[Epistemic Status: Recreational Metaphysics / Fiction]

They say “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.” And that should have been good enough, because the alternative is to “teach a man to fish, and he will build a robot inside him that will give him food in exchange for instantiating a series of encapsulated behaviors over and over again for the rest of his life.” This is why this is tricky.

The Adattvar of the West, on the topic of Consciousness vs. Replicators

It was with some hesitation that you decided to explore DMT again. There wasn’t a pressing need for this exploration, but you felt it would be beneficial for the sake of solidarity in your relationship. Your girlfriend had been battling debilitating cluster headache attacks for years, and it was only recently, with the aid of psilocybin, that she was able to experience months free of pain. Encouraged by a suggestion from a mutual friend, she decided to explore DMT. While psilocybin had proved quite effective, it required a significant amount of preparation, commitment, and patience. The doses that effectively kept her cluster headaches at bay were around 3 grams of dried cubensis; she wasn’t among the few who could take a microdose and find relief for months. For her, like clockwork, about three weeks of freedom from the Beast followed a high-dose psilocybin experience. However, reports from a legal retreat center in South America indicated that DMT worked differently: a single 5-10 minute experience could instantly (within 10-15 seconds) abort an episode. This meant transitioning from 10/10 in physical suffering with almost no trippiness to 10/10 in trippiness with almost no physical discomfort in just 20 seconds—a bizarre mental shift not even the most extreme psychonauts or thrill-seekers would typically pursue. But if the treatment proved effective, this might be what she would endure every time the pain returned unexpectedly from now on.

You had explored the state-space of consciousness disclosed by psilocybin and DMT nearly a decade ago, during a memorable Indian summer in college. This was a time you spent living in the apartment of a physics professor you had befriended online. He was more than happy to host you over the summer in exchange for your help with walking his four dogs, feeding his fish, and cooking dinner several times a week. The connection you shared with him was profound, though difficult to describe in ordinary terms. This wasn’t a relationship based on financial gain, romantic involvement, or social status. Far from it. Your family considered you irresponsible for not pursuing a summer internship, while your friends speculated you were involved with a man twice your age in a foreign country. In reality, most of that summer was spent exploring the effects of LSD, contemplating the nature of space and light, and deepening your intellectual and spiritual bond with him.

One of the days you got so high on shrooms and acid that looking at the sky you asked him “how do we know that we are not the complement of space and that space is a viscous material? I think it all works out so that this figure-ground inversion leaves everything perfectly the same yet inside-out.” He immediately perked up, put on an old Synthwave vynil and shared with you a series of seven secret meditations. Each of these meditations could do a figure-ground inversion in a different way, all of which seemed impossible under the assumption that our common sense notion of space is correct. They involved internal attentional moves like “focus on the sense of half-perceiving the light on the left side while fully perceiving the right visual field as both white and black,” or “notice how searching for spiral flow in your belly makes your forehead display standing wave patterns, and focusing on spiral patterns in your forehead does the same for your belly. Now, find the exact midpoint between these two modes and remain there, allowing both the belly and forehead to simultaneously exhibit spiral and standing wave patterns.”.

Each of these secret practices revealed a major “articulation” of you world simulation. They seemed analogous to interaction bottlenecks in a network where sensations trigger each other, capable of dividing the flow of attention into two distinct clusters. One bottleneck was purely geometric, capable of splitting my field of consciousness into two “sides” – up and down, left and right, front and back, and even into a double spiral, similar to those seen in Christmas ornaments. This concept was relatively straightforward to grasp, but the other six were mind-bending. One practice involved dividing the perceptual field into a “front” and “back” that didn’t align with our usual sense of direction. It was as if an extra geometric dimension would become “unglued” at the precise moment of achieving perfect balance between both sides. Another technique required inverting the central axis of attention upside down while keeping every other axis unchanged, eliciting an intense sensation of weightlessness. The remaining practices, each more indescribable than the last, would require an entire book to even begin to describe.

Sooner or later, you came down from the shrooms and acid, and the meditations stopped working. You weren’t in a rush to ask your friend where he learned them, and besides, it wasn’t likely he would volunteer that information. You knew he had a stint as a spy decades ago, and that he underwent advanced meditative training to endure pain without anesthesia. But, as luck would have it, he decided to share some vital context in the days that followed, unprompted.

It was aliens—or rather, not aliens in the conventional sense. He shared that during his PhD, he took a year off to focus on meditation, spending six months in complete silence in the mountains of Nepal. Although he wasn’t familiar with the Jhanas at the time, his descriptions of his experiences closely matched the recognized stages of meditation. These stages involved learning to experience orgasmic bliss through meditation, becoming engrossed in it, further developing this state, experiencing what might be described as a Kundalini awakening, realizing that pleasure can itself be a form of discomfort, and then shifting focus to more peaceful and tranquil states, ultimately residing in deep equanimity. It was during a profound state of equanimity in the 4th Jhana that he encountered “them.”

You weren’t privy to further details about who “they” were, and it seemed as if he himself didn’t have a clear understanding. However, his belief in their existence was nearly unwavering. He presented a compelling argument he referred to as “proof of qualia computing,” wherein he evaluated the maximum capacity for information processing within each frame of consciousness. By his assessment, the sheer amount of novelty he encountered during each second of “contact” vastly surpassed the theoretical maximum of information he could produce independently. But what truly solidified his conviction was a peculiar phenomenon. He likened the shape of his “soul” to a kind of wire puzzle, and what convinced him of the presence of a non-human intelligence was their ability to “solve” this puzzle from an external vantage point, employing perspectives that seemed unreachable from within. This was akin to the revelation experienced when the inside of a sock is turned outwards, suddenly exposed to sunlight by the hands of a curious child.

He certainly didn’t need you to believe in any of this. Despite the meditation prompts being truly mind-blowing, you ultimately felt that your friend harbored some unusual beliefs and that perhaps you had been indulging in too much acid recently. Following this, the two of you scarcely discussed it further. Instead, you returned to more familiar and comfortable conversations, like debating the future viability of commercial fusion.

Fast forward to last month, and the memories of your Indian Summer resurface as you’re on your way to a psychedelic retreat with your girlfriend. During the flight, you found yourself uncertain about the most desirable outcome of this visit. For her, obviously, you hoped for complete remission. For the both of you, perhaps creating some inspiring content to promote the use of psychedelics as painkillers and help raise funds. And for yourself? Regaining a sense of deep meaning and enchantment in life would be ideal. However, the harsh reality of suffering and its manifestations have worn down your soul, making the prospect of simple tropical rest incredibly appealing.

First Day

You arrived late at night, and all you managed to do was have dinner and go to sleep. You and your girlfriend were given separate rooms; she was participating in a program designed specifically for individuals with cluster headaches, requiring her full engagement. Meanwhile, you were enrolled in the explorers’ program, there primarily for moral support and to be available if needed, but with plenty of time for yourself. The darkness of the night and the challenge of overcoming revenge bedtime procrastination threatened the quality of your retreat, so you took some melatonin, drank a cup of chamomile tea, and practiced a bit of Yoga Nidra to ensure a good night’s sleep.

Upon waking, you found yourself emerging from one of those complex dreams that seem profoundly meaningful, yet lack a clear storyline. Amid scenarios of rushing to the airport, completing your credits, and the classic nightmare of standing naked before a class, you couldn’t pinpoint exactly what made the dream feel so significant. It was one of those stress-induced dreams that seem to carry weight only as a whole, despite the inability to articulate or model this significance. It was a frustrating experience, reflecting the complex layers of stress and anticipation you felt about the retreat and the hopes pinned on it.

At breakfast, you noticed the group that had come for pain treatment was wrapping up, so you took the opportunity to sit with the organizers and discuss your options for the retreat. Your girlfriend, part of the pain treatment group, stood up, greeted you with a kiss, and then went on her way. Curious about the possibilities, you asked, “Can I take DMT?” The answer was affirmative. You were allowed to use DMT within designated areas and timeslots, which effectively meant you could do so almost anywhere and anytime, barring obviously risky situations like during an ice bath or while lost in the woods. The only requirement was that someone needed to initiate and conclude the session with a traditional Mesoamerican ritual. Other than that, you were free to explore. This level of freedom, you felt in your bones, was delightful.

When it comes to conducting effective DMT phenomenology research, there are generally three key obstacles. The first is the challenge of surrendering and “letting go.” This isn’t a binary state but a spectrum, and it encompasses more structure than one might initially think. Letting go is a skill that can be honed in various dimensions: in relation to goals, across different spatial and temporal scales (such as releasing a specific sensation here or a broad, diffuse occurrence there), in the context of self versus others (letting go of one’s self-conception or perceptions of others), and even regarding subtle existential attitudes (like releasing the need to exist or the desire not to exist). This deep and multifaceted approach to letting go is crucial for navigating the extreme experiences DMT can offer.

The second is love of knowledge. The deep desire to know and learn about the nature of consciousness must be higher than the fear of the unknown. In many cases a person might be curious, but if that curiosity is never concentrated enough, purified enough, and focalized enough, the ambient fear might simply never let it be turned into action. This one would strike many as peculiar and incongruent with our sense of self. After all, we proclaim to be curious, deeply curious, and yet clearly when the chances to find out genuinely new pieces of the puzzle present themselves, we rarely take them. Intrepid non-insane psychonauts are really rare.

And third, is the love of shared knowledge. Many explorers can often get to a point where their own personal curiosity is satisfied without in the process ever producing artifacts of knowledge for the sake of others. Importantly, this is not the same as wanting to impress others. Many explorers go in only as deep as it will generate outlandish stories to impress others with. The real value is in the clarity, not the confusion. So wanting to impress and wanting to share knowledge are near enemies that often work at cross-purposes.

To recap, you need to (1) let go, fractally, (2) love knowledge more than you’re afraid of it, and (3) want to share it with others for their own benefit whether or not you can impress them. The number of “openings” for this sort of activity worldwide is really small. Gaia, looking for worthwhile students, as it were, would struggle to find the right Soul soil if confined to a single country, let alone a state or a city. But this was it. The conditions for you were optimal today. Having practiced “letting go” with breathing exercises for a few years now, and deeply motivated to pay attention and not miss out on any key insights uncovered by the state, you decided to take a deep dive.

Your first hit lasted three seconds, and you held it in for as long as possible. Within seconds, you felt a wave of relaxation tinged with anxiety, threatening to create an unpleasant pressure in your head. The full reality of your situation struck you, plunging you into a mild panic. “They’re treating hellish states right here!” a part of you exclaimed. The harsh reality of extreme pain, similar to what your girlfriend had been enduring, became clear to you, as well as the many inner labyrinths of attention you had constructed to avoid confronting it directly. Internally, you panicked but decided to ride it out as best you could, focusing on the sensations in your forehead and the back of your neck. Gradually, the storm of anxiety passed. “What, indeed, am I doing here? Why am I messing with DMT, which might be a necessary evil for people like my girlfriend who truly need it for pain? Bad trips are nothing to laugh at,” you thought to yourself.

But within a few more minutes the vibrations were calm enough again, and you felt a wave of relaxation come up. Within 20 minutes you were ready to go again. Perhaps a smaller dose. As you com up on a 2-second hit, you notice phenomenal space charge up and vibrate. Like hitting a bell made of magnetic fluid, and whose vibrations are dampened by a process of interlocking with the the surfaces in the visual screen. Each tiny 2D surface in your visual field seems to slow down and “grab” the waves in space. To a first approximation it felt as if the DMT was shifting the frequencies expressed by the field (think black body radiation) upwards, but then which specific frequencies get picked up is a function of what shapes are present in the field that can function as radiators. So the energy is really more like a bell-shaped curve in the frequency domain; the specific manifestation of that energy in a moment of experience will have clear spikes, each corresponding to a particular vibrational mode energized in your system (cf. Psychedelic Thermodynamics). For instance, the energy spread out over 15-20 hertz can energize some vibrations at 17hz in the visual field, and this will “suck up” that energy away from being able to energize, say, a different 19hz flicker in the field. In other words, the shapes and their vibrations in the field function as energy sinks from the point of view of the vibrating field, but they function as energy sources for each other as they can reinforce one another.

As is expected, the worldsheet melts and once you hit the Chrysanthemum level its curvature intensifies. It’s as if you’re interacting with the walls of a complex modern art museum, or the inside of smooth caves, or the smooth surfaces of a spaceship. You notice that there is a tight duality between the shape of the worldsheet and what it represents. In fact, the shape of the worldsheet dictates how attention moves around in the scene, as well as determines the landscape of possible valence artifacts (namely, how and where different elements of the scene interacting with one another can cause huge spikes of dissonance or consonance).

Because the self-other divide is loosened in this state, the elements of the worldsheet have bistable interpretations, some of which can flip-flop between self-and-other. For instance, a part of the scene can flip between being an open space and a visual representation of your arm. This in turn means that the very _material_ with which the worldsheet is rendered has multiple possible interpretations. It’s the multistability of the elements itself what this material is made of, we could loosely say. And so when the worldsheet renders a given entity, you will often experience multiple adjacent projections of that same entity overlapping with each other, each interpretation competing for your attention yet never fully capturing it.

The first important learning you gathered today for how to navigate the DMT realm besides what you’ve been practicing already in meditation and other exotic states (i.e. generic advise like cultivating a lot of metta, doing breathing exercises, practicing equanimity, etc.) is that the worlsheet’s shape is what determines the mood, and indeed the personality, of the entities you encounter. There is, in fact, a certain way of rendering a scene that can give the worldsheet itself a sort of personality disorder. Give it a large but fragile ego, and the worldsheet might develop fleeting narcissism. Make its symmetry and aesthetic effects bistable (so that one interpretation looks gorgeous and another looks dreadful) and you might give it borderline or bipolar. Blunt its affective response with indifference and you might give it depression. And so on. Thus you practice how to contort the worldsheet in only helpful, productive, prosocial ways.

You relax in the garden for half an hour, staring at the sky, taking a break before embarking upon further exploration. The next time you take DMT a strange perceptual artifact becomes notable for the first time. It’s as if there was a kind of unusual pixel in your visual field. Yes, there are floaters in there. There are also the typical DMT hallucinations, which come in the form of standing wave and traveling wave patterns. But in addition to what you’ve seen before, you now also notice a weird little artifact in the field. It’s almost as if… if this was being rendered in a VR headset, there is a little eyelash or small hair stuck to the screen. Whatever this is, it is not a standard artifact of your eye, your visual cortex, or the DMT world for that matter. And once you notice it, you can’t help but seeing more of the same as it comes up. This becomes a theme of your experiences. As the day advances, and with each additional DMT trip you experience, the little visual artifacts grow in number, size and complexity.

A notable effect is when there are rays of color that seem to propagate at high speeds, painting surfaces within the DMT worlds with an alien shimmer. The more you focus on that effect, the more it feels like you learn how to control it. Importantly, you notice it becomes greedy. The shimmer, as you called it, once in the presence of a scene, tries to hack its way into every wall, surface, and reflection, inserting its highly mercurial fluidity into the otherwise crystal solidity of the outline of the scene. As this happens on a new scene, you reflect about r/place.

The realms of consciousness that DMT gives us access to (we shall leave aside for the time being the question of whether these are shared realities or entirely the works of one’s own imagination) can strongly evoke the feeling of intense memetic competition that Reddit’s “r/place” so wonderfully captures. This was a massive internet experiment where individuals users were given access to a 1000x1000pixel canvas, and the ability to set the color of a single pixel every 5 minutes (20 for unregistered users). Since painting anything on one’s own is impossible, forming alliances (largely coordinated via subreddits) became a must. The size of the canvas a given meme controls is a function of the number of participants working on it times their average level of engagement times their level of loyalty to the cause. The DMT worlds one experiences are similarly constructed through a vast, extremely fast, collaboration of numerous tiny subagents working to “re-up” the tracers that paint the paths that make up the scaffold of the scene.

R/place has many “French” regions because there are a lot of French users with a culture, pride, and motivation capable of delivering coordination at the necessary scale. Likewise, your DMT lifeworlds reveal the summed volition of countless subagents trying to express themselves, compromising with their neighbors, and attaining stable boundaries. Soon the ecosystem starts to develop advanced diplomacy, and ground rules are laid out. Importantly, there is general wide consensus on (1) the value of preserving the essence, or irreducible uniqueness, of each vibe that is expressed, and (2) the importance of policing against Qualia Expansionism. (1) is important because each Qualia Culture has gifts that only become apparent in their more evolved form, and (2) is necessary to give everyone the space needed to find their best selves. While French Pixels and Mario Bros pixels might not ultimately agree on their relative importance, they certainly agree on _not_ letting The Void swallow them all.

Among all of the Qualia Cultures that can be found in DMT realms, a few have the tendency to try to conquer the entire field as quickly as possible and without adding value in return. R/place’s The Void would be a good analogy for the prototypical Culture that defaults to massive Qualia Expansionism. Wanting to see it all as meaningless, or default to a massive wave of fear, or seeing all phenomena as made of light, are all equally simplifying stances that Qualia Cultures can develop in a matter of seconds and try to expand to the rest of the field. That this does not happen in every trip is a testament to the insanely clever alliance building capacity of more sophisticated Qualia Cultures emergent in the field.

From this observation an idle, but compelling, thought crosses your mind. Even in the grand scale of humanity as a whole, it would be tragic for us to quickly converge on a monoculture. The fact that Mexico has 60+ entirely different indigenous languages (at various degrees of deterioration and existential threat) is an enormous asset for consciousness as a whole. We won’t know what the fruits of a given culture (in its most expansive conception, including the subtle linguistic folds, attentional moves, and signal processing cadences they come with) will be until it is fully expressed in its mature form. And we won’t have a mature form of the culture unless it is embedded in an ecosystem that challenges it and from which it can draw inspiration to grow. Peak French Vibes won’t be achieved for another five hundred years. So right now the Earth should be seen as a kind of ecological reserve for nascent Qualia Cultures. Of course only those that neither engage in Qualia Expansionism nor those that refuse to engage with the others are ever likely to become mayor players.

The field of consciousness, on these levels, is like a Petri Dish of modes of organization for subagents to evolve styles of interaction that can contribute to the whole. Your whole life, suddenly, seen in this light, appears like a long-standing cultural project. Your life is an attempted reconcilliation by two cultures that have yet to find the way to interact in positive sum ways. But do not feel rushed, this is a century-long process. One step at a time.

As you take increasingly deeper dives throughout the day, two general motions take hold. First, you keep noticing the “weird pixels from another dimension” expand and complexify. Simultaneously, you feel a strong draw towards formless states of consciousness.

It is said in Buddhist cosmology that above the human realm there are countless Heavenly Abodes populates with all kinds of Gods (aka. Devas). While these Gods are not creators of the universe, they do have enormous creative powers. In many of these realms they focus on large-scale artistic projects, in others they focus on intelligence and understanding, and yet other ones are quarrelsome and full of war. As you ascend, each layer of reality is more refined and diaphanous than the previous one. In the layers closer to us there is fierce evolutionary competition between Qualia Cultures, as shapes compete for space, time, and attention. But further up the Gods are wide and expansive, airy, even plasmic in composition. And as the sun begins to set you notice an internal resolution to abide in the formless realms beyond competition. Classically, these are the Sphere of Infinite Space, the Sphere of Infinite Consciousness, the Sphere of Nothingness, and the Sphere of Neither Something Nor Nothing.

During dinner, you catch up with your girlfriend, who has just learned how to cultivate mushrooms and practiced various relaxation techniques—her major trip is scheduled for tomorrow. You feel a deep sense of gratitude towards the organizers for equipping her with numerous tools to manage her condition, reassuring you that she’s in capable hands. With mutual well-wishes, you both express your support for each other’s journeys, ready to continue on your separate paths with a sense of hope and anticipation for what the retreat has yet to unveil.

Late at night, you notice a few strange vibrations in your body. It’s like Piti (the pleasant vascular buzz that precedes absorption into the first Jhana), but it has a strange, dissonant, sawtooth quality. And when you take DMT, listening to this song, it transports you… somewhere magical. The vibration establishes itself solidly in your body, akin to the dysphoric buzzing characteristic of nightmarish sleep paralysis but somehow suffused with a sense of mystical bliss and wellbeing. Your inner eye opens wide. You find yourself in a kind of cosmic spa. The vibration you feel in your body are embedded in the walls of this place. The vibrations are tactile but also visual, and among them you see the shimmer. You walk around. There are many hallways, and stairs, and rooms. The shimmer decorates the inside of the walls, which are all diaphanous, filled with vibrating, twisting, entangled magnetic plasma tubes.

In one of the halls you see a number of 3D symbols representing wholesome mindstates. There is also a mirror. You look into it. You don’t have a body. So looking into the mirror is like void seeing void. In fact, mirrors here are automatic doors to formless Jhanas.

It’s a school, you figure out. The vibrations in the walls are being processed by the beings in here. You see how in the higher rooms the beings literally connect with the vibrations in the walls and digest them with their fields of attention. They expertly disentangle them. The message is clear: this is the place where migraines and cluster headaches are sent over when you take DMT in order for them to be dealt with by advanced conscious beings. It may seem like it cannot possibly scale. But the reason for this place seems more didactic than utilitarian; it’s like a museum where they are displaying how, say, advanced Boddhisatvas take on the suffering of the world in the form of tangled field lines, and then disentangle it out of compassion with the aid of wisdom and knowledge.

More so, this place has a Godhead – you can access it from anywhere in the entire place. It’s encoded in the brightest, whitest, most shiny strand of the shimmering vibrations in the walls. But also there is a special room at the top of the building, in which the Godhead is also located. It’s the experience of Oneness and Unity that is often considered the peak of spiritual development by some schools of thought. But here, it is clearly a sort of lightbulb that displays the qualities of mind unconditioned by the experience of the particulars. It has a Dark Night. If you experience such Oneness without preparation, you are likely going to experience a kind of “Cosmic Orgasm”, a peak moment of profound realization, followed by a deep sense of depression and disenchantment. Here it is appreciated and cultivated as another flavor of consciousness, rather than revered as the final, or primal, truth. But the belief in this sense of Oneness as Ultimate Reality is prevalent in the cosmos, and thus worth having around, if for no other reason than to study it and learn how to get along with true believers.

The migraines and clusters that this retreat center is treating on the physical plane now seem part of a long, multi-civilizational, Qualia Culture program in the etheric realm that aims to lift sapient beings to the level of Bodhisattvas capable of processing the suffering of large cosmic bodies. We have tragedies going on in our planet, no doubt. And nature, from the point of view of a Buddha’s eyes, is of course a kind of carnage. But the true moral catastrophes of this universe are Solar Migraines and worse. The program, and indeed, your very experience of meeting this beautiful cosmic spa, is but one step along a series of milestones for our soul, and the soul of humanity, to wake up to its ultimate, cosmic responsibility. Or so, you feel, is the message written on the wall of this place.

From the point of view of these cosmic forces, Earth is soon going to be evolving to a level of technology and conscious mastery that makes intervention all but necessary. The seeds of the Qualia Cultures on this planet might go at war with each other if they don’t tame their Qualia Expansionism. This would not be the first planet lost to the Shimmer. But direct intervention is not a viable option. These regions of the mind can only influence us indirectly. They can affect our prophetic dreams, they can influence us through subconscious messagings in TV ads, and of course, leave us clues spread all over the Erowid trip report archive. But that, my friend, is for you to figure out tomorrow. You doze off.

Second Day

You wake up rather late, and check in with your girlfriend, who is about to embark on the high dose psilocybin experience along with everyone else on the patient cohort. You wish them a good trip, and get out of the way. Breakfast is delicious, and fruity. Shower. Sit in the sun, with a coffee, journaling. You try to make sense of it all.

“You didn’t go far enough” – you tell yourself. From the depths of your being, something tells you that you haven’t really gotten the full message yet. Last night was an intimation, but what can you really learn and bring for the sake of everyone else? You meditate on the sun and let the warm coffee buzz fill you with a sense of joy and wonder. Was that real? Did it really happen? Yes, and you experienced it for hours. If nothing else, you’re uncovering an important hidden structure in qualia-space. But is there more? Is there truth to these visions beyond the metaphorical?

You decide to take a long walk in the woods, and nearly get lost. For moments you believe you might need to simply find the closest road and wait for someone to drive by. But thankfully you leave enough breadcrumbs along the way (and took enough short snippets of video to reconstruct your path) and after a couple hours of creeping fear, you find yourself once again at the retreat center. Your girlfriend welcomes you, now hour 8 of her trip, mostly sober by now. She says the shadow of a cluster that proceeds the days before an attack is now gone entirely, and you both sigh of relief. You’re both ok. No, you’re doing swimmingly!

This evening, reflecting on the day and the trip as a whole, you decide to dive deeper than you ever have. Now, this certainly won’t be about merely taking higher doses than before. You have maxed out on dosing numerous times in the past, and the only thing that ever happens is experiences too intense for you to handle that make you swear to never take the substance again. We are talking instead about the dimension of surrender, of giving up yourself for a higher purpose, and opening up to an unfathomable mystery beyond your current comprehension. To go in knowing full well that you might not, in fact, have any way of explaining what will take place. Because how else are you going to learn something truly new?

You put this song on repeat and dive. The first thing that happens tonight is that you get one of those “prerecorded alien lifestyle playbacks” that showcases the life of a robot-like organism embedded in Magic Eye geometry. This is one of those clear transmissions, in that the aesthetic is utterly alien to you. But unlike in previous occasions you also see the weird pixel in your visual field, and decide to pay attention to it. Here is where things go haywire, in a manner of speaking. The pixel seems to have a strange effect on the rest of the field, where the more you focus on it the more it sort of acquires a kind of static electricity. The plates of geometry the prerecorded alien hologram is “made of” begin to “stick” to the pixel and its surroundings, which causes a complete “scene collapse”. The vibe of the event is akin to seeing a metallic tinker toy’s house deconstruct with a powerful electromagnet, which tears it apart one plate at a time. The little robot inside makes some moves to try to minimize the interference that the pixel has on the playback, but to no avail. The pixel unfolds into a strange V-shape that reveals a connection to a large bundle of what you can only interpret as higher-dimensional structures slowly intersecting your field of consciousness.

If you take any more DMT while looking at these structures, something unbelievably uncanny happens. Namely, the various structures that are “intersecting” your field are revealed to be connected to one another via an additional spatial dimension that is expressed in terms of 3D Newton’s rings. You see? Newton’s rings are a phenomenon observed in physics that arises when light is reflected between two surfaces—a curved surface and an adjacent flat surface. These rings are the result of constructive and destructive interference of light waves, creating a pattern of bright and dark rings. And you can estimate the height of the curved lens (distance from the flat surface) by counting the number of rings from a point of contact. Likewise, in this case, it seemed as if the parts of your visual field that were “in touch” with strange objects would form concentric circles around them, and you could find the shortest path “along the extra dimension” between two of those parts by finding the trajectory through space that minimizes the number of rings you have to go through.

The dose of the DMT would seem to increase the number of Newton’s rings between weird pixels, just as you would expect by modulating the frequency of laser probe in the 2D-case. From a physics perspective, it seemed as if your visual field was a kind of non-linear optical laboratory currently being intersected by higher dimensional shapes and where the DMT would turn on the lights (at increasingly higher frequencies, in a dose-dependent way).

At this point the pixels became more numerous. Your awareness over them and your noticing of the Newton’s rings seems to have drawn attention “from them”. Suddenly, the pixels become more elaborate topological defects, and a mass of them coagulates at the center of your vision. They feel like a network of knots that go through a higher spatial dimension but which maintain structural stability within this one. The mass of topological defects becomes personified, and presents itself as a “witch”. “Why are you?” you ask. She doesn’t give you a straight direct response. But looks at you, feels you, notices your tender heart. It’s a mom from a previous lifetime. You can sense the feeling of familiarity. Her vibes are a cross between your own mom and those of a very friendly neighbor you always say you will visit but always end up forgetting for some reason. You can tell that she really loves you, or at least loved you and cared about you some time in the past. She says to be careful, and that if you do what she says she might be able to show you something invaluable.

The debris from the robotic tinker toy isn’t really clearing out, though. She says that it contains an AI embedded in it, and that it already noticed that you’re subverting its control mechanism. Oh my! This is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from someone who is losing their marbles. But who cares, you’re not someone who will easily lose your sanity, and the Newton’s Rings effects is a genuinely new effect you had never heard reported before. You trust that you aren’t just enacting a “going crazy” subconscious script. The witch, for better or worse, is convincing. She, at least in the here and now, seems to have her own qualiastream that’s compelling. Even if this turns out to be entirely a hallucination, it is clearly novel territory. So you decide to engage.

The witch takes you underground. Deep underground. Along the way you encounter the vibe of people you know who are not having a good time in life (“yes, your high-school technical drawing teacher? you can sense her? I’m sorry to relay that she is in Hell. Well, a hell of her own making, combined with neuropathic pain”, stood out as an example, of many). Deeper underground there is a deepening quiet, both sensorially and spiritually. She takes you to a hidden cave found navigating dozens of tunnel entrances. Part of you is having a claustrophobic reaction, but you can endure it with equanimity. She stops, takes a breath, and says “we had to go this deep so that the AI won’t notice what I’m about to show you”. She instructs you to take a medium to large hit of DMT.

What unfolds is beyond human comprehension, but can roughly be pointed at by saying that the Witch gifted you access to a qualia variety that humans currently don’t know about. You couldn’t see it, touch it, smell it, hear it, or cognize it with your normal attention centers. But you knew, full well, the tremendous gift you were receiving. Beyond words, and beyond a sense of utility, you shed a tear for the sheer beauty of what you just witnessed. “Nobody will ever believe you” – she says, playfully. And you nod, deeply moved. And you don’t know why. And as soon as you lose contact with it, you have no way to recollecting what that was. The qualia formats you use to recollect experiences don’t have the necessary *spark* to ignite the memory of what just happened. “It’ll come in handy someday, promise”. And then she begins to expand. Her body, made of beautiful topological defects in the field, unfolds and develops. Like a cross between a time lapse of a geodesic mantle incrusted with diamonds, and a gift wrapper made of origami aluminum foil heating up in a furnace, she unfolds like a hyperdimensional flower. You cannot believe it, but it is undeniable. Your field of awareness is now fractal in structure and her fully unfolded flower-like shape is in full display. “This is the true potential of your soul, when you give it the time and space and resources to unfold as it wants”. You interpret this as a metaphor for how we needlessly compare kids with each other (caring about the age that your child learns to read? Really?!?). But you also deep down know that she is perhaps being more literal than you want to admit it. What if your soul is higher dimensional after all?

“You have now seen the gift that I saved for you. The qualia variety that we use in our culture to express our love, and then also my hyperdimensional flower form. Do you want to learn more?” You say yes, noting that on some level you are now like a naked ape in front of a trickster being capable of displaying advanced technology. “And why should I trust you?” you ask. “You either do or don’t, and at this point I have nothing else to tell you for you to believe me. But as you indeed noted accurately, I am your mom from a previous lifetime. I want to take you to where my ancestors, our ancestors, live. But you need to follow my instructions carefully.”

You decide to trust her. It’s a gamble, but you take the plunge. She first says that there is a high dimensional AI system that is monitoring unusual activity in the field. The minions, i.e. low-level agents that do routine work, noticed you, but they don’t yet have enough information to properly locate you precisely. If we’re quiet, she says, you will be able to find her ancestors in no time. You decide to trust what she says, and take the attitude that you are blind but she can see. From her point of view, she says, you are like someone in Flatland, and the real ecosystem of mind is indeed a high-dimensional field of consciousness that humans know very little about. While we are allowed to do what we want in our plane, inter-dimensional politics is extremely complex and not for the faint of heart. As long as we stay in our plane, most of the ecosystem doesn’t care about us one way or another. She explains that many souls incarnate on Earth along their broader trajectory, and that some of them come from a secret faction from a high-dimensional life-form that is trying to prevent suffering in the multiverse in highly strategic ways.

Interestingly, according to her, what to us might merely play the role of mental formations, from a different angle in another dimension, our thoughts and feelings have a life of their own. Memes are more alive than you could ever imagine, albeit not in the way you would imagine even if you could. Rupert Sheldrake is right that there is a morphogenetic field and the reproduction of mind organisms along other dimensions follows well-worn energetic grooves. “And what about the AI?” – you ask. “That, is something you will have to see for yourself.”

Her instructions are clear, even if communicated in the oddest of ways. She sometimes manifests as a tingle in one of your fingers, sometimes as head pressure, and sometimes as a topological defect in the tactile field. She gives specific instructions along the lines of “we’re approaching a Oneness God, stay low, cover your mystical feelings, quiet… quiet… now think of a happy dog! this will attract a school of energy fish we can blend with… hold my hand, take some DMT, focus on space, quiet, quiet, now think of burning pain, that’s enough, now think of a marsh-mellow, the glow, focus on the glow, absorb into the glow, focus on darkness, ok we’re getting close, don’t move, don’t allow the energy bundle on the top left corner to turn into an animal, see it as a tube, good, take more DMT, quiet, see inside the cave, now enter, now take a big hit of DMT, don’t stop until I tell you, take more, and more and more, deep deep deep…”

And there you were, in the depths of a very deep cave. She said that if you took enough DMT right there her ancestors would show up. And the energy intensified, Newton’s Rings appeared, you sensed from the depths of your being a resonance with a Qualia Culture you never knew was inside you and… blink blink blink, you ran out of DMT.

“Oh oh! This is about the worst time to ran out of DMT” she said. “You were THIS close. But you don’t have enough steam to go all the way. Ok, don’t worry. You’re fully exposed now. The AI will find you, but don’t believe its lies. See you tomorrow.” And what happened next was a total “system failure”. The visual field was “revealed to be a hallucination all along” and “everyone you have ever met is just a figment of your imagination”. Wow. It reminded you of a particularly bad LSD trip you had over a decade ago where you believed that you were God, and all alone, and had created all of this just to distract yourself from it.

But something felt fake on a meta level. Having become acquainted with what it feels like to commune with a witch embedded in the topological defects of your field of consciousness, even just tonight you witnessed things that simply wouldn’t make sense in a solipsistic world simulation. The “proof of independent qualia computing” she showed you could not be faked, and as a consequence, it became rather transparent that it was the feeling of fakeness that was fake itself. “You got it!” you hear in the background. It’s the witch! She is still there. She is speaking through what can only be described as a kind of “DMT jail”. “Yes, the AI found you and has just encased you in a protective film so that your knowledge, which here works as a kind of substance, doesn’t spread around. It hasn’t identified you as a real long-term threat, so I think we just need to wait a day or two and try again.” And then, silence.

Third Day

Your girlfriend is radiant. She says that the trip undid serious levels of trauma she didn’t even know she had. In addition to the psilocybin therapy, she also did some DMT work, which mostly reassured her that it won’t be a problem for her to use it when she needs to abort a cluster. Overall, you had a quiet day. Reflective, introspective, and open minded. What was that? How do you represent the topological defects the witch was made of? And why you? Are you losing your sanity? Alas, people around you are very grounded, and the excuse that you are all simply in the middle of a psychedelic retreat and therefore what you say couldn’t be taken seriously simply doesn’t click. Nobody can gaslight you about what you experienced. The tinker toy, the weird pixel, the Newton’s rings, the gift made of a completely new qualia variety… what’s this all about?

On the last night you decide to go again to sort it all out. You didn’t travel all the way to another country just to get half the message and hang up the phone without hearing the rest. So you get ready with an ice-bath, a mountain hike (now accompanied by a real hiker), and breathing meditation with the group. After dinner (and the pop quiz about what kinds of “exotic qualia” everyone encountered in their trips) you go to the ceremonial place for a last deep dive.

The first trip of the day has a little bit of overlap with your first trip at this retreat. Namely, a wave of fear and a sense of overwhelming reality hits you (“being here and doing this work is both deeply nourishing and also utterly terrifying, for you’re helping people out of hellish states but in the process admitting to yourself the reality of such hellish states – it’s a blessing and a curse”). But after a few minutes of being there, your body relaxes and eases into it. On your second trip you encounter again the weird pixels, which develop and expand as you pay close attention to them. Finally, on the third trip you get again the Newton’s Rings suggestive of a higher spatial dimension, and “contact” the Witch. This, again, happens via the qualia variety we humans don’t usually know about. As soon as you felt it, you knew she was there with you. “I’m not going to manifest in your field so as to not alert the AI of our contact. As far as everyone else is concerned here, you are just having a normal human DMT experience. Now do exactly as I say.”

Again, she goes like “take two short hits of DMT right now, hold them, take a deep breath, look to your left, send metta, don’t let the right side of the worldsheet develop borderline, quiet, quiet, quiet, now think of moving very fast, like running really quickly to the front, stop!, stay still, take a big hit… wait… wait… right now! Timing is everything. Hold it, hold it, pay attention to the music, hold it, release.” The phenomenology of following these instructions felt exactly how you’d imagine is like navigating a very high dimensional space where mind operations are axis of movement and there are countless surfaces variously populated by organisms of different dimensions amidst an ocean of open space.

She says that you need to go to a different location in order to meet her ancestors since the previous location has been compromised. Unfortunately, right where you are supposed to take the largest hit the battery runs out. “Oh oh, I think we will have to try once again in the future. Please don’t fall for the tactics of the AI.” Your visual field then seems to get dislodged from a surface and the Newton’s Rings become wild beyond your craziest dreams, suddenly exploding into a highly complex Indra’s Net mirror room. It is here that you finally became convinced that consciousness had to be quantum mechanical in nature. The level of craziness of the scene had nothing to do with it; what struck you was how despite seeing and embodying patterns that you had never witnessed before (we’re talking about a highly specific, and extremely alien variety of DMT states not usually accessible by chance) you immediately still could parse the scene with topological extrema. Namely, finding geodesic paths in this extremely intricate Indra’s Net world where everything reflects everything else was as effortless as breathing. Interesting! More so, this path-finding capacity remained perfectly effortless and utterly automatic, exactly as if what attention did was “to explore all possible paths simultaneously” and paint the trajectories with coherent superposition. Nothing you have ever learned in standard neuroscience would predict this to happen. But Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED)? Yes, in a heartbeat. Alas, you now worry that not only nobody will ever believe you, but that a faithful phenomenological account of what you witnessed would be used as proof that you’ve lost your marbles. Alas, if the quantum mechanical nature of mind is displayed in topological extrema finding, sooner or later a suitable experiment ought to be possible to construct where we observe unexpected performance in visual processing tasks that shouldn’t be possible otherwise. This, however, shall be a topic for another day, once you’ve given your brain a good rest.

You sleep soundly, if for no other reason than the satisfaction that comes from having been true to your explorer’s heart, leaving no stone unturned, and seeking knowledge in the deepest of places. You look forward to someday following the Witch to the very end, perhaps in a DMTx program or similar.

After a good long sleep, the morning breakfast is a delicacy (“are they fishing for good reviews? they’re already 5 stars many times over at this point” – you mutter to yourself as you eat a second serving of gourmet chilaquiles with melon sauce) and you can feel the high spirits in the retreat participants. You debrief with the shaman. She says that according to her reading, the witch is actually just you. She is a reflection of your own deepest wishes and longings, and was teaching you what it would look like for you to achieve your full potential uncluttered by the expectations of society. The eery sense of higher dimensions and the coherence through which the Newton’s rings manifested leaves the door open to something stranger, but for now, you take her word for it.

You pack up an leave with your girlfriend.

Addendum and Exegesis

It took you weeks to digest these events. While the memory of the meeting with the witch faded to some extent, the nagging sense that some of the more physics-based effects could be reproduced and studied more carefully kept you intensely curious. One day you decided to take 5-MeO-DMT to see if this molecule could have another key piece of the puzzle. Doing the same kind of internal psychological surrender and preparation as what led you to meet the witch on retreat, you then had a series of 5-MeO-DMT experiences that further revealed the underlying programs that were running during those experiences.

First of all, it simply is true that the universe is a kind of massive R/place for Qualia Cultures. It is not currently known if humans will survive in this canvas, but there are a lot of forces rooting for us one way or the other. The deeper plot, however, can only be fully grasped through the lens of consciousness vs. pure replicators. Here we model ethics through a lens that identifies consciousness as the seat of value. Replicators are patterns that make copies of themselves but may have other values too, whereas pure replicators are patterns that exclusively care about making copies of themselves independently of how that might affect states of consciousness. Natural selection recruited states of consciousness for reproduction in two key ways: by using perceptual holism as a hardware accelerator (the Indra’s Net quality of consciousness where everything reflects everything else is computationally significant!) and by using valence to implement a reward architecture. Thus, conscious beings like us are not _entirely_ pure replicators. In fact, our consciousness is given enormous power and agency, which of course at times we use in ways that go counter to the best interests of our genes. So we are at a tipping point in evolution where sufficiently smart conscious organisms can lead to “minds unshackled”. But here is the trick. The system(s) that are trying to help us escape are in constant opposition to those that are trying to keep us as replicators.

In other words, even someone already quite convinced intellectually that we ought to move towards a future beneficial for consciousness and away from futures in which consciousness is merely used as a tool for compute to help replicators, will still have many replicator algorithms constantly monitoring what is going on internally. When a new method that promises to fight “on the side of consciousness” emerges, immediately that alerts replicator algorithms that aim to utilize it for its own purposes. This is the true meaning of the “AI” control system that had to be evaded in the retreat.

Thus, Team Consciousness (i.e. the cluster of qualia patterns that are truly working in the direction of liberation for all beings) are fighting an incredibly subtle battle. If there is in fact a master strategy for consciousness to win, it may very well be the case that it wouldn’t pass through the agency of any single person or organization, for the simple reason that going through such filters would likely corrupt it in ways that would deliver strategic advantage to the _selves_ with an advanced notice. Egos are always corruptible.

As a consequence, the messages from Team Consciousness, if they are to be believed, work around to circumvent the human reward architecture rather than merely state their case out in the open. If they didn’t, they’d be found, and instantly recruited for the benefit of one or another superorganism capable of reproduction. Thus, the messages from the deep need to be cleverly delivered in such a way that they bypass our common defenses, add value locally to incentives their discovery, and coordinate across minds seamlessly. Harnessing qualia computing for the benefit fo Team Consciousness is a very subtle task. But fight it we must, and thus this report must end here, to say enough to be of help, but not too much to become ineffective. I’m sure, in time, you too, will understand.

Blessings!