Then the whirling rushing took me up and flung me into space and the stars ran together as before.
I suppose Earth is the same as it ever was. Yet it seems to me now to be an infinitely better place than I remembered.
Of course my viewpoint is different. Though I see out of only one eye now, I see much more. It is possible to look beyond the petty circle of addicts that had been my world. I am ashamed that I once was one of those poor deluded creatures, the cravers of the quick kick and the brief relief. They are noplace, going nowhere.
They still talk of yage, the unreachable pie in their murky sky. They want to be up there, out and away, anywhere but here. They are fools. Uru taught me that. There is no real escape from here and now. Therefore that is the thing to embrace. The inner propinquity of the here, the time-extended everlastingness of the now.
Crazy, Jack?
No. I've gone scientific. I've gone back along the dreamy trail and found the place where I took the wrong fork. I'd followed that fork a little way but then turned back without giving it a fair shake.
Peyote's what I'm talking about, friend. The thing Jones ran down. Mescalin. That's right, back to the Indians.
Only it's gone respectable since I've been away. They don't call it a fix, big or otherwise. Not the serious group of investigators I work with. It's called the Huxley effect.
It's the study of isness, if you know what I mean; the hereness and nowness that is the all of everywhere within. It's the slowing of time's rush to a standstill so you can spend a century studying the intricate truth-in-beauty of a detail in the wallpaper or the eloquent message of a rose petal.