Attention and Awareness on 5-MeO-DMT

This is both an extremely difficult/subtle and extremely important aspect of the experience to document: I think that 5-MeO-DMT shapes one’s experience by instantiating involuntary, high-frequency, flashes of awareness, and that this has downstream effects on the content and shape of the objects of attention.

To a first approximation, I think that one of the key ways in which 5-MeO-DMT affects the quality of one’s experience is the result of a different relationship between attention and awareness.

On 5-MeO-DMT the “objects of attention” (or mind objects, more broadly) have a tendency of either being very calming at a visceral level or present with a sort of existential urgency that highlights an asymmetrical facet of the state. In other words, a lot of the experience is what you get when you are trying to balance a very relaxing, calming, centering vibe together with a restless, pattern-seeking, curious mindset. More so, the state itself has a tendency to allow the coexistence of opposites. It is a state that expresses (to me!) a sort of okay-ness about reality and the universe and yet has lucidity and precision. The co-existence between feelings of eternity and feelings of time. More on this later.

In many cases, the experience is described as allowing trauma release by providing a mixture of (a) intense memory recall and sensory clarity, (b) acceptance and equanimity, (c) forgiveness and love, and to an extent (d) dissociation and anesthesia.

One way of explaining some of the aspects of the experience (indeed as a kind of algorithmic reduction) is the idea that 5-MeO-DMT works primarily by increasing the power, frequency, and breadth of awareness. Here is what could be going on (I’m curious if this resonates with anyone). What makes 5-MeO-DMT so “pure” in a way is that it ultimately lets you, up to a dose, do whatever you want with your attention. What it will do, however, is apply intense signal processing effects to what you’re attending to. In particular, it’s as if the “field of awareness” that “receives the echo of the moment of attention” can become so drastically amplified so as to cause a shift in the center of mass of the experience (or “center of attentional mass” if you will).

In other words: when you fixate on something (any aspect of your experience, like its color or a particular shape) notice how it contracts and expands around it, both reifying it (intensifying and stabilizing it briefly) and then dissolving it (into the field of awareness to which the waves travel). On 5-MeO-DMT it is as if the “echoes in awareness” are stronger. It’s not necessarily that the signal, whether externally or internally generated, gets stronger, but that the response the field has is stronger. You are still throwing little peebles into the pond, but now it responds by making a tsunami (could be a deeply peaceful underwater one, but a tsunami nonetheless).

In a way, on higher doses, I think a lot of the feedback could be “awareness responding to awareness”. That is, each big blast of awareness is, in a way, trying to make sense of the previous one. The information needs to be passed on from one to the other, like an Olympic fire seeking its final destination. Each flash of awareness has some chance of encoding the previous one, and if done intelligently, one can retain information about far-off (a few seconds to minutes) moments of experience by finding stable attractors where the information gets passed on quite reliably from one wave of awareness to the next. Of course then you deal with “phases”, as you cool off, and need to use smaller and smaller flashes of awareness. I think that the concept of “qualia tethers” can be helpful here, which is the idea of finding sequences of experiences where each can remember and make sense of the next, even if the ends of the chain are mutually unintelligible. This way, at least there is a path and a map from here to there. Similarly, you can imagine each attractor along the way during one of these experiences as a kind of tether – it can sort of remember the previous state, and perhaps even anticipate the next one, and thus be a kind of link in the chain of mutually comprehensible states of consciousness.

Because 5-MeO-DMT triggers such a change in the dynamics of attention and awareness (totally alien to even people familiar with other psychedelics), it brings a unique challenge to the recollection of the state. I found that noticing that a lot of the action was in the field of awareness rather than what one pays attention to was essential for my ability to bring more and more from the state in question as the retreat progressed.