They Know.

<Occured in Winter of 1997)
We crossed the log over the creek to the other side. I was to guide my closest friend through his first trip.

Forty-five minutes earlier we had injested those nautious little caps and stems in a simple peanut butter sandwhich.

After passing what my friend would later name "Enlightenment Bend" we took a look around us and everything felt perfect. We love the forest, and this being in the middle of the Oregon Coast mountain range during February, the rainforest was in full effect. Birch trees, Douglas Firs, and a myriad of mosses, ferns and shrubs surrounded us. And the psylociben(sp?) was beginning to trickle through our brains.

I was riding my first of what were to be many chemical waves when the laughing began. My friend had been pretty silent when looking up the creek through binoculars he said slowly, "...time and water will ware anything down." "Absolutely!" I responded cheerfully.

So many things began to happen as most, I'm sure, can understand. It was all postive. The energy welling up inside, the laughing, the beginning of understanding. The warping of concepts. Then things started to get a little heavier, and stronger.

We were looking into the sky (bright gray through swiftly moving clouds solidly covering the sky) when we both saw it.

A massive 3-D hallucination of some fractal tentacled object that was moving the clouds. Reaching out beyond and pulling smaller, darker clouds and pushing them along, over the tree line. We verbally agknowledged that was what we both were seeing. He wondered away a little and I remained. I looked across and the forest was still when a wind made the ferns vibrate, but everything else remained totally still.

After a brief trough in the chemical waves a really strong one began to hit. I was looking up at the leafless branches of trees across the creek. I closed my eyes and the branches remained but in a digital representation. The tips of the branches termanlized with random colors. It was as if I was observing visual data but in a much more raw state. Like it was bypassing some intermediary filter. I opened my eyes.
My friend sat down and it was difficult to look at him. It was as though I could see every blood vessal in his eyes and skin. The "we're animals" thought raced in then out of my mind because that wasn't true. "So this is the biocomputer," I silently thought. I closed my eyes.

I saw a complete view filled by complex pulsing patterns simulating the environment around me, including my friend, but only his blood vessals against a black background. I didn't want to communicate this-I felt it would be irresponsible of me, as a guide. It felt like a bad trip wave was coming and I didn't want to drag him down with me.

But then it subsided. Almost a feeling of sobriety came over me. "Time to collect myself," I thought, knowing full well this was the eye of the hurricane.

My friend walked back to some drop of dew he was checking out. Then I was blind sided. Thoughts, pretty much all of them, began blasting through my mind with tremendous energy. I knew I was sitting on a rock next to a quiet creek, but in here, inside, I was scared. They all flowed down the creek, away. Then to my astonishment, one made it through that shouldn't have.

No one was ever supposed to know this. No one was ever supposed to experience the thought that popped into my mind. It was the way the universe was designed. Like the tiniest of flaws in a beautiful sparkling diamond or a very subtle blemish in an almost perfectly convincing universe, it appeared. Simply by fluke.

All knowledge consisting of history, science, religion, human experience, including fundamental concepts from molecules to the mental map of the universe is a lie. A lie told to us not from our selves or some other entity, but by the very fabric of this all encompassing illusion. The universe is defined as a lie.

This seemed a paradox to me. If all is a lie, then how could this truth appear? The answer was in the question. I wasn't seeing "all". This was the difference. What I was seeing was the single truth beyond paradigm.

This rocked me to the core. Keep in mind this wasn't like some suggestion as in a discussion in philosophy class or amongst friends. This was solid. Right there. It destroyed everything.

As if this wasn't enough, one more realization arose. I wasn't the first one and it was being monitored. A presence detected me. "They know." Not only did they know of the lie, but they knew that some other consciousness (I)had stumbled across it. "Fuck this," my friend told me later I said. I dropped out of it. And unlike a dream, instead of waking up it was as if I fell back a sleep. I was back in the forest.~

Later, after less intense tripping, my friend and I crouched against a mossy over hang in the rainy dark. Five hours had passed since we had consumed the shrooms (told to me by some amazing digital indi-glow contraption strapped to my left apendage). We had turned off our head lamps to enjoy the last fleeting hallucinations with our eyes closed. We were chuckling at the grid of colored squares growing and shrinking in front of our minds.

"What we are seeing are the building blocks of reality."

"But if these are the building blocks of reality, wouldn't that make them more 'real' than reality itself?" After a brief pause of silence, we burst out into laughter.

My friend confided in me, "Shrooming is fantastic."
-----------------------------------------------------