Remembering Terence McKenna (5)

I didn't return to the secret rebel ethnobotanical base in Hawaii, but I spent some time with Terence in Occidental, about an hour's drive north from me, and he spent some time at my place. He introduced me to a fellow who sold me plants of (legal) ethnobotanical interest, which I attempted to keep alive in my greenhouse. One time when Terence and I were talking in the greenhouse, we were joined by Jaron Lanier. They had not met before. I had to go pick up my daughter, so I left them. It wasn't until I returned about an hour later that I discovered that I had reflexively locked them in.

Terence strongly recommended taking a "heroic" dose of mushrooms -- about five grams of dried shrooms would do it. He also recommended -- insisted was more like it -- that I do it alone, in the dark. The alone part suited Judy, who doesn't want to be around me when my mind is that enlarged, who agreed that I could do it outside on our back deck -- decks turned out to be a leitmotiv of these adventures -- at night. With the door locked from the inside. So I set myself up with a pad and a bucket, just in case, although shrooms tend sometimes toward mild nausea and not toward Ayahuasca's projectile proclivities. 

I also brought a cassette tape player -- remember, this was around 1990 -- and a set of tapes I had acquired. Maria Sabina, a towering spiritual figure of the twentieth century, the humble healer in the mountains above Oaxaca who introduced mushrooms to the Western world, had allowed Gordon Wasson, who had first discovered her, to record one of her mushroom veladas -- a ritual to help someone in physical and/or spiritual distress. Maria Sabina was involved, since she was a little girl, in seeking healing help from other dimensions.

Around 10 PM I ate the shrooms, lay down on the pad on my deck, turned on the cassette player, added a blindfold to keep me completely in the dark. Maria Sabina started chanting. I didn't know what she was saying, but her fervor and fearlessness came through. It was like she was flycasting, throwing out her prayer, pulling it in, throwing it out again. It went on like that for a long time. Then it seemed like she got a nibble -- no, it was a bite, and a big one. Something had grabbed ahold of her chant and she was struggling to reel it in. I've experienced what William Burroughs calls "the fear," and I know to breathe until it passes, but this feeling surpassed the normal willies. The hairs on the back of my mind were standing straight up. I took off the earphones. I was definitely fully in the soup and the soup was definitely in me. I reached for the package that had contained the set of cassette tapes and read about this Velada. Why I had not read all the captions before I embarked, I don't know. But the point is that the healer was unable to heal -- the big something she reeled in told her that the patient was going to die.

I retreated to my pad and a mildly vibrating case of "oh fuck!" Although I was aware that I was experiencing the effects of a drug and that it would wear off, the big skeery feeling just wouldn't go away. So I decided to pray. I wasn't sure who to pray to, so I just chanted "I pray to ALL the holy names!" over and over. That definitely helped calm the noetic waters, but then I stopped to take a sip of water. At that moment, I swear I heard gunfire in the distance. So I started chanting again. I paused again, and the sound of screeching brakes followed by the sound of  breaking glass came from the direction of the highway. Chanted again, paused: Somebody started yelling at somebody a block away. I felt like the person in the H.P. Lovecraft who unwittingly unlocks the prison where ancient awful gods had been stashed before the beginning of time. Or the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. There were big entities out there beyond the stairway to the stars, and not all of them were friendly disposed to earthling minds. Tonight, I had chosen to be the one to chant them away until daylight, and so I did. In the morning, I felt like a Sunday sailor who had taken my small boat out onto the bay and ran into an unpredicted hurricane, praying that if I only got back to land I would never go out there again without someone who knows what they are doing.

And that was my psychedelic graduation, after a couple decades of intermittent experimentation: I felt that I had traveled as best as I could on my own and needed someone who not only knew how to navigate but knew where to go. I never did get -- so far -- to a part of the world where such a person could be found. 

As I wrote elsewhere in my Patreon, "To a significant extent, my life path and my ways of thinking were permanently altered by my experimentation with psychedelics in my teens and twenties. In my sixties, the most important takeaway was that the revelations that had shaped my ways of thinking and living still seemed valid. Among these were the understanding that the universe (as JBS Haldane put it) is not only stranger than I imagine, but stranger than I can imagine (which makes me an agnostic on matters such as God and extrasensory experience); the direct experience of the way mind and culture construct reality -- and the infinite number of other ways it can be constructed (as William James put it: "Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different; the possibility that consciousness, like energy and matter, is fundamental (that is, just as life seems to vivify matter and consciousness seems to add another dimension to sentient life, psychedelic experience put me in touch with a way of experiencing consciousness that seemed to be extending this teleology -- and which implied that there are even more extended forms of consciousness, perhaps to come, perhaps coextant with the world we know but not perceptible to the unawkened mind; direct experience of the interbeing of all things. "

A few years ago, a quarter century after the mushroom teacher took me by the scruff of my soul and shook me the way a terrier shakes a captured critter, I took LSD a couple of times to see what it was like to go out there as an aging cancer survivor. I was a little afraid of going to dark places -- I had survived cancer, I was closer to death, etc -- but I realized that I had not taken into account two things. First, the present can expand a great deal, which causes the remembered past as the imagined future to shrink; second, I had better coping mechanisms in my sixties than I did in my teens and even my forties.

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