by Paulo Tullio
In the silence that followed there was only an odd cough, a slight movement of chairs. Konstad’s eyes scanned the room, selecting those he hadn’t convinced, bullying them with his unflinching gaze.
I stood up. ‘I want to ask a question.’
‘Ask.’
‘Your partner, Joe Kay. Was that his real name?’
‘Names are unimportant. It’s who you are that matters. Your name is just a label for the sum of your experiences.’
‘But was his real name Joe Kay?’
‘I think I’ve answered that. Are there any more questions?’ His eyes scanned the room.
‘You haven’t answered it. I want to know. What was his real name?’
‘Please sit down, sir, you’re disrupting this gathering.’
‘Why won’t you tell me?’
‘If you don’t sit down now, I’ll have to ask you to leave.’
He nodded to the back of the room and two large men seized me by the arms.
‘Tell me his name! Why won’t you tell me his name?’ I was bundled out of the room and left in the hall. I was shaking, I couldn’t stop my hands from trembling. Hartfield came out and closed the door behind him.
‘What did you think you were doing in there? I’m surprised at you, behaving like that in my house.’
‘I just wanted to know his name. It matters to me.’
‘Perhaps you should go. Yelena and White Cloud really wanted this to be a success. Your behaviour hasn’t helped.’
‘I’m sorry. I hope the meeting goes well. I just wanted to know his real name, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, I know, OK. Look, I have to go back in; I suggest maybe you should go home now.’
When I got home the trembling had stopped, but I still felt angry. Why had he refused to answer me? Why all that bullshit about names being meaningless? They’re not meaningless, they can give you a clue as to who you’re talking about. I wanted to know if Joe Kay was Greg, that’s all. The possibility had nagged at me for weeks. It was entirely possible; the time-scale fitted.
I sat in my armchair and watched the flames in the hearth lapping round the logs. I half closed my eyes and thought about my last meeting with Greg at the stones. Was death no more than a dream? A change of perspective, just as a sleeping body dreams, a dead body experiences an other-worldly reality. Maybe. I realized that I was re-running Hamlet’s soliloquy. Maybe, maybe not. Sleepers awake and tell of their dreams, the dead say nothing. Unless Greg was talking to me. Talking from across a divide that could only be spanned by deliberately splitting the skin of everyday reality. Mushrooms allowed doors to be opened that normally remain firmly shut. Either that was true, or I was quite simply going mad.
Yet it all seemed so real. Greg spoke as he always had, he spoke of things that he always spoke of. A memory brought to life? That was possible too, but somehow I didn’t believe it. Some kind of change was happening to me, as though in preparation for a journey. I’ve often thought about what I’d do if extraterrestrials knocked on my door and said ‘come with us’, but it occurred to me that expecting them to behave like humans was a bit terra-centric.
I remembered something Greg had said years ago about mushrooms being star-borne. If he was right, then the mushroom reality was a glimpse of an other-worldly reality. Perhaps the invitation had already come in the shape of the mushroom-induced visions; perhaps because their plane of existence was in no way similar to ours that was how the invitation was made. Perhaps this was how contact was made; not in the world of matter, but in the realm of dreams. Maybe I’d just had my invitation. Now I’d have to decide whether or not to accept.
Panaeolina foenisecii.
Small. 1–2 inches high.
Cap dull brown with darker margin.
In lawns and grasslands. Summer to autumn.
Sometimes classified as psilocybin. Hallucinogenic.
fifteen
I felt as though I’d taken one step forwards and now ten backwards. It was deeply depressing. Just as I was confident that I was getting somewhere with the mushroom.man I was back at square one. More obsession with Greg, and not a mention of anything that I’d asked. It was as if he was just sending me e-mail with no reference to what he’d received.
Apart from this sense of going backwards my whole intended schedule was thrown out of gear. I had planned to have my paper ready for reading at a symposium in early November. It was clearly out of the question now. I suppose I sulked. I sent nothing to him and tried to keep my mind on the task of learning the course I was due to teach the next year’s intake of students. I stayed away from the net, not checking my mailbox. It was like trying to quit an addiction; but every time the temptation came on me to get onto the net I refrained.
By the end of October I felt I could resume my life on the net, but I was determined to send nothing to the mushroom.man. I felt that he had shut me out by simply not responding to anything that I’d written and sending me anything he felt like, even if it had no bearing on our previous correspondence. When I finally checked my mail-box I found he had sent this, nearly two weeks previously.
Attn. mushroom.seeker.
Subject: magic and death.
13 October.
I think I’ve been living here, in one place, for far too long. My physical world has shrunk: the same few people are always there, peripheral to my life. I can’t define myself any longer by my interactions with others; there are too few of them to make any sense. The only expanding world I know is the cerebral one.
It’s tempting to believe that this is what mystics want to say about attachment to the world. Losing the threads of attachment should be a release of some kind, rather like death. I’m increasingly convinced that consciousness is not a product of the physical body, but rather our consciousness creates an effect on the material universe, and that effect is what we call the body. This makes the movement of consciousness from one state to another easier to deal with. From dreams to altered states to hyperspace to cyberspace to death. All one continuum accessible to the mind, but only one state accessible to the body.
The conversations I’ve had with Greg since his death have puzzled me. I’ve seen them at different times as different things, in the hope of making sense of them. I’ve thought of him as a ghost – a shade from Judaeo-Christian mythology – I’ve believed him to be a lucid manifestation of my own memory; but now I think I’ve talked to the disembodied mind – the hyper-dimensional being, the essence that once inhabited the body.
I’ve been puzzled, too, by the influence of a dead friend. If I were to add up the hours I spent with Greg over the years I’m sure they wouldn’t amount to much. Less, possibly, than I spent with Clair. So why should it seem to matter more? I have an answer that satisfies me. It’s not a question of how long, but of significance. The things that I did with Greg, the conversations that I had with him, turned out to be significant in my life. He altered the direction of it, changed my priorities, and therefore became significant. I let my destiny become inextricably bound up with his. The closer the bond of destinies, the more intensely linked two lives become. And that’s what causes the pain when two destinies become unlinked. When Jane decided to leave for her new life she didn’t leave me simply alone, but unlinked. A balloon with its string cut, floating wherever psychic winds blow.
It’s not something that we do often, because binding our fates to others carries with it the possibility of emotional pain. When we don’t do it, there is no real tie to another person. Clair never really became part of my life and so took nothing from it when she left. And that seems to be true of the few remaining people in my life. I made that bond twice, once with Jane, and once with Greg. Both bonds are broken now, not from my choice, but still they’re gone. There is no one I know now that I would start the process with again. I don’t want to be exposed and vulnerable any more.
I sometimes wonder what the procedures are that make us either admit or exclude another person from our lives. It can’t be just con
gruence of thought: I could never have stayed so long with Jane if that were the only criterion. We had very different ideas and ultimately different needs, yet for years we twinned our lives. There has to be another plane of existence on which compatibility is founded.
Quite what this other dimension is I’m not sure. There are cultures in the world that believe this other level is the dream state. In dreams we act with and react to people we know in the waking state and also to people we have never met when awake. It’s a reality in the sense that it’s a manifestation of our consciousness, but it operates by different rules. Maybe at some elemental level we recognize some people as dream-mates. This at least explains why some choices seem so odd in the light of everyday reality and why sexual fantasies often include partners who would seem unlikely candidates in the realms outside of fantasy.
It’s possible that the hallucinogenic reality is a place where interactions take place with other people in much the same way as in dreams. Unlike the waking state, these interactions are never verifiable. How do I say to White Cloud or Yelena, ‘Did you meet me with a dead friend of mine and have sex with him?’ What possible answer could you expect that could make any sense? It’s like asking someone you dreamed about do they remember being in your dream. Any answer you get is unlikely to help. It’s the old Sufi story of the man who dreamt he was a butterfly. When he awakes he asks himself, ‘Am I a man who dreamt I was a butterfly, or a butterfly who is dreaming that it is a man?’ Much of the experience in altered states has to remain in that state; you can’t take it with you somewhere else. Its validity can only be tested within the framework of its own reality.
We live in many parallel worlds simultaneously, but we are not always aware of the fact that we do. Many people are unaware of their dreams day after day, although they will accept that they must have dreamt. There is also the reality that we sometimes get glimpses of; the one where the thoughts of others for a moment become accessible, where we know who is phoning before we pick up the phone, when we are aware of being watched before we turn around to verify it. These are common manifestations of another reality; one that is accessed easily through hallucinogens, but that breaks through into everyday consciousness from time to time unbidden. The higher levels of awareness that mystics hope to achieve are probably these same realities, arrived at by different means. The point is to make their accessibility biddable, to be able to reach them at will, moving easily from one state to another.
It’s fertile ground for the imagination. The arrival of opium into England brought a new vision of reality to the poets and artists. Coleridge and Blake explored the altered state that opium brings and created strange new worlds of the imagination. The dark, brooding gothic landscapes of Coleridge and De Quincey are clear reflections of opium-induced visions. Byron and Shelley experimented with hashish. This literary pedigree passed through Baudelaire, Havelock Ellis, William James and Aldous Huxley. What binds these disparate artists is their readiness to explore the gnostic world and to exploit its stimulation of the imagination. Despite the best efforts of society to repress attempts at exploring the psyche through drugs, there has been an uninterrupted stream of just that running underground in an unbroken chain from the shamans.
What made governments decide to start a war on drugs was the explosion of LSD in the sixties. Naturally occurring hallucinogens were available only in season and only to those who knew what to look for. They also needed time to gather and to prepare. There is an effort to be made before any use can be made of the harvest. However, a reasonably competent chemist could make millions of doses of LSD in one day. That changes things considerably. Every day is in season, there is no requirement of prior knowledge or time spent gathering. The experience is available to all easily and cheaply, even to those who have no idea what to expect. This is what prompted governments to legislate. As long as psychoactive compounds remained in the hands of artists – people already beyond society’s pale – they could be ignored. When they threatened to become mainstream, when proselytes like Timothy Leary popularized them, then it was time for legislation. Today the only political debate about these drugs is how severe the penalties should be for abuse.
Would you ban chain-saws because someone used one as a murder weapon? A tool has no morality, it is neither good nor bad, but morally neutral. The use I choose to make of it defines the morality of my actions, not the tool. It’s the same with a consciousness-altering compound. I can use it or abuse it. I make the choice. The point is that because of perceived abuses a useful tool has been proscribed and driven underground. The most obvious and the most direct route to transcendence is illegal.
What sane society would spend vast amounts of tax revenues to build and test the mushroom technology of Fermi and Oppenheimer, while at the same time suppressing the use of psilocybin? The first could be the harbinger of the world’s end and yet we refine it; the other could be the point of a new beginning and we attempt to ban it.
Magic is only a parlour trick today. There is no sense of awe in the observer, only admiration for what we know to be no more than prestidigitation. When we see a clever illusion we know it is just that; our personal reality is not under threat. And that is what is so shocking to the initiate of gnosis: the assault on their personal reality. The shaman through his magic and the psychedelic through its chemical structure bend and warp reality creating the same sense of disorientation and wonder. Without the shock of discovery that reality is precarious and nebulous there can be no acceptance that other realities exist.
Today’s magicians are a long way from their forebears, the sorcerers. The magic of the sorcerers was not to entertain, but to enlighten. In most tribal societies the sorcerer, witch-doctor or shaman is regarded with a mixture of awe and respect. Mostly they don’t live in the village, but are peripheral to it. The world they represent and allow access to is a world apart, and their physical placing within the tribe is a manifestation of that. Their magic is the bending and reshaping of reality.
Shamans access a group reality, a realm of the mind where interactions with others take place unconsciously. In this reality the loves and hates of the group are unspoken. It is the world of desires and needs, the world of forces that drive the interplay of society that we are often aware of but that we rarely explore. It’s like a kind of internet with links from and to each individual in the group. In this nexus the psychic tentacles around each mind move about one another in an endless dance, like electrons in a gas. It’s a fluid world with no boundaries and no signposts, a world where initiates move easily and quickly and where others either never venture or stumble through haphazardly. This is the place where diseases and love begin. It isn’t hard to see the parallels between this and the world of cyberspace, where the shamans are the virus-writers and hackers.
In tribal societies each group member lives in the daily world of harvest or gathering but also in the group mind. The shaman is the policeman of this domain, the place where the movement of minds precedes physical actions. The shaman keeps the peace here, smoothing out hatreds and feuds before they spill over into the physical world. The group feels awe for him because he can also manipulate this world; because he moves so freely and unseen through it he can make events unfold as he wishes, bring ostracism and death, or bring harmony.
The medicine-men of the Amazon start their cure of the sick by bringing the individual’s psychic wanderings into harmony with the group cosmos. Diseases are seen as manifestations of inner distress. Behavioural disorders like compulsions are similarly viewed. Instead of focusing on the material world, the emphasis is on the inner world, since the conviction is that the material world is the shadow of the inner. This is diametrically opposed to the view of behavioural psychologists.
In our technological society we have no one to tend the group mind. In the workplace the job is done by the personnel department or by industrial psychologists, but neither of these groups has the cultural place of a shaman, and I would suspect that neither have th
ey the skills nor the understanding of one. The study of group dynamics has become a one-world study. It addresses only the physical and therefore does only half a job. It is often oriented solely toward a goal of greater productivity, and rarely if ever toward a dynamic of group harmony based on inner peace.
If the existence of this world is apparent to you, then you must become your own shaman, since there are none in the phone book. With no guide to bring centuries of knowledge to bear, you make mistakes even when moving cautiously. You must move in the world of the sorcerer and do as he does. He manipulates the physical world by manipulating the inner world. The one casts its shadow on the other.
During the twentieth century we have focused increasingly on the physical world – what we call the real world. All our technology, all our research is firmly rooted in matter. We have chained ourselves to the earth and tell ourselves that it is the pursuit of truth. But scratch a little and still we have a need to soar beyond the ordinary, to transcend. We have separated ourselves from a universe of being without even thinking about it – all that remains is a lingering longing and a partial awareness that something is missing.
What I’m sure of is that the great organized religions of the world were all mystery cults at their inception. Embedded in their core beliefs are the remnants of paths to transcendence that have become with the passing of time no more than the empty enactment of rituals whose original meaning is long lost. Why do Christians take communion and eat their god? On the face of it it’s a strange ritual. But to a mushroom-man it makes sense – it’s what we do. John Allegro suggested some years ago that mushrooms were at the heart of the Judaic cabala and that many of the Old Testament stories were thinly disguised tales of mushroom cults whose real meaning was clear only to initiates. Whatever was going on at Qumran it was right in the mainstream of gnosis. The language of the scrolls is similar to arcana in other cultures: it is oblique and circumloquacious. Words and phrases have meanings other than those commonly ascribed to them; parables are multi-levelled, designed to be understood at face value, or at a symbolic level.