The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (38 page)

The point was that this shamanic phlegm and the “violet psychofluid” that Terence and his consort exuded in Katmandu seemed similar. In the alchemical and magical traditions, these objects can be solid like crystal balls; but they can also take liquid form, as in water or mercury. The unifying concept was that these things were actually a blend of both matter and mind. They were substances, to be sure, but ones in which the future and distant places could be seen, in which anything imaginable, even language itself, literally became visible.

Someone unfamiliar with such chatter would have regarded these ideas as extremely odd if not plain crazy. But as I’ve described, Terence and I were already steeped in an exotic conceptual stew comprising alchemy, Jungian psychology, ceremonial magic, shamanism, yoga, and science fiction. To some degree, that was also true of our companions. Besides, our analytical categories were pretty loose to begin with; we were anything but rigorous reductionists, even if we might have kidded ourselves that we were scientists.

So to us, these ideas weren’t that strange. Could the body really produce a substance that was a fusion of matter and mind, and that contained metalinguistic idea-complexes that can only be comprehended in a state of profound tryptamine intoxication? We had no problem with that; in fact, in our state, that concept made perfect sense. And whatever powers the mushrooms may have given us in the service of great conversation, reductionist rigor and skepticism weren’t among them.

On the contrary, the mushrooms encouraged the wildest intellectual fantasies, as if egging us on to ever more outlandish scenarios. We heatedly discussed the parallels between alchemical fluids and crystals and shamanic phlegm. We also explored the role played by sound in evoking these phenomena. Anyone who has smoked DMT can testify that sounds heard inside the head are a prominent part of the experience. Sometimes the sounds are like ripping cellophane, sometimes they are more like electrical sounds, buzzing, popping, and humming noises. Not uncommonly, similar sounds are often heard on high doses of mushrooms. As Terence noted, DMT seems to trigger glossolalia and other forms of spontaneous vocalization. Once the interior sound is perceived, there is an impulse to imitate it with the voice, to sing along with it. The sound doesn’t lend itself well to imitation, but if one tries, the voice eventually seems to lock on to the inner buzz, which then pours out of one’s mouth in a long, powerful ululation that is quite alarming and unlike any sound one would ordinarily utter. And making the sound is cathartic. It triggers an almost orgasmic ecstasy, and it greatly stimulates the closed-eyelids visual phenomena. There is a precedent for this in the traditions of ayahuasca shamanism as well. The
icaros
, the healing songs sung by
ayahuasqueros
, are used to evoke the inner visions and thereby direct the inner journey. There is apparently a tight link between the
icaros
and the inner visions, and the manifestation of these fluid psycho-substances.

Our conversations revolved around these heady ideas night after night as we communed with our new companion. And by then we did have a sense of being in the presence of an “other,” an entity of some kind that was fully participating in the conversation, though in a nonverbal or perhaps metalinguistic way. We came to think of this other as “the Teacher,” though it was unclear whether that meant the mushrooms themselves, or if the mushrooms provided a channel for communicating with some unidentified entity.

Whatever it was, the Teacher was full of interesting suggestions about how our investigations should proceed. We began to think pure Logos had taken physical form, that is, manifested itself as a substance composed of mind, of language, of meaning itself, yet all somehow grounded in a biological substrate. We used the term “translinguistic matter” to describe this mysterious substance, and we speculated that somehow it was produced in the peculiar state created by ingesting tryptamines. We figured this matter was psilocybin or DMT that had been “rotated” through the fourth dimension so that its “trip” was on the outside of the molecule. The more we kicked around these concepts, the more excited we became.

Now, the reader may wonder what we meant by fourth-dimensionally “rotated” psilocybin, or a trip being on the “outside” of a tryptamine molecule. These are strange ideas, indeed. An analogy might help me explain them. Consider a piece of sheet music made up of printed notes on a page. The notes are an abstract way of denoting sounds of a particular pitch and duration, played in a particular sequence. The sheet music is a representation of the music, in effect a schematic diagram of the music, but not music per se. The music manifests itself when the notes are played in a process unfolding through time—the fourth dimension.

We can extend this notion to the idea of a molecule like psilocybin or DMT being four-dimensional. The inert molecule, in a bottle on a shelf, is something like the 3-D score of the molecule’s 4-D potential. Only when that mundane crystalline substance is combined with a complex mammalian nervous system does the pharmacokinetic symphony—the trip—unfold. The body in this analogy is the instrument that plays the trip, by metabolizing the molecule.

On our seventh night at La Chorrera, the idea of my body being an instrument became all too real after I’d taken nineteen mushrooms, my largest dose yet. As Terence put it, I suddenly stiffened and “gave forth, for a few seconds, a very machine-like, loud, dry buzz” accompanied by what I felt to be an intense welling of energy. In many ways, this was the moment when the weirdness leapt to another level. According to Terence, after my outburst he proceeded to tell his Kathmandu tale as a way to “calm us all.” The subsequent talk of psychofluids and so forth may have been calming to some, but not to me. The next morning, February 28, marked the start of my furious writing as I tried to capture the knowledge I’d apparently been chosen to transcribe.

In retrospect, I see how our conceits embodied a paradox of the psychedelic experience. As noted above, on one level we understood that a molecule doesn’t “contain” the trip. Rather, the trip is an interaction between a living organism and a molecule’s pharmacological properties. These properties may be inherent to the drug, but the trip itself is not. That explains why a drug manifests differently in different organisms, and even differently in the same organism at different times.

We got that, sort of. But in our delusion, if that’s what it was, we also embraced a conflicting view: We believed an intelligent entity resided in the drug, or at least somehow communicated to us through it. Even as we theorized about the 4-D expression of the drug—that the trip could somehow be expressed on its exterior by rotation through the fourth dimension—we were assuming on another level that a being of some sort was directing the trip.

We weren’t the first or the last to make that “mistake.” After all, this is very close to shamanistic views of the psychedelic experience, in which the drug speaks through a skilled practitioner. Though psychedelics have been widespread for decades, people still have a natural tendency to describe their experiences as though the trip were in the drug: “The LSD gave me wonderful visions,” they might say, or “Ayahuasca showed me,” or “The mushrooms told me.” I’m keenly aware how seductive this assumption is, and how easily I slip into it myself, if only as a figure of speech. And yet as a scientist I must say no: These substances did none of those things. The human mind-brain created these experiences. At La Chorrera, the psilocybin somehow triggered metabolic processes that caused a part of our brains to be experienced not as part of the self, but as the “other”—a separate, intelligent entity that seemed to be downloading a great many peculiar ideas into our consciousness.

That’s the reductionist perspective. Is it true? I honestly can’t say, even today. It either is true, or the alternative is true, that there actually are entities in “hyperspace” that can communicate with us via something akin to telepathy when the human brain is affected by large amounts of tryptamine. That’s a hypothesis worthy of testing, if such an experiment could ever be devised.

But at La Chorrera, we couldn’t be bothered with such nuances. Believing the mushroom, or the Teacher, to be urging us on, we conjured up our theory about what was happening and then resolved to test it. Our “experiment” was not to prove if the Teacher existed. We took that for granted. We wanted to see if what the Teacher was teaching us would really deliver.

I should clarify that by “we” I don’t mean our entire party. Life in the shadow of the little mission had taken some interesting turns. Vanessa and Dave had moved out of the knoll house to a hut nearer the river. Meanwhile, on March 2, Terence, Ev, and I had moved farther away, down the trail to the forest hut, which by then had opened. The split, while friendly, suggested a philosophic divide. Some of us wanted to run with the ideas we were entertaining, and some did not. I should add that the ideas “we” were entertaining were largely mine, as the next chapter will reveal. Dave and Vanessa were clinging to the reductionist view for all they were worth; the weirdness around us could all be explained, they said, in familiar, psychological terms. The rest of us were suiting up for a plunge into another dimension.

We decided our experiment would occur on the evening of March 4. Terence spent much of March 3 gathering dried roots and sticks from the area around our new hut. On the appointed morning, he used that to build a large fire and boil up some ayahuasca from the plants he’d brought back from the Witoto village. I had it on the Teacher’s authority that the beta-carbolines in ayahuasca, present as harmine, might be the special seasoning we needed to make the recipe work, a key component in whatever it was we were concocting. Years later, in his account, Terence would question whether his brew had really been strong enough to “provoke an unambiguous intoxication.” His theory was that the MAO-inhibiting effect of harmine might have potentiated the psilocybin we still had in our systems from the large doses of mushrooms we’d already taken. It’s worth noting that we hadn’t ingested any mushrooms for a couple of days preceding the experiment. Whatever the reason, the abyss had opened, and we were going in.

Chapter 31 - The Experiment at La Chorrera

Whether the ideas that seized us over those days were telepathically transmitted by the mushroom, or by a mantis-like entity on the bridge of a starship in geosynchronous orbit above the Amazon (which we considered), or created within our own minds, I’ll never know. I do know that our lively discussions led us to speculate about how the phenomenon might be assessed. I should clarify that. By then, the Teacher had suggested the outlines of an experiment to me.

Or I believed so anyway, in my state of hypermania. Wildly stimulated by the concepts at play, I felt I was downloading explicit instructions from the Teacher, the mushroom, or whatever it was, about our next steps. The goal wasn’t simply to test the hypothesis but to fabricate an actual object within the alchemical crucible of my body. This thing would be a fusion of mind and matter created by the fourth-dimensional rotation of the metabolizing psilocybin and its exteriorization, or “freezing,” into a physical object. Such an object would be the ultimate artifact. It would be the philosopher’s stone, or the UFO space-time machine, or the resurrection body—all these things being conceptualizations of the same thing. The Teacher was downloading the blueprints for building a hyper-dimensional vehicle out of the 4-D transformation of my own DNA interlaced with the DNA of a mushroom. But not just blueprints alone. I was also getting step-by-step instructions on how to build this transcendental object.

The basic idea revolved around our discussions about the violet psychofluid, the magical phlegm, and the scrying goo, for lack of a better term. Alchemical symbolism furnished the conceptual framework within which these notions made a kind of sense. The creation of the philosopher’s stone, in alchemical parlance, involves a multi-step chemical reaction. The metaphors of chemistry are applied to transformative operations on the psyche and spirit of the alchemist. The process is not unlike a chemical synthesis that results in a final product; Jung would say that final product is the individuated self. We were postulating something more literal and much stranger.

Among the many stages in the alchemical synthesis, one essential step is called the “fixing” of the mercury. In this case, mercury symbolizes an inherently volatile, highly reactive substance: mind itself. The volatile substance created in the alchemist’s alembic is literally “mercurial,” thus making quicksilver a particularly apt analog for mind. The fixing of the mercury is the penultimate step in the alchemical reaction, the step in which the mercury is trapped, in some way tamed in a process that is analogous to crystallization. The completed stone would be my own mind, rendered visible and trapped within a 3-D container, like a Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a magnetic bottle.

To put that another way, what the Teacher had transmitted was a set of procedures for creating, and then fixing, the mercury of my own consciousness, fused with the four-dimensionally transformed psilocybin-DNA complex of a living mushroom.

“What?” the reader may ask. “What does that mean?” I might ask the same question now, but at the time it was perfectly clear.

Bear with me here as I introduce another concept. As the “experiment” became clear to me, I understood that the sounds that could be heard on DMT or on mushrooms at high doses were caused by the “electron spin resonance” of the tryptamines metabolizing in the nervous system. Electron spin resonance (ESR), sometimes called electron paramagnetic resonance, is a phenomenon displayed by certain substances that have one or more unpaired electrons. To study the behavior of unpaired electrons, researchers apply an external magnetic field to the electrons and then measure the changes in their “spin quantum numbers” and “magnetic moment.” This technique, known as ESR spectroscopy, resembles the more widely used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, in which the spin states of atomic nuclei, rather than electrons, are measured. The ESR “signal” is generated by measuring the difference between the low-and high-energy electrons when microwaves of varying frequencies are applied in a magnetic field of constant strength. The signal can provide information about the energetics of the spin states of the unpaired electrons. The signal’s output is the microwave frequency that generates the “splitting” of the spin states. It is not an audio signal, but it can be expressed as an audio signal, as can any electromagnetic signal if it is channeled through an audio generator.