When later we talked it became apparent that her experience had dimensions for her that had not been apparent to me. From the moment we had first stepped out of the house, she discovered that the sensation of heat had not diminished but grown stronger. She noticed that directly above her was a disk of light and color-a giant tinker-toy a.s.semblage of softly glowing rods of light, with jewel-like connectors emanating every color.
"I understood," she told me, "that the relationships of the places-their lengths, their angles to each other-was infinitely complex and also the embodiment of perfect truth.
By seeing it, I was understanding everything ... but there were creatures inside the vehicle, mantis-like and made of light, that didn"t want me to know. Bending over their instrument panels, the more I understood, the more they burned me with their ray. I couldn"t stop looking, but I was being vaporized. I felt you pick me up and, as you carried me, I thought, "I hope he hurries. I"m becoming a cloud...." For a moment I was floating above and looking down at us-people bigger than life, out of time. Then I felt the water on my skin redefining the limits of my body and condensing me again."
Kat"s impression of the situation was that this was not a threat conveyed by the mushroom, but a force inside the continuum that
the mushroom makes available-a force that is seemingly morally ambiguous: pirates in hypers.p.a.ce? Kat was having a UFO close-contact experience while I was seeing nothing.
It was a contact fraught with danger and the threat of extinction. It had abruptly terminated when I had doused her with water.
We sat up all night discussing what had happened. It served to accentuate other odd things that we had noticed when taking psilo-cybin in that remote environment. We had particularly noticed small scratching and rustling noises at the periphery of sense and vision during the trips, not unlike the activation of a cla.s.sic poltergeist phenomenon.
These small movements and noises were so regular a feature of these experiences that I came simply to accept them. We also noticed waves of activity that seemed to sweep through animate and inanimate matter alike during the mushroom voyages. For instance, after a prolonged period of near-trance in contemplation of the visions, if we were to draw away from it in a collective motion to stretch or talk, the fire would suddenly flare and burn brighter and the rustling at the periphery would increase. We were definitely at the brink of the same dimension that I had been plunged into at La Chorrera, again brought there by the agency of the mushroom. This time, however, we took our threat- laden brush with the thing as an admonition for us to ease up for a time. It was after this that we determined to go to Peru, to take ayahuasca and get some perspective on the nature of psilocybin relative to other visionary plant hallucinogens.
Our walks in the rain forests of Hawaii were a pale but real echo of Amazon trails once followed in the past and in a few months to be traveled again. It was during one of those walks, reflecting on her encounter with the mantis-beings and their machines of light, that Kat pointed out that a lens is the natural result of the overlapping of two spheres. Is there something to be learned by applying this idea to the lens-shaped UFO? Perhaps some topological truth is implied in the thought that the lens is caused by the over-lapping of one continuum with another. Lenticular clouds were a part of the UFO contact that occurred at La Chorrera in 1971. This theme reemerged during those psilocybin experiences in the desolate landscapes of rural Hawaii.
On yet another mushroom trip, when Kat and I stepped outside late at night, we beheld the stars through the moving
interstices of a high lacework of thin clouds. Yet, hovering only a few hundred feet above and slightly in front of us, was a very dark, dense lenticular cloud. It grew more solid appearing as we watched; suddenly this tendency was reversed and it began to thin and fade very quickly. Then it was gone.
Years go by and there is little intrusion of the peculiar into daily life. Then suddenly it is with us again, effecting coincidence and appearing to channel the flow of events toward some end which is sensed but not possible to antic.i.p.ate. The paranoiac patina that has formed over modern society makes feedback from the culture difficult to evaluate. From a certain perspective, humanity is always a creature in transformation, imparting to every moment the deeply felt mystery of the unrealized future. Is the present situation really any different from many others in the past?
Novelty is always in the process of emergence, but does it ever emerge explicitly, suddenly, from the events in which it is embedded? And what are we to make of it when it does emerge suddenly enough for us to recognize it as a true flux of the temporal continuum? I believe in miracles and ecstasy and in situations where "forces" are seen to be at work that are undescribed by today"s physics. I felt it was necessary to retrace these familiar threads of my own life and thought. If I had not done this then no record would exist of the halting steps we took at La Chorrera, steps that lead us toward understanding psilocybin and its relation to the human soul-that knot of precious anomaly and fragile feeling that haunts our planet like a ghost.
EPILOGUE.
In which I return to the present, Introduce my fellow explorers as they are today, and genuflect before the weirdness of it all.
So WHERE DOES THIS all leave us today? Did the cosmic giggle move on? Am I like an archaeologist, condemned now to work diligently with toothbrush and nut-pick, attempting to exhume and rea.s.semble the broken shards of dreams and visions obtained in long forgotten times and places? It was easy to look back and to tell this story as if it were a completed cycle, something finished and resplendent in its completion. The problem with that approach is that this story is true, its actors real people, their lives ongoing. The major mysteries of the experiment at La Chorrera remain just that, mysteries even to this date. My colleagues, my friends and lovers, have changed and moved on. Different fates have claimed each of us. Dave remained in South America, having returned to the United States only once in the last twenty years, for the briefest of visits. I have not seen him since 1971.1 know that he has lived in most of the countries of Andean South America.
For years he remained true to his itinerant hippie roots, traveling from one high alt.i.tude village to the next teaching the local women to crochet. By now I should imagine that this minor art form is well established in places where before his
visits it must have been utterly unknown. He didn"t make it to the West Coast during his short visit to the States, but he called me and we talked at length. Same old Dave as far as I could tell.
Ev married the friend for whom she left me in 1975, and they are still married, with a son soon old enough to be sent off to college. I have not seen Ev or her husband since her departure in 1975. We talked once on the phone years ago. I muttered something about how it might be nice to have dinner sometime, but it was up to me to follow through, and I never did. This avoidance has not been casual or unconsidered. There is still a reluctance on my part and a lingering pain that goes deep and puzzles me-but it is not to be lightly gone against.
Vanessa returned to the States from the Amazon and followed in the tradition of her father and sister by obtaining a medical degree. Today she lives in Berkeley, as does Ev, and is a psychiatrist with a thriving practice. We see each other too rarely, and when we do get together I am reluctant to raise the issue of La Chorrera for two reasons. The first is that we were at opposite ends of the spectrum in our judgments concerning those events. And the second is that I don"t wish to have our friendship turn, as it easily could, into a review of what might be thought of as my "case." Vanessa is smart and fair and has no motivation to judge me harshly. Our original differences arose out of her belief that, at the time, my unwillingness to treat Dennis"s condition at La Chorrera as a medical crisis was the result of my own callousness, selfishness, lack of character, or just plain nuttiness.
The only person who was part of the original team to whom I feel I can still rave at full bore with concerning the experiment at La Chorrera is Dennis. He obtained his degrees in botany, molecular biology, and neurochemistry years ago. He is now the scientist that at La Chorrera he could only aspire to be. He is married, has a precocious child, and works as a research pharmacologist for a Silicon Valley outfit called Shaman Pharmaceuticals.
He tolerates my raving but is careful never to encourage me. I think that his att.i.tude is still much as it was only a few months after the experiment, that whatever happened the toll on him was too great. He likes to rest with the facile argument that what happened was only a folie a deux, a delusion of two brothers grieving for their recently deceased mother and obsessed with conquering hypers.p.a.ce. When I marshal my case against this and argue the evidence that something much more was going on, he reluctantly agrees, then shakes his head and turns away. To this day he remembers very little of what actually went on between the fourth and the twentieth of March 1971, and he prefers to keep it that way.
So without rancor or surprise I can say that the matter is pretty much in my keeping. The morning that we all flew out of La Cho-rrera in Tsalikas"s small plane, I was twenty-four years old, penniless, without plans, considered mad by my closest friends, and with a price on my head. In the intervening years, I have done what I could to keep the issues surrounding the experiment at La Cho-rrera from being forgotten.
Together, during the mid-seventies, Dennis and I developed and promulgated the techniques for growing the mushrooms. Though others followed us into the field, we were the first and loudest to preach the home cultivation of psychedelic mushrooms. This technology brought to tens of thousands of dedicated and curious seekers the option of exploring what would otherwise have been an obscure and un.o.btainable tryptamine hallucinogen. Psilocybin-taking in the seventies was the major factor creating and sustaining a small but dedicated public following for ideas such as those developed at La Chorrera. Over the years, the story of La Chorrera and the ideas sp.a.w.ned there have slowly made their way into public awareness via my books, and a film soon to be planned around them. My position is interesting but not enviable. Because the major idea to emerge out of this experience is the timewave and the computer software that supports it, I am in the absurd position of being either an unsung Newton or completely nuts. There is very little room to maneuver between those two positions. The timewave paints a radical picture of how time works and what history is. It provides a map of the global ebb and flow of novelty over the next twenty years and it also makes a prediction of a major transformational event in 2012. This is only as far in the future as La Chorrera lies in the past. It is soon.
These personal developments have taken place against a background of deepening problems in the real world and a rising interest in the psychedelic experience by young people. I am, I am told,
a minor icon in the culture of the underground. Is this all simply due to my schizophrenic tenaciousness in promulgating what are ultimately really only my ideas? Or do I have the winds of history blowing at my back and really did befriend the Logos and learn the secret of the universe, or at least one of many secrets, in the chaos at La Chorrera?
I honestly confess that I do not know. As I write these words my marriage to Kat of nearly sixteen years seems caught up in a process of dissolution painful to both of us.
This despite our two children, the house we built together, and both our efforts to be decent people. Apparently the presence of the Logos has done nothing to mitigate or ward off the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Like the Soul in Yeats"s poem I am still an eternal thing fastened to the body of a dying animal.
Yet if my sense of a special destiny and a way to save the world from the more dangerous and vulgar parts of itself is a delusion, then it is a grand delusion and one that is dying in me only slowly and by inches. I am a.s.sured by the people around me-publishers, editors, agents, marketing experts-people who are obviously uninformed as to the whispered promise of a special destiny made to me by the elves of hypers.p.a.ce, that I am going to be big, have influence, and change the way people think.
Perhaps this will be true. I hope so. Something happened at La Chorrera, something extraordinary. I was extremely fortunate to have briefly glimpsed a strange, beautiful, and better sort of world and to have made a marvelous pact with the alien G.o.ds who dwell there. The timewave, created over years of work, is both a prophecy concerning, and a map to, that better world. That I am an unworthy vessel for such high-minded work, I am sure. I have tried to make these transcendent fantasies return to normal and take their place in the mundane and dying worldview in which we all are imprisoned by late twentieth-century culture. But the job has been more than I could do.
My fear is that if these ideas are less than true then our world is destined for a very final and ordinary death, for reason has grown too feeble to save us from the demons we have set loose. My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery
calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past. Twenty years after the experiment at La Chorrera, I still cannot say that it shall not be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
THE AUTHOR WISHES to express appreciation to the many friends who encouraged the writing of this book. Twenty years in the writing means their names are legion, but especially important are Ernest Waugh and Kat Harrison McKenna, both of whom read and criticized the ma.n.u.script at various stages. Thanks also to Dennis McKenna, who encouraged the telling of our adventures, and to the other members of our expedition, who offered no objections to a public revealing of our story. Special and very deep thanks is due to Dan Levy, who believed in this project from the first moment that he encountered my work and who did a superb job in editing and criticizing these pages.
Without his support this tale would still be an embryonic ma.n.u.script. Special thanks also to Tom Grady, my in-house editor at Harper San Francisco, to Jeff Campbell, who did the copyediting, to Leslie Rossman, my indefatigable publicist, and to Jaime Robles, who oversaw the design of the book. Also grateful thanks to my agent, John Brockman, and his a.s.sistant, Katinka Matson. Sincere thanks also to Sara Hartley, who allowed her photograph to be used as the frontispiece. And finally thanks to all the fans, friends, and colleagues who over the years have insisted that the story of La Chorrera reach all those who sense the importance of the psychedelic experience and the strange dimensions that is makes accessible.
FURTHER READING.
Abraham, Ralph, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake. Tria-logues at the Edge of the West. Albuquerque: Bear & Co., 1992.
Burroughs, William, and Allen Ginsberg. The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 1963.
Dee, John. The Hieroglyphic Monad. Translated by J. W. Hamilton-Jones. London: Stuart & Watkins, 1947.
d.i.c.k, Phillip K. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. London: Triad Panther, 1964.
---------. Valis. New York: Bantam Books, 1979.
-. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.
Evans-Wentz, W. E. The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. New York: University Books, 1966.
Ghosal, S., Dutta, S. K., Sanyal, A. K., and Bhattacharya. "Arundo Donex L. (Graminae), Phytochemical and Pharmacological Evaluation." In the, Journal of Medical Chemistry, vol. 12 (1969), p. 480.
Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. New York: Arbor House, 1986.
--------. Count Zero. New York: Arbor House, 1986.
---------. Neuromancer. New York: Ave Books, 1985.
Graves, Robert. Difficult Questions, Easy Answers. New York: Dou-bleday, 1964.
-. Food for Centaurs. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
Graves, Robert. The White G.o.ddess. New York: Creative Age, 1948. Guenther, Herbert V. Tibetan Buddhism Without Mystification. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966.
Hardenburg, W. E. The Putumayo: The Devil"s Paradise. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912.
Harner, Michael. "The Sound of Rushing Water." In Natural History, July, 1968.
Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954.
Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber & Faber, 1939. ---------. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1922.
Jantsch, Eric. The Self-Organizing Universe. New York: Pergamon Press, 1980.
Jung, C. G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in The Sky. New York: Pantheon, 1954.
---------. Mysterium Coniunctioriis. New York: Pantheon, 1963.
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. "Monadology." In the Philosophical Works of Leibnitz.
Translated by G. Martin Duncan. New Haven, CT: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1890.
Lewis, Wyndham. The Human Age. London: Methuen, 1928.
Ludlow, Fitz Hugh. The Hashish Eater. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857.
Maier, Michael. Atlanta fugiens. hoc est. emblemata nova de secretis naturae chymica.
Oppenheim, 1618.
McKenna, Dennis, and Terence McKenna. The Invisible Landscape. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.
McKenna, Terence. The Archaic Revival. San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1992.
---------. Food of The G.o.ds. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.
---------. Synesthesia. New York: Granary Books, 1992.
Munn, Henry. "The Mushrooms of Language." In Shamanism and Hallucinogens. Edited by Michael Harner. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973. Nabokov, Vladimir. Ada. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. ---------. Pale Fire. New York: Lancer, 1963.
Oss, O. T., and O. N. Oeric. Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower"s Guide. Berkeley, CA: And/Or Press, 1975, rev. 1985.
Ponnamperuma, Cyril, and A. G. W. Cameron. Scientific Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Communication. Boston: MIT Press, 1974.
Prigogine, Ilya. From Being to Becoming. San Francisco: Freeman, 1980.
---------. Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems. New York: Wiley Interscience, 1977.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity"s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1974.
---------. V., New York: Bantam Books, 1963.
Rilke, Ranier Maria. The Duino Elegies. New York: Norton, 1939.
Schultes, R. E. "Virola as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen." In the Botanical Museum Leaflets of Harvard University, vol. 11 no. 6, pp. 229-40.
Sheldrake, Rupert. A New Science of Life. Los Angeles: Tarchei, 19BL ------. The Presence of the Past. New York: Times Books. 196&.
Stapleton, Olaf. The Starmaker. London, 1937.
Taussig, Michael. Shamanism Colonialism and the Wildman. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987.
Templeton, Alex. The Sirius Mystery. New York: St. Martin"s Press, 1976.
Valentine, Basil. The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony. London, 1685. Vallee, Jacques.
The Invisible College. New York: Dutton, 1975.
Wa.s.son, R. Gordon. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
Wa.s.son, R. G., Albert Hoffman, and Carl Ruck. The Road to Eleusis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.