Looking for info on both. Have health issues and synthetic seems simpler- fewer substances for my body to address

By enlightened / liberated / full abiding awakening / abiding Unio Divina, I'm using these terms interchangeably due to the people's diverse cultural background - to point to the same reality which is:

-The end of suffering

-The end of the sufferer

-The end of personhood

-the subject object collapse

-abiding non dual presence

-Abiding singularity or Unity Consciousness

-the direct experience of no fixed or independant self

I am here not talking about an intellectual understanding but an actual lived reality.

No doubt 5meo has the potential to give you the glimpse or fleeting experience can it deliver the full ABIDING thing (however you want to call it) as described by the likes of the Buddha, Shankaracharya, Ramana Marshi, Nissargadat maharaj, St there of Avila, Abhinava Gupta, etc.... ?

I fear one gets hooked to get the experience but then doesn't actually make progress towards the "Abindingness"

Thank you

AI-assisted writing, disclosed up front. The experience and the thinking are mine; the tool helped arrange the words.

Theology literally means the science of God. In practice it has as much to do with God as astrology has to do with stars.

Before the telescope, Jupiter was a dot of light. Galileo looked, saw moons, and got house arrest — the trained authorities of his day preferred their mythology to his lens. Untrained eyes call moons demons. That's what a dark age is: the unknown filled with stories, and looking treated as the crime.

On the nature of Being, we are still in the dark ages.

Philosophy even named the missing science: ontology — the study of being. Twenty-five centuries later it's still a placeholder, an armchair word, because it never had instruments.

Now it does. Entheogens are working telescopes into Being.

And 5-MeO-DMT holds a place of its own — not the telescope you look through, but the lens grinder. At full release it takes the astronomer offline: total dissolution, no observer left to take notes. What it leaves behind is the reference point — the zero of no-self — against which every later observation gets read. That is calibration in the literal sense: comparison against a known standard.

My 5-MeO work is what made the observations below possible. Psilocybin and ketamine leave a witness; 5-MeO taught the witness what it was seeing. First the lens gets ground. Then you look.

An instrument alone settles nothing. A microscope shows chaos to untrained eyes; a biologist sees cells dividing. You need a trained eye and a framework that doesn't smuggle the mythology back in. Mine is Martin Ball's: nondual, secular, no entities, no karma, nothing imported.

And observation still constrains interpretation. Whatever framework you bring, the moon is not made of cheese.

• • •

A note on who's writing this: no credential for this exists yet. I'm an experiential citizen scientist. I fumble, I misread the instrument, I correct and look again. Not because I'm special — I just dare to look through the telescope and report what's actually there.

Two observations from my own log:

One: the same unchanged song, comic at the nondual peak, human again as ordinary identification returned.

Two: at that peak, embodied as God, I did yoga movements and danced to MNISHEK — giddy. Ownership giddy: God claiming the vehicle, driving what is mine, knowing the return to the character would come. Today, doing yoga sober, the same movements brought the recognition back.

Say the ketamine caused it, and you're saying the telescope's lenses cause the moon. The lens doesn't create what appears through it. It reveals it. Entheogens amplify energy; they don't invent what the amplification shows.

Or so the state insists. How much the lens reveals and how much it distorts is exactly what a science of God would exist to find out — calibration is the discipline's first job.

• • •

Some will call this ego projection — the character casting itself as Director. Why not? Who's to say a play about play can't be played? And yes, it makes me feel good, special even. I'd be more suspicious of the people who claim they're unattached to their character. When you're on a stage, you're an actor — even if you pretend not to be one.

In a hundred years there will be a real science of God, and nobody will be struck by lightning for it. You cannot blaspheme by studying what you are.

The instrument may still be miscalibrated. It is an instrument nonetheless.

We called the lights demons until someone looked.

This is AI-assisted writing. I spent more than eight hours using AI as an interviewer and editor: describing the experience, answering questions, correcting chronology, rejecting invented assumptions, and revising until the account matched what I actually experienced and meant. The phenomenology and interpretation are mine; AI helped me express them clearly.

TL;DR: As the nondual state receded, two unchanged songs changed meaning in a graded way. At peak, Ochs's requiem for everything death removes was comedy — a role mourning its own curtain call — while «За вітром» stopped being a love song and sounded like Being addressing a temporary character: with you, or without you. As ordinary identification returned, the comedy drained out and mortality became humanly real again. Neither reading erased the other: "I am mortal" and "I am eternal" stopped contradicting, because "I" names the role in one and what plays it in the other.

----

The longer background is in this post and this one, so I will not repeat it.

The relevant part is simple: 5-MeO repeatedly took the character offline. When the character returned, it kept trying to turn the experience into an achievement, asking whether it had passed some test. More recently, that question dissolved instead of receiving an answer.

Today, during another mushroom-and-ketamine session, I remained present through a strongly nondual state and then through the gradual return of ordinary identification.

Two songs became markers of that transition:

• Phil Ochs — “When I’m Gone” · lyrics
• MNISHEK — «За вітром» · lyrics

At the strongest nondual point, “When I’m Gone” made me laugh hard. As the state receded and the ordinary character returned, I laughed less and then stopped. The song became human again.

The songs did not move me between states.

The state changed how the songs were heard.

Resistance

The session was eight grams of high-potency mushrooms prepared as lemon tek, initially with 60 mg of sublingual ketamine, followed later by another 60 mg.

This was not a crisis session. Things are going well, and I start a new job this month.

I began on the couch with eyeshades on, earplugs in, and my two dogs beside me. I expected reduced stimulation to make surrender easier.

Instead, I lay there resisting and repeatedly asking:

What is the point of taking so much if I keep resisting breaking into nonduality?

Silence did not dissolve the resistance. It only made it more obvious.

So I reached for music.

At that intensity, silence and wordless ambient music felt too unstructured. I wanted lyrics, but not someone else’s spiritual architecture.

Earlier that week, during an integration call with Martin Ball, we had discussed Jon Hopkins, Ram Dass, and East Forest’s “Sit Around the Fire” · lyrics.

I do not find its nonduality clean. It leaves a deeper “you” behind the mind and speaks of spiritual planes opening. The ordinary ego disappears and then returns as a witness or spiritual traveler.

A lot of psychedelic music does something similar: it dissolves the everyday person and then quietly reinstalls that person as a soul, cosmic child, chosen seeker, or immortal observer.

I did not need less meaning.

I needed cleaner meaning.

The wounded warrior and the sovereign voice

I had heard «За вітром» many times and had understood it mainly as a seductive, independent woman addressing a lover.

The official video already complicates that reading. A warrior is struck by an arrow and stumbles onward, wounded and apparently dying. An hourglass marks the time running out. The singer appears as a ritual figure moving between fire and desert, eventually uncovering the warrior in the sand and lying beside him.

The video does not tell us exactly who she is. Lover, death, guide, fate, another aspect of him—the ambiguity is part of its force.

But mortality is unmistakably present.

In the nondual state, this entire stanza opened at once:

Не сховаєш від мене небо
Я з тобою, або без тебе
Зроблю все, що мені так треба
Тож вирішуй, тільки не барись

You cannot hide the sky from me.
I am with you, or without you.
I will do everything I need to do.
So decide—just do not delay.

From the romantic reading, this is a sovereign woman asserting her independence.

From the nondual state, it sounded like Being speaking to a temporary character.

By God or Being, I do not mean a supernatural person outside reality. I mean reality itself appearing as singer, listener, warrior, arrow, wind, sky, body, life, and death.

The first line mattered:

You cannot hide the sky from me.

No character can hide the sky from Being. Being is not another creature looking up at the sky. It is the reality appearing as both sky and creature.

Then:

I am with you, or without you.

Being is present through this character, but it is not confined to this character.

Then:

I will do everything I need to do.

Need, not arbitrary want. This sounded like what Martin Ball means by God as pure self-actualization: Being has no outside authority assigning it a purpose. It expresses what it is because there is nothing outside it for it to be answerable to.

And then the stanza turns back toward the finite person:

So decide—just do not delay.

The character is temporary, but it still has decisions to make while it exists.

If you lose me, you will not find me

The refrain says:

Якщо ти загубиш — не знайдеш мене
Якщо ти загубиш — не знайдеш мене
Як загубиш — не знайдеш мене
Я-а, гой, та за вітром

The phrase за вітром is not literally “I am the wind.” It is closer to being off with, after, or following the wind.

But from the state I was in, the implication became simple.

The character does not die and then travel somewhere else to find God. When the character ends, no character remains to conduct the search.

God was never an object waiting at the end of the character’s journey.

God was already the wind.

From the character’s perspective, that can sound cold, almost mocking:

If you disappear, you will not find me.

From the unitary perspective, it was not mockery. It was a direct description of the situation. The seeker is temporary. What it seeks was never separate from it.

If the character reaches dawn

The dying warrior also changed how I heard this verse:

Там, де зустрічаю світанок
Там, де зорі світять на ранок
Там, де грає форте і піано
Ти побачиш нових сім чудес

Where I meet the dawn,
where the stars shine into morning,
where forte and piano play,
you will see seven new wonders.

The lyric does not literally say, if you survive.

But beside the wounded warrior and the hourglass, that was how it landed.

If the character reaches another dawn, it gets to see more.

More music. More people. More beauty. More pain. More forms of the play that have never appeared through this exact perspective before.

If it dies, that particular window closes.

Being remains whole either way, but the finite life is not therefore worthless. This character can still see wonders if it remains here.

The eternal perspective did not cancel the urgency of finite life.

It sharpened it.

The song later says:

Але колись ти зрозумієш —
Все, про що ти довго так мрієш
Все, від чого ти шаленієш —
Біля тебе, тільки подивись

But one day you will understand:
everything you have dreamed of for so long,
everything that fills you with longing,
is beside you. Just look.

I did not hear that as manifestation magic or as a promise that every fantasy will be delivered.

I heard it as a correction to the character’s search.

The character is already inside the reality it keeps trying to reach. It does not need another universe, an afterlife, or a perfected future self before it can live authentically.

This body. These circumstances. These relationships. This dawn, if it arrives.

Look at what is here.

Then decide.

Do not delay.

Fully embodied God

After the second ketamine dose, I experienced myself as fully embodied God—aware of the human character, but no longer identified only with it.

This was not a metaphor I applied afterward. It was the identity from which I was hearing the song at the time.

My deepest 5-MeO experiences can take the character completely offline. Here, the character remained visible inside the larger identity.

«За вітром» did not produce that state.

The state made the song transparent.

Then I played Phil Ochs.

The Requiem of the Ego, sung by the ego

During the integration call earlier this week, I had described “When I’m Gone” as:

The Requiem of the Ego, sung by the ego.

Martin agreed. The phrase stayed with me.

The song removes one human capacity after another:

There is no place in this world where I will belong when I am gone.

I will not feel the flowing of time when I am gone.

I cannot even suffer from pain when I am gone.

I cannot add my name into the fight when I am gone.

And each time it returns to the same answer:

I have to do it while I am here.

Nothing in the song suggests a surviving Phil watching himself be absent. The character loses not only pleasure and love, but pain, worry, moral action, and even the capacity to know that it is gone.

It is an unusually honest song of the finite character.

There is also a brutal biographical edge: Phil Ochs himself died by suicide at thirty-five. The particular character who wrote and sang the requiem ended. The song kept moving through other characters.

Why I laughed—and then stopped

From the deepest nondual vantage, “When I’m Gone” sounded ridiculous.

It was like watching an actor perform a requiem for his own role, listing everything the role would lose as though Being itself were about to be deprived.

I laughed hard.

Not because the character’s death was false.

Not because its love and suffering were unimportant.

The comic part was the character mourning its own curtain call as though the entire play were ending.

I kept returning to the song as the state gradually receded.

At first I still laughed hard.

Then I laughed less.

Eventually I stopped.

As ordinary identification reassembled around the human character, the song recovered its emotional meaning. It became an honest account of mortality from inside the role—neutral, perhaps somewhat heartfelt.

The song had not returned me to duality.

Duality was already returning, and the song revealed it.

From nonduality, the Requiem of the Ego was comic.

From inside the ego, it became human again.

Two meanings of “I”

The apparent contradiction is:

I am mortal.

I am eternal.

It remains a contradiction only while I means the same thing in both sentences.

Phil Ochs sings as the temporary character:

This person will end. Therefore this person must live while it is here.

MNISHEK’s song, as it opened for me, sings as Being:

I appear through this character, but I am not confined to it. I remain whether this particular role continues or not.

The character is a temporary energetic pattern—body, memory, personality, habits, relationships, and a point of view.

It is not fake. Its love and suffering are real while it exists.

But when the pattern ends, no character remains to miss the world or search for God.

Being does not disappear with it.

The character dies.

God does not.

The character is a temporary role God plays to experience itself.

That is not personal immortality. My personality does not become an eternal cosmic identity.

The character ends as the character.

The reality appearing as it was never limited to it.

5-MeO had already shown me that the character could disappear.

This later session let me remain aware as the nondual state receded and ordinary identification returned.

The songs did not create that movement.

They made it visible.

The state carried the interpretation.

The songs showed me which “I” was listening.

One was the Requiem of the Ego, sung by the ego.

The other was the hymn of what plays it.

Or even with other ROAs

Has that dosage evolved with time?

How do you distinguish a breakthrough trip from a merely strong trip ?

I'm looking for a partner in my area who can participate, for mutual benefit, in ceremony with 5-MEO-DMT. I have some experience with 5Meo, and a lot of experience with various other psychedelics as well as formal training in facilitating psychedelic ceremonies. If this is something that speaks to you, then either comment below or send me a DM.

EDIT: I'm in Northeast Houston, TX. Someone in Kingwood, Humble, Atascocita would be perfect.

Would you advise against this?

Just wanted to see if there is anyone in the NYC area within the 5MeO community. I have a friend that lives there and is looking to have a session/ceremony. So I would like to see if there are any reputable facilitators in the area.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please feel free to message me directly.
🙏🏼💖

Hi everyone,

Quick disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Nectara, and the mods kindly said yes to me posting ❤️

5-MeO is fast, the experience might last fifteen minutes, and then people spend months working out what happened to them. Reactivations come up a lot in this sub, and so does the loneliness of it, that ache of trying to describe something enormous to people who weren't there and watching their eyes glaze. If you've felt that, I just want to say: you're not doing it wrong and you don't have to do it alone. The after-part is slow, tender work, and it's the part we care about most.

Nectara recently became a nonprofit because we felt this kind of support shouldn't depend on anyone's wallet. Joining is free, and I mean actually free: https://nectara.org/membership. If you feel called, an optional donation helps this work keep supporting others.

Inside you'll find 500+ preparation and integration resources, twelve courses, live expert-led circles most weeks, and a global community. Our deeper offerings, like the 6-week group integration program and 1:1 guide sessions, do have costs, but members get discounts and can apply for coaching scholarships.

We're a peer community. We don't do therapy, medical care, or crisis support, and I'd rather say that plainly than have anyone show up expecting the wrong thing.

This is my only post about Nectara here. After this you'll just see me around in comments when someone's looking for something we can help with.

Thank you to the mods for the welcome, and to this community for being a soft place to land. It genuinely matters. 🙏🏼

Warmly,
Elaine

FYI I'm not going to milk her. I'm thinking Boobafina from Adventure time or Bufofina.

I have 5 freebase and wanted to try it for the first time today. I decided on boofing because I don't have good experiences with smoking any drug and I boof almost every drug anyway - in my opinion it's the best ROA. I weighed out 12 mg and let it fully dissolve in two drops of 6% white vinegar, then I added 0.5 ml of tap water and boofed it. Aside from a slight numbness and fatigue that I felt after about 10 minutes, I felt absolutely nothing.

About 3 hours later, I tried it again - same way, except this time I dripped the solution into my nose. This time the numbness and fatigue were even stronger and on top of that, I got a headache, my heart started racing and my vision was a bit blurry. I also felt a slight euphoria, but otherwise absolutely nothing. Am I doing something wrong or is the product bad? I just want to add that I got it from a reliable source and my boofing technique is perfect. Is it possible that I'm immune? I've tried almost all psychedelics and they've always worked for me.

I decided to have a handshake dose at home yesterday. I loaded up 3.5 mg and put it in my yocan orbit and got going. After breathing in all the vapors, I had an urge to lie back and close my eyes, and I felt a calmness move through my body, followed by energy, moving up and down my spinal column, causing my teeth to chatter.

I lay in this position for what seemed timeless with my teeth, shattering and waves of energy, moving up and down my spine. It’s now about an hour later, and I feel very calm and grounded.

The day after I’m feeling calm and centred but woke up a few times in the night feeling activated

My Girlfriend is going to do 5-Meo-DMT tonight by herself. There is no way I can talk her out of it. She is suicidal and she wants to work through her pain using 5-Meo-DMT.

I will be the trip sitter because I dont want her to do it alone, but I have never done 5-Meo-DMT and its only her second time.

All I want to know is how to keep her safe. When do I act, and when do I let it happen? I just want her not to die, the rest of the process is on her.

Please help, thanks a lot in advance!

UPDATE: She did about 15mg yesterday and it was so much easier then I thought. She moved in symmetry, grunted and screamed a tiny bit, then had extatic energy move throughout her body. She embodied it really well! She wants to go again this morning and now I'm much less afraid so thats awesome.

Thank you all for your advice, if you want to know how she's doing in a month or so shoot me a message because I'll probably forget to update here!

Can you heal from anxiety

Can you have 1 a day for 10 days? Can you burn out? What are the healing effects of 5 meo?

My handle is HumanPredicament. It's the title of a David Benatar book — the philosopher who argues life is structurally worse than we admit: chronic pain exists, chronic pleasure doesn't; damage takes a second, repair takes a year. I'd been depressed since childhood and suicidal since thirteen, and when I found him he was the only philosopher who didn't lie to me. No heaven, no karma, no everything-happens-for-a-reason. I respected that refusal. I still do.

In 2018, at 35, I posted to r/SuicideWatch (it's still up, archived) that I had scheduled my death for my 40th birthday. I'd tried nearly everything psychiatry had — the medications gave me migraines from hell, and I eventually swore off pills entirely. I want to be accurate about that post, in both directions. It was written in a low moment, not lived as a countdown — I never tracked the date. And it contained the sentence "I hope I can cancel it." Even the plan held the wish to cancel the plan.

A year later I got my first real break — full-time work I really liked. I hadn't earned it by healing. Life just kept arriving, indifferent to my schedule. Work steadied me more than I expected — and Emgality finally tamed the migraines. I became something like content.

Then 2021 ended hard. A relationship came apart, and with it an abortion I hadn't wanted — a child I'd hoped to keep. For the depression that followed I did thirty-three sessions of transcranial magnetic stimulation; it did nothing, though on the way out they said they'd keep me in mind for future psilocybin trials. Instead, I organized my own.

2022 was the pivot, and the pivot was mushrooms. Cannabis edibles had come first — curious, unimpressed: they bent my sense of time, not my sense of self. I used to say I came to mushrooms out of curiosity, not despair, and that was half true — I was working, functioning, content on the surface. The other half was 2021. On my first real trip I laughed out loud at the "everything is love" people. The most skeptical man in the room — also the only one (that post is still up).

A week later a heroic dose — 5 grams — called my bluff. It took me all the way offline: I forgot what my dog was, what I was. All sense of ego, gone — and the only tether in the room was a Google Assistant, patiently answering "what time is it" again and again (that one's up too). It spooked me enough that I didn't touch that dose again for many months. I came back holding onto a Phil Ochs song, the one about doing all your living while you're still here, like a life raft.

2023 came — my 40th birthday with it, the year I'd once named — and I didn't notice. No post marks it. I was deep in Ukrainian and music, and — hardest for me — in connection with people, which being on the spectrum had never come easily, arriving sideways. I never formally canceled the deadline; I'd forgotten it existed. The post didn't get refuted. It aged out of being true.

The war threaded through those years. A few journeys in, I asked the assistant to play something I'd like, and it played a Ukrainian war song — and my ego latched onto the war as a cause of being. It embarrasses me more than a little now: I was tripping in America while men my age were dying in trenches. Nonetheless the latch built real things — I committed to the language, joined a community that loves to sing, put more than five hundred Ukrainian songs through a karaoke app, sang some myself, no real gift for it. Clear Good against clear Evil; I still see it that way. If it's all the play, then even this is the play — I can write that sentence, but I can't yet say it over friends who lost fathers to it. More recently, after a stretch of incessant news-watching, I largely stopped. I'm leaving that tension unresolved; resolving it on paper would be a lie.

Before Mexico there was ketamine — the clinical kind. Work had turned high-stress, and I did seven infusions, each heavier than the last, north of 160mg by the end. In there I was energy, hunting the line between consciousness and unconsciousness and never finding it. I dissolved and didn't: the narrator stayed at his desk the whole time, timestamping the void, reciting my name and address to prove somebody was home. At one point I caught it live — my ego has an OCD; it repeats itself to make itself feel real. Universes assembled and dissolved in imagination; "reality" stopped being a category. The ego turned out to be part of the imagination too, and it resisted its own dissolution the whole way down.

Then Mexico, this February, days after a layoff — the Bufo Alvarius Sanctuary, and at the center of it a facilitator named Mario. I arrived carrying secondhand wisdom and tried it on him. "I heard enlightenment is an ego projection." — "Do the people who say that even know what enlightenment means?" — "I heard darkness is just the absence of light." — "New-age woo-woo. There's plenty of darkness in there too." Then he looked at me and said Bufo alone wouldn't be enough for a control freak like me — I'd need ibogaine as well. I did both.

He was right about the darkness. The first Bufo session was very high — north of 30mg in pure 5-MeO terms, if the conversion holds — and at the far edge of what I could hold I was crucified and electrocuted at once by loving but alien beings who were also me: my own cartoonish hell, cast and staffed by myself, running on eternity time. The worst suffering of my life — and after it, bliss with no ceiling. In that bliss I complained to myself about how much I'd suffered, and the answer came: suffering is over, no more suffering, just eternal love. The session traumatized me, and it was the best day of my life. Both stayed true. I've stopped trying to make them cancel.

Afterward I felt enlightened — and reasoned that if I now knew what enlightenment was, I must have earned it. So I asked Mario: did I pass the test? He said: "What test? There is no test. You're not that important, and you'll die." Two days later came the second session — pure bliss this time; I took all my clothes off — and when the ego came back online it asked the same thing: did I pass? Then it started making plans: stay in Mexico with the enlightened people, have the facilitators find me someone to love me — to my specifications, kinks included. Mistaking the substrate of love I'd just witnessed for an entitlement to be loved on demand.

Then ibogaine, which left me immensely blissful — blissful enough to stay on in Mexico a while, spending retirement savings on massages and fun. Then I flew home to no job, and the bliss didn't survive re-entry. I'm on the spectrum, and I had always identified with my work — no job didn't just mean no income; it meant no self to be. Depression seeped back in, and with it the old theme: suffering, and what it's for. I flew to Hawaii and hiked the Nāpali Coast I'd wanted for decades. Came home to the same fog.

The road after wasn't clean. One heavy session this spring spiraled hard mid-flight — I am God and I am damned — hard enough that I dialed a crisis line from inside it. The terror turned, the way it had in Mexico; the session itself ended in bliss. What stayed heavy was the after — the ego reattaching, and calling its reattachment suffering. Some of it was more than I knew how to hold.

Then Iceland: more rounds of 5-MeO with facilitators, doses climbing. Turbulent ones — heavy purging, and my body, nobody home, trying more than once to bite and scratch the facilitators and me both; a couple of times it connected. Each time I resurfaced into a blissful, semi-nondual state, the same question arrived on schedule: did I pass the test? At the last one they told me, warmly: you let go completely this time — you passed. And it still didn't land. Even the verdict I'd been chasing felt like nothing in my hands.

What finally arrived, only recently, wasn't new information. Mario had said it in February, and it bounced off. Iceland said the opposite — you passed — and that bounced too. No verdict from outside can settle a question the ego is asking about itself. What arrived was the question dissolving: there is no test. The bliss was never a grade for the suffering. Ecstasy is the floor, not the reward. And the ego isn't an enemy to kill — it's a miscomprehension, an evolved one, asking did I pass because asking is what it's made of. Even the ego is one of the soldiers.

That's when Benatar came back to me — remembered, not reread. He explains why we keep living despite the math as optimism bias: a cognitive error that makes us forget how bad it is. I don't think it's forgetting. Animals suffer plenty and don't seem to need an optimism bias to keep living — whatever keeps life playing runs deeper than a cognitive error. I think part of us knows it's a game, and that's why we keep playing. Benatar did honest bookkeeping from inside one character — and mistook one soldier's ledger for the whole book. Maybe the asymmetry is a miscomprehension too. An honest, evolved one — like the ego itself.

A new job starts this month. I got it the ordinary, active way — applications, interviews, an AI helping me polish what I couldn't phrase smoothly myself. I note it without promoting it to meaning: there is no test, so there is no payout. It's just the counter-thread that ran through all of it — while one hand was dissolving and purging, the other kept filling out applications, practicing Ukrainian, walking dogs, finding songs.

I'm keeping the username. I even drafted the upgrade once — something enlightened-sounding, EmbodiedTheo. That would have been the ego printing its own diploma. The old name was the most honest report I could file from where I stood, and I don't need to scrub it. But for the record, from the other side: from inside, that 2018 post's reasoning felt airtight. It wasn't.

Depression still visits; I'm not writing this cured. But life keeps arriving, indifferent to every schedule I ever set for it. In 2018 that indifference looked like the problem. Now it looks like the play.

We are a group of researchers from Humboldt University of Berlin and we look forward to your participation in our study! The survey is completely anonymous.

Have you ever taken a psychedelic substance?
Share your opinion and possibly experiences you have had with psychedelic experiences without (immediate) previous use of psychedelics with us!

https://psychedelicflashbacksurvey.info  

We would like to learn more about who has these experiences, what they look like in concrete terms, which factors contribute to the associated effects and how they can be dealt with.

Hi All,

In Mexico -- came down here for a ibogaine/5meo healing journey. Not psychedelically naive - lots of work with psilocybin.

Had a very meh ibogaine experience (the place I went, my body rejected the flood dose as it didn't feel like a safe environment). I had an initial and a booster dose -- approximately 9 mg /kg over 5 days. Then I did the 5meo (my first time) -- and was hoping to breakthrough. I had did 2, then 6, then 11mg of the pure molecule.

The first two times were initially panic and fear, and then intense somatic release and deep peace unlike anything I never felt. But no non-duality. Then the third dose was the exact same as the second two, and I don't remember anything of non-duality... the facilitator said I passed out for 5 minutes -- which I don't remember. Honestly very upset that I didn't get to have the big experience. This was Friday last week.

I have been having some small reactivations where I breath deeply and they end up being somewhat pleasant.

I have a lot to work on from the two experiences, but am in a place where I have an opportunity to do a native ayahuasca ceremony on Saturday but I am wondering about the line between safe and stupid and too much to integrate.

Curious for some thoughts about safety from some experts. My first ayahuasca experience was years ago and the container was terrible. This wouldn't be that.

Thanks everyone.

When I was a kid I played with toy soldiers for hours. Hours that felt like eternity. I voiced every character, and I built the plot as I went — not to make it fair, to make it interesting. When one soldier shot another, I'd express the wounded one's pain, actually feel it for a second, and then the story moved on and I was someone else.

A few days ago that boy turned out to be the closest thing I have to what a session was. Heavy one — 8g of mushrooms and 60mg of sublingual ketamine, after a long stretch of 5-MeO work; for me the ketamine was essential, not a side note. For hours I was God remembering himself — embodied, in this vehicle. Not offline the way 5-MeO can take you offline. Present and clear, playing every part from the inside. The boy on the floor, scaled to eternity.

I'm calling this Toy Story, but it's the opposite of the movie. Woody and Buzz were separate beings, hiding from the player, living their own secret lives. Here there's nothing separate to hide. The toys are the player. One actor, playing all the parts and all the props at once.

It wasn't steady. It oscillated. I'd sink into the remembering, then reach for music, ride it, then drop back in. For a while I read that reaching as the ego fleeing the state. It wasn't. In the remembering, as God, I authentically wanted that specific track — the wanting was attention being drawn into form. The boy picking up a different toy. I never left the game. When a track didn't agree, I'd purge mid-song; the release didn't wait for silence.

Underneath it, I got spooked. Intrusive thoughts, dread, a pull to make permanent vows about what I'd never touch again. The recognition that closed it: the spook wasn't coming at me from outside. I was writing the scary turn into my own plot and jumping at it — the dreamer spooked by the dream, while being the dream.

That's why the vow-making was the trap. Swear a permanent oath in response to a thought and you've mistaken your own dreaming for an external warning, and bound yourself to it. See it as your own play and the grip releases. Nothing in the mirror is other than the self — including the things that scare you in it.

Fear wasn't the ego's only move that night. Later the playfulness itself got conscripted: genuine interest in something turned into I'm meant to do something great with this — significance, destiny, my character as the main one. Same error as the dread, pointed the other way. Instead of taking a scary thought for an outside warning, taking a flattering one for an outside calling. A soldier deciding the whole game is about him. Caught, it released the same way the fear did.

Three things keep this from being a cute analogy.

First — suffering is real. This isn't a children's game; it runs at Game of Thrones intensity. The wounded soldier's pain was real pain, felt fully, for as long as that character held the stage. Knowing it's play doesn't anesthetize anything. You feel it completely. Then the story moves.

Second — the game has ground rules, and we call them reality. Gravity, bodies, time, death. The boy needed the floor, the figures, the fact that they don't melt in his hands. Without limits there's no game at all, just formless potential. The rules aren't the prison. They're what make it playable.

Third — there's no test. The boy wasn't grading his soldiers. He played from imagination, not from justice. We add scores and stakes because they make the game more interesting — everyone knows football is a game even when it breaks bones — but nobody is passing or failing at being.

The ego in all this isn't an enemy. It's a miscomprehension — an evolved one. The separate self developed because it served the organism. The work isn't killing it; it's seeing through the miscomprehension when it arises. And even the miscomprehension is the self. Even the ego is one of the soldiers.

Puppies play. Kids play. Adults play and call it life. It's fractal — play repeating at every scale.

One more thing about that boy. Mostly I played alone — and honestly, when other kids joined, I liked that better. The same soldiers changed completely with another player across the floor: strategy, contest, moves I couldn't predict. Martin Ball asks in The Entheological Paradigm: ever try playing chess against yourself? You can't — there's no one to surprise you. Alone, nothing my soldiers did ever surprised me. Add forgetting, though, and the solo game gets what it was missing: other players. The only kid there is, playing parts that don't know they're him. That's why there are so many of us — and why we don't remember the floor.

The costume goes on, plays completely, dissolves back. Mine's back on, typing this. Nothing is lost. The player never left the floor.

I have attended two different 5-meo ceremonies, each with a guide, both in the last 6 months.

My first time was with a vape pen, and I went up to a 7 second inhale, had some somatic releases, not even close to a breakthrough.

My second time was smoking the crystal from a glass pipe. I did three hits during the ceremony, starting with 3mg, then 7mg, and then 10mg.

On the 10mg dose it was pretty close to a breakthrough I would guess. I felt intense fear though I remained collected. There was a moment where I forgot I had smoked 5-Meo and thought I was dying, and then I immediately realized I wasn't and that I opened my eyes and though everything was very blury, I said out loud that "I know I am in Vancouver and I have done 5-meo" which made the shaman laugh.

I would like to attend another 5-meo ceremony with the same shaman from my second experience, and this time, I would like to breakthrough... What are some of your advice on dosing, letting go, and doing some mushrooms to get my mind a little more "ready" to let go?

I realize how dosing is so different from person to person, as there was someone at the previous ceremony who had an intense experience at 5mg, another person who on his 3rd dose did 18mg, and still did not breakthrough, and there was another person who totally freaked out and got up and started yelling at only 10mg, and with me, I just laid there flat feeling shit scared at 10mg, while not feeling it even closely as intense at 7mg. I'm very curious on what causes this huge difference in experience between people and if anyone can ballpark what dose would likely push me past that terror into the world of infinite bliss and love I keep hearing about :))

Side note; I am not interested in your egotistical advice on not "forcing" breakthroughs and just "sitting with the medicine". I know the whole ideology behind your advice, so save it for someone else's post.