 - 00:31:38] done here, at least for the moment. I was grateful for the margin of time contained in Vanessa's [00:31:38 - 00:31:46] chosen course, the whole question revolving around Dennis's state of mind, concerned how and especially [00:31:46 - 00:31:53] when he would pull out of it. Any theory had to come forth with an operational prediction on that [00:31:53 - 00:32:00] vital point. I understood from Vanessa's demeanor that we should be pretty much to ourselves in the [00:32:00 - 00:32:08] forest house. We could expect her and Dave only as visitors, and already the possibility of retreat [00:32:08 - 00:32:15] from the jungle isolation was being announced as a faint but growing theme. It all fell into place [00:32:15 - 00:32:22] from the second day onward. Ev became a kind of liaison with the rest of the world of La Churrera. [00:32:22 - 00:32:28] She arrived in the late afternoon and departed each morning, cooking an evening and morning meal [00:32:28 - 00:32:34] and being very game about it all, considering that she had only fallen in with our little group [00:32:34 - 00:32:41] three weeks before. And thus was the stage set for the next five days from the 5th to the 10th of [00:32:41 - 00:32:50] March, the chaos at La Churrera. During this time, Dennis very slowly got better. He became more [00:32:50 - 00:32:57] coherent. He said that the experience had catapulted him to the edge of the Rhymanian topology of the [00:32:57 - 00:33:04] universe, that he had to come back in and that he was regressing inward through level after level [00:33:04 - 00:33:12] after level. Very strange things went on during this period. He could hear my mind working. He [00:33:12 - 00:33:19] was telepathic. There was no doubt about it. He could do perfect voice imitations of our mother [00:33:19 - 00:33:26] and father. He became all these people, doing it perfectly. And there was much more. A vision of [00:33:26 - 00:33:34] 20th century history, building the lands and the end of time. He said that the discovery of a higher [00:33:34 - 00:33:41] physical dimension was ahead of us a few years in time, but somehow linked up to Egypt, to Acacia [00:33:41 - 00:33:50] tryptamine cults, to Tibet 8,000 years ago, to Punpo shamanic magic, all these ideas in constant [00:33:50 - 00:33:57] circulation. And he talked and performed constantly. No notes exist from that period. [00:33:57 - 00:34:04] So filled was I with the assumption that we were abiding in eternity, that I felt no need to write [00:34:04 - 00:34:10] at all. As the world seemed to me to grow more perfect, I determined at some point I would write [00:34:10 - 00:34:18] a poem. But that moment never came. Nothing is coherent or connected from those five days. [00:34:18 - 00:34:24] I remember that they were the most intense times that I have ever gone through, and that there was [00:34:24 - 00:34:31] not an emotional or intellectual chord in the human register that was not rung again and again [00:34:31 - 00:34:48] in a thousand variations. In the notes made week after those times, I could only summarize those [00:34:48 - 00:34:58] five days by labeling them absurdly. Fire, water, earth, man, peace. I sat and Dennis raved. Without [00:34:58 - 00:35:06] his glasses, his eyes were wild and unsettling to look into. Since the night of his contested shamanic [00:35:06 - 00:35:12] ramble, I had formed the intention not to sleep, but to stand watch constantly, day and night. [00:35:12 - 00:35:19] For the next nine days, I neither slept nor needed sleep. Though I know that such cases are on record, [00:35:19 - 00:35:26] for years after the experience, the lack of a need for sleep for nine days, which I personally [00:35:26 - 00:35:32] underwent, seemed to me the most solid argument for the reality of the forces that we experimented [00:35:32 - 00:35:40] with. For I did not merely not need to sleep, but was constantly thinking in a rich, calm, [00:35:40 - 00:35:47] image-filled way that made my normal thought process seem a pale and jerkily animated shadow [00:35:47 - 00:35:53] of the mental power that I felt throughout the sleepless period and long afterward. [00:35:53 - 00:35:59] The time that we were moving through seemed made of the reflections of what had preceded it and [00:35:59 - 00:36:06] what was to follow. The first night that followed upon my decision not to sleep was passed in deep [00:36:06 - 00:36:12] reverie and a growing amazement that I was actually functioning without any apparent need of sleep. [00:36:12 - 00:36:20] In the last of the darkness before dawn, at a time that I felt was exactly the time when we had [00:36:20 - 00:36:27] performed the experiment two days before, I heard Dennis stirring his hammock inside the hut. Then I [00:36:27 - 00:36:35] heard, low but strong and clear, the same ululating howl that had catapulted us into a new world [00:36:35 - 00:36:37] forty-eight hours before. [00:36:37 - 00:37:04] Three times it sounded, just as something in my mind assured me that it would. [00:37:04 - 00:37:11] The last howl was drawn out as before. It rose and fell for perhaps a minute. [00:37:11 - 00:37:13] [howling continues] [00:37:38 - 00:37:45] Then, as it faded away, I again heard the cock crow drifting across the whitening air from the [00:37:45 - 00:37:52] mission. Why did these things happen with such symmetry, as though a huge, ordered form was [00:37:52 - 00:38:00] trying to surface in the very organization of the reality around us? Sunrise flamed across the sky, [00:38:00 - 00:38:07] and another of those titanic days began, the thing in my mind stirring to meet the challenge [00:38:07 - 00:38:15] to reason that each new moment seemed charged with. All that remains of those times are images [00:38:15 - 00:38:25] and incidents. Only metaphors acted as sustained themes. All was myth-making and image-making, [00:38:25 - 00:38:29] mercurial, meta-leveled, ever-flowing. [00:38:29 - 00:38:31] [howling continues] [00:38:31 - 00:38:33] [howling continues] [00:38:33 - 00:38:35] [howling continues] [00:38:35 - 00:38:37] [howling continues] [00:38:37 - 00:38:39] [howling continues] [00:38:39 - 00:38:41] [howling continues] [00:38:41 - 00:38:43] [howling continues] [00:38:43 - 00:38:45] [howling continues] [00:38:45 - 00:38:47] [howling continues] [00:38:47 - 00:38:49] [howling continues] [00:38:49 - 00:38:51] [howling continues] [00:38:51 - 00:38:53] [howling continues] [00:38:53 - 00:38:55] [howling continues] [00:38:55 - 00:38:57] [howling continues] [00:38:57 - 00:38:59] [howling continues] [00:39:25 - 00:39:29] Chapter 13, "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" [00:39:29 - 00:39:38] Ev returned with Dave and Vanessa to the river that morning, and for the first time in two days, [00:39:38 - 00:39:45] Dennis and I were alone, and the atmosphere was one of calm. I busied myself sorting through and [00:39:45 - 00:39:52] arranging the equipment. Our campsite was again spic and span. Dennis was alternately calm or into [00:39:52 - 00:40:00] long harangues on a supracosmic scale, a la the star-maker of Olaf Stapleton. He imitated, [00:40:00 - 00:40:07] personified, described, and otherwise invoked immense gnostic and Manichean entities that were [00:40:07 - 00:40:14] struggling on a cosmic scale, but not without humor, occasionally moaning out that he felt like [00:40:14 - 00:40:21] an old man dying. Then he would collapse with laughter at this cleverness. I sat in my hammock [00:40:21 - 00:40:27] and verbally participated as much as I could in all of this, though it was clear that Dennis had [00:40:27 - 00:40:34] no difficulty in maintaining a conversation on his own. In fact, he seemed to have hit the main vein [00:40:34 - 00:40:41] of the fountain of sprung verse. I closed my eyes for a moment, and there, fully formed beneath my [00:40:41 - 00:40:48] eyelids, was the first of what I call "teachings" or "messages." It was a beautiful, recursive, [00:40:48 - 00:40:56] geometric form. The voice in my mind informed me that this was the Valentine curve. Obviously, [00:40:56 - 00:41:02] the four petals of the curve looked somewhat like a Valentine or a bleeding heart. I thought for an [00:41:02 - 00:41:08] instant of the heart-shaped fruit I had fashioned into a water pipe. No obvious connection. The [00:41:08 - 00:41:17] image slid. I went and got my notebook and drew the Valentine curve. At first crudely. Later, [00:41:17 - 00:41:23] much more smoothly. It made me think of Basil Valentine, an alchemist, author of the triumphal [00:41:23 - 00:41:30] chariot of antinomy. I had read the book, but could remember virtually nothing about it. [00:41:30 - 00:41:37] I thought, too, of Valentinian, Alexandrian gnostic of the second century, and his doctrine that the [00:41:37 - 00:41:44] material world was the condensed emotion of the errant Sophia, who had selfishly created a universe [00:41:44 - 00:41:53] without undergoing any union but with herself. The condensation of emotion into matter. The theme was [00:41:53 - 00:41:59] hair-raising. It was the theme that had brought us to the Amazon, and alchemy was the gnosis of [00:41:59 - 00:42:07] material transformation. Clues seemed everywhere. Everything was webbed together in a magical [00:42:07 - 00:42:16] fabric of meaning and affirmation and mystery. The ideas of all sorts formed in my mind unbidden, [00:42:16 - 00:42:21] and would lead inevitably to some further expansion of the set of themes that we had [00:42:21 - 00:42:27] organized our lives around. The first day, the voice inside my head suggested that I [00:42:27 - 00:42:34] set out the record I had kept for several years of my I Ching throws, it having been for several [00:42:34 - 00:42:40] years my habit to throw the I Ching at each new and full moon, and to record the throws [00:42:40 - 00:42:47] on a slip of paper which I kept inside the back cover of my copy. At the prompting of the inner [00:42:47 - 00:42:53] voice, I went through this record of throws, looking for an instance when I had thrown the [00:42:53 - 00:42:59] first hexagram. Finding that, I returned to the beginning of the list, looking now for a record [00:42:59 - 00:43:05] of the second hexagram being thrown, and so on. My list of throws covered three years and contained [00:43:05 - 00:43:12] about 80 throws and their changes. After about a half hour of this exercise, I had determined that [00:43:12 - 00:43:18] according to my record, I had thrown all of the 64 hexagrams in the three years leading up to that [00:43:18 - 00:43:27] moment. This mildly interesting unlikelihood was very significant seeming to me. It proved that I [00:43:27 - 00:43:34] had a kind of secret identity that I was in the process of uncovering. It proved that I was somehow [00:43:34 - 00:43:40] a reflection of the microcosm and had been chosen somehow to be in the situation in which I found [00:43:40 - 00:43:48] myself. I was extremely agitated at this personal verification of the ordered pattern whose design [00:43:48 - 00:43:56] I was discovering everywhere in my life. I composed myself and then at the strong prompting of the [00:43:56 - 00:44:03] inner wave of understanding, I quietly burned the record of my I Ching throws. It was a very [00:44:03 - 00:44:05] uncharacteristic thing for me to do.