Levels of 5-MeO-DMT

In a Nutshell – Dose Levels and Corresponding Effects

1. Subclinical (up to 0.1 mg): Possibly placebo-like effects, with a slight dreamy or sleepy feel.
2. Sub-threshold (0.1-0.5 mg): Light body effects and subtle mindfulness, potentially useful for meditative breakthroughs.
3. Threshold (0.5-1 mg): A light transparent synesthetic film covers the field of experience, with relaxing body effects, slight anxiety, and visual cuts. Body load can be unpleasant but dissipates with equanimity.
4. Low Dose (1-2.5 mg): A sense of oneness begins, tactile and visual sensations become finer and more coherent than on DMT. The body buzz is pleasurable and extremely feathery, and one may experience a subtle ability to connect to others in new ways.
5. Medium Dose (2.5-5 mg): “Soul Travel” — The last level where it feels like “this is happening to someone” rather than “the universe”. Personally-meaningful reflections. A plasma-like state of consciousness develops, with absorption into stimuli. The self dissolves into a field-like energy body with eyes closed, and the felt sense of oneness, impermanence, and non-attachment are all really strong, yet there is the feeling of “a soul” to which all of this is happening.
6. Medium to High Dose (5-7.5 mg): Becoming “the creative force of the universe”, which is impersonal yet intensely alive. The experience is deeply interconnected with feelings of metaphysical oneness on a level above the Medium Dose, as one stops feeling like there is a “container” individual for each person. Overwhelming sensations of love, peace, and acceptance give you a (conventional) sense of satisfaction with the experience when it is over.
7. High Dose (7.5-15 mg): “Supernova” — Every region of the field is saturated with a material that has continuous symmetry and expresses uninterrupted overwhelming oneness, and peace to itself.
8. Heavy Dose (15 mg+): Full dissolution of the sense of witnessing. The experiencer becomes a pure force of nature, losing all connection to their human identity and point of view.

Overall Assessment (applicable to any dose)

5-MeO-DMT as a Drug Cocktail: 5-MeO-DMT distinguishes itself from other psychedelics in many ways. To a first approximation, the phenomenology has elements of each of the following drugs: DMT, MDMA, nitrous oxide, and amyl nitrate. It has very “high frequency vibrations” of a tactile-visual synesthetic kind that are highly reminiscent of DMT, except more powerful and even higher frequency in nature. Above a threshold dose (coupled with little resistance to the state) you have an outpouring of love in all directions without discriminating very reminiscent of MDMA. It has a sort of anesthetizing, frequency-lowering, gaseous floaty feeling reminiscent of nitrous oxide. And it also comes with a peripheral blood rush and very generalized interaction with the blood vessels subjectively similar to amyl nitrate (“poppers”). The DMT and amyl nitrate effects hit at lower doses before the MDMA and nitrous oxide effects become apparent. At higher doses all of these effects seem to be very strong all at once.

5-MeO-DMT Demagnetization: Independently of the dose, the overall net effect of this substance is significantly more loaded towards “interrupting previous patterns” relative to “reinforcing previous patterns”. Thus, relative to other psychedelics, it seems to defabricate the phenomenal world rather than helping someone go deeper into their own imagination. 5-MeO-DMT is the ultimate attractor interrupter. It weakens the pre-existing conditioning, almost as if it were “demagnetizing” our hold on our habitual attachments. This “demagnetization” can be quite unpleasant and unwelcomed when it happens to a cherished attachment one wasn’t expecting to be so dependent on. If, on the other hand, one welcomes the feeling and apply equanimity to what happens, one instead experiences what feels like an electromagnetic reannealing that spreads out the consequences of local detachment to the rest of the organism.

Transcendent Feelings of Oneness: The “fabric” of 5-MeO-DMT seems to be distinctly non-local in nature. There are only a few or just one “memory bucket” and this forces the representational content to be highly integrated.

Internal Social Symmetry: A non-dual approach to interpersonal representations comes very naturally in this state. The sense that “other’s experiences matter as much as my own” is often inescapable at any dose. Sonder is a common reaction.

The danger of becoming addicted to the ecstatic qualities of the state (especially the come-up): While 5-MeO-DMT is not exactly reinforcing in a conventional sense (it defabricates too much for any given behavior to be reinforced), someone can become fascinated with the euphoria at the beginning. I do know several people who have taken it every day for several months and some of them say it was simply for spiritual development or exploration whereas others said it had an element of attachment to the feelings of euphoria. This to me makes sense. I would not be surprised if it finds a place in some scenes due to its hedonic effects, though I can’t imagine that they would be for public consumption.

Equanimity in the sense of “not resisting whatever happens”: The feelings of pressure can be quite unpleasant, but it is also the case that there is nothing you can do about them. You can even experience really intense body dysphoria due to intense pressure or stretching sensations in the visual and tactile domain, and yet something about the experience teaches you that if you don’t resist it slowly but surely it becomes more balanced. I think without having practiced equanimity and meditation before I would probably have freaked out at various moments during my experiences, but with equanimity and leaning especially on the “stillness” axis, the stress seems to dissipate in a strangely efficient way. I must emphasize that an attitude of equanimity, to me, felt absolutely essential to navigate this space.

The “three characteristics” feel really intuitive: Even though oneness feels really present, at the same time, one feels that it is really evident how reality is fundamentally fluid. One gains a direct perceptual sense of insight into the ever-changing impermanent flow of sensations. One may intellectually resist this, up to a dose. But if you welcome it, it can provide immense relief (cf. Rob Burbea’s approach to Insight Practices, where he emphasizes the sense of relief and comfort they provide). This substance really makes it evident and clear how it is always a little unpleasant to try to grasp pleasant sensations and try to “make them solid” somehow. You notice how this attitude leaves a trace, and the state is sort of vaporizing these traces from the past.

Diaphanous Frames: The state produces transparent colorless and symmetrical gestalts vs. the more common psychedelic ones which are opaque, colorful and lopsided.

Flickering and Strobing as a tell-tell sign of Subconscious Clinging: During the state you can tell that you are clinging to something by how it makes the field strobe in somewhat unnatural ways. Let go and notice the cleaner resonances. This makes the insight that craving is always implemented with various contractions really clear.

Tyranny of the Intentional Object Revealed: Because you notice how everything changes, you realize that your internal representations are themselves made of activity. It gives you an intuitive sense of how a symbol is itself a sensation and how what you are really pursuing has to do with the flow of energy in the body. It becomes really clear how the normal state is motivated by mere tickles of pleasure selectively painting aspects of the simulation. It’s a big trick, in a sense. But valence is real, and it matters.

Kinds of (De)personalization: Depersonalization, megapersonalization, distributed personalization, etc. The state in question tends to mess with the internal dials that construct the distinction between self and other. It is not only that oneness becomes more accessible as a phenomenological construct, but that strange in-betweens become also available. The “paradoxical union of oneness and multiplicity” would be an example of a kind of “high level insight” that is readily available in this state. You can experience hybrid views of the self.

Effects as a function of the dose

Subclinical (up to 0.1 mg): Placebo?

Who knows if this does anything. But I did try it repeatedly for an hour (say, slightly under 0.1 every 10 minutes) and I think it does have a sort of dreamy, slightly sleepy effect. Something becomes slightly slimy. Like a mild weed hangover, but more clear. Perhaps fully a placebo.

Sub-threshold (0.1-0.5 mg): Hints

At this dose you mostly just get body effects and a tiny hint of regular mindfulness that reads as “within normal range” but is unusually high regardless. If you experience it a number of times you will likely extrapolate from it and think that higher doses produce much stronger body load effects than they typically do. Many retreat participants noted that there was a sort of unpleasant hump at the low doses that benefited from increasing the dose. That said, I think that some people can still find value in the gentle energy and relaxation at this level. One is more likely to take something that is bothering you and put it aside for a moment. It might not “liquefy the subconscious” (a phrase that Shinzen Young uses to describe the long-term effect of meditation practice), but it seems to, just barely, turn it into a kind of wet clay, nearing on mud for a moment. Some level of unusual flexibility is attained, and for the right circumstance I can imagine it facilitating a psychological or phenomenological breakthrough (say if you’re really close to something in meditation). Otherwise, you might even miss it. The afterglow is a bit reminiscent of the feeling of lightness and clarity you might experience after a workout, except very subtle.

Threshold (0.5-1 mg): Light Touch

The visual field suddenly develops a very light transparent film of sorts that frames it all at once. Light relaxing effects, visual cuts, hints of a sense of some subtle aspects of perception being frozen, sudden calm yet paradoxically existing with mild anxiety, light electric feeling in one’s skin, areas of one’s skin sort of contracting very lightly into patches. Even this level represents a kind of phase transition relative to the previous one, although not particularly dramatic. That said, one of the general observations of the retreat was that 5-MeO-DMT was more potent than is usually thought of (possibly due to the high efficiency of the vaporization method we used), so for an inexperienced psychonaut this level of intensification and alternation of experience may already be quite startling and somewhat unsettling. The body load can be unpleasant, and consists of feelings of pressure, contractions in entire regions of the body, a sense of an irregular “melting” of sensations, and concentration of energy in random regions of the world simulation. About half of the times I experienced this dose range I wish I had either taken more or not at all. It became better with time.

Low dose (1-2.5 mg): Submersion

At this dose, the sense of oneness is present in the spaciousness of sensations, which develops as the dose increases and slowly saturates one’s experience with what feels like a different phase of the substrate of experience. Most of the time, this dose range gives rise to visual alterations with ayahuasca-like fluidity and enhancement of contrast, with some key differences. In particular, the “fabric” of sensations is “finer”. For context, think about how in “Practising the Jhanas”, Rob Burbea describes each Jhana as having a characteristic “fabric” of sensations. Just as cotton is more coarse than silk, likewise the bodily sensations on the 1st Jhana are more coarse than those of the 2nd. Similarly, at this and higher doses it becomes clear that the 5-MeO-DMT “fabric of sensations” is decidedly finer than that of DMT, even if they can both be unusually “smooth” relative to the normal human experience. This is generalized across the senses, but especially noticeable in the visual and tactile domains. Importantly, though, both have their corresponding version of unpleasant dissonances, which seem to also be specific to their unique kind of “fabric”, as if you were to consider how silk rubbing against itself in the “wrong way” (against the grain, say) can produce an unpleasant kind of unnerving hiss vs. how cotton rubbing against itself would produce a different kind of grainy, “hot”, vibration.

The nature of the surfaces one experiences visually at this dose is quite different from the visuals of ayahuasca when it comes to color, opacity/transparency, and “diffraction” effects. Typically, 5-MeO-DMT at this dose will maintain “outside structure” but will be significantly modified by the state. A lot of images can have a “black or white” stain glass window quality to them that also shows a lot of transparency. It sometimes feels like you can “see through” objects, as if your attention found the surfaces of previously solid objects to now be thin and flimsy, diaphanous. Paper thin. At this level there is already the presence of a general tracer effect on the whole field of experience, but unlike ayahuasca, this tracer effect is typically semi-transparent rather than colorful. It feels like a kind of averaging of the image where a monochrome semi-transparent tracer of the previous frames interact with the current one. This interaction can often lead to “moments of eternity” when the tracer creates short loops without content. There is vastly more spatial coherence and synchrony than on DMT across all levels, though at this dose one is typically quite far from a sense of complete global coherence.

The body buzz at this level can be really pleasant, once you get over the hump of lower levels. The body buzz also has overlap with ayahuasca, but it is, again, a lot more “refined”. It also feels higher dimensional and multifaceted. One analogy that came up once was imagining that our bodies are like crystals: ayahuasca creates relatively “rough cuts”, such that by shining light on it you get large blocks of rainbow light. 5-MeO-DMT, on the other hand, creates very “fine cuts” and as a consequence when light is shined on it, the light becomes largely white and soft (yet somehow crisp and detailed).

In terms of odd effects that I experienced intuitively, at this level one has the feeling of being able to help (with their permission) process other’s stresses and traumas at a subtle level. It also feels as if one could “share vibes” with others in a way that goes through different channels than normal. Whether this is a hallucination, picking up on subconscious cues, or real and verifiable by science is something we did not develop an opinion on during the retreat.

Medium dose (2.5-5 mg): Soul Travel

Some high-level features of the state catalyzed by this dose include:

• A phase transition to a “gas” or “plasma” state of consciousness for one’s body and visual field. This is typically really pleasant, but depending on how one approaches it, the pre-existing structures in place, and the content of one’s mind, it might be quite unpleasant.

• Absorption into “shapes”. At this dose range a peculiar effect takes place, which is that whatever you pay attention to on the way to the come-up can “lock in” and for periods of time feel like your entire field of experience somehow has that shape. Alternatively, one could say that “attention unifies” at this level and above, and as a consequence the content of one’s experience is strongly determined by how attention ends up converging. As discussed in other places (e.g. Attention and awareness: A two-stroke model of consciousness by Cube Flipper) attention and awareness require a fine balance of multiple streams to create a normal world simulation. Imagine what happens when attention streams unify. The world really changes.

At this dose many of us experienced a kind of absorption into stimuli, briefly believing one is that stimuli somehow. You could be staring at a piece of art, and you will feel as if you can empathize with what it would be like to have your body have the shape (and even material) of that piece of art. This is a much more reliable and totalizing effect than with other psychedelics. If you see a music video during the come-up at this dose, it will feel like you are the people dancing and feel their movements as if they were yours. Or at least that can be a strong effect that unfolds, if you are open to it.

If you close your eyes, your body schema is dissolved, and you experience a field-like energy body instead. This is where I would typically then experience a kind of “Tibetan Book of the Dead”-style phenomenology. By this I mean: a sense that my lifetime on Earth was a brief link in a long chain of rebirths, and that I could see my future rebirths.

The general theme and trajectory for these experiences for me was the intuitive understanding that perfect being, symmetry, and lack of resistance were all somehow equivalent. When I would hit this dose range, I would usually feel for a moment a sense that it was stronger than I had anticipated (this subsided with further use, to an extent) and then quickly surrender to facts of life like impermanence and dissatisfaction in the Buddhist sense. I would then get transported to a world where different energetic attractors would manifest as potential orientations for attention. I would often notice how the mind could get caught up in cycles of anger or irritation or boredom and immediately at a glance understand their pointlessness due to the way energy collides with itself inside them and add viscosity to its flow.

In other words, at this dose range it would become apparent how negative emotions are themselves a kind of geometric frustration in the flow of energy in the field. In other words, whether it is anger, fear, irritation, or boredom, the key characteristic behind any unpleasant emotion is that the flow of energy “collides with itself”.

At this dose range, after brief moments of sensing the possibility of going to a negative attractor, I would usually be attracted to one of two things: very intense pleasurable sensations of a very “contracting kind” or of a very “letting go” kind. My subconscious would tend to interpret these different positive valence attractors within the context of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The first kind of pleasure would correspond to classic “Heaven Realm” whereas the “letting go” kind of pleasure would correspond to “Pure Land”. I should clarify that I never developed a strong belief in this framework during the retreat; but during these experiences that’s an overall framework that my subconscious would tend to use due to its apparent immediate explanatory power. To me this felt like a push and pull between either very high valence forms of attention or a meta-move concentrated on transcendent and equanimous Buddhist-like orientation to being. It never really resolved in my case.

On the one hand, blissful states are on some level deeply healing, but on the other they can mask the reality of suffering, and as I found towards the end of the retreat, in high amounts can be agitating and cause insomnia.

The Buddhist orientation is very happy and peaceful, “deeply serene”, but it lacks at times playfulness and extraversion (speaking for myself, in terms of clusters of sensations or “energetic groupings” I experienced during the retreat). Together these two realms worked generally very synergistically and produced beautiful things that were harmonious on very deep levels (sensory, conceptual, emotional, spiritual levels of harmony). At times they stood in opposition (a state which of course melted or couldn’t exist at higher doses). But in general their coexistence was really beautiful, enjoyable, information-rich, and healing in many ways.

To me it always felt like the diffusion of the drug through the neural and vascular substrate of my lifeworld would show how my experience normally has a temporal depth I don’t typically notice. In a strange way, it typically felt like a 4D accordion.

Medium to High dose (5-7.5 mg): Becoming the Creative Force of the Universe

On some level, the dose below this one (2.5 to 5 mg) might be closer to “the universe happening to a person” whereas at this level (5 to 7.5 mg) the feeling would better be described as “a person happening to the universe.”

I found that it was around this dose range that the key figure-ground inversion for the locus of identity would take place, not as a flicker or toggle, but as a stable shift for a span between 60 seconds to 5 minutes. As if a final layer of conditioning would get disconnected, the “gaseous powdery consciousness” would now be able to experience itself without intermingling with solidity or fluidity. The world simulation’s ability to focus on aspects of itself seems to experience a paradigm shift around this point, as you stop being constrained by the need to “anchor” your point of view on solidity of any sort.

In this dose range, we reach a new level of “density of the 5-MeO-DMT-influenced specs of qualia” where entirely new emergent phenomena come about. The self-awareness of this cluster of sensations reaches a threshold that ignites it. Set alight.

Whatever this “superheated texture of qualia” that results from this flammable phase transition touches seems to be instantaneously connected to everything else it is also touching. As you increase the dose, within this level, this “material” increases in density until it replaces our normal everyday fabric of reality completely. This material has the property of “being everywhere at once” and is unable to ascertain its precise location, but in turn has an extremely deep sense of knowing, as if its own invisibility was the clue to its omniscience. On 5-MeO-DMT at this level awareness has a quality that embraces everything that is given to it with no filter or delay. This lack of differentiation, both internal and external, comes with a profound sense of oneness. A oneness of no flavor which becomes embodied as it dilutes into our more dualistic substance in the depth of being. At this dose, the oneness is experienced as a matter of fact about both the moment, and for most people, some deep level of reality (how this relates to indirect realism about perception is really tricky to articulate in full).

The hedonic tone on the come-up phase of this dose range is certainly the most intense “fast euphoria” I’ve ever encountered directly followed by periods of alternating highly mixed valence and extreme slow euphoria (also topping the charts, except for even higher doses of 5-MeO-DMT).

The entry can be extremely painless at times. A very fast crescendo where you realize you really did it this time. There will be no way around for the standard operating system to patch this over. When the drug hits at this dose or higher, especially when taken in a great mood and quickly rather than slowly titrating, it feels like it was *designed* to break down the self-centered ego structure. It simply opens up, rather effortlessly, and in a completely authoritative, no way-it’s-ever-going-back-to-normal kind of way, the direct and overwhelming access to a “point of view that includes all points of view at once”. The massive influx of a new ignited material substrate for consciousness has a tendency to be in a state like plasma and has low-to-no-friction fluidity. It invades the phenomenal world from all of the sides at once. Well, not exactly. If you pay close attention you will notice that some “parts” (or aspects, facets) of your experience gain access to this new “material” or “substrate” at different times. At this dose, one transitions into a centerless high-energy plasma so quickly that there is no time for the personality to react in a strategic way to prevent information loss. It really feels like being vaporized painlessly at times.

Additionally, I think that typically some fairly strong painkilling and/or anesthetic properties of the drug really kick in at this dose range, and so there is a good chance that great anxiolysis will completely overtake the emotional tone of the state. Deep feelings of peace and acceptance are typical as a response, as the energized awareness traverses what feels like a very dreamy and creamy landscape of nothingness. Deep willing surrendering to the gaseous centerless state comes natural at these densities. In some sense, if you know exactly what you’re getting into, this dose should require less bravery than the one just below, simply because of how much less personally directed and psychoanalytically powerful it tends to be at this level. It’s like you took an Express elevator to the really hot sauna / really hot bathtubs / intense massage / max level of vibration in a Subpac and you therefore mostly skipped the levels where your ego would have a chance to see the subconscious material brought up to the surface. The ego is vaporized before it can react. Instead, you, _as the field_ are typically just really immersed in the super energized sense of oneness, which typically comes with love and acceptance and peace and metaphysical revelation flavors of conceptual qualia along with it. I think it is common at this dose range to live a very interesting sequence of states of beings and “updates” about the nature of reality to suddenly find yourself staring at a very bright ceiling, realizing you’ve come down, and not really know where you have been for the last 10 minutes. Only after a few minutes do you start to remember just how ridiculously intense the come-up was and how deeply peaceful it was right after. It is as if the normal human gestalt can sometimes just “reboot” suddenly, like waking up from a weird dream, and have faint immediate recollection of what just happened. But don’t be deceived, your being knows exactly where it has been. It will show you in dreams, in other psychedelic experiences, and randomly here and there.

If music is playing in the background, at this level it feels like a message from the “other side”. It is as if the universe has arranged for this very moment to happen, because how could it possibly be otherwise? How could these levels of intense bliss and profound revelations be possible without an external agency that is *at this level* also existing and orchestrating this event? Everything feels coded with messages, as if sent from an eternal, universal, ultimate, source of existence that ties everything together. Whatever you place your attention on becomes the “one universal principle” that explains it all.

During the come-up, this dose is one where the level of self-intimacy is so extreme that you might as well be experiencing your own birth. You experience an immediate topological transformation to your attentional field and reveal a degree of centerlessness you didn’t think was possible. I found this to always be the case no matter how many times I took this dose or higher. There is something that feels intrinsically startling about the state. As if the predictive coding hierarchy of the human organism was not designed to be able to predict and recollect this shift.

It also is a place where equanimity towards positive feelings is finally not needed because the state, when it is wholly positive (most times in my particular case during the retreat, but I know there are very wide response ranges) it really gets to be very “satisfying” in a conventional sense. It’s a kind of experience that feels deep enough that one feels that a lot of sacrifices taken for it are worth it. “I worked for years searching for this, and the universe actually gave it to me!” is a common sentiment for people who get to try this dose. On lower doses one can end up uncovering a lot of unconscious material and get side-tracked by it. Or be too fascinated with lower-level sensory effects (which compared to what happens on this dose feel like mere tickles not worth getting too excited about!).

At the same time, I must urge caution: the fact that I found this dose range more consistently pleasant than the one below may not generalize to other people. I just leave this as an anecdote to guide future work, rather than anything authoritative (as with everything else in this site!).

I found that at this dose, the sense of contentment and gratefulness could be really strong and stable for a while. And at the core it would generally feel like my being moved towards a more equanimous state. A lot of the descriptions that Rob Burbea provides for the nature of the 4th Jhana (equanimity) seem to me very resonant with the natural properties of experience at this dose range, especially right after the peak and during the comedown.

Rob Burbea on the 4th Jhana (around ~24:30):

Two things, one is: pleasure and pain decrease. Pleasant and unpleasant [sensations] decrease. And what’s left is ‘neither pleasant nor unpleasant’. But what can be said about this ‘neither pleasant nor unpleasant’ that remains is that it is very, very, very nice. [laughs]. And if it’s not, something’s not right. It’s not the 4th Jhana we’re talking about. It’s very nice, and very enjoyable. It’s really, again, an improvement over the 3rd Jhana. And it is felt that way. And it’s experienced that way. And it’s also somehow a kind of neutral vedana [valence]. The second is, and possibly more important: all this talk of abandoning pleasure and pain, and of the early disappearance of elation and distress and all the possibilities for what that means. […] Basically, I would say, ‘there is equanimity’ [in the 4th Jhana] and that is all we need to worry about. Remember, we were defining equanimity yesterday not as an off-on-switch, but as a spectrum. To the degree that there is equanimity, to that degree there is a reduction of the push and pull, reduction of clinging. It’s a spectrum of decreasing push and pull.”

High dose (7.5-15 mg): Supernova

Supernova effect. Here during the comeup “reality folds in on itself” and focuses on an aspect of your experience with tremendous coherence and power. Whatever you pay attention to will simply explode into a huge number of copies and then there will be harmonics produced by such copies and then secondary harmonics produced by the harmonics of the harmonics. Thankfully, I was able to focus on light and love, and on pleasure and happiness when I tried it at these doses. And I’m very grateful for these experiences.

A metaphor evocative for this state could be “The Happiness of a Sun Being”. As if there were entities living in the sun who are always extremely energized. But their bodies are adapted to the ambient energy levels, and they’re mostly in profound intense bliss. A magnetic sentient mandala reverberating at thousands of degrees Celcius. Alas, it isn’t a Mandala. It’s a black body radiation event. A chain reaction releasing energy uniformly in spacetime. Nothing can latch onto it. It is free from attachments. It’s raw, not-even-rhythmic just-smooth heat. Hyperconsciousness without shape. Qualia lensing effects are extremely obvious. Strong nitrous-like bliss at this point, in that it’s like this change of material that feels very flesh-like and compressed, really intimate and volumetric tactile powerwashing. Super friendship qualia. Super aesthetics. Super Zen. Super Boundless Consciousness. Etc. all of these “Supers” live here. But above all, Super Smooth.

Why is this so smooth? My current guess is that the liquid crystal that implements our world simulation has become fully isotropic at this dose. Waves that use this medium for propagation have no preferred direction above a certain wavelength. Below, they scatter. Those that are above the scattering length, are traveling in literally any direction, because it takes equal energy to do so. Thus the flow is omnidirectional. While the substrate might be irregular in a certain sense, there is an emergent perfect symmetry at a higher level of organization. Thus the marriage of perfect symmetry and total entropy. That’s what this state evokes for me.

This also goes well with an observation I made early on during the retreat which others found resonance in. Classic psychedelics can produce complex geometric structures which feature interlocking symmetries, but the symmetries tend to be like those of polyhedra or polygons and tessellations. In other words, symmetries with discrete repeating blocks, where the transformation that you make to make the image look the same can only be done an integer number of times. 5-MeO-DMT instead gives you continuous symmetries, like those of the sphere. Any degree of rotation on any axis returns the same object! Likewise, the smoothness of phenomenal spacetime at this dose feels exactly continuously symmetrical. Indeed I think this also might be explained in terms of an isotropic phase for the liquid crystal that implements our world simulation.

Example experience:

Let’s say you’re sort of at the 3 mg level, to which you arrived slowly thanks to the sipping method. Then you are quite fearless¹ and ready to take a big hit. And so you take something that’s probably like 8 mg all at once and hold it in.

As you hold it in you get this feeling that holding your breath is like dying. And that if you were to hold it for long enough you would of course not be alive². You see, at this point your working memory is skipping and you are not really able to count how long you’ve been holding your breath. You know that you are safe, and trust the process. You think you’re about to die, but in reality it could be as little as 45 seconds, and then you are at a point where you think you are about to give in, fully let go… And the whole thing… orgasms in a way.

Here’s a high-speed camera view. For the first five seconds the main thing you notice is how ridiculously fast it seems to affect you. Like, what? Why so fast? And then for the next ten seconds you are sinking, sinking into holding your breath. And at the 15 second mark you start noticing your experience is made of a new material. The lungs are now made of a crystalline material that is extremely light, feathery. It is like a beautiful, silky, extremely delicate and gentle, high dimensional fractal grid of light. Yep. And it grows by the second. And it comes a point where… at around the 30-40 second mark, where it achieves a kind of criticality. And that means that it can now interact with itself at extremely high speeds. Because it doesn’t need to harmonize the intermediate material anymore, as it has enough of itself to interact with! And so you get something like an optical super-highway in which an optically reactive material is connected to itself through optical cables and the light can now be trapped for long periods of time. It forms circles around a vortex, or the whole thing strobing, or it flows as a doughnut, or Möbius, etc. and oscillates in complementary pairs. The field anneals into an “opposites attract and annihilate” process. Over the course of the next four minutes or so you are completely lost in this non-dual edge where the material is very close to keeping light trapped and also processed in such a way that it can cancel itself out.

I think I experienced this between 3 and 5 times, depending on where we draw the boundary. But it really felt that there was a sudden and unexpected phase transition around this level where the threshold amount of this new material would finally be able to interact with itself and trap light/energy/qualia in loops with unexpectedly long half-lives.

For me, each of these experiences was sublime, but I can’t guarantee it will be so for others. Their sublime quality was the result of this orientation of experience that oscillated between perfect symmetry and the appreciation of the beauty of nearly symmetrical states. I was happy to experience impermanent things, imagining myself (on the comedown) as simply a field of experience without a center. Consistently, I felt a sense of ontological release, and an acceptance of the fluid nature of reality, which generally increased my presence and sense of connection on the way down.

Heavy dose (15 mg+) (extrapolated based on my only full 15 mg dose)

Right away, you are forced to become a point, or pure space, or light, and it’s impossible to know in any way, shape, or form, that you were ever a human. You are an elemental force of nature, completely surrendered to the powerful energetic currents of the universe. But you will never be able to remember this well. All you can do is live it.

THE END