DMT also commonly induces visions of elves (the so-called "machine elves"). Having tried DMT several times I can't say it's something that ever happened to me personally but lots of people report seeing elves on DMT.
For me, I was hit with a wall of metallic gems that warped into a wormhole that sucked me into the void. My body melted into a pool of crystalline jelly, and then a pair of indescribably massive entities with vortex heads that reached infinitely far into space stuck their hands into my liquified body and started rearranging my internals.
It was interesting. But I can't exactly recommend it because it felt like I stopped breathing and died.
I was before I tried. But I also remember that I didn’t remember that fact when I took it both times. The second time I was more primed for like organic shape.
The first time I saw something what one could call a giant machine elf I guess. Though the thought occurred to me much later. It looked a bit like Galactus from the Marvel comics, but friendly. I stood in the palm of its hand. The second time I saw a jester. I definitely didn’t think about seeing a jester beforehand as I wasn’t really aware that they could be a thing.
My first trip was very meaningful. My second trip was mostly interesting. In part because I kept one eye closed and the other open to see what would happen.
Machine elves as a specific is probably closer to a mass psychosis. Someone named them that at some point, then everybody talks about them, so everybody saw "machine elves" and future people interpret what they see that way because that's what they heard before they tripped.
Really, DMT trips kinda go like an acid trip but you've taken 100x times the dose and died in the process. Reality itself kind of dissolves away and you forget what you are frequently.
In that state, there's a lot going on, with a fair bit of synesthesia and trying to decipher exactly what's happening. Things breath in and out rapidly, but it feels like lifetimes.
Anyway, the "machine elves" aren't really elves... Or machines. Even on sub-breakthrough doses, you start seeing eyes and mouths in the spaces around you, you may even hear voices/singing - IME often a beckoning. Once you break through, those hallucinations have been ramped up and your brain is filling in so many gaps (at this point your eyes will have closed) they come across almost like deities that exist in between time and space. They don't have consistent forms; they speak in tongues / songs that you can sometimes "understand". They tend to be "neutral / neutral", so to speak.
It's profoundly difficult to explain, since language wasn't really designed to capture that state of mind and lacks the adjectives. But someone tried to make something relatable with "machine elves" at some point and it stuck because "yeah, that's weird enough to capture the essence of it".
Some people do take these experiences as more than what they are, though, and act like machine elves are "real" lore or that they are something that actually exists "beyond the veil" or whatever. And now that so many people learn about it well before tripping, they may be seeing more concretely "machine elves". But that's way more... Pedestrian(?) than what I experienced without that bias.
My phone network provider ran some "12 days of Christmas" promotion last year which entailed a spam email trying to hawk me crap I don't need every single day. When I tried to opt-out they told me it would take a month. I emailed the ICO and the network provider's complaints team and miraculously they were able to remove me from the mailing list immediately.
Same, I finally managed to stick with learning standard notation this year after several false starts and I’m kicking myself I didn’t start earlier. There were a few tough moments where it seemed like I’d never get (learning about key signatures, moving past 1st position) but now I’m starting to get comfortable playing up to the 7th position. It’s so nice being able to just buy a big book of Sor or Giuliani or Carcassi studies or even some Bach transcriptions and play them straight out of the book instead of needing to listen to a performance first and then look at the tab.
The way I look at it is I just need to get through the next year or so. I also don't believe AI is going to replace everyone, but I do believe that a lot of "leaders" are going to make cuts. They all read the same blogs and listen to the same podcasts and once one makes a move they seem to tend to follow each other.
Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part but I still don't see AI replacing absolutely everyone. As someone who I'd say tends to be in the upper 20% of performers but not setting the world on fire I'm not too worried about my job completely disappearing but I am worried in the short term about layoffs and chaos when loads of people are trying to find jobs at the same time.
Yes, my previous employer listens to these podcasts. After some random minor disagreement he fired me on a whim, and is now happily adding LLM-generated pasta to his spaghetti clusterf*ck on a daily basis. Throughput baby!
Isn't this exactly Marx's criticism of capitalism through the theory of alienation? Human relationships get mediated and hidden as relationships between commodities and money.
We know how to come up with better alternatives, but as Marx also pointed out, the capitalists won't sit back and idly watch their world crumble. So putting anything else into practice is effectively impossible.
About the only time all the pieces fell into place to even begin to see anything else was Revolutionary Catalonia. However, the USSR quickly waged war with it to ensure its demise, and within no more than a few years it was no more. The capitalists who seized all the capital in the USSR under the guise of pretending to move away capitalism didn't want the people to realize that the USSR was still under capitalism all the same. That would threaten the capitalists who controlled the capital.
As Marx put it: "there is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
As an American, I'm going to need this as a volume, either in terms of Olympic-sized swimming pools or the height of a pile in an [American] football stadium. Maybe I'd accept weight as a quantity of Ford F-150s, but you'd be pushing it.
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