Sexuality & Nonduality: My Journey With 5-MeO-DMT, Part One

Part One: Meeting The God Molecule

DISCLAIMER: The psychoactive substance 5Meo-DMT described in this blog post is something that should be thoroughly researched, understood, and discussed with mental health professionals before deciding to experiment with. It can pose serious risks to mental and physical health if misused. It should never be used without the presence of a trained, experienced guide.

“I’m going to serve you the pipe and you’ll inhale it to a count of eight. When the effects come on, you’ll sense whether you’ve been given a handshake, a hug, or a blast off. If it’s only a handshake, you’ll likely feel ‘between worlds’, and I’d suggest you take another hit to get to full experience. You might be nonverbal, and if that’s the case you can use the hand sign for ‘more’.”

Jacob brought his fingertips to his thumbs on both hands, and touched his two hands together, modeling the sign for ‘more’. I nodded my head in agreement, a deep nervousness swelling in my stomach, a steadiness in my heart and mind. I had decided to do this, and I was going forth, nervousness and all.

I was on Jacob’s recently purchased land, surrounded by redwoods and Douglas fir trees on several acres in Northern California. Weeks earlier I had run into him at a one hundred person sex party, the kind I attend frequently, where party guests partake in a wide range of psychedelics. Sitting on a sofa with Jacob, a pile of naked friends playing just inches away from us, he mentioned that he guides medicine ceremonies and offered to guide me on a journey. No stranger to psychedelics, I had begun experimenting with LSD as a teenager and had explored MDMA, Psilocybin and even Ayahuasca plenty over the years. But Jacob was inviting me to try something entirely new to me…he was inviting me to try my first Bufo ceremony.

“They call it “The God Molecule’” Jacob shared, “It’s the strongest psychedelic known on the planet. It comes from the venom of the Bufo-Alvarius toad of the Sonoran desert. 5meo-DMT is the synthetic version. It’s made in the lab but is the exact same molecule. It’s different from acid or mushrooms which take all day and have an arc of a journey with a come up, peak, and come down. This stuff blasts you off into the center of the universe and gives an instant ego death. It lasts about twenty minutes but you’ll have no sense of time or space during the journey. People have described it as an experience of enlightenment.”

As he shared, my eyes widened. Chills traveled up my spine. My intuition told me I was ready for this. Grinning, I told Jacob “It sounds incredible…when can we do it?”

A week later in Jacob’s living room, he served me the pipe. For my first stop along the journey I suddenly found myself ‘between worlds’ as he had described I might. 

I was still vaguely me, the room was still vaguely the room, Jacob was still a vague presence nearby, but everything was wildly intense and unordinary. After curling into a fetal position, having a visceral flashback of being in my mother’s womb, and letting out some primal cries, I remembered Jacob’s invitation to go beyond this ‘in between space’ for the full ego death I had come for. I sat up, and mustering every bit of courage on the planet, I brought my two hands together to signal ‘more’. 

Describing the full ‘blast off’ experience of 5Meo-DMT is a difficult task. It asks that I put words to something that is beyond words—or as Alan Watts put it, it attempts to “eff the ineffable.” Here’s my best attempt: 

Within seconds, my sense of identity, the room, and anything familiar suddenly dissolved. I was not me, I was not in the room, there was no “I”, nor anything resembling anything else I’ve seen or experienced before. I merged with a dynamic matrix of color, light, and patterns. It was ever-changing, ever-random, infinitely bottomless, blissful, and utterly terrifying. I died. I was deleted from existence. Yet it wasn’t the blackness of sleep. It turns out death is nothing like sleep. This was far more complex, abstract, and mysterious than sleep. 

Pause and try to wrap your head around the concept of an experience in which you do not exist, and yet there is still an experience happening. It’s not your experience, just an experience. You’re not a witness because there is no witness and nothing to witness. You have no ability to control it, because you’re not in it. Meanwhile, nothing is controlling you either. What does not exist cannot be controlled. You’re not playing or being played with…it is an experience of play itself. No “one” is doing the playing, because it is an experience beyond the concept of a “separate one”. 

And it was utterly infinite. No sense of time or space. No light at the end of the tunnel. No end in sight. It just went on, seemingly forever and ever.

When I came back, I was astonished to rediscover my sense of self, my physical body, the room, and Jacob. Everything in the room was exactly as it was the moment before I dissolved, and yet I would never experience life or relate to death the same way.  

Looking down at my body and realizing I was completely naked (Jacob told me I had stripped in the first few minutes and that this is a common response), I followed an instinct to crawl outside onto the front porch. Seeing land, trees, and rain falling from the sky, I felt the most overwhelming and immense gratitude for life and the planet. 

Naked and barefoot, I walked out into the rain toward a tree covered in glowing green moss. Everything now looked familiar yet more vivid and alive, the way things have looked on previous LSD journeys.  I touched the tree, overcome with bliss to be alive and in contact with life. Then I followed another impulse. I walked out from beneath the tree branches, immersed myself in the rain, planted both feet firmly into the earth..and SCREAMED into the sky.

“FUUUUCCKKKKKKKK!!!!!” I bellowed. It felt as if my voice arose from the depths of the cosmos, using me as a messenger to the Earth and all its beings. And in that one word spoken, I felt this essence resonating like a gong: 

Let’s fucking go!!! Let’s fucking live!!! Let’s fucking heal!!! Fuck violence! Fuck fear! Fuck shame! Life is a gift!! We’re fucking alive!!! Let’s goooooo!!

Standing naked in the rain, the intensity of the experience surged through me. The scream, the release, the sense of being so erotically alive and in my naked body—it all felt like a profound revelation. As I caught my breath and let Jacob guide me back into the house, something began clicking into place, a deeper understanding waiting to surface.

Sex, death, infinity…were they all connected? I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had only begun to scratch the surface of this mystery. 

COMING SOON…Part Two: Integrating The Infinite. In part two I embark on a journey to deepen my personal research of the connections between sexuality, nonduality, infinity, and death…and to integrate the most profoundly transcendent experience of my life into my daily way of being in the world.