True Hallucinations Part 5

Our move began shortly after dawn in order to avoid the heat of the day. The trek to move ourselves and our equipment to the new home involved going through pastures we had not seen since our mushroom experience three days before. The Stropharia seemed to be everywhere. There seemed not to be a cow-pie without its golden flush of perfect mushrooms. I promised myself that as soon as we had squared away the new hut and otherwise settled in, that we should again take the mushroom.

However, in all of our recent surge of speculation, our original ethn.o.botanical intentions, the search for the elusive Oo-koo-he, had

not been forgotten. Far from it. Our immediate intent was to use ayahuasca as a MAO- inhibitor and a problem-solving drug, and to brew and take the Banisteriopsis caapi that Ev and I had gotten from Basilio a few days before.

As it happened, Ev and I spent the rest of the day following the move clearing the ground around the hut and pulling large tree roots out of the sandy soil. We stacked them in the sun to dry out so they could serve as fuel for the fire we needed to brew up our ayahuasca. We seemed to glory in physical exertion. Energy and light seemed to fill everything. Taking his notebook, Dennis, who had been rather withdrawn and snappish since his experience with inner sound and its mixed reception by us, wandered down the forest trail in the direction of the Witoto village thirteen kilometers away. In the middle of the afternoon he returned, very excited. He had completed writing out the preliminary notes for what became "the experiment at La Chorrera." It is the only written record of his ideas that was actually made at the time, and as such, it is the only piece of written, primary evidence that we have about how we viewed what we were doing as we were doing it.

These notes do not of course represent the final form of our theorizing about these matters and are not at all to be taken at face value. Refinement of these ideas has been constant since their creation.* But how complete the vision was and how finely worked its detail! The theory that is represented in my brother's notes remains the operational basis for understanding the effect that was triggered on March fifth at the conclusion of the experiment. His notes were our working blueprint, and they were very effective. They are not, however, for the reader of faint heart, since they read like the words of an alchemical text. Alchemy is a test of the limits of language as much as a test of the limits of matter. Alchemical machinery runs smoothest in the imagination. Magicians will wish to linger over these alchemical mutterings, which I will help decipher in the next [*The scientific basis of our work is elaborately described in The Invisible Landscape.

That work represented our considered, composite opinion as of 1975. Since then these ideas have been much revised as the myths and fallacies spun into the fabric of their first conception have been separated out.]

chapter. The rest of my readers might wish to skim over them and hurry on with what is, even without the adumbrations of arcane theory, a ripping good story: March 2,1971 Further experiments with the psycho-audible warp phenomenon yesterday raise some interesting new questions and enhance our ongoing understanding. I chose the term "audible warp " because my experience thus far, coupled with what I have been told, leads me to believe that this all has to do with vocally generating a specific kind of energy field which can rupture three dimensional s.p.a.ce. I do not understand if the field is electromagnetic, but it seems to bend s.p.a.ce in such a way as to turn it upon itself through a higher dimension. Here is how it is done: One must take enough psilocybin to allow the sound to be audible. This sound we understand to be the Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) of the psilocybin alkaloids within the mushroom. The presence of rapidly metabolizing high-energy tryptamines within the ayahuasca acts as an antenna that sensitizes the neural matrix to the spin resonance energy of the Stropharia psilocybin. It is this principle that allows the signal to be made audible. It must then be amplified via the tryptamine admixture antenna to what is felt to be its fullest amplitude. Then, via vocal sound, this energy is placed into the harmine complex within the body and within the mushroom which has been, in some small part, cooled to absolute zero-the temperature at which molecular vibration ceases, through absorption of the psilocybin ESR pulses.

Once this ESR wave has been detected, it will be possible to amplify it within the neural circuits by channeling it through the harmine complex: i.e., by imitating the psilocybin ESR with the voice, causing the amplified sound to strike a harmonic tone with the harmine metabolizing in the brain and thereby exciting the harmine ESR. Since harmine complexes are merely further down the same bio-synthetic pathway that converts tryptophane into psilocybin, it is possible to consider the ESR tone of psilocybin as a harmonic overtone of harmine and vice versa.

Using harmonic overtones, it is possible to sound a tone which will cancel one or more of its octaves reflected in the harmonic scales above and below it. This is easily demonstrated on a cello: Suppose a tone, say the open string A, is sounded. The sound is a wave-vibration of air molecules caused by the string, which then acts as a resonator.

The tone is heard mostly loudly in the key in which it was sounded, but it also sounds every other key of "A " in the octaves above and below it. It is possible to cancel out the original tone by touching the string very lightly at certain harmonic points. When this is done, the overtones in the higher and lower registers become audible. If one understands the theory of harmonic resonators well enough, one can determine which overtones will be resonated if certain points on the string are touched.

When this understanding is applied to molecular ESR res-onation, it remains essentially the same in principle. When the ESR tone of the psilocybin is heard via tryptamine antenna, it will strike a harmonic tone in the harmine complexes being metabolized within the system, causing its ESR to begin to resonate at a higher level. According to the principles of tonal physics, this will automatically cancel out the original tone, i.e., the psilocybin ESR, and cause the molecule to cease to vibrate; however, the ESR tone that sustains the molecular coherency is carried for a microsecond on the overtonal ESR of the harmine complex. This leaves the momentarily electrically canceled and superconductive psilocybin suspended in a low energy electromagnetic field generated by the harmine ESR. In so doing, it will regain its original, but now superconductivity amplified, ESR signal, which will permanently lock it into a superconductive state.

As this phenomenon proceeds, it will automatically trigger the inverse of the initial process. The psilocybin, superconductively charged by mind, will harmonically cancel the ESR resonance of the harmine within the brain. The energy of the harmine-psilocybin complex ESR will be absorbed instantly into the matrix of the mushroom. This will cause those molecules metabolizing within the body and bonded to the neural DNA to instantly drop to absolute zero. Clearly this harmine-psilocybin-DNA complex must immediately separate itself from the cellular matrix. There is great danger at this moment, but pathways exist to deal with it. We will find that these molecules condense out of our bodies accompanied by a sound. This sound will be the harmonic ESR tone of this complex amplified superconductively and broadcast and frozen into the superconductive matrix of the mushroom. The superconductively charged psilocybin acts as an antenna which picks up the amplified ESR signals of the complex and condenses vibrational signals into a superconductive matrix.

The opus can now be briefly summarized: * The mushroom must be taken and heard.

* The ayahuasca must be taken and charged with overtonal ESR of the psilocybin via voice-imparted, amplified sound.

* The ESR resonance of the psilocybin in the mushrooms will be canceled and will drop into a superconducting state; a small portion of the physical matter of the mushroom will be obliterated.

* The superconductively charged psilocybin will pick up the ESR harmonic of the ayahuasca complex; this energy will be instantly and completely absorbed by the higher- dimensional tryp-tamine template. It will be transferred to the mushroom as vocal sound and condensed onto the psilocybin as a bonded complex of superconductive harmine- psilocybin-DNA.

* The result will be a molecular aggregate of hyperdimen-sional, superconducting matter that receives and sends messages transmitted by thought, that stores and retrieves information in a holographic fashion in neural DNA, and that depends on superconductive harmine as a transducer energy source and superconductive RNA as a temporal matrix. This aggregate will be a living and functioning part of the brain of the molecular "singer" who creates it. It will be composed of higher dimensional matter, i.e., matter that has been turned through the higher dimension via the process of canceling its electrical charge with a harmonic vibration, transmitting that vibration across s.p.a.ce (from superconductive transmitter to superconductive receiver), and then recondensing that vibration onto a superconductive template (the charged psilocybin in the mushroom), until the harmine-psilocybin-DNA complex condenses into a superconducting molecule.

A molecule that is higher dimensional matter would, by

this theory, be stable as long as it remains in a superconducting configuration, probably forever, since it is powered by its own ESR energy. It will then be responsive to command via endogenous tryptamine ESR (thoughts), it will be keyed into our collective DNA, and it will contain harmine as a superconductive transceiver and power source.

Talk about a steep learning curve! I had never heard my little brother carry on so. To the extent that I grasped what Dennis was saying, he thought, and it seemed a magnificent thought to me, that the body is like an undiscovered musical and scientific instrument whose potential lies all around and within us, but of which we are unaware. He said that the mind, through an act of will, could use the singing voice to interact with the brain as though it were a color organ and holographic library all wrapped up into one.

Dennis pointed the way toward a kind of Orphic science where the great advances would be made by using only the interaction of the quarternity of singing voice, mind, brain, and imagination. More, however, than a chant-induced, collective synesthesia was promised.

He was saying that the laws of acoustics and low amperage bioelectrical phenomena, and our bodies, could be manipulated to give the experimenter a doorway into exploring states of matter and realms of physics involving high energy and low temperature that are, currently at least, supposed to be the exclusive province of researchers totally dependent on extremely sophisticated and powerful instruments. It became possible for a moment to dream that the powers of shamanism, derived from a millennium-old knowledge of microphysics and bioelectronics, was far in advance of our own. The doorway that seemed to swing open was a doorway out of historical time, back toward some sort of archaic completion nearly forgotten.

Perhaps the shamanic traditions of this planet are the keepers of an understanding that uses the human body/brain/mind as its vehicle, leaving the present state of the art, which our own "scientific method" has achieved, a very poor second. This is really an old idea-the siren song of Pythagoras-that the mind is more powerful than any imaginable particle accelerator, more sensitive than

any radio receiver or the largest optical telescope, more complete in its grasp of information than any computer: that the human body- its organs, its voice, its power of locomotion, and its imagination- is a more-than-sufficient means for the exploration of any place, time, or energy level in the universe. It was this idea that Dennis would set out to prove, to realize in the actual hardware of the dimension-roving lenticular vehicle that he was convinced could be generated out of his own DNA and living organisms present at hand in the Amazonian environment-the mushroom and the ayahuasca.

CHAPTER NINE.

A CONVERSATION OVER SAUCERS.

In which the details of the plumbing of the Resurrection Body are rehea.r.s.ed for each and all, and a partial test of our theory is made.

As I READ DENNIS'S NOTES, I felt that the themes of the strange place we had come to had crystallized. I felt again the sense of something in the sky, calmly omniscient but closely observing us. I returned to the beginning and read the notes all over again, but I had no basis whatsoever to judge what I was reading. My brother's scientific speculation seemed to have acquired a life of its own. He was like a great, all-knowing computer.

Around our campfire, we all listened to him explain his idea for the experiment. He was very deeply involved. Ideas were coming out of him like spaghetti from a rasher, thousands of words about all of these strange things. He said, "You know what we could do?" Then he laid down the rap that is now enshrined as the central doctrine of the opus.

He called it hyper-carbolation. According to his theory, you could use the singing voice and superconductivity (or the complete disappearance of electrical resistance, usually only possible with temperatures at absolute zero) to drive the molecules

of psychedelic compounds into states of permanent a.s.sociation-or bonding-with living human DNA.

Dennis's rap drew on the theory of sound. If you pluck a string, it will sound in the octave in which it is struck, but it will also sound in octaves above and below its key. It has what are called harmonic overtones. If you strike the chord and then squelch it, you can still hear the harmonic overtones, a phenomenon that had fascinated Pythagoras. Dennis pointed out to us that one can use two sounds to cancel each other if the two sounds are exactly the same in relation to each other.

The same phenomenon that produces harmonic overtones can be used to still the movements of molecules. In very localized areas, perhaps only a few thousand angstroms across, one can produce low temperatures with audio cancellation. Molecular motion is a type of vibration and in the presence of just the right audio input such molecular motion will cease. Operationally speaking, when molecular motion ceases the molecule has reached a temperature of absolute zero, and superconductivity becomes possible.

Dennis felt he had figured out a way to blow the locked doors of paradise right off their hinges using psychoactive compounds, psilocybin, the tryptamine complex, and the beta- carbolines that occur in ayahuasca. He said that if you look at the vibration of molecules in the beta-carboline family, you find that the electron spin resonance of these molecules, moving from one to another, is in fact a series of harmonic overtones. This is interesting because psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo had reported in The Healing Journey that 50 percent of his subjects who took harmine, a beta-carboline occuring in ayahuasca, reported a buzzing in the head. It was not a.s.sociated with other kinds of psychedelics; it seemed to be uniquely a.s.sociated with these harmine compounds. The Jivaro shamans of Ecuador also report a buzzing in the head. Dennis's idea was that when ayahuasca is metabolizing through one's neural matrix in the brain, a sound is heard.

Explaining just how this happens is far from simple. Electron spin resonance is a phenomenon of molecular structure in which high frequency energy is put into the molecular system and electron spin resonance signals emerge from the system. But not all compounds have an electron spin resonation; to exhibit ESR activity a molecule must have a ring free of molecular enc.u.mbrances. All compounds with a free ring will resonate under certain conditions. The hallucinogens we were interested in have free rings, as does DNA, the molecule at the center of the genetic machinery of all life.

When your body is metabolizing the alkaloids in ayahuasca, a relationship is formed with the tryptamine metabolites in the brain. A sound is heard that is characteristic of the interaction. Once the sound is heard, it can be imitated. Then what you have is a vocal sound.

Ordinarily it would not occur to anyone to draw a connection between this sound and the signals produced by the ESR, which occur in the microphysical realm. Here was where Dennis made his leap into delusion or illumination, for he began to insist that he could do things with this sound. By vocalizing, Dennis felt that he would, in effect, be emitting an amplified spin resonance signal, an amplified ESR-modulated sound that would be coming from the psilocybin metabolizing in his brain. Making this sound would set up a series of harmonic vibrations above and below it in other compounds also active in his brain.

Now, from this theoretical basis, we take flight. If he is in the correct spatial orientation to the molecule he is directing sound at, when he stops making the sound he is hearing, the molecule will become superconductive, because its vibration has been canceled. Of the many millions of this kind of molecule struck by this sound, a few dozen or hundreds will be in the correct geometrical orientation and their molecular motion will be stilled almost instantly. Now a peculiar property of low temperatures is that very high bonding energies appear between molecules. A molecule close to absolute zero will bond to anything. It just forces its way into the structure.

Dennis tried to explain: "The harmine molecule, which is structured like a little bell, gives a bell-like chiming and buzzing sound. If we come on it right and cancel it and there is neural DNA active in the brain, the electrical configuration of harmine is enough like the molecular configuration of adenine, one of the bases in DNA, that it will replace it. It will bond through into the chain. And when it is bonded in, its ring will become activated. It is the same size as

adenine, but it's a little more complicated. It has a free resonance ring." Dennis paused and then gathered his thoughts to continue.

"Now the normal ESR of harmine is a simple signal, but the electron spin configuration of DNA is very, very complicated. It is a broad band. When the harmine goes in there it will cease to broadcast its own resonation because it will have become very tightly bonded into the structure of the macro-molecule. It will instead begin to broadcast the ESR resonation of the DNA. That's it. If you have followed it this far, the rest is easy.

DNA is what you are. The physical form is just a lot of juicy macro-physical crystals caused by gene expression, you know, the result of enzymes set in motion and coded by DNA. Neural DNA is known to be non-metabolizing. It does not go away. The meat on your body comes and goes every few years. Your skeleton is not the same one you had five years ago, but neural DNA is an exception. It is there for all time. You come into the world with it. It records and it is an antenna for memory. Not only our personal memory, but any ent.i.ty or organism which has DNA in it; there is a way to find a connection to it.

This is how we open a pa.s.sage to the Divine Imagination, this is how William Blake understood Redemption. This is now within reach.

"This is how it's done. You put a radio into the DNA and this ESR resonation will begin to flood your system because the bond will be permanent; there will be no way to disrupt it. It will tell you everything-everything that can be known in the world of s.p.a.ce and time because it contains your own and everyone else's records. We are all connected through this magical substance, which is what makes life possible and which causes it to take on its myriad forms. All DNA is the same. It is the settings that are different; you get b.u.t.terflies, mastodons, or human beings, depending on the settings."

"Or so you say," was my noncommittal reply. But I had the distinct impression that I did glimpse his meaning. Organisms are complex structures that have emerged and stabilized their forms over millions of years. They are literally shaped by the ebb and flow of time on a vaster scale than any individual lifespan can experience or compare itself to.

Organisms have enfolded in their embryology, in their morphology, a message about the structure of the larger universe. Mysticism has always insisted on this. Molecular biology as the inheritor of the theory of evolution seems to confirm it.

Perhaps life is a strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy to a level where a macrophysical chemical system, in effect human beings, can experience and understand it? If one of us could pharmacologically redesign our neurocellular chemistry, there might indeed be strange new realms of perception and understanding to be explored, brave new worlds of the imagination based on new ratios of neurotransmitters in the still-evolving brains of human beings. I thought, "Who am I to judge?"

I was intrigued by his precision in invoking these ideas, but for the moment I simply did not know what to say. He stared at me, clearly expecting more. I believed in the infinite, self-transforming power of the human mind and species, and I could suppose that there were parallel worlds and alternative dimensions. I could imagine any number of science fiction possibilities, provided that I was not asked to believe, that I was about to be present personally at their discovery or unleashing. But this is what Dennis was saying: We had somehow stumbled upon or been led to the trigger experience for the entire human world that would transform the ontological basis of reality so that mind and matter everywhere would become the same thing and reflect the human will perfectly. How could anyone conceive of such a thing? We had come to La Chorrera with a belief that if life and mind are possible, then the mysteries of the universe might well be inexhaustible. Yet something very pa.s.sive, yet ever present, was there elaborating these ideas in our minds-something that we had thought of for some days as "The Mushroom."

We talked for more than an hour about these ideas and what finally emerged was the need for a test, or at least Dennis maintained that a partial test of the idea could be undertaken to convince me and our companions. He thought that as the superconducting state became stabilized there should be a marked lowering of temperature in the immediate area. In our talking, he and I had left the area of the hut and drifted down the forest path. It would be possible to attempt to generate the effect of coolness right there on the spot, he supposed.

We seated ourselves on the sandy path facing each other, with the afternoon sun on both of us. After a couple of preliminary low, mechanical buzzes, Dennis made a sound very similar to the one he

had unleashed in the knoll house three days before. This sound had an extremely peculiar quality and, as it rose in intensity, I looked down at the hair on my arms and saw it rise as goose-flesh formed and a wave of intense shivering swept over me. I yelled at Dennis to stop. He did instantly and seemed much drained by the effort. I was quite disoriented. I frankly could not tell whether a real wave of very cold air had swept over me or whether that particular sound had somehow made my body react as though it was being exposed to cold air. It was not lost on me that if the effect had truly generated a blast of cold air, then it had violated the known laws of physics. But I did not care to experiment further- the whole thing had an eerie aura about it and if the effect was real, who knew what could come of pushing it too far? I was more confused than ever by my enigmatic brother and his burgeoning ideas and abilities. The whole thing seemed absurd and yet very compelling, like a hypnotic game into which one becomes absorbed in spite of oneself.

"Now can we call the press conference?" Dennis asked insistently on our return walk down the trail. But I could barely hear him so lost in delicious antic.i.p.ation of previously unimaginable futures was I.

We returned to our camp and mentioned to all present that Dennis had generated the wave of cold air that he had predicted from the theory. But it was all sufficiently ambiguous that no one felt drawn to comment. After dinner, Vanessa and Dave returned to the riverside house and Ev, Dennis, and I settled into our first night in the forest since arriving at La Chorrera.

Dennis was in a state of continual activity, amplifying his ideas and trying out new wrinkles on us. That night and the next day, he retired into a world of very intense activity. He wrote his ideas over and over, the steps to do it and the theory of why it should work. He spent lots of time alone writing, then he would come back and talk to us. He was on to something very strange; his word-pictures caused reality to shimmer and crinkle at the edges. He was really in touch with this bubbling obsidian fourth dimensional fluid that we were going to stabilize into a usable tool. And end history. And go to the stars.

My att.i.tude was "Fine, we'll try it." The atmosphere was drenched with the bizarre. Now we had arrived at the center of the Amazon and we could feel something in the sky, watching. At first, we had been happy heads trying to explore one last fairy tale so we could be rationalists forever, and instead we encountered something enormous.

Something alive and very old and very strange. Something peculiar in every extreme.

I was quite uncreative in this period. I had taken the mushroom and was ecstatic all the time. It was the only time in my life when I was truly content simply to be. I had quite effortlessly formed the a.s.sumption, which I a.s.sumed was shared by all, that we would never leave La Chorrera. Leaving seemed unimaginable since all things seemed to be perfectly present there. The sense of homecoming and of being at last where one was supposed to be was at times overwhelming. As for the future, I imagined that I would simply listen to Dennis rave. His vision into which my credulity was dissolving went beyond anything that anyone I knew had ever dreamed of.

We had set the following evening, that of March 4, as the day we would test the full theory of the harmine-DNA bond. I noted with unusual satisfaction that this day corresponded with an idiotic pun that had stuck with me since earliest childhood: "What day of the year is a command?" Answer: "March fourth."

"How fitting then," I ranted and raved. "How fitting that we will attempt to concretize the soul on that day." Absurdly, the coincidence of the date with that pun seemed part of a universal secret plan unraveling to bring us to the history-culminating moment when humanity would march into a higher dimension. My own thoughts seemed to me to be nothing like the super-scientific theory formation that my brother was involved in. I was baffled by much of what was going on. That day, March 3, I amused myself constructing a pipe out of the strange, heart-shaped Macoubea fruits that we had otherwise given up on as inedible. From one of those fruits and a hollow reed and a bit of river clay, I constructed a water pipe that gave me great satisfaction.

While the jargon of the ESR biophysicist whirled around me, I contemplated what I had achieved with two plants and a bit of

mud. It seemed to me a marvel of ingenuity, and because the fruit was so strange, there was something about it vaguely unearthly. This pipe might have been fashioned from one of the fruits that gentle Weena offered the Time Traveler in Wells's epic. My pipe was a weird and haunting object, and when it was smoked the bubbling of the water beneath the thick rind sounded very like the beating of some great mammalian heart. Even Dennis paused to admire this pipe, and we determined that it would be used in our experiment when the moment came to smoke some of the ayahuasca bark to boost the harmine levels in our blood. We were operating in a world where scientific method, ritual, and partic.i.p.ation mystique were inseparably intertwined. Our own minds and bodies were to be the retorts, the vessels, of the psycho-alchemical transformation that we were experimenting with.

That afternoon we all pulled roots and stacked them in the sun. It seemed the most satisfying activity imaginable. Nothing could have seemed more right. That evening we made a tape of our intentions, but unfortunately our tape recorder was not in good working order and that tape has proven impossible to salvage. I greatly regret this loss, since the emotional content of what we were experiencing would come across most clearly from our own words. The taping session ranged over a number of themes: Hyper-carbolation: This is what we had named the process of altering the neural DNA and changing man into an eternal hyper-dimensional being. It was a process we imagined to be intimately akin to s.e.xual generation. We spoke of it as the "birth of an idea" in a sense whose literalness is not easy to convey to minds that have not brushed with schizophrenia. We hoped that mind, driven by a will to the good, could control the process of generation and guide this process toward the production of the imagination- modulated resurrection body so dear to the Patristic Fathers, sixteenth-century alchemists, and modern UFO enthusiasts. In this notion we were following Jung, who early on realized that the flying saucer is an image of the self, the suppressed psychic totality that lurks behind the apparent dualism of mind and nature. We thought that the field of mind and its will toward the good could be templated onto the genetic engines of life. The hope was that out of biology, Tantra could

summon the reality of the living stone, the chimerical unicorn of the alchemical quest made at last to lay his head in the maiden's lap. We dreamed, in short, of a union of Spirit and Matter.

The dead: We believed that hyper-carbolation was to be the shamanic defeat of death, that those doorways through which the dead enter daily were to be finally thrown open to a hyper-carbolated humanity, which would then have freedom of movement to and from an eternity in which all the members of the species existed as a living reality. The presence of giants from the human past-Carl Jung, Newton and Nabokov, Bruno, Pythagoras, and Herac.l.i.tus- was an overwhelming and all-inclusive intuition that we shared and could not ignore.

There seemed to be an ideological lineage, the golden chain, whose collective task was the shattering of the historical continuum through the generation of the living philosophical lapis of hyper-carbolated humanity. All these visionary thinkers had performed their part in this project. Now, as the secret work of human history, the generation of Adam's cosmic body, lost since paradise, neared completion, these shades stirred and pressed near to our Amazonian campsite. Our destiny was apparently to be the human atoms critical to the transformation of h.o.m.o sapiens into galaxy-roving bodhisattvas, the culmination and quintessence of the highest aspirations of star-coveting humanity.

The psychologically minded will recognize this as a description of messianic ego inflation. Such it is, but we felt these things as anyone would feel them if they truly believed they were at such a point in history. We wondered, "Why? Why us?"

To such questions the mushroom spoke in my mind without hesitation: "Because you have diligently sought the good and because you trusted no human being more than yourself."

The emotional impact of these sorts of inner exchanges was intense beyond anything I have ever experienced. I felt humbly grateful to the point of tears. I felt exalted. We wanted to salvage paradise for humanity, and we thanked all G.o.ds and nature that our eccentric quest, out of all the lives and paths being lived out on earth, was placed by fate so near the cutting edge. Where the elder shamanism had failed, we would succeed. The rescue of the timeless pearl of

human immortality from the well of death would, through the act of hyper-carbolation, become a living reality for every person who had ever lived. All the pain and suffering and war and desperation would somehow be repaid and made right through the intercession of the mystery of higher dimensions and a backward flowing logic of time that somehow undoes what has already happened. The wave of understanding that had been gaining strength since the twenty-seventh of February was so strong as to be nearly visible in everything around me. The lenticular shape of the approaching philosopher's stone seemed to be everywhere that I looked. Every shape and form around me was pregnant with its unearthly, opalescent depths.

CHAPTER TEN.

MORE ON THE OPUS.

In which we refine the theory and begin preparations for experimental test flights of the Sophie Aerolith.

The NEXT DAY WAS the much-antic.i.p.ated fourth of March. After we made breakfast we did not tear down our fire as we normally would have done. Instead we began to brew the carefully shredded Banisteriopsis caapi vines in several gallons of spring water. The fire made of the gnarled and now sun-baked roots burned furiously. The pot responded with an even, rolling boil that is the correct condition for making the brew.

All afternoon long we three cooked and said little. Dave and Vanessa used this time to visit and photograph the old village of La Chorrera across the lake. That evening they were to join us for a light meal, after which they had agreed to withdraw from the group and allow the ayahuasca-taking and the experimental test of hyper-carbolation to go on without them. I am sure that Dennis's mind, far more than my own, was preoccupied with the details of the test. During the days preceding, he had been often irritable, and this I took to be a part of the spectrum of effects accompanying whatever odd sort of mental unfoldment he was experiencing. While he was thus preoccupied with interior issues and vistas, I was the hawk-eyed guardian of the shamanic fires and procedures.

There recently had been much discussion of fire and the role it must have played in forming the mental world of archaic human beings. Once, as we sat staring into the camp fire, Dennis had remarked to me that, "People have been looking into fires like this for thousands and thousands of years. The squeal of these coals is the release of ionized plasma and in the flickering waves of free electrons thus created, one can see into the past and the future. The fire is the place where the ideas come from."

I was silent. I felt our ancestors then, seemingly present on the other side of the interface represented by the flame. "What is happening to us?" I again asked myself, but said nothing, silence seeming more eloquent.

Dennis, completely occupied with creating a test that would reveal the phenomenon in such a way as to overturn skepticism, spent part of the day writing furiously: March 4, 1971 It is now possible to reconstruct the physical-chemical idea that has evolved in the process of understanding this phenomenon: i.e., the fourth-dimensional rotation of matter.

I understand from examining the linguistic model we have constructed that the waveform ESR interference that will accomplish the work operates in a somewhat different manner than I had thought. It can be explained thus: The psilocybin that occurs in the mushroom acts as an antenna for picking up and amplifying the harmonic ESR tones of all tryptophane-derived compounds of all living organisms within its range. Since the psilocybin undergoing metabolism is superconductive, this means that its range of reception is theoretically infinite. The antenna does, to some degree, pick up a signal whose ultimate origin is the totality of living creatures; but since the psilocybin metabolism is carried on within the brain (or mushroom) at a very low voltage level, the antenna behaves as though its range was limited, even though it is superconductive. I see this notion as an effort to explain the very real sense of informational interconnectedness that pervaded our experience, which occurred in one of the densest tropical forests on the planet. We did seem to be in touch with the living mind of the

tropical forest. Perhaps tryptamine compounds are the mediators of the signaling mechanisms of the command-and-control structure that regulates and integrates whole ecosystems. More Dennis: It seems clear, therefore, that the signal, which when we are intoxicated on the mushroom in this ecologically dense area can be discerned so clearly, originates in the ESR resonation of the ayahuasca plant, though perhaps all the biosphere is picked up and broadcast, amplified via the ayahuasca superconductive transducer. This understanding will clarify precisely what will occur at the moment of fourth-dimensional warp.