It presents itself in a vape (DMT), so I did it this way to have an actionable protocol : three hits, five seconds in, breath out. I couldn’t and didn’t want to do more before I get used to it and that was the best idea I had that day. With just three hits, I got shot. Louder than God’s revolver. I was sitting, looking at the sky hoping to see the stars, fooling myself into thinking it’ll be contemplating, peaceful. The sky immediately went low cartoonish definition, reality drifted into abstraction as I felt myself violently sinking. Eyes closed, I saw things far beyond words, eyes open, the world was a mockery. This seems to be a strong signature LSD doesn’t have : shapes come simpler, low def, cartoons, almost videogames like. That was second one. Second two, I died. LSD brings entropy and the trip is a long negotiation. This was death. Overwhelming. Unequivocal. Shapeless. It wasn’t painful, but I could feel my ego on the verge of complete annihilation with no room to navigate the moment. This became the container of my existence, nothing ever existed before, nothing will ever exist after. I was there and there was this. My brain started to interpret every sensory input as near death and emergency-threat signals ; moving my eyes ? My eyeballs were slowly melting. Breathing ? My flesh was collapsing, shapeless. Moving was a long lost concept. Time ? Forgotten. Memory ? Erased. Interestingly, death as a story was the ultimate refuge. Anything but chaos. To me, this lasted for seconds. Looking at my watch, I was gone for 20 minutes. Weirdly enough, I was gone, and not. An observer strand remained. It was relocated and discontinuous. It wasn’t me or that, yet it was sharper than ever. This is very different yet adjacent to Ketamine ego dissolution or even ego death or LSD ego death. Thinking of ego death as a binarism would be foolish. Time disappeared. “I” disappeared, yet “I” was there in a way I couldn’t describe without reducing the experience to a geometry that we’re familiar with. The ego seems to be the alignment of many parts which can independently fall, entirely or partially and not all need to switch off for the self to die out. The same goes with my k-hole experience and the China train. I was experiencing a full k-hole and, yet, still talking. This kind of experience adds another dimension to the whole consciousness and memory-self phenomenology.
When I finally came back, it took me minutes to accept I wasn’t dead and reincarnated. Birds of a Feather, the Billie Eilish version, was playing on an old TV. The death experience is so intense, it surprises me to realize I’m alive. People say there’s something beyond that wall as more DMT forces the brain to generate, something ? With LSD, this happens through a 10-15h discussion between chaos and mirrors. The intensity of the acid trip builds up a noetic dimension that is dose dependent: small doses test the mind, large doses test the soul. This is exactly what I’m chasing ; Stripped away from all the top-down priors and constructs, what else is there ?