Black Pyramids and the Land of Gaia

The horizon shuddered slightly, a shiver in space itself like water rippling across the surface of a painting. There was a sudden stillness unlike anything ever before and not yet since that grabbed at your skin, drawing it in lava-like blobs from muscle and sinew, fascia and bone. It was like falling very slowly into a glowing vat of honey, every moment framed in still life, blurring into one another, soft with bee fur.

And then it was gone.

I can't say the exact year. It was '92 or '93... I can't quite remember that period of my life very well. It was a hazy time. Or, rather, time itself was hazy and seemed often unburdened by the demanding expectations of physics and linearity. There's a loose temporal outline I hold, pieced together from the timelines of college classes, addresses, and major events. Mostly I just remember moments, ideas, happenings, and friends, but they're like pictures hanging on a wall: flat and eternal.

It was that time in one's life - in my life - when everything was being explained in great magickal revelations washing over my world day in and day out, when me and my friends were like magnets for unfathomable circumstances, beacons strobing in hyperspace catching the eye of Time's great architect. Psychedelics and empathogens, esoteric guides and manuals, wild rock and rave communions, bounding through forests and meadows, under full moons dancing on the mercurial tides, all whipped together and pitched on its side. Even people around us, innocents, were getting caught up in the freakish whirlwinds of synchronicity and electricity that seemed to arc off of us.

I believe it was Winter. Cold and wet. A frenzied Friday evening on the verge of rain. We were at a friend's house, the seven of us, in the midst of a party filled with many people none of us knew. We sat at the dining room table, talking, drinking beers, when M pulled out the crinkled plastic baggy we'd been given by some guy from Reed College in Oregon who knew we were involved in the Santa Cruz psychedelic community. He claimed it was ayahuasca, though none of us could rationalize that claim with the actual contents of the baggy: 20 or 30 very small bits of what looked like dried apple lining the bottom. Watching M curiously it took a moment to realize what was going on - a moment too long as he popped a piece in his mouth and chewed. Then another. Then J was chewing and, moments later, we'd all consumed a roughly even portion of the bitter, spicy little bits, not really understanding why, just suddenly caught up in some aetheric swell intent upon carrying us into this experience. It was a possession, sudden and mindless.

Maybe a half hour later we were in a side room smoking a chillum and laughing a little bit more than usual for much less of a reason. Whatever it was we'd eaten was beginning to take hold, creeping up out of our stomachs along our spines, tickling the synaptic webs and retuning the receivers of our brains. We all knew we were heading out fast and needed to take bold action in order to secure our set & setting as soon as possible. No vision questing at the Friday night college party. We arranged for friends to drive us all home immediately.

Stumbling out of the hazy room, giggling and wide-eyed, I remember distinctly the sudden silence of an entire room full of people all staring at us, like we were absolutely completely out of place. You could almost hear the record come scratching to a grinding halt, then the drop of a single pin. We pushed through the door and stumbled out into the electric night laughing hysterically. Poor mortals... They had no idea.

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There were enormous leaves, bigger than most plants, everywhere, wet and luscious and tumescent, protruding from great vines & liana. A rainbow of greens colored everything I saw from my seat in one of the larger leaves in the jungle. Water cascaded down from the canopy above adding it's gentle cacophony to the symphony of life buzzing all around me. Jerry's guitar seemed just as wet and green echoing through the trees, bouncing off the ethnic percussion bubbling up from unseen drummers no doubt milling about just out of sight within the jungle. The space was solid and consistent and real and it wasn't just me but six other minds sharing it, co-creating it simultaneously all wired together in some telepathic array, feeling and sensing and imagining each leaf and each note as the rainforest concert of our minds grew more and more real until we could only all suddenly laugh together, opening our astonished eyes to peer at one another sitting in a pile on the living room couch before returning back to the collective magick of the jungle.

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Somehow we made it home. I only recall more laughter and a moment's view of the stormy night outside the car window (which I insisted on rolling down in spite of the cold). Two sober housemates were home and, upon learning of our state, tried to set us up with crayons and pens and paper, but even such a rudimentary feat as drawing proved to require far too much focus for the raging bolts of energy coursing through our bodies. Well-intentioned but clearly defeated, the housemates left us alone and concealed themselves downstairs for the duration. Too much freakiness had been suddenly visited upon the home and they needed to simply hide out and weather the storm.

I keep speaking in terms of we, in part because there were seven of us, but more so because of the great degree of connectivity that was shared between us. Harmala, which is the primary component of ayahuasca brews and contributes the MAOI component, was originally called telepathine when it was isolated after many stories of remote viewing and shared non-verbal communication. One western researcher under it's influence in some South American village suddenly saw his father dying back home in Florida. The next day he learned that, indeed, his father had suffered a major heart attack and passed away at just about the same time as the vision. For me it was like being covered in clear, luminescent psychic goo that stretched between each of us, binding our hearts and souls and minds. It wasn't just my individual experience, though at times it was only my vision that I could apprehend. Ultimately, it was a collective journey shared between us on what seemed to be a cellular level. I still feel bound to those friends, even those who've long since passed out of my life.

We ended up all packed in side-by-side along a great orange couch in the living room listening to "Blues for the Rainforest", a spectacular collaboration between Merle Saunders and Jerry Garcia. All lights were off leaving the living room dancing in the shadows thrown off by a single candle next to the stereo. Those little tiny bits of harmless, desiccated apple were now in complete charge of our little world blasting out into hyperspace and completely rewiring reality as we knew it. This was beyond mushrooms or acid. Way beyond. Superfantastic and hyperreal yet so true and solid, like pulling aside the curtains to reveal The Way Things Really Are. No words passed between us. We were incapable of speaking coherently, though it really seemed unnecessary. Thought and feeling was fluid and unconfined to mere bodies. We were all diving into the aya space led by Jerry and Merle into the great archetypal jungle. The most astonishing aspect of the whole experience was this deep sense of telepathic communion. I can only describe it from my perspective. As I focused on the music with my eyes closed, feeling it swell with my own emotions towards some intangible peak until it grew so amazing and beautiful that I had to burst out laughing, at that exact same moment everyone else on the couch would burst out laughing. This happened again and again and again over the course of the entire album until it was so obvious that we were all existing in the same numinous space, our thoughts and emotions totally shared and flowing through all of us. It wasn't just my attention and emotion tracking the music. It was all of us moving in the same fugue together. Speechless, we could only laugh and stare at one another with amazement at the sheer impossibility of it all.

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As I laid face down on the floor, kaleidoscopic visions consuming my inner vision, I pressed my hands down and began to push myself off the rug. In that movement I suddenly became aware that my arms and torso were no longer human but that of a large black panther rising from the jungle. My fur was oily and sleek, bristling slightly with ozone and static. My muscles were thick and powerful wrapping around bone and tendon pulling at the claws protruding from my feet. I felt intensely capable and proud, as if I could easily master anything the jungle could throw at me. I stretched out and arched my back before rising to my feet and stepping out of the panther, back into the living room.

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Eventually we left the group huddle of the couch and scattered out through the living room, each off to pursue our own visions now dominating the experience. I recall fending off momentary concerns about having drank a few pints of beer around the time of eating the aya. I couldn't remember if it was any type of alcohol that could inspire a hypertensive crisis when mixed with a MAOI, or if it was just red wine. J was the only one with similar concerns though we didn't vocalize these to the group. Ultimately it was moot. We were here and we'd end up wherever the experience would drop us off. In such deep psychedelic rapture, death can seem like not such a big deal after all.

I walked out onto the balcony under the night sky. The cul de sac was a whirlpool of energy whipping through the tall eucalyptus trees, the large oaks, and assorted other trees and shrubbery. The vast pines rising up behind our house were revealed to be armies of giant insect sentries stacked on top of each other watching over our innocent dimension. Each oak was itself a giant, alive and personal, aware of the life moving so quickly around it against the decades of it's resting. All of the trees exhibited this deep personality and uniqueness. They were each so very present and aware, wise with age and insight, the vastness of their roots clutching at the red earth, tickling each other below. The eucalyptus grove running along the side of the house seemed taller than skyscrapers, rustling and swaying in the wind, bending and flexing with the pulsing energy of the biosphere. Gazing up at them every cell in my body longed to climb up those thin trees, up to the tops then leaping through the rubbery branches beneath the darkened sky and swollen moon. I could feel it so very deep in my bones and knew that, if it weren't for the censor of sensibility clinging to the remnants of my ego, there would be nothing to stop me from pulling myself up into the canopy. I am, after all, an ape, perhaps long from brachiation but fully capable of returning to the trees. And there was a strong, nostalgic part of me that wanted nothing more than to run naked through the forest at night, proud and masterful.

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There's a point in any psychedelic experience worth it's salt when you have to just lie down and let the visions roll over you. This was it, the point of concrescence converging with the infinite domain of archetypes where self and other become interpenetrating, undifferentiated. Fractal landscapes pulsed and glowed, ebbing and flowing with my breath and heart beat, luminous and laden with unspeakable meanings, the rich, multimedia glossolalia of hyperspace. Every image is a feeling, a memory, a thought, reflecting back from futures past, somehow codified in these abstract patterns and geometries, deeply verbal yet astonishingly mute. Like passing across the event horizon, my body seemed to dissolve into it's component parts, smaller and smaller, to be re-assimilated into the black hole of consciousness like warm cheese pressed through fine cloth into a vat of black ink. With each exhalation I came to exist less in this space, my body falling away into the darkness lost below the neon signscape rising up all around me, the material world receding like a speck of dust beneath a rocket ship. I was anesthetized and laid to rest, the weight of flesh no longer anchoring my consciousness, no longer tied down but free to walk through the quantum gateways dividing matter from spirit, open and unrestrained inviting gnosis and transformation from whatever timeless angels or kaleidoscopic aliens might be passing by.

Amidst the raging optic storm of rainbow chrysanthemums and multidimensional hieroglyphics, dense and rich with unnamable meaning and depth and impossible volumes of information pouring into my third eye, the tempest came to a sudden stillness, thick and black and silent with the weight of a thousand suns. Chromed slivers of light betrayed the seeming emptiness of this space dancing along the edges of an enormous shape slowly revealing itself. As it rotated into view I beheld a shimmering black pyramid barely visible against the background yet powerfully present and engaging. All sense of scale was lost. It could have been an inch high but it felt to me to be the size of ocean's, continents, entire moons. Entranced I followed it's movement tracing my sight up along the reflective edges towards the apex. In the crown I beheld a great golden eye watching me with unimaginable intent and awareness, holding me in it's unblinking gaze. The eye aligned with my vision, then reflected itself on my forehead caressing the pineal to gently open. My third eye beheld the golden eye of the pyramid beholding me and in that instant seer and seen merged completely and I could see both myself and the pyramid through the same single eye of creation shared by all moments of consciousness, the timeless eternal Now of existence, so fleetingly transient yet always here and never parting. In that moment of perfect union and understanding, so completely beyond normal human awareness, beyond language and logic and thought, like the reflected image of the thing behind the thing we call God, in that moment "I" saw it all for a brief moment, then committed the great mystic mistake and was overwhelmed with astonishment.

The vision passed and I was back in my body lying on the living room floor amidst scattered friends.

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As the morning light began to creep around the edges of our world I returned to the balcony and took a seat on the weather-beaten old couch. Closing my eyes I reached out with my senses to the waking morning and was amazed to be living among so many birds. There must have been hundreds and hundreds just within earshot and I could hear each and every one distinctly, like picking a single tenor out of a cathedral chorale. For each bird I tuned into I could "see" them perched on a branch or seated in a nest feeding their young, leaping from tree to tree and soaring over the cul de sac. I could change my focus from the entire chorus to a specific group to one individual. In my mind's eye I was among them all living a bird's life.

A very curious property of ayahuasca mixtures is that they seem to function as a very specific key to a set of archetypal experiences. Unlike LSD or mushrooms, everyone who takes ayahuasca properly will apprehend visions of nature, jungles, large cats and snakes. The aya complex appears to be a very powerful technology that runs like software in the brains of the human species, delivering the divine understanding of Nature, of the Goddess. It is a tool of communion that takes any user and downloads the matrix (mater) of the biosphere into their consciousness, regardless of location, affiliation, race, or religion. Ayahuasca is a powerful ally trying to lead us back down the path to our now-distant aboriginal bond with the womb of our planet, and offers perhaps no less than the salvation of our species so lost in the mechanistic gears of consumption and unrestrained expansion.

Myself, S, and J wanted to be at the beach for sunrise so we layered up against the morning cold and padded out towards the street. We made it only as far as the eucalyptus grove which seemed so inviting and alive. Walking in amongst the trees was a moment of communion, breathing the air and touching the peeling bark and soft trunks underneath. We tore ourselves away and marched through the streets out to the coast feeling a million miles away from the morning commuters buzzing past in their steel horses.

We reached the cliff just in time to watch the sun break over the horizon like a fiery orange blast of pastiche exploding across a hazy blue canvas. Standing on the stone ridge the sea below was a wash of purples breaking on the sandy brown shore. The passing of it's tides had left thin, wavy grooves covering the shore like flames licking off the tips of the sea. The fire in the sky was reflected in the earth, washed and recycled by the water of the sea which, itself, was nourished and continuous with the air above. Standing amidst it all were the three stoned humans giving our share of spirit living on the same four elements coursing through our light bodies. This was the final seal - the pentagram merging with hexagram, microcosm and macrocosm, as above, so below. The night, the journey, the vision... it was all an act of magick and a powerful ritual of planetary shamanism binding us each and all to the breathing holosphere of Gaia, Luna, Sol, and beyond into the infinite blackness of forever.

As the raging star rose up into the sky radiating it's loving warmth down onto our humble planet, each of us glowed with joy at having been allowed into the halls of Eleusis to see past the veils of consensus reality and apprehend the true glory of creation dancing madly all around us every single moment and just a breath away.

Posted by LVX23 at June 15, 2005 12:17 PM