The Machine Elves

SOURCE 1, McKenna on machine elves: "When you break through on DMT you are in the presence of the other. It is there. It's waiting. These entities are not formed like the usual objects of the visual world. They are more like the experience of self. They are, apparently, aware of you. They have an agenda. They want to communicate. They are giving you objects made of language, made of meaning. They are showing you that meaning can be made visible." SOURCE 2, Strassman's DMT studies (DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001): "Many of our volunteers reported encounters with 'beings' or 'entities.' These beings often communicated specific information to subjects, information that subjects experienced as accurate and meaningful. The entities appeared to be aware of the subject's presence and interested in the subject's state of mind." SOURCE 3, The research literature (Davis et al., 2020 Johns Hopkins survey, J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020): "Entity encounters were reported by the majority of survey respondents. Entities were described as autonomous, as having their own agenda, and as communicating information that subjects experienced as novel. Cross-cultural consistency in entity descriptions suggests the phenomenon is not solely a product of cultural expectation." SOURCE 4, The neurological framework (Nichols, 2016): "Human beings show hyperactivated tendency toward agent detection, the attribution of intentionality to complex patterns, as an evolutionary adaptation. Psychedelics, by disrupting the default mode network's filtering function, may allow this agent-detection tendency to operate without its normal inhibitory constraints." SOURCE 5, The limitation: The agent-detection framework cannot account for cases in which entities appear to convey accurate information that subjects did not bring into the session. Several of Strassman's subjects reported entities conveying specific details about their lives that were subsequently verified.