certain instances, more accurate—less influenced by expectation and
therefore more faithful to reality—than those of sane and sober adults?
Before we started, I had cued up the video on my laptop, and now I
clicked to run it. The mask on the screen, gray against a black ground,
was clearly the product of computer animation and was uncannily
consistent with the visual style of the world I’d been in. (During my
integration session with Mary the next day, she suggested that it might
have been this image on my laptop that had conjured the computer world
and trapped me in it. Could there be a better demonstration of the power
of set and setting?) As the convex face rotated to reveal its concave back,
the mask popped back out, only a bit more slowly than it did before I ate
the mushroom. Evidently, Bayesian inference was still operational in my
brain. I’d try again later.
• • •
WHEN I PUT MY EYESHADES back on and lay down, I was disappointed to
find myself back in computer world, but something had changed, no
doubt the result of the stepped-up dose. Whereas before I navigated this
landscape as myself, taking in the scene from a perspective recognizable
as my own, with my attitudes intact (highly critical of the music, for
instance, and anxious about what demons might appear), now I watched
as that familiar self began to fall apart before my eyes, gradually at first
and then all at once.
“I” now turned into a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its, and
they were being scattered to the wind. But the “I” taking in this seeming
catastrophe had no desire to chase after the slips and pile my old self back
together. No desires of any kind, in fact. Whoever I now was was fine with
whatever happened. No more ego? That was okay, in fact the most
natural thing in the world. And then I looked and saw myself out there
again, but this time spread over the landscape like paint, or butter, thinly
coating a wide expanse of the world with a substance I recognized as me.
But who was this “I” that was able to take in the scene of its own
dissolution? Good question. It wasn’t me, exactly. Here, the limits of our
language become a problem: in order to completely make sense of the
divide that had opened up in my perspective, I would need a whole new