5-MeO-DMT vs. DMT: More Lenses

During the retreat we found a lot of convergence with what we had already noticed based on the results of Modeling Psychedelic Tracers with QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit: 5-MeO-DMT, in general, seems to produce solid color tracers. If the ball is blue you get a blue tracer. Perhaps you might get a gray tracer too, and a subtle but real white or rainbow aura at times.

DMT, on the other hand, so far has been reported as very colorful. We only tried it in the form of ayahuasca, but similar phenomenology is reported with the pure substance. Above a certain dose, one gets magnificent colorful tracers that alternate between their input color and their opposite, as well as additional random colors and complex shapes. It remains to be seen how consistent this pattern is to the substance if/when we do a more targeted DMT retreat.

Based on what we saw, we arrived at a few new key ideas for how these two substances compare (beyond the 12 already proposed):

1. 5-MeO-DMT has an “equalizing” effect in addition to “detuning and polarizing” (which as a couple DMT has) discussed further in “Self-Organizing Principles Reduction”: in summary, this means that both DMT and 5-MeO-DMT seem to trigger an initial “detuning” from one’s current objects of attention, followed by an amplification of opposites, and finally an equalization or cancelation (e.g. you are looking at the table, then detune from it, experience black at the top of the visual field and white at the bottom, and then those two polar opposites somehow cancel out).
2. The specific balance between push and pull, expansion and contraction, reification and abstraction, on 5-MeO-DMT strongly favors less solidity as a general gradient. In the sense that whenever solidity is perceived, one can also perceive its evaporation or the gradient along which it would diminish. And automatically, largely, the state encourages one to perform an internal movement that reduces that sense of solidity (such as paying attention to space, or slowing down a “wave of reification” at a critical point when it’s about to render a very solid region – by this I mean, the state somehow interrupts the process of reification and this happens in a way that seems connected to changes in the speed and density of the waves of sensation). On DMT the balance can go either way, but usually there is quite a bit of solidity at higher levels, just spread in really exotic geometric ways.
3. DMT seems to be closer to 25-30hz visually (grounded by training with a stroboscopic device and post-trip recollection) whereas 5-MeO-DMT is closer to 37-50hz range. At this level one only experiences “shadows” of patterns rather than full-blown actualized specific geometric structures as with DMT. The frequency on 5-MeO-DMT might be too high for a lot of fabrications – from their point of view, the background vibration is nearly orthogonal to them in some cases.
4. 5-MeO-DMT tends to converge towards strong attractors above a certain dose (e.g. Tibetan Book of the Dead type trips, or trips around symmetry, or trips around timelessness). What unfolds on DMT, instead, tends to be reliably surprising.
5. One recent idea I had post-retreat, still largely unverified, is that DMT generically produces chiral patterns whereas 5-MeO-DMT produces non-chiral patterns. The visual and tactile patterns one experiences on 5-MeO-DMT have a tendency to be very symmetrical and to “look the same from many different points of view”. The patterns one experiences on DMT instead tend to have specific orientations (e.g. the patterns having a specific rotational direction).
6. The “perceptual inversion sequence duration” may vary significantly between the substances in question. Both substances induce extreme superpositions of perceptual gestalts. However, on 5-MeO-DMT, these gestalts are likely experienced more simultaneously, manifesting as a “potential state space” rather than a “realized transition pathway.” To elaborate, the term “perceptual inversion sequence duration” refers to the phenomenon where interpretations of interconnected perceptual gestalts are themselves linked. Consequently, the “collapse” into a specific interpretation of a localized perceptual cascade can propagate through the visual processing system, causing a reinterpretation of an entire region or segment in a consistent manner. This concept can be illustrated using a lattice of Necker Cubes. The interpretation of the central square in each cube (as either projecting forward or receding backward) can cascade, influencing adjacent cubes to share the same interpretation. However, it’s important to note that this localized consistency does not necessitate a uniform interpretation across the entire lattice. On DMT, if looking at a lattice of Necker Cubes, one would typically experience patches of contiguous cubes with the same interpretation which would then be negotiating with each other about what the most natural way to represent the whole is likely to be. On 5-MeO-DMT, one would likely experience the entire lattice of Necker Cubes as a whole, and then experience all of the Necker Cubes in a state of superposition between different interpretations, but all of them identical or nearly so. In other words, the superposition is more homogeneous and simple, yet more complete and coherent. We could summarize this by saying that there is a contrast between: Highly coherent ambiguity (5-MeO-DMT) vs. somewhat coherent partial ambiguity (DMT). For example, “comprehending” Metatron’s Cube (or any object with many possible geometric interpretations) may be quite different on DMT than on five. On DMT you will be quickly oscillating back and forth between clusters of interpretations that connect ways of seeing the shapes in a network of gestalts. It will generally be a combinatorial explosion of possible interpretations and meta-structures that relate the similarities and differences between these interpretations. E.g. you might see cubes resonating with each other trying to win over your attention, which is competing with triangle-based interpretations. On 5-MeO-DMT, on the other hand, it would feel more like you are inhabiting a space that contains the symmetries of all of the shapes at once. The state has a sort of stabilizing, equalizing, effect where attention is homogeneously spread out across otherwise incompatible interpretations. So while on DMT you are constantly jittering between one hyper-associative compression of the shapes to another, on 5-MeO-DMT you find a “center of interpretative mass” where as many of the symmetries of the shape as possible can coexist and then you abide and become absorbed in that.