Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod!
(Dark is life, dark is death!)
--from Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde"

So goes the "refrain" of the first section of Mahler's epic sound-poem known as "Das Lied von der Erde" or "The Song of the Earth." The first section is called 'The Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth' and it exclamatorily sets the mood for the rest of that extraordinary piece of music. Dark is life, dark is death! Not an altogether cheerful sentiment, but in the face of things being what they all-to-often are, an unfortunately true one. My next two expeditions into The Unknown were to have me humming Mahler for a long time.

Goodness, but that sounds ominous. I suppose it should. I really hadn't wanted to approach the darker side of this phenomenon quite so "soon off the bat", so to speak. I had hoped that I would be spared the nittiest of the gritty for a while, at least. The outcome of these experiences, and the corresponding sets of synchronistic circumstances which began to crop up in my everyday existence as a result of these experiences, have caused me to pull back a bit from my image of myself as a sort of Psychedelic Siegfried, off on his Rhine Journey. I suddenly feel the need to remember that Siegfried also died while off on his Rhine Journey. Noble sentiments seem awfully cheap anymore.

I suppose I had better start at the beginning. Where we left our Hobbit-hero last was in a state of vision-inspired bliss, chomping at the bit for more adventure. At this writing we find him quite tired, a little rattled, and basically spent. "Ho-ho!", you say; "The boy's just a wussie!". Well, no. It's not got anything to do with wussitude. But there you go... I've gotten lost in it again. I was supposed to go back to the beginning...

It was Saturday, May 25, 1996. I sat writing in my old room at my father's house, sometime around 11:00 p.m. I have had to spend more time in my old south Texas hometown than I'm used to spending, now that my father is getting older. I was there on one of my visits when I looked around my old room and noticed that there was not a trace of "me" to be found. The room had been stripped of any sign of my previous occupancy. I knew that I had noticed this many times before, and that it had never bothered me previously. This time it bothered me, It was as if I had been purposefully wiped out of the room's memory. It unsettled me, if only for a little while. I made some comment to myself about "erasing your own personal history, or having it erased for you". I was making a journal entry, having just jotted down that I had heard another tape of some of Terence McKenna's rants, on which he stated that what the psychedelic movement needed to help it along were "the diaries of explorers". Well, here you go, Terence! I figured that someday I would send him copies of these articles. I laughed at the thought of the little boy who used to live in this room, sending tales of psychedelic adventure off to some strange man of whom his mother certainly wouldn't approve! Erasing personal history, indeed! I closed my journal notebook and went to sleep early
that night.

The next day was busy with yard work; clearing piles of junk away from the sides of an old backyard shed. Many strange things can collect in piles next to old sheds in south Texas over the span of thirty years. I found things towards the bottom of the pile that I had literally not seen for 20 years--things like parts of the air conditioner from my first car, long-broken bits of flower pots that had once been painted by my brother (then an architecture student in college) and glued into a sort of bad '70s tower-of-babel plant stand. Lots of "earthtones"...but we thought it was cool then...

South Texas gets hideously hot in the summer, and summer certainly reared its ugly head early this year. An afternoon of work out in the heat requires many a glass of too-sweet iced tea, . . . it's a Texas thing, ya'll . . . during a tea break I'm leaning on my rake, letting my senses soak up the beautiful sight of a hive of bees that has made their home in the walls of my father's shed for the past five or six years. They were intently busy regulating the temperature of the hive. I had accidentally flipped a bee onto me earlier while pulling weeds, and it stung me on the belly. I remember feeling sorry that the bee had to die because it had stung me, and I had reacted in fear and pain. The pain of the sting was mostly gone by this time, however, and I was again visually in love with the bees. I saw something scamper past my foot out of the untouched portion of the junk pile. I watched as it ran around to the back of the shed and jumped up onto the wall in one short leap. It was a lizard. A rather large lizard, unlike any I'd ever seen in that yard.

It was about a foot long, bigger than the little green chameleons that I used to find as a boy when outside in the balmy mosquito-filled Texas summer evenings--the only time of day when the heat was bearable enough to get outside and play. This was more of a scalier and browner type of lizard than my old chameleon friends (I am not a herpetologist, so I'm not real keen on lizard taxonomy.) What the lizard triggered in me, as it stared at me from the shed wall, and I stared back at it from behind my glass of tea, was my knowledge of what Lizard means in terms of the Medicine Cards, my card "oracle of choice." Lizard is dreaming. Lizard is also the knower of the shadow side of each of us, our fears and weaknesses. The final admonishment of Lizard is to pay attention to your dreams.

That was a definite omen to me. I have learned to pay close attention to the appearance of any wild animal or bird in my path. I often see hawks in unexpected places, and they are nearly always a portent of some "heavy" event happening in my life in the near future. Knowing Lizard's place in my personal mythology, I began to get excited about my Dreamtime voyages again. I still had another hour's work in the yard ahead of me, though, then cleaning up. cooked supper for Pop and then left for my own little house, nestled in deep South Austin, two hours to the north.

I had an overall good feeling about how the weekend had gone thus far, and had decided I would trip when I got home, if the signs pointed to it. I had been itching to trip ever since I had finally located a small amount of Stropharia cubensis. How something that grows on cowshit could be so hard-to-get baffled me, and the price I had to pay definitely perturbed me. This made me jot down a note to myself to look for the book on growing them that the McKenna brothers wrote. I chuckled to myself at my cleverness at engineering some time to trip into the weekend. It was the first three-day weekend in a long while, and I was pleased that I'd actually been able to take one night of it just for ME.

No one here in Austin knew I was back yet...all my friends expected me back no earlier than Monday afternoon. I called my pop to let him know I'd gotten home and then I turned the phone off, I loaded my pipe, got out some incense and the Medicine Cards, found my notebook and pen, and went to the freezer to get the little baggie of dried fungus. I chose the two smaller caps and stems, with a few assorted bits that had broken off the one large shroom left in the bag, The combined mass of mushroom for this trip was approximately twice as much mushroom as I had eaten for Trip I. I took everything over to the kitchen table and prepared to do my little pre-trip ritual.

I've decided that it is always best for me to start my pre-trip rituals off by lighting some incense in thanks to The Universe for the chance to do this thing--to make this inquiry--to set off on this journey--to make this petition for knowledge. It seems emphatically important that this be done, almost frighteningly so. After that, I always pull a Medicine Card to see what The Universe thinks about all this. (I later learned that McKenna throws the I Ching as the final determining factor in whether or not he trips.) The card I pulled this time was...Lizard. Whew! Zing!, went every nerve-ending along my spine, and the hair on the back of my neck bristled! All intense omen antennae on red alert! These sorts of synchronicities are exactly what I seek out and attempt to catch hold of and ride. That is where the action is, so to speak. I had decided to eat the mushroom at midnight. I ended my ritual at midnight by smoking a bowl of marijuana and eating the shroom. Then I went to lie down to await the experience.

I had jotted down the weight of mushroom I was consuming as 2.57 grams. The number flashed into my head as I asked no one in particular just how much mushroom this was, I wrote it down unquestioningly, knowingly. That is part of how this phenomenon has begun to affect my everyday waking existence--there are things that I simply accept as "knowingnesses"--things that I know with a sense of certainty that need not be questioned.

I began to breathe with a relaxed, circular breath, to loosen up my sore muscles and relax my body, tired from a weekend of hard work in the hot sun. About fifteen minutes into it, I began to feel the freedom in my body that I had experienced before, only this time with a different perspective. This time it felt as if there were something inside of me that was waking up and expanding to fill my body...as if there a second skin unrolling out of a ball in my gut, and expanding to fill the skin that was already there--something coming alive and filling up my body along with me--a second occupant? Was it my own awareness coming awake, or was it truly the presence of something "other"? The mushroom's ancestral onsciousness, perhaps?

That question occupied my mind as the geometrics began to emerge at 12:26. Pleasant "undersea" images of flowing seaweed-like constructs that possessed the fluid grace of movement of the old Max and Dave Fleischer animations from the 1930's--everything flowing into patterns that seemed random, but belied an exquisite order underneath it all. My ears began to ring with a rising tone at 12:28, and the "trip noise" of my last expedition began to appear as an intensely undulating backdrop to everything once more.

The bulk of the experience is still very difficult to describe in words, even after nearly a month of analyzing. Another of the purely psi information transmittals took place and I, again, "knew" several things simultaneously that I had not previously "known" that somehow would apply to this expedition. Some of these things were evident immediately, and others made themselves evident later.

The first thing I "knew" was that it was, indeed, the mushroom's ancient ancestral consciousness that had awakened and filled my body along with me. I began to almost panic at the thought of another entity sharing my personal biological space, but I quelled it immediately by thrusting myself directly forward into that thought. I had read a sci-fi short story back in junior-high about a kid who went to sleep on the beach and awoke to find that an amoeboid alien had pipetted itself into his body through his tear duct. This alien spoke to him by writing on his eyelids, and it helped the kid out with his troubled little life--a true symbiotic relationship. The story flashed to me in a nanosecond--I hadn't thought of it in perhaps twenty-five years, but I remembered it right then in its entirety, in a split instant. McKenna says that the mushroom seeks a symbiotic relationship with us. Could this be one possible scenario? "OK," I thought, "Welcome to my pad, Mr. Ancient Shroom-Dude! Mi casa, su casa! Make yourself comfy!"

Instantly it seemed as though I was filled with a definite reptilian-feeling energy. Lizard. Very large lizard. My body wagged back and forth like a lizard walking on hot sand. I felt a reptilian, scaled fluidity to my movements as I wrapped my long reptilian tail over my heavy reptilian legs, and addressed the human that happened to cohabitate this body with me. I felt as though a lizard-reptile entity of enormous age had filled my body along with me, and I was seeing through its eyes and feeling its sensations superimposed over my own.

A flash of energy hit me that almost seemed to be a question from the Lizard consciousness. I got a sense of "Well, what is it you want?" from the Lizard. This led to a flash of "realization" or moment of understanding on my part. There followed a response from me of a blast of emotional energy, which led to another flash of energy from the Lizard in my consciousness, and another (apparently) appropriate response from me, and then another round of the same. After each one of these volleys of "questioning" energy, I had evidently exhibited the correct looked-for response of emotive energy. When I beamed out my emotional response to each of these hyperspatial cues, I was presented with another cue, until a definite succession had been accomplished,

The moment the sequence of cues and responses was completed, I felt an intense sense of deja-vu that I could not shake. I knew that I had responded to these same cues before, the last time I tripped, and my responses then were the same responses I made this time. I was certain of it. Together, these cues and my emotive responses to these cues all formed some sort of "key". This key was the key to unlocking the door to cross over, to access The Unknown; sort of an energetic secret password to the Hyperspatial Speakeasy, at who's heavily bolted door I had been discreetly knocking.

When I related this to a friend familiar with these sorts of experiences, I was jabbing my hand in the air with seemingly random pin-point motions to denote each cue and response, punctuating my speech with a sort of "conversational air guitar". My friend pointed out that the placement of my "air-guitar" exclamation marks looked like the sacred Tree of Knowledge of the Kaballah. I've seen the spreads based on The Tree used in Tarot readings. That made immense sense to me. Is the key to unlocking the door to The Unknown an energetic interpretation of the ancient Tree of Knowledge--a set of emotive responses to cues given by some sort of Door-Warden? I have been intrigued by McKenna's accounts of tales of the alchemists' attempts at probing The Unknown, and have begun to see synchronicities with that work, revealing that the clues they left us might really be riddles to be solved; that they are tools to be deciphered, discovered again for what they are, and used.

I turned my focus back to the reptilian input. I immediately began to make low, guttural, croaking sorts of sounds. I eventually toned a low, metallic grumble that shook my whole body, Then my reptilian co-host spoke using my vocal cords: "I am old beyond your comprehension." "I just bet you are!" was my astonished reply. (I can now make the connection with Bilbo verbally jousting with old Smaug in the darkness beneath the Lonely Mountain, although at the time, I must admit, it escaped me.) I took stock of how this was affecting me emotionally, and I found I wasn't really all that frightened, I could sense no malevolence in the reptilian presence. Possible amusement or (at times) boredom, but not malevolence.

Through several more minutes of purely reptilian sensory input, I had more psi-transmitted realizations, most of which I cannot remember clearly, or, rather, cannot access in an "everyday" state of consciousness. (I tend to think that the latter is the case--the concept of state-dependent memory is not new to me, as Castaneda spent several books rehashing his years with don Juan after he suddenly began to remember an entire course of study that occurred while in an altered state of consciousness. The things he knew and learned while in that state were not accessible while in a "normal" state of consciousness, until the proper amount of energy had been accumulated to access them.) Perhaps the information would be meaningless unless it were accessed while in that other reality; e.g.: there is no need for the information to be accessible "here", since you have to be "there" to use it. I get the impression that a lot of the information in this segment of the trip had to do with what it was like to be one of these Lizard entities.

I got the distinct feeling that the Lizard who had unfolded himself into my consciousness was carried in the mushroom. As if the mushroom were simply a vehicle for his consciousness. Did this ancient reptile, who was "old beyond my comprehension" belong to a race of beings from some far off galaxy who somehow managed to program their genetic memory into the spores of a lowly mushroom, spores to be carried throughout space on the cosmic winds?

After what seemed hours of unspoken communication (more like "beingness") with this reptilian consciousness, the reptilian sensations seemed to fade away, and my attention to wander. I keyed in on the trip noise and immediately made spontaneous, upwardly-rising vocal tones that seemed to feed back upon themselves and amplify in my skull, until my whole body vibrated with that weird (and now familiar) electro-bio-metallic buzz. I made several different tones, each one lasting a little longer, and reaching a little higher pitch, than the last. I noticed my breathing becoming heavy after the third tone. There was also a shimmering quality to the air in the room in response to ambient sounds again, as if the sounds themselves were somehow becoming visible.

I took a deep breath and began to make a very high-pitched tone which I sustained for a long time. When I thought that it couldn't get any louder or stronger, I watched as my surroundings changed at a rapid rate. I knew instinctively that the sound was the key to traveling. I had "sung" myself into a brightly-lit kind of whirling atmospheric cloudiness that had hints of a metallic timbre to it. Sound and vision became something that blended and merged here. Suddenly objects had timbre, tone and pitch. Suddenly it was is if physical objects in this place could possess musical qualities. Thus a cloud here could have a metallic timbre. I thought of McKenna's description of the elves singing objects into being, and wondered "Could this be the place?"

I could see how this place could also be interpreted as a UFO-type of environment. It whirled around, it was brightly lit, and there were Somethings there along with me! The thought that each person's cultural filters color their perception of the psychedelic/UFO/spiritual/mystical experience (and the fact that these are ALL THE SAME EXPERIENCE) became crystal clear to me at that moment. Some people see angels, some see UFOs.

I was so awed by the change that I stopped the tone. While taking stock of my surroundings, I began to hear what I can only describe as insectoid chattering. Almost exactly like the chattering sound on old sci-fi movies whenever a spider-like alien or monster is afoot. It was as though every cicada that ever existed were sounding off at once, each one vibrating slightly off from the others. When I keyed in on the chattering, and made as similar a tone to it as I could, I felt the sensation of going into (or being pulled into) a very bright light, and found myself being joined by the presence of large insectoid creatures, seemingly condensing into being around me, seeming to condense right out of the light itself. I felt as though I were lying down, or else they were so much taller than I that I had to look up at them. I toned along with the chatter until I was exhausted.

Unlike with the Lizard, I did not get the impression that I was really communicating with these insectoid creatures. I couldn't feel any emotional message or interaction with them, as I had with the Lizard. They said nothing to me. They were so utterly foreign, so very weird, that I could not connect with them on any level. The thought crossed my mind that maybe I wasn't supposed to be here, The chattering noise engulfed me, and I began to feel what I later came to call the "cosmic dental drill". It was an eerie feeling that I was being drilled and tapped, being extracted and consumed--eaten alive energetically--basically getting sucked dry of my life force. There was definitely a feeling of malevolence to this! I came to my senses, shook myself, shouted "NO!" very loudly, and the draining feeling stopped. The force with which I said "NO!" surprised me, and temporarily shocked me out of the trip-space and back into my bed.

My thoughts were that if these were McKenna's elves, then these truly are tricky bastards! After much thought, I still am not sure if I toned myself into that same realm that McKenna likes to frolic about in, although where I was certainly did seem to bear some descriptive resemblance to it. The apparent size of these Insectoid beasts was very disquieting, besides the fact that it felt as though they were sucking my life-force away. I got the distinct impression that these were definitely inorganic life-forms. The reptilian Lizard entity was at least familiar on that level--I could relate to it because it was another organic life form. It felt like I had understood the reptilian feelings and thoughts. I had absolutely no such common ground with these Insectoid Whatevers; their energy had no organic feeling to it at all.

I lay there breathing for a bit, collecting myself. I took stock and decided that, although I had been frightened badly, I was game for a bit more. There was still plenty of visual stuff going on behind my eyelids, so I released my hold on the trip and went with it, My surroundings seemed again to be shifting at a rapid rate. Very intensely architectural images, vast buildings that folded in on themselves and became flowing rivers of architecture that condensed into shimmering palaces, melted, and then crystallized into stone edifices before unfolding back into their original forms.

I felt that I was walking over a rolling landscape, under an open sky that was lit with a pale light, I began to see images that do not now make themselves clear to me. I remember that my response to these images was the puzzled utterance "Things are pretty archetypal around here!..." (Delivered somewhat like Dorothy saying "People come and go so quickly here!" while on her not dissimilar adventures in Hollywood's Oz). The visions were like viewing statues that appeared in a spotlight on a darkened stage--perhaps like holograms? The images were just that: archetypal images. Trees, rocks, structures, animals, people, each perfect, all with intensely mythological/creation connections or connotations. It was as if I were viewing a gallery of Source Images. The original source image or model for Everything was there...was this possibly just a different perspective on The Matrix encountered in Trip I? During this part of the trip I had the distinct impression that I was walking over a gently rolling foreign landscape, though, not floating as I had in the spongy, oceanic Matrix.

An additional emphasis was placed on the fact that the sound was what had transported me to these places. "Key in on the sound and go with the sound, and you will travel." The entire concept of shamanic music has been forever changed in my mind. Could shamanic music simply be an attempt to trigger the trip noise, and is the trip noise the progenitor of The Sound That Makes Things Happen? Many mythologies say that The Creator opened his mouth and sang the world into being. Is the trip noise a way of generating the great Sound of Creation? Could the trip noise be a "springboard" frequency for reaching other dimensions via sound?

The visions began to fade away. I looked at the clock, and saw that it was nearly 5:30. A little over five hours since I ate the mushroom. I yawned and stretched and made sure I was all "here". I lay back and drifted off uneasily, exhausted from my efforts, on top of the existing physical tiredness from the weekend. My impressions of the Trip II experiences have shifted as my personal distance from them in time has increased.

What happened on Trip III changed my perceptions even more.