Cyberia

Chapter 5 Seeing is Beholding

Terence McKenna - considered by many the successor to Tim Leary's psychedelic dynasty - couldn't make it to Big Heart City Friday night for the elder's party. The bearded, lanky, forty-somethingish Irishman was deep into a Macintosh file, putting the finishing touches on his latest manuscript about the use of mind-altering plants by ancient cultures. But by Saturday morning he was ready to descend from his small mountaintop ranch house to talk about the virtual reality that has his fans so excited.

We're backstage with McKenna at a rave where he'll be speaking about drugs, consciousness, and the end of time. The luckiest of friends and mentees hang out with him in his dressing room as he prepares to go on.

"VR really is like a trip", one boy offers McKenna in the hopes of launching into him one of his lyrical diatribes. Terence ponders a moment and then he's off, sounding like a Celtic bard.

"I link virtual reality to psychedelic drugs because I think that if you look at the evolution of organism and self-expression and language, language is seen to be some kind of process that actually tends toward the visible.'' McKenna strings his thoughts together into a breathless oral continuum. "The small mouth-noise way of communicating is highly provisional; we may be moving toward an environment of language that is beheld rather than heard."

Still, assembled admirers hang on McKenna's every word, as if each syllable were leaving a hallucinatory aftervision on the adrenal cortex. They too dream of a Cyberia around the corner, and virtual reality is the closest simulation of a what a world free of time, location, or even a personal identity might look like. Psychedleics and VR are both ways of creating a new, nonlinear reality, where self-expression is a community event.

''You mean like ESP?''

Terence never corrects anyone – he only interpolates their responses. ''This would be like a kind of telepathy, but it would be much more than that: A world of visible language is a world where the individual doesn't really exist in the same way that the print-created world sanctions what we call `point of view.' That's really what an ego is: it's a consistently defined point of view within a context of narrative. Well, if you replace the idea that life is a narrative with the idea that life is a vision, then you displace the linear progression of events. I think this is technically within reach.''

To Terence, the invention of virtual reality, like the resurgence of psychoactive drugs, serves as a kind of technological philosopher's stone, bringing an inkling of the future reality into the present. It's both a hint from our hyperdimensional future and an active, creative effort by cyberians to reach that future.

''I like the concept of the philosopher's stone. The next messiah might be a machine rather than a person. The philosopher's stone is a living stone. It is being made. We are making it. We are like tunnelers drilling toward something. The overmind is drilling toward us, and we are drilling toward it. And when we meet, there will be an enormous revelation of the true nature of being. I think every person who takes five or six grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness is probably on a par with Christ and Buddha, at least in terms of the input.''

So, according to McKenna, the psychedelic vision provides a glimpse of the truth cyberians are yearning for. But have psychedelics and virtual reality really come to us as a philosopher's stone, or is it simply that our philosopher's stoned?

Morphogenetic Fields Forever

Cyberians share a psychedelic common ground. To them, drugs are not simply a recreational escape but a conscious and sometimes daring foray into new possible realities. Psychedelics give them access to what McKenna is calling the overmind and what we call Cyberia. However stoned they might be when they get there, psychedelic explorers are convinced that they are experiencing something real, and bringing back something useful for themselves and the rest of us.

Psychedelic exploration, however personal, is thought to benefit more than the sole explorer. Each tripper believes he is opening the door between humanity and hyperspace a little wider. The few cyberians who haven't taken psychedelics still feel they have personally experienced and integrated the psychedelic vision through the trips of others, and value the role of these chemicals in the overall development of Cyberia. It is as if each psychedelic journey completes another piece of a universal puzzle.

But, even though they have a vast computer net and communications infrastructure at their disposal, psychedelic cyberians need not communicate their findings so directly. Rather, they believe they are each sharing and benefiting from a collective experience. As we'll see, one of the most common realizations of the psychedelic trip is that ''all is one.'' At the euphoric peak of a trip, all people, particles, personalities, and planets are seen as part of one great entity or reality – one big fractal.

It may have been that realization that led Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake to develop his theory of morphogenetic fields, now common knowledge to most cyberians. From morph, meaning ''forms,'' and genesis, meaning "birth,'' these fields are a kind of cumulative record of the past behaviors of species, groups, and even molecules, so that one member of a set can learn from the experience of all the others.

A failed animal-behavior test is still one of the best proofs of Sheldrake's idea. Scientists were attempting to determine if learned skills could be passed on from parents to children genetically. They taught adult mice how to go through a certain maze, then taught their offspring, and their offspring, and so on for twenty years and fifty generations of mice. Indeed, the descendants of the taught mice knew how to get through the maze very quickly without instruction, but so did the descendants of the control group, who had never seen the maze at all! Later, a scientist decided to repeat this experiment on a different continent with the same mouse species, but they already knew how to go through the maze, too! As explained by morphic resonance, the traits need not have been passed on genetically. The information leak was due not to bad experimental procedure but to the morphogenetic field, which stored the experience of the earlier mice from which all subsequent mice could benefit.

Similarly, if scientists are developing a new crystalline structure, it may take years to ''coax'' atoms to form the specific crystal. But once the crystal is developed in one laboratory, it can be created instantly in any other laboratory in the world. According to Sheldrake, this is because, like the mice, the atoms are all "connected'' to one another through morphogenetic fields, and they ''learn'' from the experiences of other atoms.

Sheldrake's picture of reality is a vast fractal of resonating fields. Everything, no matter how small, is constantly affecting everything else. If the tiniest detail in a fractal pattern echoes the overall design of the entire fractal, then a change to (or the experience of) this remote piece changes the overall picture (through the principles of feedback and iteration). Echoing the realizations of his best friends, Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna, Sheldrake is the third member of the famous ''Trialogues'' at Esalen, where the three elder statesmen (by cyberian standards) discuss onstage the ongoing unfolding of reality before captivated audiences of cyberians. These men are, quite consciously, putting into practice the idea of morphogenetic fields. Even if these Trialogues were held in private (as they were for years), Cyberia as a whole would benefit from the intellectual developments. By pioneering the new "headspace,'' the three men leave their own legacy through morphic resonance, if not direct communication through their publishing, lectures, or media events.

Likewise, each cyberian psychedelic explorer feels that by tripping he is leaving his own legacy for others to follow, while himself benefiting from the past psychedelic experiences of explorers before him. For precisely this reason, McKenna always advises using only organic psychedelics, which have well-developed morphogenetic fields: ''I always say there are three tests for a drug. It should occur in nature. That gives it a morpogenetic field of resonance to the life of the planet. It should have a history of shamanic usage [which gives it a morphogenetic field of resonance to the consciousness of other human beings]. And it should be similar to or related to neurotransmitters in the brain. What's interesting about that series of filters, is that it leaves you with the most powerful hallucinogens there are: psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, and, to some degree, LSD."

These are the substances that stock the arsenal of the drug-using cyberian. Psychedelics use among cyberians has developed directly out of the drug culture of the sixties. The first tripsters – the people associated with Leary on the East Coast, and Ken Kesey on the West Coast – came to startling moral and philosophical conclusions that reshaped our culture. For today's users, drugs are part of the continuing evolution of the human species toward greater intelligence, empathy, and awareness.

From the principle of morphogenesis, cyberians infer that psychedelic substances have the ability to reshape the experience of reality and thus – if observer and observed are one – the reality itself. It's hardly disputed that, even in a tangible, cultural sense, the introduction of psychedelics into our society in the sixties altered the sensibilities of users and nonusers alike. The trickle-down effect through the arts, media, and even big business created what can be called a postpsychedelic climate, in which everything from women's rights, civil rights, and peace activism to spirituality and the computer revolution found suitable conditions for growth.

As these psychoactive plants and chemicals once again see the light of day, an even more self-consciously creative community is finding out about designer reality. While drugs in the sixties worked to overcome social, moral, and intellectual rigidity, drugs now enhance the privileges of the already free. Cyberians using drugs do not need to learn that reality is arbitrary and manipulable, or that the landscape of consciousness is broader than normal waking-state awareness suggests. They have already learned this through the experiences of men like Leary and Kesey. Instead, they take chemicals for the express purpose of manipulating that reality and exploring the uncharted regions of consciousness.

Integrating the Bell Curve

LSD was the first synthesized chemical to induce basically the same effect as the organic psychedelics used by shamans in ancient cultures. Psychedelics break down one's basic assumptions about life, presenting them instead as arbitrary choices on the part of the individual and his society. The tripper feels liberated into a free-form reality, where his mind and point of view can alter his external circumstances. Psychedelics provide a way to look at life unencumbered by the filters and models one normally uses to process reality. (Whether psychedelics impose a new set of their own filters is irrelevant here. At least the subjective experience of the trip is that the organizing framework of reality has been obliterated.)

Nina Graboi, the author of One Foot in the Future, a novel about her own spiritual journey, was among the first pioneers of LSD in the sixties. Born in 1918 and trained as an actress, she soon became part of New York's bohemian subculture, and kept company with everyone from Tim Leary to Alan Watts. She now works as an assistant to mathematician Ralph Abraham, and occasionally hosts large conferences on psychedelics. She spoke to me at her Santa Cruz beach apartment, over tea and cookies. She believes from what she has seen over the past seven decades that what psychedelics do to an individual, LSD did to society, breaking us free of cause-and-effect logic and into an optimistic creativity.

"Materialism really was at its densest and darkest before the sixties and it did not allow us to see that anything else existed. Then acid came along just at the right time – I really think so. It was very important for some people to reach states of mind that allowed them to see that there is more, that we are more than just these physical bodies. I can't help feeling that there were forces at work that went beyond anything that I can imagine. After the whole LSD craze, all of a sudden, the skies opened up and books came pouring down and wisdom came. And something started happening. I think by now there are enough of us to have created a morphogenetic field of awareness, that are open to more than the materialists believe."

But Graboi believes that the LSD vision needs to be integrated into the experience of America at large. It's not enough to tune in, turn on, and drop out. The impulse now is to recreate reality consciously – and that happens both through a morphogenetic resonance as well as good old-fashioned work.

''I don't think we have a thing to learn from the past, now. We really have to start creating new forms, and seeing real ways of being. This was almost like the mammalian state coming to a somewhat higher octave in the sixties, which was like a quantum leap forward in consciousness. It was a gas. The end of a stage and the beginning of a new one. So right now there are still these two elements very much alive: the old society wanting to pull backward and keep us where we were, and the new one saying, `Hey, there are new frontiers to conquer and they are in our minds and our hearts."

Nina does not consider herself a cyberian, but she does admit she's part of the same effort, and desperately hopes our society can reach this "higher octave." As with all psychedelics, "coming down'' is the hardest part. Most would prefer simply to ''bring up'' everything else ... to make the rest of the world conform to the trip.

The acid experience follows what can be called a bell curve: the user takes the drug, goes up in about an hour, stays up for a couple of hours, then comes down over a period of three or four hours. It is during the coming-down time – which makes up the majority of the experience – that the clarity of vision or particular insight must be integrated into the normal waking-state consciousness. Like the Greek hero who has visited the gods, the tripper must figure out how the peak of his Aristotelian journey makes sense. The integration of LSD into the sixties' culture was an analogous process. The tripping community had to integrate the truth of their vision into a society that could not grasp such concepts. The bell curve of the sixties touched ground in the form of political activism, sexual liberation, the new age movement, and new scientific and mathematical models.

Cyberians today consider the LSD trip a traditional experience. Even though there are new psychedelics that more exactly match the cyberian checklist for ease of use, length of trip, and overall intensity, LSD provides a uniquely epic journey for the tripper, where the majority of time and energy in the odyssey is spent bringing it all back home. While cyberians may spend most of their time surfing their consciousness for no reason but fun, they take acid because there's work to be done.

When Jaida and Cindy, two twenty-year-old girls from Santa Cruz, reunited after being away from each other for almost a year, they chose LSD because they wanted to go through an intense experience of reconnection. Besides, it was the only drug they could obtain on short notice. They began by smoking some pot and hitchhiking to a nearby beachtown. By the time they got there, the girls were stoned and the beach was pitch black. They spent the rest of the night talking and sleeping on what they guessed was a sand dune, and decided to ''drop'' at dawn. As the sun rose, the acid took effect.

As the girls stood up, Jaida stepped on a crab claw that was sticking out of the sand. Blood flowed out of her foot. As she describes it now:

''The pain was just so...incredible. I could feel the movement of the pain all the way up to my brain, going up the tendrils, yet it was very enjoyable. And blood was coming out, but it was incredibly beautiful. At the same time, there was still the part of me that said `you have to deal with this,' which I was very grateful for.''

Once Jaida's foot was bandaged, the girls began to walk together. As they walked and talked, they slipped into a commonly experienced acid phenomenon: shared consciousness. ''It's the only time I've ever been psychic with Cindy. It's like one of those things that you can't believe ... there's no evidence or anything. Whatever I was thinking, she would be thinking. We were making a lot of commentary about the people we were looking at, and there'd be these long stretches of silence and I would just be sort of thinking along, and then she would say word for word what I was thinking. Like that. And then I would say something and it would be exactly what she was thinking. And we just did that for about four or five hours. She's a very different physical type from me, but it reached the point where I could feel how she felt in her body. I had the very deep sensation of being inside her body, hearing her think, and being able to say everything that she was thinking. We were in a reality together, and we shared the same space. Our bodies didn't separate us from each other. We were one thing.''

But then came the downside of the bell curve. The girls slowly became more "disjointed." They began to disagree about tiny things – which way to walk, whether to eat. "There was this feeling of losing it. I could feel we were moving away from it with every step. There was a terrible disappointment that set in. We couldn't hold on to that perfect attunement."

By the time the girls got back to their campsite on the sand dune, their disillusionment was complete. The sand dune was actually the local trash dump. As they climbed the stinking mound of garbage to gather their sleeping bags, they found the "crab claw" on which Jaida had stepped. It was really a used tampon and a broken bottle. And now Jaida's foot was beginning to smart.

Jaida's reintegration was twofold: She could no more bring back her empathic ability than she could the belief that she had stepped on a crab claw. What Jaida retained from the experience, though, came during the painful crash landing. She was able to see how it was only her interpretation that made her experience pain as bad, or the tampon and glass as less natural than a crab claw. As in the experience of a Buddha, the garbage dump was as beautiful as a sand dune ... until they decided it was otherwise. Losing her telepathic union with her friend symbolized and recapitulated the distance that had grown between them over the past year. They had lost touch, and the trip had heightened both their friendship and their separation.

Most acid trippers try to prolong that moment on the peak of the bell curve, but to do so is futile. Coming down is almost inevitably disillusioning to some degree. Again, though, like in a Greek tragedy, it is during the reintegration that insight occurs, and progress is made – however slight – toward a more all-encompassing or cyberian outlook. In order to come down with a minimum of despair and maximum of progess, the tripper must guide his own transition back to normal consciousness and real life while maintaining the integrity whatever truths he may have gleaned at the apogee of his journey. The LSD state itself is not an end in itself. While it may offer a brief exposure to post-paradigm thinking or even hyperdimensional abilities, the real value of the LSD trip is the change in consciousness, and the development of skills in the user to cope with that change. Just as when a person takes a vacation, it is not that the place visited is any better than where he started. It's just different. The traveller returns home changed.

Eugene Schoenfeld, M.D., is the Global Village Town Physician. A practicing psychologist, he wrote the famous "Dr. Hip" advice column in the sixties; he now treats recovering drug addicts. The doctor believes that the desire to alter consciousness, specifically psychedelically, is a healthy urge.

"I think what happens is that it allows people to sense things in a way that they don't ordinarily sense them because we couldn't live that way. If our brains were always the way that they are under the influence of LSD, we couldn't function. Perhaps it is that when babies are born – that's the way they perceive things. Gradually they integrate their experience because we cannot function if we see music, for example. We can't live that way.

"Part of the reason why people take drugs is to change their sense of reality, change their sensation, change from the ordinary mind state. And if they had that state all the time, they would seek to change it. It seems that humans need to change their minds in some way. There's a reason why people start talking about `tripping.' It's related to trips people take when they physically change their environment. I'm convinced that if there were a way to trip all the time on LSD, they would want to change their reality to something else. That is part of the need."

The sense of being on a voyage, of "tripping," is the essence of a classic psychedelic experience. The user is a traveler, and an acid or mushroom trip is a heroic journey or visionquest through unexplored regions, followed by a reentry into mundane reality. Entry to the psychedelic realm almost always involves an abandonment of the structures by which one organizes reality, and a subsequent shedding of one's ego – usually defined by those same organizational structures. On the way back, the tripper realizes that reality itself has been arbitrarily arranged. The voyager sees that there may be such a thing as an objective world, but whatever it is we're experiencing as reality on a mass scale sure isn't it. With the help of a psychedelic journey, one can come back and consciously choose a different reality from the one that's been agreed upon by the incumbent society. This can be manifest on a personal, theoretical, political, technological, or even spiritual level.

As Dr. Schoenfeld, who once served as Tim Leary's family physician and now shares his expertise with cyberians as co-host of the DRUGS conference on the WELL, explains, "that quality-that nonjudgmental quality could be carried over without the effects of the drug. After all, one hopes to learn something from a drug experience that he can use afterward. (All this interest in meditation and yoga, all these various disciplines, it all began with people taking these drugs and wanting to recreate these states without drugs.) So, to the extent that they can, that is a useful quality. And this nonjudgmental quality is something I think that can be carried over from a drug experience."

Over There

So, the use of psychedelics can be seen as a means toward experiencing free-flowing, designer reality: the goal, and the fun, is to manipulate intentionally one's objectivity in order to reaffirm the arbitrary nature of all the mind's constructs, revealing, perhaps, something truer beneath the surface, material reality. You take a trip on which you go nowhere, but everything has changed anyway.

To some, though, it is not the just the change of consciousness that makes psychedelics so appealing, but the qualitative difference in the states of awareness they offer. The place people "go" on a trip – the psychedelic corridors of Cyberia – may even be a real space. According to Terence McKenna's authoritative descriptions of that place, it is quite different from normal waking-state consciousness:

The voyager journeys "into an invisible realm in which the causality of the ordinary world is replaced with the rationale of natural magic. In this realm, language, ideas, and meaning have greater power than cause and effect. Sympathies, resonances, intentions, and personal will are linguistically magnified through poetic rhetoric. The imagination is invoked and sometimes its forms are beheld visibly. Within the magical mind-set of the shaman, the ordinary connections of the world and what we call natural laws are de-emphasized or ignored."

As McKenna describes it, this is not just a mindspace but more of a netherworld, where the common laws of nature are no longer enforced. It is a place where cause-and-effect logic no longer holds, where events and objects function more as icons or symbols, where thoughts are beheld rather than verbalized, and where phenomena like morphic resonance and the fractal reality become consciously experienced. This is the description of Cyberia.

As such, this psychedelic world is not something experienced personally or privately, but, like the rest of Cyberia, as a great group project. The psychedelic world each tripper visits is the same world, so that changes made by one are felt by the others. Regions explored by any traveler become part of the overall map. This is a hyperdimensional terrain on which the traditional solo visionquest becomes a sacred community event.

This feeling of being part of a morphogenetic unfolding is more tangible on psilocybin mushrooms than on LSD. McKenna voices Cyberia's enchantment with the ancient organic brain food: "I think that people should grow mushrooms. They are the real connector back into the archaic, even more so than LSD, which was largely psychoanalytical. It didn't connect you up to the greeny engines of creation. Psilocybin is perfect."

Like LSD, mushrooms provide an eight-hour, bell-curve trip, but it is characterized by more physical and visual "hallucinations" and a much less intellectual edge. Users don't overanalyze their experiences, opting instead to revel in them more fully. Mushrooms are thought to have their own morphogenetic field, which has developed over centuries of their own evolution and their use by ancient cultures. The mushroom trip is much more predictable, cyberians argue, because its morphogenetic field is so much better established than that of acid, which has only been used for a couple of decades, and mostly by inexperienced Western travelers.

As a result, mushroom experiences are usually less intensely disorienting than LSD trips; the "place" one goes on mushrooms is more natural and user-friendly than the place accessed on acid or other more synthetic psychedelics. Likewise, `shroomers feel more tangibly a part of the timeless, locationless community of other users, or even animals, fairies, or the "greeny engines" of the spirit of Nature herself.

For this feeling of morphic community and interconnection with nature to become more tangible, groups of 'shroomers often choose to create visionquest hot spots. Students at U.C. Santa Cruz have developed a secret section of woods dedicated to mushroom tripping called Elf Land (the place just behind Ralph Abraham's office). Some students believe that fairies prepared and maintain the multidimensional area of the woods for 'shroomers. Some students claim to have found psilocybin mushrooms – which these fairies are said to leave behind them – growing in Elf Land. Most of all, Elf Land serves as a real-world reference plane for the otherworldly, dimensionless mushroom plane. And, like the morphogenetic mushroom field, Elf Land is shared and modified by everyone who trips there, making the location a kind of cumulative record of a series of mushroom trips.

Mariah is tripping in Elf Land for the first time. A sophomore at U.C. Santa Cruz, the English major had heard of Elf Land since she began taking mushrooms last year, but never really believed in it as a real, physical place. She eats the mushrooms in her dorm with her friends Mark and Rita, then the trio head out to the woods. It's still afternoon, so the paths are easy to follow, but Rita – a much more plugged-in, pop-cultural, fashion-conscious communications major than one would expect to find tripping in the woods of Santa Cruz – suddenly veers off into a patch of poison oak.

Mark, a senior mathematics major and Rita's boyfriend, grabs Rita by the arm, afraid that she's stoned and losing her way.

"It's a pathless path, Mariah," Rita assures the younger girl, without even looking at Mark. Rita knows that Mariah's fears are the most pressing, and that Mark's concerns will be answered by these indirect means. Rita has made it clear that this trip is for Mariah.

"It's the perfect place to trip." Rita puts her arm around Mariah. "People continually put things there. Some of it's very subtle, too. Every time you go there, there's different stuff there. And it's all hidden in the trees up past the fire trails, up in the deep woods there." She points a little farther up the hill.

Then Mariah sees something – a little rock on the ground with an arrow painted on it. "Lookee here!" She stops, picks it up, and turns it over. Painted on the back are the words "This way to Elf Land."

"Someone left this for me?" Mariah asks, the mushrooms taking full effect now, and the fluorescent words on the gray rock beginning to vibrate.

"Just for you, Mariah," Rita whispers, "and for everyone. Come on."

"Here's another one!" Mark is at an opening to the deeper woods, standing next to another sign, this one carved into the side of a tree: "Welcome to Elf Land."

As the three pass through the opening, they walk into another world. It's a shared state of consciousness, not just among the three trippers but among them and everyone else who has ever tripped in Elf Land or anywhere else.

Mariah is thinking about her name; how she got it, how it's shaped her, how it's like the name Mary from the Bible, but changed somehow, too. Updated. At the same moment as these thoughts, she comes upon a small shrine that has been set up in a patch of ferns between two tall trees. The two-foot statue is of the Virgin Mary, but she has been decorated – updated – with a Day-Glo costume.

"How'd that get there?" Mariah wonders out loud.

Meanwhile, Mark has wandered off by himself. He's been disturbed about his relationship with Rita. She seems so addicted to popular culture – not the die-hard Deadhead he remembers from their freshman year. Should they stay together after graduation? Get married, even?

He stands against a tree and leans his head against its trunk, looking up into the branches. He looks at the way each larger branch splits in two. Each smaller branch then splits in two, and so and so on until the branches become leaves. Each leaf, then, begins with a single vein, then splits, by two, into smaller and smaller veins. Mark is reminded of chaos math theory, in which ordered systems, like a river flowing smoothly, become chaotic through a process called bifurcation, or dividing by twos. A river splits in two if there's a rock in its path, the two separate sections preserving – between the two of them – the order and magnitude of the original. A species can bifurcate into two different mutations if conditions require it. And a relationship can break up if ...

As Mark stares at the bifurcated pairs of branches and leaves, he realizes that bifurcation is the nature of decision making. He's caught in the duality of a painful choice, and the tree is echoing the nature of decision-making itself.

"Making a decision?" Mariah asks innocently. She has read the small sign nailed into the side of the tree: "Tree of Decision."

"I wonder who left that there?" Mark wonders aloud.

"Doesn't matter," answers Rita, emerging from nowhere. "Someone last week, last year. A tripper, an elf ... whoever."

As if on a visionquest, Mark and Mariah were presented with a set of symbols in material form that they could analyze and integrate into a pattern. They were ''beholding'' their thoughts in physical form. The reality of their trip was confirmed not just by their fantasies but by the totems and signs left for them by other trippers experiencing the same things at different times.

Mushrooms very often give users the feeling of being connected with the past and the future. Whether the 'shroomers know about morphogenetic fields, they do feel connected with the spirit of the woods, and everyone who has traveled before in the same space. Going up is the voyage to that space, peaking is the un-self-conscious experience of the new world, and coming down is the reintegration during which the essence of the peak experience is translated into a language or set of images a person can refer to later, at baseline reality.

Chapter 6 Making Connections

Distribution and Manufacture

For some cyberians, making sense of things and feeling the connections with other trippers is not enough. They use psychedelics to forge new connections between cultures, people, or even individual atoms. It is important to them that the real world, and not just the psychedelic space, consciously reflect the interconnectivity that underlies reality. Just as a fractal exhibits self-similarity, the psychedelic subculture should reflect the quality of a single trip.

LSD distributors, in particular, believe that acid functions as a twentieth-century psychic grease, allowing modern people to move their mental machinery through the ever-increasing demands of an information-based society. (Acid, unlike mushrooms, can be mass-produced, too.) Leo is an LSD dealer from the Bay Area who believes that his distribution of psychedelics is a social service. One of his favorite distribution points is the parking lot at Grateful Dead shows, where thousands of people mill about, looking for ''doses.''

Tonight's concert has already begun, but most of the crowd of young merchants who follow the Dead don't have tickets for the show. Instead, they wander about the lot, smoke pot with one another, and prepare for the concertgoers who will exit the arena in two or three hours.

Leo is well into his own acid trip of the evening (he says he's been tripping every day for several months) and sits in a makeshift tent, explaining his philosophy to a young couple who make falafel and beaded bracelets. While his rationale is the result of a few years in the military and a few others with skinheads, he does express the psychedelic concept of interconnectivity and networking from a modern cyberian standpoint. The Deadheads (who many cyberians feel are still caught in the sixties) are deep into a conversation about how they can feel their ''third eye'' while tripping, and how it makes them feel connected to everything in the world. Leo shakes his head scornfully.

''The sixth sense of society as a whole also lies in its connectivity and its ability to intercommunicate. When society becomes enlightened, its third eye happens to be that connectivity. That's the evolutionary factor.''

Leo tries in vain to get them to understand the concepts of feedback and iteration, and how they relate to human society connecting through telephones and the media. The bong gets passed around again, and Leo tries a different tack.

''I'm attempting to work this on a subversive level by distributing a large amount of LSD throughout the U.S. and trying to reach other countries, too.'' One of the Deadheads laughs, just liking the sound of breaking the law. Leo rolls his eyes and stresses the global significance of his subversion.

''LSD's definitely an interconnectivity catalyst for the countercultures and subcultures that we're tuned in to. We're able now, with our information-age technologies, to know about groups and countercultures who are communicating together and sharing common resources and information – like all you Deadheads living in this parking lot. As these groups develop their own identities, they gain a certain amount of awareness about themselves as a collective conscious. That offers a channel for catalytic tools like LSD to be exchanged, putting all these groups on the same wavelength.''

The falafel merchant shrugs, too stoned or too straight to understand Leo's point. ''I don't get it. Is LSD making this happen, or is it happening so people can get more LSD?''

''LSD is part of and a result of this interconnectedness. It's mind expansive and group-mind expansive. And what it does is act as a catalyst for culture and individuals. Now that we've left the industrial age and come into the information age, the rate information exchanges is increasing exponentially. It's very fast; you can look at it in binary terms. Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two – that's how fast the information multiplies. What's going on is, the way people learn, is they cause an imprint in their subconscious, and then they're able to build a type of structure on their imprint which represents their knowledge. And how they see their own knowledge is their own wisdom ... it's their knowledge of their knowledge.''

Both Deadheads are lost now. The girl has started mindlessly unbeading a bracelet and the boy is reloading the bong. But Leo doesn't care that he can't make an impact on these people. He just continues to reel out his run-on sentences into the datapool in the hope that they get picked up morphogenetically.

''LSD primes the mind for subconscious imprintation – makes it more susceptible to it. We're able to learn more information at a faster rate because we're able to imprint ourselves at the same rate as the information is being developed, because in the LSD state you're able to conceive such a vast quantity of anything. When I'm on LSD sometimes I can think in broad terms and sometimes I even gain vocabulary that I've never used before and I'm able to retain that in the future.''

''If you gave us another hit of your LSD, Leo,'' the bead girl smiles, "maybe we'd know what you're talking about, too.''

This is where traditional, sixties-style tripsters differ from their cyberian offspring. The sixth sense, or ''group mind oversoul,'' to which Leo has dedicated himself (but which these old-fashioned-type Deadheads can't understand) is the locus of awareness that most cyberian psychedelic explorers seek. Whether it be Mariah in Elf Land or Leo in the LSD distribution net, the cyberian difference is that psychedelic activity now becomes part of an overall fractal pattern, experienced, in one way or another, by everyone.

While Leo draws the lines of interconnectivity between users and groups of users, other reality designers at sublevels of the psychedelic fractal network are more concerned with the lines of interconnectivity between the very atoms of the substances they take. Becker, Leo's LSD source, is a twenty-eight-year-old chemistry grad student with a strong background in illicit psychopharmacology. His experience of psychedelics is on a different fractal order from that of classical personal tripsters or even Leo and other cultural catalysts. Becker knows about drugs from the inside out, so his answer to any drug's problems lies in its chemistry. If a drug is illegal, alter its chemistry to make it legal again. If a drug is too short-acting, figure out a way to stunt the user's ability to metabolize it.

Leo arrives at Becker's attic laboratory discouraged from the Deadheads the night before. He's wondering if Becker can whip something up with better transformational properties than those of LSD.

Becker has just the answer. He spent all of last night creating his first batch of 2CB (in chemist's lingo, 4-Bromo-2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine). ''It's called Venus, and it's a synthetic version of mescaline, with a few designer improvements.''

Becker's problem with mescaline, another organic psychedelic, is that it is metabolized by the body very quickly. By the time the user begins to trip heavily, he's already on the way down. To figure out how to modify the substance, Becker took a large dose, then went on an internal visionquest into the chemical structure of the active mescaline molecule.

''The native mescaline molecule is a ring. I saw how the methoxy group which hangs on that ring could be pried off easily by the metabolism, rendering the molecule impotent in an hour or so. By replacing that methoxy group with bromine, which can hang on much tighter, the drug becomes ten times stronger. The body can't break it down, and it goes much much further because it can stay planted in the brain's receptor site that much longer.''

''But how much do you have to take? And how do you know it's not toxic?'' Leo asks, fingering the white powder in its petri dish.

''It's less toxic, Leo, don't you see? Plus it's much more effective, so you don't have to take as much. That way you don't get any side effects either. I'm on it right now!''

Leo had dropped a tab of acid about two hours ago but it wasn't doing anything. He licks his finger, dabs it in the mound of powder, and puts it on his tongue.

''That's a pretty big hit,'' Becker warns. "Probably about eight doses.''

Leo just shrugs and swallows. He can handle it. ''How fast can you make this stuff?''

''That's the joy. It's really simple to make. Just think of it as stir, filter, wash, and dry. That's all there is to it.''

As Becker goes over an ingredients checklist for a mass-production schedule, Leo collapses into a hammock and waits for the new drug to take effect. Both believe that they are on to something new and important.

By designing new chemicals, psychopharmacologists like Becker design reality from the inside out. They decide what they'd like reality to be like, then – in a kind of submolecular shamanic visionquest – compose a chemical that will alter their observations about reality in a specific way. Then, Leo, by distributing the new chemical to others who will have the same experience, literally spreads the new designer reality. The world changes because it is observed differently.

The other reason to make new drugs is to create unknown and, hence, legal psychedelics before the FDA has a chance to classify them as illegal. A relatively new law, however, has made that difficult. The Analog Substance Act classifies yet-to-be-designed chemicals illegal if they are intended to serve the same function as ones that are already illegal. This law was passed shortly after the "Ecstasy craze" in Texas, where the new, mild psychedelic got so popular that it was available for purchase by credit card at bars. As a result, according to Becker, "Lloyd Bentsen put a bee in the bonnet of the Drug Enforcement Agency, and it was stamped illegal fast."

But rather than simply stamping out Ecstasy use, its illegality prompted chemists like Becker to develop new substances. Like computer hackers who understand the technology better than its adult users, the kids making drugs know more about the chemistry than the regulatory agencies. The young chemists began creating new drugs just like Ecstasy, with just one or two atoms in different places. In Becker's language, "Thus, Ecstasy began to stand for MDMA, MDM, Adam, X, M-Ethyl, M methyl 3-4-methyline dioxy, also N-ethyl, which was sometimes called Eve, which had one more carbon, or actually CH2, added on." This flurry of psychopharmacological innovation prompted the Analog Act, and now almost everything with psychedelic intent is illegal or Schedule 1 (most controlled).

Despite its illegality, Ecstasy, even more than LSD and mushrooms, has remained on the top of the cyberian designer-substance hit parade. LSD, mushrooms, and mescaline – all powerful, relatively long-acting psychedelics – bifurcated, so to speak, into two shorter-acting substances, the mild, user-friendly Ecstasy, and the earth-shatteringly powerful and short-acting DMT. Both drugs can be found in many carefully manipulated chemical variations, and epitomize the psychedelic-substance priorities in Cyberia.

The E Conspiracy

The circuits of the brain which mediate alarm, fear, flight, fight, lust, and territorial paranoia are temporarily disconnected. You see everything with total clarity, undistorted by animalistic urges. You have reached a state which the ancients have called nirvana, all seeing bliss.

--Thomas Pynchon on MDMA

Cyberians consider Ecstasy, or E as it's called by its wide-grinning users, one of the most universally pleasant drugs yet invented. While negative experiences on Ecstasy are not unheard of, they are certainly few and far between. Everyone knows somebody who's had a bad acid trip. Ecstasy does not carry the same stigma, which may be why people don't "freak out" on it.

As Dr. Schoenfeld explains, another part of the reason may be that some of the substances aren't yet illegal, so users don't have the same negative associations and paranoia. In addition, according to the doctor, the Ecstasy drugs are nonaddictive and shorter-acting.

''As you know, there are drugs being used that the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] isn't aware of. Once they get aware of them, they'll try to make them illegal; but people who take substances are becoming aware of these new drugs, which are nonaddictive, and which don't last as long as the other drugs used to last. They don't have the same adverse effects. For example, there are a few reports of people having bad experiences with MDMA or occasional freak-outs, but it's highly unusual. And even with LSD it wasn't that common to have freak-outs. You'd hear about the cases where people tried to fly or stop trains or things like that, but compared with the amount of use there was, that was uncommon. With a drug like MDMA, it's still less common for people to have bad experiences.''

But E is not just a kinder, gentler acid. The quality of the E-xperience is very different. Bruce Eisner wrote the book Ecstasy: The MDMA Story, still the most authoritative and enlightening text on the drug's history and use. His scholarly and personal research on the chemical is vast, and he describes the essence of the E-xperience well:

''You discover a secret doorway into a room in your house that you did not previously know existed. It is a room in which both your inner experience and your relations with others seem magically transformed. You feel really good about yourself and your life. At the same time, everyone who comes into this room seems more lovable. You find your thoughts flowing, turning into words that previously were blocked by fear and inhibition.

''After several hours, you return to your familiar abode, feeling tired but different, more open. And your memory of your mystical passage may help you in the days and weeks ahead to make all the other rooms of your house more enjoyable.''

The main advantage of E is that it allows you to ''take your ego with you.'' Acid or even mushrooms can have the unrelenting abrasiveness of a belt sander against one's character. E, on the other hand, does not disrupt "ego integrity'' or create what psychologists call ''depersonalization.'' Instead, the user feels as open and loving and connected as he might feel on a stronger psychedelic but without the vulnerability of losing his "self'' in the process. If anything, E strengthens one's sense of self, so that the issues that arise in the course of a trip seem less threatening and infinitely more manageable. E creates a loving ego resiliency in which no personal problem seems too big or scary. This is why it has become popular in the younger gay and other alternative-lifestyles communities, where identity crises are commonplace.

E-volution

"You touch the darkness - the feminine, the gross, whatever you see as dark," Jody Radzik explains to Diana as they hand out flyers in the street for a new house club. "When you're on Ecstasy, the drug forces you to become who you really are. You don't get any positive experience from a drug like cocaine; it's a lie. But with Ecstasy, it can have a positive effect on the rest of your life!''

Jody and Diana are on their way to a club called Osmosis, a house event which occurs every Thursday night at DV8, a downtown San Francisco venue, for which Radzik serves as promotional director. Promoting house, though, is almost like promoting Ecstasy. The drug and subculture have defined and fostered each other. Osmosis is proud of the fact that it mixes gay, straight, ''glam,'' and house culture, and Radzik – a gamine, extremely young thirty-year-old with a modified Hamlet haircut and a mile-a-minute mouth – credits E with their success.

''There's a sexual element to house. E is an aphrodisiac and promiscuity is big. In everyday life men usually repress their `anima.' Ecstasy forces you to experience what's really going on inside.'' Diana (who runs her own house club down the block) is amused by Jody's inclination to talk about taboo subjects. Jody goes on proudly, exuberantly, and loud enough for everyone else in the street to hear. Being publicly outrageous is a valued personality trait in E culture adapted from Kesey's Merry Pranksters.

''E has a threshold. It puts you in that aahh experience, and you stay there. It might get more intense with the number of hits you take, but it's not like acid, which, with the more hits you take, the farther you're walking from consensus culture. With E, your ability to operate within the confines of culture remain. You can take a lot of E and still know that that's a red light, or that there's a cop here and you don't want to fuck up too much. On acid, you can be completely out of your head, and walking in a completely different reality.''

So E is not simply watered-down LSD. While acid was a "test," Ecstasy is a "becoming." Acid involved a heroic journey, while E is an extended moment. The traditional bell curve of the acid trip and its sometimes brutal examination and stripping of ego is replaced with a similar vision but without the paranoia and catharsis. By presenting insight as a moment of timelessness, E allows for a much more cyberian set of conclusions than the more traditional, visionquest psychedelics.

Rather than squashing personal taste and creating legions of Birkenstock clones, E tends to stimulate the user's own inner nature. Hidden aspects of one's personality – be it homosexuality, transvestitism, or just love and creativity – demand free expression. All this is allowed to happen, right away, in the E-nvironment of the house club. Reintegration on E is unnecessary because the E-xperience itself has an immediately social context. If anything, the E trip is more socially integrated than baseline reality. E turns a room of normal, paranoid nightclubbers into a teaming mass of ecstatic Global Villagers. To Radzik, the club lights, music, and Ecstasy are inseparable elements of a designer ritual, just like the campfire, drumbeats, and peace pipe of a Native American tribal dance.

Arriving at the club in time for the sound check, Jody and Diana dance a while under the work lights. Jody's diatribe continues as he demonstrates the new hip-hop steps he picked up in Los Angeles last week.

''The Ecstasy comes through the house music. The different polyrhythmic elements and the bass ... this is current North American shamanism. It's technoshamanism. E has a lot to do with it. It really does. I get a little nervous but I've got to tell the truth about things. But the system is probably going to react against the E element.''

Diana cuts in: ''And then they'll just shut you down like they closed our party last week.'' She takes a cigarette from behind her ear and lights it.

Jody still dances while Diana stands and smokes. Neither he nor the E culture will be taken down that easily. ''E is an enzyme that's splicing the system. E is like a cultural neurotransmitter that's creating synaptic connections between different people. We're all cells in the organism. E is helping us to link up and form more dendrites. And our culture is finally starting to acknowledge the ability of an individual to create his own reality. What you end up with, what we all have in common, is common human sense.''

The E-inspired philosophy borrows heavily from the scientific and mathematics theories of the past couple of decades. House kids talk about fractals, chaos, and morphogenetic fields in the same sentence as Deee-Lite's latest CD. Jody's ''cultural neurotransmitter'' image refers back to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which is the now well-supported notion that planet Earth is itself a giant, biological organism. The planet is thought to maintain conditions for sustaining life through a complex series of feedbacks and iterations. A population of ocean microorganisms, for example, may regulate the weather by controlling how much moisture is released into the atmosphere. The more feedback loops Gaia has (in the form of living plants and animals), the more precisely "she'' can maintain the ecosystem.

Evolution is seen more as a groping toward than a random series of natural selections. Gaia is becoming conscious. Radzik and others have inferred that human beings serve as Gaia's brain cells. Each human being is an individual neuron, but unaware of his connection to the global organism as a whole. Evolution, then, depends on humanity's ability to link up to one another and become a global consciousness.

These revelations all occur to house kids like Jody under the influence of E. This is why they call the drug a ''cultural enzyme.'' The Ecstasy helps them see how they're all connected. They accept themselves and one another at face value, delighted to make their acquaintance. Everyone exposed to E instantly links up to the Gaian neural net. As more people become connected, more feedback and iteration can occur, and the Gaian mind can become more fully conscious.

Jody and Diana both believe that house culture and the Gaian mindset literally ''infect'' newcomers to the club like a virus. As Osmosis opens, Jody watches a crowd of uninitiated clubbers step out onto the dance floor, who, despite their extremely "straight'' dress, are having a pretty Ex-uberant time.

''This looks like a group of people that might be experimenting with Ecstasy for the first time. They're going to remember this night for the rest of their lives. This is going to change them. They are going to be better people now. They're infected. It's like an information virus. They take it with them into their lives. Look at them. They're dancing with each other as a group. Not so much with their own partners. They're all smiling. They are going to change as a result of their participation in house. Their worldview is going to change.''

Indeed, the growing crowd does seem uncharacteristically gleeful for a Thursday-night dance club. Gone are the pickup lines, drunken businessmen, cokeheads, and cokewhores. The purposeful social machinations – getting laid, scoring drugs, or gaining status – seem to be overrun by the sheer drive toward bliss. Boys don't need to dance with their dates because there's no need for possessiveness or control. Everyone feels secure – even secure enough to dance without a partner in a group of strangers.

Whether that carries into their daily life is another story. Certainly, a number of new cyberian ''converts'' are made each evening. But the conversions are made passively, as the name of the club implies, through Osmosis. Unlike acid, which forces users to find ways to integrate their vision into working society, E leads them to believe that integration occurs in the same moment as the bliss. The transformation is a natural by-product – a side effect of the cultural virus.

As club regulars arrive, they wink knowingly at one another. Jody winks and nods at few, who gesture back coyly. The only information communicated, really, is ''I am, are you?'' The winkers are not so much the "in'' crowd as the fraternity of the converted. They're all part of what one T-shirt calls ''The E Conspiracy.'' These are the carriers of the cultural virus. No need to say anything at all. The E and the music will take care of everything (wink, wink).

''The sixties went awry because they wanted a sweeping cultural change to go on overtly,'' explains Radzik, nodding to two girls he's sure he has seen before. They wink back. "And that didn't happen. What's different about house is that no one's trying to `spread the message.' It's more like, we're into it because we love it, but we're not out to convert people. 'Groove is in the heart' [a Deee-Lite lyric]. We just want to expose people to it. People decide that they're into it because they respond to it on a heart level. I think the bullshit's going to come apart of its own accord.''

So is this a dance floor filled with socially aware, fully realized designer beings? Certainly not. It's a dance floor filled with smart kids, sexy kids, not-so smart kids, and not-so sexy kids, but they do seem to share an understanding, in the body, of the timeless quality of bliss and how to achieve it through a combination of dance and E. Even the music, playing at precisely 120 beats per minute, the rate of the fetal heartbeat, draws one into a sense of timeless connection to the greater womb – Gaia. The lyrics all emphasize the sound ''eee.'' "Evereeebodeee's freee,'' drones one vocal, in pleeesing gleeeful breeezes, winding their way onto the extreeemely wide smiles of dancing boys and girls. It's just the E! Likewise, the way in which E infiltrates society is much less time-based and confrontational than was the case with acid. E infiltrates through the experience of bliss, so there's nothing to say or do about it. The ''meta'' agenda here is to create a society with no agenda.

As Jody screams over the din of the house music, ''Fuck the agendas. We just have to manifest our culture. You have to trust your heart. That's what Jesus really said. And that's what E does. It shows people they have their own common sense. They realize, I don't need this!''

Bruce Eisner shows up at about midnight, exploring the house scene and its relationship to Ecstasy for the second edition of his book Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. A veteran of the sixties and just a bit too old to fit in with this crowd, he almost sighs as he explains to E-nthusiastic clubbers how E's preservation of social skills and ego make it a much better social transformer than the psychedelics of his day.

''In the sixties, we were sure we were going to have this revolution that would change everything overnight. And it never came. We got the seventies instead.''

A few girls laugh. They were born in the seventies. Bruce smiles slowly. He's got a dozen stoned kids hanging on his every word, when in fact he's trying to understand them.

''With E, you don't get so far out, like on acid, where you lose touch with the physical world. It allows you an easier time to bring the insights back in. Huxley talked a lot about the importance of integrating the mystical experience with the worldly experience. He had that one trip where he decided, `The clear light is an ice cube. What's important is love and work in the world.' And love and work in the world is what Ecstasy shows you. It's a model for enlightenment, and the challenge is bringing that into the real world.''

So maybe revolution has become evolution as house culture awakens to the fact that there is method behind Gaia'a madness, and that Darwin wasn't completely right. Life naturally evolves toward greater self-awareness, and we don't need to push it anywhere. The universe is not a cold sea of indifference but the warm, living waters of an oversoul composed of waves of love – Gaia's morphogenetic fields. The mock self-assuredness of the ''me'' generation gives way to the inner wink-wink-say-no-more knowing of the E generation, as the sixties bell curve finally touches down, and ego fully reintegrates into a postpsychedelic culture.

Chapter 7 The Blast Furnace of Disillusion

For those still intent on smashing the ego into oblivion and discovering the very edge of what it means to be sentient, DMT (dimethyltryptamine, and its cousin, 5-hydroxytryptamine) is the only answer. It is a naturally occurring hallucinogen that is usually smoked, although shamans snort it and some aggressive Western users inject it. It's effect is immediate – definitely within a minute, usually within seconds – and all-encompassing. It cannot even be described in terms of magnitude (one user says, ''It's like taking every LSD experience you've ever had and putting them on the head of a pin''), but makes more sense when thought of as a true, hyperdimensional shift. As Terence McKenna describes it:

''The experience that engulfs one's entire being as one slips beneath the surface of the DMT-ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The mind and the self literally unfold before one's eyes. There is a sense that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had just been recast in the furnace of one's birth. Breathing is normal, heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world? What of incoming sensory data?

''Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder, and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.

''The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with coloured balls. Many diminutive beings are present there – the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language; they sing in pearly voices that rain down as coloured petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.

''This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension – frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send the fearless experts, whatever they may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find.''

DMT is the most hard-core cyberian drug experience for several reasons. The user ''penetrates'' another dimension, experiences timelessness, and then enjoys nonverbal and nonlinear communication and connectedness. Even "mind'' and ''self'' unfold, freeing the user to roam about this dimension unencumbered by physical, emotional, and mental barriers. This is a psychopharmacological virtual reality.

DMT is metabolized almost as soon as it enters the system, a fact that, McKenna argues, indicates a long history of human co-evolution with its molecular structure and a well-developed morphogenetic field. He sees DMT and human beings as companions in the journey toward a hyperdimensional reality. Still, the intensity and severity of the DMT experience make any user aware that he has taken something foreign into his system, and that he may never be the same. Nearly everyone who smokes DMT reports hearing a high-pitched tone corresponding to what they believe is a ''carrier wave'' of reality at that moment. The visual world begins to vibrate at the same frequency until everything breaks up into geometric patterns and crystalline twinkles. This is when the "machine elves'' show up, if they're going to. They look like little elves, and sometimes hold wands or crystals and seem to be dancing or operating some kind of light-and-glass machinery. The elves definitely have a good time, but by the time the idea to join and dance with the elves arises, they're gone and a different set of images parades by.

Terence and his brother Dennis McKenna's experiences on DMT shape many of the cyberian conclusions about reality. They believe that DMT works by latching on to the DNA in a user's own cells. Traditionally, DNA is understood to be the carrier of genetic information in living things. It is thought to be in the shape of a double helix (two spirals) so that it can split up and replicate. The McKennas took this a little further both scientifically and philosophically by assuming that DNA works by resonating certain frequencies to their host cell and organism. They believe that when DMT connects with the molecule, the two strands of the double helix vibrate against each other like tuning forks, which is why the user hears a tone and also experiences such a radically different reality.

Terence and Dennis went to the Amazon to conduct experiments on themselves and test these theories using the state-of-the-art organic tryptamines of the Jivaro Indian medicine men. Dennis heard the most tones, so he became the main subject, while Terence observed and speculated. The two young men succeeded in putting Dennis into a completely psychotic state for several weeks. But as Dennis freaked out, Terence sat on the other side of their tent making notes and having insights. What he realized in a sudden flash was that the structure of DNA resembles that of the ancient Chinese I Ching sequence. Further, their functions are the same.

As a gene carrier, DNA is what links any being to the ancestors in his evolutionary past and the offspring in his evolutionary future. The double-helix structure of the molecule can be seen as a pair of metaphorical spiral staircases: one going down into history, the other up into the future. Its purpose is to compress linear time into these two active springs. (As Sheldrake would also later conclude, the DNA is what ''sings'' morphogenetic fields over time and space.) The I Ching is thought to work the same way, and uses a sixty-four-part structure almost identical to that of DNA to help people predict future events and understand their personal roles in the overall continuum of time and space. Finally, back in the United States, Terence and Dennis used computers to compute the I Ching as a huge fractal equation for all of human history. According to their fractal, called "Time Wave Zero,'' history and time as we know it will end in the year 2012. This date has also been linked with the Mayan Tzolkin calendar, which many believe also calls 2012 the end of linear time. It makes the notion of a simple, global renaissance pale by comparison.

Many cyberians agree with Terence that end of history is fast approaching. When history is over, human experience will feel like, you guessed it: a DMT trip. Experimentation with tryptamines, then, is preparation for the coming hyperdimensional shift into a timeless, nonpersonalized reality. It helps cyberians discriminate between what is linear, temporary and arbitrary, and what is truly hyperdimensional. This isn't an easy task.

Downloading Infinity

Just as the most earth-shattering information off the computer net is useless without a computer capable of downloading it into a form that a user can understand, the DMT experience provides nothing to a user who can't similarly download some essence of timeless hyperspace into a form he can understand in linear reality. However amazing and blissful the DMT euphoria may be, coming down is much trickier than with any other hallucinogen. It's no wonder, though. DMT brings one into a new dimension – a dimension where the restrictions of time and self don't exist – so stepping back into frictional, cause-and-effect reality must be a letdown.

Most cyberian users do their DMT in pairs or small groups, so that they may help one another come down more easily and document as much of every experience as possible. In Oakland, an entire household cooperative called Horizon is dedicated to fostering good DMT trips. Several nights a week, the dozen or so residents sit in a circle on the living room floor and take DMT in sequence. As one tripper returns to earth, the next takes hold the pipe and launches himself.

Dan, whom most consider the head of the house, is a psychology student at Berkeley whose doctoral thesis is on shared states of consciousness. He leads the evenings and judges whether to intervene when someone is in great physical discomfort or freaking out too heavily. Tonight, thanks to a connection made by one of the residents over his computer bulletin board, a new batch of ''5 MAO'' DMT has arrived, a close relative of DMT but even more powerfully mind-bending effects. Dan is aware that he'll have to watch extra-carefully for disasters tonight – his well-traveled math professor has warned him, "On 5 MAO, you begin to see the words `brain damage' literally printed out in front of your eyes.''

The first two adventurers log fairly typical experiences. One girl curls up into a ball, but emerges understanding how the nature of reality is holographic. ''Each particle of reality reflects, in a dim way, the whole picture. It doesn't matter who you are or where you are. Everything that ever happened or ever will happen is available to everyone and everything right now.''

The next boy, Armand, who just returned from a three-month visionquest to South America, has been taking acid every day this week in preparation for tonight's ceremony. He remarks how this circle ceremony is exactly the same as the way he took ayahuasca and ibogaine (organic psychedelics) with a shaman in the Amazon. Then he lights his pipe and almost immediately falls back onto a pile of pillows. He writhes around for several minutes with his eyes rolled back, then rises, announcing that he's been gone for three days. He met an entire race of forest creatures, and they needed his help. As he describes the place where he's been, what the people look like, how he's eaten with them and even made love with one of them, another girl in the circle suddenly perks up.

''Hey! That's the story I've been writing!''

Dan establishes that the boy hasn't read the girl's story; then, with techniques he has developed in shared-states psychology, he helps the two relate their stories to each other. Armand has, indeed, been living in Sabrina's fantasy story. He decides to go back to help his new interdimensional friends.

Still stoned, Armand rolls back his eyes and he's gone. He spends about ten more minutes moving around on his back. When he rises again, he explains that in the five minutes he was absent from the other dimension, several weeks went by and the crisis was averted without him. Armand can't bring himself to feel happy about this. He feels that his need to come back and tell his experience to the rest of the circle deprived him of his chance to save the forest creatures.

''But they were saved anyway,'' Dan reminds him. "It's only your ego getting in the way now.''

Armand shrugs. Dan doesn't want to let him reenter like this, because the boy might be depressed for weeks.

''Think of it this way,'' he says, putting a comforting hand on Armand's shoulder, "maybe what you and Sabrina did out here, recounting the story and verifying the reality of the forest people, is what actually saved them.''

Jonathan, whose main interest is making music for other people to listen to while they're on acid, breaks decorum by taking the pipe and lighting it before Dan and Armand are quite finished. He had a bad day in the recording studio and wants to make up for it with a good DMT trip. Now.

But as soon as he inhales the DMT smoke, his expression changes to one of fear – like the look on a young kid after the safety bar slams down on a roller coaster. He's stuck on this ride. Bizarre visions that Jonathan knows he won't remember whiz by. He can see the other people in the room, but he can also see past them, through them, around them. He can see their experiences in the lines of their faces, then the lines become his whole reality. They point everywhere. The walls of the room are gone. ''This is cool,'' he thinks. "I can take it.'' Then he gasps in terror, ''Who thinks it's cool?''

The flip side of Jonathan's euphoria is that he doesn't know who he is.

''Oh fuck! Oh fuck!'' Jonathan screams.

Sabrina moves to touch him, but Dan holds her back. ''Let him go,'' the leader warns, "he's got to get through it.''

Just then Andy, a musician who lives downstairs, barges in. ''Fuck! This new sampler just erased my entire drum machine's memory! That's all my samples! All my patterns! Weeks ... months of work!'' Dan quickly gets Andy out, but the synchronicity is not lost on the members of the circle.

''Jonathan, are you okay?'' Dan asks gently. The tripper stares up at him from the floor. "Jonathan?''

Jonathan suddenly sits up. ''I'm your creation, aren't I?''

''What do you mean?''

''You made me, didn't you? I'm only here when you're on DMT. Otherwise I don't exist, do I?'' Jonathan stares cynically at his creator. "And you gave me this drug now, because it was time for me to know, right?''

Sabrina is worried. She's been attracted to the boy for some time and would hate to lose him now. ''Jonathan?'' she says, putting her hand on his back.

Jonathan lurches forward as if he's been stabbed. He breathes heavily, holding his head in his hands, crying intensely and then suddenly stopping.

Hours later, after everyone else has their chance to try the new drug, Jonathan explains what happened to him when Sabrina touched his back. ''I had forgotten who I was. I had no identity other than being Dan's creation. Then, all of a sudden I heard my name – Jonathan. And I remembered my last name, and my mom, and I went, `Wait a minute.' It was as if all the fragments of my life had been blown apart and I was sticking them back in my body. I was eagerly grabbing the information; I wanted this illusion of my life. I was eagerly pasting it back on me. I was willingly accepting this illusion.''

Sabrina feeds Jonathan chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen as life at Horizon hums back to normal. Dan watches Jonathan out of the corner of his eye.

''There's still this conversation going on in my head saying–'We're sorry you had to find out this way,''' Jonathan says.

''You still think you're a DMT creation of Dan's?'' Sabrina asks.

''No. Jonathan is just a role I'm playing! It's as if the whole search of life is not to obtain some kind of knowledge, but trying to remember what you lost at birth. 'We're sorry you had to find out this way. Such a shock to you. But now you know ... you're not Jonathan.'''

Sabrina frowns. She was hoping that the cyberian truth wouldn't be so depressing.

Jonathan reads her instantly and takes her hand. ''It was a good experience, Sabrina, don't you see? Whatever God is, we're all one thing. We're all part of the same thing. We've got no identity of our own. 5 MAO DMT is like when you die. Life is like this dream, and when you die you go, `Oh wow! It was so real!' And then discovering that higher level – it's not like `Oh my god I'm that higher self?' It's more like discovering `I'm not that back there. I thought I was Jonathan – how silly!'''

Dan smiles and quietly moves out of the room. The download has been successful.

Straight and Stoned

It's hard to know whether these people are touching the next reality or simply frying their brains. Transformation, no doubt, is occurring in either case. But no matter how much permanent damage may be taking place, there is substantial evidence that these voyagers are experiencing something at least as revelatory as in any other mystical tradition. The growing numbers of normal-seeming Americans who are enjoying DMT on a regular basis attests, at least, to the fact that even the most extremely disorienting DMT adventures need not hamper one's ability to lead a ''productive'' life.

World sharing and discovery of parallel realities fills the DMT afternoons of ''Gracie and Zarkov,'' she a published anthropologist, he an established and successful investment analyst. Sex swingers in the 1970s, they became psychedelic voyagers in the 1980s and self-published their findings in Notes from Underground: A Gracie and Zarkov Reader out of their East Bay home.

A cross between an opium den and a sex chamber, their bedroom takes up at least half of their house. While most people's parties end up in the kitchen, Gracie and Zarkov's end up here in the bedroom, which is equipped with an elaborate lighting system hidden behind translucent sheets on the walls and in the ceiling panels, a remote control sound system, and several cabinets filled with straps, studs, and belly-dancing gear.

Their writings on psychedelics are a detailed and well-thought-out cross between the Physician's Desk Reference and a wine-tasting guide; in describing the drug 2CB they point out details such as ''there is a long, low-level tail to the trip.'' They've become regular Mondo 2000 contributors, avid heavy-metal fans, and frequent DMT travellers. They spend their free hours experimenting with new types of psychedelics and new combinations of old ones. Gracie occasionally manifests the spirit of a female goddess, most often Kali, and the two indulge in hyperhedonism on an order unimaginable by others in their professional fields – hence the pseudonyms. But Zarkov's practical, rationalist Wall Street sensibilities shine through his storytelling about psychedelics. To Zarkov, it's all a question of hardware and software.

''Tryptamines are a real phenomenon. If you take a high dose of tryptamines you see certain things. I am a believer that you are not a blank slate when you're born. You're a long complicated product of genetic engineering by the Goddess, under all sorts of selection criteria. And there's a hell of a lot of hardware and wetware, so that DMT's not going to change everybody, or everybody positively. That has to do with how you're wired up, and how you're raised. Now, my experiences have been extremely positive, but several of my closest friends are dead as a result of psychedelic drugs. If you're not up to handling heavy equipment, DMT is a very dangerous, very powerful hallucinogen. It's extremely strong.''

Gracie and Zarkov can be considered designer beings. They use their DMT experiences to consciously recreate their identities in their professional worlds.

''Gracie and I have developed the ability to write some software to become significantly different people. That is a big advantage in terms of being able to run our lives.'' They sometimes like to think of themselves as anthropologists from another dimension, merely observing the interactions and concerns of human beings.

Zarkov makes practical use out of the sublime DMT state to redesign the personality he uses in real life. He enjoys his DMT experience, then downloads it in order to devise new business strategies or even new sexual techniques – but he does not take any of it too seriously. Zarkov remains convinced that our reality is not making a wholesale leap out of history. His views sharply contrast those of his good friend Terence McKenna.

''I don't buy Terence's whole package. I just say that right out. On the other hand, Terence is on to a lot of very important things. Does that mean that the world's going to come to an end in 2012? Does that mean that there's going to be a major bifurcation? I don't see it that way. A drug is a tool, like a microscope, a telescope, or a radio. Is it some godlike metaphysical entity? Where I part company with Terence is where he talks about the drug as a metaphysical entity which looks, smells, tastes, and acts like God. I don't believe in God.''

Terence attributes Zarkov's obstinacy to an inability to translate the experience of the infinite, egoless reality into a model that can jive with his experience of daily, straight life. Zarkov is great at downloading useful information, but, still attached to his personality, he is not equipped to deal with the most crushing nonpersonal cyberian conclusions. It's a question of his ability to download threatening material.

''Zarkov is terrified of psilocybin, and a fairly ego-bound person. He is forceful, opinionated, and it never enters his mind that he might not be entirely 100 percent correct. The couple of times that he's tried to take mushrooms it's just been too rough for him, because of the dissolving of the ego and surrender. This is the issue for most males and most dominator types – is how can you fling yourself into the blast furnace of disillusion?''

The point here is not to pit Zarkov and McKenna against each other, but to distinguish the specific qualities of the cyberian psychedelic experience from other sorts of psychedelic experiences. What makes a vision qualify for the renaissance is that it is an experience of greater mystical dimensionality, which can then be translated down, at least in part, to the three-dimensional realm. One must retain an inkling of the infinite – an intimation of immortality. As Terence argues:

''You have to download it [the DMT experience] into some kind of model, and I don't know why I'm so able to do that. It may be because of a bad upbringing. Because really there is nothing new about this. This is what lurks behind Kabbalism and Catholic hermeneutics. If you talk to the village priest, that's bullshit; but if you talk to the theologians of the Jesuit order, they will tell you God will enter history. History is the shock wave of eschatology – the fall of all these dimensional models. This is the secret that lies behind religion, but religion has been subverted for millenia as a tool of social control through the notion of morality. Morality has nothing to do with it. It isn't good people who go to heaven. It's smart people who go to heaven.''

Chapter 8

1234567: All Smart People Go to Heaven

Earth Girl – a beautiful if slightly otherworldly twenty-year-old from Los Angeles – is at Mr. Floppy's Firm and Floppy house party in Oakland, explaining the effects of Psuper Cybertonic to several young girls who have traveled from the suburbs to get a taste of the house scene. Adorning her Smart Bar (a Peter Max version of Lucy's psychiatrist's booth) are several posters of mushrooms, spaceships, and loose quotes from The Starseed Transmissions:

''As this new awareness increasingly filters into everyday levels of human function, and as more and more individual human cells become aware of what is taking place, the change will accelerate exponentially. Eventually, the psychic pressure exerted by a critical mass of humanity will reach levels that are sufficient to tip the scales. At that moment, the rest of humanity will experience the instantaneous transformation of a proportion you cannot now conceive.''

Earth Girl and her traveling Smart Bar offer two brain nutrient mixtures: the Cybertonic and a stimulant drink called Energy Elicksure, made from ephedra (an herb related to the active ingredient in Sudafed, the cold medicine that keeps one from getting drowsy) and a few amino acid uppers. Her advice to the high-schoolers is heartfelt but somewhat underinformed. She relies heavily on the fact that these herbs are ''100 percent safe, used for centuries by ancient cultures, and make you feel really good.'' The girls all buy the Cybertonic for $3 a glass and chug it down. "Light up and live,'' Earth Girl calls after the kids as they return to the dance floor.

A punkish boy stumbles up to the bar at about 4:00 a.m. His girlfriend wants to dance till dawn but the LSD he took at three that afternoon has sucked about as much in adrenaline as it offered in insight. Earth Girl sells him a large cup of tangy Energy Elicksure, and soon he's back under the strobe lights, pulsing with new life.

It is the kind of scene that would horrify parents. What the hell's going on?

Earth Girl isn't really selling drugs; she's selling nutrients. Drugs are patented medications that enhance brain function; nutrients are nonpatented substances that the body uses more like food to do the same thing, usually less invasively but also a bit less effectively. They include substances like the amino acid L-pryoglutamate, the herb Gingko biloba, niacin, lecithin, and certain vitamins. Earth Girl's brews are slightly altered versions of prepackaged nutrient mixes available at health food stores or through multilevel marketers. These mixes bear the names of Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, whose book Life Extension first publicized the existence of smart chemicals and the notion of nutrient-enhanced ''designer beings'' back in the 1970s.

Smart drugs (with names like vasopressin – a snorted spray – hydergine and piracetam) are generally unavailable in this country. Depending on the legal weather, these drugs can be purchased through the mail from pharmaceutical companies overseas because of a loophole demanded by AIDS patients who wanted access to drugs not approved for use in the United States. (For more information, see Dean and Morgenthaler, Smart Drugs and Nutrients.) Smart drugs fall between the cracks of America's ability to comprehend the uses of medication, which is why we have such a cloudy understanding of their abilities and their categorization.

Most cyberians understand the science by now. Acetylcholine is one of the chemicals that allow for transmission of information at the nerve synapses. As we get older, our supply of acetylcholine decreases. While we can't just eat acetylcholine to increase the supply in the brain, we can take its precursors, such as choline, as well as chemicals that tend to increase our own production of acetylcholine by the cholinergic system. Some of these chemicals are now called ''nootropics'' (noos, "mind'' + tropein, ''to turn'' – that is, "acting on the mind''), the new class of drugs that provide cognitive enhancement with no toxicity.

The most widely used, over-the-counter smart nutrients are mixtures of several forms of choline along with a few of the enzymes and co-enzymes that turn them into acetylcholine. Earth Girl's Cybertonic is a combination of choline, acetylcholine precursors, and co-factors. Their effect is noticeable over time but not very dramatic. The sudden increase in popularity and marketing visibility of these nutrients is due to the fact that other, much more potent smart substances have arrived in Cyberia. It is a case of fame by association.

The pyrrolidone derivatives are the smart substances deserving the most attention. In an unknown way, they improve the functioning of the cholinergic system. They increase memory, boost intelligence, and enhance certain kinds of learning. They were originally used for diseases of old age such as Alzheimer's and senility. The most widely distributed one in Europe is a geriatric medication called piracetam, which is unavailable in the United States. (Users here purchase it directly from European distributors through the mail.) It is a fast-acting, easy-to-notice cognitive enhancer. Walter Kirn, a novelist and smart drugs user (whom we'll meet later), describes piracetam's effect as ''going through life wearing a miner's lamp with a beam of intelligence.'' Nearly everyone who takes it experiences greater ability to conceptualize complex problems and to retain information.

Users' reactions to the drugs differ, and all have their preferred combinations and dosages. It's quite common to see a bottle of vasopressin on a computer terminal, next to a bar of chocolate or a pack of cigarettes. A particularly dense passage of text to understand or a complex series of steps to write into a program? A blast of vasopressin and everything gets clear in less than a minute. Going to have a difficult day filled with interviews? Probably better off with piracetam or pyroglutamate in a few doses spread out over the course of the day – that added articulateness and recall will come in handy. And, of course, don't forget the daily dose of hydergine until the end of the semester. Jet lag still a problem? Maybe some L-tyrosine (an amino acid) to wake up this morning instead of coffee – it works as well, without the jitters or the stress to the adrenal system. Smart drugs even help psychedelics users come down off difficult trips.

Smart drugs don't get cyberians high or stoned, but they do seem to help them cope with complex computer problems, ego-bending philosophical or spiritual inquiry, odd hours, a highly pressurized work environment, or a creativity lapse. The most common perception among users is that they have gained the ability to deal with more than one or two parameters of a problem at the same time. A computer programmer, for example, gains the ability to track three or four different interdependent functions through a series of program commands rather than only one. Smart drugs give some writers the ability to keep half-a-dozen plot points in mind at once. Psychedelics users report the ability to download more of the information and realizations of a trip when they augment the coming-down period with smart drugs.

A typical smart drug user receives his supplies from laboratories in Europe, then creates his own regimen based on self-experimentation. ''Personal neurochemical adjustment,'' as users call it, is designer consciousness. Earth Girl's distributor, Lila Mellow-Whipkit, a large, bald, hedonistic smart drugs enthusiast, loves explaining how this neurochemical self-modulation fits in to the new paradigm. He often sits behind Earth Girl's Smart Bar sharing his wealth of data and insight with newcomers.

''Personal neurochemical adjustment – the equivalent is personal paradigm and belief adjustment. And there's a basic presupposition stolen from cybernetics that's used in NLP [neurolinguistic programming]: the organism with the most requisite behavior – the broadest variety of requisite behavior – will always control any situation.''

To Lila, smart drugs, NLP, and cybernetics are all basically the same thing: programming.

''In other words, if two people interact and they're trying to get something done, the one who has the most variety in behavior is the one who will be in charge and decide where it's gonna go. It's an excellent operating presupposition. It works most of the time, because that person's more able to compromise and come up with ideas, they're less stuck. Think about children who are getting a good Christian education right now. Where are those people gonna be in the future? They're gonna be what Hunter S. Thompson called `the doomed.' They are the doomed. They have one belief system; they have one basic operating strategy, which is the avoidance of pleasure. That's about it in Christianity as far as your real life. You get to kneel and pray to this dead guy.''

What Lila argues is twofold. First, smart drugs and nutrients open up new neural pathways, allow for new thoughts and more flexibility in conceptualizing. Those who take smart drugs can understand more patterns and survive better. Second, and more important, the implicit argument he makes is that the idea of smart drugs and the willingness to experiment with them are themselves heralds of the new paradigm. Not only is a smart drugs user more equipped to deal with the increasingly complex reality matrix; a person willing to take smart drugs is already coping better. He has taken the first step toward becoming a designer being.

The Readiness Is All

Downloading the massive information wave emanating from the end of time is no easy task. Sure, a stockbroker can use smart drugs to help himself draw broader conclusions about certain market data, but cyberians have always known that the real destiny of these chemicals is to foster the processing of the inconceivable.

Mark Heley had just graduated Cambridge when he first found smart drugs. An experienced psychedelic explorer, Heley already believed that the earth is heading toward a great bifurcation point. As a would-be usher of the final paradigm, he knew what was required of him: a hierarchical leap in his mind's ability to identify, process, store, and articulate the complexities of eschatological acceleration. Mark was already smart – very smart – but he'd need to be even smarter to face the challenges ahead. He knew that smart drugs were going to play a major role in the formation of Cyberia, and he knew he was going to be a part of it.

At that time Earth Girl, who hadn't yet abandoned her given name, Neysa, was visiting England. Her mother was a New Age extremist, and Neysa, age eighteen, had left the West Coast to get away from what she saw as trivial and fake spirituality. She wasn't going back until she knew she had something to fill the vacuum.

As a writer for England's ID, Heley exploited his Cambridge philosophy education to become an articulate launcher of cultural viruses. In articles and lectures on topics ranging from permaculture farming techniques to technoshamanism, Heley defined the ways and memes of cyberian culture in London. He was DJing for a house club and running a ''brain gym'' (brain machine rental store), and in the process he gathered a wide following for a twenty-four-year-old. Neysa, for the time being, was just hanging out. When they met, they knew it would be forever.

In many ways, Heley and Neysa are opposites. He's an intellectual who grounds every psychedelic revelation into a plan. He's all business, and even his most far-reaching DMT experiences mean nothing to him if he can't process them into concrete realizations about the nature of reality. If those realizations are to be worth anything, he must also quickly determine how to communicate them to others through articles, chemicals, club events, or cultural viruses. Heley is a mind. So much so, that his body, often neglected through aggressive chemical use and lack of sleep, revolts in the form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which incapacitates him completely for weeks or even months at a time.

Neysa lives through her body almost exclusively. She can feel what she calls spiritual ''weather,'' evaluate people at a glance, and predict events in the weeks ahead entirely through her body. She is incapable of articulating her experience through words, but has developed her own "language of heart,'' which takes the form of a smile, a touch, an embrace, or even sex. Wherever she goes, a cluster of admirers forms around her looking for the security that her carefree yet self-assured manner offers them. With the help of Heley and his cyberian epiphanies, Neysa was able to embrace the New Age ideas of her mother in a new, cyberian context. Then she was complete: Earth Girl was born.

Where Heley valued smart drugs for their mental effects, Earth Girl saw them as a physical preparation for the coming age. They both knew that smart drugs and the cyberian designer minds that the chemicals fostered needed to be broadcast to a wider audience. America was ripe and ready. A few books on the substances had come out in the United States, but popular, club culture had no idea what was going on. Together, then, they decided to put smart drugs and cyber culture on the map.

After severing ties with his partners at the Mind Gym in London, Mark Heley came back to the Bay Area with Neysa and a new idea: Smart Bars. They could distribute the drugs as healthy fruit drinks over the counter right next to the dance floor. Mark's media savvy and pharmaceutical experience could develop the idea into a workable concept. Neysa's personality and flair made her the perfect barperson and iconic representation of new, designer being. Their mission was clear.

In San Francisco, Heley was introduced to Diana, a Berkeley dropout who, with her friend Preston, was running Toon Town, an underground roving house event for kids fed up with haughty dance hall atmospheres. Heley's multidimensional language and strong ideas soon earned him Diana as his new girlfriend, as well as a position as one of the coordinators of Toon Town. Heley's presence quickly manifested as an infusion of cyber-culture viruses. Rooms were set aside for brain machines, virtual reality demonstrations, sales of books and tapes, and the infamous Smart Bar. While Preston would later resist Heley's metabrainstorm, for the time being it made Toon Town the highest profile house gathering in town. That, coupled with Diana's gentle pleading and positive attitude, kept competition between the two men in check.

Heley, who by now had inherited and updated Ken Kesey's role as charismatic visionary of the San Francisco psychedelic underground, invited the press and public to sample the Smart Bar and other attractions at the ''cyber disco'' party. While he tells only the facts to the press, "Smart drugs enhance neurofunctioning legally and safely,'' he shares the real secret of his success with anyone who thinks to ask.

''My theory is that all that's happening is really the same thing. There are cultural viruses which are actually no more than elaborate placebos to draw people in. They're not the actual things that are happening. For example, smart drugs and virtual reality, these are two of my favorite cultural viruses because they really hit wide and hard. Virtual reality comes from the heart of a society which is really wired in to technology; it's a powerful cultural virus for people to interface with a computer in a harmonious way. And yet, if you try to experience it, you're sadly disappointed. Or you take a smart drug and even after designing an intelligent program, you realize that you've had all this inside you in the first place. People think they're going to get evolved using smart drugs, when actually you've got to be evolved to want to use them in the first place.''

But Earth Girl shares a different story. Her enthusiasm for smart drugs and her newfound fame are irresistible. She puts her hair up in a Bardot-meets-Diller dredlocked beehive, and wears Day-Glo silk robes. She offers her take on the smart drug virus to the crowds who have gathered.

''For me they're really good `cause I do enjoy getting high, as everyone does. I love altered states – they're fun. But I can't do the `body degeneration trip' anymore, especially the mental one. Pot turns me into a moron. And a lot of these other kids are doing so many drugs in one night that they're depleting themselves of vitamins and minerals that these drinks put back. Will they feel more love and communication ability from the Psuper Cybertonic? Probably not. But at least they're going to be maintaining a balance. They're tripping forever. They don't eat for days. So I say, `Okay, here, have some of this, this is all of the daily whatever you need. It's cheap, and it's actually, really, really, really, really good for you so just like get into it.'''

Mark gets pretty annoyed as Earth Girl babbles on to the press. He knows her words are heartfelt, but they're also mindless and dangerous. Soon, Earth Girl is more of a phenomenon than the smart drinks themselves. She's gathered a posse of young, mostly gay or sexually nondescript hangers-on whom she calls the Foxy Seven. To anyone uninvolved in the scene, Earth Girl begins to look more and more like a space cadet – or, in even the best light, a new version of the stereotypical San Francisco ''fag hag.'' The control she begins to exhibit over her seven assistant bartenders is absolute. She is their mother and spiritual guide. She holds out the promise of glory and adventure, and it's all in the form of an elaborate theater/comic book/cosmic fantasy.

Earth Girl shares her new vision of the Smart Bar mission with her squadron as they set up her portable booth.

''We're doing this because what we really are is, writers and performers. This is the perfect way to get in. We're going to make our own comic book. We can keep launching all of our stuff. That's why we all have to dress up. We're the Foxy Seven – Earth Girl, Galactic Greg, Dynama, Greenfire. We get to play. Play and serve ''

Earth Girl takes on the tone of a restaurant manager briefing her new waiters, but in the language of a Course in Miracles instructor on local cable access. ''When people are talking to you and asking questions, they're looking at you like you're an authority, so you conceive thought. And the stuff that we put up – the pictures of mushrooms, quotes from The Starseed Transmissions – it will help you keep on suggesting all this stuff hypnotically and subliminally. I mean, everyone needs a little awareness kick, as far as I'm concerned.''

Heley begins to feel it is Earth Girl who needs the awareness kick. First, she has started bringing the Smart Bar, which Toon Town paid for, to other clubs. Heley has been working a carefully controlled culturo-viral experiment – now it is ''out.'' Second, the kind of indiscriminate, overflowing enthusiasm she exhibits clouds many of the issues that Heley is attempting to clarify. She's even been on national television news saying, "Smart drugs are really really really really really really really really really really good!''

But things get even worse when Rolling Stone shows up to do a piece on smart drugs. Of course, Earth Girl is the center of the interview: ''Alcohol, cigarettes, coffee – work culture is drug culture,'' she explains to their reporter. "With smart drugs, there's no hangover, you're not depressed, you have a better memory. Instead of getting fucked up and making a fool of yourself, you're more in touch.''

Heley is incensed by her blanket statements, which counteract months of his machinations. He broods in a back room with the contempt of spurned lover. ''Alcohol is out there. Its dangers are well known. It's promoted by a massive machine. She's running up against something which she can never ever hope to defeat. What are they going to do? Stop selling alcohol? No fucking way. It just has to be played out. What you've got to do is move the ground. You don't attack the monster. You infect him, like a virus. Neysa's attitude is almost like a sixties' `left' thing; it's like, `attack the monster.' But if you do that, you become the monster. You're playing to spectacle. What we should do is simply infect the monster and let it destroy itself. By activating a media virus. And a media virus isn't a media attack, it's something which exposes things internally.''

This conflict made for a tense week in Cyberia, as Earth Girl explains: ''Honestly, the best way to tell on a reflection level is the weather, as I'm sure you know. And if you just check the weather out for the past three days it's just like ... it's still ... we're coming out, we're trying to come out of it.''

It seemed to be a week in which cyberians were learning that somewhere else, someone else was doing exactly the same thing they were. Someone else was writing a book about cyber culture. Someone else was mixing a new house tune. Someone else was creating a club. Someone else was doing a Smart Bar. In addition, it had been raining for four days, and nearly everyone was fighting the same cold. No one was fully sick, but everyone felt under the weather.

Sitting with Earth Girl in a Thai restaurant on Haight Street, I take some of the herbal formulas that Lila Mellow-Whipkit has given me for my sniffles. Earth Girl explains to me how everything fits together. In spite of her generalizations, Earth Girl is a sensitive, ''spiritually mature'' young woman. It would be a mistake to let her cosmic jargon obscure her quite perceptive observations on human nature in the trenches of Cyberia:

''The weirdness of this weekend is that everyone's discovering all these parallel things that are going on and everyone's reeling from the fear of `do it first.' But this is just the realization of a universal mind! Of course everyone's doing it all at the same time. It's all part of the same thing! Everyone's fighting a cold, and feels like they've got a cold, but ... it's not breaking through ... it's a slightly physical thing, but it's much more psychological because in this time all the fear can get in and all these negative thoughts and all this stuff can get in, and it is getting in. It did get in ... but now I feel today we're coming out of it. We've still got a lot of shit we've got to work out personally, like, group-wise.''

To Earth Girl and her followers, the current friction is really a morphogenetic stress. Many people are having the same ideas at the same times because they are all connected morphogenetically. The sickness and fear results from the inability to break the fiction of individuality. But in the cyber culture world, the denizens must realize that they are all connected. Their commitment to the metatransformation of humanity has put them all into the same ''weather system.'' They must be content with never "owning'' an idea. There is no room for pride or credit.

But Earth Girl also seems to realize that her final allegiance is to herself and the Foxy Seven. Survival and ambition – however rationalized – still take precedence. By the time the Rolling Stone piece goes to press, Earth Girl has gone off to Big Heart City, another club in town, which gives her their entire basement (which was the location of Tim Leary's reception last month) to create a smart drugs lounge. There, she will be queen bee, and will never again have to put up with Heley or his mild-mannered political arrogance. Her Smart Lounge will just ''light up and live.''

Heley, meanwhile, partners with Chris, an electrical engineering student and smart nutrients chemist whose knowledge of neurochemistry is as vast as Earth Girl's knowledge of spiritual weather.

It stops raining Friday afternoon, and Chris, Heley, Preston, and Diana convene at 650 Howard Street (a club that has become the temporary home of Toon Town) to eat the free hors' d'oeuvres that the daytime bar gives out during happy hour. Having reviewed the Rolling Stone article, they now discuss strategies to keep their new and improved Smart Bar sans Earth Girl, called the Nutrient Cafe, on the cutting edge of neuro-enhancement. Mark gets on one of his articulate impassioned riffs about the smart drugs virus, as the others drink beer and nod. Not that they haven't heard all this before, but nodding generally keeps Mark from getting too worked up and pissed off. Heley's main regret is that the Smart Bar, which was supposed to be an outlet for true information about good drugs and bad drug laws, turned into a media joke.

''It's a war on information. If you're not capable of fighting the wrong information then you're not capable of fighting the machine. The point is, that if we manage to combine the subtlety of good information with the bludgeon of its media impact, we'd have had a tool against the war on drugs. What do we have at the moment? Petty hype for a bunch of multilevel marketing people who want to scam a few fucking dollars out of something that doesn't do what they say it does.

''What could have happened is that we could have gotten to a level where we could have argued the case for the complete restructuring of the drug patenting laws just on their own internal logic. Piracetam is not available in the U.S., not because of any toxicity, or any side effects, but because it's not patented. Because the company that invented it didn't patent it. At the time, it just wasn't thought of as commercially viable. The psychotropic effects of piracetam were discovered years later. Also, there's no FDA approval procedure for a nootropic drug. It has to be for Alzheimer's, or it has to be for treating strokes.''

Heley's disgust is well founded. Today, most smart drugs are not available in the United States even to victims of geriatric disease. In order for a drug to get FDA approval, a pharmaceutical company must spend millions of dollars on tests. It's worth it to these companies to do the tests only if they know they will have a patent on the medication; with piracetam, the companies know they cannot get a patent. So, instead, they race to develop substances similar to piracetam and then patent those. Meanwhile, only the underground knows of piracetam's existence, and it's in the pharmaceutical companies' best interests to keep it that way. The FDA obliges, and most doctors who know of the drug do not buck the system or risk liability by ordering unapproved substances from overseas.

In even more ludicrous cases, chemicals and nutrients like DHEA (not legal in the United States) and L-pyroglutamate (which is available at any good health store) have been studied by pharmaceutical companies and proven to enhance cognitive skills in humans. But the companies intentionally conceal these studies and instead attempt to develop variants of these chemicals that can be patented and sold more profitably. Some of these substances have even been shown to be effective in treating AIDS, but, again, since the drugs are not patentable, the studies done on them are suppressed. In one case, a scientist has been issued a court order not to reveal the results of his discoveries about DHEA. Heley believes that smart drugs, as a cultural virus, will expose how the American health-care business may be our nation's most serious health threat:

''Smart drugs is a good way of burrowing in there. The argumentation that surrounds smart drugs, the web of the cultural virus, is just a worm designed to eat into those regulatory bodies and explode them by turning the mirror back on themselves. If we can create a cogent argument we can show up their structural inadequacies. The war on drugs, for example, being this blanket war on drugs. You can advertise cigarettes and alcohol and there are all these horrible over-the-counter drugs that you can buy; painkillers in this country are pretty fucking dubious to say the least. But the thing that can't be said in American culture, because of that massive media attack, is that some drugs are good for you in some ways.

''What I object to is the smart drug argument being completely obscured. Now the FDA has a counteraction. Their counterattack has been to close the loophole which allows the importation of smart drugs. And that is the only rational piece of legislature in the entire cannon of American drug laws. And that wasn't a loophole established by the smart drugs movement; it was established by Act Up, and by AIDS activist organizations over a long period of time with sustained political pressure of an absolutely enormous magnitude. All the FDA is waiting for one public excuse for closing this, and it's gone.''

Diana rises to get more food. Heley realizes he's grandstanding a bit, and justifies himself. ''I admit that we made a mistake with this thing. It got out of hand. What we're doing now is we're actually trying to put this right. Doing this Nutrient Cafe: really straightforward. We're not hyping, we're not going do a media virus about it, but we'll provide a really good product within a certain milieu, and lots of information about it. And if we completely stay within the laws as they exist at the moment, it'll just do the fucking job without all of the bullocks.''

Diana returns with some chicken wings and joins in the conversation. ''That bar never even evolved. When we started it the whole idea was that Mark and Neysa [Earth Girl] would create these products. They knew that Durk and Sandy products were shit anyway. That's never happened. ...''

Mark defends: ''Well it's not just that they're shit; they're old. It's told and tired.''

''The only thing that's evolved down in that basement [Earth Girl's new Smart Lounge],'' Diana continues with candor, "is that there's more decorations. And there's more flash and there's more superstars. And that's not the point. There's no books down there, there's no information, there's no pamphlets, there's no nothing, and the people that designed it didn't know shit about it. Not that I do, but I'm not selling the stuff.''

Mark interrupts: ''I'm certainly not washing my hands of it, because we're all partly responsible; we instituted a lot of the processes that lead to this thing. But I find myself radically disagreeing with the way she's doing it. It's not her, it's not even the way that she's approaching it. It's the way that she's allowing it to go. It's a group thing. It's not Neysa, the owners of Big Heart City, Rolling Stone, or Lila Mellow-Whipkit. It's basically what all of them want out of it. This is a propagation of an immediate product over something which is an informational thing. How many people have ever fucking taken smart drugs since we started this? That's a measure of its failure. The people that fucking do the Smart Bar don't even use them.''

He stares off into space. He knows his ego is probably as responsible for his upset as the political vulnerability of Earth Girl's glamour image.

''It's a matter of fine balance. I really believe that if it had gone other ways, that FDA loophole wouldn't even be in question. I think we'll still manage to keep it open, maybe we have to do some repair work. It should never ever have been this way. It's just my stupidity to allow it to happen.''

Maybe he should have taken more smart drugs.