Fractal Elves & Collective Unfolding

"Fractal Elves" are entities perceived by users of psychedelic drugs like DMT with references found in cultures ranging from shamanic traditions of Native Americans to indigenous Australians & African tribes. DMT or N,N-DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a substituted tryptamine that occurs in many plants and animals and which is both a derivative and a structural analogue of tryptamine. It is used as a recreational psychedelic drug and prepared by various cultures for ritual purposes as an entheogen.

Overview

References to such encounters can be found in many cultures ranging from shamanic traditions of Native Americans to indigenous Australians and African tribes, as well as among Western users of these substances.

At about minute one or two of a DMT trip, according to McKenna, one may burst through a chrysanthemum-like mandala, and find: There is a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side, saying "How wonderful that you're here! You come so rarely! We're so delighted to see you!" They're like jewelled self-dribbling basketballs and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in a high-speed mode where you're being presented with thousands of details per second and you can't get ahold on [them ...] and these things are saying "Don't give in to astonishment", which is exactly what you want to do. You want to go nuts with how crazy this is, and they say "Don't do that. Pay attention to what we're doing".

What they are doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at this! Look at this!" and as your attention goes towards these objects you realise that what you are being shown is impossible. It is not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it is impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Fabergé eggs, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what is happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying "Do what we are doing" and they are very insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this. They say "That's it! That's it! Keep doing it!". We're now at minute 4.5 [of the trip] and you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There is a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called "meaning". After a minute or so of this, the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they begin to physically move away from you. Usually, their final shot is that they wave goodbye and say "Deja vu! Deja vu!". This concept may be related to a tendency for the brain to imagine living entities during certain altered states. The best example of this is the extremely common feeling of a living presence during sleep paralysis (which has been theorized as the origin of the succubus, as well as a common theme in many alien abduction stories). However, Terence McKenna and Dr Rick Strassman have both asserted the sense of the reality of the experience is distinct from ordinary hallucinatory experiences, leading both researchers to speculate that perhaps the physics of many worlds is involved. Jacques Vallee has proposed that the entities met may be of an interdimensional nature in his interdimensional hypothesis.

James Kent has put forth a different explanation for machine elves. Kent postulates that the DMT landscape is simply disrupting or "editing" our processing of visual information and causing a chaotic interpretation of it inspired by hyperactive phosphene activity. The brain may fill in the blanks and since we all have an affinity for anthropomorphic things, a humanoid entity may appear out of all this chaos. Our "imaginal workplace" will take the center stage in brain activity, allowing internal data to be interpreted as external stimuli.

When reflecting upon his experiences Aldous Huxley suggested that there was something, which he called Mind at Large, which was filtered by the ordinary functioning of the human brain to produce ordinary experience.

Reported encounters with external entities

Entities perceived during DMT inebriation have been represented in diverse forms of psychedelic art. The term machine elf was coined by entheobotanist Terence McKenna for the entities he encountered in DMT "hyperspace", also using terms like fractal elves or self-transforming machine elves. McKenna first encountered the "machine elves" after smoking DMT in Berkeley in 1965. His subsequent speculations regarding the hyperdimensional space in which they were encountered have inspired a great many artists and musicians, and the meaning of DMT entities has been a subject of considerable debate among participants in a networked cultural underground, enthused by McKenna's effusive accounts of DMT hyperspace. Cliff Pickover has also written about the "machine elf" experience, in the book Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves, while Rick Strassman notes many similarities between self-reports of his DMT study participants' encounters with these "entities", and mythological descriptions of figures such as Chayot Ha Kodesh in ancient religions, including both angels and demons. Strassman also argues for similarity in his study participants' descriptions of mechanized wheels, gears and machinery in these encounters, with those described in visions of encounters with the Living Creatures and Ophanim of the Hebrew Bible, noting they may stem from a common neuropsychopharmacological experience.

Strassman argues that the more positive of the "external entities" encountered in DMT experiences should be understood as analogous to certain forms of angels:

The medieval Jewish philosophers whom I rely upon for understanding the Hebrew Bible text and its concept of prophecy portray angels as God's intermediaries. That is, they perform a certain function for God. Within the context of my DMT research, I believe that the beings that volunteers see could be conceived of as angelic - that is, previously invisible, incorporeal spiritual forces that are engarbed or enclothed in a particular form — determined by the psychological and spiritual development of the volunteers — bringing a particular message or experience to that volunteer.

However, Strassman's experimental participants also note that some other entities can subjectively resemble creatures more like insects and aliens. As a result, Strassman writes these experiences among his experimental participants "also left me feeling confused and concerned about where the spirit molecule was leading us. It was at this point that I began to wonder if I was getting in over my head with this research."

Hallucinations of strange creatures had been reported by Stephen Szara in a 1958 study in psychotic patients, in which he described how one of his subjects under the influence of DMT had experienced "strange creatures, dwarves or something" at the beginning of a DMT trip.

Other researchers of the entities seemingly encountered by DMT users describe them as "entities" or "beings" in humanoid as well as animal form, with descriptions of "little people" being common (non-human gnomes, elves, imps, etc.). Strassman and others have speculated that this form of hallucination may be the cause of alien abduction and extraterrestrial encounter experiences, which may occur through endogenously occurring DMT.

Likening them to descriptions of rattling and chattering auditory phenomenon described in encounters with the Hayyoth in the Book of Ezekiel, Rick Strassman notes that participants in his studies, when reporting encounters with the alleged entities, have also described loud auditory hallucinations, such as one subject reporting typically "the elves laughing or talking at high volume, chattering, twittering".

There is no personal enlightenment. This is not a race that someone will win someday, leaving the rest of us behind. We are all in this together.

The more we awaken, the more we realize we are inseparable from the vast tapestry of life. There is no ‘me’ to get enlightened. We are all different expressions of the same source. I call this source the Goddess; you might call it a different name.

We are all threads in an incomprehensibly vast tapestry that stretches through time and space, stretching so vast that even the concepts of time and space cease to exist. This journey is not all up to you. When you bring a sticky pattern into yogic awareness, into practice, you do it for us all; and when you forget, someone else somewhere remembers, for us all.

Your challenges and awakenings, although experienced so intimately through the personal, are part of a collective unfolding.

― Chameli Ardagh