This article is about the study of the mind-consciousness when it meets with one of the most powerful and mysterious molecules in the universe, the 5-MeO-DMT.
It’s meant for anyone interested in the topics of consciousness, spirituality, freedom, space and time, love, and of course… psychedelics.
You can browse this article following the links here:
The eternal present moment
1. The meaning of freedom
2. Space, time, and the universe
3. Heaven and hell
Love as the acceptance of dying
Introduction
There was that Mexican guy staying at the same hostel with me for the last 12 or 14 days, tall, almost black, with a black beard and a strong muscled body. His face and his eyes were always reflecting inner peace, joy, and abundant love. Since I have always been extremely good at feeling and recognizing people, I immediately recognized him… Among other things, I recognized him as my best friend.
One day, very randomly, he told me that he had a very very long day. His eyes were shining like usual, and the tone of his voice was very calm. “So what happened?” I asked him. He told me that he met with an amazing woman and that he woke up early this morning and went with her to a ceremony. “Oh really”, I said! “So what did you take?” I stopped moving. My attention came at its maximum, my ears were standing up and I plunged into his eyes. “I smoked the Bufo DMT”, he said.
The molecule
We are talking here about one of the most mysterious and the most powerful molecules that exist, as far as we know, in the entire universe. It’s been used on the American continent for ages, but it has only been chemically understood by Western scientists in the 20th century. There are variants of DMT, and the one we’re talking about here is the 5-MeO-DMT, also called the O-methyl-bufotenin, from the Bufo, a toad living in the north-western deserts of Mexico. It’s a venom produced by glands within its skin. You catch the toad, squeeze those glands, get the poison, let it dry, and…
The molecule goes exactly like C13H18N2O, the one of LSD goes like C20H25N3O; different but similar… With the DMT found in some other plants and animals, including in the famous Ayahuasca brew, they are part of a class of extremely powerful molecules within the family of what’s called “psychedelic drugs”.
5-MeO-DMT has been famously nicknamed the “God Molecule”. You can know everything you want about this big family of molecules here:
DMT – 5-MeO-DMT – The Bufo toad – LSD – Ayahuasca – Mescaline – Psilocybin
5-MeO-DMT is an entheogen, a substance used “to produce a non-ordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes” (definition from Oxford languages). You can find a whole list of entheogens here:
List of substances used in rituals
The journey until the toad
His name is Zohar, and just 10 minutes after he told me about his sacred journey of that morning, I found myself in the house of Arlak, the woman he was talking about (Arlak is a nickname as she prefers to stay anonymous) It’s that I didn’t want to lose my time for useless hesitation. I’ve been already very passively looking for the toad. And I immediately recognized that the toad came to me at the right moment with exactly the right people, at the right place.
It’s been years that I’m interested in the exploration of our infinite consciousness and the effects of psychedelics on the different states of consciousness. The scientific literature on the topic is abundant but still blurry. More recently, there has been a lot of ongoing research in psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry about that crossroad between the altered state of mind induced by psychedelics and the process of psychological healing. That’s one of the things I already started to investigate a long time ago, and that I wanted to continue investigating with the poison of the toad.
Another thing I wanted to investigate is of course my own mind. I wanted to see what the molecule will have to tell me about my life, and our lives in general.
At the house of Arlak, the discussion didn’t last a long time. We decided that we will do it the morning of the next day, on an empty corner of the beach. Even if Zohar took the “medicine”, as they call it, that day, I invited him to come again the next day. This was important for me that he’s there, as I identified him as a protector. A protector is like someone you go to war with, and you’d be happy to die with!
It was still late afternoon when we left the house of Arlak, the woman taking care of the ceremony. From that moment and until the next morning, I entered a kind of inner religious prayer. I already had a good idea about where I’m going, and I wanted to arrive there with a maximum concentration and a free and open heart, without fear, without doubt, and any particular expectation.
With Zohar, Arlak, and others, we headed towards the beach. I noticed that Arlak was a very caring woman, and it didn’t surprise me as Zohar already spoke with me about her qualities. When I was sitting on the beach, she came to sit next to me and asked me how I feel about the ceremony of tomorrow, and I only told her that I feel very happy. She asked me if I had set to myself any particular intention, and I simply answered her: Yes, but just like the intention I wake up with every day. Then, there was a silence. I saw she wasn’t able to find exactly who I am or how I feel, and she smiled at me and left.
I entered to swim into the ocean with the very precise thought of dying. As I swam further from the coast, I contemplated the horizon in front of me and talked to death: Come and take me whenever you want, I am ready to die, and I’d like to meet you with open arms!
Then I went back to the hostel, ate a light dinner as Arlak advised us to do, and I kept far away from my phone. I entered into introspection, contemplating what I did in this life and what I’d like to do. I also went into deep contemplation of the mystery of our consciousness and our physical and mental connection within the universe. When I arrived in bed, I put on my headphones and chose a piece of music with the poetry of Rumi, one of the deepest poets about Love. And this is how I slept until I woke up around 7h AM the next morning.
I’m writing all those details because preparation for this kind of trip is not only important, it is crucial. The line between heaven and hell could be written right there in those moments of preparation, in what you put in your mind, and in how peaceful and authentic you are and you feel with yourself and the world around you.
In the morning, as Arlak suggested, we didn’t eat anything, not even drink water, and we headed to her house, and from there, after a walk of few minutes, we arrived at the beach. On the way, Arlak asked me again about how I’m feeling and if I was nervous, and I just told her that I was feeling very good. She didn’t know anything about me, but that was going to change in the next hours.
The rituals
When we arrived at the beach, Arlak started to collect some small pieces of wood and dry leaves to start a fire in the sand. She put some small blankets on the sand and took her equipment out: glass pipes, a flute, other musical instruments, and some other ritual objects. The fire, she said, is very important, the most important of our elements; it’s the place we come from.
The presence of Zohar was for me as a source of bliss. He was walking around playing his traditional kind of drum, and as Arlak was advanced in her preparation, she started to sing songs of amazing beauty.
Then one by one we went through a ritual of cleaning, with the smoke of a special powder thrown into the fire in a small bowl.
During that time, I was walking around and opening my arms to the wind and the infinity of the ocean. Then I was sitting and opening my chest and my arms, while smiling and laughing, like in a preparation for a state of total craziness. I was already feeling extremely “intoxicated” with deep happiness and love, and a feeling of infinity.
Arlak prepared the venom of the toad into a glass pipe. It’s a kind of hard white powder put into a perfectly round and transparent glass pipe. I had already asked Zohar to go first, and he immediately agreed. Once everything was ready, he sat down crossing his legs, and Arlak came right in front of his face holding the pipe in one hand and the lighter with the other. She looked at him in his eyes and told him some beautiful words. She started to burn the glass from the outside and once there was a white smoke inside the pipe, she gently put it between his lips. He started to inhale slowly, for many seconds, keeping the smoke of the venom into his body. Then, suddenly his head seemed to become very heavy, and while Arlak was gently holding his neck, he fell on his back.
Into the toad
His breathing became very deep, and his body, his arms behind his head, his chest, and his belly, were moving very intensely. His eyes were closed as he looked totally disconnected, or radically connected, with the world and the people around him. His face was showing the signs of absolute bliss.
I was also sitting legs crossed close to Zohar. In front of us, a man was playing the flute. His eyes and the movement of his fingers on the flute were connected with Zohar. And when Zohar started to open his eyes and look at the people around, the eyes of the flute man were plunging into his eyes while he continued to play. Zohar started to look at each one of us deep in the eyes, as some people kept playing their basic music instruments and singing.
While Zohar was still “traveling” and looking at us, my arms and my chest were wide open to the wind coming from the ocean. My face and my laughter were showing a mix of total craziness and exaltation. I was already “gone” before inhaling anything, and some tears came out of my eyes. Extreme happiness was hitting me already, and I was letting it come and grow in me very consciously.
At a certain point, Zohar started to say things, talking exactly like a prophet or a priest. He turned to me and I hugged him. One of the first things he said was: “Fear doesn’t exist”. Then he said: “We don’t need anything else. We have everything”. After that, he stood up and started hugging everybody and saying amazing things to them. We hugged each other again, and we plunged into each other eyes recognizing our deep friendship.
The high-intensity trip of the Bufo DMT lasts for a few minutes. Depending on how you define “high intensity”, you can say that it lasts between 5 and 20 minutes. Then, other things could last for hours, days, weeks, years, and even an entire life. How to know? How to measure something like this? It’s probably impossible.
For everyone, the experience of the Bufo DMT is a very profound inner experience, that is very often indescribable with words. As Zohar was tripping, I already said to myself: There is no one of us looking at him at that moment, who would be able to guess and say what was happening in his head. The access to the consciousness of others, and very often to our own consciousness, remains a tricky undertaking.
As I had those thoughts, I remembered that one of the goals for which I was there, was to write this article. The goal of this article is to put into words an experience that is unique and hard to describe. As the reader of this article, you can maybe find in it something that could enrich your life or widen your curiosity.
Exactly like Zohar, I sat down crossing my legs, Arlak approached me with the pipe while bearing on her face a wonderful smile, full of love and kindness. She thanked me and told me very sweet words. I felt that I wanted to hug her and kiss her at that moment, but the white smoke was already appearing in the pipe. I plunged with absolute trust into her eyes, and as she put the pipe between my lips, I immediately started inhaling the poison of the toad.
The eternal present moment
Once I finished inhaling all the white smoke, I immediately fell backward, the eyes closed and the face towards the sky. At the very beginning, it felt like I was totally passing out, but in reality, my consciousness was still alive and even very alive. I just felt as if I was sucked up into a black hole in the middle of the universe! It is like the place where we all come from and where we all go to: the birth and death of everything, the origination and the dissolution of everything. Then, the most important eternal moment was going to happen.
I suddenly felt that I was being taken to another world from which there will be no possible way back. In that fraction of a second, I was realizing that I’m going into such a profound confusion and craziness, that never again I’ll be able to come back and live in this world. That fraction of second, that moment that I called “the eternal present moment”, is the “place” about which we can write and say an infinite number of things. But I’m going to reduce it here to three main points.
1. The meaning of freedom
Once I found myself on that spot, on that crossroad between keeping control or surrender, between holding to life or accepting to die, between sanity or irreversible craziness, I chose to surrender, leaving behind me everything from my family, my friends, my memory, my knowledge… Everything was over. My ego exploded in millions of pieces, and it got blended within the atoms of the entire universe. While I was still conscious and fully feeling what was happening, I was saying to myself: That’s it! Everything is over! It is game over! I didn’t feel one single moment of doubt or fear. On the contrary, I felt the bliss of the absolute fusion between death and rebirth, end and beginning. In Hindu or Buddhist terms, I went into the bardo, an intermediate state between death and rebirth. In monotheistic words, I went into the arms of God or into a total fusion with god. Those are here words, just words. And words can for sure describe an experience, but at the same time, they reduce it and make it flat and poor in comparison to its original fullness and richness.
Let’s make a small pause here, and ask a question. I just wrote above: “I chose to surrender”. But did I really choose? Or did the toad choose for me? Is the belief in the freedom of choosing a reality or a lie? Is it true that we can choose freely? Or is that “freedom” the last lie, the last illusion, and the last tentative to desperately hold on to a likely self, a possible ego?
Is the belief in freedom, in reality, the last and most subtle expression of fear? The fear of having not a single control over anything! Is freedom the expression of the terrible fear of not existing, not being?
There, when the venom of the toad took me, I believe that I had no freedom, no choice, no fear, no self, no past, no future. I was just gone. I went into a total fusion with everything and nothingness. I became everything and nothing. The word “freedom”, with the meaning of being able to consciously chose between A and B, had absolutely no meaning at all. Freedom on the contrary meant the fact to surrender to the mysterious determinism and/or contingency of the universe. The feeling of freedom became the feeling of not knowing anything, not knowing how to take any decision, and even not wanting to know anything. It’s like the freedom of an electron around its atom.
2. Space, time, and the universe
As I went beyond that “eternal present moment” and found myself swallowed into oneness or nothingness, my senses and my consciousness became much more acute. I was there where the people around were playing music, chanting, performing rites, and looking into my eyes. At the same time, I was in the center of the universe and on an infinite number of parallel multiverses. The concept of time as we commonly know it seemed not only totally meaningless but even ridiculous. The same can be said about the meaning of space.
Past and future, as well as the common understanding of the flow of time, disintegrated. The physical distances between different spaces and galaxies collapsed. There is not a single doubt that our common perception and understanding of the reality of space, time, and the universe is a total illusion and a huge ignorance. Ask any quantum physicist, or any meditation master, or a shaman, and they will all tell you the same thing: Space and time, as we perceive them and even as we can measure them with the most sophisticated scientific tools, leave us just into a total ignorance and total confusion about the reality of those mysterious phenomena that are in total fusion with our mind(s) and consciousness. When the most eminent quantum physicists of the 21st century come to talk about the most fundamental “particles” or “waves” of space and time, they end up talking like the most profound and the most accomplished spiritual masters, leaving their audience and the whole undertaking of modern science faced with an infinite confusion and embarrassment. And when, in the presence of the Buddha, Avalokiteshvara said the Heart Sutra, he spoke like the most modern quantum physicist of our times.
When I started to open my eyes, being reborn, as fully healthy and not lacking anything, I started to plunge into the eyes of each person who was present on the spot. I was able to plunge into each one’s universe, shifting from quickly from one to the other, and finding in all of them the same universe: a universe of absolute connection and love.
My hands, my arms, and my legs grew up from the earth and stayed anchored inside the earth, inside Mother Earth. And I became a reptile. But in reality, I didn’t become a reptile; I am a reptile. Exactly like a terrible and a wonderful huge lizard, I walked on my four legs, I rolled myself into the sand and I plunged into the eyes of those people and multiverses, with a total feeling of trance, of ecstasy, and of being who I am.
There was absolutely nothing that was happening and that was surprising me. I felt like being in the universe exactly like I know it, exactly like I love it from the depths of my heart. All the eyes were plunging inside me and I was plunging into all the eyes. The eyes of the Arlak, Zohar, and the flute man were shining, vibrating like a well with infinite depth and infinite love.
I wanted to say something but realized I didn’t know if I should speak Spanish or English as not everybody understood those two languages. So I stood up, and went directly to the flute man, as I had a message for him. I looked deep into his eyes and I told him: “You have a very old soul. You are extremely connected. Thank you so much”. In an extremely emotional moment, he stood up, and we hugged each other very strongly, while the others were playing the music and singing. Then, I hold his shoulders between my hands, and looked again into his eyes, and told him: “You have to keep being exactly like you are. You have to continue like this”. Apparently very moved by my words, with shining eyes he told me: “I’m going to take your words very seriously. It was really a great honor for me to attend such a ceremony with someone like you”. And I hugged him again.
Right after that, I went to deliver other special messages to Zohar and then to Arlak Big and long hugs followed. I hugged everyone and established a deep connection with everyone. Then, I walked further. I slowly went away from them on the sand, watching the ocean. I noticed that they just kept playing the rhythms and singing. I wanted to have a moment for another mission. The medicine or the venom, call it as you want, was still very active in my mind. That’s where I just stopped to think about the words I’m going to use to write this article. I just asked myself for few seconds: What happened exactly? How to say it? The whole words came to me in one shot like the lightning. The article was already written. I was totally satisfied. I achieved my mission. But I felt exhausted. I couldn’t stand up anymore. So I came back to my place, I laid down on my back. The singing face of Arlak came very close to me. Her eyes came inside my eyes, and as I smiled at her, she smiled at me and kept singing. My heart was beating like the heart of the universe. Following the rhythm of the music and the chants, I started moving my hands above my chest. Arlak synchronized her energy, her voice, and her rhythm to the rhythm of my heartbeats. With both hands, I was holding my heart that was beating outside of my chest. The voice of Arlak was shaking, her throat was trembling, her eyes were close to the tears as she plunged them deeper and deeper into mine. Zohar was slowly moving around playing his drum, his eyes were full of water, he was on the edge of crying of bliss. Together, we entered the orgasmic universe of love.
3. Heaven and hell
Back to that eternal present moment, I’d like to say something about that time where the next second has to unfold, has to be realized, and come into existence. Using the same figurative way, I’d like to say something about that moment when a quantum particle appears or disappears, appears as a particle or as a wave, appears here or there… How does that work? Who decides, who can predict the position and/or the state of a quantum particle? The only answer we have now is that there is no answer. Not only there is no answer, but also when it comes to the “relation” between a quantum phenomenon and its observer or sensor (the way it is captured), it seems like modern physics is going into a deadlock. The whole paradigm of physics probably has to collapse again to find a clue. With the breakdown of that paradigm, we will very obviously consider those pre-Columbian shamans, ancient Tibetans, or Indian masters, much closer to “reality” than contemporary physicists.
When we talk here about the unpredictability of a quantum particle, the real topic is the unpredictability of human feeling, thought, and behavior. It probably happened to you that you come before a situation where for a fraction of a second, you don’t know if you would explode with anger or laughter. If you explode with anger, you into hell; and if you explode with laughter you go into heaven. This is what we are talking about here. So the same questions we asked about quantum particles come back here in the field of psychology: Who decides about how you feel and what you do? How is that decided? How is a decision taken? Or is there no freedom and no decision?
Some will tell you that it depends on your habits, your values, beliefs, your karma… But what does all that mean? Some others will say that it depends on the will of god… Does that still mean anything?
So how is it when you are faced with the ultimate truth of dying? “Dying” here has many meanings. There is the physical or clinical death that we all more or less agree about its manifestation; and there is also the psychological death when your pride is severely hurt when the beliefs you were holding on just collapse like a house of cards, when the scientific/metaphysical ground you’re walking on disappears, when your lover of a lifetime stabs you in the back, or when ultimately, you ego dissolves. How do you react? Do you chose between hell or heaven or are you chosen by hell or heaven?
On the day of your certain execution, do you go with a feeling of bliss and an accomplished life? Or do you go with the feeling of horror, terror, and depression?
Those are the questions that are held into that eternal present moment when the 5-MeO-DMT molecule comes to take you. Do you say yes? Or do you say no? What is the way to heaven? Is it to say yes to heaven or hell? Is the way to heaven into the acceptance of hell? Or is the way to heaven into the aversion to hell?
There are numerous accounts of people experiencing heaven or hell under the influence of such powerful molecules. Recently, a young woman told me that she took Ayahuasca three times; it went very well the first two times, but in the third ceremony, she went through hell, terrorized to death for hours! Why? How does that work? Which freedom do we have in the choice of the hallucinations that come to us?
I also talked with Arlak, the woman collecting and administrating the venom of the toad, where she told me about some people who came out from the experience depressed. When I asked her about the reason she thinks is behind their depression, she told me: It’s because when the Bufo showed them the other reality of the universe, they came back on this earth realizing that all their life was totally foolish and meaningless, all their beliefs were futile and pointless. In this situation, the mere fact of tasting the heaven made them go into hell! How is that possible?! No one knows. But one thing is sure: Going into the “God Molecule” without adequate preparation is like going to climb Everest after having spent years watching documentaries about it from the comfort of your couch on the TV. If you reach elevations of more than 7500m and the weather changes, the oxygen gets low, the mind gets blurry and death starts to appear as much more likely than the summit, you can still go into two possible paths. There will be the voice of heaven saying: I will survive, but if death comes before survival I’ll be happy to take it. There will be also the voice of hell saying: I regret I came here, I’m shocked and terrified.
Resilience and acceptance are probably the key. We have to open our arms very wide to hell to appreciate the absolute delights of the heavens. But that’s very obviously easier said than done. We are fundamentally “designed” to hang on with all the strength and power we have to the survival of our body and our ego. The Bufo is there to destroy that attachment. If you resist it, you either go to hell, or it can have no effect at all on you, and you walk out from the experience with the feeling of staying in the same ordinary world, a material world of disconnection and very superficial knowledge.
Love as the acceptance of dying
The “God Molecule” could also be named the “Love Molecule”. Most of the people come out of such an experience talking about the feeling of oneness or the feeling of god (this depends on their previous belief paradigm), and about love and universal love. Why does such a thing happen? What is behind the psychological trigger of this feeling of immense love?
When Zohar started to come back from his galactic journey, one of the first things he said was: “There is nothing called fear”, and then he added: “This is all that we need”. In this second short sentence, there is no doubt that Zohar was referring to love, exactly like in the famous “All You Need Is Love” written by John Lennon. So what is the link between the first and the second sentence? What is the link between fear and love?
Usually, we don’t associate the topic of love with the one of death. But once we look into music, literature, theater, myths, cinema… we often find love and death present one next to the other. In the tragedy of Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet end up dying. In the last scenes of the Titanic movie, DiCaprio dies of hypothermia while offering his lover the “eternal” life, the life during which one feels loved from an inexhaustible source of love.
“Is this love that I’m feeling?” goes the famous song. That’s not a random question. The love we’re talking about here when putting the words “fear” and “death” next to it, is not about that love within the security and the predictability of preconfigured spaces and social structure. It’s not the love that aims to satisfy our desire of feeling loved and in control of our life within the sexual-relational conventions of any society. We’re rather talking about the love of all risks and fears. We are talking about love as a burning fire, as the most thrilling and risky undertaking. We are talking about the love that can shake every cell of your body and your soul like the view of death itself. That’s the love we are talking about here!
This part of the psychedelic journey is extremely hard to put in words. But there is very obviously a direct relationship between the experience of the ego-annihilation induced by the venom of the toad and the opening of the heart for the universal feeling of absolute connectedness and love. To love someone, in this meaning we are talking about, is to go and put yourself totally naked in front of that person, ready to give yourself in the riskiest and most vulnerable way. When you inhale the poison of the Bufo, you become naked, you die, you disappear… And once you realize that you don’t exist anymore, or that you exist as a connected whole with everything else, the fear to love disappears, your heart becomes wide open and you become a lover like a god; you love others because you love yourself, and you feel that your heart is so big that it is indestructible. Of course, it doesn’t mean that that power will last, nor that it will last for anyone who goes into the “Love Molecule” journey. Once you go back to the separation between our egos (the ordinary world), fear comes back. To fall into the absolute drunkenness of love becomes hard again, like accepting to die, like inhaling the Buffo poison again.
When you go into the acceptance of dying, you go at the same time into the acceptance of swimming into the most dangerous oceans of love. You declare all your fears, unveil all your shadows, and provide all your vulnerabilities to the other person to be able to betray you and “kill” you. As you know that you cannot gain control over what the other person can feel and do and that you cannot trust the alterations of the future, you willingly accept to walk towards an unknown place… a place that can look like the most delicious heaven, or like the burning fire. Inhaling the dried Bufo poison can lead to the acceptance of love as the most epic, the most important, and the most fantastic journey that can be lived and felt in this “life-universe”.
Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, says: “This is how I would die into the love I have for you: As pieces of cloud dissolve in sunlight”. He is very clearly relating to the experience of the dissolution of the ego coupled with the genesis of absolute love.
DMT and Psychotherapy
There is a lot of ongoing scientific research about all the shamanistic rituals and more generally the psychedelic drugs. For centuries, DMT has been recognized by ancient humans for its powerful healing properties. But to heal what exactly? And how? There are a lot of things that can be said about this topic, but I’m going to limit myself to just very few points.
Science in face of mystery
Western psychology and psychiatry are facing troubles when trying to integrate ancient healing practices within the modern paradigms of science. Conducting scientific research on consciousness or the effects of DMT has been extremely hard and complicated for many reasons. One of the most obvious reasons for this hindrance is just the fact that we don’t understand much about the realms of human (and animal) consciousness through the lenses of Western science. The deeper we go into the comprehension of neuronal and hormonal activities happening in the brain, the more we get confused about the explanation of the mere experience of consciousness and cognition… The mystical experiences of religion, love, oneness, emptiness-fullness, or artistic creativity, seem to escape from the actual paradigms of Western psychology. For those reasons, scientific research on psychedelic molecules will probably remain inaccessible to science as it is commonly understood nowadays.
Psychotherapy
That said, there are still a lot of serious researches, obeying Western scientific protocols, showing for example that a single inhalation of 5-MeO-DMT has a positive impact on healing depression, anxiety, stress, apart from increasing mindfulness and general satisfaction with life. See for example this article with many other links about the same topic in the webpage of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine (2019).
For decades, Western researchers have shown that the effects of Ayahuasca, for example, were similar to that of “an intense psychotherapy” (see Naranjo C. (1979). Die Reise zum Ich. Psychotherapie mit Heilenden Drogen). Before being prohibited in the USA around the sixties, it was quite common that your psychotherapist gave you a microdose of LSD before a session (see Michael Pollan (2018), How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence). For decades, Western scientists have been trying to find what are the possible therapeutic uses of the DMT and LSD molecules. But the more they dig into this topic, the more it seems the list of therapeutic possibilities widens; as if a molecule like DMT could heal a very wide set of afflictions.
There are researches on the role of DMT with tissue protection and neuroregeneration, degenerative illnesses, addiction issues, almost all psychopathologies including traumas (see The Therapeutic Potentials of Ayahuasca: Possible Effects against Various Diseases of Civilization, 2016). DMT is even considered to play the role of an “anti-amnesic” in the case of repressed traumatic memories, thus opening the way to heal post-traumatic stress disorder (for this particular topic, see Hypothesis: The Psychedelic Ayahuasca Heals Traumatic Memories via a Sigma 1 Receptor-Mediated Epigenetic-Mnemonic Process, 2018). But the problem (or the opportunities) of those drugs will always remain the same: Their effects strongly depend on the appropriate psychological-spiritual preparation, and also on the setting, which means the environment (physical, psychological, and “energetical”) where the medicine is administered. It was not an irrelevant fact that Arlak took a lot of time and care in preparing the scene for us before inhaling the venom of the toad. We went to an empty part of the beach, she prepared a fire, performed cleansing rituals, brought ritual objects and musical instruments. That non-molecule or non-drug part is as important as the drug part. So how are psychiatrists and psychotherapists going to do to undertake their scientific researches and their therapeutic sessions? That’s going to remain a challenge.
The other challenge is: How are they going to know which molecule is the best suited for the needs of their patients? The psychedelic molecules are not something we can understand by reading the latest researches and books. If the psychotherapist doesn’t try those molecules him/herself, there is not much he or she can understand about them. And even if they would try all of them, they would have to do it at least 2 or 3 times for each kind of them to be able to distinguish which one is suitable for whom, when, in which setup, etc… For all those reasons, the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy will remain faced with challenges, and will also encounter much abuse. Let’s be clear about it: This is not a miracle substance for effortlessly solving complicated psychological problems; some other work has to go with it. Surely though, it can incredibly accelerate a healing process and trigger a spectacular mind shift.
Conclusion
I hope this article was able to put in understandable words a mysterious experience of pure spirit. Inhaling the 5-MeO-DMT brings you into an intense phase that lasts for 5 to 20 minutes, but the impact it leaves on the mind can last forever. Many articles, poetry, and books can be written about the Bufo experience and DMT in general. If you would like to share more about this topic, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you for reading.
Are you interested in similar journeys? Visit my Travel Agent page: Sacred Pilgrimage.
Nadim M. 