The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (43 page)

While I may have been recovering, Terence was not. He often sat cross-legged on the floor near me, reading from what was perhaps the
I Ching
, writing in his tiny script, making his calculations and graphs. As I lay enveloped in my own reveries, I didn’t pay close attention to what he was doing there, bent over his notebook like a half-mad Talmudic scholar.

“I was caught up in an obsessive immersion, almost an enforced meditation, on the nature of time,” he writes. “My attention was entirely claimed by my efforts to build a new model of what time really is.” This marked the start of his effort to commit his timewave concept to paper. He began with a forty-day cycle as the crucial wheel in his temporal engine. Only later did he swap that out for a sixty-four day cycle tied to the
I Ching
, drawn by the correlation between its sixty-four hexagrams and the sixty-four codons that form the basis of the genetic language of DNA. (I’ll look at this development later.) That initial “crude, self-referential, and idiosyncratic” work in Bogotá would evolve greatly over the years, until the timewave eventually achieved a certain formality and elegance, worthy to behold. Whether his model represents the structure of time at all levels and everywhere, I have my doubts. Nevertheless, as Terence concludes: “It was only my faith that it could be made coherent and rational to others that kept me at it for those several years, transforming the original intuition into a set of formal propositions.”

I’d say that Terence’s activity had as much to do with his reintegration as it did with constructing a formal theory of time. As I was condensing through level after level of space, Terence was attempting to build an instrument for temporal navigation. His device would establish, first, our place in time, and then track our movement toward a future moment at which the spiral of time would condense to an infinitesimal point, just as space would collapse to a point that would be its own singularity.

I’ll save my critique of the timewave as a scientific theory for another chapter. Whatever its value in that regard, constructing and calibrating the timewave was, for Terence, an alchemical exercise—that is, an ongoing act of individuation in the Jungian sense. Ultimately, it was clear he’d been trying to map his own odyssey through time as much as define time’s hidden structure. As all theories of everything must be, his was only partially successful, and so the pursuit of his individuation remained a work in progress, never completed, even at the time of his death. But individuation is almost by definition a life’s work, an important task that perhaps in the end few of us ever finish.

After a few more days in Bogotá, we were all in a dissipative state, exhausted from our adventures. We still had no word on the whereabouts of Dave and our supplies. Vanessa saw little point in sticking around and flew home to New York, and then I decided to return to Boulder. I felt well enough to travel, and I wanted to get my feet back on the ground in a familiar place. I also desperately needed new glasses. The replacement pair I’d picked up in Bogotá weren’t much good.

I had no idea when I left Colombia that I’d never see Dave again. He remained in South America for the next thirty-five years. I don’t know much about the later life of a man who shared that formative moment so early on in mine. If our trip was any measure, he was a guy whose basic goodness led him to get too caught up in the obsessions of others, namely ours. Then again, that pretty much defines what it is to be young, adventurous, and open to experience. We briefly reconnected by phone and email in 2007 when he returned to visit his aging parents in upstate New York. Shortly before his scheduled departure for his home in Bolivia he learned he had a virulent form of melanoma. He postponed his return for treatment but it was for naught, and a few months later he was gone.

On March 29, I arrived in Boulder; I’d been gone around sixty days but it felt like centuries had passed. A few days later I left for Paonia to see my father. It was an uncomfortable meeting. He knew something had happened to precipitate our abrupt exit from La Chorrera and my premature return to the States (I had planned to stay until early summer). But we’d supplied no details beyond that I’d gotten “sick” and had to be flown out. I haltingly tried to narrate the events of the trip while omitting the most salient parts; he could certainly sense that there was more to the story, but he didn’t probe too deeply, for which I was grateful. By then he may have reached a point where he knew better than to question us too closely. He just assumed we were both mad, and probably criminals, and the less he knew the better. I’m quite sure he was still grieving over our mother’s death and likely in a deep depression.

Terence and Ev remained in Bogotá for a few days after my departure. They took a brief trip to Florencia to get outside the city and relax, but something was drawing Terence back to Berkeley. He remained preoccupied with the theory of time he’d begun roughing out in feverish notes, more convinced than ever that we had stumbled onto something of vast and unimaginable import for humanity and the planet. In his view, we’d been right all along, and that our only failure had been in our efforts to identify the time and place of the stone’s concrescence. But his model of time would fix that. He was obsessed. He needed validation from his friends and intellectual peers.

So Terence, still presumably a wanted man, took a risk and returned to Berkeley with Ev, entering the country on the false passport he’d gotten in Japan. He had no problems clearing the border; apparently Interpol and the U.S. government had better things to do than to track a minor hash smuggler for a crime committed two years earlier. They reached Berkeley on April 13, and at Terence’s insistence I flew out to join them.

Terence and Ev stayed with friends for a couple of days, then Ev departed to visit her parents in Southern California. On the day she left, Terence and I met with a handful of our closest friends, all of them eager to hear our story. Terence remained in a state of persistent cognitive ecstasy, still obsessed with cycles, already beginning to plot his early timewave graphs, utterly convinced that we’d succeeded at whatever it was we’d meant to do. The task was to convince our peers, despite the lack of evidence that anything had happened, as far as they could see. Terence’s tale left them politely, and not so politely, skeptical. Their basic response was, “You drove your brother crazy, and you followed him over the edge.” It’s a testament to his powers of persuasion that he was able to seed the tiniest kernel of doubt in their surety we’d lost it. But overall, in their opinion, Terence had gone around the bend and I wasn’t far behind. Without Ev there to back us up, it certainly looked like a case of folie à deux, triggered by too many drugs and too little intellectual rigor.

This wasn’t what Terence wanted to hear. I don’t know what he expected. His friends certainly didn’t fall all over themselves and say, “My God, man, you’ve done it, you’ve triggered the millennium, and you and Dennis are the immortalized superconducting progenitors of a transformed species!” It was a lot to ask anyone to believe, and they were anything but a credulous bunch.

For my part, I kept quiet. I didn’t dispute what Terence was saying, but I was still confused, still sorting things out. And my credibility was pretty much shot. I wasn’t sure what had happened. In any case, I’d had enough, at least for a while.

A few days after that meeting, I traveled down the coast to visit Deborah and celebrate her birthday. I hadn’t seen her for about four months, and I missed her, but it was a less than a joyful reunion. She was cold and distant, our lovemaking furtive under the circumstances and her heart no longer in it. She had rediscovered her fundamentalist Christian roots since her return and was feeling quite guilty about our liaison. I didn’t know it then, but I wouldn’t see her again for five years. During that time she would lacerate my heart in so many ways the recollection still pains me.

After a brief return to Berkeley, I departed for Colorado. I’d lost a semester of school by going to Colombia; I suppose it was a measure of my disillusion that I regarded the trip that way, as a loss. I’d yet to realize that my education there went far beyond what I ever would have learned had I spent those months in Boulder. I wanted to get back into summer school, get my teeth into some studies, do some ordinary, tangible things. I had not abandoned or renounced our discoveries. I was still caught up in them, though not as much as Terence. One thing I was clear about: I was going to change my major from anthropology and religious studies to biology and biochemistry.

After La Chorrera, Terence was ready to renounce science. He asserted that our experience had shown science to be bankrupt, science could never explain what had happened to us, and we should reject it—an attitude he held for the rest of his life. I was not so sure. I granted that our experiences had certainly stretched the boundaries of the known, that there was no ready scientific explanation of the events that had gone down at La Chorrera. But, I pointed out, we were not scientists. We may have been magicians, shamans, alchemists, or madmen, but we weren’t scientists. Not at the time. We had no real scientific training, and we didn’t know how to think like scientists. Had we understood the scientific method, we might not have stumbled into a cognitive wilderness where we lost our way.

I knew scientific thought had its limits; but before we could reject science, the most powerful set of intellectual tools ever developed by the human mind, we first had to learn how to
do
science. Then, if we still wanted to reject it, we could do so as scientists, with full knowledge of what it we were rejecting. We had to become scientists, or at least I had to become one. So I set about changing my academic trajectory and started studying both science and the philosophy of science.

That decision was a pivotal diversion in our continued intellectual development. I’ve spent my life since then studying and practicing science. As I result, I’m now acutely aware of how powerful science is, and how extremely limited. There are many things in heaven and earth that are beyond the ken of science, and may remain so forever. Anyone who has taken psychedelics seriously or had other transcendent experiences is likely to share that conclusion.

At the same time, science remains the most effective method for asking questions of nature and getting back answers that can be tested and validated. Everything we know about the biological aspects of consciousness, everything we know about how psychedelics do what they do at the molecular level, is the product of hard-won scientific investigation. What science has not yet done, and may never be able to do, is to span the gap between what science has revealed about the physicochemical foundations of consciousness and our subjective experiences of truth, beauty, dreams, memories, love and emotions, and, yes, even hyperspatial dimensions, self-transforming machine-elves and all the rest of the shamanic menagerie. Building that bridge is to my mind the great challenge of the twenty-first century. I have little doubt that science will play a critical role in unraveling these mysteries, if they are to be unraveled at all.

Chapter 34 - Reflections on La Chorrera

The
chorro
at La Chorrera. (Photo by S. Hartley)

The months leading up to our descent into the abyss, followed by the months we spent stumbling out, defined a crucial period in our lives. The two brothers who found themselves in Berkeley in April 1971 were not the same people who shoved off from Puerto Leguizamo in early February, so fired with dreams and delusions. Now that I have finished my narrative of that pivotal epoch, I want to step back and attempt a reflection on those events from a distance of forty-one years.

First, I must admit it is somewhat disturbing that to the extent we are known to a wider world, it is because of events that played out when we were still achingly young. Though most of my life has occurred after our trip to La Chorrera, the years since then have been haunted by its shadow, and I believe the same was true for Terence while he was alive. We went on to pursue careers and raise families, to write books and conduct research, to travel and teach in our efforts to make our mark in the world. We kept plugging away at the Mystery, though without the energy or recklessness that fueled our original quest. Nevertheless, the unsettling fact is that what we’ll be remembered for, if we’re remembered at all, is an episode of aberrant behavior that others might have tried to expunge from their life stories.

Whatever our separate accomplishments, they are modest indeed compared to what we hoped to accomplish at La Chorrera, which was nothing less than to trigger an end to history, throw open the gates of a paradise out of time and invite humanity to walk in. You can’t get more ambitious than that. But what was it that led us to form that wild ambition in the first place? Megalomaniacal obsessions rarely rise to such a level, and they’re generally diagnosed as pathology when they do, to be treated with medication and even physical restraint. Whether by cleverness or luck, we got to act on our obsessions to an appalling degree.