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94 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
What was threatening me? I have this mental image of something that happened a couple of years ago when my sister graduated from her Ph.D. program. My father, sister and I took a trip up to Yosemite. We backpacked down Yosemite Creek from the whatever road it is, and then we hiked down the next day to the very top of Yosemite Falls. Have you ever been there?
S: No.
A: I mean it’s incredible. You’ve been to Yosemite Valley perhaps?
S: No, never.
A: That’s too bad. It’s enormous. I’d only been in the valley before and you look up at the falls and you look up at Half Dome and you look up at all of these mountains all around you. Well, here we were looking down on everything—and this falls, this river, just comes shooting out of this gorge and goes leaping out into space. At the time I had eaten mushrooms. My sister had brought along some mushrooms, and so she and I were kind of quietly hallucinating. You don’t really hallucinate on mushrooms, but it was definitely a psychedelic drug.
And I had wedged myself into this little crack on the face of this wall where I felt that I was safe, that I couldn’t roll off—so that while I was going though this half hour of very intense drug experience nothing would happen to me. There I was, looking at this water just leaping out into space. And there were swallows, these little cliff swallows. They skim along the ground and kind of go darting out over the cliff to chase the insects that I guess are brought up on the updraft. I don’t know too much about their feeding habits but they do chase insects and they would just go swooping down over my head in front of my face and out into this abyss. I mean there are two big miles of air out there in front of you, it’s awesome—and that’s a little bit the way I felt.
I was sort of looking out over something that was plummeting out into nothingness, into space, and it was terrifying—it was anticipatory, it was riveting. I mean I sat there for half an hour and didn’t move. I probably barely even blinked, just contemplating this space in front of me.
I wasn’t seeing it as a panorama, like people take pictures and they say, “Oh, how beautiful!”—you know, all of this scenery. It