The Ark is only to be consumed by Nature's most hardy adventurers, who are so spiritual that they despise physical death. The only information I had on this yellow mushroom was that I could tell it was an Amanita. What I didn't know was that I was about to eat a mushroom that was listed in authoritative mycology as a deadly poison.

There were two mushrooms growing next to each other, exactly alike in every respect. Choosing the one closest to my right hand, I picked and consumed the entire Soma. I wanted to find out what it was like to take a powerful shamanic journey to the other side — where the mushroom was reputed to give its user visions of the future. I could tell that Pantherina was more concentrated in energy than the Muscaria. I soon learned just how much. In power the Ark was twenty times stronger. One bulb is enough to kill two men.

First, I started walking at a rapid pace, and within twenty minutes I began to have finger, hand, arm and shoulder convulsions. I really didn't know what was going on. This had never happened before.

Forty-five minutes later, I stopped at a restaurant and ordered a meal, naïvely thinking that food would soak up the poisons. By the time I had finished eating, I was having blackouts of the most alarming kind.

Suddenly it was as if my consciousness had been erased — literally shoved aside from my brain. Then, I would come back to consciousness within seconds and grab the table. Meanwhile, the convulsions were becoming critical. I took out my Tarot cards and prayed to God that I would live, while doing a reading on, “What's going on?” The spirit of the Charioteer said to me, “Congratulations, you have just lost all control over your life and are now dying.”

Word for word, it is a message I have never forgotten.

I had just one reading left, as my hands were so badly convulsing that I was in danger of losing the cards from my grip. Propping my elbows on the table to stabilize myself, I asked the question, “What should I do?”

Keeping the cards from flying all over the restaurant was important to me because if I died, I wanted to die with my bible, Tarot, next to my heart. I knew at my present rate of convulsions that I could never pick them up, as I lacked the finger coordination. I was literally hanging on to my life.