5-MeO ceremony with Richard

Had a session planned with Richard. Andrés happened to be sleeping in the Maloca, and after gently waking him he wanted to stay and observe the ceremony. The original intention was simply to show Richard how my vape worked, but it became a show and tell in which we shared our respective strategies for working with methoxy. Mine was low dose sipping, initially in silence and then with structures from silence playing. Unfortunately the vapes were on low battery so we couldn’t go very deep. But the state was very pleasant, and I think it prepared me for what came next.

For some reason before we began I grabbed a rubbish bin and placed it next to where I was seated in the ceremonial space; while I’ve had the thought “what if I puke?” before, this was the first time I acted on the impulse. We started with smoking the tobacco pipe – I asked rather than he offered, as I saw him doing so for himself, in order to have the most ‘traditional’ experience. He asked me my intention and I said to experience methoxy in his manner, with no expectations attached. He explained the metal pipe + blowtorch method (which I grokked fairly quickly), and explained that he would wait for me to go in before dosing himself (at a much higher dose). He didn’t explain what he would do in the state, nor did I have a very clear model of what exactly I was in for. I was simply open to having a novel experience.

I vaped what was in the pipe, during which he whispered encouragements, such as “keep breathing”, and “hold it in”. I think he put more in than I asked for – perhaps he sensed that I could handle it, though I suspect he believed that I needed it via some sort of teleological reasoning. Regardless, it was a good call. The come up was very fast and intense, and I remained sat upright throughout the entire experience. Shortly after reaching the peak Richard began making unsettling noises, mostly barking, burping, and retching, which startled my awareness. Prior to this there was a spacious stillness, but then the space was filled with Richard’s vocalizations as he channelled ‘Cerberus’ – the three-headed-dog spirit that he claims to work with in ceremonies – presumably to consume whatever bad juju I had to shed.

Throughout the experience there remained a self-other divide; some part of my awareness could sense the sound qualia as an external stimulus originating from outside of the experience. My processing of the information contained a trace of understanding that this was Richard just ‘doing his shaman thing’. I remember breathing heavily throughout, and moving my body slowly and deliberately during the come down – but not in the sense of ‘making a decision to do so’. The movement came naturally, as if every point within my energy body initiated motion in a particular direction independently, so that the global behaviour was emergent from these local properties behaving holistically. After coming down to ~35% of the peak I opened my eyes and Richard appeared within my visual field like a deity, waving his eagle feather around and channelling the ‘medicine man’ – the second ‘healing’ spirit he works with – all the while making swishing mouth noises and performing ritualistic body movements.

Rather than initiating a conversation, Richard coaxed me into vaping the second pipe that he had prepared – I get the sense that he knew I didn’t fully let go and wanted to take me ‘all the way there’. To be perfectly honest I was reluctant to go in too deep, but I think I was tricked by my somewhat-autistic tendency to optimize for performing functions efficiently. In this case it was holding the blowtorch at a particular angle to heat the element without risking combusting the material inside the pipe. I believe that I have a fairly well-calibrated mental model of the physics of vaporization, but as they say, the proof is in the pudding. Note that each pipe had ~6mg loaded in it, calculated via Richard’s eyeballing, however I suspect that there was some residue leftover from a previous session that hadn’t been cleaned.

This hit was very smooth and I was immediately launched into an extremely high energy state of consciousness, similar to the feeling of sudden acceleration while buckled into a rollercoaster. Indeed, the come-up was such a rapid defabrication of information-theoretic structures represented within my awareness that I barely had the capacity to consolidate memories about its phenomenal character. The last thing I can well-remember was Richard whispering “hold it”, and that utterance conveying an incredible sense of meaning – I simply had to hold the vapor in. By the time I released my breath, my awareness could barely register this (I’m not confident that this was consciously registered at all, to be honest). At this stage in the experience I had experienced an exponential build-up of frustrated energy; individual vectors within the field of my awareness felt as if they were vibrating at a very high-frequency, containing lots of potential energy which refused to dissipate.

Then instinctively I knew that there would be an eruption, perhaps in response to the oh-so-biological noises Richard (aka; Cerberus) was making. My organism groped out an arm to the front right from where I was seated, somehow grasping the bin I had prepared and pulling it to my chest, after which I immediately began to throw up. As if I had pulled an unreasonably large plug in a bathtub, all of the frustrated energy began flowing toward a sink (negative divergence in the vector field). This coordinated flow felt incredibly good. The energy was emanating from every point within the field of my awareness, moving at an increased velocity the closer it came to my neck region (where most of it was concentrated), upward toward my mouth (as if it were a pipe) and then dissipating. During this process I could not taste the vomit, nor sense the strands of spit and mucus hanging from my beard – I barely even registered the tactile sensation of having my arms wrapped around the bucket, nor the somatic sensation of hunching over it.

After my purge I was struck by a deep sense of relaxation, which accompanied the sensation of releasing tension from different layers of my experience (some of which I’d never before accessed). It wasn’t a wave, because it didn’t travel from any one region of my awareness to another. It was more like every vector within the field of my awareness, having submitted/given into the biological process that led to my purging, sunk deep into its own sense of non-contraction. There was resistance between these vectors on the come up, but after all of the frustrated energy had been released, no resistance appeared to remain.¹ Consequently, the entire experience became one unified whole with no noticeable variation between different regions.

It is important to note that this description of ‘oneness’ is not a metaphor to describe phenomenal states in which every point is connected to every other point (e.g., nodes within a network), or where every point is qualitatively identical to every other point (i.e., token identity). Rather, insofar as it makes sense to talk about local regions of my awareness as ‘points’, every point was numerically identical to every other point (i.e., type identity: x = x), resulting in the independent existence of any particulars dissolving. These ‘points’ did not even appear to bear spatial relations to one another! Thinking back on this state of consciousness, I find it difficult to fathom the existence of patterns, or entities (e.g., objects, beings), which would seem to require there being a relational difference between such points (i.e., the fabrication of dualism).²

Prior to this experience I had thought letting go was a mental move to be trained, such as ‘don’t contract’, or ‘maintain open awareness’. Now I see it ought to be characterized as a lack of movement, or directionality, locally or globally within my experience, which includes attempting to instantiate this state of consciousness. If I had to use words to describe it, I would say neither ‘thing’ nor ‘not-thing’, but ‘neither thing nor not-thing’. It resists description and, to me, feels totally ineffable given the constraints of my internalized language game. However, I can speak to the valence of the experience, and I’ve never felt such a lack of resistance before – it feels very much like this experience was acting upon a deeper layer of my nervous system than any prior experience on the retreat. It’s hard to say whether I could have had this experience at the beginning of the retreat; was it Richard’s shamanism, or a gradual softening/sublimation process resulting from using methoxy for the two prior weeks, that allowed for such a deep sense of release to occur? Who knows.

One striking feature about this experience compared to the first was that the self-other distinction between myself and Richard collapsed. There’s a sense in which we shared the experience – my experience, pervaded and shaped by his guttural noises – plausibly to the degree of having initiated the biological process of purging within my organism. During the come-down, this was especially noticeable as the different noises he made directly mapped onto changes which occurred within my phenomenology, primarily involving different modes of relaxation. At times my body responded with its own noises – again, zero resistance within my nervous system, so the impulse could not have been suppressed. Certain noises I made began in the shared audible context, then became exploratory as my organism played around with their effects on my phenomenology, which often involved hitting certain frequencies that created a resonance within the room, or vibrations within my body.

Sitting in the state was like being blissed out, but without the tingly/fizzly high arousal quality (rather; low arousal/high valence). Felt more healing/annealing. Slowly coming back into my settled body and the sense-making shell of my mind was like slipping on a glove, except with zero friction. I eventually opened my eyes to find Richard glowing with love and laughter – his gaze caught me during my slow descent, and gently grounded my experience into the world.