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

[David Stockhoff]

What? no takers? I thought it was an easy question.

The phrase that caught my eye was this:

SELF-TRANSFORMING MACHINE ELVES OF HYPERSPACE

!!!!

On 11/27/2012 9:21 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
> 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.
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>