Hi all.

This is only my second post on this forum. My first is in the Introduction section.

One of the most intriguing aspects of DMT and other entheogens to me is the strange visions people report seeing and the possible interaction with alien beings (Machine Elves, DMT entities). It's amazing how such a simple molecule can have such a profound effect on a person's brain. It's as if DMT really does transport the soul to another reality.

Do you guys believe that these Machine Elves are real? I personally believe that they might be. If only somebody could prove that they are real and not subjective (hallucination). It would be proof of extraterrestrial life!

Has Marko Rodriguez progressed in his research? I saw him in an interview talking about getting the entities to find the prime factors of large numbers. Did he succeed? I think that getting the entities to give you more useful/profound information would be a better way forward. For example, asking the machine elves for the winning lottery numbers for a specific date (they might be outside of our space-time and be able to see future events unfold); or asking them for a cure for cancer; or they could in theory give us a TOE (theory of everything). Surely this is worth a try. Imagine all that knowledge that they could impart on us. Has anybody tried this? Maybe these entities are just waiting for us to interrogate them (Q and A session).

Thank you so much guys for reading my second post. Please let me know what you think. Incidentally, I have never tried DMT or any other hallucinogen.

The Case Against DMT Elves


Not saying I have an opinion one way or another but this is an interesting read.

Hi,
Great post, I'm going to try the winning lottery numbers trick on my next visit!

Thanks purple-dye for that information.

Arcanum, good luck! Let me know how many numbers you get. And, don't forget to get the correct date for the draw!

It's not that simple... Unfortunately

Welcome to the forum.

First of all, I personally don’t like the term “machine elves”. The entities I encounter are neither machines, nor elves, nor are they self-dribbling basketballs. Terrence McKenna used language very creatively, and sometimes I think people take too literally the terms he coined.

My experience is that entities in the DMT realm are not very concerned about our Earthly realm, and aren’t eager to indulge petty human requests. I doubt very much that entities are going to “prove” their existence to a human by factoring a large product of two primes. Their existence and “reality” is self-evident. Although Marko Rodriguez’s idea is interesting, it reveals a lack of understanding of what the DMT realm is all about.

“Reality” is a definition. We define reality, and we define it in such a way that our ordinary wakeful state of consciousness is “real”. If any subjective experience conforms to the definition, we call it real. If a subjective experience does not satisfy the criteria of the definition, we call the experience a “dream” or a “hallucination”, etc. We can’t say if there is such a thing as “objective reality” – we can only determine if an experience satisfies criteria that people have decided to collectively call “reality”.

Another observation I’ve had is that not all people experience DMT in the same way. Even a single individual can have a wide range of experience types, some radically different from others. Since people base their beliefs on their experiences, it seems reasonable that people with different ranges of experience will have different beliefs. This fact is too often ignored in discussions concerning the “reality” of DMT realms.

Personally, I’ve had DMT experiences that, in some respects, more fully satisfy the definition of reality than does the usual state of consciousness. Does this mean that the DMT realm is “more real” than everyday reality?

Very true, and for many people each experience is totally or very different. For me, each experience is very different, which is very interesting as you never know what's coming next.

i had an experience in the "real world" that gave me a kind of proof for the existence of entities (you can read about it in my last thread) not that it can be regarded as a scientific evident, but it kind of shake my belief system up side down.

i don't know whats real and whats not real or if that question even makes sense in regards to dmt, and i haven't read that article in its entirety in a long time..but this part from the link seemed telling to me. regarding the dmt experience:

"Although this may appear at first glance to be "shocking," it is actually no more shocking then the fact that most people dream at night, or that most people see geometric patterns (pressure phosphenes) when they close their eyes and press against their eyeballs. But the difference between pressure phosphenes and DMT is that DMT is illegal and very hard to come by, so most people never have the opportunity to experience it. If we could all hold our breath for a minute and produce vivid hallucinations of alien landscapes it would seem quite mundane, no more than a mere curiosity of the human condition. However, since this particular alien landscape is produced by a specific rare substance (DMT), people seem to think it is akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe when they actually get their hands on it.

Now don't get me wrong, DMT is stunning in its effect, no doubt. But, like anything, when you do it many times the magic tends to wear off and reveal itself for what it is; an exotic aberration of the brain's perceptual mechanics."

DMT is no more shocking then the fact that people dream at night? or see geometric patterns when they press against their eyeballs? It goes so much deeper than any of this that this quote just seems laughable..IMO.. this guy needs to smoalk moar, but thats just me


Welcome to the forum EKUMA1981!

In terms of the entities being real, I don't know. In terms of certain other aspects of the experience, I have my theories. With a sufficient dose that isn't really that large anyway, I can get these very intricate holographic open eyed visuals where machinery, cities or beings come right out of hyperspace. I can reach out and touch them and they have a very physical magnetic feeling presence. My hand will contour to the object...even if I'm not looking at it. It just will do it by itself. It seems to be present whether or not I'm looking at it. Another example is if an entity approaches me and without even opening my eyes, I blindly reach out and my hand will naturally be attracted to it, only in the event that it's within reach and only where it is (i.e. no entity there, no magnetic presence). It's one thing for the mind to create hallucinations and it's another thing for it to create an physically interactive hallucination that doesn't even depend on my awareness of the energy structures being there, though if I change my perspective, perhaps by closing my eyes or opening them, I can see that there is in fact something there. It just seems like a lot of coordination for the brain to be doing, and I'm not saying that it's not possible that the brain isn't just plain hallucinating and that these things aren't real, and that no, my evidence isn't conclusive that these things are real, however for me, it's very compelling.

i've yet to see machine elves or anything that would resemble one so in short no

but the entities i do see tend to be in a form that i commonly precieve to be dragons, aliens and human - sadly i do not feel as though any of these are real images of any material or energy based creature i feel as though they are my subconceous minds way of propagating a thought

"believe in nothing, belief allows the mind to stop functioning, a non-functioning mind is clinically dead" - James Keenan
a relevant quote

I felt the same way, word for word.

This article (e-mail conversation actually) is fairly laughable. If it was just the private dialogue between two people on the subject, I would leave it alone... but seeing as Mr. Kent saw fit to publish this stuff and considers it valid in the debate about "Hyperpatial Reality," I will respond to some of what he has said.

His basic point is that:



I am sure that many of us here in the Nexus have used DMT hundreds of times more than Mr. Kent, and it is safe to say that the magic has not worn off for the vast majority of us.

Calling the DMT experience exotic aberrations of the brain's perceptual mechanics is basically saying nothing and is equally true of looking through a microscope or listening to space with a radio telescope.



Maybe for you. SWIM can stare directly at the entities he encounters and they do not disappear, drift or otherwise become fleeting in the least. In fact, they tend to envelop, engage and do their very best to not allow SWIM to ignore them. If SWIM turns his head away, they teleport to stay in front of him. They often will say his thoughts out loud a fraction of a second before he has even thought them. They seem to enjoy demonstrating how utterly beyond human conception, ability, and understanding they are.

Saying that visuals become more elaborate on the periphery makes me doubt the author's vaunted experience with spice.

Many of the hallucinations he describes in the article are far more like LSD than they are like DMT. He spends a lot of time talking about "creeping patterns" and trails as well.

Regardless of how well his DMT experiences match up with those of us who know and love Hyperspace rather well... much of what he says is pure conjecture and wishful thinking IMO, and demonstrates the paucity of his experience and a desperate attempt to write off the notion of an authentic Hyperspace.

In his own words:



To me, and in common parlance, "a number of times" means not a great deal of experience. SWIM breaks through a number of times each night he goes for it... and has been doing so for decades. I think it is safe to say that Mr. Kent is something of noob. He speaks often in the article of the idea that since he is unable to do something, than it must not be possible. Saying that a guitarist who took a few lessons can not play like John McLaughlin does not indicate that playing like John McLaughlin is impossible.

That he has been unable to pull useful information out of the entities during his brief experiences could be a result of his seemingly respect-less attitude towards beings of vast intelligence. This could say more about his skill level with social interactions and humility in the face of cosmic intelligence, than anything about their being subconscious projections.

The entities do not need to prove themselves to you. They sometimes deign to give you some solid proof if you show them the proper respect and seem like you can handle what they will show you. A mathematics professor would not attempt to prove differential equations to a child who can barely count to 100, either.

Also, the only thing that ties the vast number of trippy things that Alice experiences (in the two seminal Lewis Carroll novels) together is that "The aesthetic of the visual phenomena is consistent, unique, and wonderous..."

One of the most interesting things about Mr. Kent's assertions is that he contradicts himself a number of times and often admits that his statements of fact are mere speculation on no more solid ground than those he thinks he is debunking.

Take this doozy of a quote:



Do I even need to point out the extreme level of irrational disconnect here?



And this is more logical than that archetypal worlds exist, and that various humans throughout time have accessed them via various methods... how?



Please tell me this is not what passes for critical thinking among scientific materialists these days.

He claims to have done "many experiments with lucid dreaming..." again a phrase I would consider to indicate a very small amount of experience, seeing as I have been having a half dozen or more lucid dreams every night since I was a baby. In my many decades of life, I have had so many lucid dreams that the idea of calling them experiments is ludicrous and comical.

His lack of skill with lucid dreaming is borne out in this quote:



Ummm... I guess he is not what I would consider a very good lucid dreamer, then. I realize I am dreaming, and then proceed to fly through interstellar space and congregate with ascended masters. Waking up upon becoming lucid is pretty low level stuff IMHO. A bit like falling down when your Dad points out that your training wheels are not actually touching the ground.

Also, hyperspace beings shine lights of reason on you, and if they dissolve it is because you need to smoalk moar.

One of the things he said that does resonate with me is...


I just think in light of his own "Gaia consciousness" conjectures, he might need to expand his concept of who "you" is.

Mr. Kent indulges in quite a few mystical beliefs actually. He claims to believe in Samsara and the transmigration of souls. He even says this:



It is unclear to me how someone who can say something like that can turn around and assert that the DMT experience is simply the result of an overworked CNS. But then again, his arguments are so porous and contradictory that it is not really surprising.



I would tend to phrase this in the inverse. We can not prove anything is real with deduction, and even induction doesn't really make a strong case. We can, however, come up with deductive proofs to show when we are not experiencing reality. This is one of the main methods of entering a lucid dream. It is also why we don't freak out when we watch films.

Our experiences can be summed up into two categories. Those we know are not real, and those we are unsure of. Any other stance is irrational.

This quote from the article sums this up rather nicely.



Who is saying that hyperspace isn't a hidden or hard to see aspect of this world? How is a hidden aspect of the so-called real world all that different from a parallel world anyway? Calling it "another layer of the same old world we already live in" in no way addresses its fundamental reality or its connection to our everyday consensual reality.

And how can anyone claim to know that the "real" world exists independently of the observer? We can't even say that about subatomic particles.

I find that scientific materialists have no problem accepting extremely mystical concepts like quantum entanglement and the collapsing of probability states as long as it is explained in their scientific lingo and put forth by an acknowledged member of their science "club."

(interestingly the same holds true about evangelical Christians or any other faith based religion)

The simple fact is that scientific materialism has no concept of reality that passes logical muster. It has no concept of consciousness that even approaches a reasonable hypothesis. Even according to the theories it does have, all we know about consensual reality are the illusions our brains create in response to sense stimuli that is purely waveform in nature. Curiously, the brain itself doesn't seem to distinguish between dream signals and supposedly external signals... otherwise how could wet dreams be possible?

Saying that the DMT experience is similar to dreaming doesn't discount it. Like dreaming, the people who have actually developed some considerable skill with it have been able to prove to themselves the veracity of their experiences. This is as it has been for untold millenia, and it is all that we can truly hope to do at this point.

The shaman who finds a cure for an illness in his ayahuasca journey and comes back able to heal someone doesn't care if you believe that this information was new to him or not.

There are many things that take a lot of practice and talent to do well. The fact that an unskilled scientist can not reproduce such things in their labs is not an indication of their unreality. An amateur guitar playing lab technician can not prove or disprove the soul that great musicians demonstrate in their music.

The fact that a researcher can not convince the entities they encounter to give them irrefutable evidence of their independent existence is no different than the fact that a kitten can not convince the president of the USA to prove that he can cause nuclear explosions with his red phone.

People can and should doubt things like precognitive dreaming, shared dreams, hyperspatial realities, autonomous entities etc. However, when one has had enough experience with these things oneself, it becomes untenable to doubt your own repeated experience.

I doubted that anyone could be stupid or skilled enough to surf the huge waves at Jaws, Maui... but I have seen it with my own two eyes.

I suppose I could have been dreaming...

i like your metaphors!
thanks for a brilliant argument!

Yes, thank you for the critique of that article. It always has rubbed me the wrong way, but I only read it before I started my experiences with DMT so I had no basis to refute the information on, and have ignored the article ever since.

I don’t think you’ve understood my point. “Reality” is an abstraction. There is no such thing as an “ultimate” objective reality. And if there was, we wouldn’t know it. The deductive proofs you use to determine whether or not you’re in a dream state don’t prove the dream state isn’t real. The deductions simply inform you of your current state of consciousness – they tell you that you’re dreaming, but they can’t “prove” that the dream state is any less real than the waking state.

We define reality. Ask yourself this question about your current experience: “Is this current experience real?” I assume you’ll answer in the affirmative, but regardless of how you answer, next ask yourself “What about my current experience makes it real? (or not real?)”


What about my current experience makes it real?

How would you answer that question? You might say it’s real because of its stability. And its visual clarity. The level of object detail. Or because of object permanence – you look away from something, then return your gaze to it and it’s still there. You might say it’s real because of the high degree of interactivity. And the coherence of objects and their interactions. And the clarity of your mental state. The perfect synchronization of the senses. The amount of time spent having the experience. The strict adherence to physical laws. Etc.

Once you start answering the question, you see reality for what it is: A definition. A collection of criteria. Arbitrary experiential characteristics.

When an experience matches the criteria, we call it real. When it doesn’t we call it something else.

Each state of consciousness carries with it its own criteria. In a dream, you might be able to float or fly. So in the dream state, “physical laws are flexible” is a test for reality.

Measured using the criteria of the dream state, wakeful experience isn’t real.
Measured using the criteria of the wakeful state, the dream state isn’t real.
The reason people don’t see reality as the arbitrary abstraction that it is, is because they always try to measure all states using the criteria of the wakeful state.

Each state carries with it its own set of characteristics, and when we have an experience whose characteristics match a particular state, we conclude we are “in” that state. But this is the only conclusion we can make. We cannot conclude that the state we are in is “real”.

^^ Oh, I get you Gibran2. And I agree about your definition argument.

The fact that I choose to use it in the inverse is more about my preference for logic over common practice than it is any fundamental disagreement.

You asked what "what about my current experience makes it real?"

I answer: nothing.

I can often prove when I am dreaming, and I have never been able to prove when I am not. I either know I am dreaming, have good reason to suspect that I might be dreaming, or am merely in a situation that can not be proven to not be a dream (what you are calling the reality definition of the waking state).

Thus for me it is simply more rational to define states of unreality and recognize those. Reality turns out to be something that can only be defined by its absence. The term is defined in the context of our talk as "objective validity" which is impossible to prove, but its inverse is easy to prove in the right circumstances.

If you try and limit the term reality to mean "something that really is or exists, as opposed to what is imagined or pretended" this is a circular and irrational definition. Even things that are imagined or pretended exist, to some degree.

So again, we are left with things that are clearly not objectively valid (like daydreams and televised fiction), and things which easily could be not valid, but we are unsure enough to treat them as if they were objectively valid for the time being (waking life, extremely vivid lucid dreams, hyperspace etc.).

Sadly it appears that not every entity one meets in hyperspace has things to share with us. For instance, in my most recent mushroom trip I had an NVC (non-verbal conversation) with two entities and I asked them if they could see what would happen to our world in 2012. The one responded to me that 'it doesn't work that way and we would have no idea where to even look'. Also, these two seemed just as shocked by our ability to communicate as I was so it leads me to believe not every entity from hyperspace knows what's going on with us here on earth (although the one entity told me to 'come out of there [presumably my body] since I looked silly 'holding onto that thing like that' so they clearly had a perspective about me that I do not have). I've also been flat out lied to while in hyperspace (however these lies were to force me to find my own answers so there was nothing malevolent about it).

I've encountered all types of beings. I've seen what looked like classic garden lawn gnomes, right down the pointy red hats, working away on human bodies with hammers almost like they were building them or making repairs. I've seen a cartoony santa claus type elf sit right behind my eyelids and sort of sneak a peak into my world (and when I caught the bugger doing this boy was he surprised, he looked almost terrified!). I've seen a brownie (grey type alien although brownish) appear and disappear right out of absolute blackness. I've seen a million eyed multi-jeweled octopus like creature that winked at me playfully as I drifted by it. I've encountered a gruff drunken giant (only way I can describe him LOL) sitting on a tv, and inside of this tv was an entire reality very much like ours but I could tell it was not ours. I've met my guide Teo, who looks very much like a ghost except bright green and not at all scary. I've met the entire muppet cast of Eureeka's Castle who treated me like I was a long lost friend (very odd, but appropriate to my life experiences with this 1980's television program). There are many other tales too and I'm sure many I've forgotten about too. There apparently is no end to the proverbial jungle one finds out/in there.

I sort of look at things in a Platonist perspective. Our physical world is but a shadow world of the divine realm, or the world of thoughts and ideas. As such, which is more real: the thought, or the thing? Put another way, what came first in our 3D space, the thought or the thing? Take a beloved cartoon character like Mickey Mouse. We think in our cause and effect 3D earth space that a guy, Walt Disney, had a great idea one day and created Mickey Mouse, however psychedelics provide a different way to interpret the creative process. If we assume the realm we enter on psychedelics to be Plato's theorized divine realm of thoughts, and if this realm is as infinate as it seems to be, then every idea already exists in the timeless sea of eternity, including Mickey Mouse. In other words, Micky Mouse was not Walt Disney's creation per se, merely Walt Disney was a channel or way for the concept of Mickey Mouse to become manifest in this world of 3D space, you dig? Mickey might exist independently of Walt Disney in another parallel Earth or an alien system entirely. Indeed perhaps every thought is alive in some strange sense, as in everything god (used loosely here) thinks has a life as god is a divine creator of all things. This theory offers a partial understanding why things like cartoon elves exist as independent, seemingly self-aware entities in hyperspace.

I hope that all made sense and was applicable.

Thanks everybody for your contributions.

TEK, thank you so much for that excellent post about Platonic Realism. I think this is fascinating. It reminds me of the Akashic Records idea.

Ultimately, I believe everything is information. Information generates our universe and maybe even purported hyperspace.

Divine knowledge could also be (transcendent) information that we humans channel or download from a higher source.

I personally think hypnosis might be the best technique to use to channel this higher knowledge. I wish more hypnotists would get involved in this research. Where are the modern day Edgar Cayces? Anybody know?