Eighth Words from B.C.
Ok, I'm back at the keyboard again, and it's going to be a long one. That means I'm not going to do too much sidetracking or add a lot of poetic flourishes. There are a few things I wanted to mention before I go into my extraordinarily fascinating and mindblowing primary subject.
Pavement. Not the road, the band. I've been listening to their album Terror Twilight. What an awesome album. Better than Slanted & Enchanted in my opinion. My favorite line of all: "Irish folk tales scare the shit out of me."
On the Road. Finished reading it. I enjoyed it, but it made me sad to realize how much the world has changed since then. Also finished a collection of poetry by Charles Bukowski called Open All Night. I'd like to share one of the poems called "I don't want Cleopatra" with you all. It's not exactly a typical Bukowski piece, but I liked it. After that I'll get into the heavier material.
I am always exposing myself.
I go out on the front porch in my shorts
bend over to pick up the paper and
my parts fall out.
I sunbathe nude in the backyard
and sometimes stand up.
"you fool," my girlfriend says,
"Mrs. Catherty can see you over the
wall!"
"where is she?" I ask.
"she's standing right there watering her
rose bushes!"
"oh..."
"get down!"
to me, nudity is a joke.
I don't think nude people are attractive
at all.
I like my women fully clothed.
I like to imagine what might be under
there.
it might not be what you'd expect.
imagine stripping a woman down
and she has a body like a little submarine
with a periscope, propellers, a few torpedoes.
she would be the one for me!
I'd marry her right off and
be faithful to the end.
Now, about Terence McKenna's ideas. It occurred to me that I may not have provided enough context with the passages I quoted. I decided that in order to correct this I would go back through the book and pick out a number of selections that will hopefully contextualize and expand upon his ideas that I presented previously. I must apologize to anyone reading who was hoping for strictly original material from these emails, but I don't foresee all of you reading the whole of True Hallucinations and this way I can familiarize you with the important parts that I would like to talk about. Don't worry, I will be adding my own thoughts as well.
This first passage is a description of McKenna's experience smoking synthesized DMT at Berkeley. It should give you an idea of where he's coming from when he talks about words being transduced into something visible.
"I had had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures. Dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Faberge eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry. They seemed to be babbling in a visible and five-dimensional form of Ecstatic Nostratic, to judge from the emotional impact of this gnomish prattle. Mirror-surfaced tumbling rivers of melted meaning flowed gurgling around me. This happened on several occasions.
It was the transformation of language that made these experiences so memorable and peculiar. Under the influence of DMT, language was transmuted from a thing heard to a thing seen. Syntax became unambiguously visible. In searching for parallels to this notion I am forced to recall the wonderful scene in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice encounters the hooka-smoking caterpillar seated on a mushroom. 'Who R U?' the caterpillar inquires, spelling out his question in smoke above his head...
Which is not to say that DMT is to be thought of as a stimulus for mere inner cartoons. It is not. The feeling that radiates from the DMT encounter is hair-raisingly bizarre. It is as much as one can stand without the categories of consciousness becoming permanently rewritten. I am occasionally asked if DMT is dangerous. The proper answer is that it is only dangerous if you feel threatened by the possibility of death by astonishment. So great is the wave of amazement that accompanies the dissolving of the boundary between our world and this other unsuspected continuum that it approaches being a kind of ecstasy in and of itself." (7-8)
Later on in the book he makes the following comment, similar but brief.
"The normally invisible syntactical web that holds both language and the world together can condense or change its ontological status and become visible. Indeed there seems to be a parallel mental dimension in which everything is made of the stuff of visible language, a kind of universe next door inhabited by elves that sing themselves into existence and invite those who encounter them to do the same." (73)
Now I know that some of you may be a little put off by his description of these visions as "elves." Keep in mind, though, that this is an attempt to describe what is basically indescribable. It is fantastical, but it is not a fantasy. The important thing to consider is what he's saying about the synesthesia of meaning. Words are just symbols, but it is possible for meaning to come from direct sensory input. Words can sometimes even be an impediment to conveying meaning. As Jen said in her reply to my last email words "come with preconceptions and mistaken identity." This can make it very difficult to describe hallucinogenic experiences. McKenna says this is particularly true of DMT experiences "where a kind of glossolalia of thought, which had seemed the very embodiment of meaning to me, seemed mere gibberish when verbalized and heard by other people." (53) This reminds me of a second hand story I believe I heard from Steve about two people who were tripping on psilocybin mushrooms and carrying on a meaningful conversation with each other, but which was heard as blathering and strange vocal noises by their sober companion. I myself have experienced what I might call a deconstruction of language (though in reverse) while on psilocybin. While I could read words and hear them spoken, and though I recognized them as the English language, they seemed to be in a completely random order and devoid of coherent meaning. I decided I would check this apparent randomization of language by memorizing something read while tripping and rereading it when sober. I chose to read some words on Trevor Wideman's stereo that didn't seem to make sense to me. I read them as "linear skating mechanism." Unfortunately, the next day it still said "linear skating mechanism" and it still didn't make sense to me. That experiment, admittedly, was unsuccessful and inconclusive. I am still curious to know the parameters of this incomprehension. Was I actually hearing and seeing things differently? Or was I simply not able to interpret it properly? My limited attempt to obtain an answer seems to suggest the latter. In either case, why was this so? What had the mushrooms done to cause this? I must further take into account that it was not only language that seemed to undergo randomization. My apparent perception of time itself was jumbled. I felt at some moments as though I was remembering what was in the future and experiencing now what had already happened and what should have been happening now was going to happen in the future. For example, given a timeline of 5 minutes, my awareness would not move linearly through that time as normal (0:00-0:30, 0:30-1:00, 1:00-1:30, etc.). It would move through sections randomly (4:00-4:30, 1:30-2:00, 3:00-3:30, 4:30-5:00, 0:00-0:30, etc.). One might consider it a kind of temporal dyslexia. Although this is not an entirely accurate portrayal it is probably the best I can do with the limited symbolism of words.
I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here and I'd like to come back to the visible language idea for a moment before moving on again. Steve wrote in his email to me that he didn't think it would be possible for human eyes to detect micro-density changes in the air. Yes and no. What I quoted was merely a speculation, on the extreme end of possibility. However, it is actually possible to see such movement of air molecules. I should have included this next quote at the time. It follows directly after the one in question. "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 shimmer 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." (151)
Now before I get to the final topic of my discussion (which is really the most intriguing and ontologically challenging) I'd like to share a somewhat unrelated portion of the book. It's unrelated to what I plan on talking about, but it's one of the more interesting stories contained therein. It's about an experience Terence McKenna had in Nepal with an English couple he met there while investigating hallucinogenic use of pre-Buddhist shamanic practices in the area.
"The method I had evolved for probing the shamanic dimension was to smoke DMT at the peak point of an LSD experience. I would do this whenever I took LSD, which was quite occasionally. It would allow me to enter the tryptamine dimension for a slightly extended period of time. As the summer solstice of 1969 approached, I laid plans for another such experiment.
I was going to take LSD the night of the solstice and sit up all night on my roof, smoking hashish and star-gazing. I mentioned my plan to my two English friends, who expressed a desire to join me. This was fine with me, but there was a problem; there was not enough reliable LSD to go around. My own tiny supply had arrived in Kathmandu, prophetically hidden inside a small ceramic mushroom mailed from Aspen.
Almost as a joke, I suggested that they substitute the seed of the Himalayan Datura, Datura metel, for the LSD. Daturas are annual bushes and the source of a number of tropane alkaloids--scopalamine, hylosciamine, and so on--compounds that produce a pseudo-hallucinogenic effect. They give an impression of flying or of confronting vague and fleeting visions, but all in a realm hard to keep control of and hard to recollect later. The seeds of Datura metel are used in Nepal by saddhus (wandering hermits and holy men), so their use was known in the area. Nevertheless my suggestion was made facetiously, since the difficulty of controlling Datura is legendary. To my surprise, my friends agreed that this was something they wanted to do, so we arranged that they would arrive at my home at six PM on the appointed day to make the experiment.
When the evening finally came, I moved my blankets and pipes up to the roof of the building. From there I could command a fine view of the surrounding village... Six o'clock came and went, and my friends had not arrived. At seven they still had not been seen, and so I took my treasured tab of Orange Sunshine and settled down to wait. Ten minutes later, they arrived. I could already feel myself going, so I gestured to the two piles of Datura seeds that I had prepared. They took them downstairs to my room and ground them with a mortar and pestle before washing them down with some tea. By the time they had returned to the roof and gotten comfortably settled, I was surging through mental space.
Hours seemed to pass. When they seated themselves, I was too distant to be aware of them. She was seated directly across from me, and he farther back and to one side, in the shadows. He played his flute. I passed the hash pipe. The moon rose full and high in the sky. I fell into long hallucinatory reveries that each lasted many minutes but felt like whole lifetimes. When I had emerged from a particularly long spell of visions, I found that my friend had stopped playing and had gone away, leaving me with his lady.
I had promised them both that I would let them try some DMT during the evening. My glass pipe and tiny stash of waxy orange DMT were before me. Slowly, and with the fluid movements of a dream, I filled the pipe and gave it to her. The stars, hard and glittering, stared down from a mighty distance on all of this. She held the pipe and took two deep inhalations, sufficient for a person so frail, then the pipe was returned to me, and I followed her into it with four huge inhalations, the fourth of which I held onto until I had broken through. For me it was an enormous amount of DMT and I immediately had a sense of entering a high vacuum. I heard a high-pitched whine and the sound of cellophane ripping as I was transformed into the ultra-high-frequency orgasmic goblin that is a human being in DMT ecstasy. I was surrounded by the chattering of elf machines and the more-than-Arabian vaulted spaces that would shame a Bibiena. Manifestations of a power both alien and bizarrely beautiful raged around me.
At the point where I would normally have expected the visions to fade, the pretreatment with LSD synergized my state to a higher level. The cavorting hoards of DMT elf machines faded to a mere howling as the elfin mob moved on. I suddenly found myself flying hundreds of miles above the earth and in the company of silvery disks. I could not tell how many. I was fixated on the spectacle of the earth below and realized that I was moving south, apparently in polar orbit, over Siberia... In a series of telescoping leaps, I went from orbit to a point where I could specifically pick out the circular depression that is the Kathmandu Valley. Then, in the next leap, the valley filled my field of vision. I seemed to be approaching it at great speed. I could see the Hindu temple and the houses of Kathmandu... Among the several hundred roof tops I found my own. In the next moment I slammed into my body and was refocused on the roof top and the woman in front of me.
Incongruously, she had come to the event wearing a silver satin, full-length evening dress--an heirloom--the sort of thing one could find in an antique clothing store in Notting Hill Gate. I fell forward and thought that my hand was covered by some cool, white liquid. It was the fabric of the dress. Until that moment neither of us had considered the other a potential lover. Our relationship had functioned on quite a different level. But suddenly all the normal sets of relations were obviated. We reached out toward each other, and I had the distinct impression of passing through her, of physically reaching beyond her. She pulled her dress over her head in a single gesture. I did the same with my shirt, which ripped to pieces in my hands as I took it off over my head. I heard buttons fly, and somewhere my glasses landed and shattered.
Then we made love. Or rather we had an experience that vaguely related to making love but was a thing unto itself. We were both howling and singing in the glossolalia of DMT, rolling over the ground with everything awash in crawling, geometric hallucinations. She was transformed; words exist to describe what she became--pure anima, Kali, Leucothea, something erotic but not human, something addressed to the species and not to the individual, glittering with the possibility of cannibalism, madness, space, and extinction. She seemed on the edge of devouring me.
Reality was shattered. This kind of fucking occurs at the very limit of what is possible. Everything had been transformed into orgasm and visible, chattering oceans of elf language. Then I saw that where our bodies were glued together there was flowing, out of her, over me, over the floor of the roof, flowing everywhere, some sort of obsidian liquid, something dark and glittering, with color and lights within it. After the DMT flash, after the seizures of orgasms, after all that, this new thing shocked me to the core. What was this fluid and what was going on? I looked at it. I looked right into it, and it was the surface of my own mind reflected in front of me. Was it translinguistic matter, the living opalescent excrescence of the alchemical abyss of hyperspace, something generated by the sex act performed under such crazy conditions? I looked into it again and now saw in it the lama who taught me Tibetan... I could not understand it. I looked away from the fluid and away from my companion, so intense was her aura of strangeness...
Then the thought of discovery sobered me enough to realize that we must get away from this exposed place. Both of us were completely naked, and the scene around us was one of total, unexplainable chaos. She was lying down, unable to rise, so I picked her up and made my way down the narrow staircase, past the grain storage bins and into my room. The whole time I remember saying over and over to her and to myself: "I am a human being. I am a human being." I had to reassure myself, for I was not at that moment sure.
We waited in my room many minutes. Slowly we realized that by some miracle no less strange than everything else that had occurred, no one was awake demanding to know what was going on. No one seemed even to have heard! To calm us, I made tea and, as I did this, I was able to assess my companion's state of mind. She seemed quite delirious, quite unable to discuss with me what had happened only a few moments before on the roof. It is an effect typical of Datura that whatever one experiences is very difficult, indeed usually impossible, to recollect later. It seemed that while what had transpired had involved the most intimate of acts between two people, I was nevertheless the only witness who could remember anything at all of what had happened.
Pondering all of this, I crept back to the roof and collected my glasses. Incredibly, they were unbroken, although I had distinctly heard them shatter. Obsidian liquids, the ectoplasmic excrescences of tantric hanky-panky, were nowhere to be seen. With my glasses and our clothes, I returned to my room where my companion was sleeping. I smoked a little hashish and then climbed into the mosquito net and lay down beside her. In spite of all the excitement and the stimulation of my system, I immediately went to sleep." (58-63)
Though I don't speak from experience, I can assure you that actually experiencing this would be about a billion times more bizarre and mindblowing than the description. The weird thing about Datura is that, not only is it incredibly difficult to remember what happens while on it, often people don't realize they are intoxicated while on it. They may hold long conversations with inanimate objects, but at the time it seems perfectly normal. It's not something you would want to do without a sitter to accompany you (especially if you decide to venture outdoors). But that's neither here nor there (you know, I really like that expression).
This is where it should really get interesting. I'm going to begin with a final quote from McKenna, from which I will go into some really ripping concepts.
"Before Einstein, space was thought to be a dimension where one put things; it was analogous to emptiness. Einstein pointed out that space is a thing that has a torque and is affected by matter and by gravitational fields. Light passing through a gravitational field in space will be bent because the space through which it travels is bent. In other words, space is a thing, not a place where you put things.
What I propose, in a nutshell, is that time, which was also previously considered a necessary abstraction, is also a thing. Time not only changes, there are different kinds of time. And these kinds of time come and go in cyclical progressions on many levels; situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space. These two patterns condition matter. Science has long been aware of the patterns of space--we call these 'natural laws'--but the patterns of time? That is another consideration entirely.
Matter has always been assumed to epitomize reality, but it actually has some qualities more nearly like thought. Changes in matter are defined by two dynamic patterning agencies that are in a co-relationship: space and time. This idea has certain axioms, one of which is taken from the philosopher-lensmaker Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz. Leibnitz described monads, which he envisioned as tiny particles that are infinitely reduplicated everywhere in the universe and contain all places within themselves. Monads are not merely here and now; they are everywhere all the time, or they have all space and time within them, depending on your point of view. All monads are identical, but they interconnect to build up a larger continuum while at the same time maintaining their individual, unique perspectives. These Leibnitzian ideas anticipated the new field of fractal mathematics, an exotic example of which is my idea of a temporal pattern.
Ideas such as this offer a possible explanation for the otherwise mysterious mechanisms of memory and recall. Destruction of up to 95 percent of the brain does not impair memory function. It appears that memory isn't stored anywhere; memory seems to permeate the brain. Like a hologram, all of the memory seems to be in each part...
This 'holographic' aspect of memory has been assumed to be of central importance by such thinkers as David Bohm and Karl Pribram." (195-196)
It gets even more interesting when you consider an experiment performed by physicist J.S. Bell. What he did, in a nutshell, was break an atom in half and change the spin of the electrons on one of the halves. What he found was that regardless of distance apart the electrons on the other half would also change instantaneously. So could the two halves of the atom somehow communicate with each other over vast distances by some kind of signal? Well, no signal can travel faster than the speed of light so apparently that is not the case. What Bohm suggests is that the two halves aren't really separate at all, that the whole physical universe is actual a kind of hologram itself. In other words, the separateness of objects is merely an illusion. Bringing in McKenna's idea of time as a thing like space we see that the illusion applies in both time and space. This again connects with Leibnitz's monads being everything, everywhere, always. The idea of a holographic universe, evidenced in numerous areas, may also explain some paranormal phenomena such as telepathy. If all things are connected on a deeper level than what we perceive it is much easier to understand how the minds of two different people can be connected. Further, if our perceived reality is only a projection then it must be much more malleable than we suspect. What we believe to be impossible may actually be possible. The limitations of our physical world may simply be a matter of consensus. In conclusion (because I'm not sure what else to say at this point), let's all drop some shrooms and explore the vast realms beyond our fixated perceptions. Until the next one.
Tony "The thing behind the fridge attacked the cat again" Hawkins
Note: I would very much appreciate feedback on this one. Did I really go overboard with the quotes? Should I have gone deeper into the subjects? Were the subjects too heavy? Was it simply too long? Should I just stick to reciting what I did the past week? Would you like more poetry or more prose? More philosophizing or more storytelling? Or am I doing everything just fine?
Pavement. Not the road, the band. I've been listening to their album Terror Twilight. What an awesome album. Better than Slanted & Enchanted in my opinion. My favorite line of all: "Irish folk tales scare the shit out of me."
On the Road. Finished reading it. I enjoyed it, but it made me sad to realize how much the world has changed since then. Also finished a collection of poetry by Charles Bukowski called Open All Night. I'd like to share one of the poems called "I don't want Cleopatra" with you all. It's not exactly a typical Bukowski piece, but I liked it. After that I'll get into the heavier material.
I am always exposing myself.
I go out on the front porch in my shorts
bend over to pick up the paper and
my parts fall out.
I sunbathe nude in the backyard
and sometimes stand up.
"you fool," my girlfriend says,
"Mrs. Catherty can see you over the
wall!"
"where is she?" I ask.
"she's standing right there watering her
rose bushes!"
"oh..."
"get down!"
to me, nudity is a joke.
I don't think nude people are attractive
at all.
I like my women fully clothed.
I like to imagine what might be under
there.
it might not be what you'd expect.
imagine stripping a woman down
and she has a body like a little submarine
with a periscope, propellers, a few torpedoes.
she would be the one for me!
I'd marry her right off and
be faithful to the end.
Now, about Terence McKenna's ideas. It occurred to me that I may not have provided enough context with the passages I quoted. I decided that in order to correct this I would go back through the book and pick out a number of selections that will hopefully contextualize and expand upon his ideas that I presented previously. I must apologize to anyone reading who was hoping for strictly original material from these emails, but I don't foresee all of you reading the whole of True Hallucinations and this way I can familiarize you with the important parts that I would like to talk about. Don't worry, I will be adding my own thoughts as well.
This first passage is a description of McKenna's experience smoking synthesized DMT at Berkeley. It should give you an idea of where he's coming from when he talks about words being transduced into something visible.
"I had had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures. Dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Faberge eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry. They seemed to be babbling in a visible and five-dimensional form of Ecstatic Nostratic, to judge from the emotional impact of this gnomish prattle. Mirror-surfaced tumbling rivers of melted meaning flowed gurgling around me. This happened on several occasions.
It was the transformation of language that made these experiences so memorable and peculiar. Under the influence of DMT, language was transmuted from a thing heard to a thing seen. Syntax became unambiguously visible. In searching for parallels to this notion I am forced to recall the wonderful scene in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice encounters the hooka-smoking caterpillar seated on a mushroom. 'Who R U?' the caterpillar inquires, spelling out his question in smoke above his head...
Which is not to say that DMT is to be thought of as a stimulus for mere inner cartoons. It is not. The feeling that radiates from the DMT encounter is hair-raisingly bizarre. It is as much as one can stand without the categories of consciousness becoming permanently rewritten. I am occasionally asked if DMT is dangerous. The proper answer is that it is only dangerous if you feel threatened by the possibility of death by astonishment. So great is the wave of amazement that accompanies the dissolving of the boundary between our world and this other unsuspected continuum that it approaches being a kind of ecstasy in and of itself." (7-8)
Later on in the book he makes the following comment, similar but brief.
"The normally invisible syntactical web that holds both language and the world together can condense or change its ontological status and become visible. Indeed there seems to be a parallel mental dimension in which everything is made of the stuff of visible language, a kind of universe next door inhabited by elves that sing themselves into existence and invite those who encounter them to do the same." (73)
Now I know that some of you may be a little put off by his description of these visions as "elves." Keep in mind, though, that this is an attempt to describe what is basically indescribable. It is fantastical, but it is not a fantasy. The important thing to consider is what he's saying about the synesthesia of meaning. Words are just symbols, but it is possible for meaning to come from direct sensory input. Words can sometimes even be an impediment to conveying meaning. As Jen said in her reply to my last email words "come with preconceptions and mistaken identity." This can make it very difficult to describe hallucinogenic experiences. McKenna says this is particularly true of DMT experiences "where a kind of glossolalia of thought, which had seemed the very embodiment of meaning to me, seemed mere gibberish when verbalized and heard by other people." (53) This reminds me of a second hand story I believe I heard from Steve about two people who were tripping on psilocybin mushrooms and carrying on a meaningful conversation with each other, but which was heard as blathering and strange vocal noises by their sober companion. I myself have experienced what I might call a deconstruction of language (though in reverse) while on psilocybin. While I could read words and hear them spoken, and though I recognized them as the English language, they seemed to be in a completely random order and devoid of coherent meaning. I decided I would check this apparent randomization of language by memorizing something read while tripping and rereading it when sober. I chose to read some words on Trevor Wideman's stereo that didn't seem to make sense to me. I read them as "linear skating mechanism." Unfortunately, the next day it still said "linear skating mechanism" and it still didn't make sense to me. That experiment, admittedly, was unsuccessful and inconclusive. I am still curious to know the parameters of this incomprehension. Was I actually hearing and seeing things differently? Or was I simply not able to interpret it properly? My limited attempt to obtain an answer seems to suggest the latter. In either case, why was this so? What had the mushrooms done to cause this? I must further take into account that it was not only language that seemed to undergo randomization. My apparent perception of time itself was jumbled. I felt at some moments as though I was remembering what was in the future and experiencing now what had already happened and what should have been happening now was going to happen in the future. For example, given a timeline of 5 minutes, my awareness would not move linearly through that time as normal (0:00-0:30, 0:30-1:00, 1:00-1:30, etc.). It would move through sections randomly (4:00-4:30, 1:30-2:00, 3:00-3:30, 4:30-5:00, 0:00-0:30, etc.). One might consider it a kind of temporal dyslexia. Although this is not an entirely accurate portrayal it is probably the best I can do with the limited symbolism of words.
I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here and I'd like to come back to the visible language idea for a moment before moving on again. Steve wrote in his email to me that he didn't think it would be possible for human eyes to detect micro-density changes in the air. Yes and no. What I quoted was merely a speculation, on the extreme end of possibility. However, it is actually possible to see such movement of air molecules. I should have included this next quote at the time. It follows directly after the one in question. "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 shimmer 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." (151)
Now before I get to the final topic of my discussion (which is really the most intriguing and ontologically challenging) I'd like to share a somewhat unrelated portion of the book. It's unrelated to what I plan on talking about, but it's one of the more interesting stories contained therein. It's about an experience Terence McKenna had in Nepal with an English couple he met there while investigating hallucinogenic use of pre-Buddhist shamanic practices in the area.
"The method I had evolved for probing the shamanic dimension was to smoke DMT at the peak point of an LSD experience. I would do this whenever I took LSD, which was quite occasionally. It would allow me to enter the tryptamine dimension for a slightly extended period of time. As the summer solstice of 1969 approached, I laid plans for another such experiment.
I was going to take LSD the night of the solstice and sit up all night on my roof, smoking hashish and star-gazing. I mentioned my plan to my two English friends, who expressed a desire to join me. This was fine with me, but there was a problem; there was not enough reliable LSD to go around. My own tiny supply had arrived in Kathmandu, prophetically hidden inside a small ceramic mushroom mailed from Aspen.
Almost as a joke, I suggested that they substitute the seed of the Himalayan Datura, Datura metel, for the LSD. Daturas are annual bushes and the source of a number of tropane alkaloids--scopalamine, hylosciamine, and so on--compounds that produce a pseudo-hallucinogenic effect. They give an impression of flying or of confronting vague and fleeting visions, but all in a realm hard to keep control of and hard to recollect later. The seeds of Datura metel are used in Nepal by saddhus (wandering hermits and holy men), so their use was known in the area. Nevertheless my suggestion was made facetiously, since the difficulty of controlling Datura is legendary. To my surprise, my friends agreed that this was something they wanted to do, so we arranged that they would arrive at my home at six PM on the appointed day to make the experiment.
When the evening finally came, I moved my blankets and pipes up to the roof of the building. From there I could command a fine view of the surrounding village... Six o'clock came and went, and my friends had not arrived. At seven they still had not been seen, and so I took my treasured tab of Orange Sunshine and settled down to wait. Ten minutes later, they arrived. I could already feel myself going, so I gestured to the two piles of Datura seeds that I had prepared. They took them downstairs to my room and ground them with a mortar and pestle before washing them down with some tea. By the time they had returned to the roof and gotten comfortably settled, I was surging through mental space.
Hours seemed to pass. When they seated themselves, I was too distant to be aware of them. She was seated directly across from me, and he farther back and to one side, in the shadows. He played his flute. I passed the hash pipe. The moon rose full and high in the sky. I fell into long hallucinatory reveries that each lasted many minutes but felt like whole lifetimes. When I had emerged from a particularly long spell of visions, I found that my friend had stopped playing and had gone away, leaving me with his lady.
I had promised them both that I would let them try some DMT during the evening. My glass pipe and tiny stash of waxy orange DMT were before me. Slowly, and with the fluid movements of a dream, I filled the pipe and gave it to her. The stars, hard and glittering, stared down from a mighty distance on all of this. She held the pipe and took two deep inhalations, sufficient for a person so frail, then the pipe was returned to me, and I followed her into it with four huge inhalations, the fourth of which I held onto until I had broken through. For me it was an enormous amount of DMT and I immediately had a sense of entering a high vacuum. I heard a high-pitched whine and the sound of cellophane ripping as I was transformed into the ultra-high-frequency orgasmic goblin that is a human being in DMT ecstasy. I was surrounded by the chattering of elf machines and the more-than-Arabian vaulted spaces that would shame a Bibiena. Manifestations of a power both alien and bizarrely beautiful raged around me.
At the point where I would normally have expected the visions to fade, the pretreatment with LSD synergized my state to a higher level. The cavorting hoards of DMT elf machines faded to a mere howling as the elfin mob moved on. I suddenly found myself flying hundreds of miles above the earth and in the company of silvery disks. I could not tell how many. I was fixated on the spectacle of the earth below and realized that I was moving south, apparently in polar orbit, over Siberia... In a series of telescoping leaps, I went from orbit to a point where I could specifically pick out the circular depression that is the Kathmandu Valley. Then, in the next leap, the valley filled my field of vision. I seemed to be approaching it at great speed. I could see the Hindu temple and the houses of Kathmandu... Among the several hundred roof tops I found my own. In the next moment I slammed into my body and was refocused on the roof top and the woman in front of me.
Incongruously, she had come to the event wearing a silver satin, full-length evening dress--an heirloom--the sort of thing one could find in an antique clothing store in Notting Hill Gate. I fell forward and thought that my hand was covered by some cool, white liquid. It was the fabric of the dress. Until that moment neither of us had considered the other a potential lover. Our relationship had functioned on quite a different level. But suddenly all the normal sets of relations were obviated. We reached out toward each other, and I had the distinct impression of passing through her, of physically reaching beyond her. She pulled her dress over her head in a single gesture. I did the same with my shirt, which ripped to pieces in my hands as I took it off over my head. I heard buttons fly, and somewhere my glasses landed and shattered.
Then we made love. Or rather we had an experience that vaguely related to making love but was a thing unto itself. We were both howling and singing in the glossolalia of DMT, rolling over the ground with everything awash in crawling, geometric hallucinations. She was transformed; words exist to describe what she became--pure anima, Kali, Leucothea, something erotic but not human, something addressed to the species and not to the individual, glittering with the possibility of cannibalism, madness, space, and extinction. She seemed on the edge of devouring me.
Reality was shattered. This kind of fucking occurs at the very limit of what is possible. Everything had been transformed into orgasm and visible, chattering oceans of elf language. Then I saw that where our bodies were glued together there was flowing, out of her, over me, over the floor of the roof, flowing everywhere, some sort of obsidian liquid, something dark and glittering, with color and lights within it. After the DMT flash, after the seizures of orgasms, after all that, this new thing shocked me to the core. What was this fluid and what was going on? I looked at it. I looked right into it, and it was the surface of my own mind reflected in front of me. Was it translinguistic matter, the living opalescent excrescence of the alchemical abyss of hyperspace, something generated by the sex act performed under such crazy conditions? I looked into it again and now saw in it the lama who taught me Tibetan... I could not understand it. I looked away from the fluid and away from my companion, so intense was her aura of strangeness...
Then the thought of discovery sobered me enough to realize that we must get away from this exposed place. Both of us were completely naked, and the scene around us was one of total, unexplainable chaos. She was lying down, unable to rise, so I picked her up and made my way down the narrow staircase, past the grain storage bins and into my room. The whole time I remember saying over and over to her and to myself: "I am a human being. I am a human being." I had to reassure myself, for I was not at that moment sure.
We waited in my room many minutes. Slowly we realized that by some miracle no less strange than everything else that had occurred, no one was awake demanding to know what was going on. No one seemed even to have heard! To calm us, I made tea and, as I did this, I was able to assess my companion's state of mind. She seemed quite delirious, quite unable to discuss with me what had happened only a few moments before on the roof. It is an effect typical of Datura that whatever one experiences is very difficult, indeed usually impossible, to recollect later. It seemed that while what had transpired had involved the most intimate of acts between two people, I was nevertheless the only witness who could remember anything at all of what had happened.
Pondering all of this, I crept back to the roof and collected my glasses. Incredibly, they were unbroken, although I had distinctly heard them shatter. Obsidian liquids, the ectoplasmic excrescences of tantric hanky-panky, were nowhere to be seen. With my glasses and our clothes, I returned to my room where my companion was sleeping. I smoked a little hashish and then climbed into the mosquito net and lay down beside her. In spite of all the excitement and the stimulation of my system, I immediately went to sleep." (58-63)
Though I don't speak from experience, I can assure you that actually experiencing this would be about a billion times more bizarre and mindblowing than the description. The weird thing about Datura is that, not only is it incredibly difficult to remember what happens while on it, often people don't realize they are intoxicated while on it. They may hold long conversations with inanimate objects, but at the time it seems perfectly normal. It's not something you would want to do without a sitter to accompany you (especially if you decide to venture outdoors). But that's neither here nor there (you know, I really like that expression).
This is where it should really get interesting. I'm going to begin with a final quote from McKenna, from which I will go into some really ripping concepts.
"Before Einstein, space was thought to be a dimension where one put things; it was analogous to emptiness. Einstein pointed out that space is a thing that has a torque and is affected by matter and by gravitational fields. Light passing through a gravitational field in space will be bent because the space through which it travels is bent. In other words, space is a thing, not a place where you put things.
What I propose, in a nutshell, is that time, which was also previously considered a necessary abstraction, is also a thing. Time not only changes, there are different kinds of time. And these kinds of time come and go in cyclical progressions on many levels; situations evolve as matter responds to the conditioning of time and space. These two patterns condition matter. Science has long been aware of the patterns of space--we call these 'natural laws'--but the patterns of time? That is another consideration entirely.
Matter has always been assumed to epitomize reality, but it actually has some qualities more nearly like thought. Changes in matter are defined by two dynamic patterning agencies that are in a co-relationship: space and time. This idea has certain axioms, one of which is taken from the philosopher-lensmaker Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz. Leibnitz described monads, which he envisioned as tiny particles that are infinitely reduplicated everywhere in the universe and contain all places within themselves. Monads are not merely here and now; they are everywhere all the time, or they have all space and time within them, depending on your point of view. All monads are identical, but they interconnect to build up a larger continuum while at the same time maintaining their individual, unique perspectives. These Leibnitzian ideas anticipated the new field of fractal mathematics, an exotic example of which is my idea of a temporal pattern.
Ideas such as this offer a possible explanation for the otherwise mysterious mechanisms of memory and recall. Destruction of up to 95 percent of the brain does not impair memory function. It appears that memory isn't stored anywhere; memory seems to permeate the brain. Like a hologram, all of the memory seems to be in each part...
This 'holographic' aspect of memory has been assumed to be of central importance by such thinkers as David Bohm and Karl Pribram." (195-196)
It gets even more interesting when you consider an experiment performed by physicist J.S. Bell. What he did, in a nutshell, was break an atom in half and change the spin of the electrons on one of the halves. What he found was that regardless of distance apart the electrons on the other half would also change instantaneously. So could the two halves of the atom somehow communicate with each other over vast distances by some kind of signal? Well, no signal can travel faster than the speed of light so apparently that is not the case. What Bohm suggests is that the two halves aren't really separate at all, that the whole physical universe is actual a kind of hologram itself. In other words, the separateness of objects is merely an illusion. Bringing in McKenna's idea of time as a thing like space we see that the illusion applies in both time and space. This again connects with Leibnitz's monads being everything, everywhere, always. The idea of a holographic universe, evidenced in numerous areas, may also explain some paranormal phenomena such as telepathy. If all things are connected on a deeper level than what we perceive it is much easier to understand how the minds of two different people can be connected. Further, if our perceived reality is only a projection then it must be much more malleable than we suspect. What we believe to be impossible may actually be possible. The limitations of our physical world may simply be a matter of consensus. In conclusion (because I'm not sure what else to say at this point), let's all drop some shrooms and explore the vast realms beyond our fixated perceptions. Until the next one.
Tony "The thing behind the fridge attacked the cat again" Hawkins
Note: I would very much appreciate feedback on this one. Did I really go overboard with the quotes? Should I have gone deeper into the subjects? Were the subjects too heavy? Was it simply too long? Should I just stick to reciting what I did the past week? Would you like more poetry or more prose? More philosophizing or more storytelling? Or am I doing everything just fine?
posted by Ad Hawk at
6:06 PM
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