(urth) Claw = Fang? off-topic-ish

[David Stockhoff]

On 11/26/2012 11:45 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 11/26/2012 3:40 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>> I've never heard of this test -- one prophet was asked to put a hot coal
>> into his mouth which then became The Word Of The Lord for him to speak.
>> That's about it.
>
> Isaiah 6: "6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in 
> his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he 
> touched my mouth and said, 'See, this has touched your lips; your 
> guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.' "
>
>
Speaking of visions (sort of), I encountered the following description 
of a "prototypical" hallucinatory (DMT) experience in Sam Harris' 
response to the new book "Proof of Heaven" and found some parts to be 
quite familiar (note the date):

Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth,
a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that
flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the
sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience.
There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of
wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien
nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of
human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the
howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is
the Aeon.

The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play
with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there—the
tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they
the children destined to be father to the man? One has the
impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the
portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the
synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as
ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the
magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an
epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which
is stranger than we /can/ suppose. Here is the mystery, alive,
unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it
fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift
of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as
colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become
toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of
emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries
revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon
another in the small world we have gone so ill in.

This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from
lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing
through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one
of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in
the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby
dimension—frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to
imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send
fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to
report on what they find. (Terence McKenna, /Food of the Gods/,
1992, pp. 258-259.)


Can anyone guess which four or five words in particular caused me to 
post this?

If nothing else, this description suggests that mystical visions 
experienced by different people are more the same than they are 
different. This commonality might even explain much of the deep 
attraction some readers feel to the Solar cycle and Severian's account 
in particular.