lysergify wrote:where's the one on the entities?
Here ya go:
Bear in mind this is unfinished.
It is widely reported by people who have experienced DMT that entities are frequently encountered during their trips. Perhaps the most well known of such accounts comes from Terence Mckenna, who spoke of the "self-transforming machine elves" of Hyperspace. Arguably, Terence set the standard for having a discourse on these peculiar states and the entities that inhabit them, so I feel that is my responsibility to quote him directly before I even begin to touch upon any of my own personal speculations regarding them. Terence provided me with the tools to open my mind; I owe everything to his influences. For those of you who have "met Them," I promise this will be well worth the read.
"The most extraordinary thing about the DMT experience is that see entities. You encounter beings whom I've described as self-transforming machine elves. They are the denizens of this other dimension. They are trying to teach something." Food of the Gods
"The experience always reminds me of the twenty-fourth fragment of Heraclitus: "The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls." One not only becomes the Aeon at play with colored balls but meets entities as well. In the book by my brother and myself, The Invisible Landscape, I describe them as self-transforming machine elves, for that is how they appear. These entities are dynamically contorting topological modules that are somehow distinct from the surrounding background, which is itself undergoing continuous transformation. These entities remind me of the scene in the film version of The Wizard of Oz after the Munchkinds come with a death certificate for the Witch of the East. They all have very squeaky voices and they sing a little song about being "absolutely and completely dead." The tryptamine Munchkins come, these hyper-dimensional machine-elf entities, and they bathe one in love. It's not erotic but it is open-hearted. It certainly feels good. These beings are like fractal reflections of some previously hidden and suddenly autonomous part of ones own psyche.
And they are speaking, saying, "Don't be alarmed. Remember, and do what we are doing." The fractal elves seem to be reassuring, saying, "Don't worry, don't worry; do this, look at this." Meanwhile, one is completely "over there." One's ego is intact. One's fear reflexes are intact. One is not "fuzzed out" at all. Consequently, the natural reaction is amazement; profound astonishment that persists and persists. One breathes and it persists. The elves are saying, "Don't get a loop of wonder going that quenches your ability to understand. Try not to be so amazed. Try to focus and look at what we are doing." What they're doing is emitting sounds like music, like language. These sounds pass without any quantized moment of distinction - as Philo Judaeus said that the Logos would when it became perfect - from things heard into things beheld. One hears and beholds a language of alien meaning that is conveying alien information that cannot be Englished." The Archaic Revival
Come to think of it, I also cannot leave out Rick Strassman, whose groundbreaking DMT study also encountered "contact" with beings from another dimension. His life's work changed my life forever as well; without his lucid brilliance and startling objectivity, I never would have dared to explore the regions of mind that I have. From his book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule:
"When reviewing my bedside notes, I continually feel surprise in seeing how many of our volunteers "made contact" with "them," or other beings. At least half did so in one form or another. Research subjects used expressions like "entities," "beings," "aliens," "guides," and "helpers" to describe them. The "life-forms" looked like clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures. It is still startling to see my written records of comments like "There were these beings," "I was being led," "They were on me fast." It's as if my mind refuses to accept what's there in black and white.""
And so, without further ado:
When I first started experimenting with DMT, I gently waded into the waters; I did not jump, as I was well aware of its incalculable power thanks to the books that I had read. I was already acquainted with challenging states of mind as a result of my experimentation with psilocybin; however, nothing could have ever prepared me for the being contact that I established after only a few dips into the DMT dimension. You can read all you want about psychedelics and entity contact, but until you actually experience it, you truly have no frame of reference upon which to make any sense of such vague metaphors. Ego dissolution is one thing; Alien contact is another thing altogether. These are free-flowing "beings of energy" which are moving in conjunction with an ineffable display of color and multidimensionality. They appear "more real than real" and yet, they are impossible to describe.
I started with quite "standard" - as far DMT goes - visions; I saw beautifully symmetrical "chrysanthemums" of incredibly deep colors that vibrated and seemingly "danced." I saw the most incredibly bright, yet deep, greens, reds, yellows, and a contrast of the deepest blackness to the most ethereal of white. With eyes open, everything seemed to vibrate and upon closer inspection, objects seemed to give off energy, as if matter was slowly disintegrating and regenerating. I even saw an "alien" alphabet superimposed upon my vision, which can be best represented by some of Allyson Grey's artwork such as this:
http://cosm.typepad.com/...33011168a06d04970c-800wiAnd I cannot leave out Alex's most perfect representation of his first smoked DMT experience:
http://www.alexgrey.com/...y/8-24/tranfiguframe.jpgAs I kept going "further" and "deeper" with each subsequent experience, I began to realize that, during my trips, I was essentially realizing and experiencing for the first time, that everything around me is Alive, i.e., it is all consciousness; it is "God's" all-encompassing, eternally regenerating Manifestation. This dissolution of boundaries and bright colors finally gave way to a movement of energy which can only be experienced to be properly understood. An incredible build up of "psychic" energy occurred within seconds, during which a "warm mass" of energy slowly rose up my spinal cord to where I felt a center in my head concentrate in "pressure." This all brought to mind the Indian view of chakras and the kundalini serpent; but that is for another post.
Unfortunately, the barriers of our language and especially our ways of understanding the world entirely inhibit any kind of explanation that I come up with, i.e., unless you've been there, you have zero frame of reference to understand where I am coming from. I am most aware of this, however, so for those of you who have witnessed what I am discussing; this is for you.
This is what I have come to learn from communicating with "Them" for over 3 years. What happened to me on my first contact experience was absolutely beyond description; it quite literally shook the foundation of my entire existence, as I became aware that what was occurring was truly impossible, unless I was genuinely crazy. Yet in knowing of all these other accounts of contact, I had a frame of reference which allowed me to not succumb to a purely personal, idiosyncratic view point which could have led to my psychic disintegration. DMT truly allows a window into the "schizophrenic" mind, to say the least; it provides an immediate apocalypse of grandeur beyond imagination. Schizophrenia is defined as a mental disorder, and yet, do you really know anyone without one? Truly, there are people who are most definitely not well psychically due to unfortunate circumstances that occurred during their lives, but even the average person carries weights around in their unconscious that effect their behavior. These psychic - for lack of a better word- weights form the complexes which are the basis of our own relative neurosis. What we are essentially experiencing during these psychedelic contact experiences, in my opinion, is the outpouring of our unconscious into consciousness (It took years of reading Jung for this to sink in). The outpouring is so incredible that we experience an acute psychotic outbreak, which is accompanied by internally manifested, yet seemingly autonomous, beings that communicate to us impossible correlative insights and show off mind bending feats of pure imagination.
To the unfortunate predisposed shizophrenic, these perturbed or "elevated" states of mind are often met with confusion, which often leads to a hostile denial of internal stresses, which are fed by this confusion in question. This psychosis, this perpetual behavior of cyclical outbreaks of repressed unconscious contents, is often detrimental to the personality of the individual and therefore, the individual loses a slow battle of personality disintegration, which then leads to his total dissociation from reality. Now, the ample-minded individual who partakes in a consciousness perturbing experience, such as taking a psychedelic compound, he will experience something not too far from the predisposed schizophrenic; however, the fundamental difference is that the experience is self-willed, and therefore depending upon what lies within that person's personal unconscious, they could experience a multitude of things, such as incredible contact with small entities that convey hidden knowledge; a momentous epiphany of Self-realization and integration; or they may experience macabre visions which accompany the release of negative psychic contents - this is the classic "bad-trip." These are truly consciousness expanding plants and depending upon the person, the entities in question will either assist you, or torment you; the interpretation is ultimately up to your Self- your entire catalog of being - memories, fears, and especially, state of mind. They are the guardians of God knowledge; literally, they are the beings who weigh our souls worth upon entry into the death state.
The entities themselves appear to exist as autonomous manifestations of some sort of primordial state of matter and consciousness. They represent a state of energy which is utterly exempt from the laws of physics as we know them, as such that they marvel us with their incredible feats of dimension manipulation. They continually extol sheer effortlessness in shocking us with insights which quite literally blow the lids off of our minds. Often this sort of overload of input results in our immediate shock and subsequent denial, which leads to our forgetting of the experience itself; quite literally, we reject the experience as impossible and possibly psychotic. Sometimes, the entities appear to be "waiting" for us; welcoming us back, so to speak, to this autonomous land of infinite potentiality and dimension-free imagination.
The Elves seem to weigh our consciousness almost immediately upon our entry into this state. Now whether or not they are our strictly personal manifestations is not actually knowable; however, the vast consensus, the similarity of accounts that span thousands of years; it is these psychic facts which we cannot ignore. These beings litter our worlds religions and mythologies; they are the "little" representatives of the collective unconscious; they are the fairies and elves of our worlds countless myths. These beings, as understood by Jung, were the Devil's fallen angels of the unconscious; Lucifer - the bringer of light - they are his workers; communicating to us the contents of our unconscious for the purpose of fulfilling the great alchemical opus that has spanned the entire duration of the Universe which exists within the human mind. They urge for the reconciliation of the opposites; the final consummation of Eternity; the realization of the Ouroboros. They help mankind achieve this by facilitating our evolution through the mechanized release of unconscious psychic contents.
The final achievement; the heiros gamos of the human mind and subsequently, the human race, lies upon these entities which either grant us, or deny us entry to the Godhead. They are "His/It's" protectors. They weigh our worthiness with their trickster-like macabre playfulness, which is meant to shake us from our rigid complacency. They are the Tykes of the Aeon; God's mischievous elves which are the living Logos. They exist within our unconscious, in my argument both on a personal and most of all, on a collectively shared level. Physicians or shamans who enter this state often get right to business with these entities, because they have gained the control of their manifestation. The entities appear to be a distraction to those of whom intentions are either suspect or utterly destitute of any true spiritual context. Those who enter this state without any true purpose will be met with entities who may seemingly torture you with their "negative" energy and shocking visions; or they may go easy on you and just seemingly "play around" with you. To those of the pure in heart and poor in spirit, however, they seem to welcome you with open arms and try to acquaint you as gently as possible. They grant you entry and take care of you while you are in this state. A feeling of great love and comfort is often felt by people whom are open to the entities and are harboring no pent up "darkness" (negative psychic contents) within their respective being. The entities are a manifestation of our shadow. Our shadow is essentially everything that deny or repress in consciousness. I will be adding an addendum on the Shadow in the very near future.
The following are a few unbelievable accounts of entity contact:
The Book of Enoch dates from the third through first centuries before Christ and its Messianic content was utilized extensively in both the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, notably in the titles of the Messiah: Christ [the Anointed One], the Righteous One, the Elect One, and the Son of Man. In two places the last of these titles is in the context of what are virtually verbatim quotes from the Book of Enoch. The book tells of a great chastisement that will come from the heavens to judge mankind during some remote generation which has yet to come.
LXX1. 5-8
"And he (angel Michael) translated my spirit into the heaven of the heavens,
And I saw there as it were a structure built of crystals,
And between those crystals tongues of living fire.
And my spirit saw the girdle which girt that house of fire,
And on its four sides were streams full of living fire,
And they girt that house.
And round about were Seraphim, Cherubim, and Ophannin:
And these are they who sleep not,
And guard the throne of his glory.
And I saw angels who could not be counted,A thousand thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand,
Encircling that house,
And Michael, and Raphel, and Gabriel, and Phanuel,
And the holy angels who are above the heavens,
Go in and out of that house"
Italics mine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seraphimhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherubimhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OphanninThe structure built of crystals definitely reminds me of DMT space, as does the description of living fire. However, what was really most startling to me was the reference to the Seraphin, Cherubin, and Ophannin as being those "who sleep not" and that they guard the throne of his glory.
Perhaps the entities really are psychic "guards" that are capable of directing our experience by manipulating negative psychic contents. It seems to me that they use their ability to do so in order to distract or more importantly, teach, those who are not ready or worthy to experience God's glory, aka mystical experience, divine love, gnosis etc. If you have any skeletons in your closet, they are immediately addressed by the entities in order to test your worthiness. It brings to mind the doctrine of sin and the intuition that every thing you do is in fact remembered by God when you finally do get around to seeing Him.
DMT definitely seems to be the greatest morality device imaginable; without complete comfort of oneself, the experience will most likely be hellish and full of fear. However, if you are comfortable with yourself, with your past and your present, it is possible to experience God and all that mystical experience implies, if the entities deem you worthy.
From Carl Jung's Red Book:
What serviceable forms rise from your body, you thieving
abyss! These appear as elemental spirits, dressed in wrinkled
garb, Cabiri, with delightful misshapen forms, young and yet old,
dwarfish, shriveled, unspectacular bearers of secret arts, possessors
of ridiculous wisdom, first formations of the unformed gold,
worms that crawl from the liberated egg of the Gods, incipient
ones, unborn, still invisible. What should your appearance be to
us? What new arts do you bear up from the inaccessible treasure
chamber, the sun yoke from the egg of the Gods. You still have
roots in the soil like plants and you are animal faces / of the
human body; you are foolishly sweet, uncanny, primordial, and
earthly. We cannot grasp your essence, you gnomes, you object souls.
You have your origin in the lowest. Do you want to become
giants, you Tom Thumbs? Do you belong to the followers of the
son of the earth Are you the earthly feet of the Godhead? What
do you want? Speak!"*
The Cabiri: "We come to greet you as the master of the
lower nature."
I: ''Are you speaking to me? Am I your master?"
The Cabiri: "You were not, but you are now."
I: "So you declare. And so be it. Yet what should I do with
your following?"
The Cabiri: "We carry what is not to be carried from below
to above. We are the juices that rise secretly, not by force, but
sucked out of inertia and affixed to what is growing. We know
the unknown ways and the inexplicable laws of living matter. We
carry up what slumbers in the earthly; what is dead and yet enters
into the living. We do this slowly and easily; what you do in vain
in your human way. We complete what is impossible for you."
I: "What should I leave to you? Which troubles can I transfer
to you? What should I not do, and what do you do better?"
The Cabiri: "You forget the lethargy of matter. You want to
pull up with your own force what can only rise slowly; ingesting
itself affixed to itself from within. Spare yourself the trouble, or
you will disturb our work."
1: "Should I trust you, you untrustworthy ones, you slaves and
slave souls? Get to work. Let it be so."
31I[HI 166] "It seems to me that I gave you a long time. Neither
did I descend to you nor did I disturb your work. I lived in the
light of day and did the work of the day. What did you do?"
The Cabiri: "We hauled things up, we built. We placed stone
upon stone. Now you stand on solid ground."
1: "I feel the ground more solid. I stretch upward."
The Cabiri: "We forged a flashing / sword for you, with which
you can cut the knot that entangles you."
1: "I take the sword firmly in my hand. I lift it for the blow."
The Cabiri: "We also place before you the devilish, skillfully
twined knot that locks and seals you. Strike, only sharpness will
cut through it."
1: "Let me see it, the great knot, all wound round! Truly a
masterpiece of inscrutable nature, a wily natural tangle of roots
grown through one another! Only Mother Nature, the blind
weaver, could work such a tangle! A great snarled ball and a
thousand small knots, all artfully tied, intertwined, truly; a human
brain! Am I seeing straight? What did you do? You set my brain
before me! Did you give me a sword so that its flashing sharpness
slices through my brain? What were you thinking of?"312
The Cabiri: "The womb of nature wove the brain, the womb
of the earth gave the iron. So the Mother gave you both:
entanglement and severing."
1: "Mysterious! Do you really want to make me the executioner
of my own brain?"
The Cabiri: "It befits you as the master of the lower nature.
Man is entangled in his brain and the sword is also given to him
to cut through the entanglement."
I: "What is the entanglement you speak of?"
The Cabiri: "The entanglement is your madness, the sword is
the overcoming of madness."313
I: "You offsprings of the devil, who told you that I am mad?
You earth spirits, you roots of clay and excrement, are you not
yourselves the root fibers of my brain? You polyp-snared rubbish,
channels for juice knotted together, parasites upon parasites, all
sucked up and deceived, secretly climbing up over one another
by night, you deserve the flashing sharpness of my sword. You
want to persuade me to cut through you? Are you contemplating
self-destruction? How come nature gives birth to creatures that
she herself wants to destroy?"
The Cabiri: "Do not hesitate. We need destruction since we
ourselves are the entanglement. He who wishes to conquer new
land / brings down the bridges behind him. Let us not exist
anymore. We are the thousand canals in which everything also
flows back again into its origin."
1: "Should I sever my own roots? Kill my own people, whose
king I am? Should I make my own tree wither? You really are
the sons of the devil."
The Cabiri: "Strike, we are servants who want to die for
their master."
I: "What will happen if I strike?"
The Cabiri: "Then you will no longer be your brain, but will
exist beyond your madness. Do you not see, your madness is
your brain, the terrible entanglement and intertwining in the
connection of the roots, in the nets of canals, the confusion of
fibers. Being engrossed in the brain makes you wild. Strike! He
who finds the way rises up over his brain. You are a Tom Thumb
in the brain, beyond the brain you gain the form of a giant. We
are surely sons of the devil, but did you not forge us out of the
hot and dark? So we have something of its nature and of yours.
The devil says that everything that exists is also worthy, since
it perishes. As sons of the devil we want destruction, but as your
creatures we want our own destruction. We want to rise up in
you through death. We are roots that suck up from all sides.
Now you have everything that you need, therefore chop us up,
tear us out."
1: "Will I miss you as servants? As a master I need slaves."
The Cabiri: "The master serves himself"
1: "You ambiguous sons of the devil, these words are
your undoing. May my sword strike you, this blow shall be
valid forever."
The Cabiri "Woe, woe! What we feared, what we desired, has
come to pass."
*
The Cabiri were the deities celebrated at the mysteries of Samothrace. They were held to be promoters of fertility and protectors of sailors. Friedrich Creuzer and Schelling held them to be the primal deities of Greek mythology, from which all others developed (Symbolik und Mytlwlogie der alten Volker [Leipzig: Leske, 1810-23]; The Deities of samothrace [1815], introduced and translated by R. F. Brown [Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977]). Jung had copies of both of these works. They appear in Goethe's Faust, part 2, act 2. Jung discussed the Cabiri in Traniformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912, CW B §209-II). In 1940 Jung wrote: "The Cabiri are, in fact, the mysterious creative powers, the gnomes who work under the earth, i.e., below the threshold of consciousness, in order to supply us with lucky ideas. As imps and hobgoblins, however, they also lay all sorts of nasty tricks, keeping back names and dates that were 'on the tip of the tongue,' making us say the wrong thing, etc. They give an eye to everything that has not already been anticipated by consciousness and the functions at its disposal ... deeper insight will show that the primitive and archaic qualities of the inferior function conceal all sorts of significant relationships and symbolic meanings, and instead of laughing off the Cabiri as ridiculous Tom Thumbs he may begin to suspect that they are a treasure-house of hidden wisdom" (attempt at a psychological interpretation of the dogma of the trinity," CW II, §244). Jung commented on the Cabiri scene in Faust in Psychology and Alchemy (1944, CW 12, §203f). The dialogue with the Cabiri that takes place here is not found in Black Book 4, but is in the Handwritten Drift. It may have been written separately; if so it would have been written prior to the summer of 1915.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Thumbhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CabiriIf the last bit on Carl Jung didn't blow your mind... well then I guess I'm all alone.
Please forgive any errors on my part, I kinda threw this together, versus laboring over it like I usually do.
The DMT entities.
They are projections of the unconscious.
Carl Jung actually communicated with them, just as Terence Mckenna did. The only difference being that Carl was naturally predisposed toward experiencing their presence and Terence had to trip to realize them.
They are psychic manifestations that facilitate our evolution through the disclosure of our unconscious contents.
Our unconscious, after all, is where our instinct exerts its influence, so if we can learn to understand our unconscious contents we can then direct our will toward integration of our psyche.
The entities beckon us to integrate what is in our unconscious into consciousness for the purpose of furthering the enfoldment of the Cosmic Drama; the reconciliation of opposites of which the unconscious and consciousness represent.
When we can unite our unconscious with consciousness, we experience Enlightenment; the freedom from duality. Love; pure understanding of the necessary reciprocity of the Universe and Man.
I believe that the entities are of a personal nature; however, they are also collectively shared in the unconscious, as we are all truly One single Self (in my opinion). The entities, no doubt, follow archetypes; especially the Trickster. They are trickster entities; I will have an entire section up on this topic in the near future.
I am not trying to merely reduce the experience to our psyche, as I am most aware that that cannot be the sole "answer." What I essentially believe is this: we all have predisposed temperaments and these boundary conditions lie in our personal unconscious. Now, when we dissolve our ego and experience the collective unconscious, the entities, as a collective archetype, follow the boundary conditions that our persona sets for us. So if we are more predisposed toward a certain type of contact experience, such as a UFO or an elf-like entity, we will have that experience due to our personal temperament.
The entities themselves seem to be an outpouring from both the collective and personal unconscious, so you are right; it cannot be solely just our psyche. But once you get down to it, we are really all just One Mind, so when you really think about it; it is "just" in our heads. Although it seems like such an alien experience, that only makes sense because the unconscious is alien to us by default of its being hidden within our Self. Repressed psychic contents are going to be experienced as "other-worldly," because we have zero frame of reference, personally or culturally, unless we transcend ourselves via esoteric knowledge, such as psychology and psychedelic plant use.