different resonance, keeping a complicated rhythm and 
modulating, even syncopating, the strokes. Your body 
lies in the darkness, heavy as lead, but your spirit seems 
to soar and leave the hut, and with the speed of thought 
to travel where it listeth, in time and space, accompanied 
by the shaman’s singing and by the ejaculations of her 
percussive chant. What you are seeing and what you are 
hearing appear as one: the music assumes harmonious 
shapes, giving visual form to its harmonies, and what you 
are seeing takes on the modalities of music—the music of 
the spheres. ‘Where has there been greater rivalry be- 
tween seeing and hearing?’ How apposite to the Mexican 
experience was the ancient Greek’s rhetorical question! 
All your senses are similarly affected: the cigarette with 
which you occasionally break the tension of the night 
smells as no cigarette before had ever smelled; the glass 
of simple water is infinitely better than champagne. Else- 
where I once wrote that the bemushroomed person is 
poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, 
seeing but not seen. In truth, he is the five senses dis- 
embodied, all of them keyed to the height of sensitivity 
and awareness, all of them blending into one another 
most strangely, until the person, utterly passive, becomes 
i pure receptor, infinitely delicate, of sensations. (You, 
being a stranger, are perforce only a receptor. But the 
Mazatee communicants are also participants with the 
curandera in an extempore religious colloquy. Her utter- 
ances elicit spontaneous responses from them, responses 
that maintain a perfect harmony with her and with each 
other, building up to a quiet swaying antiphonal chant. 
In asuccessful ceremony this is an essential element, and 
one cannot experience the full effect of the role of the 
mushroom in the Indian community unless one attends 
such a gathering, either alone or with one or at most 
two other strangers.) As your body lies there in its sleep- 
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