Ingesting the ayahuasca harmine will speed up the process of metabolism enough to amplify its ESR tone to an audible level; this ESR tone will harmonically cancel out the ESR tone of the psilocybin within the mushroom, causing it to lose its electric field and snap into a superconducting configuration. The ayahuasca ESR signal will have keyed the mushroom psilocybin into a superconducting antenna; it is then ready to have the psilocybin- harmine-DNA compound being metabolized within the body condensed onto its charged template. A microsecond after the mushroom psilocybin has been superconductively charged, its amplified ESR wave will then cancel out the ESR signals of the tryptamines and harmine metabolizing in the body, as well as the genetic material.

This will cause these compounds to drop into superconductive configuration and bond together at the exact moment that they bond to the waiting mushroom template.

This transfer of superconductive compounds charged within the body to a superconductive template prepared within the mushroom will not occur in three- dimensional s.p.a.ce; no actual physical transfer will be visible, as the organically processed superconductive material will bond itself to the mushroom template through a higher spatial dimension.

It is at this point that the rationalist will despair, for indeed what abyss of untested theoretical and perhaps fanciful a.s.sumptions hides behind the phrase "through a higher spatial dimension"? Nevertheless, and like the alchemists of old, Dennis seemed to act from the a.s.sumption that the experiment, once successful, would

sanction the theory. Like the vocabulary of alchemy, his words are a blend of modern scientific formalisms and Hermetic aspiration. He had created a new alchemical dispensation and raised the specter of alchemical hope, phoenix-like, from the ashes of modernity. The result will be the work of works-that wonder which cannot be told-four dimensions captured and delineated in three. The stone will be all things; but the elements which are bound together in hypers.p.a.ce to form it are among the most common natural products, and the function and place of each in the stone can be understood. The stone is a solid-state hyperdimensional circuit that is quadripart.i.te in structure: First, psilocybin, charged in the mushroom to act as a template on which the rest of the circuit is condensed. In the final state the psilocybin acts as a superconducting antenna to pick up on information diffused through s.p.a.ce and time.

Second, the superconductively charged harmine complex within the stone will act as its transmitter and energy source. It is interesting to note that the same energy that sustains the antenna circuits in superconductivity will sustain the whole of the device.

The third component of the stone is the DNA bonded to and resonating through the harmine. It will const.i.tute the hyperdimensional, holographic memory of the device and will contain and explicate the genetic history of all species. It will be the collective memory of the device, and all times and places and conceivable forms will be accessible within its matrix.

The fourth part of the circuit will be the RNA, which will also be superconductively charged. [Normally the function of RNA is to "read" the molecular code of DNA and to transcribe its genes into usable protein molecules.] Through its function of self- replication turned through hypers.p.a.ce, the RNA will be able to project a wave form, a three-dimensional holographic image, and thus it will give form instantly to any idea. It will perform the same function it has always had-the process of replication through time. But henceforth replication will be subject, in part, to the whim of consciousness.

Why I and my companions have been selected to understand and trigger the gestalt wave of understanding that will be

the unleashing of the hyperspatial Zeitgeist is becoming more clear to me each moment, though I know I won't understand our mission fully until the work is complete. We will be instructed in the use of the stone by some infinitely wise, infinitely adept fellow member of the hyperspatial community; of that I feel sure. It will be the taking of the keys to galactarian citizenship. I speculate that we will be the first five human beings to be instructed in its use- our mission will be to selectively disseminate it to the rest of humanity, but slowly, and in such a way as to ease the cultural shock. It is also somehow appropriate that at least some segment of the species have an intimation of the implications and possibilities of this, the last cultural artifact.

And so now, against all probabilities and chance and circ.u.mstance, my companions and I have been given the peculiar privilege of knowing history will end. It would be a strange position to find oneself in if being in that position did not bring with it a full understanding of the forces that brought one there. Fortunately, as the phenomenon is an acceleration of understanding, one gains clearer insight into the forces that have bent s.p.a.ce and time, thought and culture back upon themselves to focus at this point.

As this monumentally inscrutable statement intimates, Dennis was in the process of turning some sort of corner. Under the influence of his ideas and images, our lives had become pure science fiction. This entire transformation had been achieved through the opening of our collective imagination. But what had really changed? Were we about to take the tiller of history into our hands, or was this one more sadly misguided reach for the power of an archetype that must always slide though one's fingers?

Now I can look upon my life as spread before the scanner of memory and understand all those moments that foreshadowed this one. It is easy to look beyond the personal history to the events of human history and discern therein the prefiguration of this last moment.

As a phenomenon it has always existed and it will continue, for it is the moving edge of phenomenal understanding that was generated in the era before physics and it has gathered momentum-a constant acceleration ever since. What we are moving

toward in three dimensions is the pa.s.sing of this wave of understanding into a higher dimension, the realm of the atemporal. As it happens, it will make this transition through one of us. But there will be no change in this cosmic order or even a blip on the cosmic circuits, for the phenomenon has gathered constant momentum from the beginning and it will flow through and beyond all dimensions with the same smoothness with which it entered until finally it has moved through all beings in all dimensions. Its joy will then be complete when in a vast amount of time it has constellated full understanding throughout creation.

If we trigger the eschatology, we will appear to act in the role of the Anti-Christ, but the real Anti-Christ is history's distorted reflection of the Christ at the end of time-the cosmic Adam-anthropos. The eschatological Christ is Anti-Christ only from a historical perspective. It is interesting that among Maza-tecans and other tribal groups of the Central Mexican highlands the idea of Christ is linked to the mushrooms-is this syncretism or prophecy?

That evening's collective meal with Dave and Vanessa at our camp, with the ayahuasca infusion cooling in the background, was less than successful. By now positions relative to "the phenomenon" had polarized us into irreconcilability. Dave and Vanessa did not arrive till the close of day, but they joined us in the hut for a smoke. Discussion led to an update and final outline of the experiment proposed for the evening. Dennis spoke: "We will obtain a metabolizing, living mushroom. Dig up the s.h.i.t around it and physically move the whole thing to the hut. We want to do the bonding in the mushroom because we don't know what it would be like if it were done in our own bodies. It is wide open. With your voice, your mind, and a mushroom, these things can be done. That is all one needs. Particle accelerators, all of that, no! With the energy that is hundreds of times less than the energy in an ordinary flashlight battery, one can probably rend s.p.a.ce/time apart."

The air was heavy with charged ions. Dave was full of doubts; as he talked, there was the grumble of distant thunder far off over the jungle. Dave's objections to what we were doing were emotional

and fearful, along the lines of "Man was not meant to know these things." Hardly what we expected from a colleague. We tried to be rea.s.suring, but he became agitated and rushed out of the hut, perhaps, we thought, intending to walk back to the river house.

Instead we heard an exclamation of fear and a kind of moan, a yell of amazement. We all clambered out of the hut to find Dave, white-faced and staring at the sky, pointing. The light of a first-quarter moon revealed the tattered sky and, directly above the path returning to the river, an enormous black thunderhead rearing its twisting and writhing form up through thousands of feet of moisture-and electricity-saturated air. It looked like an enormous centipede with broad strokes of lightning flickering out of its lower portions, stroking the tops of the jungle canopy with a roar that, when it broke over us, was as deafening as field artillery. Over the howl of the wind now whipping into a wild frenzy the jungle all around us, I heard Dennis yell: "It's a backwash from the approaching breakthrough. It says to me there is now no doubt that we'll succeed!"

Dave moaned as he sank, unbelieving, to the sandy soil while the first huge drops began to fall. I thought of Ahab saying, "I'd strike out the sun if it insulted me. For could it do that then could I do the other, since there is ever a sort of fair play." In the wake of an ear-splitting blast we all fell back to the hut, during which Vanessa sprained her ankle slipping from the notched log that served as a step-ladder. In a few minutes the giant storm moved on, leaving only a chaotic and churning sunset.

The sudden electrical storm and its impact on us was taken as an omen by both points of view. Dennis, Ev, and I a.s.sumed it was a.s.sociated with a feedback of effects from the experiment whose performance was only a few hours ahead of us. Dave and Vanessa thought it a light dose of the wrath of G.o.d for having such Promethean aspirations. The possibility that it had nothing to do with us at all went unexamined.

"Is this the healing of my split-T that my astrologer predicted for this time?" Scorpio Vanessa asked of no one in particular.

Ev and I shared a light meal with our guests while Dennis ate nothing. Dave and Vanessa wished us goodnight and good luck, and then hobbled away toward the river. The three of us were left alone, and there remained nothing but to make the test that Dennis had devised and whose antic.i.p.ation had caused such strain on our expedition.

The ayahuasca had been brewed. Since then, having seen ayahuasca brewed professionally by shamans in Peru, I am sure that our brew was too weak to have had any major role in what followed. It was the mushroom that was the causal agent, if a causal agent could be isolated. And mushrooms we had, both ones we had picked as well as a specimen moved into the hut, in situ in its manure base. Dennis confidently stated that living, metabolizing psilocybin should be present. We had hung the chrysalis of a Mor- pho near the mushroom so that animal tissue undergoing metamorphosis would also be represented in the target area tableau. What was science and what ritual? We did not know and could not tell. All bets were covered. Poetic inspiration and scientific insight had become fused.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

THE EXPERIMENT AT LA CHORRERA.

In which the experiment is attempted and the brothers McKenna are driven mad by its unexpected aftermath.

The NIGHT OF MARCH 4 was absolutely black. A low-lying cloud bank had appeared, m.u.f.fling the small world of La Chorrera and wrapping it in a bowl of all-absorbing velvet darkness. Following the storm we had rebuilt our fire and boiled off several liters of water from our infusion of Banisteriopsis caapi, so that it was much stronger than it had been before. We then added crushed leaves, which Dennis had gathered that day near the chorro and which we were using as DMT admixture plants. It was the admixture plants that we hoped would provide the DMT necessary to drive the intense hallucinations for which the brew is famous. We had tentatively identified these plants as Justiciapectoralis var. steno-phylla-a plant thought to be used as an admixture of ayahuasca in the Vaupes drainage north of us. Now, years after that evening, not only do I question the concentration at which we brewed the Banisteriopsis but also our identification of the admixture plant.

There is no doubt that there was considerable harmine alkaloid in the infusion, but as I later learned not as much as is necessary to

provoke an unambiguous intoxication. The harmine alkaloids present were, in my opinion, boosted by the psilocybin that had acc.u.mulated in our systems, or rather the MAO-inhibiting effect of these beta-carbolines caused the residual psilocybin to emerge into consciousness as a deep hallucinogenic experience.

While I completed the boiling, Ev and Dennis went to their hammocks and lay down to await the completion of the preparations. We laughed together and talked softly. Yet in spite of this there was an undercurrent of tension as we approached the experiment into which we had poured so much of our energy. As we neared the critical moment, Ev and Dennis became unaccountably clumsy and seemed to find their bodies hard to handle; it was that which had sent them to their hammocks. I seemed unaffected and was able to look after whatever needed attention. Lying in his hammock, Dennis ate two mushrooms to launch the beginning of the experiment; Ev and I did the same.

Our little thatched hut on its stilt legs looked in the flickering firelight like a small s.p.a.ceship dropped into the howling jungles of an alien world. We all felt as if we were approaching hyperspatial overdrive. There was a sense of immense energies acc.u.mulating. The effect was reinforced by the hammocks hanging like acceleration slings ready to receive a starship's crew. Dennis lay in his hammock nearly unable to hold a pencil, but writing furiously in tight, operational terms about the experiment just ahead: The mushroom is presently metabolizing within our bodies; this has keyed in on the tryptamine template in the living mushroom and it has been sensitized for the condensation of the harmine-psilocybin-DNA molecule. When the ayahuasca is ingested the harmine a.n.a.log will start to metabolize within the body. The ESR of the presensitized psilocybin circuit will immediately cancel the ESR of the harmine and cause it to bond superconduc-tively to the DNA-RNA complex both in our bodies and in the mushroom simultaneously in a higher dimension. The bonding completed, the harmine-DNA memory bank and drive unit will condense into the waiting, charged psilocybin circuit in the mushroom. We will see this condensation, as it will appear in the

mushroom at the same instant that the bond is completed in a higher dimension.

I had no notion of what this all meant or was leading to. I took the att.i.tude that I must simply be a good witness. Surely nothing at all would happen, or something wonderful was in store.

Dennis explained that he was unable to move about very well because of something having to do with the backward flow of time. The ever-increasing constraints on the set of possible futures had rendered him nearly immobile; only the mind, planning and computing, was free.

We finished boiling the ayahuasca. I ground the admixture plants and added them to the cooling brew. I moved the ayahuasca into the hut, then the mushroom. With those things in place, we were ready to begin. Dennis began narrating our countdown toward an Omega that none of us could really understand; we were completely transformed by the expectation that we might witness the outbreak of the millennium. He said that time was appearing to slow down as we approached this point. Prior to this, we had taken no hallucinogens for several days, so the effects we were experiencing were not arising from that source. Something else was happening. As proof of this amazing a.s.sertion, he called our attention to the candle that I had set upon a small shelf jutting from the wall of the hut. Unattended, its slight tilt had become slowly exaggerated so that now it hung at a crazy angle, defying gravity because, he said, time was pa.s.sing so slowly that we could not see that it was actually in the act of falling.

I walked closer to this apparition and bent toward the flame. The fire appeared still, absolutely frozen. My mind shot back to the moment above the river when it too had seemed stilled forever. The flame was uncanny. As deeply as I cared to look into it I could see no movement of particles or gas. I seemed to have my usual freedom of movement, but the world around me was coming to a crystalline and eerie halt.

It was Dennis who finally spoke: "A series of discreet energy levels must be broken through in order to bond this thing. It is part

mythology, part psychology, part applied physics. Who knows? We will make three attempts before we break out of the experimental mode."

We all drank the ayahuasca. The taste was sharp and astringent, like a sauce of leather and mole, but it faded quickly as the liquid went churning through our guts. Dennis took only one more mushroom to help him hear the tone. The darkness outside was utter and we had no clock; it seemed hours since Dave and Vanessa had left us. All was finally in readiness: the living mushroom, the harmine brew, and a harmine smoking mixture, "just in case." After we each had about a half-cup of the ayahuasca infusion, we settled down to wait.

For the past several days, Dennis had been hearing the ESR tone that he deemed the sine qua non of what we were attempting. After about fifteen minutes, he announced that he could hear it more clearly and that it was gathering strength. He felt prepared to attempt the experiment at any time, he said.

We agreed that each time during the actual making of the sound we would extinguish the candle so that our minds would not be burdened by the sight of any tryptamine-induced facial distortions that the odd yelling might cause. Years before, during peak episodes of DMT among our old Berkeley gang, we had witnessed spasms of facial musculature that were completely hair-raising, invoking as they did the ent.i.ties of Tantric Buddhism-the bulging eyes, the impossibly long, rolling tongue, that sort of thing. Dennis then sat up in his hammock. I put out the candle, and he sounded his first howl of hyper-carbolation. It was mechanical and loud, like a bull roarer, and it ended with a convulsive spasm that traveled throughout his body and landed him out of his hammock and onto the floor.

We lit the candle again only long enough to determine that everyone wanted to continue, and we agreed that Dennis's next attempt should be made from a sitting position on the floor of the hut. This was done. Again a long, whirring yodel ensued, strange and unexpectedly mechanical each time it was sounded.

I suggested a break before the third attempt, but Dennis was quite agitated and eager to "bring it through," as he put it. We settled in for the third yell, and when it came it was like the others but lasted

much longer and became much louder. Like an electric siren wailing over the still, jungle night, it went on and on, and when it finally died away, that too was like the dying away of a siren. Then, in the absolute darkness of our Amazon hut, there was silence, the silence of the transition from one world to another; the silence of the Ginnunga gap, that pivotal, yawning hesitation between one world age and the next of Norse mythology.

In that gap came the sound of the c.o.c.k crowing at the mission. Three times his call came, clear but from afar, seeming to confirm us as actors on a stage, part of a dramatic contrivance. Dennis had said that if the experiment were successful the mushroom would be obliterated. The low temperature phenomena would explode the cellular material and what would be left would be a standing wave, a violet ring of light the size of the mushroom cap. That would be the holding mode of the lens, or the philosopher's stone, or whatever it was. Then someone would take command of it-whose DNA it was, they would be it. It would be as if one had given birth to one's own soul, one's own DNA exteriorized as a kind of living fluid made of language. It would be a mind that could be seen and held in one's hand. Indestructible. It would be a miniature universe, a monad, a part of s.p.a.ce and time that magically has all of s.p.a.ce and time condensed in it, including one's own mind, a map of the cosmos so real that it somehow is the cosmos, that was the rabbit he hoped to pull out of his hat that morning.

Dennis leaned toward the still whole mushroom standing on the raised experiment area.

"Look!"

As I followed his gaze, he raised his arm and across the fully expanded cap of the mushroom fell the shadow of his ruana. Clearly, but only for a moment, as the shadow bisected the glowing mushroom cap, I saw not a mature mushroom but a planet, the earth, l.u.s.trous and alive, blue and tan and dazzling white. "It is our world." Dennis's voice was full of unfathomable emotions. I could only nod. I did not understand, but I saw it clearly, although my vision was only a thing of the moment.

"We have succeeded." Dennis proclaimed.

"I don't understand," and I did not. "Let's walk to the pasture. I need to think."

Ev was exhausted by the night's activities and probably glad to have us leave her in the hut with the encroaching dawn promising some sort of new day. As we let ourselves down the log ladder to the ground, I was struck by the scene of utter confusion our activities had left behind during the last frantic hours of brewing. Our huge fire was now only white ashes. The waste from the ayahuasca-making was piled beside it, looking like a mound of beached seaweed. Everything was strewn about. We walked through all this, shaking the stiffness out of our bodies and stopping at the small stream that crossed the path to splash water in our faces.

We had not spoken. It was Dennis who broke the silence.

"You are wondering if we succeeded?"

"Yes. What happened? You're riding herd on this effect, so what is going on?"

"Well, I am not sure how, but I know we have succeeded. Let me try to understand this."

Though the mushrooms and ayahuasca of the night before seemed to have worn off, my own mind was racing with questions. As we walked along, Dennis would make occasional comments that were, it burst over me, answers to things I was thinking but not articulating. I stopped in my tracks. I clearly formed a question in my mind. Dennis, head bent beside me, began to answer without waiting for me to speak my thought aloud. I was dumbfounded. Was this it then? I asked. Had he somehow acquired telepathic powers?

No, he replied, there was more to it than that.

According to Dennis, the bonding of the harmine into his DNA had given him immediate access to an enormous, cybernetically stored fund of information. And this information was freely available to anyone in the world who looked into their mind and prefaced their question with the word "Dennis." The absurdity of the second half of this proposition struck me as utterly too much. But naturally, at his insistence, I made the test. I picked up a small plant growing at my feet, closed my eyes and asked: "Dennis, what is the name of this plant?" Immediately and without any effort of my own that I was aware of, a scientific name, now forgotten, popped into my head. I tried the same thing again with a different plant and to my amazement

received a different answer. The experiment seemed to secure that something was giving answers in my head, but I could not tell if they were correct or not. I was shaken. When we left the hut I was sure we had failed and that we had to talk over revising our approach. I was even relieved since the obsessive nature of it all had been a strain. But now as we walked along and I could hear a voice in my head that was answering, however inanely or inaccurately, any question put to it, I was less sure.

Dennis was oddly preoccupied, yet he a.s.sured me that his effort had succeeded and that all over the world the wave of hyper-carbolation was sweeping through the human race, eliminating the distinction between the individual and the community as everyone discovered themselves spontaneously pushing off into a telepathic ocean whose name was that of its discoverer: Dennis McKenna.

As I watched my mind and listened to my brother rave, I began to realize that the experiment had indeed unleashed some sort of bizarre effect. I ask myself now why it was so easy for me to make the leap from a.s.suming that we were having a peculiar localized experience to the idea that we were key parts of a planet-wide phenomenon? It is an important, unanswered question that speaks volumes about my susceptibility to inflation and suggestion at that moment. I was quite simply the victim of a cognitive hallucination; that is, rather than a visual experience of something not actually present, a cognitive hallucination is a total shift of the highest levels of our intellectual relationship to the world. The psilocybin-induced cognitive hallucination made the impossible and unlikely seem probable and reasonable. I became flooded with ecstasy as the realization pa.s.sed over me that we had pa.s.sed the omega point, that we were now operating in the first few moments of the millennium. Both of us felt our excitement rising as we became convinced that somehow the world was now radically, fundamentally different.

"So this must be it," Dennis said. "We have not condensed the stone into visible s.p.a.ce, but we have generated it in our heads. It does not immediately appear as a visible vehicle, but first as a teaching-the teaching we are hearing in our heads right now. Later, the words will be made flesh."

I could only stare at my brother. Who was he and how was he able to know and do these things? I could only wonder.

"Now Mother and possibly lots of dead people will be showing up soon. Jung will doubtless come and, by G.o.d, I want to hear what he has to say." Dennis, saying this, gazed over my shoulder as if craning his neck to see who approached our hammock-hung hut. "Is that Nabokov, Sunny Jim that nice Joyce boy, or is it that pesky Nick Cusa?"

We embraced each other, laughing. I felt as though I was being led like a little child. For no reason, I had ceased to question; rather, I felt an urge to see other people and to feel their immersion in the new heaven and the new earth. Dennis agreed I would go to the river and get Dave and Vanessa and return with them to the forest. Dennis would return to the camp and explain to Ev what was happening.

As I set out toward the river, I seemed to be nearly weightless. I felt reborn, full of energy, and bursting with good health and vitality. Over a period of a few minutes, I had pa.s.sed from weary, disgruntled skeptic to ecstatic believer. Looking back on it, I believe that, for me, this was the critical juncture. Why did I not question Dennis more closely?

Was I somehow self-hypnotized? Did the unfamiliar setting, the restricted diet, the strain and expectations push me into a place where I was unable to resist partic.i.p.ation in the world of my brother's bizarre ideation? Why was I unable to maintain my detached and skeptical viewpoint? In some sense this willing suspension of disbelief is the crux of the matter-and, I believe, of many a "close encounter" situation.

The Other plays with us and approaches us through the imagination and then a critical juncture is reached. To go beyond this juncture requires abandonment of old and ingrained habits of thinking and seeing. At that moment the world turns lazily inside out and what was hidden is revealed: a magical modality, a different mental landscape than one has ever known, and the landscape becomes real. This is the realm of the cosmic giggle. UFOs, elves, and the teeming pantheons of all religions are the denizens of this previously invisible landscape. One reaches through to the continents and oceans of the imagination, worlds able to sustain anyone who will but play, and then one lets the play deepen and deepen until it is a reality that few would even dare to entertain.

As I walked along that perfect morning no such soothingly objective thoughts came to me. Instead I a.s.sumed that my body was metabolizing its way toward the resurrection body, the "soul made visible" of Christian hermeneutics, that we had expected to be part of the success of our experiment. I did not know what was happening in the world or far away, but I did know that since the moment Dennis had p.r.o.nounced the experiment finished, I had felt an expanding and ever-increasing wave of energy and understanding unfold through my being. As I walked along, what seemed to be a profound realization came over me. The understanding bloomed in my mind that we are all enlightened beings and that only our inability to see and feel ourselves and others as we really are keeps us from shedding our guilt and experiencing ourselves as truly enlightened. I have never been a psychedelic bliss bunny, yet there I was suspended somewhere between cliche and archetype.

I felt beatific, yet I couldn't believe what seemed to be happening. The walk to Dave and Vanessa's place took about ten or fifteen minutes. By now it was about 7:00 A.M. The sun was well up in the sky and it was a beautiful day. As I walked across the pasture I would stop and say, "Dennis," and the response would be instantaneous, just like thought.

It confused me. I kept stopping and asking questions. Sitting down on the gra.s.s. "Is it all right? What is it? I don't know. Is it safe? I can't understand what this means."

I walked on toward the river. As I walked, I did some experiments. I said "Terence.

Terence." It was very much like talking to myself. Then I said "Dennis," and the thing was instantly there, ready to do business. Then I said "McKenna, McKenna," and it was still there. I realized that I couldn't reach it with my first name, but I could reach it with my last name. I felt simultaneously enlightened and bewildered, I could not understand what was going on.

I was pondering these sorts of things when I arrived at the riverside house of Vanessa and Dave. They were still asleep in their hammocks, but crowded around the door, even this early in the morning, was a group of wide-eyed Witoto children. As I pushed my way through them, my gaze fell on each and I thought: "You are enlightened, and you ... and you ..."

My arrival was the first event of the day for Dave and Vanessa. I told them that we had succeeded and that the fruit of our success

was not a condensed hyper-object, but a teaching. I asked them to dress and come with me. While they were gathering their hammocks, they told me that during the darkest part of the night Dave had awakened hysterical, in a state not unlike the condition induced in him by the electrical storm the evening before. They had been very agitated and could only attribute this to what we had been doing.

I was interested in all of this but seemed to hear it as from a long distance. I wanted to return to the forest and see what would unfold there. In my mind I was recalling something Dennis had said a few minutes before in the pasture. He had said that the demarcation between day and night, the dawn line, was now making a twenty-four hour sweep around the world, a sweep that began at the dawn moment when the experiment at La Chorrera was finished. Throughout the world, traffic and factories were coming to a halt. People were leaving their homes and schools to stare into the sky, realizing that someone, somewhere, had broken through, that it was not a day like any other day. Dave and Vanessa followed me back to the forest. Vanessa's ankle had made little improvement overnight and they grumbled a good part of the way.

When we had gone slightly past the place where Dennis and I had parted, we came upon something that could not be fit into any set of expectations. This was Dennis's ruana, a short blanket worn by South American peasants, and his shirt discarded in the middle of the path. Next came a pair of pants and then further on two sweat socks. And, though I was to learn this only later, his gla.s.ses and his boots had also been hurled away. We followed this trail of cast-off garments back to the hut in the forest. There we found Ev and Dennis, both naked and sitting on the floor of the hut, discussing and doing the "ask Dennis" meditation.

With the instruction that you could not receive a proper initiation unless you were naked, Dennis insisted that we take off our clothes. Vanessa peeled and Dave and I followed.

Even their skepticism seemed to have been put aside. The presence of the mushroom was palpable and it seemed to be saying, "Take off your clothes. Throw everything away.

Everything is breaking. All objects are no good to you now. Throw everything away. You do not need it any more."