Other Dimensions B 201
stages of the experience-to accept the additional cups which Pacho
and others said would bring on the visions."
Soon he noted that without losing their familiar natural quality, the
extraordinarily sharp details of the jungle landscape were being trans-
formed into geometric clusters of color and light that shifted and coa-
lesced kaleidoscopically. "My movie screen filled with such beautiful
imagery-star-bursts, diamond facets, fireworks, mandalas, stained-glass
windows, Disney Munchluns, and yellow submarines-that I became
dumbfounded. For the first time, I came to know the full meaning of
the word ecstasy. Despite the way the images rushed by, each one was
actual and examinable.They were more real than anything I'd ever seen
in dreams or under the effects of the acid and mushrooms I had tried
many years before. So, far from being an hallucination, it was nothing
less than a vision.As an experiment, I opened my eyes and focused on
my surroundings.Then I turned back to the visions; they were as po-
tent as ever."
After midnight, as Wieskopf thought he was getting used to the
vine, he says he foolishly began to feel proud of having resisted vomit-
ing and diarrhea. "I should have known better, for yaje has a tendency
to challenge inflated egos, and it now chastised me with a characteris-
tic flick of its tail. A transcendental nausea drove me out of my ham-
mock, onto my knees. I managed to crawl just outside the hut, where
I spent a long time with my forehead pressed against the soil, trying to
throw up and nearly blanking out."
Wieskopf was then compelled to a trip to the cagadero, or toilet, a
log placed across a small stream twenty meters away. "I have noticed
more than once," writes Wieskopf, "that some of the most forceful yaje
illuminations occur in the moment just before shitting or vomiting,
when the gut's inner turmoil reaches a peak and you feel about as bad
as you can ever feel.This happened now."
Amazingly, Wieskopf's ordeal brought to light a host of Steiner's
"very useful elementals," denizens that evidently throng the Amazon
rainforest. "The swarms of mosquitoes that buzzed around my bare ass
and the sinister weeds lurlung in the foul-smelling stream joined my
trip, and a host of tiny devas, genies, and gnomes winked and cavorted