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What about you? You ever done any hallucinogenic substances?

Same here. Not tons, but enough. I used to grow shrooms for a short time. I was really good at it. I have a gift for fungus. 

I sank to the floor. I [experienced] this hallucination of tumbling forward into these fractal geometric spaces made of light and then I found myself in the equivalent of the Pope’s private chapel and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them, and I was aghast, completely appalled, because [in] a matter of seconds . . . my entire expectation of the nature of the world was just being shredded in front of me. I’ve never actually gotten over it. These self-transforming machine elf creatures were speaking in a colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Fabergé eggs but crafted out of luminescent superconducting ceramics and liquid crystal gels. All this stuff was just so weird and so alien and so un-English-able that it was a complete shock — I mean, the literal turning inside out of [my] intellectual universe!

This went on for two or three minutes, this situation of [discontinuous] orthogonal dimensions to reality just engulfing me. As I came out of it and the room reassembled itself, I said, ‘I can’t believe it, it’s impossible.’ To call that a drug is ridiculous; that just means that you just don’t have a word for it and so you putter around and you come upon this sloppy concept [that] something goes into your body and there’s a change. It’s not like that; it’s like being struck by noetic lightning.” [Author’s note: “Noetic” derives from the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” — the collective consciousness of humankind conceived of as a sort of philosophical virtuality.]

[What] astonished me was [that] . . . in the carpets of Central Asia, in the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an Arcimboldi or a Fra Angelico or a Bosch, there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of this thing,” says McKenna. “This was more [multiplex] than the universe that we share with each other. It was the victory of Neo-Platonic metaphysics; everything [was] made out of a fourth-dimensional mosaic of energy. I was knocked off my feet, and set myself the goal of understanding this. There was really no choice, you see.