Nil est dictu facilius. - Terence McKenna

Rod Dickinson: In fact, the whole phenomenon is more like a large collective work of art, involving circle-makers, investigators, the media, and just about anybody who comes into contact with the circles. It's a kind of mind virus: once you get involved, you can't get out.<p>Terence McKenna: Absolutely. All these phenomena—UFOs, crop circles, even the cattle mutilation in the states—are all artifice in one form or another. All this stuff, these are fluctuations in the syntactical machinery of reality. The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.

So where does this all leave us today? Did the cosmic giggle move on? … It was easy to look back and to tell this story as if it were a completed cycle, something finished and resplendent in its completion. The problem with that approach is that this story is true, its actors real people, their lives ongoing. … My colleagues, my friends and lovers, have changed and moved on. Different fates have claimed each of us. … The only person who was part of the original team to whom I feel I can still rave at full bore with concerning the experiment at La Chorrera is Dennis. … He is now the scientist that at La Chorrera he could only aspire to be. … He tolerates my raving but is careful never to encourage me. … Because the major idea to emerge out of this experience is the timewave and the computer software that supports it, I am in the absurd position of being either an unsung Newton or completely nuts. … Do I have the winds of history blowing at my back and really did befriend the Logos and learn the secret of the universe, or at least one of many secrets, in the chaos at La Chorrera? I honestly confess that I do not know. As I write these words, my marriage to Kat of nearly sixteen years seems caught up in a process of dissolution painful to both of us. This despite our two children, the house we built together, and both our efforts to be decent people. Apparently the presence of the Logos has done nothing to mitigate or ward off the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Like the Soul in Yeats's poem I am still an eternal thing fastened to the body of a dying animal. … I am assured by the people around me—publishers, editors, agents, marketing experts—people who are obviously uninformed as to the whispered promise of a special destiny made to me by the elves of hyperspace, that I am going to be big, have influence, and change the way people think. Perhaps this will be true. I hope so. Something happened at La Chorrera, something extraordinary. I was extremely fortunate to have briefly glimpsed a strange, beautiful, and better sort of world and to have made a marvelous pact with the alien gods who dwell there. … My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.

What I've done here this evening is just create a string of metaphors to try and pique your interest. Not once did I do justice to the truth of the situation or the depth of the psychedelic experience, because it cannot be told. It cannot be told. My technique is to tell the wildest, strangest story I can think of, claim that's the psychedelic experience, and leave it at that. But you should all know that the journey begins where the words stop.