By George Hartley
October 18, 2011 4:33 A.M. Topeka, Kansas
I’m trying to make practical sense of my last week of travel and discovery. I know I have reached a profound state of being that I’m not sure I ever really imagined before. I’ve imagined it, surely, but never really thought such a state was possible in this life, in this modern culture, in this age. And where I go from here, I guess, is the big question. I’m not sure I can continue this path within the confines of academia. That, perhaps, is the big question.
Kansas Journey—Butterfly Sermon
I guess I should begin with the butterfly sermon. I can’t write about this experience—I was instructed not to, in fact—but I think I can write that this solo experience was presented to me as my initiation. An initiation, that is, as much as I understand it at the moment, into a shamanic Gaia kind of apprehension or comprehension or immersion into a texture of energy fields that surpass accepted Western limits of everyday perception. I was told to tell the story of this butterfly sermon, but only through face-to-face spoken communion and sharing. I will only say here and now that the sermon was a culmination of years of intellectual and spiritual exploration transformed during a profound and beautiful psychedelic mushroom experience, and that the experience affirmed and consolidated much of the thinking and exploring I have engaged in during the past year or so.
Outside of the terms of the butterfly sermon, but fully within its scope of influence and understanding, I have recognized my ability to perceive certain strata of energy flows in the natural world—particularly in the human-animal-plant-mineral continuum—that reveals suppressed the Gaia-like nature of our current inhabitation of this planet, not unlike that expressed in the depiction of indigenous life on the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar before human colonial intervention.
Desert Transformation
The most outstanding aspect (beyond its content concerning my unseen depths of my spiritual life development up to this moment) was the profound continuity of the guiding voice of the butterfly that initiated me into this state of awareness. I had come to count on the company of this comforting spirit voice as I dove into new regions of psychic exploration. But things took a strange and unexpected turn during my quartz mine mushroom experience in Crestone on October 15, 2011. At the height of my psychedelic experience on that day, which was more profound and intense than any I had ever experienced before, I was, on occasion, close to panic. Unlike the butterfly sermon experience, here I had no guiding voice to lead me through the visions and the lessons they conveyed. In fact, this could only be considered a conversation to the extent that one could consider visual presentation a kind of communication, a documentary movie with no scripted voice in which the visual field was meant to express the message of this particular lesson or sermon.
From where I was reclining on my quartz perch, looking southwest across the San Luís Valley of southern Colorado, snow-covered Blanca Peak to the South and the San Juan Mountains to the West, the earthly desert terrain (lying about 1,000 feet below me) was transformed far beyond the typical breathing aspect of mushroom perception to an infolding fractal plasma view of the forces at work in the sacred geometry of the planet’s crust. What I took as the melting of the world seems instead to have been a glimpse into the primary energetics of surface dynamics.
The landscape began rippling in a way that I can only begin to describe in earthly terms by comparison to some kind of lava field. The long trails of aspens and cottonwoods that follow the creek beds down from the Sangre de Cristos across the high desert plateau of the San Luís Valley rippled as frothy ribbons alongside vaster rippling ribbons of sage brush and sand. The colors were dramatically heightened in texture but not especially unusual in terms of typical sandy browns, rocky browns and greys, green and yellow (Fall) tree line ripples, etc. The rippling of the continental crust became so intense at times that I would lose all sense of comprehensible geographic features, as though the world lying before me were transformed into one vast rippling field of molten matter, intensely beautiful yet beyond usual comprehension. I saw the landscape as a quilted layout of torus vortices layered side by side like infolding spaghetti columns of power or like noodles rippling through boiling soup. Van Gogh’s landscape paintings might be the closest analogues to what I was seeing spread out pulsating before me.
I guess the word “comprehension” keeps insisting itself into this description because “understanding” is too stable a word for what I was experiencing. I could not com-prehend, hold together, the world before me. Perhaps more interesting was the fact that I would completely forget that the world before me might appear differently under “normal” conditions. It was only when I would remember how the Valley usually appears differently that I would begin to panic—but only ever so slightly. I never was consumed by fear, perhaps because what I saw was simultaneously so beautiful and awesome. At one point, for example, as I was totally overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of the scene before me, I saw some little bands of color moving independently across the rippling Earth surface. The idea slowly dawned on me that those moving bands were people—I had forgotten that such things as people even existed.
To the extent that I would begin to panic, I would ask why there was no guiding voice engaging me in dialog. Only at these moments would my guiding voice intervene. Initially the plant spirits simply explained that whereas my butterfly sermon was my initiation, this moment was my transcendence. I’m not quite sure what they meant by transcendence, although I have an intuitive understanding that lies beyond consciousness. Maybe the point was that this psychedelic experience was meant to transcend my assumption that I might need such psychedelic experiences in order to achieve my goals of understanding and comprehending the nature of the energies that flow through our universe and what these energies might mean for human action and response, for a broader sense of human ethics that would take into its perspective its intimate relationship with the greater-than-human world we inhabit.
At other semi-panic moments when I would again ask where the guiding voice might be, the plant spirits would simply say that this was my moment of transcending fear. This was my moment to accept my identity as the tiger. I had never imagined a world so wildly different from normal experience before. “Of course you have! In fact, you’ve imagined things far wilder and more magnificent. The imagination is the true psychedelic sensorium.”
But most curious of all during this mushroom vision was the series of questions that transformed the nature of my entire experience. At this peak of my visionary engagement with the world turned fluid, the mushroom spirits themselves asked me, “What more do you want? This is what you wanted? There is nothing in this visual transformation of the world that you didn’t already know since your butterfly initiation and your acceptance of your powers that manifested in your spirit journey through the Garden of the Gods. There you showed to yourself the extent of your ability to recognize and tap into the fluid trails and signs made present by the guiding animals and the light that emanates from those trails, allowing them to stand out against all other possible paths. What does this psychedelic experience offer that you didn’t already have?”
Release
My most immediate future plans included what would have been my first ayahuasca journey in the mountains of New Mexico in a week’s time. “But what about my date with the Amazonian plant spirits?” The mushroom Spirits instantly responded, “That is not your path. Don’t mistake our intentions—we are not suggesting that such an experience should be prohibited, to you or to anyone else. For you right now this is a practical point, not a moral one.” Confused, I answered, “But you are the plant spirits, and they are also plant spirits. Are you telling me that I don’t need you or them for this path?” And they responded, “You never did need us other than to show you exactly this! This was the path you needed for your transmutation, your transport. Your own visionary powers are greater than this. You need to go back and tend the medicine wheel of the Solar Disc called Kansas. That’s where the real power lies for you.”
The whole experience climaxed with the plant spirits telling me that the remaining mushrooms (lots of them) needed to be liberated, just as they had liberated me. I asked them how, and they told me to throw them into the creek. So I hiked about two miles up the Crestone Campground road to a beautiful spot on the rushing mountain stream. The Mushroom Spirits then told me to throw them into the water, one by one, saying a prayer as I tossed each into its liberating stream. The sun had set and the colors of the earth were so stunning and the birds’ singing was so phenomenal as I prayed and tossed each one magically, beautifully into the froth of the creek and watched each one sink, arise, circle, spin on its way downstream in utter exhilaration.
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