Arataki’s Diary

2 September 2023 — Day 1

Woke up at 6:30am with Flipper & Scry at the Fairview airport hotel. Met with Andrés, Roger, & 𝛙 around 8ish at the airport to fly to Castlegar. We hung around the airport for 2 hours and were joined by Wystan, arriving at the Sentinel retreat. What a place! Had a short orientation and spent the evening discussing phenomenology & philosophy, despite the major jet lag.

3 September 2023 — Day 2

• Woke up at 6:30am, went out to chat about lucid dreams with Wystan, Roger, and met Max & Luca.
• Breakfast at 9am, then a meditation on the phenomenology of personal identity led by Andrés. Great post-meditation unpacking discussion.
• Round of intros, Andrés did a presentation on the purpose of the retreat & psychedelic epistemology.
  • Purpose of the retreat is to make real headway on understanding consciousness via direct phenomenological inquiry.
  • QRI making a big bet on this approach.
  • Champion a new scientific paradigm - startup mentality.
  • Collaboration: we might all have our own projects to work on, but we’re here to help each other.
  • Skillshare on non-medicine days.
  • 5-MeO-DMT: more useful for studying valence. Global coherence.
  • N-N-DMT: more useful for studying the computational properties of consciousness. Competing clusters of coherence.
  • Academia: large number of people but very small effect size. This retreat: fewer people but larger effect size.
  • Why the sentinel?
    • It’s legal.
    • Institutionalizing this type of research, Canada has a progressive approach. Hoping to take things further.
    • Getting out of the frame of psychedelics as therapy, or psychedelics as religious.
    • The sentinel staff want us to progress using our own truth-seeking approach. 90% of contacted retreat centers wanted to impose their own ontology onto this retreat. Many have particular protocols who are opposed to what we’re doing - see it as ‘reductive’.
  • 5-MeO very new. Lots of ego maniacs who have interpreted their experience in a particular way and want to spread their frame of reference. Apparently no evidence for historic/ancient culture of use.
  • Receptor profile: Super high affinity for 5-HT7 receptor, unusual for psychedelics. N-N doesn’t.
  • 1st retreat: methodological improvements in studying these states. Optimizing for experimental conditions for maximum well-being and motivation to contribute high quality data. “Cast a wide net and see where the large effect sizes are”. Interdisciplinary synergy on a retreat like this.
  • Qu: does color of tracer change with 5-MeO vs N-N?

4 September 2023 — Day 3

Active dreaming

• Dreaming as annealing: another way of getting your brain into a mushy malleable state, so that it can restructure on a day to day basis.
• Remembering your dreams.
  • Dream journaling/voice memo
• Galatamine

5 September 2023 — Day 4

Prepared doses

12 vials with 2.5 mg of 5-MeO.

16 vials with 3 mg of 5-MeO.

Equipment

OHAUS Scout SPX (Model: SPX123) – Link

DIY E-mesh Vaporizer – instructions Link

• Components:
  • GeekVape 80W Aegis Mini
  • Cthulhu Ceto RDA (Black)
  • Vandy Vape Mesh Wire – SS316L, Size: 150
  • Armerah Pipe Stem XL 810 Drip Tip

Method

Doses were measured by weighing double the intended amount of freebase and splitting into two portions (via careful eyeballing). This method was deemed more accurate than the initial procedure of individually weighing 2-3 mg doses, given the error rate of weighing at a scale’s lower limits.

Scales run into trouble when you try to weigh small amounts of material that are very close to the readability of the scale, because a scale’s precision is half the value of its readability […] a scale with a 1 gram readability has a 0.5 gram precision, half the value of the readability

• See ‘Measuring Range’ section of ‘Digital Scales: The Illusion of Precision in Measuring Concrete Countertop Mixes’

I started out by weighing 2.5 mg doses (5 mg/2). After 12 vials I noticed that some of the freebase was sticking to the inside of the vial, so I began to weigh 3 mg doses (6 mg/2) in order to compensate for this small loss of material. Hereafter, the doses I report are likely to be slightly less because of this stuck residue, in addition to the inherent variability of low dose measurement.

Timeline

(note: you can see other recordings here, but we stopped after a week)

1. Arataki: 3 mg, instant vaporization. ~5x more intense experience than anticipated.

Accidental coil reset while reloading. Coil resistance changed (for unknown reason), altering the parameters of the TC algorithm in the emesh modbox (which modulates wattage to maintain a constant temperature).

Functional result

Lower wattage delivered to the SS mesh, so the material vaporizes at a slower rate.

2. Andrés: 2.5 mg, but split between two attempts, and had problems vaporizing it all in one go. From memory there may have been a small amount of freebase (<10%) left on the mesh.
4. 𝛙: 3 mg, very powerful experience, lasted ~40 minutes?
5. Flipper: 2.5 mg, ~10% leftover (0.25 mg)
6. Roger: 3 mg + 0.25 = 3.25, ~50% leftover.
7. Luca: ~43% of Roger’s 3.25 mg = 1.4 mg.
8. Scry: ~7% of Roger’s 3 mg = 0.23 mg.
9. Andrés: 3 mg, ~50% leftover.

The experimental day ended, everybody left the temple. 11 of each vial left over. Vape set to fixed wattage mode at 17 W.

10. Arataki went outside and had Andrés’ leftover (1.5 mg), instant vaporization with new setting.

6 September 2023 — Day 5

I do 6 mg, complete overpowering tuning into single frequency. Could drift awareness between different aspects of the experience, resting onto perception of jazz music, sitting upright, social dynamic, etc. Uncontrollable heavy breathing – my awareness was out of touch with my body, but could at times within the experience ‘notice’ this physiological response.

Core insight: an important (but neglected) consideration for legitimizing this approach to phenomenological research is standardizing the equipment! Already we have discovered that 5-MeO is likely much more effective than commonly believed when you have efficient vaporization tech on-hand. Using a flame is likely to be unreliable for empirical research at least, due to subtle but nontrivial changing variables in each vaporization attempt.

7 September 2023 — Day 6

Working day – made a shared spreadsheet to track dosing, along with a few other (mostly admin) tasks.

Cannabis in the evening – took way too much (was a liquid thc vape) and coughed, hurting my throat. Had to disengage socializing very rapidly, but was having all sorts of psychedelic experiences throughout the night. E.g., intrusive thoughts, uncomfortable noticing’s (e.g., couldn’t see myself as a human in the mirror), overpowering sensations (salivating for one, felt like litres of saliva were being produced every minute). Very sore throat in the shower, likely due to my mind focusing on and resisting the sensation (amplified).

When lying in bed I twisted my head and got crazy tinnitus – loud enough that I struggled to focus on the music I was listening to. Then 10 minutes later I felt a high frequency vibration across my body map, recognized it as 5-MeO, and it got stronger and stronger, having a visual ‘whitening’ effect. I just rode out the experience, which faded away after approx 90 seconds. I have never had such an experience before on cannabis, or anything else. This wasn’t so much of a memory flashback, but a phenomenal flashback, the kind of full body multi-modal experiences you read about. And the fact that it was directly preceded by the tinnitus (a notable symptom of negatively valenced 5-MeO experiences) is interesting. The tinnitus faded after perhaps 20-25 minutes, primarily because I didn’t focus on reifying it within my experience, resting my attention on my audiobook.

8 September 2023 — Day 7

Went to hot springs, had such a fun time.

Evening:

Dose 1

10 minute breathing meditation with Roger, then we split a small dose. Mild discomfort and high frequency tingling on surface of skin, ‘edges of experience’ vibrating.

Dose 2

Eyes open, visual field slowly lost its dimensionality. 3D to 2D – depth map collapsed, became a screen/flat sheet. Then began to collapse into 1D – zero information – but didn’t get quite there. Each point/vector on the 2D screen ‘folded’ into itself, but without directionality (i.e., X,Y coordinate shift). Darkish visual with the faint outline of previously reified objects of perception. Felt like with another mg I would have perceived a single visual field with zero discernable information content.

Open awareness but forced – felt like my attention was being forced open, like the clockwork orange forced eyes open scene. Not super pleasant tbh. The aperture of my attentional field expanded until the whole visual field was simultaneously in focus, but also not in focus. The more you fight this process (resistance) the more dissonant the experience is? (need to test more) Looked like a 2D projection of a 3D plane. Constant contrasts along these lines: hallucinations which contained everything and nothing.

Doesn’t feel like a psychedelic, other than when coming down and trying to grasp onto words to describe the experience. But none of the embodied, playful energy I usually get. Almost like white noise being injected into my nervous system. Tinnitus effects overlap here?

Tentative hypothesis: lower doses more likely to be dissonant. Any amount of 5-MeO within experience wants a complete dissolution of sensation – more precisely, variation in the information content we perceive via our sense organs. There’s a sense of ‘tuning in’ to the high frequency of 5-MeO, but this ‘tuning in’ process is interrupted by the perception of external stimulus – at least at low doses. I suspect that at higher doses it becomes easier for the 5-MeO frequency to overpower external stimulus, leading to a purer experience. Even the perception of thought can disrupt the 5-MeO process.

9 September 2023 — Day 8

Working day

10 September 2023 — Day 9

2.5 mg dose:

• Played with sine wave generator and was sensing which tones ‘fit’ the overall vibe of the substance
• Tried that again but felt scrambled – way too intense

1 mg dose

• Initial sine wave sweep – nothing conclusive. Need better interface.
• Kasina @ 3 Hz, Subpac @ 30 Hz, Sine wave @ 300 Hz. The kasina strobe seemed to flicker in between 3 Hz and 6 Hz, like sometimes there would be double the frequency.

1.2 mg dose

• Kasina @ 14 Hz. Felt nauseous halfway through. Only interesting visuals were several gestalt rings, arranged like ripples emanating from a single point on the surface of a pool.

5.5 mg dose

• Felt very off, energy scrambled throughout my body but unable to attune/tune in to the frequency of the 5-MeO. Surplus energy funnelled into one sensory modality – sound – manifested through tinnitus.

2.75 mg dose

• Inspired by Roger’s account, I decided to go in again to have another go at fixing things. Managed to tune into the frequency by maintaining open awareness. Had moments of experience that were clean slices with no past or future, but each blended into the next smoothly. But also phase shift between dissonant to clean – triggered by thoughts appearing or dissolving.

11 September 2023 — Day 10

Today I mixed 4-AcO-DMT with 5-MeO. Some quotations from an audio recording:

This is much more pleasant and it feels more controlled, the sense of pleasantness. I get the sense of what you were saying: I could be in the state for hours and it feels very healing. This is the de-coagulation of my nervous system. Yeah, I think my state of mind going into this was about as good as it can be and it feels, as you said, like a very controlled sense of release.

Feels like everything is just a sheet hanging over the field of my awareness, it’s just smoothed over. Doesn’t feel like a frustrated kind of high energy, if in each point, or if it’s like a smooth like a gentle, smoother, you know, kind of release, that occurred at each point, with something like that. And it was a tune into quality, like, now I’ve tuned into it, and it’s kind of like a warm, healing blanket, but then if I was not the tuned to the frequency or the sensation, then it’s like a highly energised, each point from the field, which was vibrating, had a lot of energy that didn’t have a release.

12 September 2023 — Day 11

Rest day mostly – did some admin work.

Had two very strong 5-MeO experiences in the evening – likely in the range of 8-10 mg. Both more powerful than I had expected. The come up and first half of the peak was dissonant and profoundly unpleasant – felt like each point within the vector field was vibrating at a very high frequency, but the energy could not dissipate (almost as if the vectors were not touching/repulsing each other, preventing their connection). After the intensity stabilised (halfway through the peak) I could ‘rest into’ the state, and the valence flipped.

Not a flow of energy per-se. Moreso the vibrations stabilising/syncing up.

13 September 2023 — Day 12

Had some THC in the evening and (to my surprise) Andrés called David Pearce! It was super nice to catch up with him :).

14 September 2023 — Day 13

Tai chi with Riccardo & wonderful chats throughout the morning – beautiful day, crystal clear and still water. Downed 20 mg of 4-AcO-DMT with Flipper at 12:36pm. Spent the come up sunbathing on the dock creating intricate tactile patterns by tapping my fists on my chest in sync with the music I was listening to (mostly madlib instrumentals). Honestly was insane how immersed I got – low dose DMT intensity and valence.

Went to the Maloca with Flipper and at 2:31pm did some 5-MeO. Like the earlier experience I had, it was very easy to slip into a deeply annealing state of consciousness, but not quite as strong due to the lower dose. Had a very smoothed over experience – all of the crevices and creases felt like they were ‘ironed out’ of the fabric of my awareness. My energy body felt solid but without any internal texture, as if it were composed of a single whole/continuous energetic substance with no difference in the density between different points. Flipper and I had one fun experiment where we communicated non-symbolically; every noise I made, Flipper responded with a vocalisation roughly equal to the perceived information content. Was pretty cool to see how much emotion could be captured without making reference to semantic concepts! Also, this gave me the very visceral feeling of words ‘conjuring’ mind objects (as pointed out by Andrés that morning on the dock), as if I were a magician breathing life into an inanimate object (bearing in mind that symbols don’t have fixed meanings), or a snake charmer coaxing a slippery reptile out from its den. There was a very playful sense in which I beheld different semantic concepts, rotating them in my mind and manipulating their shape across various different axes until they were unrecognisable relative to their starting state, taking on entirely new mental forms and acquiring new meanings.

For one of the trips I went to the bathroom and stared into the mirror, there was a distinct point where my perception of my face disappeared and the visuals looked like a skin glove texture – lots of indiscernible patterns that would only reify if I forced my attention to fixate on them (note that this reification process was near instantaneous, and didn’t involve these patterns moving around until they were arranged in the correct orientation; was more like every relevant facial feature came into focus simultaneously without any in-between transitory frames). Also my face seemed to age near the end of the experiment after taking a slightly larger sip of vapour, and I began to feel a bit nauseous (which I suspect had more to do with my standing up than the semantic content of the experience). After returning to the maloca I had one last strong trip, maybe 5 mg, very intense and unpleasant for the first 2/3rds, but then I managed to work things out on the come-down – lots of physical smoothening motions, sculpting my perception of the energy flow projected on my body map. Had an awesome dinner, then a swim, spa, and sauna to cool off.

15 September 2023 — Day 14

Today we did a hike in the mountain ranges, and briefly explored the small town of Kaslo. Did some methoxy in the evening with Roger, and then we had a spa and sauna with Riccardo. The trip was difficult to start, but as usual I found a way to work with the energy during the second half of the peak. In my lower torso/back there was a negative divergence (convergence?) in the vector field of my energy body, managed to work with it and smooth everything out. Hot tub felt more pleasant than usual.

16 September 2023 — Day 15

Woke up and within 20mins did some methoxy outside by the rocky abode. This time I had the vape set at a much lower setting (11w) and tried sipping on it slowly & gradually in an attempt to control my entry into the state – was much more pleasant this way. Had a lovely brekkie, downed a monster, and got to work. First few hours were spent working with Dash to create a vector field flow diagram to visualise the previous day’s experience. After a yummy lunch, I took a loaded pipe down by the docks and entered into a smooth relaxed prolonged trip (using the prior technique), with lots of stretching and yoga postures. Felt again like my energy body became smoothed over, a super annealed state. Dipped my feet in the water during one of the experiences and my feet were still cold/mildly numb during; I was aware of that sensory signal and it was neither suppressed nor amplified. Walked back up the hill and did some more in the hammock, really just sinking deep and marinating in the phenomenal character. Then a tad more in the Maloca alongside Roger who wanted to try the sipping method – unexpectedly, I was planning on simply returning the vape and going off to do some work. Then again with Riccardo – also unexpectedly, but he wanted me to show him how to use the vapes and also the sipping method (which I had mentioned to everyone over breakfast). Rather than using the maloca again, we went outside to the seats overlooking the lake, coming out the other side feeling deeply healed/blissed out.

17 September 2023 — Day 16

Another morning methoxy session. Had a beautiful session with Riccardo in the Maloca; we were sipping gently for 30-40 minutes, then went in much deeper at a higher vape temperature. Complete formlessness in the state – need to listen to audio recording of our decompression for more details. I remember my awareness slowly slipping back into my body, and then we spent 15ish minutes moving around the room, dancing, slowly allowing the energy to travel in its own flowy way.

Met with the others outside for a methoxy sunset dance party. After dinner had THC-assisted hangs at the maloca. Andrés, Dash, and I stayed up late doing 5-MeO, but I left a bit early.

18 September 2023 — Day 17

Had a session with Richard today – wow. Complete release – lack of resistance at every layer of experience.

• Different layers I’ve been working though on this retreat. Hit the deepest one here.
• See Richard trip report.

Afterglow: clock speed of my thoughts are completely synchronised with my expressing them. I feel the seeds of the thoughts before they’re expressed – they’re only formed in the process of expression/coming into being. This is philosophically interesting. The mind often attempts to sow the seeds of thoughts in its own discrete space, but this creates a tension between one’s (in)direct perception of the world and the abstract plane of thought. Perception of sensory stimuli is a predictive model of the external world operating at a very low latency. Thought – and mind, more broadly – seems to be a predictive model of the predictive model (of the external world). Patterns of thought can be understood as attempting to model the contents of phenomenology (note that the carving/splitting of phenomenal properties into discrete parts/components is itself a function of the mind – access consciousness has layers! Literally because I think this aspect of the mind is a representational screen or filter over sensory perception). In conversations, I’m now less preparing a carefully planned response to what others say, and when I speak the words flow through me like a gentle stream. There’s a very noticeable synchrony between these two regions of experience, when before they were fractured – information previously had to travel from one region to the other in order for understanding to occur, but now the qualia and cognitive processing of the qualia occur in the same general space (not quite at the level of ‘qualia knowing themselves’, but in that direction of perception).

Other such changes to my experience are increased bodily awareness. While writing this my attention is fixated on semantic content, however I am simultaneously aware of the sensations which are present in different regions of my body map, but which previously my awareness would have ‘tuned out’ as noise. In particular, I am unusually aware of when I hold tension in my muscles (e.g., hunched posture), and seem to have an increased capacity to relax them. The mental move is no mental move! It’s a matter of letting go/releasing contractions within the body map, which otherwise create a sort of resistance to the flow of energy from point A to point B. When I send the signal “Relax” or “Don’t contract” to my muscles, this pattern creates a sense of resistance preventing full relaxation from occurring. It makes me think that complete relaxation isn’t even possible at certain levels of the nervous system if one attempts to initiate this by thinking rather than feeling their way into the state. The body map itself is considerably crisper when I direct my attention inward – perhaps twice or three times as much as before. The acuity of each bodily sensation has increased within my awareness, including those which are ongoing (e.g., normal biological functioning).

I feel very unperturbed, as if the edges of my awareness have been smoothed or ironed over. The qualia computations I’m performing are less discretised, more of a holistic function of the entire system. While I can still get lost in thought, I’m more aware of this when it occurs, and I have greater control over whether I will fall into a deep conceptual thinking/collapsed awareness state. I’m generally low-neurotic/low-stress, so I can’t comment directly on the effect of 5-MeO on this aspect of mind, but I would bet a lot of money that if my current phenomenological disposition was transferred to another human who did feel stress more acutely, a substantial portion of their stresses would dissipate. It feels like the fabrication of complex patterns to explain phenomena has a greater energy cost than before, and the environment of my awareness is less hospitable to the survival and propagation of such patterns.

There’s a deep sense of contentment resting with what is, without the need to analyse or model such phenomena. But I don’t feel like I’m stupider than before the retreat, or less capable of comprehending complex patterns of information that I perceive. Rather, it’s like I’m less likely to internally generate complex patterns in response to perceived phenomena. I feel more of a disposition toward simple explanations of phenomena that maximise predictive power while minimising the cost of generation (note that I felt this way prior to the retreat, but my disposition toward this explanatory approach feels stronger than before). Another way to phrase this is that the complexity of my 2nd-order explanations (thoughts, reasons, mental models) scales evenly alongside the complexity of my 1st-order perceptions (sensory representations) – a given explanation tends more to fall within the optimal ratio of informational complexity and simple elegance.

Some thoughts:

• All qualia know themselves – information doesn’t need to travel between regions of experience.
• Certain thoughts have the quality of wanting to express themselves (discussion with Roger).
• We inherit language from culture, but language is the scaffold of thought.
• What is it like; what does it mean? What does it mean to say what is it like?

19 September 2023 — Day 18

Really low energy day. Recovery, integration.

20 September 2023 — Day 19

Departure