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did some work with the dissociated anesthesias (producing wide awake but not
there states) having consulted with John Lilly, a brain scientist who used these
agents as a courageous self-medicating explorer of sensory isolation tanks; I met
several native shamanic practitioners including the Huichol Indian that was the
model for Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s five volumes of pseudoethnography
written up in my essay “Is Don Juan Alive and Well?” in The Pushcart Prize of 1977.
Issues of culture and brain chemistry came together in several accounts about
entheogenic, mescaline-containing peyote use among the Huichol Indians in a book
edited by Kathleen Berrin and Thomas Seligman of the San Francisco Art Museum
called Art of the Huichol Indians.

Over these years I collected many nauseating, upper and lower bowel
wrenching and ecstatically transcendent and exhausting day-long episodes of the
angular geometries of visual pattern-generating DMT, the animistic breathing of
bush and flower breathing peyote cactus, the darkly forbidding shadows of the
psylocybin-containing mushrooms, the irreversible rocket launches into the
electrically buzzing, kaleidoscopic circus of LSD-containing vials from Sandoz and
the optimistic, trust engendering, expansively warm rush of six of Sacha Shulgin’s
gregarious, rave dancing, chlorinated, methoxylated and ethoxylated
phenylethylamines which he had, years before, synthesized for “an undisclosed
purpose” for the Dow Chemical Corporation under contract with the U.S. Army
Chemical Corps. The best known of the latter group remains part of the rave culture
as Ecstasy.

These agent’s peaks are flooded with exaggerated, caricaturizing images of
people’s faces and a belief in the mindedness of animals and even the embodiment
of inanimate things. Evoked are simultaneous and diametrically conflicting
interpretations of the same social context, heteromodal sensory fusion called
synesthesia so that sound bespoke color and smells induced music, habitual
thoughts rearranged as new ideas in what is experienced as exciting new insights,
and, most of all, that which Louis Lewin, Berlin’s early 20th Century Freud of
psychotropic drugs in his book Fantastica, called gladness of the soul. Timothy
Leary wrote of entheogenic escape from the habitual human brain’s mental-

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