17:06 - June 12, 2002
mushrooms
I've been reading Terence McKenna's 'True Hallucinations', and despite it's being a very 'smartly written' book, by which I mean he uses a lot of big scientific words, I have to stop every ten pages and look around me, and then, usually involuntarily, giggle madly for a few seconds. See, the book is all about McKenna and his brother going to the Amazon to research various psycheledic effects of different plant life, or (so I took it as), get high a lot. Theirs was an expedition of five people, two of whom turned out to be skeptics (three, had I been along). They ended up with this whole theory, mostly conceived by Dennis McKenna, that through these mushrooms and various catalysts and inhibitors taken along with the mushrooms, including ayahuasca brew, they had been chosen to be the bearers of the world's secrets and become enlightened and spread the oneness into all people, etc. (Somewhere within the whole explanation, over a hundred pages long alone, was the mention of them being, in effect, the Antichrist (since the world was supposed to end once they'd had this hallucinogenic combo), and another concerning random UFO's being in the middle of the Amazon Jungle, in clearings.)

Preceding the actual experiment, (the previous was all hypotheses on the part of Dennis and Terence McKenna), they ate mushrooms. At the actual experiment, they ate mushrooms, plants containing DMT, ayahuasca brew, and various other things I didn't catch. In other words, they were fucking blasted. They considered the experiment to be an amazing success when, in the middle of the night, the mushroom growing in front of them appeared to turn into the earth. (Wow! I can see all of what is! I am holding the world in my hands!)

Then, best as I can describe, everything went mad, and Dennis believed himself to be completely omniscient and went wandering around naming flowers in their Latin tongues and climbing trees and meditating backwards to his birth and talking to dead people, unable to communicate with anyone else. Terence McKenna describes this with the greatest reverence, naming his brother as something wondrous and inexplicable; actually the Antichrist! or whatever they were calling it at that point!(It changed.)

That's as far as I've gotten, but every few pages I just look up, cock my head, and my mind says, 'He's high. He's blasted. And then I'll go off into a gale of giggles. It's written in the style of an old stuffy scientist with mad hair in a secluded lab somewhere, with charts of true experimental form and all, but he's investigating his brother being the antichrist and the world exploding and a mushroom turning into the entire earth.

I might be a horrible person for making light of such an ancient plant. Maybe it will come and attack me, or maybe my room will turn into a mushroom. Or the Antichrist.

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