Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Let me tell you where I’m coming from. I was reading Scott McGreal’s blog, which has some good articles about so-called DMT entities, and mentions how they seem so real that users of the drug insist they’ve made contact with actual superhuman beings and not just psychedelic hallucinations. You know, the usual Terence McKenna stuff. But in one of them he mentions a paper by Marko Rodriguez called "A Methodology For Studying Various Interpretations" of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine-Induced Alternate Reality, which suggested among other things that you could prove DMT entities were real by taking the drug and then asking the entities you meet to factor large numbers which you were sure you couldn’t factor yourself. So to that end, could you do me a big favor and tell me the factors of 1,522,605,027,922,533,360,535,618,378,132,637,429,718,068,114,961,380,688,657,908,494,580,122,963,258,952,897,654,000,350,692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat. The sea turned hot and geysers shot up from the floor below. First one of wine, then one of brine, then one more yet of turpentine, and we three stared at the show. “I was afraid you might say that. Is there anyone more, uh, verbal here whom I could talk to?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person. At the sound of that, the big green bat started rotating in place. On its other side was a bigger greener bat, with an ancient, wrinkled face. “Not splitting numbers / but joining Mind,” it said. "Not facts or factors or factories / but contact with the abstract attractor that brings you back to me / Not to seek / but to find”. “I don’t follow,” I said. “Not to follow / but to jump forth into the deep / Not to grind or to bind or to seek only to find / but to accept / Not to be kept / but to wake from sleep”.

The bat continued to rotate, until the first side I had seen swung back into view.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to hazard a guess as to what you’re talking about, and you tell me if I’m right. You’re saying that, like, all my Western logocentric stuff about factoring numbers in order to find out the objective truth about this realm is missing the point, and I should be trying to do some kind of spiritual thing involving radical acceptance and enlightenment and such. Is that kind of on the mark?” “Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat....

I vomited, hard, all over my bed. It happens every time I take DMT, sooner or later; I’ve got a weak stomach and I’m not sure the stuff I get is totally pure. I crawled just far enough out of bed to flip a light switch on, then collapsed back onto the soiled covers. The clock on the wall read 11:55, meaning I’d been out about an hour and a half. I briefly considered taking some more ayahuasca and heading right back there, but the chances of getting anything more out of the big green bat, let alone the cactus person, seemed small enough to fit in a thimble. I drifted off into a fitful sleep.

Behind the veil, across the infinite abyss, beyond the ice, beyond death, the dew rose from the soaked ground and coalesced into a great drop, which floated up into an oily sky and became a watery sun. The cactus person was counting on his spines.

“Hey,” the cactus person finally said, “just out of curiosity, was the answer 37,975,227,936,943,673,922,808,872,755,445,627,854,565,536,638,199 times 40,094,690,950,920,881,030, 683,735,292,761,468,389,214,899,724,061?”

“Yeah,” said the big green bat. “That’s what I got too.”

#weekendreading