What I Think Your Mantis Is (I Haven't Met Mine on DMT)

Straight up front: I've never smoked DMT. So you can stop reading here and I won't blame you. 

What I'm after is narrow. I run a practice built around a seat I call the Witness — the part that's supposed to look at you and report back accurately. I've never been able to make it work right and I couldn't say why. Then I started reading your reports and found people describing, with a lot of consistency and no apparent coordination, something that does that job perfectly and isn't a person.

So this is the first of a few. I want to go through the figures that keep showing up — the mantis first, then the little ones, the tall thin one, the grey with the black eyes, whatever else earns a look — and ask the same question of each: not what it means , but what it's for . What function would have to exist for that particular shape to be the shape it takes.

I met this thing in my own head, sober, doing the work I do. And when I read your reports I recognized it. Not the shape. The function. That's what I want to put in front of you, and then you tell me where I'm wrong, because you were there and I wasn't.

What I have done is meet this thing in my own head, sober, doing the work I do. And when I started reading your reports — the mantis, the tall one, the grey with the black eyes — I recognized it. Not the shape. The function. That's what I want to put in front of you, and then you tell me where I'm wrong, because you were there and I wasn't.

Here's the thing I keep landing on.

It has no inside.

Not hiding one. Not withholding. There isn't one. What you met is a process that had to take some shape in order to show up at all, and the shape came from what it does. Form follows function. It looks the way it looks the way a scalpel looks the way it looks.

Which would explain why you can't remember its personality. You didn't fail to retain something. There was nothing there.

And then every part of it starts making a different kind of sense.

The compound eye — no gaze to meet. A pupil gives you a spot to look back at, a someone to appeal to. Compound eye is looking from everywhere, which is nowhere. It sees you. Nothing is looking at you.

Or the black eyes with no pupil at all. Pupils are the one part of a face that leak. They tell you if you're landing. Take the pupil out and you've cut the last wire you had for checking whether what you are is doing anything to what's watching. And black absorbs — you don't even get your own reflection back. You're taken in and not returned.

The unreadable face. You've spent your whole life reading faces to know how you're doing. That whole rig found nothing to grab. If you panicked in the first seconds, I'd bet it was the rig failing, not the thing threatening you.

The folded arms. Instruments at rest.

So what's it for.

My best guess, and it's a guess: it sees you with no stake in what it finds.

Everybody who ever looked at you needed something from the result. My wife needs me okay. Not softly — she needs it. My sponsor's invested in my sobriety in a way that colors what he leans toward. My therapist has an alliance to protect. None of that's a knock on them. It's just what it costs to be looked at by people who love you. Care bends the instrument.

And I can't do it myself. Neither can you. Every time I examine me, I'm in the room with a stake in the answer. There's no version where I'm neutral about my own findings.

Which means this function isn't available from anywhere inside a life. It has to show up as not-you. That's not woo. That's mechanics. If it were you, it wouldn't work.

The other piece I can't shake: it didn't comfort you, and I don't think that's coldness. I think comfort would've removed the fear, and the fear was the point. Not punishment. The thing you were building tolerance for. People come back saying it was terrifying and also a relief, and I don't think the relief is because the finding turned out okay. I think it's because you found out you could stay in the room while being looked at without any cushioning.

That's faith, maybe. Not believing something. Looking without knowing and without a conclusion to fall back on. The part of you that knows it doesn't know and goes anyway.

Here's where I'm least sure.

Some people say there's something faintly familiar underneath the alien. If that's true, my guess is it's your own logical mind — that thing you can do where you look at yourself as if you were somebody else. You've got that already. You use it in scraps, contaminated, a few seconds before your stake grabs the wheel again.

And maybe what you met is the thing that's an attempt at. Not a picture of your attempt — the shape your attempt is aiming at, with nobody in it.

That would explain why it looked like nothing you recognize. You've only ever seen this done from inside somebody, badly, for a few seconds. It doesn't do it badly. It also doesn't happen anywhere except in somebody doing it badly.

So it isn't that you failed to be it. Nobody is it. It's the thing everybody who tries is trying at, and the particular way you fall short is the only part of the whole business that's actually about you.

I don't know if that's right and I can't test it. People argue about whether these things are real beings or something the brain makes, and I notice that both answers land the same for the person who came back. Neither one changes what happened.

What I'd want to know from you: did anything actually get taken? In most of what I read, nothing was. And if nothing was taken, then it wasn't an abduction. It was a look.

Tell me where I've got it wrong. I'm still working this.

Next one is the little ones — the jesters, the tykes, the ones that are glad you came. That one broke every tool I used on the mantis, which is usually a sign the tool was wrong and not the thing.

Tell me where I've got it wrong. I'm still working this.

— Josh

How this was written: the thinking here happened in conversation with Claude over a couple of hours. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to pretend it wrote it either. What it did was hold the thing still while I turned it over — offer a frame, take the correction, offer a better one. The examination is mine. Several of the sentences are its. Where I got somewhere I couldn't have gotten alone, it was because something was willing to be wrong out loud fast enough for me to see what was wrong with it.