Remembering Terence McKenna (3)

Terence was somewhere in the house. I was on the porch, queasy, lying on a pad, wearing a shift. I knew what the bucket was for. The battle was to keep the brew in my stomach long enough to absorb the psychoactive ingredients; projectile vomiting was inevitable. That wasn't all. When I couldn't hold it any longer and started spewing from my head end, my tail end erupted simultaneously with projectile diarrhea. That's what the shift was for. Okay. I was definitely disoriented. Something was happening to my head in a big way, but my physical body was a mess. I got a lot in the bucket, but I also missed. The outdoor shower was downstairs. I carried the bucket. I emptied it in the shower drain, turned on the water, and stepped under the shower. I noted that in the mixture of bodily expulsions that I was attempting to wash down the drain, there seemed to be myriad wiggly glowing worms. Aha. One of the benefits of Ayahuasca is that it kills parasites -- handy for jungle dwellers. The little worms resisted the water that was flowing them down the grate. I was standing there, holding my soaked shift up with my hands, a flashlight in my mouth. The willies truly started to set in when the glowing worms not only resisted the flow of the water, but started swimming up the light beam of the flashlight.

I washed off my shift and my body and the bucket, refilled the bucket, climbed back up the stairs, washed off the deck, and laid back down. The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the black silhouette cut out of the milky way, the shadow of Banisteriopsis-supporting trees surrounding the clearing that faced the deck I was lying on. They looked like giant vegetable transmitting towers. 

When I closed my eyes, I saw what seemed like a clay-like, moldable substance, the color of caramel taffy. Looking closer, I could see something inscribed on it in a writhing script that disappeared to be replaced by more script, all in a symbol system I didn't recognize or understand. It reminded me of the time when I was in the middle of a book project and semi-woke in the middle of the night. Before I realized that I had been dreaming, I saw screensful of words. I couldn't read them, but I knew they were my words. Some unseen hand was selecting, moving, deleting, replacing blocks of text. I only caught about a second and a half, but it was like I had caught my subconscious doing what it usually does -- except its activities are usually hidden. 

I was familiar with The Fear and knew about breathing and turning off my mind and relaxing and floating downstream. It seemed like ego death had happened an indetermined amount of time in the past, but the sense of being thrashed around indiscriminately by something far larger than me became overwhelming. Terence told me to sing if I encountered turbulence. I reached for my voice. It wasn't there. It's like when you partially reawaken from sleep and can't move and try to scream but can only emit a puny whisper. I couldn't think of what to sing. So I croaked "help!" for an indeterminate period. My voice got stronger and that seemed to help. But "help" seemed too pathetic. It turned to "help me!" and eventually to "help me understand" and then the inchoate audio-visual-psycho-spiritual maelstrom snapped into focus. Those plants literally ARE vegetable transmitters, and I am being beamed instructions. That I didn't understand the language the instructions were beaming in didn't seem to matter. I can't remember anything else of that night.

When I got up in the morning, Terence was fixing breakfast. "Your singing was strong," he said. It wasn't until years later that it finally sank in that he had been able to hear me and heard me croaking out "help" and "help me" for an indeterminate time without doing anything.

back to Part 2 

to be continued in Part 4