Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a variety of forms around his own self: thus the vegetables of our first picture book encircled a boy in his dream--green cucumber, blue eggplant, red beet, Potato père, Potato fils, a girly asparagus, and, oh, many more, their spinning ronde going faster and faster and gradually forming a transparent ring of banded colors around a dead person or planet.
--from Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov
"Mind," this bright process of intelligence,
In one way exists and in another way does not...Realize past awareness as trackless, clear, and void,
Future awareness as unproduced and new,
And present awareness as staying natural, uncontrived.
Your looking is transparent, nothing to be seen.
This is naked, immediate, clear intelligence.
It is clear voidness with nothing established,
Purity of clarity-voidness nonduality;
Not permanent, free of any intrinsic status,
Not annihilated, bright and distinct,
Not a unity, multidiscerning clarity,
Without Plurality, indivisible, one in taste,
Not derivative, self-aware, it is this very reality
--from Natural Liberation Through Naked Vision attributed to Padma Sambhava as translated by Robert Thurman
The upper case letters which begin the words The,Fane, Psilocybe, and Mushroom are perhaps a little difficult to recognize at first. Each capital letter has the appearance of being crafted from a floor lamp consisting of a white porcelain column with a small pudgy porcelain sphere and three short protruding porcelain legs at floor level. The letters look as if they are about to wander off.
Let's examine the letter T in the first word The. As one would expect the central stem of the letter T consists of the lampstand column. Crowning the stem is a mushroom cap similar in color and shape to various psilocybe species. The cap is conical fading from a caramel with an orangish tone to a lighter tan almost white color at the edge. The cap is shiny as if its surface is slightly gelatinous. The purple disk which appears half way down the column is reminiscent of an annulus dusted with the dark purple spores characteristic of some Psilocybe species.
The next upper case letter is F which begins the word, Fane. Two (as one would expect) arms extend from the lampstand to the right. These arms end in eyeballs with green irises radiating from black pupils. The top eyeball is looks off to the right, while its lower companion looks directly at us. There is a sense of curiosity and desire to explore in their gaze as if they are seeing the world for the first time.
The upper case letters T and F rest on a green and red tiled ledge which juts out from a green and red tiled wall. The lower case letters float slightly above the ledge. Some of them cast shadows onto the tiled wall and ledge and some of them are reflected in the tiles.
The next upper case letter is P from Psilocybe. It is perhaps the most obscure of the upper case figurines. It consists of a lampstand with an oval donut shape somehow attached to the stem. There are sperm hovering around the outer circumference looking like the thin petals of a flower or perhaps a halo of light rays from a sun. A yellow yolk like light illuminates the bio-energy matrix from within.
The next upper case letter is the M from Mushroom. It rests on the red and green tiled floor below the ledge in front of and to the right of the P. The central stem splits at the top from a yellow ring from which two arms extend one curving to the right and then down and the other curving to the left and then down as is proper for an M. Upside down mushrooms with broad convex caps and exposed purple gills are held in the spherical yellow mits at the end of the arms. The figure is reminiscent of the brooms carrying water buckets which were animated by the sorcerer's apprentice in Disney's Fantasia.
There are a total of seven light sources casting light and shadows on the scene. There is a blue light shining weakly from within the mushroom cap lampshade in "The" and a yellow light shines from the center of the 'donut' in the letter P. Four of the remaining five lights are Light grey ; the fifth one being a light pink. One of the Light grey lights sits directly on the floor in front of the M while the others are located farther back towards the viewer on both the right and left sides of the scene.
1 In the beginning Man created
God; and in the image of
Man created he him.2 And Man gave unto God a multitude
of names, that he might be Lord
over all the earth when it was suited
to Man.3 And on the seven millionth day
Man rested and did lean heavily on
his God and saw that it was good.4 And Man formed Aqualung of the
dust of the ground, and a host of others
likened unto his kind.5 And these lesser men Man did cast
into the void. And some were burned;
and some were put apart from their
kind.6 And Man became the God that he
had created and with his miracles did
rule over all the earth.7 But as these things did come to
pass, the Spirit that did cause Man
to create his God lived on within all
Men: even within Aqualung.8 And Man saw it not.
9 But for Christ's sake he'd better
start looking.-- From the album Aqualung by Jethro Tull
A great fish plunges in the dark,
Its fins of rutted silver; sides,
Belabored with a foamy light;
And Back, brilliant with scaly salt.
It glistens in the flapping wind,
Burns there and glistens, wide and wide,
Under the five-horned stars of night,
In wind and wave...It is the moon.-- ---by Wallace Stevens
Some questions:
Can any one tell me what are shrooms?
Is it short for mushrooms?
If not what do they do?The answer:
Shrooms are just like mushrooms, only they've had the mu taken off during harvesting. This slightly decreases the potency, but it alleviates a lot of the nausea some people get from mu ingestion.
--Adapted from a news group posting
For this is the very problem that is obsessing me: although I see man crushed, asphyxiated, diminished by industrial civilization, I can't believe that he will degenerate, decline morally, and finally perish, completely sterile. I have a limitless confidence in the creative power of the human mind. It seems to me that man will succeed -- if he wishes -- in remaining free and creative, in any circumstance, cosmic or historical.
But how can the miracle be brought about? How can the sacramental dimension of existence be rediscovered? At this point, so much can be said: all the things that have existed we have not definitively lost; we find them again in our dreams and our longings. And the poets have kept them. This is to say nothing of the religious life, because the authenticity and depth of the religious life among my contemporaries seems to me a most mysterious problem. There must be a way out. Aldous Huxley proposes mescaline...
--from No Souvenirs by Mircea Eliade
I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescaline or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic Theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large -- this is an experience of inestimable value to anyone...
--from The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
Our teachers always told us classic literature would send our minds on a journey -- and now some experts think it could really be true. That's because , they say, the fungi that feed on old paper may be mildly hallucinogenic. Writing in the British medical journal The Lancent, London fungus researcher R. J. Hay, MD, said these 'fungal hallucinogens' may cause an 'enhancement of enlightenment' in readers. 'The source of inspiration for many great literary figures may have been no more than a quick sniff of the bouquet of moldy books.'
--from Men's Fitness magazine
The daughter of a Connecticut country doctor and only twenty-four, [Eunice Pike] had been living in Huautla for two years and intended to stay for however long it took to master the Mazatec language. Her goal was to translate the New Testament, a task she addressed with all her time and energy. She had no interest in buying converts with aluminum pots and modern trinkets. She was honest enough to know that most conversions were shallow and ephemeral, less transformations of the spirit than triumphs of expediency.
Once I tried to explain heaven to a young woman, she said, smiling, as she poured Schultes a cup of tea. I said it was a beautiful place, a place where there are no tears. She asked whether I had been there. I said no. I explained that only the dead know heaven. Then she looked at me with the saddest face. She said she was so sorry for me. And she left almost in tears.
How strange, Schultes said.
It was only later I realized that most Mazatec actually claim to have been to heaven.
With the mushrooms?
Yes. They believe Jesus speaks through the mushrooms, that their visions are messages from God. What was it you called them?
Teonanacatl, Schultes said. Some believe it means 'flesh of the gods.'
In Mazatec, the mushrooms have several names. One translates roughly as 'the little holy ones.'
Have you ever seen them?
No, she said.
What about the effects? What do people say?
She held his eyes and for a moment said nothing. Then with a sign of resignation she explained, There are things we know that we cannot know. Christianity is a thin veneer over the lives of these people. I've heard them singing at night. They always begin with the Lord's Prayer. The leader will say she has the heart of Christ and is the daughter of the Virgin Mary. But then in the next moment she is the daughter of the moon and stars, snake woman, bird woman, whatever. She smiled and began to laugh softly.
It doesn't disturb you? Schultes asked.
Yes, of course, she said, But, then, no. I mean, how can it, really? When I first came here I complained about the use of mushrooms to an old man. Do you know what he told me?
No, Schultes smiled.
He said, 'But what else could I do? I needed to know God's will, and I don't know how to read.'
They both laughed.
So how does one get the message of God to a people who seem to have something far more spectacular and immediate than anything we have to offer? She asked the question he had wanted to but hadn't dared.
With difficulty, I suspect, he said. What do the padres say?
Oh, the Catholics have it even worse. It's hard enough to translate the meaning of the Last Supper, but the Eucharist! Compared to the mushrooms, bread and wine must seem rather tame.
Schultes laughed once more. What an extraordinary woman, he thought a missionary who could laugh, one who could love God without hating people.
I once was waiting for an airplane, and I started to sing a hymn. It was one no Mazatec knew. I had just translated it. Two of the women said, Isn't it Beautiful! How lovely! It's just like the mushroom. I turned and rather piously told them that it wasn't like the mushroom. That God and Jesus were different. But they wouldn't listen. Can you imagine what they said?
No, said Schultes, ready for anything.
They said, 'We mean, wasn't it gracious for the mushroom to teach you that song.'
--from One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest(pp. 105-106) by Davis Wade
Notice how this space
Between Heaven and Earth
Is like a bellowsAlways full, always empty
Come in here, go out there
Breathing...
SilenceThis is no time for talk
Better to hold fast to the void
--from Psychedelic Prayers (II - 8) by Timothy Leary
Another thing we are not supposed to do is to explain the inexplicable. Men have learned to live with a black burden. a huge aching hump: the supposition that "reality" may be only a "dream." How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of reality's dreamlike nature were also a dream, a builtin hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point, just as there is no lake without a closed circle of reliable land.
--from Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov
In 1938, ethnobotanist Richard Evan Schultes at that time still a graduate student traveled to Mexico to research the economic botany of Oaxaca supported by a grant from Oakes Ames who headed the Botanical Museum at Harvard. Included in his activities was a plan to verify the identities of the sacred Aztec plants teonanacatl and ololiuqui. Contrary to the then accepted opinion in the academic botanical community, Schultes was convinced that teonanacatl was a mushroom based on extensive evidence presented in 16th and 17th century Spanish texts. In 1936 he had been encouraged in this quest by a letter he found while researching his senior thesis. The letter was attached to a voucher specimen of peyote at the United States National Herbarium and was written by Blas Pablo Reko in 1923. Reko wrote "I see in your description of Lophophora that Dr. Safford believes this plant to be the teo-nanacatl of Sahagún, which is surely wrong. It is actually, as Sahagún states, a fungus that grows on dung heaps, and which is still used under the same name by the Indians of the Sierra Juarez in Oaxaca in their religious feasts." Schultes wrote to Reko who in return sent a collection of mushrooms which he identified as teonanacatl. The mushrooms however were in too poor of a condition to be identified as to species. Schultes later learned that this collection had been obtained by the anthropologist Roberto J. Weitlaner in the town of Huatla de Jiménez through an informant José Dorantes, a Mazatec merchant. Having arrived in the Mazatec capital Huautla de Jiménez in July, 1938, Schultes met a young missionary, Eunice Pike, who verified the mushroom's role in the religious life of the Mazatecs. Schultes also met Jean Basset Johnson, an anthropology student and future son-in-law of Roberto Weitlaner who that very same month had been among the first known outsiders to witness a vigil where teonanacatl had been ingested by the curandero conducting the healing ceremony. (Johnson also learned that the Mazatecs employed a "tea" made from the beaten leaves of a "hierba Maria" for divination.)Schultes was told by Johnson that there were at least three kinds of mushrooms that could be used in the mushroom velada: los hongitos de San Ysidro, and two others known in Mazatec as tsamikíndi, and tsamikíshu. Later that month, July 27, 1938 to be precise, Schultes obtained what was then thought to be the first identifiable collection of teonanacatl (labeled as Schultes and Reko number 231 at the Farlow Herbarium) by way of the Mazatec merchant José Dorantes. The collection consisted of three different kinds of fungi one of which was identified as Panaeolus campanulatus var. sphinctrinus (later reidentified as Panaeolus papilionaceus) the other two being in poorer condition. Much later the mushrooms in this collection were determined not to be the ones used in the traditional mushroom velada. In 1939 Schultes published an article Plantae Mexicanae II: The Identification of Teonanacatl, a Narcotic Basidiomycete of the Aztecs in the Botanical Museum Leaflets. The door was open for further exploration which was not to be continued until after the war.
"How did one become a shaman?", Tim asked.
"It took months, years of hard work. First one had to master the basic visions. You had to be able to bring forth specific visions when you took the medicine. You had to learn to bend the visions with the songs. Then there was the terror. The master shaman conjured up snakes wrapped in fire, thousands of angry claws tearing at the sky. the apprentice had to face them, upright, no hesitation, with power. Then and only then could he suck at the breast of the jaguar woman. Just when he was getting comfortable, she would fling him away into a pit of vipers. One of the snakes would carry him away to heaven, where the yagè people introduced him to the spirits of the dead. Only after many such terrible journeys did the initiate meet God. He stood before a solitary tree and a door that opened into nothingness. The initiate had to walk into that emptiness. Only when he realizes what lies beyond the door can he receive his staff and the summons from God to be the protector of his people."
--from One River - Exploration and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (page 196) by Wade Davis