The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (41 page)

To our companions, what was going on must have presented itself as a classic example of folie à deux, a delusion or psychosis shared by my brother and me.
None of us had the vocabulary to describe it at the time; it was only years later that we learned that such phenomena are well documented in the psychiatric literature. What happened to us was certainly a shared altered state, but to reduce it to a mere instance of shared psychosis doesn’t really do it justice. I say that even as I know I may still be expressing a compulsion to treat it as something other than that, something more.

But as far as Vanessa and Dave were concerned, the lens of psychiatric illness was the one they reflexively adopted to explain our strange behavior. Because we were acting crazy, we
were
crazy; and the best solution, as they saw it, was to get us out of that jungle backwater as quickly as possible and into the nearest psychiatric facility. Considering where we were, that option was problematic. I’m grateful that circumstances did not permit it, but I am equally grateful to Terence for resisting the pressure to leave La Chorrera. He insisted that whatever was happening to us be allowed to unfold in its own time and on its own terms. It was clear to him, at least, that I was slowly getting better, and that there was no need for intervention beyond making sure that I didn’t wander off or hurt myself. Against her better judgment, perhaps, Vanessa accepted Terence’s argument and agreed to a course of watchful waiting. Had my return been interrupted, I doubt that I would have ever “recovered” completely (if that’s even the appropriate word). Under the classic model of shamanic initiation, I’d been torn asunder, but I was able to stitch myself back together. There is no telling how things might have gone had the process been aborted.

Over the next few days, we came to assume our alchemical quest had basically succeeded, but that some of our assumptions had been incorrect. The stone we sought to construct, the transcendental object, the lens, had not materialized in a flash. Would that it had! That would have settled the matter. Instead, our success apparently presented itself as a gift for telepathy and access to a vast database not unlike the akashic records, the mystical library of all human and cosmic knowledge spoken of by the Theosophists. True, our efforts to validate that knowledge had been problematic, but our connection seemed intact. Our shared line to the Teacher was still open, and we were kept informed, in real time, of what was going down.

We likened this at the time to “how the boar ate the cabbage,” our grandfather’s phrase for any account that could be trusted as authentic. The Teacher was quite ready to lay down how the boar ate the cabbage. It also insisted we’d gotten everything right, but our timeframe was off. The stone had been created; but because it was by its very nature atemporal, it was tricky to predict just when it would manifest. Part of our task became trying to nail down that moment of “concrescence,” that moment when the “ampersand” as we called it then, or the “eschaton” as we dubbed it later—in any case, the last event—would arrive.

Indeed, Terence’s effort to predict when and where the stone would appear marked the start of his obsessive ruminations on the nature of time, and the clues to that riddle he believed he’d glimpsed in the
I Ching
. In his account, Terence remembers the period of my “shamanic ramble” as the most intense time he’d ever gone through. For the next nine days he “neither slept nor needed sleep.” He scanned the environment constantly, hoping to catch the stone in the act of concrescence. Willing himself into a state of hyper-vigilance, he also watched me constantly—probably a good thing because I had a tendency to wander away from the hut.

Every day we’d go to the pasture, where Terence would demand that I produce the stone; I couldn’t do that, of course, but I predicted it was getting closer and closer. He claims that one reason he made this daily demand of me was to keep me focused on condensing myself as well, which is probably true. I now realize his intense preoccupation with time was as much an integrative process for him as my cosmic homecoming was for me. Both were desperate attempts to get reoriented over the next two weeks; both were more or less successful. This process continued well beyond our departure from La Chorrera; indeed, in some respects, for me it is still ongoing.

Over the next ten days, there also transpired a series of anomalous events, which Terence describes in detail. Some were tied to the odd skills I’d apparently developed, like my ability to pluck episodes out of his head though I had no prior knowledge of them. One example involved Terence’s story about his frenzied coupling in the marinade of psychofluid on that rooftop in Katmandu. Somehow, I was able to reenact the conversation he’d had with his English friend in the confusion afterward, when she pointed out that Terence had somehow ended up wearing her “knickers,” that is, her panties—an embarrassing detail he’d elected to withhold from us until I repeated the entire dialog verbatim, lifted from his thoughts.

On another occasion, I connected with a kind of cosmic telephone exchange that enabled me to ring up anybody I wanted, alive or dead, anywhere in time. One of them was my dead mother, who I reached while she was listening to a radio broadcast of the World Series in 1953. She didn’t believe it was me on the line because my nearly three-year-old self was sleeping in the crib beside her! Other such events seemed to penetrate into the “real world,” though at the time that notion seemed very loose indeed. We were living in a situation where the mind was creating reality, or at least modulating reality at a time when it seemed bizarrely susceptible to the force of our imaginations. None of this surprised us; that’s what happens when you seize control of the machinery that generates reality. Reality becomes whatever you want it to be.

What we wanted, it seemed, were unexpected electrical phenomena and rainbows without rain, among other quirks of nature. I’d fallen into the habit of addressing Terence as “
ama
,” the Witoto word for brother. During one of our walks in the pasture, I led him to a large tree, bent down, and pulled the grass back to reveal the weathered letters “A M A” carved into its base—and surely carved years earlier from the looks of them. How had I known that word was there? Why
was
it there? I do not know.

Once, when I got tired of Terence demanding that I produce the stone, I produced instead a tiny silver key. We had been talking about that key, or one just like it, which opened an inlaid wooden box with a secret compartment that had once belonged to our grandfather. Terence was keenly aware of the key’s special importance in our childhood as one of our earliest “alchemical analogues of the philosopher’s stone.” It was he who challenged me to produce the key as a way to prove my new skills, so I did, placing it in his hand. He was shocked. We had assumed the key had long since disappeared, along with the box, and to this day I have no idea how I conjured it, or at the very least one just like it. Interestingly, while rummaging through some stored family boxes recently, untouched for decades, I stumbled on this box, but not the key. Presumably it has disappeared back down whatever wormhole had coughed it up that day in the pasture.

While Terence and I were immersed in our folie à deux, our shared reality, or whatever it was, our companions were puzzled, if not alarmed. Terence and I were communicating telepathically. What was going on was certainly strange, but we understood each other, or so we believed, and these events made sense to us, especially once we understood they were taking place in a surreal universe created by the Irish author James Joyce. That realization gave a context to the zany things going on; it was a pun-filled farce cooked up by James and Nora Joyce, who happened to inhabit the body of a large rooster and a small hen living near the river hut. We were in on the joke; Vanessa, Dave, and even Ev to a certain extent, were not.

Four decades later, I still find it hard to put a label on what was going on. In retrospect, the best explanation is perhaps that we somehow underwent a shared shamanic experience that superficially resembled schizophrenia. The following excerpt is from “A Preliminary Report on an Experiment at La Chorrera,” a previously unpublished account we collaborated on, with Terence narrating, in the months after our return from La Chorrera, as we struggled to make sense of what had happened. It gives some sense of how we were interpreting those events at the time. Note that we trace our initial break from reality to the earliest hours of February 28, when I first heard and imitated the harmonic ESR tone after eating nineteen mushrooms:

The most difficult of the aspects of our work at La Chorrera to write about must certainly be the psychological. Here is an area where we are called on to exercise objectivity in discussing personalistic contents and situations. Several themes have suggested themselves as being major motifs of an archetypal nature that our experience caused us to experience…the major theme is that of death and resurrection. Silverman has noted two types of schizophrenia under the heading “reactive”; these he calls “essential” and “paranoid,” and his descriptions of these two types correspond exactly to the varieties of unusual ideation that were the major confirmation of our success on the submolecular level that we received following our experiences of February 28. From that date on, the normal configurations of both my own and my brother’s personalities started a migration toward these two forms of reactive schizophrenia. Dennis evinced enormous mental powers and irritability during the six days following the twenty-eighth; during this time period my own psychology was marked by prolonged states of deep active imagination and “delusions of grandeur.”

In the early morning hours of March 5, shortly after the completion of the macroexperiment, the development of both our symptoms took a quantum jump upward. In the space of hardly more than an hour, my brother entered a progressively more detached and cosmic state of essential schizophrenia; this development, coupled with his assurances that this was the proof of the measure of our success, was causing in me a growing certitude that we had succeeded and that this success meant nothing less than the cessation of all natural limitations in the very near future. For the next thirty-seven days, especially the next fourteen days, my brother’s ideation consisted, among other themes but as a dominant theme, of the idea of a shamanic journey of return, from the ends of space and time, to the earth, with the collected energy configuration of everything condensed into a kind of lens or saucer, a true
lapis philosophorum
. He projected, and I, experiencing an intense state of reactive paranoid schizophrenia, accepted, the role of God, or father, big brother, or Christ, or, and especially, moral judgment. He in turn manifested an understanding of the principles and methods of science and information control that was truly miraculous. He saw himself at times as a giant computer in a starship making a long journey home under the control of his brother, garbed in the dual role of the cosmic shaman and the Adamic Christ.

From the sixth until the twentieth, neither of us slept, and Dennis raved continuously, in telepathic rapport with anyone he wished, in command of enormous technical erudition and of a strange and rapidly evolving hyperspatial cosmogony. He visualized, following a Manichean perception, the solar system as a huge light pump wherein the light of souls was pumped from planet to planet until it finally leaves the solar system altogether and is transmitted to the home lens at the galactic center. Some of his discoveries included that the Saturnian moon Titan is composed of hashish which resonates with the living mycelium of psilocybin culture, that tryptamine fish swim in the harmine seas of Neptune, and, most important, that Jupiter is the reflected image of Earth in hyperspace, is teeming with bizarre life forms, and is somehow an essential key to unraveling the racial fate. Late twentieth century history was seen by Dennis as a frantic effort to build an object which he called “the lens” to allow life to escape to Jupiter on the heels of an impending geomagnetic reversal. Slowly, as the shamanic voyager neared his home, his place in space, his stitch in time, the symptoms faded in each of us. However, the continuing process of understanding triggered by our experiment did not cease. Rather, it continued to exponentially accelerate with the passage of each twenty-four-hour cycle, leading us out of the fantastic ideation of the early days following the experiment—we now understand this ideation as the shape of things to come—and into the understanding that has led us to the ideological model of the eschaton. This model allows us to trace the logic of the eschaton’s operation from the molecular levels where our superconductive bond was forged to the macrophenomenon of the particular nature of an individual given historical period, for all phenomena are at root constellated by a wave form which is a reflection of its constituent parts—energy grams identical to those in DNA.

During the model two-part reactive schizophrenia which my brother and I experienced as a result of our experiment at La Chorrera, my brother, manifesting all of the amorphous and dissociated symptoms of reactive process schizophrenia, was clearly assimilated to the archetype of Chaos while I, manifesting the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia and the complementary archetypes, was assimilated to the King, Hero, and Healer—all expressed in the idea of the shaman-alchemist, who is both poet and redeemer. The body of ideas associated with these concerns, shamanism, poetics, heroics, and alchemy, were in constant circulation between my brother and I… . The most relevant idea complex relative to the time cycles and emotional states which I experienced seemed to be that of the Christos, the archetypal shaman redeemer whose intervention into history at the end of time triggers the Apocalypse and the Millennium.

If we correctly understand our accomplishment at La Chorrera, then we did in fact take upon ourselves the eschatological task supposedly reserved for the Son of Man who will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, that is to say that by being the instrument by which the wave form of understanding passes out of three dimensions and into the fourth we were able to fulfill the literal expectations of the Apocalypse that sets Christianity apart. For once the hypercarbolation of the genetic matrix begins, that is, once the molecule begins to form in hyperspace, it is only a matter of time before the mind, as Lapis, becomes visible and independent of the physical body. This is the resurrection body that was such a puzzle to the early Fathers of the Church. We cannot yet settle this ancient controversy, but if we correctly understand the operation of the molecule we have assembled then it would seem that the answer as to the form of the resurrection body is that it is the same in appearance as our present body but with the optional ability to appear as a sphere or rotundum, as the spherical conception of the culmination of the alchemical opus was called. This idea is similar to the Egyptian conception of the soul or “ka” as a mobile lens-shaped object. Jung believes all of these spherical images to be reducible to the self, and further suggests that the form of the so-called flying saucer is a similar phenomenon. It is these two themes, the collective end of time and the resurrection of the body that seem to have been responsible for the nearness to the Christian worldview that was reflected in the psychological contents with which we had to deal as a result of our own “ending of time” through the experiment at La Chorrera.