Visual Effects of 5-MeO-DMT

One of the highlights of the Canada retreat for me was the couple of nights where I got a chance to hang out with the main artists while taking small to medium doses of 5-MeO-DMT and discussing in real time the visual alterations we were experiencing.

We were listening to Structures From Silence by Steve Roach (the whole album, but probably the first song more times than the others), relaxing, sitting cross-legged or doing yoga stretches or lazily spread over mattress toppers, blankets, and cushions and talking, sometimes entirely disengaged and laying down with eyes closed, unbothered. The vibe had a combination of personal unwinding, curiosity, trust, and happiness, with meditative undertones rather than ecstasy and rapture reactions or social moves with dramatic flairs to call attention and jitter the field in some way. Imagine four introverts getting a chance to talk at a loud and busy party in some low-lit tiny small room found in the deserted hallway of the big house that is hosting the gathering. The interpersonal ambiance and deep shared interest in the specifically visual effects of 5-MeO-DMT made the few hours of these sessions feel worth months or years of research in other contexts.

I was very surprised by how pleasant, productive, and meaningful the research felt here. We could talk with each other in real time, even though we were each taking 2-6 mg doses at 15-20 minute intervals or so for the span of 90-120 minutes. The cumulative unwinding and relaxation caused by this pattern of use felt very compatible with the task we were doing. Namely, exploring the various parameters of the psychophysics toolkit André Silva, Adam Grzelec and Diego Blanco helped us develop, to find particularly interesting effects. We had this in the background as well, but we didn’t really pay much attention to it after all (I did notice things worth sharing about it, which I’ll address further below).

On intuition and some theory, I focused on making sure we had a good look at the “Hypnagogic Quasicrystals” setup:

Front-loading the most important findings, we all experienced an ability to see the entire pattern as a large unified gestalt with detail. The coherence of the picture was really extraordinary, but also, upon careful analysis, illusory in very startling ways. I cannot express how amazingly perfect, symmetric, eternal, even divine the emergent gestalts felt from watching this setting. They would float in space, and border on counterexamples to the three characteristics (indeed they would give off a sense of eternity of sorts), but in a way where the exception proves the rule (even these symmetric gestalts had a kind of “dissolving quality” in them).

At least in one of the experiments, where three of us (me and two of the three core visual artists) stayed late into the night, this particular setting was examined in detail over the course of probably 20 minutes. This is an extraordinary amount of time for something like 5-MeO-DMT consciousness to be analytical about a specific pattern with mathematical features for the sake of science, and yet it felt deeply nourishing and enriching. A sense of doing my life’s work, if that communicates something.

On 5-MeO-DMT there are two powerful vibrations that complement each other – the low-frequency whole body nitrous-oxide/amyl-nitrate/MDMA-like relaxation wave, and then the DMT-like high frequency tensing wave. The former is more dominant, but it interacts non-linearly with the latter. This shifts the balance between fabrication and de-fabrication. Due to the MDMA-like love and the DMT-like constructive vibrations there is something that the underlying relaxation wave can deconstruct whether or not you’re clinging to anything at all or not. In other words, unless you take a high enough dose where the relaxation wave completely overpowers the constructive high frequency wave, there is always going to be a sort of dialogue between the two “energies” in the state, and this dialogue will modify and unravel the walls/building blocks of your world simulation along the way.

Three Types of 5-MeO-DMT-specific Visual Gestalts

The visual gestalts, to me, presented in three different ways:

• Dissolving solidity.
• Translucent/semi-transparent/polarized/lens/optical element.
• Simply as a pattern of superposition of linear waves in a void.

Let me expand upon the three types of 5-MeO-DMT visuals I recognized and catalogued that night:

Dissolving solidity

This is a wide class of 5-MeO-DMT visual effects which share a hint of a commonality with “DMT visual crystals” but with very marked characteristic differences. The “crystal world” level of DMT crystalline formations tends to be biased in the direction of “collapsing ambiguities into clearly-defined surfaces that form a frame of reference for the further collapse of ambiguities into surfaces”. Don’t get me wrong, the DMT crystal world is a sort of mesh of “necker cube” illusions – each module has in itself this delocalized/holographic/superpositiony quality. But the network as a whole tends to have well-defined intersection points, lattices, grids, and vortices that function as scene stabilizers.

On the other hand, the “principal component” of the visual effects of 5-MeO-DMT is one of de-fabrication and dissolution. The embodied feeling is literally one of “letting go” and “unclinging” at a deep level, in every aspect of one’s being. Or, alternatively, clinging and feeling the discomfort that comes with it instantly (except when one is fully immersed in a high valence object, in which case clinging can feel ecstatic, but this requires a lot of symmetry and a certain specific mindset).

This applies to the visual patterns as well. It’s as if the visual field had an overall tendency to “relax” the way in which it is normally “clasped” or “pressed” in order to render scenes accurately. A metaphor that comes to mind is like removing pinches off the edges on a Chladni plate so that the visible standing-wave pattern (the nodal lines in that case, the non-linearities in ours) are precisely a reflection of the clean, un-clinched, geometric shape. This happens recursively and at all levels, where micro-fixations in the visual scene un-clinch and un-clench and release their tension, thus “linearizing” the waves and letting them pass through each other with a lot less intermingling than normal. That said, as a function of the dose, this intermingling can actually get stronger and stranger at some scales and for some periods of time. This relates my current (5-MeO-DMT-inspired) understanding of the “Dark Night of the Soul”¹ (see discussion elsewhere), where the process of un-clinging leads to chaotic attractors.

The “dissolving solidity” type of visuals are the most impressive “moments of eternity” gestalts. These kinds of visual gestalts are the longest-lasting most-solid-looking free-floating seemingly-self-existing-for-brief-periods-of-time not-changing and saturated kinds of gestalts I’ve ever witnessed. On mushrooms and ayahuasca there could be at times brief flashes of crystalline structures, but they were always pulsing, alive, organic, made of interlocking vibrations, and coherent as a whole due to dynamics.

Here, on the other hand, we are talking about actual dead-looking crystals of visual sensations that seem “stuck” in a hyper-coherent phase, as if their very grain was made of perfectly aligned micro-patterns. On DMT this grain is, at best, a mixture of crystal phases with some degree of ever-changing geometric frustration collision points. On 5-MeO-DMT, this grain can be a square or hexagonal lattice with either zero geometric frustration or where this frustration feels, amazingly, fully delocalized.

When you experience a geometrically frustrated gestalt of this sort on 5-MeO-DMT it’s as if the electrons that can’t find a way to align with each other become spread out over the entire gestalt, giving it a kind of sense of impossibility, superconductivity, and intense mixed valence desperation that’s hard to put into words but seems to point to a universal principle for how valence works in highly symmetrical configurations. A hexagonal lattice trying to fit an impossible pattern on 5-MeO-DMT feels charged and hyper-pressurized not unlike perhaps the feeling of being bound by a blanket that fixes you in place while also having a strong inner restlessness that desperately needs to be shaken.

We’re talking about a valence landscape that has entirely new creatures than we normally encounter. Rather than a constantly evolving world-sheet that’s trying to adjust in order to maximize local and global coherence in stages, where there is a dynamic multi-scale interplay of attention and awareness that’s constantly reliving points of pressure and saturation (I’m talking about most states of consciousness, including normal waking life and DMT hallucinations), on 5-MeO-DMT instead one gets these timeless symmetrical structures that are so close to being completely perfect that the tiny imperfections manifest as a kind of pressurized electrical feeling that runs through the entire system at high speeds rather than as local plastic deformations and joint adjustments. Does this make sense? Probably not if you have never tried it. But for those who have, how am I doing?

The way these types of 5-MeO-DMT-specific visual gestalts showed up in the “Hypnagogic Quasicrystals” setup we focused on (6 layers, at 0.2 speed) was as whole-picture layers that drifted slightly in space and would simply hang out until they’d disappear. The process of disappearance is not the focus here, and thus it’s hard to describe, but I think it goes through stages similar to the full-blown version of the second and third type I’ll describe below. The focus, what your mind and body is “fixating on” and “grasping” and in turn “solidifying” is a static impression that is, by some level of your being, confused as a kind of direct experience outside of time.

These gestalts are inextricably connected with one’s more universal grasping towards material existence as a whole, and I’d expect that some people would experience them either much more intensely or not at all, depending on their baseline default approach to life. It actually teaches you, subtly, whether you like it or not, on some level, the connection between this kind of internal move of grasping visual sensations and negative valence as a whole. Whether I liked it or not, even this visual perception study had subtle Buddhist undertones (removing the memetic Buddhist elements from the retreat would have been unfeasible, so let’s just embrace it for now).

I’d learn about how the very reification of a sense of solidity in everyday life creates this kind of “stuckness” in the field of sensations, and how letting go of it is both uncomfortable but a way to learn to grasp less in the future and thus generate less turbulence in your field overall. The sense of solidity aggregates and is passed along, but unless you metabolize it, it will always find its way somewhere. “Where the brush does not reach the dust accumulates” – and oh boy how much “dust” do we normal mortals have! This is the sort of thing that would simply present itself as a teaching from this state. And this is what I got merely from watching some visuals with friends on the state!

Optical elements

The second type of visual gestalts plays with entirely new “optical” effects that 5-MeO-DMT generates. Classic psychedelics can do this in a somewhat unpredictable, patchy, inconsistent way. On high-dose psilocybin one may in fact be able to stabilize large crystalline simulation with very non-trivial optical properties, such as imagining a 3D cubic grid made with flat glass surfaces. The fact the glass is a little reflective can massively complicate the complexity of rendering this scene. On psilocybin this rendering seems to happen all on its own and be rather accurate. So I am inclined to believe that the rendering process of the contents of our visual field uses an optical medium of some sort (or at least a medium with a wide range of micro-functional properties that lend themselves to emulating optical systems).

5-MeO-DMT takes this sort of effect to the next level. Now rather than having the ability to render a glass along with its optical properties like transparency, an index-of-refraction different from air, and reflexions, the kind of gestalt I’m talking about also plays with things like polarization, diffraction grids, and variable index of refraction. Seriously. As I would transition from the “phase of the visual field” characterized by the solid-looking “eternity gestalts”, the field would unlock new ways for waves to travel that allowed for entirely different optical effects. The gestalts could become translucent and polarized and then their overlap would generate incredible highly consistent and coherent optical tricks.

The above images give you a tiny flavor of the sort of effect I’m talking about. It felt like a paradoxical, very feathery, delicate, almost-not-there, ethereal, yet very vivid quality of being, as if at the edge of dissolving into a void it regards as its true home. Yes, I know I’m talking about psychedelic visuals, but wow, the process of dissolution that these gestalts go through recapitulates the whole mystical journey you’re immersing yourself in by virtue of exploring 5-MeO-DMT at that level. In other words, the process of dissolution would have even a slight sort of euphoric death quality – not for the self, or the Self, or of Being itself, but of a subagentic network that is in charge of constantly painting your visual field with representations that balance familiarity (learned priors), geometric consistency (inductive priors), and minimizes predictions errors (out-of-phase interactions with the sensory input). This system is dying, and as it surrenders and gives up trying to make sense of the scene, so does a part of you – it teaches you to let go and surrender, in visual phenomenology form.

The translucent polarized gestalts of 5-MeO-DMT are also reminiscent of thin soap films. But unlike the soap films of DMT, which are “slimy” and like to wrap around and multiply within any new niche they touch (indeed they could be seen as a kind of binding made of micro-attachment and sub-agentic pattern craving), the 5-MeO-DMT ones stretch and spread out along Euclidean degrees of freedom. A square can suddenly look completely straight and the plane it’s embedded in then extends as a translucent thin rigid film across your visual field. At times, one’s visual field can even feel full of these straight planes which almost go through each other without interacting, but do subtly interact and thus enmesh each other in complex ways.

The degree to which the experience balances the “MDMA love”, the “DMT vibration”, and the “nitrous/amyl nitrate” relaxation will either melt, crystallize, or evaporate, or even sublimate this enmeshment of translucent gestalts. In some cases, where one is at a sort of triple point between these forces, you can control what happens to these gestalts just with attention. You bias the process towards reification and you see how it starts forming more DMT-like crystals. You bias it towards love, and they will melt and harmonize. And if you bias it towards the sort of dissociative clean detachment facet, the pattern will simply evaporate or sublimate, sometimes making you go through interesting, sublime and/or unpleasant whole-body/whole-field vibrations as you detach from them.

Superposition

And finally, more or less towards the end of the sessions, when I was feeling very “clean” in terms of significantly lowered attachment/grasping due to the repeated exposure to 5-MeO-DMT, the more prominent type of gestalt shifted to the third kind. This is also what one experiences on higher doses, but I believe it also happens on its own at lower doses with repeated use. I do not currently know if this is good or bad for you, because it clearly leaves a sort of mark in how you see the world – for me it has been really positive, but I do not mean to generalize!

This third type of visual gestalt is extremely beautiful and ungraspable. It feels to me as waves in a linear medium, practically not interacting with each other, yet capable of forming a pattern of superposition that from a certain angle can carry a lot of information. One important limitation: I don’t think this way of rendering can encode subtle symmetry breakings easily and accurately, precisely because every one of its configurations has a sort of deep symmetry implicit in it. Namely, the symmetries of the way waves travel in the medium! So modeling non-linear dynamics of a certain complexity might be an adversarial case for this kind of visual phenomenology. But with that said: these are by far the most clean, “liberated”, beautiful, and pleasant type of visuals I’ve ever experienced. Let me explain.

When I experienced “dropping into the void” in some of the culminations of individual trips this would change the “solidity” of my world simulation in very significant ways for a period of minutes to hours (and with a bit of a residue days, weeks, and months after, when recalled by chance here and there). Recently Roger Thisdell made a video articulating a concept he calls the “axial aspect of perception”, which is the sort of frame of reference we use to interact with the world simulation and tells us the level of solidity with which we’re approaching it. During these experiences I’d often have a final moment of recognizing that I’ve been chasing solidity all along and then finding a completely new move to make that allowed me to “drop” solidity altogether and experience it oscillate in a gigantic void where the frame of reference was more fuzzy and decentralized. The remnants of solidity would seem to create “gravitational waves” in the world simulation, as they would dissolve (up to a point) in this gigantic void devoid of a center.

Post-this-process, for a period of minutes (perhaps up to 10 minutes?) my whole simulation would feel extremely light and void-like, and my perception of the world around me would lack a lot habitual solidity. At this point flipping interpretations would be quite easy and in fact volitional – like the Necker cube but for much more in-grained and familiar things, like choosing to interpret the window as a slab of space seen from a completely different angle. Here the frame of reference felt provided by the light rather than by a material! And the visual effects, correlates, causes, or consequences (we don’t know) would be of a very crisp holographic nature, as if I had “realized” that my whole world simulation is a kind of space crystal that can polarize light in any which way it wants and then being able to do so in a hyper-coordinated and large-scale fashion.

I must emphasize that this state is very peculiar and it feels like a “success case of 5-MeO-DMT therapy” where you manage to significantly improve the generic valence of the visual field, it’s relationship with somatic sensations (very clean and isomorphic rather than distorted or twisted), and of the rendering process of reality, without also sacrificing (too much) the representational capacity of the visual field.

Importantly, in this state, looking at Hypnagogic Quasicrystals in the settings discussed would be extremely beautiful in a very sustainable non-fake kind of way. It specifically didn’t feel like a “hyped sensation” as the previous two, but in fact what beauty is to be found in the visual field when it knows itself for what it is without additional fanfare or excitation. Without going through a layer of solidity as usual. It is very Zen-like, in a way.

The fidelity of the representations was impaired to the extent that the image can’t be rendered as a linear pattern of superpositions. In fact, I am pretty sure that the gestalts felt really symmetrical (not purely wallpaper symmetry groups, because they did also represent some additional symmetry breaks like left-right or even diagonal, but they were few and far between) and they erased important information. The stimuli isn’t exactly a clean grid of hexagons. However, some grids of hexagons superimposed make really really good approximations of the stimuli, which the state would find incredibly quickly.

In other words, I believe that this “post solidity” state of consciousness after the “drop into the void” experience has unique computational properties: it allows you to search for the simplest fully linear representation of a pattern very quickly. Like a spatial Fourier transform. In some cases this could give you the correct representation, if the input is carefully tuned. Wouldn’t that be interesting? A shape you can only see clearly if you just had a mystical experience where you felt all sense of solidity drop for a moment, and which cannot be seen clearly sober, on psilocybin, or even on DMT. The next frontier for psychedelic cryptography!

Comparisons to DMT/Ayahuasca/Psilocybin

The framework of “competing clusters of coherence vs. global coherence” as outlined in numerous QRI publications to explain key differences between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT phenomenology was generally regarded as on the right track by all research participants who had the experience to judge. What this experiment/experience provided was a far more in-depth exploration of the phenomenon.

To begin with, 5-MeO-DMT visuals tend to be “expansive” in that there is a kind of pressure buildup that energizes gestalts and makes them grow. In some cases, they “bloom”. This is especially nice, hedonically speaking, when the seed that it expands is very beautiful or pleasant to begin with. But many other things can get expanded in all sorts of unexpected ways. From the sense of space, to the sense of time, to one’s embodied self, to one’s mental ego, to the representation of others. Anything can balloon, so to speak, on the come-up of low to medium doses of 5-MeO-DMT.

Recall the idea that 5-MeO-DMT phenomenology is approximated by the synergy between waves of relaxation, a sense of love and closeness, and a high frequency pattern-constructing vibration. The waves of relaxation deconstructing a gestalt and fighting the high frequency vibration constructing it can at times create really startling DMT-like visuals but with the difference that they are sort of dissolving in space and time rather than (as is common on DMT) getting interconnected and hyper-associated with a whatever else is in the ecosystem of patterns. On 5-MeO-DMT, the DMT patterns exist in a context that is dissolving/sublimating. The evolutionary selection pressures on the kind of DMT-like pattern (in the sense of this high-frequency, tensing, compressing, weaving, interlocking kind of energy) that survives is entirely different than on ayahuasca, on its own, and as part of the 5-MeO-DMT state.

On ayahuasca, the mood-boosting, softening, and exciting qualities of the MAOIs color the effect of DMT. They seem to soften the rough edges and add a soft ADSR wave envelop on top of them. The patterns are, in a way, generically more friendly in an organic mellow-yet-energized kind of way. But it’s also wide awake and clear-headed, perhaps due to a dopaminergic edge to the experience.

On the other hand, the way 5-MeO-DMT at low to medium doses also includes a DMT-like vibration, affects it at a much deeper level. The 5-MeO-DMT relaxation wave makes the experience extremely, extremely delocalized in feeling. Every “particle” that relaxes entirely on 5-MeO-DMT gets a shared feeling of “being reset” and this feels extremely global and decentralized. Nitrous oxide has a tiny hint of this feeling, but on 5-MeO-DMT you get the pure, more raw, totalizing version of it. This sort of works as a “globalizing network” that dissipates stress and information globally extremely quickly. Hence, now you have the DMT-like vibration (itself very fast and speedy) in a sort of space that contains “qualia material” that is dissolving but is doing so within a space that is as a whole extremely inter-connected and where waves travel much faster than normal. In other words, it’s like a kind of Apocalypse for solid patterns of qualia but with wi-fi enabled, so they go out with a level of intelligence that is unusual even for DMT states.

By this I mean: the clusters of solidity that remain as you dissolve on 5-MeO-DMT get to be excited by a high frequency DMT-like vibration which in turn gets to experience the affordance of a decentralized hyperconnected space. You thus experience a sort of super-intelligent dialogue between the world of the solid and the post-solid world. The world of matter and the world of spirit having a chat, if you will (or at least that’s the sort of poetic image that the state naturally and effortlessly evokes in order to try to express its unusual nature in a memorable way).

I find that the DMT realms tend to be very self-enmeshed. To the extent that one is simulating subagents with less than pure intentions (because that’s adaptive in our current environment) the “walls of the simulation” have a tendency to turn into elaborations of the unpleasant tropes we expect out of social interactions. I do believe that aligning DMT entities is possible and desirable. And in general I experienced very positive and welcoming intelligences during my ayahuasca journeys. But when all is said and done, I think that the DMT phenomenology is more about highlighting and shifting around one’s latches rather than actually undoing them. You can do wonders with the energy body on ayahuasca – there are more dimensions along which you can move, as space was relieved to have additional dimensions along which one is able to exchange excitations across new layers previously collapsed or projected onto lower dimensions. But DMT is at its best just “a little air in the tubes”.

5-MeO-DMT, on the other hand, feels more like power-washing for the high-dimensional plumbing of our being with something akin to a magnetized plasma. Not only is the “gap between the layers” widened more than on DMT, but also there are more gaps that DMT doesn’t touch that 5-MeO-DMT does as well, and they all get inflated at the same time. So after experiencing both substances, it feels rather clear that in terms of “unfolding potential”, 5-MeO-DMT is a few orders of magnitude more powerful. On DMT you are still trapped along dimensions you don’t even know exist, and almost as if stuck in an unsolvable Rubik’s cube, you may get the impression that a few more twists and turns will be enough for you to arrive at the clean slate. But the game is rigged. DMT might itself play with asymmetries at the grain level, meaning that no matter how you arrange it, you won’t experience the clean global symmetries that 5-MeO-DMT naturally takes you to.

In many ways, the “cornerstone” most distinguishing feature of 5-MeO-DMT visuals is the broader context in which they are taking place. The nature of experience is completely interconnected, at the deepest of levels. And every sensation is being conditioned, affected, and correlated with every other sensation at all points during a single experience. The groundlessness induced by the state re-contextualizes the solidity within which representations take place. This changes their very nature, in that the very purpose and goal of art must be re-interpreted to make earnest sense. Whatever aesthetic experience one has at this point is interpreted within a “reality lens” that is very general and which has exited a huge number of “assumed realities” and conventional notions we take for granted. A centerless view will more commonly be congruent with enjoying the show as a meditative exercise, or as a mystical revelation, or even as a trap to overcome (“don’t get caught up in the world of form”), and thus the very “ground” that feeds the solidity to one’s background representations transubstantiates into flowy patterns of gaseous dissolution of specific points of view. The gradient pushes you to a “view from nowhere”.

The visual phenomenology in turn expresses all of these pre-cognitive and pre-cultural changes to the medium of thought that the state induces. I think that carefully studying the way in which gestalts dissolve, become ethereal/optical in nature, and then feel like superpositions of linear waves in a void, are all important hints for how experiential geometry comes about to begin with. With only DMT as a reference point, one would tend to imagine that hallucinations have a vector of construction and complexification sprinkled with symmetrical reductions and dimensionality collapses. With 5-MeO-DMT it becomes apparent that the sense of solidity and its lessening have profound connections to the geometry of attention and awareness and thus the way the geometry of experience is woven together. The dissolving aspect makes the experience hyperbolic in a completely different way than DMT: we are talking about expansion, diffumination, homogenization, and a sense of superconductivity where, likely, flow field lines could be described as moving outwards out of any object of attention. On DMT the flow is balanced, and indeed one can inspect the elements with a lot of precision and information content. On 5-MeO-DMT the expansion/dissolving quality makes careful introspection on the details of the low-level features somewhat jarring and unnatural; attention is oozing out of the field and its flow is pressurizing you from all sides already. Trying to focus on anything is in some ways counter to the direction of this global flow. It encourages you to relax your focus, generically.

States of stability often felt like lazy laminar flow in a lake or pond. Sometimes the flow would quiet down and be so smooth that it reflected like mercury at plain sight. Sometimes the image would actually look like a little bit of oil, a thin film of microscopic thickness, standing on an extremely quiet and still pond of water. “Blowing on it” would deform the image painted on the thin film, and expose the clean water surface underneath.

Another peculiar effect I found in these sessions was the experience of centerlessness as a kind of hall of mirrors in perfect alignment (typically a kind of hexagonal lattice arrangement, but sometimes cubic or with no shape). The crazy thing is that the “location” of this alignment was in many ways having an indeterminate relationship with the rest of the experience, as if happening in a parallel, almost Platonic, realm disconnected from this world. But of course there was a connection, just non-trivial. The rotations and translations and projections of the clusters of “aligned light and mirrors” would interact with the remnants of the world simulation. The more attention I would place on them the more centerless my sense of awareness in general would become. In a way, I now think that as long as there is a single “patch” of experience that has the centerless quality, then the whole experience can have it as well. It’s as if the centerlessness worked as a kind of funnel through which a delocalized “convolutional filter” over experience would take place. It’s like taking the convolution of a well defined probability function with clear peaks and valleys and a smooth simple wave, or perhaps a square wave, making the probability mass smear over greatly. There is the sense that even a tiny funnel could greatly smear the whole experience – very much as if the uncertainty accumulated on an experience could easily blow up to “infinity” i.e. the maximally spread out state. Thus, 5-MeO-DMT states are akin to a diffusion process in some ways. They dissolve the world into centerlessness.

In summary, I found that the visual phenomenology of 5-MeO-DMT was also a window into the overall dynamics catalyzed by the state. Looking at a visual stimuli that would generate gestalts under normal circumstances (say, a square grid), on 5-MeO-DMT would cause the gestalts to “dissolve”. Then as they dissolve, they would acquire peculiar “non-linear optical” properties, such as becoming transparent, behaving like diffraction gratings, or polarizing (phenomenal) light. In turn, after letting this process run for a bit, the solidity of the gestalts would ultimately go away entirely, and be replaced by a “superposition of linear waves”. This progression of visual effects is entirely unique to 5-MeO-DMT in my experience, and it mirrors what happens to other aspects of experience. From the sense of the body to one’s sense of self, all phenomenal constructs seem to dissolve, become optical, and finally be replaced by a superposition of linear waves. I think these are very important hints for what is happening at the substrate level. And ultimately, one of the lines of reasoning that led us to liquid crystals as an explanatory framework (see Phases of Liquid Crystals as an Explanatory Framework to Distinguish Between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT).

THE END