After effects and reactivations

Attending QRI’s 5-MeO-DMT from the 7th until the 20th of September 2023 was a remarkable personal experience, possibly among the top 10 life experiences that transformed my experience and beliefs.

Attending the retreat had a variety of effects on different aspects of my experience, ranging from consciously perceivable new phenomenological patterns to changes in unconscious automatic response to happenings, from short-term immediate after effects of intaking 5-MeO-DMT to medium-term changes in my day-to-day experience once back from the retreat.

It appears to me that at the time of writing – end of October 2023, 5 weeks after the end of the retreat – most of the after effects of the retreat have been positive. Next, I will describe some of them from the most immediate to the long lasting.

Short-term (during the retreat and up to one week after)

One of the most noteworthy immediate after effects of repeatedly intaking 5-MeO-DMT was a significant reduction in the sense of phenomenal solidity and viscosity across sensory modality and the perception of ideas and concepts. I describe in my video about the tactile phenomenology of 5-MeO-DMT how after a couple of session I started experience what I called a sense of soft solidity or inverse memory foam in my tactile experience, during which solid shapes would feel soft as their shape world harmoniously propagate throughout my body from the point of contact.

My mindfulness skills skyrocketed during the retreat. One day I sat to meditate for one hour and went through – what seemed to me at the time – all the jhanās in sequence. I am not convinced this is true and I do not want to claim any specific attainment, but it certainly was a powerful experience, full of vast phenomenological variety and profound calming effects to my mind. My qigong practice also improved substantially in terms of how willing I was to engage with it and how much benefit I experienced while practicing it. It was much easier for me to slow down and practice qigong sequences at a very slow pace, which linked with a slowing down in my breath rate. On retreat, when lifting my body up to the sky during qigong practice, I often experienced brief 5-MeO reactivations, which also supercharged the valence and my perceived healing of the practice.

5-MeO DMT reactivations were an entirely new phenomenon for me, as I had never experienced anything similar with any other substance before (note I had never used any substance so frequently in such a short time span). What struck me as particularly fascinating was the brain’s ability to recreate the profound altered state induced by the substance with such astonishing precision.

This effect of soft solidity grew stronger throughout the retreat, as I consumed more 5-MeO-DMT – and peaked during my travels back home. On the first of my three flights back home I meditated for almost four consecutive hours while in a state of very vague and vaporous connection with my body and its place and position in space. During the second flight, aided by 100mg of pregabalin, I entered a different state during which my mind interpreted all sensory inputs in a much softer and gentler way than usual. To give a concrete example, I was sitting next to the bathroom of the airplane, and whenever someone flushed the toilet, my brain somehow attributed some cosmic vaporous qualities to the sound (which, in my opinion, already sounds somewhat flowy during sober consciousness).

This also shows a different way in which the sense of reduced phenomenal solidity showed up in my experience. In conceptual space, reduced solidity and viscosity created much looser links between experiences and meanings. Attaching a certain interpretation to an experience or a feeling felt much more arbitrary, feeble and short-lived. This pattern of effect paved the way for many of the positive medium-term after-effects I experienced.

Medium-term (from one week to one month after)

Substantially reducing the stickiness between experiences and meaning is in my opinion highly related to the Buddhist concept of emptiness, or at least from how Rob Burbea describes it during his retreat on Practicing the Jhanās. I suspect that my understanding of emptiness is still shallow and available for further development, but my current conceptualisation of it points to the dependence of perception on perspective and how nothing exists when not observed, reality has no shape when devoid from who observes it.

Experiencing a significant reduction in the stickiness between one’s first person experiences and the meaning that one’s mind attributes to them seems to me to be good evidence of this idea of emptiness and a parameter relating to the depths at which one experiences it. Low stickiness of meaning implies that one can easily move between different perspectives and interpretations of reality and experience how each can be equally valid and bring different changes on experience and perception. It also means that one can, sometimes and briefly, experience reality with very little meaning and content attached to it.

In turn, this created in me a whole host of benefits that substantially increased my hedonic baseline. One of the more obvious effects of this was a noticeable reduction in attachment to interpret events and make meaning. After the first few trips, I began feeling less entangled in the complexities of life and found it easier to let go of interpretations and thoughts that may have previously caused distress or anxiety. I discovered that I could more easily remain anchored in the present moment and maintain equanimity during everyday activities, like lying in bed waiting for sleep to take over. This correlated with a greater ability to let go of mental labels and judgments, which resulted in a continuous sense of acceptance and ease. Negative emotions and experiences seemed to become somewhat less painful and annoying. Decisions, which are something that I historically struggled with given that I have had a tendency to over-analyze options and often fall into decision paralysis (note that I have a MSc in Decision Science) felt much easier and bearing much lower stakes. Decisions come about alongside this deeper sense that while choosing well matters at the end of the day no outcome mattered that much since both outcomes carried meaning that was somewhat arbitrarily attached to my experience of reality.

My meditation and mindfulness abilities also retained their enhanced state in the weeks after the retreat. I found it easier to slow down, stay present, and maintain a meditative state even during dynamic activities such as dancing. A few weeks after the retreat, I experienced the second jhanā during contact improvisation.

These changes seemed to be occasionally apparent to those around me. My partner, for instance, noticed my reduced attachment and simpler speech. Life appeared to become somewhat less convoluted, with fewer hypothetical scenarios, which seemed to lead to more straightforward interactions.

In the weeks just after the retreat, 5-MeO reactivations occurred somewhat frequently, especially as I was on the brink of falling asleep or when I was gradually waking up. I found that the combination of these reactivations with a state of deep relaxation led to an incredibly positive emotional experience. The fact that they happened unexpectedly allowed the altered state to emerge in a context of fewer expectations, creating an excellent training ground for my mind to work with unpredictable circumstances.

A specific journey pattern that included a 5-MeO reactivation happened twice in my dream with completely different semantic contents. It unfolded as follows:

1. I dream of tripping on 5-MeO
2. I would experience a reactivation of the 5-MeO state
3. I would experience a dissolution of the sense of self and reality
4. I wake up from the trip into a lucid dream
5. I would realize that I was dreaming and felt the intention of waking up
6. I wake up from the lucid dream into another dream, usually located in a deeper layer of my mind (e.g. early life experiences)
7. I wake up fully to this reality, quite disoriented;

Moreover, during these reactivations, I noticed that my mind swiftly traversed through many of the memories I accumulated between reactivation events. It was as though these memories were seamlessly blended together and I could traverse them at fast speed across different dimensions of meaning and interpretation.

A minor complication that started emerging a few after the retreat is that a part of my mind started forming expectations towards these states of deeper self-absorption and high valence. At times the forming of these expectations led to the emergence of tension and additional contractions, in the form of self-pressure, to pursue and enter these states, which was a naïve stance, because by reducing relaxation it actually made achieving them less likely. However, a recurrent pattern was that despite these increases in pressure and mental complexity, I have been somewhat consistently able to find peace at the deeper level and direct it towards these patterns, becoming ultimately able to relax into them.

Long-term (from one month after onwards)

Accordingly, the primary lasting effect I have experienced follows this pattern. One month after the retreat, my hedonic tone has somewhat renormalised to a lower average, which feels lower than the month immediately following the retreat but still higher than the many months preceding it, and my ability to easily enter deep self-absorption states as somewhat reduced.

However, what seemed to have remained and very much established itself in my experience is a heightened ability of decontextualise and relativise experiences. This is something that I felt somewhat capable of already doing before the retreat, but the speed and effectiveness at which I can see my struggles as relative and depending on my current perspective seem to have increased. In a sense, I feel irreversibly less attached to interpreting experiences in any specific way.

This, in turn, relates to another facet of my post-retreat experience, which also reflects less solidity in phenomenal conceptualisation. Having had 5-MeO-DMT trips that significantly altered my sense of reality and suddenly shifted the palace of my beliefs from one place to another perceivably lowered my sense of ontological confidence. I feel overall much less confident that I know what reality is and much more open to surprising and unexpected realizations about this. I consider this a mixed effect because it is sometimes quite confusing and difficult to manage, especially in the context of social interactions and interfacing with the beliefs of others.

I note that, six weeks after the retreat, self-absorption and profound meditative states still occur more often than they used to before, but perhaps I consider them more normal and less surprising. However, the normalization of them also brought with it a reduced sense of pressure to find and enter them and more relaxation and ease in my attitude towards them.