Cyberia: Seeing is Beholding

PART 2
Drugs: The Substances of Designer Reality
CHAPTER 5
Seeing is Beholding

Terence McKenna–considered by many the successor to Tim Leary’s psychedelic dynasty–couldn’t make it to Big Heart City Friday night for the elder’s party. The bearded, lanky, forty-somethingish Irishman was deep into a Macintosh file, putting the finishing touches on his latest manuscript about the use of mind-altering plants by ancient cultures. But by Saturday morning he was ready to descend from his small mountaintop ranch house to talk about the virtual reality that has his fans so excited.

We’re backstage with McKenna at a rave where he’ll be speaking about drugs, consciousness, and the end of time. The luckiest of friends and mentees hang out with him in his dressing room as he prepares to go on.

“VR really is like a trip,” one boy offers McKenna in the hopes of launching into him one of his lyrical diatribes. Terence ponders a moment and then he’s off, sounding like a Celtic bard.

“I link virtual reality to psychedelic drugs because I think that if you look at the evolution of organism and self-expression and language, language is seen to be some kind of process that actually tends toward the visible.” McKenna strings his thoughts together into a breathless oral continuum. “The small mouth-noise way of communicating is highly provisional; we may be moving toward an environment of language that is beheld rather than heard.”

Still, assembled admirers hang on McKenna’s every word, as if each syllable were leaving a hallucinatory aftervision on the adrenal cortex. They too dream of a Cyberia around the corner, and virtual reality is the closest simulation of a what a world free of time, location, or even a personal identity might look like. Psychedleics and VR are both ways of creating a new, nonlinear reality, where self-expression is a community event.

“You mean like ESP?”

Terence never corrects anyone–he only interpolates their responses. “This would be like a kind of telepathy, but it would be much more than that: A world of visible language is a world where the individual doesn’t really exist in the same way that the print-created world sanctions what we call `point of view.’ That’s really what an ego is: it’s a consistently defined point of view within a context of narrative. Well, if you replace the idea that life is a narrative with the idea that life is a vision, then you displace the linear progression of events. I think this is technically within reach.”

To Terence, the invention of virtual reality, like the resurgence of psychoactive drugs, serves as a kind of technological philosopher’s stone, bringing an inkling of the future reality into the present. It’s both a hint from our hyperdimensional future and an active, creative effort by cyberians to reach that future.

“I like the concept of the philosopher’s stone. The next messiah might be a machine rather than a person. The philosopher’s stone is a living stone. It is being made. We are making it. We are like tunnelers drilling toward something. The overmind is drilling toward us, and we are drilling toward it. And when we meet, there will be an enormous revelation of the true nature of being. I think every person who takes five or six grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness is probably on a par with Christ and Buddha, at least in terms of the input.”

So, according to McKenna, the psychedelic vision provides a glimse of the truth cyberians are yearning for. But have psychedelics and virtual reality really come to us as a philosopher’s stone, or is it simply that our philosopher’s stoned?

Morphogenetic Fields Forever

Cyberians share a psychedelic common ground. To them, drugs are not simply a recreational escape but a conscious and sometimes daring foray into new possible realities. Psychedelics give them access to what McKenna is calling the overmind and what we call Cyberia. However stoned they might be when they get there, psychedelic explorers are convinced that they are experiencing something real, and bringing back something useful for themselves and the rest of us.

Psychedelic exploration, however personal, is thought to benefit more than the sole explorer. Each tripper believes he is opening the door between humanity and hyperspace a little wider. The few cyberians who haven’t taken psychedelics still feel they have personally experienced and integrated the psychedelic vision through the trips of others, and value the role of these chemicals in the overall development of Cyberia. It is as if each psychedelic journey completes another piece of a universal puzzle.

But, even though they have a vast computer net and communications infrastructure at their disposal, psychedelic cyberians need not communicate their findings so directly. Rather, they believe they are each sharing and benefiting from a collective experience. As we’ll see, one of the most common realizations of the psychedelic trip is that “all is one.” At the euphoric peak of a trip, all people, particles, personalities, and planets are seen as part of one great entity or reality–one big fractal.

It may have been that realization that led Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake to develop his theory of morphogenetic fields, now common knowledge to most cyberians. From morph, meaning “forms,” and genesis, meaning “birth,” these fields are a kind of cumulative record of the past behaviors of species, groups, and even molecules, so that one member of a set can learn from the experience of all the others.

A failed animal-behavior test is still one of the best proofs of Sheldrake’s idea. Scientists were attempting to determine if learned skills could be passed on from parents to children genetically. They taught adult mice how to go through a certain maze, then taught their offspring, and their offspring, and so on for twenty years and fifty generations of mice. Indeed, the descendants of the taught mice knew how to get through the maze very quickly without instruction, but so did the descendants of the control group, who had never seen the maze at all! Later, a scientist decided to repeat this experiment on a different continent with the same mouse species, but they already knew how to go through the maze, too! As explained by morphic resonance, the traits need not have been passed on genetically. The information leak was due not to bad experimental procedure but to the morphogenetic field, which stored the experience of the earlier mice from which all subsequent mice could benefit.

Similarly, if scientists are developing a new crystalline structure, it may take years to “coax” atoms to form the specific crystal. But once the crystal is developed in one laboratory, it can be created instantly in any other laboratory in the world. According to Sheldrake, this is because, like the mice, the atoms are all “connected” to one another through morphogenetic fields, and they “learn” from the experiences of other atoms.

Sheldrake’s picture of reality is a vast fractal of resonating fields. Everything, no matter how small, is constantly affecting everything else. If the tiniest detail in a fractal pattern echoes the overall design of the entire fractal, then a change to (or the experience of) this remote piece changes the overall picture (through the principles of feedback and iteration). Echoing the realizations of his best friends, Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna, Sheldrake is the third member of the famous “Trialogues” at Esalen, where the three elder statesmen (by cyberian standards) discuss onstage the ongoing unfolding of reality before captivated audiences of cyberians. These men are, quite consciously, putting into practice the idea of morphogenetic fields. Even if these Trialogues were held in private (as they were for years), Cyberia as a whole would benefit from the intellectual developments. By pioneering the new “headspace,” the three men leave their own legacy through morphic resonance, if not direct communication through their publishing, lectures, or media events.

Likewise, each cyberian psychedelic explorer feels that by tripping he is leaving his own legacy for others to follow, while himself benefiting from the past psychedelic experiences of explorers before him. For precisely this reason, McKenna always advises using only organic psychedelics, which have well-developed morphogenetic fields: “I always say there are three tests for a drug. It should occur in nature. That gives it a morpogenetic field of resonance to the life of the planet. It should have a history of shamanic usage [which gives it a morphogenetic field of resonance to the consciousness of other human beings]. And it should be similar to or related to neurotransmitters in the brain. What’s interesting about that series of filters, is that it leaves you with the most powerful hallucinogens there are: psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, and, to some degree, LSD.”

These are the substances that stock the arsenal of the drug-using cyberian. Psychedelics use among cyberians has developed directly out of the drug culture of the sixties. The first tripsters–the people associated with Leary on the East Coast, and Ken Kesey on the West Coast–came to startling moral and philosophical conclusions that reshaped our culture. For today’s users, drugs are part of the continuing evolution of the human species toward greater intelligence, empathy, and awareness.

From the principle of morphogenesis, cyberians infer that psychedelic substances have the ability to reshape the experience of reality and thus–if observer and observed are one–the reality itself. It’s hardly disputed that, even in a tangible, cultural sense, the introduction of psychedelics into our society in the sixties altered the sensibilities of users and nonusers alike. The trickle-down effect through the arts, media, and even big business created what can be called a postpsychedelic climate, in which everything from women’s rights, civil rights, and peace activism to spirituality and the computer revolution found suitable conditions for growth.

As these psychoactive plants and chemicals once again see the light of day, an even more self-consciously creative community is finding out about designer reality. While drugs in the sixties worked to overcome social, moral, and intellectual rigidity, drugs now enhance the privileges of the already free. Cyberians using drugs do not need to learn that reality is arbitrary and manipulable, or that the landscape of consciousness is broader than normal waking-state awareness suggests. They have already learned this through the experiences of men like Leary and Kesey. Instead, they take chemicals for the express purpose of manipulating that reality and exploring the uncharted regions of consciousness.

Integrating the Bell Curve

LSD was the first synthesized chemical to induce basically the same effect as the organic psychedelics used by shamans in ancient cultures. Psychedelics break down one’s basic assumptions about life, presenting them instead as arbitrary choices on the part of the individual and his society. The tripper feels liberated into a free-form reality, where his mind and point of view can alter his external circumstances. Psychedelics provide a way to look at life unencumbered by the filters and models one normally uses to process reality. (Whether psychedelics impose a new set of their own filters is irrelevant here. At least the subjective experience of the trip is that the organizing framework of reality has been obliterated.)

Nina Graboi, the author of One Foot in the Future, a novel about her own spiritual journey, was among the first pioneers of LSD in the sixties. Born in 1918 and trained as an actress, she soon became part of New York’s bohemian an subculture, and kept company with everyone from Tim Leary to Alan Watts. She now works as an assistant to mathematician Ralph Abraham, and occasionally hosts large conferences on psychedelics. She spoke to me at her Santa Cruz beach apartment, over tea and cookies. She believes from what see has seen over the past seven decades that what psychedelics do to an individual, LSD did to society, breaking us free of cause-and-effect logic and into an optimistic creativity.

“Materialism really was at its densest and darkest before the sixties and it did not allow us to see that anything else existed. Then acid came along just at the right time–I really think so. It was very important for some people to reach states of mind that allowed them to see that there is more, that we are more than just these physical bodies. I can’t help feeling that there were forces at work that went beyond anything that I can imagine. After the whole LSD craze, all of a sudden, the skies opened up and books came pouring down and wisdom came. And something started happening. I think by now there are enough of us to have created a morphogenetic field of awareness, that are open to more than the materialists believe.”

But Graboi believes that the LSD vision needs to be integrated into the experience of America at large. It’s not enough to tune in, turn on, and drop out. The impulse now is to recreate reality consciously–and that happens both through a morphogenetic resonance as well as good old-fashioned work.

“I don’t think we have a thing to learn from the past, now. We really have to start creating new forms, and seeing real ways of being. This was almost like the mammalian state coming to a somewhat higher octave in the sixties, which was like a quantum leap forward in consciousness. It was a gas. The end of a stage and the beginning of a new one. So right now there are still these two elements very much alive: the old society wanting to pull backward and keep us where we were, and the new one saying, `Hey, there are new frontiers to conquer and they are in our minds and our hearts.”‘

Nina does not consider herself a cyberian, but she does admit she’s part of the same effort, and desperately hopes our society can reach this “higher octave.” As with all psychedelics, “coming down” is the hardest part. Most would prefer simply to “bring up” everything else … to make the rest of the world conform to the trip.

The acid experience follows what can be called a bell curve: the user takes the drug, goes up in about an hour, stays up for a couple of hours, then comes down over a period of three or four hours. It is during the coming-down time–which makes up the majority of the experience–that the clarity of vision or particular insight must be integrated into the normal waking-state consciousness. Like the Greek hero who has visited the gods, the tripper must figure out how the peak of his Aristotelian journey makes sense. The integration of LSD into the sixties’ culture was an analogous process. The tripping community had to integrate the truth of their vision into a society that could not grasp such concepts. The bell curve of the sixties touched ground in the form of political activism, sexual liberation, the new age movement, and new scientific and mathematical models.

Cyberians today consider the LSD trip a traditional experience. Even though there are new psychedelics that more exactly match the cyberian checklist for ease of use, length of trip, and overall intensity, LSD provides a uniquely epic journey for the tripper, where the majority of time and energy in the odyssey is spent bringing it all back home. While cyberians may spend most of their time surfing their consciousness for no reason but fun, they take acid because there’s work to be done.

When Jaida and Cindy, two twenty-year-old girls from Santa Cruz, reunited after being away from each other for almost a year, they chose LSD because they wanted to go through an intense experience of reconnection. Besides, it was the only drug they could obtain on short notice. They began by smoking some pot and hitchhiking to a nearby beachtown. By the time they got there, the girls were stoned and the beach was pitch black. They spent the rest of the night talking and sleeping on what they guessed was a sand dune, and decided to “drop” at dawn. As the sun rose, the acid took effect.

As the girls stood up, Jaida stepped on a crab claw that was sticking out of the sand. Blood flowed out of her foot. As she describes it now:

“The pain was just so…incredible. I could feel the movement of the pain all the way up to my brain, going up the tendrils, yet it was very enjoyable. And blood was coming out, but it was incredibly beautiful. At the same time, there was still the part of me that said `you have to deal with this,’ which I was very grateful for.”

Once Jaida’s foot was bandaged, the girls began to walk together. As they walked and talked, they slipped into a commonly experienced acid phenomenon: shared consciousness. “It’s the only time I’ve ever been psychic with Cindy. It’s like one of those things that you can’t believe … there’s no evidence or anything. Whatever I was thinking, she would be thinking. We were making a lot of commentary about the people we were looking at, and there’d be these long stretches of silence and I would just be sort of thinking along, and then she would say word for word what I was thinking. Like that. And then I would say something and it would be exactly what she was thinking. And we just did that for about four or five hours. She’s a very different physical type from me, but it reached the point where I could feel how she felt in her body. I had the very deep sensation of being inside her body, hearing her think, and being able to say everything that she was thinking. We were in a reality together, and we shared the same space. Our bodies didn’t separate us from each other. We were one thing.”

But then came the downside of the bell curve. The girls slowly became more “disjointed.” They began to disagree about tiny things–which way to walk, whether to eat. “There was this feeling of losing it. I could feel we were moving away from it with every step. There was a terrible disappointment that set in. We couldn’t hold on to that perfect attunement.”

By the time the girls got back to their campsite on the sand dune, their disillusionment was complete. The sand dune was actually the local trash dump. As they climbed the stinking mound of garbage to gather their sleeping bags, they found the “crab claw” on which Jaida had stepped. It was really a used tampon and a broken bottle. And now Jaida’s foot was beginning to smart.

Jaida’s reintegration was twofold: She could no more bring back her empathic ability than she could the belief that she had stepped on a crab claw. What Jaida retained from the experience, though, came during the painful crash landing. She was able to see how it was only her interpretation that made her experience pain as bad, or the tampon and glass as less natural than a crab claw. As in the experience of a Buddha, the garbage dump was as beautiful as a sand dune … until they decided it was otherwise. Losing her telepathic union with her friend symbolized and recapitulated the distance that had grown between them over the past year. They had lost touch, and the trip had heightened both their friendship and their separation.

Most acid trippers try to prolong that moment on the peak of the bell curve, but to do so is futile. Coming down is almost inevitably disillusioning to some degree. Again, though, like in a Greek tragedy, it is during the reintegration that insight occurs, and progress is made–however slight–toward a more all-encompassing or cyberian outlook. In order to come down with a minimum of despair and maximum of progess, the tripper must guide his own transition back to normal consciousness and real life while maintaining the integrity whatever truths he may have gleaned at the apogee of his journey. The LSD state itself is not an end in itself. While it may offer a brief exposure to post-paradigm thinking or even hyperdimensional abilities, the real value of the LSD trip is the change in consciousness, and the development of skills in the user to cope with that change. Just as when a person takes a vacation, it is not that the place visited is any better than where he started. It’s just different. The traveler returns home changed.

Eugene Schoenfeld, M.D., is the Global Village Town Physician. A practicing psychologist, he wrote the famous “Dr. Hip” advice column in the sixties; he now treats recovering drug addicts. The doctor believes that the desire to alter consciousness, specifically psychedelically, is a healthy urge.

“I think what happens is that it allows people to sense things in a way that they don’t ordinarily sense them because we couldn’t live that way. If our brains were always the way that they are under the influence of LSD, we couldn’t function. Perhaps it is that when babies are born–that’s the way they perceive things. Gradually they integrate their experience because we cannot function if we see music, for example. We can’t live that way.

“Part of the reason why people take drugs is to change their sense of reality, change their sensation, change from the ordinary mind state. And if they had that state all the time, they would seek to change it. It seems that humans need to change their minds in some way. There’s a reason why people start talking about `tripping.’ It’s related to trips people take when they physically change their environment. I’m convinced that if there were a way to trip all the time on LSD, they would want to change their reality to something else. That is part of the need.”

The sense of being on a voyage, of “tripping,” is the essence of a classic psychedelic experience. The user is a traveler, and an acid or mushroom trip is a heroic journey or visionquest through unexplored regions, followed by a reentry into mundane reality. Entry to the psychedelic realm almost always involves an abandonment of the structures by which one organizes reality, and a subsequent shedding of one’s ego–usually defined by those same organizational structures. On the way back, the tripper realizes that reality itself has been arbitrarily arranged. The voyager sees that there may be such a thing as an objective world, but whatever it is we’re experiencing as reality on a mass scale sure isn’t it. With the help of a psychedelic journey, one can come back and consciously choose a different reality from the one that’s been agreed upon by the incumbent society. This can be manifest on a personal, theoretical, political, technological, or even spiritual level.

As Dr. Schoenfeld, who once served as Tim Leary’s family physician and now shares his expertise with cyberians as co-host of the DRUGS conference on the WELL, explains, “that quality–that nonjudgmental quality could be carried over without the effects of the drug. After all, one hopes to learn something from a drug experience that he can use afterward. (All this interest in meditation and yoga, all these various disciplines, it all began with people taking these drugs and wanting to recreate these states without drugs.) So, to the extent that they can, that is a useful quality. And this nonjudgmental quality is something I think that can be carried over from a drug experience.”

Over There

So, the use of psychedelics can be seen as a means toward experiencing free-flowing, designer reality: the goal, and the fun, is to manipulate intentionally one’s objectivity in order to reaffirm the arbitrary nature of all the mind’s constructs, revealing, perhaps, something truer beneath the surface, material reality. You take a trip on which you go nowhere, but everything has changed anyway.

To some, though, it is not the just the change of consciousness that makes psychedelics so appealing, but the qualitative difference in the states of awareness they offer. The place people “go” on a trip–the psychedelic corridors of Cyberia–may even be a real space. According to Terence McKenna’s authoritative descriptions of that place, it is quite different from normal waking-state consciousness:

The voyager journeys “into an invisible realm in which the causality of the ordinary world is replaced with the rationale of natural magic. In this realm, language, ideas, and meaning have greater power than cause and effect. Sympathies, resonances, intentions, and personal will are linguistically magnified through poetic rhetoric. The imagination is invoked and sometimes its forms are beheld visibly. Within the magical mind-set of the shaman, the ordinary connections of the world and what we call natural laws are de-emphasized or ignored.”{EN1}

As McKenna describes it, this is not just a mindspace but more of a netherworld, where the common laws of nature are no longer enforced. It is a place where cause-and-effect logic no longer holds, where events and objects function more as icons or symbols, where thoughts are beheld rather than verbalized, and where phenomena like morphic resonance and the fractal reality become consciously experienced. This is the description of Cyberia.

As such, this psychedelic world is not something experienced personally or privately, but, like the rest of Cyberia, as a great group project. The psychedelic world each tripper visits is the same world, so that changes made by one are felt by the others. Regions explored by any traveler become part of the overall map. This is a hyperdimensional terrain on which the traditional solo visionquest becomes a sacred community event.

This feeling of being part of a morphogenetic unfolding is more tangible on psilocybin mushrooms than on LSD. McKenna voices Cyberia’s enchantment with the ancient organic brain food: “I think that people should grow mushrooms. They are the real connector back into the archaic, even more so than LSD, which was largely psychoanalytical. It didn’t connect you up to the greeny engines of creation. Psilocybin is perfect.”

Like LSD, mushrooms provide an eight-hour, bell-curve trip, but it is characterized by more physical and visual “hallucinations” and a much less intellectual edge. Users don’t overanalyze their experiences, opting instead to revel in them more fully. Mushrooms are thought to have their own morphogenetic field, which has developed over centuries of their own evolution and their use by ancient cultures. The mushroom trip is much more predictable, cyberians argue, because its morphogenetic field is so much better established than that of acid, which has only been used for a couple of decades, and mostly by inexperienced Western travelers.

As a result, mushroom experiences are usually less intensely disorienting than LSD trips; the “place” one goes on mushrooms is more natural and user-friendly than the place accessed on acid or other more synthetic psychedelics. Likewise, `shroomers feel more tangibly a part of the timeless, locationless community of other users, or even animals, fairies, or the “greeny engines” of the spirit of Nature herself.

For this feeling of morphic community and interconnection with nature to become more tangible, groups of ’shroomers often choose to create visionquest hot spots. Students at U.C. Santa Cruz have developed a secret section of woods dedicated to mushroom tripping called Elf Land (the place just behind Ralph Abraham’s office). Some students believe that fairies prepared and maintain the multidimensional area of the woods for ’shroomers. Some students claim to have found psilocybin mushrooms–which these fairies are said to leave behind them–growing in Elf Land. Most of all, Elf Land serves as a real-world reference plane for the otherworldly, dimensionless mushroom plane. And, like the morphogenetic mushroom field, Elf Land is shared and modified by everyone who trips there, making the location a kind of cumulative record of a series of mushroom trips.

Mariah is tripping in Elf Land for the first time. A sophomore at U.C. Santa Cruz, the English major had heard of Elf Land since she began taking mushrooms last year, but never really believed in it as a real, physical place. She eats the mushrooms in her dorm with her friends Mark and Rita, then the trio head out to the woods. It’s still afternoon, so the paths are easy to follow, but Rita–a much more plugged-in, pop-cultural, fashion-conscious communications major than one would expect to find tripping in the woods of Santa Cruz–suddenly veers off into a patch of poison oak.

Mark, a senior mathematics major and Rita’s boyfriend, grabs Rita by the arm, afraid that she’s stoned and losing her way.

“It’s a pathless path, Mariah,” Rita assures the younger girl, without even looking at Mark. Rita knows that Mariah’s fears are the most pressing, and that Mark’s concerns will be answered by these indirect means. Rita has made it clear that this trip is for Mariah.

“It’s the perfect place to trip.” Rita puts her arm around Mariah. “People continually put things there. Some of it’s very subtle, too. Every time you go there, there’s different stuff there. And it’s all hidden in the trees up past the fire trails, up in the deep woods there.” She points a little farther up the hill.

Then Mariah sees something–a little rock on the ground with an arrow painted on it. “Lookee here!” She stops, picks it up, and turns it over. Painted on the back are the words “This way to Elf Land.”

“Someone left this for me?” Mariah asks, the mushrooms taking full effect now, and the fluorescent words on the gray rock beginning to vibrate.

“Just for you, Mariah,” Rita whispers, “and for everyone. Come on.”

“Here’s another one!” Mark is at an opening to the deeper woods, standing next to another sign, this one carved into the side of a tree: “Welcome to Elf Land.”

As the three pass through the opening, they walk into another world. It’s a shared state of consciousness, not just among the three trippers but among them and everyone else who has ever tripped in Elf Land or anywhere else.

Mariah is thinking about her name; how she got it, how it’s shaped her, how it’s like the name Mary from the Bible, but changed somehow, too. Updated. At the same moment as these thoughts, she comes upon a small shrine that has been set up in a patch of ferns between two tall trees. The two-foot statue is of the Virgin Mary, but she has been decorated–updated–with a Day-Glo costume.

“How’d that get there?” Mariah wonders out loud.

Meanwhile, Mark has wandered off by himself. He’s been disturbed about his relationship with Rita. She seems so addicted to popular culture–not the die-hard Deadhead he remembers from their freshman year. Should they stay together after graduation? Get married, even?

He stands against a tree and leans his head against its trunk, looking up into the branches. He looks at the way each larger branch splits in two. Each smaller branch then splits in two, and so and so on until the branches become leaves. Each leaf, then, begins with a single vein, then splits, by two, into smaller and smaller veins. Mark is reminded of chaos math theory, in which ordered systems, like a river flowing smoothly, become chaotic through a process called bifurcation, or dividing by twos. A river splits in two if there’s a rock in its path, the two separate sections preserving–between the two of them–the order and magnitude of the original. A species can bifurcate into two different mutations if conditions require it. And a relationship can break up if …

As Mark stares at the bifurcated pairs of branches and leaves, he realizes that bifurcation is the nature of decision making. He’s caught in the duality of a painful choice, and the tree is echoing the nature of decision-making itself.

“Making a decision?” Mariah asks innocently. She has read the small sign nailed into the side of the tree: “Tree of Decision.”

“I wonder who left that there?” Mark wonders aloud.

“Doesn’t matter,” answers Rita, emerging from nowhere. “Someone last week, last year. A tripper, an elf … whoever.”

As if on a visionquest, Mark and Mariah were presented with a set of symbols in material form that they could analyze and integrate into a pattern. They were “beholding” their thoughts in physical form. The reality of their trip was confirmed not just by their fantasies but by the totems and signs left for them by other trippers experiencing the same things at different times.

Mushrooms very often give users the feeling of being connected with the past and the future. Whether the ’shroomers know about morphogenetic fields, they do feel connected with the spirit of the woods, and everyone who has traveled before in the same space. Going up is the voyage to that space, peaking is the un-self-conscious experience of the new world, and coming down is the reintegration during which the essence of the peak experience is translated into a language or set of images a person can refer to later, at baseline reality.

241 comments August 28th, 2005