part0046

By early summer 1971, I was living in a tiny room in Boulder and trying to reinvent the poor student I’d been before I left. I busied myself in summer school and found a job as a dishwasher and server in a rest home. It wasn’t the most edifying work, but I took pleasure in the normality of it. I was still dealing with the memories of our experiences in the jungle, but I had no one to talk to about them, least of all the pure-minded, fair-haired Peggy, my longed-for, if mostly imaginary, flame. In a brief encounter with her, I tried to explain a bit about what had happened to me, but it was useless. Her reaction was one of alarm, and no wonder, with me raving like a wild-eyed prophet back from his forty days in the wilderness. She didn’t know what to make of my account beyond not wanting to hear any more of it. She gently broke it to me that she had a new boyfriend, but I hardly took notice, being so caught up in my own drama.

Terence, meanwhile, had spent the previous months in Berkeley, utterly absorbed in adapting his idea for a model of time to the inner machinery of the I Ching . As I noted earlier, the I Ching consists of sixty-four hexagrams, each corresponding to a different phase in a cyclical, Taoist model of time. Based on that, Terence had, by then, assigned the numbers six and sixty-four a special significance in his calculations. In True Hallucinations , he writes that he realized his relationship with Ev began sixty-four days after our mother’s death. Counting forward from our mother’s death by six such units, or 384 days, he discovered a thirteen-month lunar year that would end on his upcoming birthday, November 16, 1971. These were the initial correspondences that got Terence thinking about applying the I Ching to his timewave theory. Indeed, his birthday became the first of his projected end dates for the so-called concrescence—the final event the timewave seemed to predict.

Then as before, Terence’s obsessive writing and charting seemed to be part of a reintegration he’d begun after the bizarre events in March. Early on, the numerical constructs he’d apparently downloaded from the Teacher had been keyed to our personal and familial history. He’d continue to refine the timewave concept for years, pushing it beyond its narrow confines toward something wider and more intricate, even elegant, in its peculiar, numerological way. He came to believe that the cycles within cycles he detected on a personal level were active on a historical, geological, and cosmological scale. Terence would later use the term “fractal time” to characterize these nested cycles, though when he first began his investigation the term fractal had yet to be coined.

There is also the curious relationship between the I Ching and the structure of DNA—that is, the “language” that DNA utilizes to code for the proteins that exist in all living things. I’ve alluded to this earlier. Indeed, talk of this coincidence was in the air at the time. Since the mid-fifties, there had been a growing popular interest in the ancient Chinese classic and in the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule as well. The number of hexagrams in the I Ching can be written as 26 , or the number of 6-line hexagrams that can be made from lines that can appear in either “broken” or “unbroken” form. In DNA, the number of 3-letter codons that can be generated from 4 nucleotides can be written as 43 . The product in both cases: 64. That seemed to resonate with our belief at La Chorrera that we’d somehow hacked into the central store of knowledge that life had acquired and carried over time on a molecular level.

Among the first to note the resonance between DNA and the I Ching was one Gunther Stent, a German-born professor of molecular biology at the University of California in Berkeley. Stent explored the idea in his book The Coming of the Golden Age , which appeared in 1969. Terence actually visited Stent on campus, eager to share the insights from La Chorrera. Terence’s account of the put-down that followed is one of the more comical and painful moments in True Hallucinations . The encounter was not unlike mine with Peggy, in a sense. Each of us had tried to express the ineffable to someone we hoped would understand, only to confront a reflection of ourselves raving like lunatics. I was lucky in that mine occurred with a friend on the street. For Terence, the rebuff from one of the era’s leading biologists revealed something of his ambivalence about science. He loved scientific concepts and language, both of which he was known to borrow for his own playful and metaphoric purposes. He knew the lessons of La Chorrera involved an intuitive leap over an abyss that science in its current state was unable to bridge. And yet he may have wanted the scientist to acknowledge an insight that couldn’t be verified in scientific terms. He had asked one of the leading scientists of his day to endorse what was, in essence, a deconstruction of science, even a rejection of it, with humiliating results.

That’s not to say his only doubters at the time were mainstream academics. During that spring and early summer, Terence’s efforts continued to baffle most of his friends; despite his inborn persuasiveness, he had yet to win them over. In addition, rumor had it that the FBI had gotten wind of his illegal return to the country, arousing his fear that the net cast after the 1969 hash bust might be closing. Both factors played into a decision by Terence and Ev to embark on what struck me, at least, as unthinkable: a return to La Chorrera.

Overall, the rationale for that second trip seemed less than entirely rational. One unspoken motivation, I think, was nostalgia—a yearning for paradise that motivates humans to envision, and seek, magical realms beyond space and time, an impulse that may go back to when our womb-born species first began seeing itself as a creature fallen from an original state of grace. La Chorrera might have made for an unlikely Shangri-La, but there was no doubt that in our imagination it had taken on this numinous aspect.

While Terence felt compelled to go back, I had excellent reasons not to, as I made clear in our talks. He thought we should try to repeat the experiment, even as he paradoxically insisted that, according to the Teacher, we’d already succeeded and now just had to wait for the concrescence to manifest. Our only task was to identify, if possible, when and where the concrescence would occur. For my part, I had no stomach for another expedition. I was happy to be back in ordinary reality and not eager to put my ass and sanity back on the line. Moreover, I argued, what we’d experienced was an irreproducible event. It was the classic Heraclitean conundrum: we couldn’t travel the same river twice. What happened, I argued, shouldn’t be called an experiment for several reasons, but most notably because it couldn’t be repeated. We could call it the singularity, the occurrence, or the events at La Chorrera, but whatever it came to be known as, an experiment it was not.

I had thrown myself into my studies, by then redirected toward science, which I believed (and the Teacher agreed) would give me the tools to understand our experiences. I belonged in school. According to Terence, his friends were troubled enough by his singular focus to encourage his return to the field, literally—back to the mist-enshrouded pasture from which his obsessions had sprung. He needed to get away. What’s more, unlike me, he and Ev had the means to do so, having bought a quantity of emeralds just before departing Colombia. Back in the States, they’d sold them for enough to travel and live modestly in South America for the foreseeable future.

By mid-July they found themselves downriver from Puerto Leguizamo, pressing ever deeper into the jungles of the lower Putamayo. Over the weeks ahead, they re-navigated the maze of rivers, drawn by the siren song of the fungal fruiting bodies that grew near an isolated mission on the Río Igara Paraná. They arrived in late August. Aside from the rare letters they entrusted to the police captains at various towns along their route, I’d hear nothing from them for nine months.

After my summer classes ended, I moved into a communal house a couple of blocks down Pine Street from where I’d lived the year before. My housemates were a familiar assortment of counterculture types, with one exception: Beverly, a fellow student from Boston whom I immediately liked. Intelligent, studious, Jewish, and cute, she had an infectious laugh and liked my jokes. I have no idea what she saw in me, but before long we’d gotten together. Beverly was no hippie chick. I took delight in corrupting her, but I didn’t get very far. Both of us disliked living in a house with four other people, and by Thanksgiving we’d found our own place—a tiny upstairs apartment a bit closer to the foothills.

By then, Terence and Ev were on their way out. Their second visit had been less productive in terms of mushrooms, which were less abundant than before. What trips they took seemed less charged with the immanence of the Other—there were no UFO sightings, and the weather during the dry season yielded fewer mysterious anomalies. Terence did a lot of writing and thinking, however, much of which he chronicled in his journal. He continued to refine his speculations on the hidden patterns of time despite a frustrating lack of reference materials. His first predicted date for the concrescence—his twenty-fifth birthday in November—came and went without incident, a disappointing test for the timewave in its prototypal form.

Word had reached him via our father that a plea deal for his prior smuggling activities might be in the offing. The time seemed right for heading home. The trip was full of delays, weeks spent in mosquito-infested, riverine outposts that wore them down. They finally reached a city we’d passed through earlier, Florencia, the capital of the Department of Caquetá in southeast Colombia. In a chance encounter in a tienda, they met a guy who was home for Christmas from Europe. The son of a local journalist, Luis Eduardo Luna was about a year younger than Terence. Terence was trying to buy a few items using his broken Spanish. Luis Eduardo, overhearing him, offered in perfect English to help. Luis Eduardo had been studying philosophy and literature at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. After hearing an account of what had led the weary travelers to Florencia, he invited them to stay in a small house his family owned a few miles out of town. Thus began a friendship that was to last until Terence’s death.

Their stay at Villa Gloria, as the place was called, was an idyllic time for Terence and Ev, a chance to rest, eat good food, and enjoy the pleasant company. Terence had a quiet place to work on his writings, which by then were coalescing into a book. He also had a receptive audience for his outlandish and captivating raps. I wasn’t there, of course, but I picture something like what I’d seen in Berkeley where similar scenes played out many times. As for Luis Eduardo, he’d never been exposed to such ideas, let alone to the Santa Marta gold that Terence had brought with him. A former seminary student, Luis Eduardo was leaning more toward Marxism and atheism at the time, but those long talks at Villa Gloria may have encouraged him to revisit an earlier fascination with the mysteries of existence. By the time he returned to Europe, his academic priorities had shifted to physics, chemistry, botany, and neuroscience. He later earned a Ph.D. from the Institute of Comparative Religion at Stockholm University, where his thesis focused on the study of vegetalismo —the use of ayahuasca in shamanic practices among the mestizo populations of Peru (Luna 1986). Eduardo is now considered the world’s authority on the ethnography of ayahuasca. I didn’t meet him until 1981, but since then he has been one of my closest colleagues and friends. Following his fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon in 1982, we collaborated, with Neil Towers, on a review of the botany and chemistry of ayahuasca admixture plants that was published in 1986 in the journal America Indigena (McKenna, Luna, and Towers 1986) and later reprinted in a collection edited by R.E. Schultes entitled Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline (1995).

Terence and Ev eventually made their way back via Bogotá and Mexico City, Terence’s false passport again serving him well, and landed at my door at the end of January. Or rather “our” door: Beverley and I had been living together for a few weeks. Though she joined me in welcoming them, she might not have been sure what to make of these two gypsy seekers blown up on a southerly wind. I, of course, was delighted to see them. The core of the brotherhood was together again.

Terence’s dubious legal status made it necessary for him to keep a low profile. He and Ev found menial jobs cutting roses at one of the flower businesses near Longmont. They got up early to catch the bus to work and spent all day at their easy task; each night the dope came out and the conversation flowed as we reflected on the previous year and tried to sort out what it all meant. It was a time of bonding and camaraderie for us, but not for Beverley, who felt left out. I must admit I didn’t help matters, partly because of my ambivalence toward our relationship, which I attribute to the sense of emotional unavailability I felt—and may have cultivated, in my attachment to a series of likewise unavailable love interests.

The simple fact was that, instead of getting their own place, Terence and Ev had moved into an apartment that was too small for four people. Ev, who wasn’t apt to be friendly toward any woman who got near Terence at the time, turned Alpha female and made it uncomfortable for Beverly to stick around. After a number of painful episodes, Beverly decided to move out. I behaved quite badly during this episode in not sticking up for her, and yet our friendship somehow survived. Though she certainly had her doubts about Terence, she might have seen something worthy of emulation in his intrepid character. I thought of her as a girl who was afraid of things like bugs, who had no truck for camping or roughing it in any way. But after graduation she went on to work for various relief organizations in some of the most challenging places on Earth: Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Congo, among other countries. You never know what reserves of strength may reside in a person, especially in that untested phase of life.

Over those weeks, Terence and I began collaborating on the manuscript he’d begun, then entitled Shamanic Investigations . We even had a few copies bound at a local bindery that specialized in university theses. It was satisfying to see the large volume with its many hand-drawn charts and graphs fixed between hard covers. At least something had resulted from our adventures beyond madness and bizarre ideas. We had no prospects for publication and were not really looking for them.

After a few months clipping roses, Terence and Ev began talking about a return to Berkeley. Before then, however, Terence had to deal with his legal issues. I’m not sure what inquiries were made or how the matter proceeded to be so easily resolved; I do remember that Terence and our father went to the Federal Building in Denver accompanied by a lawyer. As Terence later told it, he announced at the courthouse that he was there to turn himself in, but nobody seemed to know what he was talking about. After a search, someone found the paperwork and had him fill out a few forms and schedule a court appearance. It was all politely bureaucratic—hardly the reception an international fugitive might have expected after eluding capture for nearly three years.

Once the case was settled, I believe he got three years unsupervised probation in return for telling them “everything he knew” about his hashish suppliers. Terence’s response was a long, rambling account with references to an auto body shop in a back alley in Bombay, as I recall. When I read the statement months later, I assumed he’d made it all up, but it apparently satisfied the authorities. To the best of my knowledge, the whole mess ended there; he never heard another word about it.

Terence and Ev moved to Berkeley early in the summer of 1972. They found a small home only a block or so from the Telegraph House where Terence had lived before his travels began in October 1967. His life soon fell into a familiar routine. He reconnected with some of his butterfly contacts, including a wealthy Japanese broker who had subsidized Terence’s collecting efforts in Indonesia while he was on the run. Before long, new specimens to mount began arriving in batches via the mail, creating a great job he could do stoned, at home, and in the presence of company. After I moved to Berkeley a year later, I spent many an hour in the upstairs loft where Terence worked. Various characters from our eclectic and peculiar circle would stop by for a smoke and a bit of raving. By then Terence had filled a formerly neglected garden out back with various psychoactive species, including a riot of morning glories dotted with a few datura bushes along the fence. He was back in his element.

Terence’s departure for California marked a new stage in the slow bifurcation of our lives. Another familial shift during the summer of 1972 was our father’s remarriage. Lois, a woman from Delta he’d met through his golfing friends, looked a bit like our mother, though the similarities ended there. Dad had been lonely after Mom’s death and was slowly sinking into alcoholism and despair. I was happy when he found a nice person to live with, and, on balance, I’d say his second marriage benefited him. But the union wasn’t an entirely happy one. Nobody could have replaced our mother in our father’s eyes, though I think he unfairly expected that of Lois. She may have resented him for putting that on her, and rightly so; he may have resented her for not being the love of his life. They remained together twenty-five years until my father’s death.

The undergraduate degree I completed in the spring of 1973 was in a thing called “distributed studies,” meaning my coursework had been “distributed” over several areas rather than concentrated in one or two majors. My primary emphasis was in biology with secondary specialties in anthropology and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of science. It was a degree that qualified me for almost nothing except graduate school—and certainly not a job.

Nevertheless, my education, post-La Chorrera, was far from a waste; I valued it for helping me make sense of our experiences there and for directing me toward my later studies. I’ve mentioned how my trip to South America left me eager to learn more about science and scientific thinking, if only so I could more honestly reject the scientific worldview. I threw myself into biological studies for the remainder of my undergraduate years, thanks largely to a gifted mentor, Charles Norris, a biology professor who encouraged my interest in the philosophy of science. Under his guidance, I designed my own curriculum and independent-study courses. Instead of rejecting science, I found myself transfixed by the latest thinking in theoretical biology. The works that influenced me included The Phenomenon of Life (1966) by the philosopher Han Jonas; General Systems Theory (1968) by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy; Hierarchical Structures (1969), edited by Scottish thinker Lancelot Law Whyte; the chemist Ilya Prigogine’s ideas about non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative structures, and self-organizing systems; and the neurosurgeon Karl Pribram’s holographic model of certain brain processes. Terence was conducting his own inquiry into these and other works. In sharing our insights, we were amazed to discover a conceptual framework in which some of the “crazy” ideas that emerged at La Chorrera seemed not so crazy after all.

Of all these new influences, the work of Alfred North Whitehead had the greatest impact on us. Whitehead’s “organismic” philosophy provided a logically rigorous metaphysics that seemed not only consistent with the current scientific understanding of reality but also fit many of our own speculations. Whitehead’s notions about “process” and the “ingress,” or entrance, of novel events into reality greatly appealed to us. By then, the timewave was on its way to becoming a complex metaphysical system in itself; Whitehead’s concepts seemed a way to describe, and even quantify, its principles. Though Whitehead had been one of England’s leading mathematicians earlier in his career, his later philosophical works incorporate certain aspects of Eastern thought and animism. We realized we had no need to seek a rationale for our beliefs in exotic and alien religions or philosophies; Whitehead’s metaphysics, though ensconced in the Western tradition, had what we were looking for, namely, the perspective that in some sense everything is alive and changing over time.

In Whitehead’s view, everything from atoms to galaxies are “organisms” with their own processes and rules of self-organization. Another key idea is that consciousness pervades the continuum; it is as fundamental to the structure of reality as the electron or the quark. Truth and beauty, even love, are intrinsic to existence, not qualities pasted onto a dead universe by deluded souls longing to find a meaning that isn’t there.

Thus, for us, Whitehead’s philosophy seemed to demolish existentialist despair. Far from being a lifeless, terrifying place, the universe teemed with life; indeed the universe itself was alive. All this meshed with what the Teacher had imparted at La Chorrera, and what our own evolving views had insisted upon. Whitehead’s insights were good news for a couple of Catholic kids who had long since rejected the comforting fairytales offered up by their tradition. His philosophy didn’t demand faith; rather, it allowed us to look at the universe through the lens of a metaphysics that was open to scientific insight. My studies might not have made me a scientist per se, but they did give me an understanding of science that went beyond that of many practitioners who hadn’t stopped to think about what science really was, and how it operated. The events at La Chorrera had shoved our faces hard up against those questions, and Whitehead’s ideas in particular provided some answers. Decades later, that’s still true; and to the extent that I have a spiritual belief, it is a secular system based largely on Whitehead’s philosophy.

By the time of my graduation, however, my knowledge of theoretical biology and the holographic brain still had me in the dark when it came to the patterns of my love life. Beverly had finished school and returned to Boston. Peggy was still in Boulder but the fact she was seeing someone else left little chance we’d get together. I had more cause to think that Deborah and I might have reunited now that she’d finished school. Instead, the girl with whom I’d shared some of the happiest times I’d ever known was moving in with a fundamentalist surfer dude on a boat. I should have made that the last heartbreak tied to my unhealthy attachment to her, but, well, I didn’t. Looking back on my romantic misadventures from that era, I marvel at how miserable they made me, and how much time I wasted because of that misery. When my mother left me off in Boulder for the start of college in 1969, I had no idea the years ahead were destined to be so emotionally difficult and lonely at times. Do others become as obsessed over romantic loss as I did then? I suppose they do. According to the familiar adage, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I’m not so sure.

With no prospects for a good job in Boulder or Denver, I figured I might as well relocate and take a menial job in the Bay Area. By late summer 1973, I was working as a porter at a fancy restaurant in Kensington, near Berkeley. My job was to arrive early in the morning and open the place—collect the dirty laundry, mop the floors, chop up a big tub of salad greens, and generally get things ready for the chefs when they arrived around midafternoon. It was a good gig that fit my temperament. I’d get there at 6:30, fix myself a huge breakfast and a pot of coffee and read the San Francisco Chronicle before lifting a finger. Nobody cared what I did as long as I finished my chores on time. In the afternoon, I’d stop by Terence’s, get loaded, and join that day’s activities at the perpetual salon. By the summer and fall of 1973, Nixon’s Watergate scandal had begun to preoccupy the country. Over the months until the president’s forced resignation on August 9, 1974, we followed the television coverage obsessively and gleefully as Tricky Dick became ever more mired in troubles of his own making. Every day, it seemed, there’d be a new outrage reported on the evening news, and we could hardly wait to tune in.

By the spring of 1974, the manuscript Terence and I had worked on in Boulder, and again over the previous summer, had gotten the attention of Justus George Lawler, an editor at Seabury Press. I don’t recall how Lawler, a respected Catholic scholar and author, became aware of our book, but he asked us to submit a copy for examination, which we did. Lawler said he loved the book and wanted to publish it.

Seabury, a small publishing house in New York originally established in the early fifties by the Episcopal church, seemed an unlikely venue for us. Its backlist included many religious and theological books, and the closest they’d come to a radical work like ours was The Thought of Teilhard de Chardin by Michael H. Murray (1966). Lawler, however, may have been pushing the company beyond its usual repertoire. Around that time, Seabury also published the Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem’s weird surrealist drug novel, The Futurological Congress. Lawler’s support was great news, but he insisted on a title other than Shamanic Investigations . I took a walk in Tilden Park in the hills behind Berkeley, and after a little assist from Sister Mary I came up with The Invisible Landscape , which both Terence and Ev liked. We got a modest advance ($1,200 split between us, as I remember) and a deadline: Seabury needed the final manuscript before the end of the year to release our book the following spring.

We had a lot of work to do. Certain parts of our exposition had to be supported, if possible, with scientific evidence, and our wildest assertions needed to be toned down. Importantly, the mathematical basis of the timewave had to be developed and a computer program devised to generate the numbers. This task was beyond us, but luckily one of Terence’s friends had access to the university computers and wrote some code. (Other programmers would later contribute to the timewave as well.) Terence and I had a lot of fun working together over the next few months. We knew we were on a creative roll, and the revisions forced us to reexamine our assumptions as we tried to render them comprehensible to the outside world. By mid-September we’d finished a version and submitted it to the publisher.