So is this a dance floor filled with socially aware, fully realized designer beings? Certainly not. It's a dance floor filled with smart kids, sexy kids, not-so smart kids, and not-so sexy kids, but they do seem to share an understanding, in the body, of the timeless quality of bliss and how to achieve it through a combination of dance and E. Even the music, playing at precisely 120 beats per minute, the rate of the fetal heartbeat, draws one into a sense of timeless connection to the greater womb – Gaia. The lyrics all emphasize the sound ''eee.'' "Evereeebodeee's freee,'' drones one vocal, in pleeesing gleeeful breeezes, winding their way onto the extreeemely wide smiles of dancing boys and girls. It's just the E! Likewise, the way in which E infiltrates society is much less time-based and confrontational than was the case with acid. E infiltrates through the experience of bliss, so there's nothing to say or do about it. The ''meta'' agenda here is to create a society with no agenda.
As Jody screams over the din of the house music, ''Fuck the agendas. We just have to manifest our culture. You have to trust your heart. That's what Jesus really said. And that's what E does. It shows people they have their own common sense. They realize, I don't need this!''
Bruce Eisner shows up at about midnight, exploring the house scene and its relationship to Ecstasy for the second edition of his book Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. A veteran of the sixties and just a bit too old to fit in with this crowd, he almost sighs as he explains to E-nthusiastic clubbers how E's preservation of social skills and ego make it a much better social transformer than the psychedelics of his day.
''In the sixties, we were sure we were going to have this revolution that would change everything overnight. And it never came. We got the seventies instead.''
A few girls laugh. They were born in the seventies. Bruce smiles slowly. He's got a dozen stoned kids hanging on his every word, when in fact he's trying to understand them.
''With E, you don't get so far out, like on acid, where you lose touch with the physical world. It allows you an easier time to bring the insights back in. Huxley talked a lot about the importance of integrating the mystical experience with the worldly experience. He had that one trip where he decided, `The clear light is an ice cube. What's important is love and work in the world.' And love and work in the world is what Ecstasy shows you. It's a model for enlightenment, and the challenge is bringing that into the real world.''
So maybe revolution has become evolution as house culture awakens to the fact that there is method behind Gaia'a madness, and that Darwin wasn't completely right. Life naturally evolves toward greater self-awareness, and we don't need to push it anywhere. The universe is not a cold sea of indifference but the warm, living waters of an oversoul composed of waves of love – Gaia's morphogenetic fields. The mock self-assuredness of the ''me'' generation gives way to the inner wink-wink-say-no-more knowing of the E generation, as the sixties bell curve finally touches down, and ego fully reintegrates into a postpsychedelic culture.
Chapter 7
The Blast Furnace of Disillusion
For those still intent on smashing the ego into oblivion and discovering the very edge of what it means to be sentient, DMT (dimethyltryptamine, and its cousin, 5-hydroxytryptamine) is the only answer. It is a naturally occurring hallucinogen that is usually smoked, although shamans snort it and some aggressive Western users inject it. It's effect is immediate – definitely within a minute, usually within seconds – and all-encompassing. It cannot even be described in terms of magnitude (one user says, ''It's like taking every LSD experience you've ever had and putting them on the head of a pin''), but makes more sense when thought of as a true, hyperdimensional shift. As Terence McKenna describes it:
''The experience that engulfs one's entire being as one slips beneath the surface of the DMT-ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The mind and the self literally unfold before one's eyes. There is a sense that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had just been recast in the furnace of one's birth. Breathing is normal, heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world? What of incoming sensory data?
''Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder, and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.
''The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with coloured balls. Many diminutive beings are present there – the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language; they sing in pearly voices that rain down as coloured petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.
''This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension – frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send the fearless experts, whatever they may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find.''
DMT is the most hard-core cyberian drug experience for several reasons. The user ''penetrates'' another dimension, experiences timelessness, and then enjoys nonverbal and nonlinear communication and connectedness. Even "mind'' and ''self'' unfold, freeing the user to roam about this dimension unencumbered by physical, emotional, and mental barriers. This is a psychopharmacological virtual reality.
DMT is metabolized almost as soon as it enters the system, a fact that, McKenna argues, indicates a long history of human co-evolution with its molecular structure and a well-developed morphogenetic field. He sees DMT and human beings as companions in the journey toward a hyperdimensional reality. Still, the intensity and severity of the DMT experience make any user aware that he has taken something foreign into his system, and that he may never be the same. Nearly everyone who smokes DMT reports hearing a high-pitched tone corresponding to what they believe is a ''carrier wave'' of reality at that moment. The visual world begins to vibrate at the same frequency until everything breaks up into geometric patterns and crystalline twinkles. This is when the "machine elves'' show up, if they're going to. They look like little elves, and sometimes hold wands or crystals and seem to be dancing or operating some kind of light-and-glass machinery. The elves definitely have a good time, but by the time the idea to join and dance with the elves arises, they're gone and a different set of images parades by.