Although this is a blog about Ayahuasca, I figured it would be worthwhile for everyone to read about my recent breakthrough experience with DMT. After all, Ayahuasca contains DMT. These past 12 months, I've been guinea pigging myself and have dabbled with Ayahuasca and high doses of psylocibin mushrooms, alongside my daily meditation practice to study the mind. I've experienced many of the usual trip reports that most people read about (ego death, encountering entities, oneness, interconnectedness, divinity, amplified sensory experience, and altered states of consciousness). However, my experience yesterday afternoon was quite beyond your ordinary trip. It's been quite difficult to grasp and wrap my mind around. It was inconceivable, beyond imagination. It wasn't your typical hallucination or journey, but almost a direct experience into the seeing of our mind unfolding and then reconstructing reality. If you think our physical reality is it, I'll tell you, it cannot be any further from the truth. A DMT breakthrough is by far the most bizarre experience anyone could ever fathom and go through.
I basically attempted to smoke DMT for the first time with the intention of breaking through. For those of you who don't know what DMT is, it's dimethyltryptamine, a chemical compound found in all of life and is supposedly released by the brain upon death. "Breaking through", is to take a high enough dose to pierce reality and enter other realms or different dimensions. Don't believe in other realms, different dimensions? Try again, smoke DMT, cause you'll be in for a surprise.
In my 1st attempt, I didn't smoke enough. Reality shifted, things got interesting and everything became rather fake, cartoonish, or like lego blocks. But I was still able to tell what was going on. My 2nd attempt, I still didn't smoke enough, but I closed my eyes this time and entered your standard trippy vortexes and tunnels that you usually see on Ayahuasca, only that the content was much more raw and basic without any entities or any presence. Also, "you" as an individual, disappears, and it's just raw experience. Like you're aware, yet "you" are gone.
On my 3rd attempt, I finally broke through and something very terrifying, awestruck, and profound happened. This was probably the most intense experience I've ever encountered on psychedelics and in life. Hopefully this experience can shed some light on the understandings of the nature of reality and may be valuable to anyone who reads this.
So here we go. Just as I took the last puff and peaked, I saw that things were going to unravel and quickly go out of control. I felt a rush of energy rising up from my back, up to my neck, and then to the back of my head while hearing a high pitched ring. It felt like everything was going to go south very fast. I attempted to put the pipe and lighter down as fast as possible for fear of dropping it, as the glass pipe appeared to be melting. As I was doing so, within seconds, I started to see my hands and body shrink itself into youth. My hands and body shrunk and I became a child again. For a split second I felt pure innocence, but at the same time was in complete shock and disarray. As it progressed, I fell backwards onto my bed and saw my hands shrink into a baby's hand. It was surreal. Incomprehensible.
I recall the last of my thoughts were, "Oh no, I made a mistake, this is not how I wanted to die." And was worried about disappointing my parents and what they would think of me. And what my coworkers would think of me. "Oh no, this is it, this is how I'm going out, too late, I messed up." As I attempted and continued to grasp and cling to life, there was nothing stable that I could hold onto. Everything that I thought I was, got completely thrown out the window. A "me" kept phasing in and out until finally all concepts, the structure of reality, and thoughts were gone. It was like I was being crushed, twisted, bended, flipped, and inverted all at the same time. Any attempt to be mindful was impossible, there was no one left to be mindful. It was pure chaos and there was no control whatsoever. No Love, no God, no Oneness, no Bliss. Nothing left but raw sensory input, raw data. And as life was dizzyingly breaking apart, slipping away, and fading out, consciousness finally shut down, blinked out of existence and blacked out. Emptiness. It was like I died.
Not too long after, it was quite strange and compelling. It was as-if my brain was rebooted and my system was coming back online. For a brief moment, it was like I forgot why I was here or what I was doing, a clean slate. I felt completely foreign to my surroundings. Like I was some being in some strange environment. But as my personality came back, I began to see and make sense of things, "Oh, I'm Peter, this is my room, I was smoking DMT." The narrating mind reappears. As I began to look around, I was able to see and comprehend the frames around all objects within reality, the basic building blocks of shape and form. It was like everything in the world was a three dimensional translucent blue print and model made of rudimentary geometric shapes. My curtains were two dimensional lines, my hardwood floor was semi-translucent, as was my bed. Doors, walls, and furniture were perfect rectangles, squares, circles, and triangles.
And as the mind slowly attempted to re-stabilize reality, one by one more details came into play and was layered in. The color brown was applied onto my wooden floors, colors began appearing in other objects, curves were added to all the box-like straight-edged objects. The surface of all objects in reality started to appear extremely smooth, like a dolphin's skin. And finally, as the effects wore off, the finer details and subtleties of reality began to emerge, like the pores of my friend's skin, the fine lines of her hair, or wrinkles on her face. It was a lot like watching one of those time-lapsed videos on youtube where an artist begins to draw an image with basic shapes until all the details have been finally overlaid on top of the original image to make the final product. So I thought to myself, "This is how the mind constructs reality", as I watched it fill in the remaining details. Super fascinating.
This whole experience lasted probably 5 to 7 minutes. At this point, I really don't know what to make of this, other than it just being quite an extraordinary experience. It was overwhelming, pretty scary, yet interesting at the same time. It's definitely piqued my curiosity. The first time I did Ayahuasca, I surrendered and went through a symbolic death. But now I see, the DMT death experience is a much more real simulation to death because the sense of dread and wanting to cling to life was much more powerful. Way more intense. As I gained experience and learned to navigate reality with Ayahuasca, it was much more fun to explore. Perhaps it may be the same with DMT. I'm just not sure I'm ready yet.
DMT has shown me what I unexpectedly wanted to see.
