Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (79 page)

“So shamanism is kind of like remote viewing when it’s done by Ingo Swann,” says Gordon. He’d never thought to make the connection until just that moment, but it makes perfect sense now.

“It’s that and more,” Lloyd confirms. “Shamans can access the Implicate Order to acquire wisdom, spiritual energy, and healing abilities. They usually do it for the benefit of other people in their tribe or extended families. A truly great shaman might even be capable of healing the psychic wounds of an entire nation. But before such awesome powers can be obtained, the shaman first has to face the Terrors of the Underworld–or the
Bardo
, as some might call it.”

“Is this a Tibetan lama or a Mexican shaman we’re talking about here? Make up your mind…” Gordon says, poking fun at Lloyd.

“The basic principles and methods of shamans the world over are remarkably similar, despite their separation by oceans and continents. It’s only the terminology that varies. So I’m trying to be as inclusive as possible, perhaps at the risk of confusion. But it’s important for you to know that whether shamans reside in Tibet or Mexico–or among the Maori, the Jívaro, the Shipibo-Conibo, or the Khoi Kalahari Bushmen–they all travel to essentially the same place.”

“Yeah,
Crazyland
…” sneers Jimmy, unimpressed. “Not one of those guys could hold down a job on Wall Street.”

“No, they’d quite rightly consider a job at one of the big brokerage firms to be a form of insanity,” Lloyd counters. “A shaman would never deign to work for Merrill Lynch. But remind me to tell you about James Merrill–the poet son of one of Merrill Lynch’s founders. He’s had some rather interesting encounters with a Oujia board that might be germane to our conversation later.”

“I’d rather hear about the Terrors of the Underworld,” Jimmy pouts.

“So you shall,” Lloyd says. “So you shall….”

“Do they have flesh-eating zombies there?” D.H. wants to know. “And girls in bikinis who fire machine guns at the zombies?”

“How much does it cost to get in?” asks Skip. It sounds like he wants to go there.

“The details vary,” Lloyd says, “but every successful shamanic initiation involves an encounter with fearsome entities. Those entities convince the shaman of the reality of the other world–the Implicate Order. Terror makes the experience more memorable, a matter of life-or-death. It burns the experience into your synapses in a way that a happy little shamanic journey might not. That’s important, because once you’ve truly become convinced that the other world exists, then you can begin to navigate it.”

“How do we know the whole thing doesn’t just happen inside their brains?” asks Skip. “I mean, they could just be hallucinating their shamanic asses off.”

“Need I point out to you that
everything
we see happens inside our brains?” Lloyd says with snarky élan. “Color, for instance, isn’t actually a property of light, or of objects that reflect light. It’s a sensation that arises from within the brain when light strikes the cone cells in our retinas. Each cone cell contains one of three pigments made of color-specific variants of a protein called
opsin
. When those pigments absorb light–or more specifically, discrete packets of colorless electromagnetic radiation known as
photons
–the added energy triggers off a cascade of molecular events that results in impulses being fired along the optic nerve, conveying electrochemical information to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. How the brain then manages to reassemble those electrochemical signals into a coherent, seemingly three-dimensional colored image remains a mystery. Modern science still can’t properly explain how consciousness and our visual system works, how we see a putatively ‘real’ object in front of us, much less how we see things that aren’t supposed to be there–what we term ‘hallucinations.’ But consider this: birds and most reptiles have
four
spectrally different cone cell pigments, so they’re able to see colors that we can’t–especially in the near ultraviolet range. Now I ask you: when a bird sees those colors, is it hallucinating?”

“I guess you’d have to ask an ostrich that,” says Gordon.

“Or a Komodo dragon,” Jimmy suggests.

“Why should I take the word of an ostrich or a Komodo dragon and ignore the testimony of a shaman?” asks Lloyd. “According to shamans the world over, the visions they see are real, but does mainstream science believe them? No. Not at all.”

“At least you can pet a Komodo dragon, even if it doesn’t have any real colors,” Skip says, verging on incoherence once again, “but you can’t pet hallucinations.”

“Can’t you?” Lloyd asks. “You’ve been doing some heavy petting with our dear friend Twinker throughout this trip, but on the subatomic level, as you should well know, Twinker is little more than an organized cloud of atoms–and atoms consist almost entirely of empty space. In fact, as the oft-repeated scientific analogy goes: If you were to enlarge the electron cloud of a hydrogen atom up to the size of the dome in St. Peter’s Cathedral, that atom’s corresponding nucleus would be the size of a grain of salt. What’s interesting is that an atom’s nucleus contains 99.95 percent of its mass, while taking up only one thousand million millionth of its volume. The rest of the atom verges on nothingness yet appears to be much more–a grain of salt projecting an illusion of St. Peter’s dome. If you follow that analogy, you’ll realize that Twinker, too, is mostly just empty space. If her entire body were to be compressed to the density of her atoms’ nuclei, she’d end up smaller than a pinhead.”

“Hey, I resent that!” Twinker protests.

“And if the electricity in the electron clouds of those atoms Twinker is carrying around were to be switched off, even for an instant, she’d disappear in an implosion of atomic dust–dust so fine it wouldn’t even be visible to the naked eye.”

“You’re just trying to make me feel insignificant.”

“It’s the same for everyone and everything we see,” Lloyd explains. “The illusion of solidity is wholly convincing, but it’s an illusion nonetheless. On the subatomic level, matter exhibits characteristics closer to the fluidity of thought than to anything solid and stationary. My friend Terence McKenna has some interesting thoughts along these lines. He’ll be lecturing at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics to be held at Esalen this December. You all should come…. Terence has this crazily intriguing notion that life on our planet was seeded by extraterrestrial mushroom spores.”

Everyone else starts to laugh.
Psilocybe
mushrooms are not unheard of on the Kingsburg High School campus.

“Go ahead, laugh like a pack of giddy hyenas… but know that the largest living organism on our planet just happens to be a mushroom–a giant Honey Mushroom with an underground mycelial network that covers 2,200 square acres of the Malhuer National Forest in eastern Oregon,” Lloyd informs them.

“Will it get you high?” Skip asks as the laughter escalates.

As he waits for the laughter dissipate, Lloyd checks under the picnic basket lid for another bottle of champagne (
one left)
, then stoically plods ahead: “The way Terence tells it, a sassy little mushroom known as
Stropharia cubensis
tried to convince him that its species was not of this Earth. In fact, the mushroom claimed to have re-engineered its genes elsewhere so that it could propagate using a ‘spore-dispersion strategy’ for wafting itself hither and yon across our galaxy, and a ‘mycelial network strategy’ upon contact with new planetary surfaces. Of course, Terence was deep into a mushroom trip at the time this information was being conveyed to him, having eaten a rather large specimen of
Stropharia cubensis
–what he later termed ‘a heroic dose.’ Fortunately for him, the mushroom didn’t mind being eaten. It explained to him that it was a
symbiote
, and as such was seeking ever deeper symbiosis with the human species, which Terence had just facilitated by allowing it to hitch a ride in his nervous system.”

“That sounds just like something a shroomhead would say,” D.H. jokes.

“Once you experience the depth of insight, clarity of thought, and concision of language that Terence McKenna brings to what are essentially shamanic explorations of nonordinary reality, you’ll know his sensibilities go far beyond the ken of the average
shroomhead
…” Lloyd replies to D.H., nettled. “He strikes me as someone who’s truly in touch with the Logos. In one of my favorite passages of his–about a DMT experience–Terence says (and I quote):

“‘There was a declension of Gnosis that proved to me in a moment that right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien.’”

“Oh, you
would
like that…” Twinker jokes.

“My theory is that certain psychoactive substances like psilocybin and DMT help us perceive that transhuman, hyperdimensional, extremely alien universe by stimulating the emission and reception of biophotons in our DNA, which initiates us into a wider spectrum of holographic reality than we’re ordinarily used to seeing. I’d even go so far as to suggest that the collective unconscious–or consciousness itself–could be the sum total of those biophoton emissions from the universal network of DNA-based life. In that sense, the phrase ‘God is Light’ is true indeed, and the Divine Spark literally resides in each of us, glowing in our DNA.”

“Why do I feel like Casper the Friendly Ghost all of a sudden?” Gordon jokes.

“It’s a cool theory,” D.H. says, “but what can we do with it?”

“You mean aside from know
God?”
Twinker kids him.

“No, I mean, unless we’re high on mushrooms or DMT all the time, what good does it do us?”

“That wider spectrum of reality I’ve been talking about can also be accessed in meditation, active imagination, and lucid dreams,” Lloyd says. “It’s those safer, slower, but surer routes that I’d recommend. As for what good it can do you, it’s better to ask what good you can do for the world. Shamans, you’ll recall, usually access nonordinary reality for the benefit of others, not to benefit themselves. If you go into it for personal gain, or merely seeking thrills, you might find yourself treated harshly. That’s why it’s unfortunate that most psychedelic drug users are in their teens and twenties. A pimply-faced sixteen-year-old boy who spends his time playing video games and driving around in a jacked-up Chevy Monte Carlo is in no way prepared for an encounter with the numinous. If he were to take a heroic dose of one of Terence McKenna’s
Stropharia cubensis
mushrooms, he’d probably skip the gentlemanly conversation with the mushroom spirit about its extraterrestrial origins and be more likely, instead, to have the psychic stuffing knocked out of him by a gang of corpulent gargoyles riding jet-powered merry-go-round horses.”

“Do the gargoyles have Ninja swords?” Jimmy asks him.

“Absolutely,” Lloyd answers without hesitating.

“I thought so.”

“T.S. Eliot said
‘Old men ought to be explorers,’”
quotes Lloyd. “
Shamanic
explorers, I’d clarify. But even a seasoned man of the world can face difficulties in that wider realm. He might, for instance, find himself making love to a sultry Babylonian priestess–his
anima
–but if he hasn’t yet crossed the Choronzon to transcend his own ego, that priestess in his arms could mutate into a hideous corpse-demon bent on his soul’s destruction.”

“Has that ever happened to you?” Skip asks, entirely credulous.

“Only in slow motion, during my marriage.”

“Too bad, Boo-Boo…” Twinker says, making a moue to telegraph her fraudulent sympathy. She’s officially drunk.

“That’s just how things work out sometimes,” Lloyd says with a self-pitying sigh. “To access the Higher Self, you must go through the Lower Self. The passageway to Heaven is routed through Hell, as we all know.”

“The diamond of Eternal Truth lies beneath a spewing volcano of Horseshit,” says D.H., stroking an imaginary Fu Manchu mustache.

And a hard-on can lead you to wisdom
… thinks Gordon. “Have you ever tripped on mushrooms yourself?” he asks Lloyd.

“I have not,” Lloyd admits, “although I’ve ingested
ayahuasca
.”

“Gesundheit!”
D.H. says, as if Lloyd had just sneezed.

“Ayahuasca…” Lloyd pronounces with greater care. “It’s a brew made from two plant ingredients, boiled together for hours. The first comes from the leaves of a bush containing the hallucinogenic alkaloid,
dimethyltriptamine
, which is also secreted as a hormone by the human brain–squirted out by the pineal gland, I believe. But you can’t just eat the leaves and start seeing things, because a stomach enzyme called
monoamine oxidase
inhibits its effects. That’s where the second plant comes in–a liana vine called
Banisteriopsis caapi
often found growing in charming double helixes. It’s also known as
yagé
or ayahuasca, which translates as ‘vine of the soul.’ William Burroughs believed this vine contained a drug called
telepathine
, but he was, quite frankly, talking out of his ass. The ayahuasca vine merely contains a substance that inactivates monoamine oxidase in the digestive tract, allowing dimethyltriptamine–or DMT–to do its trick. It’s the DMT that produces true hallucinations, visions so strong and convincing they can seem to swamp ordinary reality entirely. Linus Pauling would be able to explain this to you better, but on a molecular basis, I’ve been told that the same neural receptors that accept the common brain hormone
serotonin
also accept DMT, like a lock that accepts similar keys. What’s fascinating is that shamans throughout the Amazon were able to discover how these two plant species worked together to modify human consciousness–out of some 80,000 species to choose from. The shamans themselves say the knowledge came to them directly from conversations they had with the hallucinogenic plant spirits.”

“Sort of a chicken-or-the-egg thing they’ve got going there,” Gordon observes.

“I like to think someone ate a hallucinogenic mushroom first, and the mushroom spirit then told them how to brew ayahuasca. But that’s just me…” Lloyd says.