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The case against Elves

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VisualDistortion

VisualDistortion

Rising Star
I thought this was a very interesting read. Basically a study on the archetypes that we visualize while on DMT, why our brain creates those archetypes, and the character of those archetypes.

The Case Against DMT Elves : James Kent

Tripzine.com is dedicated to the exploration of psychedelic and visionary drug subculture. Formerly Trip Magazine, Formerly TRP: The Resonance Project, Formerly Psychedelic Illuminations
www.tripzine.com

Enjoy
 
The experience of non-physical space and non-physical beings validates itself, what's there to argue about..?. Science freaks get swept up in their categories, needing a 'proof' beyond the subjective.

Call it what you will - Jungian Archetype, elf, snake, alien ufo - fracture it to bits with names, but the waking state, run by fracturing ego, thinks it has to validate totality of being, with words !> Just try to 'wordify' a dream !

The meaning of Archetype is powerful .. ! They are a numinous, super-profound, ego-running facets of your collective unconscious. Archetypes might even 'inform' the ego.. Angels and guardians, tricksters and manipulators of your conscious mind are archetypes, I agree. But it doesn't end there ... with a word and definition.
 
who knows maybe they all are the same in a sense but they shapeshift to whatever is most weird/or can be noticed to us

I like how terrance said it takes a million elves to make up a personality.. haha
 
it seems incredibly silly to me that someone who has taken DMT several times as he said he has...would still have the notion of "it is this, it isn't this" everything is everything! that seems to be a prominent message of the experience.

I think it's hilarious that after pages of his writing he ended with:
"The only thing I can say for certain is that it is different every time."
...because that seems to be all you can say for certain about it!

"and people tend to "editorialize" the content of their psychedelic experiences, or they create a narrative filled with concrete objects and entities in order to compress the experience into language, meaning, and memory."
the answer is right there! I wonder if he saw it when he wrote it. compressing the experience into language/meaning..... isn't that the root of shamanism? isn't that what mckenna's main theory about tryptamines is? a source of linguistic inspiration.
 
People put things into objective terms so we can create patterns. This is what religion is for, it allows us to rationalize the unexplainable. If you gave us something without pattern we could create a pattern even though it indisputably had none. Using this synthesized "patterned" we could now rationalized the un-rationalizable.
 
Wow, what a night I have had. I look at every thing from the point of view that life is one giant pardox now. I swaer I am gonna go insane. I don't even know what is going on with life. I am definately not journeying with my ally anymore but I feel like these thought patterns will shatter me into oblivion.
 
the best thing you can do VD is relax...and everything happens in stages..and all you have to do is hold on..just like a spice experience..and as long as you dont freak out..nothing bad happens..the world is a crazy place..but its no place to go crazy! :)
 
Swim tends to agree with the author. He has never felt the elves to be 'real'... and he also suspects that what he sees is very different to what many on here see, because he has deliberately not read anything about the experience so as to not influence his visions.

He personally believes that what he is being shown is manifested by his own mind... a beautiful lightshow by aspects of his own Jungian shadow... architypes... the animal psyche made visual. He loves how cheeky, sacred, loving, enticing and sexual his elves are... they are often 'primitive' in character. But he has an open mind and it does feel like a profoundly spiritual experience and so he doesn't care whether this is what they really are or not, or whether they are real or not, because he knows that they have no control over him once his time in hyperspace is over. Perhaps he is just worshipping his own mind... but who cares if he is? :)
 
The thing that really gets me is that people from all walks of like, all parts of the world, find they seem to experience very similar things on DMT -- Elves, jokers, carnivals, angels, demons...

If it were ONLY mental imaging wouldn't these relate more with the culture in which the person has lived?
 
Well, it could be that people on here are influencing each other, and through the stuff they read... or that archetypes within our genetic memory are being summoned... SWIM's elves no longer fit into any existing category, they're the weirdest morphing creatures he's ever seen!
 
Jorkest said:
the best thing you can do VD is relax...and everything happens in stages..and all you have to do is hold on..just like a spice experience..and as long as you dont freak out..nothing bad happens..the world is a crazy place..but its no place to go crazy! :)
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Yeah, I was able to finally relax last night after awhile. I wasn't gonna freak out or anything, but I was getting caught in series' of mental loops and what have you. That was intense. I though many thoughts last night. Good thing I had my trusty pen and paper around.
 
also.. what about shamans going into the experience with the will to find a certain plant to heal somebody who they have no idea of what kind of sickness has taken them. whatever they are.. but they do actually seem to show one stuff that one doesn't already know. they have shown me a LOT of stuff which I didn't know. I myself for example have never had anything much to do with chakras and the different colors of chakras and such. But all this has been shown to me in the experience. Also quantum mechanics steers more and more into the direction that parallel dimensions or interwoven dimensions exist at the same time and the same spot, just on different frequencies. Kind of like a number lock which only unlocks when the bolts have just the right position.

why do people always try to explain.. can't they just use it as it is?
 
You know lorax, that was kinda one of my first thoughts when I read the article. The author picked apart the entire DMT experience to say that elves and such are not real and they are not beings from another dimension. Well of course they're not. But they can be useful tools to withdraw thoughts from your sub consious and bring them to light.
 
The brain is interconnected. Some areas are more involved in certain processes but its all interconnected. DMT is most likely involved in sensory perception. I think it doesn't make sense that certain brain areas are involved in conjuring up images of elves or demons. Its called the imagination. Plain and simple.

I don't find it surprising at all that people from totally different back rounds see similar things on dmt. First of all you don't know exactly what someone is seeing no matter how they try to describe it. It would be like trying to describe a color to a blind person. Second the imagination is a powerful thing and you can conjure up all kinds of imagines in your minds eye. Psychedelic drugs can enhance the imagination making one see things they normally wouldn't think of. Finally all cultures have magical creatures in their stories and myths. Who cares if we call it a dmt elf and someone else cause it an animal spirit? It makes no difference. Its all part of our vast human imagination. Which is also interconnected via art culture music etc.

About the shamans and their knowledge on healing. All they are really doing is using the experience as a way of diagnosing and healing illness. For example when one is infected with parasites a shaman tends to be able to pick up on that. Its nothing magical its just how he has trained himself to look for an illness via the use of mind enhancing drugs. They help him/her become more perceptive. All different cultures have different ways of diagnosing illness. Just because shamans happen to be tripping when they do it doesn't make it any more special.
 
Sorry for all the posts, I have had alot of things on my mind, and here is the only place i can get it out.


By conceiving the brain as a receiver of information, one can accomodate the biological model of changing brain function with a chemical. At the same time, it allows for the possibility that what is being received, while not usually perceptible, is consistently and verifiably existent for a LARGE number of individuals. It may indeed reflect a stable, parallel planes of reality.

If we are to think of them all as inwardly generated hallucinations, therefore, the we are more or less obliged to conclude, as some academics do, that evolution has hard-wired the bizzare images,sensations, and information that they contain inot the modern human nervous system. Right here we collide with evolutonary paradoxes. Namely the difficulty of seeing why natural selection should have favored the survival of such a large amount of useless information, and how it could possibly manifest itself in the form of universal images, ranging from therianthropes, to aliens and angels to demons, to elves and fairies, in settings as diverse as a crazy carnival mixed with UFOs.
 
Actually, i believe what the traits evolution has conserved in humans are more related to a very developed capacity of pattern recognition in the brain, and especially in differentiating between faces. Given the prominence of facial recognition hardware in the brain, it is perhaps inevitable that the archetypes reported resemble faces. We are also hardwired [so to say] for color vision and spotting predators. The themes are consistent with reports.

Just after re-entry, however, they sure seem a lot like elves and aliens. One is compelled to wonder at the ephemeral existence of apparently imaginary entities. It is truly amazing, no matter where the fabulous contact originates. "Explaining away" a concept won't make it stop happening:twisted:
 
It is a fascinating phenomenon but also a potentially dangerous phenomenon. I mean in terms of paranoia and bad trips and psychosis or long lasting delusions (of grandeur etc). Aliens can tell you to jump off a bridge or tell you that they love you and want to help you.

By conceiving the brain as a receiver of information, one can accomodate the biological model of changing brain function with a chemical. At the same time, it allows for the possibility that what is being received, while not usually perceptible, is consistently and verifiably existent for a LARGE number of individuals. It may indeed reflect a stable, parallel planes of reality.
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The brain is not only a receiver of information but a processor of information. This processing capability is very important especially when one wants to understand what is happening inside the brain/body when one takes a psychedelic substance like dmt.

If we are to think of them all as inwardly generated hallucinations, therefore, the we are more or less obliged to conclude, as some academics do, that evolution has hard-wired the bizzare images,sensations, and information that they contain inot the modern human nervous system. Right here we collide with evolutonary paradoxes. Namely the difficulty of seeing why natural selection should have favored the survival of such a large amount of useless information, and how it could possibly manifest itself in the form of universal images, ranging from therianthropes, to aliens and angels to demons, to elves and fairies, in settings as diverse as a crazy carnival mixed with UFOs.
Click to expand...

Humans evolved the ability to have a vast imagination. That doesn't mean the imagination is always an advantage but in a number of instances it must have been otherwise we would have never evolved such intellectual capabilities. Because a human can imagine magical creatures doesn't really seem like an evolutionary advantage (because its not) but having the ability to imagine is. You see? There is no paradox.
 
All SWIM knows is that when he meets the elves...they always seem so comfortable in that realm...like they have been there a very very long time...and to him they are real entities living in another dimension/reality..this is because he is not aware of them..unless while on DMT..

so he believes they do live in an independent reality..from himself..it doesnt really matter if its a real dimensional space or one created upon breakthrough..this is because its STILL a different dimension than we are normally aware of..it may be another dimension of thought...or another dimension of space..or time..or whatever..

but we still dont understand how the universe is really put together..maybe dimensions are thought controlled...maybe they are frequency controlled...which to me are exactly the same thing..

the point is..since we dont truly understand how or if separate dimensions/realities exist..yet we can still put our consciousness into them...they are real on some level...because right now..all that i am aware of is that i am aware of being in some reality...what makes this place our consciousness resides(normal world) any more of a 'real' dimension than the one visited while on the dust?
 
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