"'Me, sir!' cried Sam, springing up like a dog invited for a walk. 'Me go and see Elves and all! Hooray!' he shouted, and then burst into tears." Thus Sam Gamgee expresses the joy and the fear of going off to meet the elves with Frodo in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." Joy and fear... strange bed mates at the outset, but more than compatible in the end. I have had to come to terms with both in what has become the wildest and most intriguing odyssey of my 37 years.

Having awoken to the fact that "everything you know is wrong" at a very early age, I have been a fringe-dwelling seeker all my life. I've been down pretty much every so-called "path" out there... none of which I was able to swallow 100 percent. That, in itself, seems to be the one "truth" I have gleaned in the wake of it all: CALL NO MAN MASTER. Accept no cult, guru, teaching or religion 100 percent; pick and choose what feels right from what's out there, since none of them seem to be worthy of anyone's total devotion. This has necessarily set me on a collision course with life, as my dogma-swallowing abilities were pretty much nil from the start.

Thus my quest for an answer to all this has resulted in a veritable Max Ernst collage of ideas and concepts carefully assembled with lots of psychic duct-tape into a serviceable, though somewhat crude, framework around which my attempts at knowing The Unknown could be based. Casteneda was an early hero (although information I have received recently seems to point to the fact that heroes do, indeed, die hard). His work outlined a system of ideas and beliefs that I found much more palatable than the insane "God Is Hate" Southern Baptist party line that was shoved in my every orifice as a child. Absorbing Castaneda's books gave me permission to believe that my own personal feelings about Life, The Universe and Everything weren't all that far off to begin with.

Having several well-placed people explode into my life in the last year, I have begun to feel the old tug of The Unknown harder than ever. Synchronistic "coincidences" have always played a part in my personal mythology, and they began occurring with a vengeance this year. When one of my new friends introduced me to the work of Terence McKenna, I felt something come alive in me: my old Hobbit sense of adventure. After devouring "True Hallucinations" first on tape and then in print, I knew I had found a viable avenue of exploration. McKenna's adventures with Stropharia cubensis, the magical psilocybin mushroom, seemed to point toward a door that I thought I had closed years ago.

I did at least my fair share of LSD during my college days in the late '70's and on into the '80's. I first tried fresh psilocybin mushrooms (in a blender with orange juice--blech!) in 1981. However, these were all "party" experiences; none of them undertaken with any solemnity, nor any intention of unraveling the true nature of reality. Let's just say I wasn't into grappling with any big questions yet; I was just trying to have a good time in a world that had never really made any sense to me. Too many "bad" tripping experiences with groups of people eventually made me vow never again to do acid or mushrooms. It never occurred to me to do them in private, with a clear intent, under the right conditions.

McKenna got my attention when he described his "Logos" as a voice which answers whatever questions you put to it. I couldn't help but notice that this seemed remarkably similar to the voice of the "Dreaming Emmisary" that Casteneda describes in his book "The Art of Dreaming." In that book he also describes the realm of the Inorganic Beings, populated with little creatures that jump in and out of your chest, radiating love. McKenna gleefully describes the denizens of his hyperspatial playground as "self-transforming machine-elves" which jump in and out of body with delight, bathing you in love. The similarities here intrigued me. Could they possibly be describing the same place? What if this place were truly accessible; this place where you could, in effect, converse with the elves?

McKenna claims that this place is achievable by munching five dried grams of Stropharia cubensis mushrooms. Casteneda claims it is only achievable through a life of impeccability: by following the path of the warrior. Time to pick and choose again. Having done a stretch in the "Recovery" cult in my travels, I ran across the work of Stan Grof and the phenomenon of Holotropic Breathwork. Basically a trip without the drugs, the Breathwork was developed by Grof as an alternative to LSD for therapeutic use. I did Breathwork on a nearly weekly basis for about 18 months. The similarities to the acid/mushroom experiences of my youth were there, but transformed into a therapy tool that was very useful in cutting away layers of emotional and psychic shit that had become encrusted onto my consciousness over the course of a somewhat rocky life.

The Breathwork experiences became part of my framework, alongside the earlier psychedelic outings. When I discovered that Grof and McKenna were friends, and knew each others' work, one of those bizarre chills ran up my spine--the kind that feels like your spinal column has jumped completely out of your body and is hovering a few inches behind you. The reconciling and merging of the two different set of psychedelic experiences in my life was solidified with I read McKenna. A lifetime of constant searching and yearning had yielded very little in the way of satisfactory answers to the questions I asked of my existence. I wanted to talk to somebody, or something, with some answers, damnit! McKenna hooked me with the concept of The Logos. That alone, to me, would be worth the price of admission. Me and the Logos could have coffee and talk. That would do.

Somewhere inside I felt the Tookish part of this old Hobbit awaken; the smell of adventure was in the air again, and I welcomed it. Early in April of 1996 I found myself realizing that I had made the decision to dedicate my energy to a quite serious, and not unscientific, exploration of The Unknown. No more pussy-footin' around, dudes. This time, I wanted to grab God by the balls and squeeze real hard: look him right in the eye and demand some answers. The voracity of my dedication to this endeavor was astounding to me. That, by itself, was enough to set the parts of me concerned with self-preservation and fear on mild alert.

My literary models themselves say there is cause for fear, even terror. McKenna says that the elves are "traders"--they're smooth talkers; they offer you pretty toys, but they want something from you--sort of a hyperspatial commodities exchange, I suppose. McKenna claims they took his knowledge of the I Ching, but without his permission. "Don't let them get behind you!', he warns. Casteneda was nearly trapped in the Inorganic Beings' world, where his energy would have been milked for all eternity, like some kind of hyperspatial dairy cow for the Munchkins. Hmmm...pick and choose.

I can accept what McKenna and Casteneda both say, but I also take each with a grain of salt. They are each bound up in their own models and traditions and, even if they may deny it, they are affected just as much by their own internal filtering systems as are the rest of us.. (Their psychic frameworks may be a little better constructed, but theirs probably have some duct tape on them, too.) The message I get here is: "C'mon and have a look, but be cautious." Don't sign anything, as it were. I can deal with that; I don't like signing things anyway.

Thus armed with a healthy sense of caution, I began to lay out my plan. There would be a preliminary trip, a sort of test-drive, to make sure this was what I should be doing. If the preliminary trip proved successful, I could proceed from there. At that time, I was caught up in the swirling squirreliness of hearing McKenna's talking-book recitation of "True Hallucinations", and I kept thinking "I wish I had just one mushroom to try this idea out..." One of the trite adages that I like to spout in times of adversity is "The Universe Will Provide." Well, The Universe did, indeed, provide said mushroom almost instantaneously, from a most unexpected source! I was gifted one perfect dried cap and stem, approximately 1 1/2 inches in diameter, in a tiny little plastic bag, as a surprise treat, by a friend. A surprise treat, indeed!

I hurried home and lay the little package on the kitchen table. I hemmed and hawed for about thirty seconds before deciding it was time to put up or shut up. I drew a Medicine Card (an oracle that I feel comfortable using) to see what The Universe thought. I picked Badger, which basically says to be more aggressive in reaching your goals. Sounds like we have a "go" to me. It was April 5, 1996. It was 3:00 a.m. The timing was impeccable. Being a nocturnal creature by nature and habit, I am used to being up until past dawn, and sleeping until the afternoon. I had made the plan in my mind that I would follow McKenna's recommendation of taking the mushroom at night, alone, with all the lights and sounds in the house turned off. Total solo trippage to the max. I made my own little ceremony to commemorate and consecrate the experience. I can best describe by leanings as free-form-pan-sexual-neo-pagan (now there's a handy little collection of hyphenated words). I lit some incense and basically made my peace with The Universe As I Knew It, asking that I be shown some piece of the puzzle that would let me know whether or not this was a viable course of study to take. I ate the little shroom, turned off all the lights, smoked a healthy pipe of marijuana and lay down on my bed to wait.

I did some deep breathing to relax my body, and kept consciously visualizing letting go of my expectations about this. After all, it was only one little shroom. Within 30 minutes, the first crystalline fractals began to creep across my eyelids. At the same moment, I began to hear a buzzing sound; an electro-bio-metallic hum. The sound seemed to come from inside my head. It permeated everything. I immediately dubbed this shimmering buzz "the trip-noise", since it remained constantly in the background. I smiled as I caught the phrase "the hum of the operating frequency of DNA" flit by--was I hearing voices already? I began to feel a freedom in my body. I wanted to shake myself out into my limbs, fill myself up. I began to explore my body with my hands, and noticed that the area covered by my body seemed vast, as if my hands were running over miles of terrain. "Good sign", I thought, "Spatial distortion at 3:38 a.m.! Excellent!" Having satisfied myself that I could still coherently tell time and jot notes, I began to loosen up and play with the experience a little. I wanted to analyze each perception as carefully as possible, but I didn't want to forget to have fun.

I first noticed that wherever on my body I concentrated my focus, I noticed a distinct climactic quality to the energy field that surrounded my body. This had nothing to do with the conditions in the room. This was a distinct climactic quality to the energy itself, solely dependent upon where I focused my attention. This was quite an unexpected realization.

What I observed was that when my attention was focused on my sexuality, there was a warm and moist quality to the energy immediately around me. That realization rocked me. I became mental about it right away, and began analyzing how that could happen, and got floored by a second realization: as soon as my attention left my John Thomas and went into my analytical brain, the climactic "feel" of the energy immediately took on a cool and arid quality. My breathing changed to compensate for the (apparently) sudden change in temperature and humidity. I was stunned. I quickly zapped my attention back to my naughty bits, and the energy became humid and warm, almost tropical. As quickly as I could, I switched up into my brain and, Voila: cool and arid. I had a grand time zapping back and forth and laughing my ass off. I remembered to thank The Universe at appropriate intervals for the gift I was enjoying. That seemed seriously important.

After awhile, I began to see what seemed like gory, intestinal sorts of patterns, and I wanted to look away. I heard a voice say "Don't look away!" I kept looking and finally realized that I was seeing the inside of my body, a-la Fantastic Voyage. My perception had focused down into a pin-point that was able to travel through my internals. I must have been somewhere in my chest. I decided to take the tour. I zipped down into my leg, down to a toe, saw the insides of blood vessels, and zipped through my brain. I saw the trademark patterns of the blood vessels on the insides of my eyeballs (the ones that can be seen during an eye exam). While I was playing with that image, I saw everything go completely black.

I saw a point of light, like a comet, sail through space, and smash into an invisible, flat surface. At the instant of impact, the surface flashed with a bright light. It showed the pattern of a grid. I watched the light spread out and cover the surface to infinity in all directions. When my mind made that realization, I found myself experiencing a feeling of floating, which was very strange to me, since I cannot swim, and don't know how to float. But I knew I was floating in some sort of spongy ocean or mist, and then I noticed that everything else in the world was floating right along with me, but separated from me, and I was separated from all of it by some sort of equidistant equilibrium that seemed to hold everything bobbing in place. I heard someone or something speak the sentence: "This is the Matrix."

At that moment, something occurred with I can only describe as a transmittal of information on a totally psi level. I knew and understood several things simultaneously, and with great ease. First, I knew that the point of light which hit the grid was me--my consciousness--the focus point of my perception. Second, I understood that the Matrix is some sort of place or state which exists OUTSIDE of time. Time does not exist while you are in the Matrix. Third, I knew exactly how to jump in and out of the Matrix at will. I giggled and said another "thank you.' I heard the phrase "Swim in the At-Onceness of it all," and enjoyed bobbing up and down in the oceanic sponginess that surrounded me. There was a very big deal made about the choice of the term "at-onceness" as opposed to "at-oneness"; perhaps to signal me about the Matrix' location outside of time. I practiced jumping in and out of the Matrix for a while.

I noticed that the transmittal of information, and my comprehension of it, took what has always been its traditional form with me. When I receive something of psi origin, it is as if a wave of complex emotion sweeps across my entire being, a large wave, consisting of complex combinations of emotional energetic charges in a shifting, formless wave that drenches me. These waves are then translated into a sentence or word or phrase or sometimes an idea. Sometimes the translation is instantaneous, as it was here, or it takes a few days, sometimes a week or two to translate.

After the Matrix portion of the experience, I suddenly became interested in trying to make a sound like the one I had heard on the McKenna tape; the sound that I supposed to be the actual field recording of Dennis McKenna's three rising, metallic buzzing noises that he made during their mushroom experiment at La Chorrera. I made a preliminary sound, and was awed by what I heard. It became a very metallic sound, and it began to rise in frequency. I made the noise with very little or no effort; the noise seemed to make itself, and to use my head as a sounding board. When I stopped, I noticed that there was a "shimmering" quality to all the sounds heard immediately after I made the noise. I tried it again, and made an even louder, longer wail. It was as metallic and buzz like as the trip-noise, and as unearthly as the sound on the tapes. This both delighted and scared the shit out of me. The sounds were wonderful to make and hear, but my stick-in-the-mud rational voice piped up to tell me that I should remember that Dennis McKenna had also taken a stroll around the galaxy that took a couple of months to return from after he made those sounds...

After the sounds, I lay back to take stock in the experience so far. It was a little after 6:00 a.m. A three hour tour... a three hour tour... all in all, quite a smashing good first trip. I made some notes for future reference, and lay back down to sleep as the light grew outside, and the trip-noise lingered faintly. It was decided. I was to become an explorer, and oneironaut sailing The Dreamtime Seas. I would record my experiences to share with others who might be grappling for answers in a similar manner.

So I began a series of trips, increasing the dosage each time. This first trip was accomplished with one small mushroom. I looked at just how much five dried grams of mushroom really was a d decided to would be prudent to slowly work my way up to that "heroic" amount. My initial plan was to trip once a week for a while, and see where this thing led. My premise would be simple. Each trip would be recorded with field notes (mostly jotted cue words to trigger my memory) for later interpretation and compilation into a readable form. I would also try to get hold of a voice activated mini-cassette to record any sounds that chose to come forth.

At the time of this writing (September 1996) I've made two more trips into The Unknown. These two trips were somewhat more complex, (due in part, I assume, to the increased dosages each time) than the first, and have required much more effort on my part to process through and describe. This has become an adventure in the truest sense of the word, stretching my abilities and limits in a most tantalizing way. I do feel as though I am "on to something" here. The developments of the last two months have certainly changed my sense of perspective, where this thing is going to end up, I can't say. But I sure aint quittin' now.

Look for Trips II and III next time.