Reality Hit Different
Phenomenology of the Post-Ego State: Field Notes from T+1
T+1: The day after Toad (bufo alvarius) the source of my 5-MeO-DMT journey.
Vanishing Point: A 5-MeO-DMT Journey
To exist in the presence of God, first I must become non-existent.
It’s been a month since my encounter with non-existence. Every day it surprises me that the impact is not fading. Each morning I awake excited to see what will happen. My life is more meaningful, even the mundane is, well, fulfilling.
Over the next few months I will document my healing; physically, emotionally, spiritually I can feel the changes that are happening.
The following account is the first day after the medicine ceremony. At the end I’ll attempt to make sense of this in terms of the transformation of my consciousness.
But first, the story:
T+1: The day after
We're in the park, walking around, feeling - honestly - pretty normal. No strong residual effects. No hangover. No emotional comedown. Yesterday I disintegrated - sublimated into infinity. Today, I’m fine. Healthy. Happy. Actually, I feel really good.
As we wander the paths around Virginia Water, I notice something unusual: the usual sense of “me” and “them” is absent. There’s no distinct sense of separation, no internal narration about who I am in relation to others. Instead, there's a soft, spacious presence - a kind of I/we. But even I/we is a remnant, an after taste, like finishing a great coffee, you can still taste it even though the cup is empty.
Instead there’s a strong sense of … being. Shared, continuous, undivided. Connection feels different now.
What does connection even mean without division? What is relationship when there is no other?
The Latin relatio means “a bringing back, a restoring.” From relātus—“again I bear, I carry.”
To be in relation is to return something, to carry it again. To restore it.
And that’s how it feels. What was separate is no longer so. Restored to wholeness. I bear witness to the world in it’s state of completeness.
I believe this is what the Vedic and Buddhist traditions point to when they speak of Maya - the illusion of separation. The ego is the magician, conjuring duality where there is only one.
There has been a fundamental and irreversible shift in my understanding of reality. Decades of spiritual, scientific, and philosophical study transmuted into direct experience. It’s not just an idea anymore, no longer a theory to play with.
Everything really is one.
We follow the lake until we reach a cascade. Water tumbles down over a series of rocky outcrops, flowing with effortless grace. I’m watching it - but I’m not seeing water, I’m seeing thought. Not my thoughts, just … thought itself. Consciousness flowing.
The movement of mind made visible.
I try to look elsewhere, at the plants moving in the wind. Same thing.
The flutter of leaves is the flutter of mind. Not mine - mind writ large.
Birds lift themselves into the air, pivoting and catching thermals with no effort at all.
Again, all I see is consciousness in motion. An endless, beautiful pattern, consciousness manifesting, unfolding itself, within itself, for itself.
This. Is. Reality
Meanwhile, Claudia and Mihaela continue their conversation beside me. I watch and listen. People stroll past with their children, dogs weaving between legs, laughter and casual chatter floating on the breeze. I watch and listen.
There’s a quiet ache - not sadness, but a kind of yearning - to share what I’m experiencing. To try to name it, give it shape. But I know it wouldn’t land. Not fully. This isn’t just unusual - it’s incomprehensible as a proposition, this has to be directly experienced to be understood.
People might hear it as a curiosity, a concept, maybe even a psychedelic side effect. But for me, what I’m experiencing is reality. Not my reality. The reality. This. Is. Reality.
There’s no going back to seeing the world as I once did. What was once theory - some spiritual ideal or poetic metaphor - has become actual. Propositional knowledge, so easily dismissed or twisted to confirm one’s beliefs has become participation, an undeniable experience.
The difference between knowledge and insight is the undeniability of the realisation. A-ha is not a moment, it’s a state of being.
I’m in it now. And it’s in me.
Liberation?
We continue walking, drifting along the winding paths. There’s a subtle flow to movement - as if everything is intricately in a state of flow. Super-confluent, a singular source. Imagine thought passing through a prism like light, only, instead of a rainbow emerging you have life in all it’s diversity and glory.
It’s not about me anymore. Whatever the words “I am” once tried to capture now feels diffused, embedded within something far greater. There’s still a role to play, of course - an enactment within a narrative. But the story? I don’t need to know it. That’s not mine to hold.
And in that, I find peace. A deep, quiet ease.
Is this liberation?
For so many years I’ve been trying, striving, sometimes forcing my way through life. I’ve been seeking control over my thoughts and emotions. Every achievement and success providing temporary relief. The next goal being set to alleviate the disappointment of completing the last. A hollowness that terrified me. I felt like a hungry ghost, never to be satiated.
“Know thyself” - attributed to Socrates
About 7 years ago I entered therapy, trying to wake up, to heal, to become my “authentic” self. I studied psychology, psychotherapy, spirituality, philosophy. I meditated, exercised, dieted. Worked on my relationships - trying to become self aware.
But maybe self-awareness was never high on the job description for being human?
Maybe I’ve been swimming upstream, without even knowing the stream existed.
Now I float.
My awareness inverted - awareness of what is, not awareness of self.
Fleeting aeons
We turned a corner and stumbled upon the ruins of Leptis Magna, once a grand city in Libya, the third largest in Roman Africa.
Its original buildings, preserved for centuries beneath desert sands, had been transported across continents to sit here, incongruously, in George IV’s garden in Windsor. And now, they too are being reclaimed, steadily, inevitably by flora. Ivy climbs the columns. Moss settles into crevices. Nature remembers differently.
Rome is a memory fading in the meta-consciousness.
The universe forgets. Material reality shifts.
Plants eat stone, and life goes on.
Everything I once took to be solid, to be physical, to be enduring - is thought - in motion, like a wave it looks constant but is ever shifting.
What feels like aeons to us mortals is fleeting in the eternal mind.
It’s all just footprints in the sand.
Big-C Consciousness revised
It’s been a month, and my attempts to articulate what’s happening bring a lot of questions.
Has my consciousness expanded? Are there different states of consciousness that are available to me? To us?
I’ve played with these questions for weeks and I’ve had to learn to listen to my body / heart like a diving rod, a signal detector for insight.
Firstly, “my consciousness” is the wrong frame. Consciousness is constrained from the infinite and eternal, to the finite. Separated like refracted light into narrow specific beams. It’s expanse inhibited, focussed like a laser, into uncountable variants. Each variant, each instance of consciousness, provides a unique perspective. The difference in perspective is experienced as separation, but this is the illusion.
When you take an elevator to the top of a tall building and look down at the world below it looks and feels fundamentally different, but its the same world, just from a different perspective. Same, same but different.
Separation is the means by which different perspectives can come into existence and provide different information, painting a fuller picture. This is how Consciousness can “Know Thyself”.
“My consciousness” along with yours, and the consciousness within animals and plants is a specific constraint, an instance or variant, of big C Consciousness. Never separate, but necessarily providing a unique perspective to add to the Knowing.
The expansion is a loosening of those constraints. It’s more like removing filters to allow more of the light that is already there to enter the frame. Or unmuting the frequencies within a piece of music so you can hear more of what is already playing.
Different states of consciousness are analogous to playing with the filters, playing with the frequencies of light and sound to get different impressions. But underneath it is one song, one story, a uni-verse.
The illusion of space-time, that things exist as physical objects with a past and future, is so powerful that we treat it is fundamental to reality. Yet, we know that there is nothing but the present moment. However, as with separateness, the illusion of space-time is a necessary set of constraints that affords perspective.
I suspect that, the seemingly infinite variety of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are similarly “dials and filters” of perspective. Whether beautiful or ugly, healing or traumatic, these perspectives are within a unified Consciousness playing out the endeavour of Knowing and Becoming.
For me, the pressure is off, whatever this instance of life brings, it is a contribution to something infinitely and eternally greater.
Bring more awareness, less judgment, more healing regardless of how painful the process. Make this perspective count.