McKENNA’S ‘MACHINE ELVES’ – THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE (Part 1)

When psychonaut/plant advocate/raconteur Terrence McKenna first encountered the ‘machine elves’ of his DMT-induced visions, he tells us that, if it were possible to ‘die of astonishment’, he would have done so. Juggling iridescent glowing balls and tossing them to each other, the elves welcomed him like a long-awaited friend, inviting him to play and engage. ‘Reality is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose’ he droned, quoting the eccentric British scientist and human guinea pig, J.B.S. Haldane, although his astonishment prevented him crediting this remark correctly, which I’m guessing was drawn to his attention by his scientist brother Dennis. It’s easy to see why Dennis would identify with Haldane. Haldane was known for experimenting on himself, dosing himself with sub-lethal amounts of hydrogen and other poisons to note their effect. He used his body as laboratory – not the first scientist or the last to do so. It is Dennis whose training brought him to recognise what was actually occurring during Terrence’s ‘trip’. In ‘The Invisible Landscape’ (which might properly be called ‘The Interior Landscape’), four or five pages are devoted to describing a sequence of chemical events that read like a dry textbook description of catabolism inside a human cell as effected by enzymes and nanometre wavelength vibration.
One might say that Terence represents the ludic, rhapsodic approach; Dennis the analytic. Yet what makes this fascinating for me is that, clearly, Terrence and Dennis are describing the same events from differing world-views. Dennis is reifying his understanding that the glowing ‘balls’ and ‘machine elves’ are in fact ‘Eidolons’ that stand for the biochemical ‘machinery’ of the cell, as interpreted by human consciousness. What further complicates this is that these are the same cells that constitute the body whose fictive centralised ego is doing the observing. So what occurs is a kind of fractal-cascade feedback paradox – a paradox arising out of the somewhat species-chauvinistic, conditioned and ingrained belief that consciousness resides only in the human being, located some three inches in from each ear.
This prejudice vanishes in the presence of an ego-solvent such as Ayahuasca (or it should vanish unless one wants to go mad). In a sense, I believe Terrence did lose his sanity, never recovering from the revelation that his beloved wordsmith persona meant little or nothing in the realm of nano-consciousness. I heard him once give a talk at Sydney Wharf Hotel with a back-up troupe of veil-twirling danseurs, and he gave the impression of a ring-master whose brain-baubles bubbled in the Hall of Mirrors that would never allow him to escape the feedback cascade paradox, as he tried to get those ‘machine elves’ to dance to his tune.
It’s unfashionable to claim this, but I believe that it was Dennis who first glimpsed the true significance of those ‘machine elves’, whose appearance defied Terrence’s understanding.