True Hallucinations Part 8

"Be amazed at nothing; you are to receive the kings.h.i.+p of the father," spoke the quiet voice from hypers.p.a.ce. "The Mystery of the wellspring and the datepalm will unfold."

I watched my own understanding of the connections between what we were doing and cla.s.sical alchemy move by vast intuitive

leaps to implicate Gerhard Dorn, Robert Fludd, and Count Michael Maier, names a.s.sociated with the finest literary flowering of the alchemical mind. And equally a.s.sociated with a view of man and nature that had perished with the rise of modern chemistry.

Yet I was haunted by their alchemical imagery. The thirty-sixth emblem of Maier's Atlanta Fugiens is a wonderful visual pun that connects the cube of Stropharia cubensis with the UFO, the hyper-object seen in the sky. It was an image that was constantly before me through those times. John Dee, with his angel-haunted skrying stone and the occult geometry of his cryptic opus The Hieroglyphic Monad, is mixed up in the same set of images. Why? Did this circle of alchemical adepts penetrate the mystery to a secret undreamed of by their contemporaries and compet.i.tion?

Images flashed before my mind's eye: Nicholas Flamel and his wife, Pemelle, their legendary love affair and their unknown end. Mutus Liber ("the silent book") depicts a couple working at a furnace; it almost looks as though they are drying mushrooms. How sophisticated did alchemy become before Enlightenment science scattered the adepts and rendered their control language inoperable?

In the pasture each foggy morning, when I demanded of Dennis that he give me the philosopher's stone, it was both pressure upon him to reformulate his consciousness into a unity and something that served to focus the transference potential that was so intense as to again and again threaten to engulf us. Not sleeping, being awake constantly, I was both in the world of the developing situation at La Chorrera and also in the world into which my brother had become psycho-topologically enmeshed-a dimensional vortex beyond which seemed to be eternity, the land of the dead, all human history, and the UFOs. It was a world whose unseen, cybernetic chroniclers spoke to us telepathically in our minds and revealed that we and all humanity were in the act of once again becoming able to go between these alien dimensions and our own to re-establish the es-chatological shamanism lost scores of millennia ago.

At one point I picked up a stick and in the sandy soil of our living area I scratched the shorthand symbol for "and." I called it "the ampersand." I found its binding fold in one corner of a quaternary

structure to be very satisfying. I began to imagine this symbol as the symbol of the condensation of the alchemical lapis. To me it appeared to be the natural symbol for a four-dimensional universe somehow bound into a 3-D matrix. I spoke of it as the ampersand for several days, then I called it "the eschaton." This I imagined as a basic unit of time; the combination and resonance among the set of eschatons in the universe determined which of the possible worlds allowed by physics would actually undergo the formality of occurring. "The formality of actually occurring" was a phrase from Whitehead that kept echoing through my thoughts like the refrain of a half-forgotten song. I imagined that at the end of time all the eschatons would resonate together as a unity and thereby create an ontological transformation of reality-the end of time as a kind of garden of earthly delights.*

Occasionally I would seem to catch the mechanics of what was happening to us in action.

Lines from half-forgotten movies and snippets of old science fiction, once consumed like popcorn, reappeared in collages of half-understood a.s.sociations. Punch lines from old jokes and vaguely remembered dreams spiraled in a slow galaxy of interleaved memories and antic.i.p.ations. From such experiences I concluded that whatever was happening, part of it involved all the information that we had ever acc.u.mulated, down to the most trivial details. The overwhelming impression was that something possibly from outer s.p.a.ce or from another dimension was contacting us. It was doing so through the peculiar means of using every thought in our heads to lead us into telepathically induced scenarios of extravagant imaginings, or deep theoretical understandings, or in-depth [* These were the first faint stirrings of thoughts that were to lead eventually to the development of my own theory of time described in The Invisible Landscape. These early intuitions bore no resemblance to the final theory; and it is just as well that they did not, for at that time I would have been completely unable to understand the theory that I was finally to develop. It took years of reading and self-education to keep track of the things that the internal voice was saying. Its presence and persistence over the years since La Chorrera has been amazing. That day at La Chorrera, the voice had a holistic and systems-oriented approach to things that did seem to be slightly of another order-not enough to be alarming, but enough to repeatedly remind me that the ideas I was producing were coming fully organized from somewhere else, and I was nothing more than a message decipherer, hard-pressed to keep up with a difficult, incoming code.]

scannings of strange times, places, and worlds. The source of this unearthly contact was the Stropharia cubensis and our experiment.

Our collective intelligence was not compromised, but what was compromised was the ability of reason to give a coherent account of what was going on, as paradox, coincidence, and general synchronistic strangeness began to increase exponentially. Into the vacuum left by the collapse of reason rushed a staggering array of exotic intuitions about why things were as they were.

Shortly after breakfast on the morning of the seventh, the third day following the experiment, Dennis announced a new teaching. He said that one could see any point in time by closing one's eyes, visualizing an eight, turning it on its side so that it approximated the sign for infinity, and then mentally sliding the two closed rings over each other to form a circle, shrinking the circle to a dot, and thinking the word "please"

and the target point in s.p.a.ce-time. Usually I knew not whence these images came to him; however, this time I was amazed. I recalled with perfect clarity that six weeks before, shortly before I left Vancouver, British Columbia, I had gone to a dentist as part of the standard pre-travel tune-up. While in the waiting room, I had read a several-months-old journal of some Canadian education a.s.sociation. In that journal, which I had not discussed with anyone, was a very short article about teaching-machines and very young children. The "Picture This" scenario with which the article opened was of a child looking at a figure-eight on a television screen, rolling it on its side, squeezing it together, etc., etc. It was a bit of media flotsam that my brother, or something working through my brother, was able to lift right out of my mind weeks after I had forgotten it. Something was able to refas.h.i.+on and use our memories in whatever absurd way that it wished.

"Now can we call that press conference, Bro?" Dennis inquired again from his hammock swinging hypnotically in the shadows.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN LOOKING BACKWARD.

In which several miracles are recounted, not the least of which is the appearance of James and Nora Joyce disguised as poultry.

Two MONTHS AFTER ALL of these experiences, around mid-May of 1971, I was moved to try to sum up the particularly bizarre and possibly physics-compromising incidents that I could then recall. Here is what I wrote at that time-a time when Iwas concerned to refute the idea that schizophrenia was a magic word explaining all that we had undergone: May 12,1971 I have almost two months' perspective on the events surrounding our experience at La Chorrera, and I can clearly recognize that both my brother and I evinced the cla.s.sic symptoms of the two generally distinguished categories of process schizophrenia. He appeared to manifest the withdrawn characteristics of essential schizophrenia while my behavior was of a more outward and paranoid sort. Nevertheless, I am unable to make the a.s.sumption that our experiment was therefore "nothing but" two simultaneously occurring cases of schizophrenia. With the full knowledge that such a position argues that I may still be experiencing residual

symptoms of the illness, I maintain that we were in fact dealing with an objective phenomenon that, though of a highly peculiar nature inexorably bound up with psychic processes, does have its basis in the molecular ideas we were in the process of investigating. As empirical evidence of this viewpoint, I mention the following points, which seem to me to set our experience outside the realm of mental illness: The suddenness with which the symptoms developed following our actual experiment: Within a few minutes after we completed our pre-planned experimental procedures, my brother began to disengage himself from the continuum of shared perceptions and at this same time I underwent a willing suspension of disbelief and began to experience the cybernetic unit that we had predicted would be a part of the effect we would cause if we were successful in our attempt to generate a superconducting genetic matrix and harmine bond.

The integrated or dovetail aspect of our shared disa.s.socia-tion: meaning that though both of us were exhibiting the symptoms of types of schizophrenia, the fantasy, the ideas, and the understanding which we were experiencing was shared. While my brother thought of me as the shaman messiah in all manifestations, I perceived him as the condensed mind- lens making a return journey across the universe that might have been one logical outcome of our experiment. Each of us alone would have given the clear appearance of being deluded; however, each of us seemed to offer elusive proof of the correctness of the other's position. I might add that though no one else could understand my brothers peculiar mental processes, I believed I could discern depth and an integrated understanding which seemed to be behind them-but at the same time I understood that his apparent lack of integration was due to the fact that his thinking was moving backward in some fundamental way. In the same way that a film running in reverse seems to present a spectacle of wild and irrational confusion, yet manages in the end to have things in their proper places, my brothers ideas and physical movement seemed to me to be simply the exact reverse of logical expectations.

Dennis felt confident that the brain operates on the principle of a hologram. This was an idea originated by Karl Pribram, a

neurophysiologist at Stanford, that was very much in vogue in our circles then. It neatly explains the fact that a large percentage of the physical brain can be damaged or removed with no impairment of memory, since a portion of a hologram contains all the information embedded in the larger whole from which it has been taken. Dennis had speculated before our experiment that he might receive a reverse image of my brain/mind organization for a brief time during the experiment. In listening to his free a.s.sociations after the reversal, I became certain that this had in fact occurred-but for a much longer time than we had antic.i.p.ated. In fact, I still believe that our only error throughout this entire experiment and the events following it has been our inability to correctly predict the duration of the process. I believe that our understanding of the mechanics of the process, aside from its duration, has been correct, though still incomplete. Time is still, in other words, the crux of this matter. At times my brothers free a.s.sociations consisted of incidents which I had experienced more than a year previously and more than ten thousand miles from where Dennis was then living-incidents about which I had spoken to no one.

Dennis seemed to possess the ability to hear my mind working during the period immediately after the experiment. I ill.u.s.trate by recalling an incident when I was sitting outside of our jungle hut listening to his free a.s.sociation, having noticed a few moments before that his muscles were almost rigid with the enormous physical energy a.s.sociated with some types of schizophrenia. I worried that he might at some future time resist my efforts to keep him from wandering away on the archetypal errands that constantly motivated him to try to leave our immediate living area. It occurred to me that with such strength he could easily injure me or perhaps escape. While mulling over this disturbing possibility for the first time, I noticed that Dennis had left his hammock and was standing in the doorway of the hut; in a perfect imitation of our father's voice, he consoled me with the spoken thought that "Dennis is a good lad and would never do a thing like that."

Another incident occurred seven days after the reversal began, on March 12. Dennis announced that at eleven o'clock that night the "good s.h.i.+t" would appear. This was a reference to a kind of psilocybin-enriched has.h.i.+sh that Dennis claimed he had encountered a few months before leaving the States, but which would be impossible to find in the Amazon. This prediction of a material trans.m.u.tation is not so odd when the alchemical concerns and ideas that led us into this experiment are recalled. After all, we had been reading and discussing alchemical ideas ever since I had discovered Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, at age fourteen. It had seemed to us then that in the projection of the phantasms of the unconscious onto matter, the alchemists were achieving a kind of psychedelic state of understanding. And, after all, isn't the alchemical faith really a faith that the world is made of language? That poetry can somehow be the final arbiter of authentic being?

After this conversation, Ev and I returned through rainy darkness to the forest house for the night and Dennis stayed at the river house with Vanessa and Dave, where he had moved by this time. As was our custom, we smoked a bit of our Santa Marta Gold before turning in. During this process, a small fragment fell, still burning, from the pipe. As I picked it up to return it to the pipe, the characteristic odor of Asian has.h.i.+sh was very noticeable. I examined the pipe's bowl very carefully and, though no change in the physical appearance of the smoking mixture had occurred, it was now definitely, to my own satisfaction and to that of skeptical Ev, behaving exactly like has.h.i.+sh-a luxury absolutely unknown in the Amazon in 1971.

This phenomenon persisted for about five minutes and then slowly faded, returning to the rational continuum of normal behavior for materials. It is to be regretted that this trans.m.u.tation occurred with a substance where any skeptic will be at ease in venting his or her scorn. We are all familiar with the facile view that "pot-heads can't think straight,"

but to anyone who has in-depth involvement with these two substances the difference is unmistakable. This experience contained a number of parallels to the Nijuli movement among the Law.a.n.gan people of Borneo, who in the early 1920s promulgated ideas centering around the claim that a piece of resin had suddenly become longer through the influence of a flute played nearby, and that the lengthening of the resin foreshadowed human immortality.

Equally absurd and even more inexplicable was an incident that occurred on the morning of the fifth day, or the ninth of March. Dennis was sitting and raving to no one in particular with the normal camp life going on around him. I was sitting near the cooking fire sharpening the expedition's buck knife. I listened while Dennis raved, scanning his ramblings for a hint of a message. Suddenly I stopped my work.

"Are you my tailor?" He demanded, in a strong English accent.

That seemed familiar to me from somewhere.

"All these reflections. See. It's me. Uh, but where is my tailor, my silly? Look, look at you, cor, why you've got my knickers on!" I blushed deeply. I looked at the ground and said nothing. I felt very boxed in. Dennis was imitating the conversation that I had had with my English friend in Nepal, after I had come looking for her and had returned with her delirious to my room during our LSD and DMT trip more than a year before! This crazy conversation, which I had never discussed with anyone save her, was now booming out over our Amazon clearing in the mad voice of my brother.

It was hardly the sort of situation in which I wanted to exalt my brother's prowess as a telepath. I said nothing and waited, squirming, for his raving to drift off into incoherence.

But I was impressed and convinced that he had somehow penetrated not only my immediate thoughts but my private memories.

Most important among the factors arguing for more than a simple case of simultaneous schizophrenia is the surprising durability of the model we have created out of the careful observation of the things that happened to us. No one can deny that the theory of the hyperspatial nature of hallucinogenic drug states, and the experiment my brother devised to test that theory, yielded spectacular results. But I have taken the fruits of the visionary revelation and carried them further, deconstructing them to discover a very elegant wave/particle theory of the nature of time. Quite unexpect- * edly, what I now propose, based on those initial experiences, is a revision of the mathematical description of time used in physics. According to this theory, the old notion of time as pure duration, visualized as a smooth plane or straight line, is to be replaced by the idea that time is a very complex fractal phenomenon with many ups and downs of many sizes over which the probabilistic universe

of becoming must flow like water over a boulder-strewn riverbed. I had discovered the fractal dimension of time itself, a mathematical constant that replaces probability theory with a complex, but elegant-indeed an almost magical-set of constraints on the expression of novelty.

After the first mushroom experience at La Chorrera, Dennis and I were involved with two ideas in particular. These were the motifs of the "teacher" and the insect. We could feel the overwhelming presence of some unseen, intelligent ent.i.ty that seemed to be observing and sometimes exerting influence to keep us moving gently toward a breakthrough.

Because of the bizarre nature of the DMT flash, with its seeming stress upon themes alien, insec-tile, and interstellar, we were led to speculate that this teacher was somehow a diplomat-anthropologist, come to give us the keys to galactarian citizens.h.i.+p. We discussed this ent.i.ty in terms of a giant insect and through the insect trill of the Amazon jungle at midday we seemed to be able to discern a deeper harmonic buzz that was the signal keying us to the ent.i.ty in hypers.p.a.ce.

This sense of the presence of an alien third party was sometimes very intense, especially from March fifth to the tenth, after which it faded off gradually. The image of the insect teacher gave rise to numerous entomological speculations: We thought at the time that the process we were involved with was akin to giving birth to a child, but also much like the metamorphosis that occurs in the life cycle of insects, especially beetles, moths, and b.u.t.terflies. We "knew" that tryptamine was somehow a major part of the solution to the enzyme mysteries surrounding metamorphosis. We recalled certain unconfirmed reports of the grub of a beetle eaten by Indians in Eastern Brazil for its hallucinatory effect.

The diffraction of light that occurs in natural phenomena such as rainbows, peac.o.c.k feathers, certain insects, and the colors that appear on the surfaces of some metals during heating are persistent motifs within a particular stage of the alchemical opus. The cauda pavonis (the peac.o.c.k's tail) is the brief stage that heralds the final

whitening; by exotic intuition I "knew" that the occurrence of such iridescence in nature indicated the presence of tryptamine-related compounds. Going further, I "knew" that the New World b.u.t.terfly genus Morphoea, which is characterized by a large wing area usually entirely expressed in brilliant blue iridescence, would be an ideal group upon which to conduct research to illuminate this unstudied field.

I "knew" that the enzymes active in insect metamorphosis received molecular tuning and control through resonation induced by the harmonic strum of those forest insects with psychoactive trypt-amine in their bodies. The tryptamine acted for them as an antenna to the electron spin resonance signal of the collective DNA, just as it did for us in the experiment. This signal is somehow keeping the entire cla.s.s Insecta keyed into a point of stable equilibrium in the evolutionary stream. This odd notion explained the remarkable durability of insect adaptation, which, it is true, stabilized its basic evolutionary strategy some hundreds of millions of years ago. Such improbable insights into nature were delivered quite conversationally by the voice in my mind.

During this time, an iridescent black sheen from the mushrooms particularly caught my eye. This effect occurred when Stropharia cubensis grew in clumps, and larger mushrooms shed spores on the caps of smaller companions. Interestingly enough, this same metallic blue-black sheen was quite noticeably present on the carapace of a large and shrill beetle, a member of the genus Buprestidae that I had captured in the forest in the heat of the afternoon. It is known that the chitinous material that forms the outer covering of insects and spores is one of the most electron-dense materials in organic nature, being, in this property, similar to metal. The inner teacher urged that this specimen be a.n.a.lyzed for the presence of psychoactive tryptamines. If they were found, it would tend to confirm the idea that some species responsible for the buzz of the forest would be discovered to contain tryptamines. The tryptamines are the antenna of a bioelectronic system that allows the insects to key in on harmine present in local Banisteriopsis lianas and through them to key on the collective DNA network. I supposed that if a few of these species resonated, then other shrilling species could tune themselves to the molecular signal- thus amplifying it and sustaining it through the forest for some hours of every day.

Acoustically driven chemical reactions are well known; I felt sure that some of the life processes of the Insecta must be acoustically regulated by a few species in this way.

These unlikely and bizarre ideas unfolded themselves over those long, hot days, while Dennis lay confined to his hammock and I squatted on the earth nearby. By the third or fourth day following the experiment, I had learned enough of the new and peculiarly symbolic language that he was speaking that I was increasingly convinced that through it I could observe him achieving a gradual but progressive integration. Often, then, long silences would fall between the raves, and we would each drift off into a world of private reveries. Several times on such occasions I looked down and noticed with a weird thrill that my unconscious fingers had been engaged in gathering small twigs and arranging them in patterns as though they were to be miniature fires. This unconscious laying of small fires by my busy fingers seemed to me most extraordinary- I interpreted it then as a literal overflowing of the organizing energies that were being poured into me from some unknown source, the same source that was supplying me with energy so that I could matter of factly go without sleep.

Occasionally Dennis would interrupt me to ask that I or Ev smoke a cigarette for him.

Questioning uncovered his belief that in hypers.p.a.ce the topology of all human bodies is continuous and so he could effortlessly absorb what he needed directly out of our bodies.

For five days life went on in that mode, a waking dream of overkill by palindrome and pun. We sent amazingly few waves of interaction out into the "real world" around us. No one stopped to stare at us or our camp; we seemed to have become invisible. The morning of the tenth of March changed that.

I had hardly been away from the hut and the short stretch of trail that separated it from the edge of the pasture for five days; so after breakfast on that particularly flawless morning I chatted with Dennis and found him calmer and more lucid than he had been at any time since the experiment. So composed and relaxed did he

seem that I made the inevitable mistake of taking the situation for granted. I slipped away with Ev and the b.u.t.terfly net for a relaxed stroll down the trail and deeper into the jungle.

The trail was of washed, white sand, inches deep in places and soft and inviting. We had walked hardly a quarter of a mile when l.u.s.t overtook our interest in lepidoptera. Adding to our thrill was the risk of discovery by Witoto trail users. We tossed caution to the winds and were soon lost in each other. Pleasant it was in that verdant setting to part and defile the s.h.a.ggy, slippery riches of Ev's s.e.x. I thought of it as "Doing it for Vladimir."

Verdant l.u.s.t and b.u.t.terflies were always entwined in Nabokov's enviable mind. We were gone scarcely forty minutes, but returned to the hut and clearing to find it humming with a deserted, heart-sinking air of emptiness. I was no longer afraid that Dennis would wander into the forest and become lost. I was convinced that whatever his state of mind it did not include that sort of thing. What I did fear was that he might focus others' attention on us and the borderline area that we were investigating.

Leaving Ev at the camp in case Dennis should turn up, I ran to the pasture and across it to the mission on the far side. As I ran I was busy telling myself that he had probably just gone down to see Dave and Vanessa and that I would find him there. I was too preoccupied to notice that the bells of the mission, silent normally except on Sundays, had been pealing for some time. As I came over the rise that gave me a clear view of the river house and the lake below the chorro, I saw Vanessa leading Dennis toward the river house. I could sense as I arrived that the situation was more difficult than I had hoped.

Vanessa was angry and had seized the situation to drive home her point. It seemed that Dennis must have bolted from his hammock the moment Ev and I had pa.s.sed out of sight. He had gone straight to the mission, located the bell rope of the bell used to call the people to Ma.s.s, and had rung it furiously until the priest found Vanessa and Dave and they had none too gently persuaded Dennis to desist from his hijinks. Nevertheless, the already circulating rumor that one member of our expedition had gone a bit off the deep end was not eroded by this sudden and totally public outrage. The delicate political balance I had established allowing me to

have my way in the matter of how to treat Dennis was now destroyed. Vanessa's idea that he should be moved to the river house was brought forth and endorsed by the priests and, I was told, by the police. Riding on the inner a.s.surance that worry would be preposterous and acknowledging that I had completely lost control of the situation, I agreed to all suggestions.

Vanessa had more news. An airplane was coming. It was not coming to take us out, but it would enable us to begin our withdrawal, since it would allow one of us to get a lift over a hundred kilometers of jungle to San Raphael, where we had left the cache of equipment before making the overland march to La Chorrera. This was the only opportunity to fly rather than walk back to those supplies, and Vanessa pressed that we should take advantage of it. I agreed with everything. I a.s.sumed that the eruption of the millennium would soon obviate all such mundane concerns, but that was a fact that I would let others discover for themselves as they made their way into the ever-deepening dimension of the future.

Dave volunteered to go on the airplane-the decision was made almost at a moment's notice. He would reach our supplies and single-handedly undertake to have them and himself s.h.i.+pped up the Rio Putumayo and then back to Bogota. We would meet him back there when and if we got out by some means not yet clear. A bag was hastily packed. The airplane came skimming in, and then it was gone again, and with shocking suddenness we were four.

Dennis was moved to the river house, and Vanessa and Ev became his nurses. I preferred to continue to live at the jungle house to avoid crowding. The debate continued as to whether the direction in his raving was toward improvement or whether he was only drifting further into the world in which he had become lost. As residents of Berkeley, we had all encountered acid casualties; comparison of Dennis's state with those lost souls was not rea.s.suring. Dennis's move to the river was a turning point, for from then hence the effects the phenomenon unleashed were less in our minds and more in the world.

Through it all, even after the move, he and I were still after the lens-shaped object. What the teacher told me in the first few days after the experiment was, "You almost got it; you didn't quite get it." Or rather it used the metaphor of condensation: "It is condensing."

It was like a perfect alchemical metaphor. The stone is everywhere. It is here.

Dennis would say, "I can see the lapis. It is two hundred and fifty feet away to the left; it's down near the waterhole, hovering above the water." I continued to ask him each day for the stone, and each day the Sophie hydrolith-a.k.a., the universal panacea-would get closer in. There were freak lightning storms. Slowly I noticed that meteorological phenomena tended to concentrate in the southeast. I began to look there and whenever I did, I would see rainbows.

Our intuitions concerning what was going on ranged from the religiously profound to the utterly absurd. On the afternoon of the twelfth of March, Dennis underwent a few hours when he was able to respond, however cryptically, to the questions we put to him concerning how things appeared to him. This conversation went on at the river house underneath which a handsome rooster and his mate were living. He was perhaps the very c.o.c.k that I heard crow at dawn on the day of the experiment and again two days later.

There was a perky alertness about this c.o.c.k and hen that had received comment among us before. This particular afternoon, Dennis called our attention to the little hen, saying that if one thought of her as art, then the achievement she represented was immense. Who could make such a hen? Only the one who could have fas.h.i.+oned the peculiar world that we had fallen into. And that was? He looked around expectantly, but finding no takers he delivered his own punch line: "James Joyce."

Over the next few minutes he proceeded to make his case: that Finnegans Wake represented the most complete understanding yet achieved of the relation of the human mind to time and s.p.a.ce and that therefore Joyce, at his death, had somehow been shouldered with the responsibilities of overseeing this corner of G.o.d's universe. In this Dennis was only following Wyndham Lewis, who made Joyce's ascent to eminence in the afterworld the subject of his novel The Human Age.

"Jim and Nora," as Dennis called the newly revealed deity and his consort, were both in and acting through everything at La Chorrera, particularly in the things that Joyce had loved. The little hen as the symbol of Anna Livia Plurabelle of the Wake was one of

these things. It was Joyceaen humor that radiated outward from everything in our jungle Eden. These ideas were absurd but delightful, and they led me eventually to reread Joyce and to accept him as one of the true pioneers in the mapping of hypers.p.a.ce. They did not, however, shed much light on our predicament at the time.

From the view of life as literature Dennis moved on. He reminded me that one of our alchemical a.n.a.logues for the philosopher's stone, which we shared in our private code of a.s.sociations as children, was a certain, small, silver key to a box of inlaid wood with a secret compartment that had belonged to our grandfather. I reminded him that the key had been lost since our childhood. I said that the ability to produce that key right then would prove the reality of Dennis's shamanic powers and ability to transcend normal s.p.a.ce and time. The conversation took the form of a question-and-answer session that ended with Dennis demanding that I hold out my hand, and then, slapping his closed hand into my open one, letting out a loud, ludicrous squawk, and depositing in my palm a small, silver key.

At the time I was thunderstruck. We were hundreds of miles from anywhere. He was practically naked, yet the key before me was indistinguishable from the key of my childhood memories. Had he saved that key over all those years to produce it now, in the middle of the Amazon, to completely distort my notion of reality? Or was this only a similar key that Dennis had been carrying when he arrived in South America, but that I had somehow not noticed until he produced it? This seemed unlikely. He was confined to a room far from our stored equipment, and it was difficult to conceive of him becoming calm and organized enough to go to the baggage and carefully sort through it to find the secreted key. And anyway, it was I who had conceived of asking for the key; had he somehow tricked me into asking for the one object that he had brought with him to deceive me? This matter of the silver key, whether it was the original key or not, has never been satisfactorily settled. The original box was lost long ago, so the key was never tested. A final ironic note is added to the episode by the fact that both Dennis and I are fans of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and so were aware of his story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," a tale seething with

many dimensions, strange beings, a cosmic time scale, and reckless, oddball adventurers like ourselves. After Dennis was moved to the river house, there was no longer any need for my sleepless watch at night. But the lack of a need to sleep prevailed. I actually looked forward each night to the time when everyone would retire and I would have before me long hours of delicious, silent thought. Like the fox spirit of the / Ching who wanders eternally among the jeweled, night gra.s.ses, I wandered in the pastures and on the trails around La Chorrera. Sometimes I would sit beneath the AMA-initialed tree for hours, watching vast mandalas of time and s.p.a.ce turn and glisten around me. At times I would walk with long strides, nearly loping, head thrown back, gazing at the every-colored stars. Effortlessly, the deeper something that shared my mind connected up the constellations for me and showed me the enormous Zodiacal machine of stellar fate that must have come to the ancients with the same suggestive force.

I immersed myself in millions of images of humankind in all times and places, understanding and yet struggling with the insoluble enigmas of being and human destiny.

It was during those velvet, star-strewn, jungle nights that I felt closest to understanding the tripart.i.te mystery of the philosopher's stone, the Alien Other, and the human soul.

There is something human that transcends the individual and that transcends life and death as well. It has will, motive, and enormous power. And it is with us now.

I have come to believe that under certain conditions the manipulative power of consciousness moves beyond the body and into the world. The world then obeys the will of consciousness to the degree that the inertia of pre-existing physical laws can be overcome. This inertia is overcome by consciousness determining the outcome of the normally random, micro-physical events. Over time the deflection of micro-events from randomness is c.u.mulative so that eventually the effects of such deflections is to s.h.i.+ft the course of events in larger physical systems as well. Apparently, when want-ing wishes to come true, patience is everything.

Is this just a fantasy, a grown man trying to explain to himself how wishes can come true? I don't think so. I have lived it and

know that the greater the amount of time that consciousness has in which to make its effects felt, the greater the possibility becomes that the desired event will come to pa.s.s. It is as though subtle pressure toward a given end accomplishes a series of micro-deviations leading to a non-random and anti-entropic situation-a wish come true. And I confess the desire to make wishes come true was a wind ever blowing at my back. I remember being so small that my mother could cradle me in her arms, and she would lean over me and whisper the old nursery rhyme, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." I could say it before I could understand it. In fact I am still trying to understand it.

Now it seems to me that this must be how consciousness works within the brain, where matter and energy are in a more unbound and dynamic state than throughout the rest of nature. It is easy for consciousness to direct the electrical flow in the central nervous system (though we have no idea how this is done); it is less easy for it to move, not electrons, but the whole atomic system spread far and wide in time and s.p.a.ce. This may explain why it is easy to form a thought, but having one's wishes come true takes longer.

I pondered these things during the long, starry nights at La Chorrera when the very heart of the mystery of being seemed about to give itself to me. Alchemical gold was ever flowing through my fingers; I was certain that if I could alloy it with hope and imagination it would not pa.s.s away.

I saw that there is an interphase between consciousness active in the world and consciousness active in the central nervous system, whose intermediary is the body. That interphase is language. To use language, consciousness informs the brain to inform the body to impart coherency to the random motion of the air molecules near but outside the body. This coherency is supplied by consciousness in the form of a word. None of the physical laws operating on the air molecules have been violated, because the coherent pattern of behavior of the molecules is due to an input of energy-an input of energy whose release was initiated by an act of conscious will. Will is not an item in the toolkit of scientific explanation.

Language is thereby seen to be a kind of parapsychological ability since it involves action at a distance and telekinesis, albeit

voice-transduced. Perhaps under the influence of psilocybin an immense energizing of will could be vocally transduced into the world where it might do more than imprint a signal onto the random motion of air molecules. Perhaps instead a word, visibly beheld, might be transduced and appear through appropriate s.h.i.+fts of refraction in those same nearby air molecules.

Normal speech itself is sometimes seen to effect the refractive index of the air in front of the speaker's mouth. Viewed in profile a speaker is sometimes seen to generate a wavering of the air in front of the mouth that is like the s.h.i.+mmer of a mirage above a hot highway. Perhaps this is an indication of the hidden potential of speech to go beyond its normal function of symbolizing reality to actually signifying it. A more perfect Logos would seem to be the result- a Logos able to regulate the activity of the ego as it exists in the sum total of individuals living at any time. It is like a G.o.d; it is the human G.o.d. It is something that will happen to human destiny sometime in the future, and because it will happen, it is happening. Nothing is unannounced. The ontological mode of the higher dimensions into which humanity is being propelled is being antic.i.p.ated by the singularity that we call the wholly Other or the alien. The alien is teaching something through its reinforcement schedule: It is preparing us to confront the G.o.d facet of ourselves that our explorations into the nature of life and matter are about to reveal.

Such was the table talk of our distressed band of adventurers. How long ago our arrival at La Chorrera then seemed!