Autobiography
electric flesh
There was in 1971 a singular cosmic event, the total eclipse of the Sun in Oaxaca ,Mexico.I don't remember exactly where I had heard about or probably read about it. I was living in New York City at the time,but I was struck by the fact that it was to be the longest eclipse until the next millenium and that it would take place in a sacred area of ancient Mexico.This was a place where a mysterious people,the Mixtex Indians had lived long before the Empire of the Aztecs had come into being. They had built fantastic temples and low pyramid structures for observing the stars.The eclipse would be extraordinary as well because it would be a rare time when you could see the planet Mercury with the naked eye. The fact that it was in Oaxaca had a further significance for me because a decade earlier that was where Tim Leary had begun his journey in exploring the connections of the mind with the sacred mushroom.He had been drawn there by the recent publication on hallucigenic mushrooms by Watson ,a famous mycologist and,of course, Aldous Huxley's book,"The Doors of Perception ".There was a mushroom woman who lived there called Marie..She specialized in healing potions and various herbal remedies and it was said she had been sanctioned by Indian wise men of the area to allow white people to taste the sacred mushroom.That to their way of thinking that the time had come for this opening into their society and way of thinking . Several years later Marie had sent a message through the "grapevine ' to Tim Leary at Harvard about his much publized experiments with hallucingenes which ended in his dismisal that the sacred nature of the mushroom was not to be used in a profane manner.The sacred mushroom had been used since time immemorial before even their civilization had come into existance.It was a way of seeing .it was outside of time .