Sacred Mushroom of Visions

by Ralph Metzner

  I put my finger in my mouth and make myself into a round ball, so that my tummy is more protected; my back seems more stable. Someone in the circle clears his throat loudly. The sound is shocking: it goes like a knife throughout my whole body, and I’m unable to defend myself against it.

  Then our guide arrives, crawling on hands and knees, snuffling around my head like a great warm mother mammal that protects me and soothes me. Immediately, I feel at peace again, and now also I’m curious. He crawls and snuffles around to everyone in the circle.

  Now there are curved lines and sweeping shapes that coalesce into a great blue wave that contains many curved and sweeping lines and shapes, becoming larger and larger. Now this great wave arrives at where I am. I am dissolved into it—am both here and then not here. At first I find this quite acceptable. After a while, though, I begin to feel uneasy at the relentlessly soft and sweeping forms. I think that clear, linear forms also have their place. Just at this time, they could provide structure and holding. So I begin to draw straight lines in the air with my finger, and right angles on the floor with my foot. Already I feel better.

  Now our guide is sitting in the circle and begins to chant an invocation of many names, rocking back and forth. I perceive him as an archetypal feminine being, yet in the body of a man. He calls each one of our names and the names of others who are not in the circle, but part of our community; we feel their presence as their names are called. Then he calls Odin and Freyja, Isis, Osiris . . . many gods and goddesses, and at the end, Odin and Freyja again.

  Thus the journey comes to an end. There is a closing circle ritual, in which each one relates something significant from their experience. I am deeply touched by what each one speaks. The journey has been a great gift for me, from the “little princes.” I thank them all.

  And finally, we do the dance of the moccasins, based on the Native American proverb, “Don’t judge another until you have walked for a day in his moccasins.” Each one of us dances first in the place where we have been lying or sitting; then proceeds to the place of the one to the left and dances in their moccasins. And so I become in turn each one of these human beings, understanding a little better what they are. At the same time I see myself in the eyes of the others: alive, lively, sensual, and joyous, but also silly, exaggerated, ridiculous—as many shadings and varieties of me as there are humans who are dancing in my moccasins.

  After this dance, the circle dissolves. We all disperse into the night.

  Fifteen years later, upon reflecting on this and other experiences, I see that my encounters with the “little princes” initiated a new phase in my life and consciousness. They showed me worlds of unique and special beauty that I could never have imagined. This feature alone would have made these encounters worthwhile for me, but beyond that, I have been shown depths, treasures, and insights into my own existence. These function like time-released explosive charges, gradually transforming my attitudes, behavior, and feeling nature—in short, my entire worldview.

  I have become more authentic, self-confident, less interested in mainstream conventions, less impressed by the material realm. I believe that without the painful insights into my own story and without the challenge of transforming these painful aspects into something new and better, the beautiful visions would not have been accessible to me. I find it good that it is so.

  One thing I can say for certain is that my relationship to nature, and particularly to plants, has been drastically altered. Where before nature was basically alien and exterior to me, I now experience it as a living whole, of which I am a part. Plants are my relatives: I can meet them, communicate and learn from them. I have the most profound respect for their ancient and enduring wisdom.

  Perhaps some people approach such journeys in consciousness with the expectation that they will become happier. I can’t say whether I have become happier; that would be simplistic. My life has acquired greater intensity and authenticity: when I am happy, my happiness is greater than before; when I am unhappy, there are deeper dimensions to this state also. Because of this, I have had to learn how to bring more balance into my life, in order to be able to contain such intensities.

  What I have learned from the plant and mushroom spirits, the visions they have given me, I count among the greatest gifts I have received in my life.

  MUSHROOM MAGIC IN THE LIGHTNING FIELD

  MARTIN GOODMAN

  A single mushroom takes this forty-two-year-old English writer on a little walk into a magical landscape where he finds his song and gives it to the mountain and the sky.

  “Quemado. What does it mean in English?”

  “Burnt!”

  So we speed from the town of Burnt, turn onto a dirt road, and cruise through mile after mile of brown grassland. Gates are opened and closed and we surge through pools of mud, heading further into the hinterland. The first of the steel rods of the Lightning Field appears and beyond it, a wooden cabin.

  The Chevrolet wheels around and pulls up at the front door. In fact, it is a good house: solid and commodious, my first log cabin. The tables, ceiling, walls, floor, chairs, everything in it is made of dark wood. No picture, no rug, no cushion, no cloth spoils the effect of wood on wood on wood.

  Wooden rocking chairs on the back porch give views across the grassland to a ring of distant mountains. Between the log cabin and the mountains stretches the Lightning Field. The house is wood; the Lightning Field is steel. I see a poetic contrast of cabin, field, and mountains, wood, steel, and stone.

  The Lightning Field is one of the world’s largest art installations, placed here, in New Mexico, by the artist Walter de Maria in 1977. Four hundred lightning rods, shining steel poles that rise to a sharpened point, are set in a quadrant one mile by one kilometer. In all, forty-five rows of sixteen rods, each set so perfectly that if you face a line of rods just so, they all disappear behind the foremost rod’s four-inch width. The same in the diagonal directions. Each rod is around twenty feet high, adjusted to the level of land into which it is set, so that the points form an exact plane on which an imaginary sheet of glass might rest in perfect balance. We tread through this forest of steel poles, feeling small and somewhat lost. The Lightning Field is on a scale beyond aesthetics, somehow.

  We discover another element when we walk out into the lightning field: water skims the surface in patches, turning the earth to bog. We hunt for a missing element: fire. I see the first sign of it: a thin jag of lightning threads into the tip of a steel pole to my right.

  It is the peak of New Mexico’s lightning season. Some nights lightning blazes across the southern skyline. Sheets of it fill the night and contrast trees, mountains, and clouds in sharp silhouettes. Branches of it reach from high with multiple sizzling fingers that stab down across miles and miles of landscape.

  I have learned something of the lore of lightning. Enormous winds swirl within thunderclouds to generate sparks of electricity. Bolts of up to a million volts shoot out at the speed of light, up to twenty-six of them at a time fusing into what we perceive as a single lightning flash.

  I know to stay away from metal objects. I know that these giant lightning rods are anchored into the ground in deep stacks of cement, and know a lightning strike spreads high voltage through the ground. Lightning strikes at least a thousand people off the globe each year, plus those many beyond the reach of official records, innocents on some pampas, some tundra, some steppes or taiga or desert or grassland. Two thousand thunderstorms are sporting themselves around the planet at any given time. A small one contains ten times as much power as the atom bomb that flew from here, New Mexico, to destroy Hiroshima.

  Thunder echoes inside a cloud beyond the range of mountains to the south. Dark clouds begin to pile up over to the west. The Lightning Field no longer seems a safe place to be.

  We sit on rockers on the verandah of the cabin and wait for the show to commence. Thunderclouds gather over the mountains, but the sky above the plain remains fairly clear. Our anticipation dims
a little.

  I take out a small plastic package. Inside is a mushroom, given to me by a friend for my birthday. I have never “shroomed” before, taken the journey where magic mushrooms lead. The package contains one cap and one stem, the length of my little finger from knuckle to tip. It is dry, a fairly dark brown, and as I say a prayer and pop it in my mouth, I am surprised by its taste. I expect no taste at all, but here is the strong flavor of mushroom. It is pleasantly grounding and natural that a magic mushroom tastes like a mushroom. I chew, activate the strands with my saliva, and swallow. Psilocybin, the mushroom’s hallucinogenic ingredient, is now in my system. I am on a chemical journey with no turning back. The dose is supposed to be a small one. Some lightness, some sense of opening should come.

  The company of the others suddenly seems a little harsh. I wish to observe the mushroom’s effects in solitude and go to my room. My bed, single and smart beneath a bright red blanket, is in an annex built to lean against the cabin’s rear wall. I lie down and close my eyes.

  The effects are physical at first. There is a click of release inside my ears. Heat gathers inside my jaw then turns to numbness. Then the visions begin.

  The Lightning Field lies several walls away, on the far side of the cabin, but I see it clearly, eyes open or eyes closed. I tour the field from within and from a distance, turning to view the rods in different formations, from different angles. Lightning slips down from the sky with exquisite accuracy to pass in through the points of the giant steel needles. As I study the sight, I note how the rods absorb electricity from the sky, but they also spit it back. I watch twin forks of lightning shoot from steel tips to jag heavenward.

  I watch the show for some time, absorbed in its wonder, before I suspect I am being ridiculous to have traveled all this way out into the wilderness, and content myself with a vision inside a closed room. The scene is so real I presume it is happening in the outer world also. I get up to join the others and share the experience.

  One person is reading. Others are chatting. Another is staring out across the field. The mountains have captured the threat of the storms, so just the occasional bulk of white cloud drifts in the blue sky over our heads.

  I decide to let the mushroom take me for a walk. It’s a lesson I learned on ayahuasca, one I often ask my body to do on its own. I accept that there is a physical consciousness as well as a mental one, so I still my mind to let the physical have precedence for a while. I am hesitant at first, checking that my normal mode of decision-making is not completely overridden. I walk slowly. Perhaps fear is playing a part, for my body turns to the right, skirting the field entirely. Eventually I veer left and pass near a high steel rod to enter the lightning field, on a course toward its core.

  This route is dry and the ground stays solid underfoot. Two slender mushrooms grow to my left, rooted in a cowpat, likely to be hallucinogenic. I bend over and touch them, wondering if this is the purpose of my walk, this opportunity to bend in reverence to the living form of the mushrooms that are active in my own chemistry. But my body urges me to rise and walk on.

  I look some distance ahead of my feet as they set a regular rhythm and start to breathe in time with my steps. The breathing asks to be given voice. I try some sound, showing a song the way if it wants to follow, and soon the open-throated song of my body is loud all around me. My song, my walk, and my breathing all share one rhythm. The walk has arrived at its destination, for it is walking within itself. I look out to see what is attracting it.

  A mountain, the most distinctively-shaped of the mountains that ring the area, rises in the west with a flat peak: Mount Allegre. I am pleased to be in the center of a march that is directed at a mountain, and my song sings louder. It started as open-mouthed calls, its notes swooping and plummeting, but my tongue is working now and forming words. I am singing in a language I almost recognize but don’t understand this language of my body.

  My song is so full it surprises me to hear another voice, a gentle command from within which says, Stop! Like taking the foot off the accelerator, the command sets itself against my momentum. My footsteps slow. I pause and grow silent. I listen. I have been the center of my own attention, but it’s clear to me that other forces are present. I wonder how they will show themselves.

  Sing! my body tells me. You are here. There is no need to march. But sing!

  My song resumes, sure of itself, with its lyrics in the language I don’t know. I sing to the mountain, then raise my head and sing to the sky. My feet resume their march, treading on one spot in time with the song, as my hands rise from my sides. My fingers straighten and spread; my hands begin to shake and the fingers to shiver as they reach high to clouds lit white and rounded with shadow racing across the sky.

  I am singing to the sky as my feet beat the rhythm of the song into the Earth. I know the song now. It has verses and a chorus and a shape. It has a beginning, passes through a middle, and in the natural way of things, it comes to an end. I stare into the sky, leave my hands to hold the moment of silence, then bring them back down to my sides. I am still following the promptings of my body, so I simply wait.

  Look, my body says. See what you can see!

  I look ahead, where Mount Allegre stands. I wait.

  It comes in the air across to my right. The mental part of me notes disappointment in the plainness of the apparition, but I keep on watching. First one small violet-blue ball appears, the way I would imagine a molecule to be, then others follow to form a small ring. It revolves at an angle, then glides down and to the left, turning to present me with the full circle of rather than the sidelong oval.

  It rests on the ground in front of my feet, still revolving, and as I watch, the circle expands. A broad avenue between the lightning rods opens between the mountain and me. The circle expands along it. It stretches to form an oval and twists to form a figure eight. Its violet-blue molecules are always spinning in a flow of energy, so that even as the circle twists and flattens along the ground, the tiny globes that form it still revolve around its perimeter.

  Its pathway is complete. At one end of the pulsing, spiraling avenue is the mountain. At the other end is myself. This molecular stream is the energy that flows between us. There is nothing for me to do now but to stand and appreciate. I had thought, I had hoped, that my walk would lead me to the mountain. This stream of violet light is happening outside of my hopes. My walk has led me toward the mountain, but the mountain has also come to me.

  As with the song, this encounter with the mountain has a beginning, middle, and a natural ending for me to play out. With the stream of violet light still winding between us, I acknowledge the mountain, thank it, and turn away. My body has declared it is time to walk back.

  I had picked up a stone on the way out, a rough white one, and slipped it into my pocket. On my return I spot another stone, this one a blushing pink in the shape of an ear. I bend toward it and recognize it as a stone belonging to the journey. Laying the white one down, I take the ear stone in my hand and walk on.

  The song returns. I drop the stone into my mouth and sing the song from beginning to end, for the ear stone to absorb.

  My route home takes me through the Lightning Field, beyond the outer rods with the log cabin ahead of me. I pause and look to my right. A young rabbit stands at the edge of a patch of marshland, using its paws to wipe its face, bending its soft ears forward. A little further on I reach a broad stand of thistle, crowned with purple flowers. I kneel beside it for a moment, place my ear stone on the ground at the thistle’s roots, and walk away.

  I turn to Mount Allegre before entering the log cabin. The sun is dropping behind it, sheathing the sky in crimson.

  At the time of this experience I was completing the manuscript of my book, I Was Carlos Castaneda. That book contains an account of an ayahuasca trip into the jungles of Peru in which the beneficial effects of hallucinogens were poisoned by the dark side of shamanism. The account given here marks my first return to psychedelics since that experien
ce, and it was enormously cleansing. Mushrooms open me to the natural world in a very healing way and return me to a path of sacred mountains that is very real for me. I have revisited the mushroom once since then, a journey that surprisingly extended my experience with ayahuasca of personal transformation into the form of a jaguar (perhaps guided by the presence of a photo of a South American shaman dressed in jaguar skin that hung above the platform where I took the medicine). The effects of the mushroom help me seal a major experience of the past, whilst simultaneously giving me strength for further shifts that are to come.

  I invite readers to visit my website, which is found at: www.MartinGoodman.com. There I would be glad to share experiences as the journey continues.

  Martin Goodman is an English-born journalist and novelist, whose books include I Was Carlos Castenada (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), In Search of the Divine (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), and On Bended Knees (London: Pan Macmillon, 1992).

  BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

  Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., obtained a B.A. in philosophy and psychology at Oxford University and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Harvard University; he also held a postdoctoral fellowship in psychopharmacology at the Harvard Medical School. He worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert on psychedelic research, edited the Psychedelic Review, coauthored The Psychedelic Experience (1964), and edited The Ecstatic Adventure (1968). He is also the author of Maps of Consciousness (1971), Know Your Type (1979), The Well of Remembrance (1994), The Unfolding Self (1998), and Green Psychology (1999). He has pursued research in altered states of consciousness and cross-cultural methods of consciousness expansion and published more than one hundred articles on consciousness, shamanism, alchemy, transformation, and mythology. He is a professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and maintains a private practice of psychotherapy in the Bay Area. He is president and cofounder of the Green Earth Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to healing and harmonizing the human relationship with the Earth. He is also the editor of essays and experience accounts on ayahuasca, the Amazonian visionary vine. His book Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca will be published by Inner Traditions in 2006. Dr. Metzner can be contacted via e-mail at: ralph@greenearthfound.org. His Web site address is: www.greenearthfound.org.