React is a javascript library that helps you bundle bits of interface functionality into little buckets called components. The cool thing about a bucket is that you can put a bucket in a bucket. And a bucket in that bucket! And so on! But what if you could nest buckets one inside the other forever? You'd have a very peculiar kind of bucket, a recursive bucket.
If you allow a component to call itself, you can get buckets in buckets until the call stack overflows. Add a spinning effect and set a limit on the number of nested buckets and here's what you get:
The animation loop of each square is set to have the same exact duration, and yet the speed of spin increases as your eye moves from the outside into the depths. Shouldn't the bigger squares spin faster? After all, their edges have much more distance to cover in that same amount of time. What's going on?
Imagine a moving sidewalk. When you walk on that sidewalk you notice something actually pretty strange: your pace has not changed at all and yet all those slack-jaw luddites who have chosen to walk manually to their gate are conveyed past you like shining boxes of shipped inventory.
Now imagine a second moving sidewalk affixed to the moving carpet of the first moving sidewalk, and you're walking on that second “penthouse" sidewalk only to look up and notice a third moving sidewalk and another above moving, no, sailing into the distance, which rises now— you see it upward, a ziggurat of moving sidewalks. The highest cupolas of this recursive moving sidewalk disappear into the distance, perhaps red-shifted, as they approach light speed becoming completely inaccessible.
That's what the boxes in boxes are like, turning squares one on the other, except you're looking not up an adamantine upward swoosh of sidewalks but down into the many toothed gear of the inset squares.
One thing I've found interesting above all about psychedelics is that they don't make you drunk. When you drink alcohol your vision blurs but you don't see Mosque art and MC Escher prints. That this does happen when you eat magic mushrooms or smoke DMT is an astonishing cosmic accident. Perhaps the kind of neurochemistry required to produce visions of symmetry appears very rarely in the universe. Or maybe it's just as common as the emergence of intelligence anywhere. For my money, I bet them aliens are stoned as hell.
Coming out of the DMT breakthrough experience is like suddenly remembering you're not a crocodile. Imagine a device from the future like the one from minority report or the mood organ that allows you to, say, become a spider for an hour for the purposes of having sex in the arachnid body. What could you take back? Words?
The squares each inside the other spin at increasing speeds in relation to the distance from the greatest transcribable circle to the vanishing point in the center of the turning squares. Could such a mechanism be used to accelerate the outer edges of a physical object to near light speed? Maybe, but each nested level would need its own source of propulsion.
You get a few sailors to march around the capstan of your accelerator's first floor. And then on the second floor you have a second capstan, this one with smaller humans pushing slightly smaller levers. And on the third level, you get children pushing a sort of Fisher-Price capstan. From there you can use increasingly small animals from raccoon to rat, all the way down to the amoeba. If stopped before relativistic speeds are achieved, the tiny stylus spinning at the terminus of the structure could be used to set the clock speed of a powerful computer. Here's a rough simulation of what it would look like:
For the first attempt at dosing smoked DMT, we sprinkled less than the volume of a pencil eraser onto a bowl of weed and used a regular big lighter. In the large photo on the wall, kayakers were borne aloft on florets of white water. The waves flowed within their outlines, distinct against the red and orange hulls, creating a really beautiful tension between the stillness of the image and the visual movement within it. As our bodies welcomed a sensation of warmth and tenderness, we peered into the photo as if into a snow globe.
For the second attempt, this time outside on the porch and without weed, we deposited about the same amount directly onto the metal screen of a slide inserted into the Toker II, a scientific looking bong from the 70s, basically an Erlenmeyer with a rush. Came up with a few things during this experience:
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The tubes, the tubes!
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I needed to assume the eternal yogic position of the sphinx by laying my arms flat on the deck chair and straightening my back like the alien navigator. It became a joke about the Three Stigmata of Joe Rogan whereby you lose your hair, your ears cauliflower, you become thicker, a podcast mic descends to your lips, and so forth. This transformation prepares you to meet the machine elves.
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The smell of DMT is like burning plastic extruded from an alien spinneret. I could imagine an intrepid representative of the Ekumen in a LeGuin novel accidentally getting a faceful of this stuff from the glands of a wasp on some uncontacted planet where the locals use it for an ancient ritual. That or Can-D, perky pat, and the layouts.
The last method was a massive increase in effectiveness. We heated a wax banger by blow torch and dropped in tiny spoonfuls of orange DMT sand which immediately vaporized leaving very little residue, shocking the nose with that alien fragrance.
At this dose and method, the visuals became much more dramatic than eyes in wood grain and paisley in the pores of the face—the pareidolia we normally associate with psychedelics. Instead of warping or bending, DMT lathed the objects making up the field of vision into pure physical clockwork so clear it seemed a work light had been trained upon them. I remember the bark of branches and trees hardening into solder surrounding and fitting together tiles of repeating foliage, mirrored across the vertical axis of the back yard into the symmetry of a face that seemed curious to have found me there.
On the second and last attempt, I spooned a slightly larger chunk into the heated banger. I immediately felt that I didn't need any more of what I had taken. (That feeling follows me to this day—almost two years out from this experience, I haven't had the courage to touch the stuff again.)
The visual field immediately twisted into hyperbolic geometry, kind of like Escher's Escape Velocity III or whatever. Then a mesh-surfaced darkness enveloped me as if a BDSM vacuum hood in the style of a Tool album cover were placed over my head and leather filled my throat like a substance I could breathe.
Ego death is psychedelic blackout. You completely forget you took a drug, completely forget that life had ever been any other way. In this case, it felt like biological transformation into a non-human life form. The boundaries between the inside and the outside of the body completely disappeared: what would it feel like to be physically embodied as a mycelium or network of rhizomatic grass? And for that living substrate to take on the aesthetics of crocodile flesh and space temples?
The experience lasts about 8-15 minutes, but the time dilation is absolutely bonkers. You look at your phone in horror, astonished that only 10 minutes have passed and not entire lifetimes. My best guess is that psychedelics create time dilation by exaggerating perceptions of the eternal that are already very recognizable to us in sober life.
One eternity is certainly vertical, the opposite of duration. This is the eternity of the snow globe, the musical chord, and the first kiss. It's the sudden breath but not what came after. Indivisible unit of time and out of time and the leaves in the basin and all that. What's above and what's below on the music staff.
Another eternity is loopy. Anyone who has looked at a tree from trunk to leaf tip has noticed that trees could repeat forever. So can escalators, music, and whole moods. This is the eternity of orbits, frequencies, vibrations (important for adding color to the vertical eternity just mentioned). Not to mention computers, spiderwebs and, of course, the psychedelic experience. Even cauliflower suggests a visual rhythm that lasts.
But the temporal is not the only flavor of eternity. Like savory or sweet, it's a big category. You've also got the taste of the spatial. Do we live in a bounded or unbounded universe? If I continue in one direction infinitely do I eventually curve back to where I started—and if so does that mean that I can finally see the back of my head if only I squint very hard?
Or is the universe a big old saddle shape with hyperbolic geometry a la DMT?
Apparently you can test this by drawing immense triangles among distant points of the microwave background. If we're in space that is not flat (but potentially still eternal, why not) then you'd expect the angles of the triangle not to add up to 180 degrees in every case. But apparently when they do this measurement, they find that the triangles are perfectly Euclidean.
Pattern recognition is a search for symmetry. The hunt for patterns underlies cognition (and has developed in many non-human things). Just like everything in the sea eventually become a crab, things get smart (for a time). By intensifying pattern recognition, psychedelic drugs grip the levers of cognition. And part of the beauty of the psychedelic visual experience is not the recognition of one symmetry but the constant emergence of new symmetries.
I like to call it the windshield wiper effect. If you've ever been sitting at a red light in the rain (and if you're American a huge chunk of your earthly existence will pass in the car, that confession box of anger) you sometimes notice a piece of great magic: your windshield wiper and the rear window wiper of the car in front of you happen to hit the left side of their respective windows at about 7 on the clock face and at what appears to be the same instant.
This kicks off a great couple wipes during which the blades are in perfect sync, like two old style metronomes set flicking at the same instant. But this beautiful symmetry slowly collapses as the frequencies of the wipes fall out of sync. Like two musical notes in a chord slowly bent apart into dissonance. Sometimes just a tiny grain of difference is enough:
An uncertain stage begins during which the blades are kind of chasing each other but either lapping or falling behind until stranger symmetries begin to emerge: they may end up pointing at opposite angles, at say 9 and 3 o clock. And then they may meet perfectly upright, at midnight. Eventually the wipers begin to get closer and closer together until, if lucky, on one fateful wipe they synchronize once again to begin another cycle with slightly different starting parameters, and we're back at the beginning of the bar or song.
Psychedelic visuals follow a similar logic of symmetric chaos under which symmetries arise and dissolve -- but on those moments when the "wipers" resynchronize you achieve moments of ecstatic wonder. Even if it has nothing to do with a truth "out there," that feeling resembles the exhilaration of pure recognition, QED, the nous, intuition etc. Windshield wiper effects also appear prominently in different kinds of polyrhythmic music. In metal it's known as heaviness.