Episode 6: 5-MeO-DMT Theory A Reality Framework

I'm building a framework to help me understand the 5-MeO-DMT encounter and this continuous transformative experience - a way to integrate what happened and make sense of it.

Before working with the Toad, I had already spent years studying mythology, religion, cognitive science, and consciousness studies.

I'm especially influenced by Bernardo Kastrup and his work on analytical idealism. I’ve come to believe that consciousness is the primary reality. It’s the foundation - the source from which everything else arises.

Versions of this idea appear in almost every religious tradition, especially in creation stories. A common thread: the universe was dreamt, thought, or spoken into existence. Time, space, life - all of it - is born of consciousness.

Consciousness and the Self

So what about our individual consciousness?

I don’t believe it’s separate from the whole. It’s more like a constrained instance of the larger field - like a wave on the ocean or a whirlpool in a stream. We can point to it, describe it, even feel it as a distinct ‘self’, but it's never truly separate. It’s a temporary expression of something continuous and vast.

The magic is that these constraints can loosen - or even fall away. In those moments, we get a glimpse of the greater whole. We feel what it’s like to be more ocean than wave.

Before I go further, I want to add a caveat. There are many words used to describe this larger field: Source, Universal Intelligence, God, the Godhead. For now, I’ll avoid them. I’m too ignorant to claim any one of them as accurate.

Loosening Constraints

Psychedelics have given me direct access to a version of reality that feels very different from my usual one. When the constraints on consciousness loosen, the boundaries of experience stretch - and the sense of ‘self’ begins to dissolve.

The greater the loosening, the more extreme (and often alien) the experience becomes. That makes intuitive sense: radically different states of consciousness are bound to feel unfamiliar. But what really surprised me is that these altered states often feel more real than everyday life.

Which raises the question: how can something feel more real than the life I live every day?

The insight that helped me make sense of this was simple: our everyday life is temporary. We live and die - whatever that ultimately means. And everything we experience happens within consciousness. Even something as physical as knocking on a table - yes, it feels real, but that sensation exists inside our awareness.

When we’re in deep sleep, the feeling of the bed disappears. It’s no longer part of consciousness. This suggests that consciousness - not the physical world - is the ground of all experience.

So there is a deeper more fundamental reality than the physical world.

What’s Really Real?

So what is it that I’m experiencing during psychedelic journeys?

Let’s start with what I mean by real in everyday terms.

My daily sense of self is consistent. My body feels more or less the same: sometimes tired, sometimes energetic, but recognisably me. My thoughts and emotions are familiar - even when disrupted by frustration or joy, they have a texture I know. That stability gives me the feeling of being a continuous self.

This consistent, continuous self is dependent on a set of consistent and continuous constraints on my consciousness - this is my ‘reality’.

Expanded Reality

But under psychedelics - especially peyote, LSD, DMT, and radically so with 5-MeO-DMT - there’s always expansion.

It starts with the senses. Colours are brighter. Sounds are more vivid. Smells and tastes more layered. At first glance, it feels like sensory enhancement. But that implies something important: the world didn’t change - our access to it did. The detail, the depth, the beauty, was there all along. We just weren’t perceiving it.

The expansion goes further than sensory data. It opens up awareness itself.

And with this broader consciousness comes new ways of knowing - not analytical, but intuitive. You know or feel something to be true, even if it can’t be measured or explained.

But expansion isn’t always easy. Our sense of self depends on boundaries - especially the boundary of consciousness. I can’t know exactly what you’re thinking or feeling. That gap between minds creates the experience of separation, of individuality.

One of the effects of psychedelics is to soften - or dissolve - those boundaries. The line between me and something much, much larger begins to blur. Sometimes it disappears entirely.

Dissolution and Return

When that happens, when the boundary dissolves, consciousness expands into territory far beyond the familiar. It can be terrifying. But it can also be profoundly beautiful. It allows us to come into contact with something that feels more real. We become consciously aware of more fundamental layers of reality.

And then we return.

We come back to ourselves - only now with a glimpse of something larger. Something enduring. The real question is: what do we do with that glimpse?

Can we integrate it? Can we bring it into our everyday lives in a way that remains meaningful? Can it help us live differently?

That’s the task. That’s integration.

It’s the work that follows the vision.

Let's pause a momentum and create a temporary framework for reality (temporary because this is undoubtedly wrong and I don't have the hubris to believe I'll ever get it right).

Framework #1

1. Consciousness is fundamental.

2. The material universe and everything in it is created by consciousness at large.

3. Our conscious experience is a constrained and temporary instance of consciousness at large (waves on the ocean; whirlpools in the river).

4. Those constraints can be loosened.

5. Psychedelics loosen those constraints and expand conscious awareness.

6. Expanded conscious awareness allows contact with deeper layers of reality.

7. Integration is required to make this meaningful.

Flavours of The Beyond

So what did Toad show me? What reality did I glimpse?

Naturally words falter here, it will take more encounters to really grasp it, but still, something lingers.

There is a vastness. Infinite, yet intimate.

There is stillness - not the absence of movement, but the presence of peace. A stillness that is eternal space and infinite time.

There is radiance, not of light, but of being. A luminous presence.

There is personhood, like you or me, only vast, infinite, peaceful, and with incomprehensibly intelligent awareness.

There is love. Not sentimental but relational love, the essence of love - as if reality itself is made of it.

And there is clarity. A sense that all things are exactly as they must be. That nothing is outside the order of what is.

No visions. No stories.

Just this direct, undeniable is-ness - something more fundamental than the self, more ancient than thought, more enduring than time.

You don't come back with answers. You come back with a resonance.

A remembering.