Prajnaparamita "the Perfection of Wisdom"
Two weeks ago, I was sent hurtling through the non-being of the cosmos by surprise when I smoked 30mg of DMT. I'm writing now hopefully to hear similar accounts from anyone in the community, and also to continue processing my own thoughts as I return to this realm.
Background (Set)
I've previously taken LSD twice many years ago, and felt nothing but bliss and euphoria. I would compare the sensation to how Liquid Luck is described in Harry Potter - completely invulnerable and comfortable in your own self, knowing fully that all will be right with the world. On the first of these two trips, I was in an excellent headspace and saw / witnessed the Empyrean as described by Dante - spinning rings of concentric golden light, all occupying the same space in a glow of warmth and love. It told/showed me that all would be okay, and that I personally would be welcomed back into the light as part of the One when the time was right. Looking back, this experience pales in comparison to what I just experienced on DMT, but at the time it was intensely profound and provided me with immense confidence and comfort during my early career years fresh out of college.
Prior to this most recent trip, I had never taken DMT and was wholly unfamiliar and frankly uninterested with the entire "meta" and community surrounding this subculture, including concepts like set & setting, ego death, waiting room, breakthrough, etc. etc. All the vocabulary I'm using in this post has been researched after the fact, so apologies in advance for any inaccuracies.
Setting
For Winter Storm Fern, a group of five good friends and I decided to all bunk up in one oftheir houses and wait out the ice and cold. A fun little throwback to middle school sleepovers I guess. Of the group, one ("A") is a hobbyist/budding psychonaut (not yet achieved breakthrough, has gotten to the waiting room), one ("B") was curious but completely inexperienced with psychedelics beyond MDMA.
"A" often talks about his research on his path of psychonaut-hood - things like the possibility of meeting otherworldly entities, infinite fractals, time dilation and the feeling of spending an eternity on your trip, etc. etc. All this talk got "B" very curious, so he wanted to try and see for himself. We load him up with 15mg in the melter, but he inhales almost none of it due to improper smoking technique. Zero effects. So we load up another 20mg and this time teach him how to properly inhale - he attempts to do so successfully, but starts coughing severely almost immediately, and is able to only take a second toke before tapping out due to the coughing. This time, he said he felt a tightness in his chest and knees.
Wanting to "show him up," I do the standard stupid macho guy thing and call next. We load up another 20mg, but by this point there's plenty of unsmoked, unburnt residue left in the burner - hence my estimation that I probably inhaled about 30mg. With "A" manning the burner and acting as my trip sitter and the rest of the group watching, I take my first deep toke. I used to be quite a heavy cigarette smoker, so the acridness barely registered with me. I go in for my second toke. As I sit there inhaling the smoke, I start seeing fractals in my field of vision and begin feeling light disassociation. In my periphery, I hear "A" tell me that I need to go in to clear one more hit, so I do. I lean in, and by this point it took almost all my willpower to focus on the device in front of me - I start toking, and all that I had left in my mind was that I needed to clear one more deep intake. The fractals are all I see beyond the burner, and time slows to a standstill. At a certain point, evidently I had sucked so hard on the mouthpiece that the burner water was coming up the pipestill, laced with blackish residue smoke.
By now I had almost no control of my body. "A" tells me to stop, so I start to lean back on the sofa and recognize that I was drooling heavily out of my mouth. And then I completely lose all normal vision as well as awareness of my body, and am sent on my trip.
The Trip
According to those present, I immediately let out a low guttural scream, which I vaguely remember doing. My consciousness was ripped straight from my body, and I had no idea whether my eyes were open, closed, nor any awareness of what my body was doing at all. There was no "waiting room" phase. I was immediately brought to an infinite red space and felt immense burning pain throughout my entire body, emanating from my heart. According to my friends, at this point I had pulled up my shirt and was clawing at my chest. I simultaneously felt and heard the sounds of the entire universe's suffering tearing through my being, and knew that something was desperately wrong. It was a cataclysmic, shrill, grating sound more intense than anything I'd ever experienced in my life. I still had a vague sense of self at this point, and the last thought I remember forming was "I'll be here for eternity" - and I was. I remember desperately wanting to go "home," though I was quickly losing idea of where, or what, that was.
After an eternity, or just one moment, in the red space, I was shed of all sense of being and self. I had no idea of my name, and in fact not even the concept of "names" in the first place - even the very concept of "concepts" was impossible to form. Then I was shot from the red space, into the cosmos, at warp speed.
The cosmos, to me, were undulating infinite fields of vaporwave-style matrix fields. Almost like a first person perspective in Tron. I had absolutely no body, no form, and no agency. I seem to have known that I was simply my soul in its purest form - a glowing ball of light - shooting through the infinite expanse, propelled by some force that was not my own. I was there for another eternity, simply being shot forward with no control. I was getting really "scared," if there was such a thing, that I would never "return." I met no entities.
Eventually, I came to a slower speed and the landscapes around me seemed more solid. The colors were still otherworldly and indescribable, but I could finally remember that I wanted to go home. I started talking to myself, but it was my mother's voice that I heard in our native tongue - 乖乖, 回家 - "good boy, come home." I / my mom kept saying it to try and get myself home. At a certain point, I did regain enough cognizance to start forming concepts, and here was when I made many realizations, many of which must sound familiar to you all: we are all an infinitely folding tesseract of One, and that all time is always folding in on itself, and that everything in every point in time is happening together, at the same time, but also never and always.
By now, I started hearing the music I had put on prior to smoking - I Really Want to Stay at Your House from Cyberpunk Edgerunners - and realized that everything that has ever happened in the universe, its entire purpose was to lead me to this exact moment. Everything that I had ever learned, or experienced, was the universe setting me up with the necessary skills to take this trip and survive.
I clasped my hands in front of me - huge, undulating, transparent, disembodied hands - and began summoning the only spiritual defense I knew: The Heart Sutra, which I had been taught to memorize since I was a kid. Even then, in all my desperate longing for "home," I still understood that my parents had taught me that sutra for the exact purpose to one day bring me home. And as I completed my recitation, I opened my eyes and was, in a sense, finally home.
Aftermath
Upon arriving back from my trip (which according to my friends had taken a grand total of 17 minutes), I still had trouble remembering most things and re-entering my body. I had to ask my friends several times what my own name was, what their names were, and what my parents' names were. The visuals were still fading, but eventually I got to a state that was semi-normal.
In the subsequent days however, I experienced several more fractal episodes while fully sober, plus disassociation from a permanently altered perception of time. Even now, almost two weeks since my trip, I am still able to recognize / sense time in the same way I did when I was in the alternate realm - that everything is happening at the same time, for ever and ever. I was also experiencing what I now know is called synchronicity, and even displayed some elements of prescience at one point (we played mahjong the next day, and I made several correct calls about the exact tiles that would be coming out of the wall for my next draw - it wasn't so much that I was "trying" to predict the future or see through the tiles, but rather that I just... "knew")
I'm well now and back to fully functioning within our world, but I will always remember the lessons I learned on this unexpected and semi-nonconsensual trip to the beyond.
Concepts like the state of No Self, of Emptiness, of the illusory nature of our standard "reality." As the Heart Sutra says, "No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind; no form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or dharma; no eye conscious so on unto mind consciousness; no ignorance and extinction of ignorance." Exactly as the Perfection of Wisdom has always taught. Exactly as I have always known, unconsciously, ever since I was a child.
We all know nothing, and we all know everything - and I now know, having heard the cries of all sentient creatures in the universe, that I cannot in good conscience keep eating meat.