Reflections on QRI's HEART Retreat

It’s 1am and I stare up from my computer screen to see a dozen researchers, psychiatrists, meditation teachers, software engineers, and mathematicians collaborating on their laptops. There are art supplies and in-depth surveys scattered across the room. Notably, an EEG headset is sitting in the corner. People are consulting recordings that were taken immediately after a week of silent meditation so they can recall what they actually experienced, unaffected by the reports of others. Everyone is seeking to build a computer simulation that matches their subjective experience while meditating.

A Scandinavian mathematician is asking me “did the tingling move in waves across your body or did it swirl?”, “what was the texture of the sensations in your hands?”, “did the warmth feel like it had a central point in your body or was it more evenly distributed?”

We tend to think of our subjective experience as personal, unrelated to anyone else’s. But meditators have long reported something odd: after a while, reliably, they feel tingling, warmth, and energy moving in their bodies. When I first felt this sensation in meditation, I passed it off as an idiosyncratic and unimportant experience. That is until I learned that when other meditators compare these reports to each other, they start to converge.

In the same way that I originally wrote off these sensations, I also wrote off studying them in finer detail. I thought that the only thing worth noticing was that there were some sensations there. Whether or not they swirled, waved, or crescendoed hadn’t seemed important so I didn’t notice it. Only when I was challenged to be more precise could I see I had only scratched the surface of understanding what this energy feels like.

At this Qualia Research Institute retreat, the group is taking these reports seriously and attempting to create the most accurate representation of this shared experience. Their hypothesis is that these representations are hiding mathematical signatures that can tell us something about what is happening in the brain in these deep states that might explain why these states feel so different from everyday life.

As a meditator rather than a mathematician, I’m not a good judge of whether or not these reports hide formulae that might reveal some aspects to consciousness. But I do feel joy in knowing that so many people across so many fields are working together to give us the best shot at determining if this is the case. And I was impressed by how hard everyone was working to combine the best parts of meditation retreats, hackathons, and art festivals, with the protocols necessary to maintain the validity of this research. There was a tightly choreographed dance of who could talk to whom about what, without influencing people’s reports of their experience.

The same methodology extended to the study’s 5-MeO-DMT arm, where facilitators administered 5-MeO under medical supervision at a nearby retreat center. I knew almost nothing about 5-MeO going in, only that it was unscheduled in Mexico and that Michael Pollan had described it as the single psychedelic experience he didn’t particularly enjoy.

Over the course of a week, we slowly ramped up in dosage to ensure that no one had adverse reactions. I found the initial days to produce effects remarkably similar to light meditation: increased wellbeing, warmth moving around the body, a sense of emotional tenderness directed at myself and towards others. It was only on the last day that I experienced something new.

In deeper states of meditation, I’ve had the sense that my thoughts and perceptions quieted down in an extreme way, such that only my sense of knowing I was still meditating remained. At the time, I considered this to be consciousness without any object. But on the last day of the retreat, I felt for the first time a deeper dissolution where even the flow of time itself faded into timelessness. That experience showed me my meditation map was mislabeled. It’s not that my consciousness had been objectless. It’s that the objects it was taking were incredibly subtle. Very faint perceptions, or past moments of consciousness, or the intention to meditate. I’m not quite sure yet. I only know that when even the sense of knowing dissolves (and time goes with it), it feels very different. And these days I use the memory of that experience to inform what I notice in the stretches of meditation where it once seemed there was nothing left to notice.

I found the retreat incredibly valuable to my own meditation practice, and am excited to learn from QRI’s publications in the upcoming months. With a unique gathering of experts and approaches from different fields, they’ll likely produce something novel that at least helps us better understand what people in deep states of consciousness perceive. They’re plumbing the depths of these first-person experiences to pull out treasures that others can observe and be delighted by, and perhaps even learn from.

If you ever find yourself wanting to be in that room at 1am, working alongside people who care about these questions, these are your people.

Scintillating grid illusion replication under 5-MeO-DMT.