In the end there was nothing left but the thatched central structure, stranded on a sandbar. When a representative of the egalitarian alternative-living community known as the Rainbow Family of Living Light—the Rainbow People—offered Haynes a few hundred dollars, he accepted. A year later Haynes and his now healthy prostate (thanks to a change in diet) moved back to the United Kingdom, where he is again working in the information-technology field. He hopes to raise money to rebuild the pyramid.

The Farmhouse Floor

I had frequently heard, and as often read, that the ayahuasca experience is impossible to put into words. I wonder—as a peculiar sensation, a tickling tenderness develops in my arms and legs; nothing is indescribable. Nothing is indescribable, but everything else is. Drawing, pictures, can be economical, but when invisible components, sounds, and smells accompany conceptual content, and it all turns to interactive animation, full-color, three-dimensional, then a drawing is hardly worth a thousand words.

It happened quickly, the premonitory tickle, a roll on my mat to relieve abdominal discomfort, then, without losing a sense of self, or feeling my capacities distorted as by the flattery of alcohol or opiates, there I am, very definitely, in non-ordinary reality, so called, and this overlays, without occluding, the ordinary reality of the canyon farmhouse’s darkened front room. I hear my fellow seekers after self-knowledge shifting, breathing, alive, distributed about the floor on their mats. The ayahuasca experience has dropped suddenly, like a gorilla net in a jungle movie, and I do not bother to struggle against it. There is no escape. I can sense the jungle medicine’s formidable power, and I’m aware it has a considerable ways to grow as yet. How that power might express itself at its fullest extent is not a profitable or comfortable speculation. It will, like the 900-pound gorilla in the joke, do whatever it wants, and I will let it.

Common counsel and common sense argue for giving myself unresisting to the ayahuasca—as resistance prolongs our lessons, whether the teacher is experience, Miss Lucas for arithmetic, or the visions associated with consumption of a Stone Age botanical hallucinogen. I hear the shaman start to sing; I hear his rattle; the words of his icaros form chains which are incorporated into delicate symbolic arabesques in visions that evolve like life-forms in a world where film with resolution indistinguishable from reality is shot at a speed of one frame a century. Every detail of a vast cliff face, an open-pit mine, composed of copulating salamanders, is presented and recognized and responsive to sound continuously evolving, by what seems like a logical progression, into the detailed hues of the internal organs—this makes me vomit. The visions recede, briefly, and as I pant and drool over a convenient plastic bucket, I feel better. The visions resume with newcomers, self-dissecting aliens presenting themselves, and their internal anatomy, in the turning pages of an abnormal-physiology textbook, published on sheets of fundamental matter, quarks and gluons, massless constituents of the infinitesimal, actually becoming the things they appear to represent. An errant thought, “At least I haven’t seen any snakes,” flickers in my mind, and can’t be taken back, and now is, of course, no longer true. I am invested with intertwined squirming serpents, some slithering kraits, a club-bodied Gaboon viper, a mass of obscenely active serpents in primary colors, some jokers that mimic a barber pole, another brown and lumpy like an old Mars bar, and a mustache cup of albino worms that invade my nostrils, making for the brain. I resolve to believe they are conducting overdue repairs, and I wish them well as I sense them at their business throughout my body. Bless the distraction of an explosive retch to my right, amplified enormously into one ear—it was my floor neighbor (the owner of a celebrity rehab center in Malibu). I wish his suffering ameliorated, and, as if the thought would do so, I congratulate myself on my charitable instincts. I find a moment of quiet, like the eye of a hurricane, where I’m untroubled by overlaid sounds and visions and multiple layers of meaning all attempting to impose themselves on an unequal consciousness. I’m content to lie still, and to listen to what might be one of those new symphonic compositions—I mean new in the 1920s, with cowbells and porkchops smacked together—only this time the instrumentation is created by men and women of different ages and sizes being sick. In the dress circle, older music-lovers leap to their feet and shout “Shame!” while in the balconies and at the back of the house the composer’s faction shouts back “Ignoramus!”