The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (25 page)

Richard was the friend I’d known the longest. That fall, his parents and mine had a tense meeting that went nowhere, mostly because my father could not discuss the matter without storming out of the room. To their credit, Richard’s parents seemed much more reasonable. Looking back, I’m a little puzzled as to why the hammer didn’t come down harder. Not much could have been done; we were in the throes of teenage rebellion, and I think our parents were intimidated. The parents of others in our group really didn’t seem to care, or perhaps had given up trying. The so-called “generation gap” seemed to have widened everywhere, and similar scenarios were surely playing out across the country.

Despite our hasty retreat back to Paonia, Tom and I had accomplished our objective of securing more cannabis—a couple of lids, much better than that first batch, but still terrible, I’d guess, by today’s standards. We also scored half an ounce of hash, a few hits of acid, something we were told was mescaline but probably wasn’t, and—the Holy Grail—half a gram of DMT. I’d bought a small metal opium pipe in Chinatown similar to the one Terence used for smoking hash. As far as our pharmacological adventures went, we were set.

A few of us began finding excuses to take trips up Hubbard Creek, a nearby area accessible by a degraded but passable road. We passed these off as “fishing expeditions,” which in a sense they were, but not in any stream—we were bound for the ocean of mind. We dropped acid on one of these occasions, and our trips were similar to what Tom and I had experienced in Berkeley.

But DMT proved even more fascinating. In some ways, DMT is what this book is all about. Terence and I were destined to become preoccupied with this substance; it’s what led us years later to the Amazon in search of the Secret. We didn’t know what the Secret was, exactly, all we knew for sure was that there was a Secret, and that DMT was somehow the key. It beckoned to us like the glittering jewel of a singularity, a beacon on the threshold of unimaginable dimensions at the edge of space and time. More than forty years later, it’s still a mystery, and it still beckons, though in a different sense. I think it’s safe to say that had it not been for DMT, our lives would have turned out quite differently. They would certainly have been more boring.

I had first heard of DMT the previous summer, sitting on the blanket in the city park enjoying cannabis for the first time. Terence spoke of it in hushed tones. He called it “the ultimate metaphysical reality pill,” though it wasn’t a pill, of course, it was something you smoked. He didn’t have any with him, but I was captivated by this description and wanted to try it. Terence insisted that DMT was too much to handle without a lot more experience; I needed more exposure to “mild” hallucinogens before I was ready. As my mentor in all things psychedelic, I took his admonitions to heart. In any case, DMT was never easy to come by. It was rare and had a well-deserved reputation for being the ultimate psychedelic. People referred to DMT as “the businessman’s trip” because of its short duration; you could smoke it on your lunch break and then return to work. That didn’t explain why a businessman would want to return, much less remain a businessman after gazing into the DMT abyss.

But Terence had worked the network, and by the time we got to Berkeley that summer he’d secured several grams of DMT. It was a waxy, orange-colored paste with a foul smell, like ozone, kind of like shit. Terence colorfully described the smell as that “of beryllium welding in interstellar space,” and a mere whiff of it seemed to hint at the cosmic dimensions it could open. Pure DMT is a white to off-white crystalline powder and is almost odorless. The stuff on the streets back then was the product of sloppy syntheses, bathtub batches cooked up by crazed chemists who couldn’t be bothered to clean up their product. It didn’t matter. It delivered. During one of our long conversations in Terence’s room in Berkeley, the subject of the philosopher’s stone came up, and he remarked, “I know what the philosopher’s stone is; it’s sitting in that jar right there on the bookshelf.” At least to us, this substance was mysterious, magical, and not to be taken lightly.

My first taste of DMT wasn’t in Berkeley. Rather, I heeded Terence’s advice to get my psychedelic feet wet first before taking the plunge. I brought some home with me, and on one of our visits to Hubbard Creek we “bioassayed” it for the first time. It was everything he had promised, and more. On the second toke, I struggled to hold in the foul-tasting smoke as I watched reality dissolve before my eyes into a billion scintillating fractal jewels, all transforming and squirming before my eyes like iridescent jellyfish while a buzzing, burbling, ripping sound like cellophane being torn to shreds echoed through my aural space; there was a feeling of literally tearing loose, accelerating, falling forward, faster and faster into a twisting, writhing tube or tunnel lined with glistening jewels, a supersonic roller coaster careening through the intestines of God. The term “trip” is a cliché for the psychedelic experience, but in the case of DMT it was very apt. There was definitely a feeling of movement, and of crossing a threshold of some kind, of briefly poking one’s head into a parallel dimension where the most astonishing things imaginable were going on, all in a frenetic, circus-like atmosphere of hilarious ecstasy. It’s almost as if this dimension is always there, just a toke away, and these things, these entities, are bouncing around and cheering, “So happy to see you, so happy to meet you, meat-worm, welcome to our world, won’t you join the fun?” It was the ultimate carnival ride: climb aboard and away we’ll go! Richard described it as being set adrift on a jeweled raft on an ocean of electricity. I thought this was another beautiful description, just as accurate but different. As my explorations continued, that became an axiom. All the trips were different: different on different occasions, but also different for different people. And yet all had similarities.

The problem with DMT, and part of its challenge, is that the experience is inherently ineffable; it cannot be described in ordinary language, it is translinguistic. You come down, slam back into your body, out of breath, suffused with ecstasy, babbling, sobbing. And yet we are linguistic creatures, and there is a nearly irresistible impulse to try to describe it. This begins almost immediately following the trip, as if verbalization were a protective reflex. DMT is more than the mind can handle; it’s overwhelming in its raw nakedness; we feel compelled to try to stuff it back into some kind of linguistic box, and yet to do so is to diminish it. All of the descriptions, even Terence’s, as elegant as they are, fall short of the actual experience. This is part of the mystery of DMT. It is a phenomenon that can be repeatedly experienced, and yet it is as astonishing the hundredth time as it was the first, and something that strange is worthy of our attention. Certainly we thought so then, we thought so at La Chorrera, and I still think so.

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to qualify what I’ve just declared, in light of more recent experiences. While going through an old trunk, I stumbled across a journal from that year, 1967. Amid a mishmash of teenage musings, bad poetry, and expressions of longing for this or that girl, I came upon my account of that first experience with DMT, which if nothing else illustrates how transformative it was:

Only fragmented and elusive shards of the universe that I visited remain within the grasp of my memory. That is in part what is so baffling about the entire experience: I know that it was the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me, that the reality that I encountered is so totally divorced from normal reality that when my mind reintegrated itself into space-time, it was completely incapable of comprehending, hence of remembering, what it had been through. What is left are only two-dimensional metaphors and shallow dialectical pictures. Even these slip from my consciousness as I attempt, through the use of the inadequate tool of language, to derive some coherence from the half-recollected visions. These were of a bizarre and otherworldly beauty, so alien and yet so beautiful. The human mind cannot endure that much beauty, and that
kind
of beauty, without losing its conception of what reality is.

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to analyze this other reality and fit it into some kind of linguistic description; what I have here set down is the closest I have been able to come. It is extremely unsatisfactory, incomplete, perhaps nonsensical. During the time that I was out, I was unable to speak. My vocal apparatus, had it wanted to, would have been able to form the sound of a habitual expression; but my
mind
, or the part of it that normally forms articulate thoughts to be embodied in speech, could not function. Though I could not myself speak, I heard, felt, saw, listened to, perhaps communicated with, a sound that was not a sound, a voice that was more than a voice.
I encountered other creatures whose environment was this alien universe that I had broken through to.
I became aware of, perhaps entered into communication with, actual distinct and separate consciousnesses, members of a race of beings that live in that place, wherever that place may be. These beings appeared to be made of part thought, part linguistic expression, part abstract concept made concrete, part energy. I can say no more as to the nature of these beings except that they do exist.

One thing that is clear is that the experience is a total redirection of karmic goals. I know that after this I am going to strive to be a better person; I am going to try to express the beautiful and concentrate less on the hideous. I am going to see more of [my friend] Dea and try to learn some lessons from her, because I believe that she is good. I am going to try to do good.

And here’s an additional passage written some weeks later:

Once again, tomorrow at the rising of the sun, I will do dimethyltryptamine. I have done it too often in recent days, but I regret none of the times; I have profited by each one. I look forward to tomorrow. It will be my last journey for a while to that universe, this time with a girl I could love. Its beauty defies comprehension, but the beauty that it produced and I experienced has made me a better person. As long as one can experience and express (and to experience is to express) the beautiful, then he is saved from madness, he is saved from damnation. I have tried to look at life more positively, I have tried to be more aware of beauty; I have enjoyed the world more and hated myself less.

That I was an insufferable romantic at sixteen is certainly clear, but at least I was leaning in the right direction. That experience was therapeutic in many ways. It certainly marked a transition in my life, a pivotal turning point toward the rainforest and beyond. After this (apparent) evidence of the existence of a parallel universe inhabited by non-human, intelligent entities, it was a little hard to go back to the routines of daily life.

When I began writing this book in the summer of 2011, it had been more than fifteen years since I’d inhaled a hit of DMT. In fact, that occasion, in a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro, involved not DMT per se but its close analog, 5-methoxy-DMT. Some have said that substance is even more bizarre and transformative than DMT, if that’s possible. Since then, I’ve had other encounters with DMT but always in the orally activated form found in ayahuasca. There are definite similarities between DMT and ayahuasca; but those familiar with both states will confirm that they are not identical.

In any case, when a chance arose recently to try some highly purified DMT, I did so, feeling that a return to that “place” was integral to my research. I smoked the DMT on the same evening I’d taken a strong dose of ayahuasca. That experience had ended hours earlier, but I must have still been in a state of extreme MAO inhibition, because it only took one deep breath to plunge me into the abyss of a full-on DMT flash. It was not what I had expected, or remembered. All the elements were there: the frozen feeling bubbling up and permeating my body like quantum foam fizzing up to engulf the fragmenting mind, the feeling of acceleration, my dissolving self urging me to let go, to surrender, as I was sucked into the visionary maelstrom. But there were no entities there this time; no joyous shouts of “hooray” by welcoming, self-transforming, elfin Fabergé eggs as Terence described them to the delight of so many. It was like visiting a brightly lit but abandoned amusement park; the music is playing and all the rides whirl and gyrate and glitter, but there is no one there, no laughter of happy children to add joy and merriment. It was startling to me, and a little sad, how cold and sterile it seemed.

The experience was no less amazing than it used to be, perhaps, but far more austere. Reality is a hallucination generated by the brain to help us make sense of our being; it is made of fragments of memory, associations, ideas, people you remember, dreams you’ve had, things you’ve read and seen, all of which is somehow blended and extruded into something resembling a coherent conscious narrative, the hallucination that we call “experience.” Dimethyltryptamine rips back that curtain to show the raw data before it has been processed and massaged. There is no comforting fiction of coherent consciousness; one confronts the mindless hammering of frenzied neurochemistry.

Is this the difference between the DMT dimension visited by a lusty, romantic kid of sixteen and the jaded man of sixty-one? I honestly can’t say. I don’t feel that all joy and meaning has fled from my life. I still take ayahuasca regularly and am grateful for the lessons she imparts. But I may never again visit that amusement park of the mind. It is a place for romantics, a place you take your girl on a first date, and I am romantic no longer.

Chapter 21 - The Stoners’ Revenge

With the summer of love fading into a fall of discontent and our rebel band growing more alienated from our parents and peers, Terence left to travel the world with his girlfriend. After finishing the Tussman program, he’d decided to drop out of school, which outwardly at least upset our parents. On a deeper level, however, our father’s response was probably more complicated. To begin with, he’d paid a lot to support Terence and gotten little gratitude for the sacrifice. He also considered Berkeley to be the epicenter of the degeneracy that was sweeping the younger generation, which it was. Despite the inevitable lecture about Terence needing to complete his education, I think Dad felt some relief when Terence departed with Elaine on the first of his global jaunts.