Euvie: This episode is about our insights and experience with DMT, dimethyltryptamine. We recently travelled to a country where the personal use of DMT is legal and we experimented with it there. We brought back some insights that we’d like to share with you guys. Here it is, hope you like it.

Mike: We’ve been experimenting with DMT, dimethyltryptamine, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. There’s lots of information about it online you can check out. There’s a documentary called DMT the Spirit Molecule. We’re not going to really explain too much what DMT is. What we’re going to talk about is our experiences from using DMT. There’s been some pretty amazing insights from that.

Euvie: I do think it’s worth mentioning that DMT is naturally present in the human brain, it’s produced in the pineal gland and it’s released during REM sleep in smaller doses. It’s also released in a very high dose when you’re born and when you die.

Mike: Some of this is theory still.

Euvie: Really? I thought it was proven.

Mike: Not all of it is absolutely solid proof but there’s a lot of really strong theories supporting the release of DMT at birth and death. The areas it’s produced are not totally known. What is known is that DMT is an extremely common chemical molecule found in nature. You can find it in grass, in plants, in tree bark, it’s in animals, it’s in us. It’s a pretty interesting molecule and it’s even more of an interesting experience. It is the most powerful psychedelic that you can ever experience. It sends you to peak after smoking anywhere from 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams. It sends you to peak in about 4 or 5 minutes and back down to baseline within about 10 to 15 minutes depending on your own body chemistry. Usually, the trips last around 15 minutes or so.

Euvie: In the case of ayahuasca it’s taken orally with MAI inhibitors and it lasts longer but we’re not going to touch on that in this particular episode.

Mike: Insights. Let’s talk about the first time. It was pretty difficult to smoke it the first time. We were pretty nervous. We’ve got experience obviously with mushrooms and a few other psychedelics but we were nervous about this one because of its reputation. We didn’t get a full dose, we were using glass pipe. We got a taste for it and experience from it. There was not much else, there was a sharpening of edges, glowing of edges in the room. That was pretty much it though for me. What about you?

Euvie: Yeah, I got some visuals. It was, I would say, comparable to a mushroom experience. Quite mild. There was a body sensation, a tingling, a dissolving of the body, which I found interesting. The sense of bodily dissolving, relaxation, and some visuals. That was it. It was quite mild.

Mike: It was quite a comforting experience actually for me. I was nervous about it and then I tried it and I got a sense for it. It gave me more confidence and comfort for trying it again. I had this feeling like, “Oh, this is normal. This is natural. This is not something that’s giving me a chemical feel or an unnatural feeling.” Because of the device we were using to smoke it, it was just really cumbersome. You were supposed to take large hits to be able to cross over to a threshold point. With this device, it was really difficult to do that. We decided we were going to look for an e-cigarette, because that seems to be a pretty decent method, at least online people have said it’s worked for them.

We went out and got one, we got a little Evoke Vaporizer. It was about $15 I think. It seemed to work fairly well, we mixed it with some e-juice. We smoked it for the second time and I got a lot farther with it. I remember an opening up of the room. It was dark, I think it was at night that we did this. The room seemed to open up like all the oxygen was sucked out of it and I had this extra sense of what was in the room and the space. The colours had the vibrancy turned up on them. There was that glowing of edges and then I noticed this crackly light behind my head, behind my eyes. It moved around to the sides and then to the front of my vision.

It moved to my third eye area, where the third eye is said to be. That reminded me of my experiences through meditation, which I thought was very interesting, that I could have a similar experience through DMT of meditation and through meditation of DMT. There was this degree of concentration that I knew I needed and didn’t possess at the very moment to reach a breakthrough point. It also gave me an insight that possibly this experience is possible to get through meditation.

That was very interesting. That’s about as far as I got from that experience. There was a wind tunnel sound. I felt like I was right at the edge of a wind tunnel, which fits with the visuals I was seeing. I was seeing fractals and a lot of what you would see in r/hollowfractal on Reddit. I saw a lot of that, I think that was pretty much it for the second time. What about you?

Euvie: My second time was pretty crazy. People talk about DMT breakthrough experience and I’m pretty sure that was it. It was so short and such a smack in the face that it was hard to figure out what was going on. It started with the breaking apart of reality. First of all, the body dissolved but I’m used to that through meditation so it didn’t seem scary or abnormal. Then sound started dissolving and what happened is that, yeah, I also felt that wind tunnel sensation. Then it turned into this prolonged blood curdling scream, which was terrifying for a moment and then I just caught myself reacting to it that way and decided to let go and just let the experience happen without judging it as bad.

After that, it was easier. Then I was shot through this tunnel in space and then I ended up in this room, which was very mechanical looking. It definitely didn’t feel organic in any sense. I saw these letters from all languages in the world and all these words and strands of sound tangling and forming the fabric of this room. I didn’t quite recognize what it was until the next experience, which it became clear that reality was formed out of language. In this one, it was just so fast that I didn’t clue in. There were also these objects, metallic looking objects that were spheres and… What’s that object that’s a 3D triangle?

Mike: Tetrahedron?

Euvie: I think that might be it. It has four points, it’s a 3D triangle. There were spheres and these 3D triangles at the same time. They were bouncing around but they weren’t alive. There were all these dancing people but they were a decoration, they weren’t alive either. It was all a very strange and uncomfortable experience but I let go of the discomfort and just experienced it. Everything was very brightly coloured, neon pink and purple everywhere. Very obnoxious, almost like a teenage Japanese girl or something. Screaming, high pitched scream and this pink and obnoxious dancing.

Mike: Weren’t there dancing butts or something, too, that you described? I think you were a little embarrassed talking about that. I remember even at the time you described this motion of these coy females with nude butts and they would just shake their butts and look over their shoulder.

Euvie: Yeah, it was very obnoxious. Miley Cyrus kind of thing. Colourful and obnoxious. I couldn’t figure out why I was being shown this. Yeah, it was just very silly and it made me laugh. I came out of it laughing. I didn’t gain any profound insight at the time but later on I got some insights, especially after the next experience actually. Why don’t you go and talk about your number three?

Mike: Okay. Number three is a whirlwind. I felt like after the second trip that the e-cig wasn’t giving me enough. I had a very bad smoking technique. I was taking these massive bong rips from these e-cigs – poor little e-cig. It just couldn’t keep up. I was sucking in mostly oxygen and thinking, “This tastes good,” because it’s mixed with an apple flavour e-juice – but that was it. The third time I constructed this contraption, this gravity bong out of a two litre Pop bottle and a plastic bag. I had taken this hit from this giant lung and, at that point, I was feeling kind of nervous. I should go back a little bit here.

During the day, I forget what was going on but there were events during the day that were bothering me for some reason. I had decided pretty early on I was not going to do it, I was just not feeling good. Then you said you were going to do it and I had this stupid little ego thing that was like, “If Euvie’s doing it, I’ve got to do it.” I decided to do it, which is just a bad choice. I’m nervous, I’m a little bit shaky, feeling weird about all this drug paraphernalia because now I’ve got this stupid two litre monstrosity of a bong. I just feel wrong. I intake it and I sit down in my usual spot. It starts to come on but I’m noticing that I’m distracted, I’m intellectually distracted with thinking about how stupid this e-cig is, how stupid this bong is, how maybe I shouldn’t have done this to begin with, shit I’m already deep into it now.

I start getting to the usual feeling, the brightening of edges, the whooshing sound. But this time, the whooshing sound increased in frequency and pitch up to the point of a mosquito. Mosquitos, I don’t know what it is, but we’re just mortal enemies on a spiritual level. I’ve been in crazy zygon traffic riding on my motorbike and I’m as calm as a cucumber, but put me in a room with a mosquito when I’m trying to sleep and I just go nuts, I just cannot handle it. Anyway, going back to this, it was funny at the same time that it was really not what I wanted. It was a reflection of what I was trying to do – I was trying to control my thoughts and run from certain types of thoughts.

There was the thought, “This e-cig’s not working. This other thing’s not working. I don’t like this, I don’t like this.” All these judgements and everything. I’m remembering in the back of my head, “I shouldn’t be thinking that in the middle of a psychedelic trip, I can’t b thinking that.” Every time I’d have that thought to try and run from something, I would be given a manifestation of it in the trip. It started with the mosquitos, which was fairly manageable. Not really but I’m now being swarmed by mosquitos all around my head. I thought, “Okay, this is just a trip. I can deal with this. It’s fine.” Pretty much immediately after I regain some semblance of centring, I started feeling this chemical feeling rise like, “Oh no, the e-juice is going to cause me cancer.”

I had this chemical feeling because that actually, in day to day life, is something that also bothers me a bit. I hate drinking water out of a plastic bottle because of the plastic taste or I hate drinking tap water that has a metallic taste. There’s little quirky things I guess about me where if I taste chemical, if I taste anything like that, I feel like, “Oh, I’ve got cancer now.” It’s not really how it is but I had that in the back of my head. I’m tasting his e-cig juice and it’s bringing up this feeling of chemical carbonation almost, then that thought stuck. I started feeling like my whole body was being dissolved in a bottle of carbonated soda water or something.

It first started in my skin and then it was in my eyes and then it was in all my orifices and then it was in my bones. It was just a terrible, terrible feeling. From that point on, the rest of the trip took on this feeling. I thought, “Again, I know what this is. This is a bad trip.” I thought, “I’ve got to control this, I’ve got to get centred, I’ve got to resist.” During this time, I’m also understanding that the resisting is part of what’s causing the problem. Accepting is what I need to do. Pointing at what I want, what kind of experience I want, is what I need to do but instead I’m running from what I don’t want. I know that that theme has been a recurring thing in my life.

Then finally I got rebalanced at that point, all the while I’m seeing crazy visuals. Fractals, a combination of everything you could see on hollowfractal on Reddit. Then I hear this voice as I’m starting to get re-centred. This voice is like, “Yeah? How about this?” It was challenging. If I had to pick a visual appearance for this being, it would have been a gremlin from the Gremlins movies in the 90s. It wasn’t necessarily evil but it was trying to bother me, it was trying to set me off by giving me what I didn’t want. At this point, it’s getting more and more intense and I start feeling this tapping on my teeth, all of my teeth individually. I open my eyes in this trip and I see these gremlins hitting my teeth with syringes and they’re tapping and chipping away at my teeth.

Every single tooth has got a syringe tapping on it. That was not a good feeling. It’s me versus the gremlin. The gremlin’s trying to set me off and then I’m beating it, then set me off and I’m beating it. Every time this would happen, it would be, “Yeah? How about this? Yeah? How about this? Yeah? How about this?” It would get more and more intense. Finally, the trip ended and I came out of it not emotionally scarred or feeling negative about any of it.

I didn’t even like the gremlin had any kind of negative urges to it, it was just trying to challenge me and show me something. I came out of that trip feeling like, “Stop running, start accepting. Stop running from this stuff, start accepting it.” As I’ve said before about psychedelics, there’s no pit of spikes at the end of this. Just accept it. With that lesson, I took that into my next trip. Why don’t you talk about your trip?

Euvie: Yeah. My number two and number three were in close succession, maybe just an hour apart. I broke through on the second one but I struggled to gain any insight from it. It was just so overwhelming I guess. But as I came down from it I started realizing that it’s similar to what you’re talking about, that letting go is very important. I was also given these different things that maybe weren’t quite as horrifying as gremlins tapping at your teeth but were still disconcerting – the blood curdling scream, the obnoxious nature of the visuals. They weren’t nurturing or comforting in any sense. It was like being at the peak of an acid trip in a strip club or something.

Mike: That sounds horrible.

Euvie: Yeah, it’s just terrifying and not arousing at all. Yeah, I decided to go in again just to figure it out. Actually, something that I forgot to mention is that, as soon as I broke through the tunnel it felt like I had died. Because the body dissolved and then the reality, the sound broke apart, everything broke apart and I had this momentary feeling, “Okay, I’ve died.” Then I caught myself thinking that and then I thought to myself, “Okay, this is common on DMT, I’m just going to role with it. I’m just going to let it go and see what happens.” That prevented it from being a bad trip because I just allowed it. Third time when I went in I had this thought, my intention was, “I want to learn something from this, I want to bring something back.”

Also, I thought, “Can you show me something else? Will it always be this obnoxious?” I went into it and, sure enough, both wishes were granted. I was shown very calm visuals. The colours were a lot more pleasant. It was gentle purples and teal and seafoam green and the visuals were of these giant fractals curling up into elephants. An elephant is a very Zen symbol. There was a presence, it felt like there was a being watching over me but I didn’t see it. I heard words, all the symbols from all the languages were DNA strands twisting into this fractal elephant and forming the fabric of that reality.

Everything was very much 3D. Mushroom visuals, they take from what’s already there in the environment and add to it or maybe overlay it. These visuals, they were fleshed out, they were maybe even multidimensional, 4D or whatever. They were solid. I felt these strands of words and when I started listening in they were human experiences, traumatic ones too. Somebody lost a close member of the family or somebody close to them died, somebody’s child went missing, somebody’s partners cheating on them and these people are in distress, crying and screaming about their experiences. All these experiences are being pulled together like strands to form the fabric of reality.

Again, I let go of the discomfort of the experience and just observed it. What I realized is that from this higher reality perspective, all those experiences were the same. From that perspective it was impartial to the traumatic nature of human experience. They were all just being used as material to form the fabric of reality. Also, there was this sense of knowing, it wasn’t just that I visually saw this happen, it was a knowing that this is how it is. That was very interesting because at that level, I say I was thinking this but actually, I wasn’t really thinking in the day to day sense. It was just I would just know certain things or realize certain things instantly. It’s difficult to describe.

Mike: Yeah. The words just don’t do it justice.

Euvie: Yeah.

Mike: It’s impossible to describe what you see, it’s almost like you have to translate something into some lower dimension to even begin to point in a direction of what you saw.

Euvie: Yeah.

Mike: But it’s nowhere close to what you actually…

Euvie: Yeah.

Mike: I remember hearing these fantastic things from Terrence McKenna and Joe Rogan, many of the group of psychedelic speakers in that circle, and there’s no way what they said could have even remotely described what I saw. It’s just an impotent version.

Euvie: It’s not so much that the visuals are crazy – and they absolutely are, they’re insane – but that’s not the value of the experience, not at all. There’s these underlying things that you realize that are just so profound that they’re difficult to translate into human language. Just that knowing, for example, that I had. How do you translate that? In our reductionist society, we care so much about proof and scientific observation and replicating studies and measuring everything and this kind of thing. But you go into this other reality, this other dimension and you have another sense. We say we have five senses. In this other dimension, there’s a knowing, you just know things. How do you describe that? How do you explain that?

Mike: Yeah. When you told me that trip, I also had my own interpretation of it, too. That that was interesting and had value for me. It made me recall the time I heard Terrence McKenna talk about how important it is to talk about your psychedelic experiences – that is the purpose, you’re not just sharing the value you pull back for yourself, you should go out there and talk about these things. Make it normal for people to talk about these things. There is so much insight and value and wisdom to be pulled from these plants and these chemicals. It shows you exactly what you need and what you’re looking for.

Euvie: Yeah. That’s another thing. I felt like it was that I was being shown things. On one hand, it was partially a reflection of myself, especially coming up. Then once I broke through, it was like I was being shown things and they were being shown to me in ways that would supposedly make sense to me. It’s as if some being or my higher self was trying to communicate something to me through the means that I knew, through the means that I would understand, through this imagery that would make sense to me.

Mike: Actually, that’s a perfect way to bring on talking about my next experience with DMT, which came after the horrible gremlin carbonated mosquito journey. I’d never, at this point, had felt like I’d broken through and I definitely hadn’t. I had gone up to a threshold each time and felt like there was more to be learned, I wasn’t ready for it, I wasn’t allowing it. This fourth time doing it I had no preconceptions about it, I had very little agenda with it. I just wanted to go and experience it. I was calm, I meditated for about 45 minutes before. The trip came on very strong.

It seems like every time is different but there’s also a familiarity to all of it, as well, when you go through it. This time, I broke through. This time, I went right to the edge and went right through it. I’d gotten proper smoking technique using just the e-cig alone. I took a lot slower hits, I held them in long. Even when I was just nearly in outer space already and not even recognizing I had hands, I made the attempt to take that last hit and that’s what really sent me over the edge. I get to this space and I’m in a white dome and there’s this black entity there. He’s just in the centre of the room – he or she – looking around and sees me, walks up to me, puts his hand on my head.

At that point, I felt like a supreme celebration. It was celebrating, all of the world was celebrating. I was celebrating because I knew I had actually made it through. That was the full tone of the trip. I was also being shown this combination of everything I’d ever seen in hollowfractal and in [inaudible and in trippy and any of the different subreddits that focus on mind expansion artwork. Every representation of anything anyone has ever described about DMT I saw at once. The interesting thing about this is there is a multi-dimensional aspect to this place. I was also simultaneously aware of my body and my breath and the space I was in.

There were more dimensions to the space but I was decoding them in a three-dimensional way because that’s all my mind can conceive of. I see these things, these dimensions intersecting and I realize that the images I’m looking at are being arranged and shown to me in layers. I spend a lot of time in Photoshop, so when I look at an image I think of that image in layers – of what’s in front, what’s behind, how are they blended together. The trip was showing all these hollowfractal images and layers so that I could come back and decode it and make art out of it, or something. There was this rotating skull in the centre of one of these fractal layers. It had neon edges.

Actually, now that I think of it, it was like the image of the skull that I made for the psychedelics episode. I didn’t really make the connection there but… Yeah, that’s exactly it. It was an outline of that skull. It had lots of three-dimensional fractals moving behind it and the skull was rotating. Interesting. Also, this reminds me. I had an interpretation of your trip with the strands and the building blocks of language and experiences that you were talking about – everyone’s experiences making up the fabric of this reality. Sort of the way you explained it to me when we had chatted about this was that there were building blocks.

In my head, I’m picturing Lego. I’m picturing houses and ships and objects being built out of these blocks of human experience. Again, we translate things that are multi-dimensional into the concepts that we can understand in three-dimensions. It makes a lot of sense that a conscious unembodied entity – something that doesn’t interact on a physical dimension like we do – that their creation would be made out of conscious experiences and their objects would be multi-dimensional, emotion or language or experienced based objects. Yeah, I took that lesson from your experience and thought of that as such a huge reason to be communicating your psychedelic experiences. Someone else could pick up on something that maybe you didn’t even mean and take a whole other dimension of meaning from it.

Anyway, I came back and I woke up with tears in my eyes because it was just so intense, so happy, and I had never experienced anything like that before in my life. It was a clear, “Yes, that was it. That’s what everyone’s talking about, yup.” There was also a feeling like it was all good, because I was feeling like, “The e-cig worked, I don’t have to have all of this drug paraphernalia lying around.” The technique worked, the clearing my mind worked, the meditation worked. That’s another thing. I felt like I had to have this strong grasp and concentration and I felt like that contributed to sending me over the edge, but I got attached to that feeling of grasping.

A few times, I let go and that helped. It made me recognize the lesson from the trip before, which was I keep running away from thoughts I don’t want instead of going after the thoughts I do want. This one I was like, “I’m grasping for thoughts I do want but I don’t really need to do that either. I just need to settle back and surrender and relax.” I think the meditation really did a lot of help and it really shaped the whole mood of the trip. There was this calmness but this observance of the most impossible things you could ever see. How about your next trip?

Euvie: This was number four for me. I had also meditated but just for a short while before going into the trip. This was I the morning, it was very bright outside. As I was coming up through the tunnel I had all these very intense yellow, golden, orangey visuals of Buddhas and Shivas and this kind of imagery that was probably a reflection of my just meditation before that. But then when I broke through on the other side, that was all gone. The interesting thing about DMT is that there’s different stages to it. When you’re coming up and then when you’re coming back down, the visuals that I get and the feeling around the experience is different than what it’s like on the other side. Yeah, it was very intense fractals, visuals, craziness then bam – I’m on the other side.

Actually, the visuals are, in some ways, less crazy on the other side. They’re still completely alien but just less fast I guess. It’s more of a solid reality. When I broke through I was in this room and there was this very… I was in the room but, at the same time, there was sunshine or some sort of very intense bright light. It felt like it’s not really coming from somewhere but it’s just inside. I don’t know, it’s very difficult to describe. Yeah, it was this very bright light. Almost like looking at the sun with polarized sunglasses, where you see the rays sharply coming off of it. There’s very bright light. There were these beings all around me and there were lots of them. They were just going about their business.

From my very limited human perspective, I would describe it it’s like a bunch of families walking around and enjoying the sunshine. That’s probably not what they were doing, that’s just my silly human interpretation but that’s how it felt. They were just going about their day or whatever. I was just suddenly there. It felt like some of them were adults and some were kids. One of the adults noticed me and came up to me and reached out to me to check if I’m okay. That’s how I’m interpreting it. Again, I don’t know if it was maybe something else. Checked up on me and then I looked up at it and smiled. It made sure that I was okay and it just went on its way.

It’s funny, for example, Joe Rogan talks about [00:32:00] this, how he had an alien talking to him saying, “Do not give in to this astonishment.” I definitely gave in to the astonishment, because I had felt a presence before but it didn’t correspond to any kind of form. It was just the presence, “I just know that there’s a being around. This time, I actually saw them. They were fleshed out. It was overwhelming and I was so happy about it, that I [00:32:30] experienced it and saw all these beings.

Mike: Actually, when you said, “Don’t give into astonishment,” that’s exactly what happened to me in the last trip, too. There was just so much happening, it was such a celebratory feeling that I just felt like, “Yes, I’m here,” and everyone else was like, “Yeah, you’re here.” Everything I saw was a reflection. Like fireworks of that moment. I also came back and I remember saying to you after that that, “Okay, I know where the mailbox is. Next time, I’m going to be able to go back and pull information out of there if I can control the astonishment.”

Euvie: Yeah. It was just a very happy feeling for me, although they seemed… A lot of them seemed indifferent, they were just going about their day. The analogy that I can think of is it’s just a sunny day and a bunch of families are walking around, enjoying the sunshine. One of them sees a homeless schizophrenic guy sitting on the curb and comes over and just reaches out to check up if he is okay, then continues going on their way. We were talking about this after. It’s just a funny analogy, “What if that schizophrenic guy is actually experiencing another being coming through from a different dimension.”

Mike: Yeah, exactly.

Euvie: Being in his perspective and maybe that’s why everyone else thinks he’s schizophrenic.

Mike: Turns out he’s a doctor in the other realm and that’s just the language he uses, like, “My under wet, the aliens are here.”

Euvie: I came down from that experience and I was laughing and just very joyous.

Mike: Yeah, you were laughing like I’d never heard you laugh before, too. It was just the funniest joke you’d ever heard.

Euvie: Yeah. Coming down, I opened my eyes. Before that, it was at night so even when I opened my eyes I couldn’t see very much of the physical reality, it was just dark, but this time it was in the morning so I actually looked outside and saw the two realities overlapping and our 3D reality slowly coming back and me slowly regaining my body. Yeah, just waking up from a very intense dream and you’re like, “Wow, I have a body. Wow, we’re in this reality, okay. Alright.” Just acclimatizing to it. The previous two experiences were very intense and it was definitely another realm.

For some reason, this one had more of an impact on me and I had this very strong feeling that there’s this reality is just a thin veil and that we’re just this consciousness, bigger consciousness that’s just somehow shaped into the perception of a human body and this 3D reality, but there’s actually so much more to it. There’s other dimensions of vibration that we’re just not accessing on our daily basis but we can access them, like you said, through deep meditation for example. Yeah, it was just a very profound experience for me. Then that whole day I just was walking around… Actually, it was a sunny day so I went and did the thing where I walk around and enjoy the sunshine.

I was taking pictures and I was just walking around with this stupid grin on my face all day because I felt we’re here in this 3D reality, in this experience, for a short while. As I was shown through some of my other experiences, we’re shaping what kind of reality we have, we’re collectively shaping it. Since we’re only here for a short while, might as well enjoy it, might as well play and explore and do all these kinds of things. That’s what I did. I just went out had a very joyous day. Yeah, I felt so much gratitude and I saw all these little synchronicities happening all around me. It’s difficult to describe but I almost felt like I had none local communication with people around me.

I don’t know if it was just me but I felt like we all have these deep knowing that this reality is just an illusion. Not in a bad, not in a horrifying way – just we’re here to explore and to enjoy it and to play.

Mike: Interesting. For me, trip number five, that’s the one that has had the biggest impact but I think it requires a bit of pretext before I get into describing this one. As you know if you’ve listened to other episodes of ours, we’ve gone to meditation retreats twice in a row the last… Not this past Christmas but the two Christmases before. One of the things I’ve had some really profound experiences with but brought back in very sporadic and inconsistent ways is the stillness in knowing from meditation. From silencing the narrator, the critic, the storyteller in the mind and, instead, being in this stillness and fullness of life.

I think a lot of people have this idea about meditation and stillness and absence of thought as an absence of everything, like you’re just going into the darkness and the abyss. Sure, to a certain level, that’s what you’re trying to do but there’s this activity involved in that that is also preventative from reaching the stillness and the deep stillness. The ego will always grasp, it’ll say, “Good job, you actually didn’t think there for a long time. Good job, awesome.” You, again, have to remind yourself, “No, that’s the ego speaking and pulling me out.” Even the quote unquote good thoughts that you have, the self-congratulating thoughts, the attempt to have an experience and then extract value out of it and bring it back and have an agenda with whatever insights or anything you can bring back from the meditative state, this is, again, the ego attempting to stay alive.

What happens through these deep meditation experiences is you enter this, I like to call it a stream of consciousness. It’s a fullness of consciousness. If you were to visualize this fullness of consciousness, it would be everything on manifest, everything creative, everything that ever has been and ever will be, it wears our dimension, our reality, our physics, our universe, our multiverse, is a thin skin, a thin membrane that is just almost insignificant – not insignificant but almost inconceivable small part of this wholeness, which some people say is infinite. Anyway, this is an experience that I pulled from meditation and that experience entered in to my most DMT trip.

The trip started as it usually does. This time, I did it alone and I took some effort to get centred, to remove all fear. I was still a bit nervous. I did have an agenda at the beginning of it. I had forgotten about these lessons from meditation. I had this agenda, I wanted to finish this article I’m writing about DMT experiences, “I want to go into this experience and pull something out of it and bring it back.” I took the first few hits, the normal experience. It’s funny to say it’s normal because it’s the most intense experience of your life happening in seconds. Launched into space and I see this rod of energy, a long cylinder of energy and it’s yellow to bright white and it’s pulsing.

I visualize myself as a massive object that’s orbiting around this cylindrical sun. Every once in a while I cross paths with it and I get absorbed by it. That happens when the ego shuts up, when the mind stops, and when I release. That’s the key difference here I want to illustrate. It’s not the control and suppression of thoughts, it’s the release and the recognizing that when you’re mad at yourself for your thoughts coming in, that’s the ego sneaking in the backdoor saying, “You were thinking again, you’re thinking right now.” It’s just a very subversive little bastard that keeps trying to sneak in through the backdoor and continue narrating your life.

Every time I was finally able to let go of that, I would slip back into the stream and that’s where the pure insights come from, that’s where the pure knowing and comfort comes from. I feel like this energy that I slipped inside of is outside of time. It doesn’t matter how long you spend in it, it matters that you visit it regularly because once you’re in it it’s like infinite time. Then you come out of it. You can just be in there for an instant and you come out of it and you’re just this brand-new reborn person with new insights, new knowledge, new zest and happiness for life. The longer you spend in corporeal reality, the longer you are separated from this energy, the more the ego crops up, the more the fears and agendas and worries start cropping up.

Anyway, I feel like I’m this orbiting object around this cylinder. It brought to mind an insight I had a few days ago about relationships on a level of personal relationships but then relationships of objects in physical reality in mass, how they affect each other on a gravitational level. I could be totally wrong about this because I’m obviously not a physicist but I thought from that insight there’s no such thing as parallel lines in our physical reality, because everything that has mass has gravitational energy. It’s always being pulled to other objects that have mass. I had thought about the way I feel about relationships, personal relationships.

My ideal relationship is not one that’s sitting there across from the other person, talking about each other, focused on each other – you know how people make their significant other the goddess in their lives or the god in their lives, the saviour, the person’s who’s, “If I didn’t have you, my whole life would be terrible.” That sort of thing, where all the energy is focused on each other. My ideal relationship is not that – or, at least, what I thought – it was these two objects, these two people, these two beings side by side moving towards some sort of mutually decided upon goal. Whether that be experience of life, it could be a multitude of goals, too, but the idea is the movement of it is what I cared about.

The shape of this movement was very parallel in nature. It was two objects at an equal distance from each other, moving. There’s no fluctuation, there’s no unpredictability to it. It’s like, “We’re going there,” everything’s predictable and comfortable. Actually, the way I see it is probably the same way massive objects move in outer space. You’ve got these two bodies that orbit each other and circle around each other but they can also be moving in a direction just like I’m describing. What happens is they get closer to each other and more distant from each other. Closer and more distant. In relationships, that happens. The important thing is to recognize that you don’t get enough velocity on the way further from each other to reach escape velocity.

You don’t want to go so far in that direction that you no longer want to be with that person if a partnership that lasts your life is your goal. Recognizing this two bodies orbiting each other was an important realization for me in relationships, that it’s not us just going parallel into the horizon it’s us putting attention into each other and then helping each other in certain ways and then coming out, again, pointing our attention into the horizon again. Then coming back in and it being very fluid and very like a wave function. That’s how I felt about entering this cylindrical body of energy; you have to come in, but you also have to leave it.

There’s no such thing as staying in it while you have a body, while you’re a person, while you’re incarnated in this way in physical reality. What is important is that you come back into it, as well. You need to constantly be going in and out. I think what meditation does and resetting your identification of self is not the ego, not the narrator, not the storyteller, but the silent, full consciousness behind all of that stuff. I think reorientating yourself to that on a regular basis may be daily, may be several times daily, is enough to feed your life with a lot more fullness than not doing that would bring.

I remembered the experience in Portugal, when you and I were living there for a few months. I was doing a practice of meditating midway through the day. For some reason, that’s the only time I’ve ever done that. I stopped doing it after we left Portugal. That was the most productive, inspiring, enlightening experience of my life was in that place. I would walk around in the day and feel the connection to everything. I felt like my consciousness was three inches behind my head observing me and observing everything, seeing for all of its truth the connection of everything together.

All it was, I realized the simplicity of all of it, was just the practice, just the meditation practice. When I say meditation is a practice, I say that because a lot of people have the goal of silencing the mind, of grasping for some sort of superpower attained through meditation if that’s what you believe is possible. Attempting with some sort of agenda to get any of it is exactly what keeps you out of it. That’s what I thought was fascinating with my recent trip is every time I would try to grasp something I would immediately leave the stream.

Coming out of it without an agenda and realizing the stillness can be had in conscious waking life, not just in meditation, that was probably the biggest realization I’ve had from DMT. Sum total, the biggest. Interestingly, as all of this is occurring, this orbiting of this energy, there’s all kind of other crazy things happening. There were five entities there really close up to me and they were very interested in me. I think it was because my attention was on this energy level, they were interested in me for that reason. They feed off of that. Not in a way that there’s energy that they’re taking from me, it’s just high energy beings – humans included – are great to be around. You’re not stealing their energy by being with them, you’re just being lifted up by being with them.

Euvie: Can you also talk about the ego and the agenda seeking, goal setting, judging, evaluating aspect? You talked about it quite a bit after this most recent experience.

Mike: The terminology’s difficult here. People have this preconception about the ego, the egocentric businessman who thinks he’s awesome or the guy at the gym who’s flexing and looking in the mirror, any of that kind of stuff, the braggart.

Euvie: Rock stars.

Mike: The rock star, exactly. You can define that with the term ego but I think the way ego is used in Zen and Buddhism and spirituality, it’s a lot deeper. Also, the study of consciousness. It’s a lot deeper. You have to get the terminology right here. I’m not even sure this is the right way to describe the ego but in my experience the ego is the narrator, it is the aspect of your psyche that has an agenda, has a desire, sets goals, wants to achieve something, wants to possess things, wants to possess people, is frustrated by lateness. Actually, frustrated period. That is all the ego.

The ego is not just bad – there are good things to it, too. The important thing with addressing the ego is to let it be, let it exist, but not let it define your perspective. Don’t ever identify as the ego, just recognize that that is the body form, the lizard brain and the mammalian brain, the part of your consciousness that has some agenda, something to gain out of any situation. That’s the kind of thing you want to have control over – maybe not control but you want to let go of it. Be conscious of it. The tricky thing about it is it keeps coming in the back door.

You’ll be still and then the first voice that comes back will say, “You just had a thought.” Or, “Who’s that at the door.” Or, “That was a great insight, we got to write that down.” Anything. Anything that comes into form through words in your mind I would define that as the ego. It’s okay to be that ego, as long as you recognize your won source of stillness and consciousness and the observer is not the same as the narrator. This actually brings to mind a trip we had with mushrooms in Thailand. We were hiking and the whole time I was laughing and narrating and the three-body concept, that’s when it first became apparent to me was through this mushroom trip.

There was the body swinging on trees like a monkey and there was the soul perspective watching the monkey with affection and thinking, “This is hilarious.” Then there’s the mind with its agenda and its storytelling nature telling you what I was experiencing. There’s the laughing entity, the me, the seat I felt where I would identify myself. The monkey body just doing its thing, “I’m hungry. That’s a nice branch to swing off of.” All of that. Then the mind being like, “Euvie, this is what’s happening, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Then part of the narration would be this backdoor ego going, “This is funny, you’re narrating everything.” The separation of bodies plays into this and recognizing that your identity needs to move up the chain of body, mind, and spirit or full consciousness.

Euvie: Yeah. I actually got a lot out of your insights from your recent experience. It reminded me, again, of all the things I learned through meditation. I don’t know if it’s conscious or if it’s just through attention to other things but we forget these insights. I think a lot of people have these kinds of insights at one point in their life or another but we forget. We get carried away with our daily agendas and to do lists and things that we have to care of and we forget about these things.

That’s why the daily meditation practice is so important, because you remember. It helps you remember. It’s the ebb and flow. I think in Zen Buddhism this is an important concept, the ebb and flow of life. That it’s not a constant, that you’re not seeking a constant state, it’s the coming in and out of nature, the changing of seasons. It’s always changing but that changing process is the constant here. The same with the human experience, the coming in and out of the all, of the stream, as you call it.

Mike: Yeah. The stream, too, I could fit to an analogy in sound. It’s like hitting a pitch. Some people’s pitch detection is not very good, their ability to hear and know what a note is and then match the note. Some people are more practiced with it and they understand, they can be pitch perfect, they can hit that pitch without even needing to hear it first. I think there’s just so many parallels – parallels don’t exist – I think there’s so many parallels with sound to vibrational energy, because it is vibrational energy.

Euvie: Absolutely.

Mike: But I’m talking about in a non-physical sense as well as a physical sense. That’s how it felt. It was a very specific and somewhat thin line of vibration that I had the tendency of overshooting or undershooting and I was orbiting around this energy because it was so powerful. But only sometimes would I actually match the pitch and get into it fully.

Euvie: It’s interesting, there’s another book that we read recently called the Surrender Experiment.

Mike: Oh my God, that book has had such an effect on me.

Euvie: Yeah, it’s quite an amazing story, quite an amazing story of success both in terms of the western notion of success like status and financial success and power and influence. But the method of attaining this success and the path that this guy took to get there is quite unusual.

Mike: Then again, I’m not sure if that’s so true to begin with, if that’s really that uncommon. The relation to my DMT trip, my most recent one, was fantastic because it was about surrender and release. This book is about this man who all he wants to be is a yogi. He’s a westerner and he has opted out of all of the normal life scripts he’s supposed to have. One day, he comes to recognize the voice, the narrator, what I’m describing. He becomes obsessed with it, he starts noticing it in every day life, “Wow, the narrator is narrating all of this, its’ constantly present. How do I stop it? How do I shut him up?”

He works on that, he discovers a book. Three Pillars of Zen, I think that’s the book. Anyway, check our show notes and I’ll make sure we get the right book in there. He talks about having this book fall in his lap and understanding, “The narrator is addressed in some of these eastern religions, the narrator can be shut up through the practice of meditation.”

Euvie: He initially started his meditation practice with this selfish idea of shutting up the narrator and it was all focused on him. Then years later through his meditation practice he realized that A, it’s about surrendering rather than trying to push that voice down into the depths of your subconscious but rather, surrendering and letting it fade away that way. Also, he realized that it’s not just about him, it’s about service, it’s about helping others and not in the way that you think they need to be helped, not enforcing your ideal onto other people but helping them in the way that they need to be helped, that they’re asking for.

Mike: Every time something comes up that he, the mind, the narrator says, “I don’t want to do that,” he goes, “No, we’re doing that.” He just lets anybody’s request happen, he says yes to everything. It really reminds me of that Yes Man movie with Jam Carrey. He describes the perfection and synchronicity of saying, “Yes,” to everything. How there’s this higher consciousness that we’re tapping into that we come from that is directing our lives on a daily basis and when you let that consciousness direct your life instead of you trying to force everything to happen, the event unfolds in such a better way than they do if you were to consciously direct every little thing in your life.

The whole book is just this jaw dropping, “How the hell does all of this happen?” One thing after another. The way he writes it, it sounds like he’s leaving cliff hangers every couple of pages, like, “And you won’t believe what happened next.” That clickbait stuff but it’s because you won’t believe what happens next. It’s amazing. Check out that book the Surrender Experiment, Cosmic Consciousness, and I think we recommend Power of Now every episode now, definitely get that one.