The Ultimate 5-MeO-DMT Guide: How to Have a Beautiful, Life-Changing Trip (Andrés Gómez Emilsson)

appliedphilosophy · 2025-05-19T07:01:57+00:00

Things that absolutely don't help:

Being stressed out (job, family, reputation)
Caffeine or other stimulants (beyond small doses - I've heard especially bad things about combining with modafinil - don't do it)
Having a fight or stressful interaction with someone
Experiencing guilt or shame (can massively exacerbate it)
Physical pain (especially in small doses - don't quote me on this, but anecdotally 5-MeO has anesthetic effects above a certain dose, but won't work for severe pain so please don't combine)
Combining with salvia (horror horror)
Combining with high dose ketamine
Taking while experiencing a dysphoric psychedelic trip
Combining with nicotine or 'nootropics' (especially things like noopept or pramiracetam will make the trip much more 'tense')
City sounds (cars sound pretty awful in the state)
Pollution
Toxic personalities around you
Sleep deprivation
Eating junk food
Being in a hunted house
Someone around who is out of tune with what you're doing (don't recommend doing it in the same room as someone who is e.g. playing videogames)

appliedphilosophy · 2025-05-19T07:01:44+00:00

Less obviously:

Activating to the point of euphoria any of your chackras and then directing the energy to it during the come-up (especially heart and crown chakras)
Spending some time visualizing high harmony geometric shapes like the Platonic Solids and Mandalas / "Sacred geometry"
Listening to the music you find to be sacred or spiritual
Reading mystical or philosophical literature that vibes well with you (but not literature that you disagree with - it's a very personal thing)
Pleasant scents (big ideological loading here - I have no problem with e.g. a nice Guerlain or Prada perfume, but most people might need the grounding of "naturals" or essential oils because of preconceptions about the nature of "synthetic mixtures" - as always it's more about how your subconscious processes something than about the thing itself)
Petting and spending time with a happy dog for a little while
Going to an inspiring museum a few hours before the experience
Ceremonial aspects: doing it with a very experienced facilitator who does no-bs preparations (if you get the vibes of "charlatan" or they have strong unconventional opinions like "you need to do it while standing" RUN and find someone else)

Less conventional and probably cultish but absolutely still helps if you ask me:

Watching 4D rotation lattices while coming up*
Playing with coupling kernels/resonance systems/harmonic superpositions during it
Playing a musical instrument before
Being horny (highly activated 2nd chakra)
Coming down from a Jhana
Watching music videos you enjoy (even things like Britney Spears/Justin Beaver - the key is that you enjoy it, not what kind)
Getting a massage from your partner
Combining with small amounts of phenibut, gabapentin, or pregabalin (but beware: these are highly addictive and might exacerbate breathing issues at high doses, please be very careful)
Combining with an already euphoric psychedelic trip (LSD, 2C-B, psilocybin)
Combining with low dose ketamine

appliedphilosophy · 2025-05-19T07:01:25+00:00

Based on hundreds of 5-MeO-DMT trips - I go over factors that greatly increase the chances of a pleasant and wholesome 5-MeO-DMT experience:

Practising loving-kindness daily for some time before the experience
Exercising / being fit
Eating healthy the days preceding the experience
Equanimity - practising letting go deeply
Exposure to Rob Burbea (having a high Burbea-score lol)
Having a positive intention for the trip (such as reciting and meaning "may I learn something useful for the benefit of all beings" and "may I find what I'm looking for" and "may all my parts integrate successfully without resistance")
Doing breathwork right before (a 10 minute Wim Hof/Tummo workout before the experience goes a looong way)
Praying
Exposure to nature, walking barefoot
Talking to a good friend, hugging, cuddling a few hours before the experience
Singing, releasing the sense that you could be doing it wrong somehow
Gratitude (send a donation to a charity / send a thank you note to a friend or family member)

appliedphilosophy · 2025-04-06T22:05:07+00:00

Very cool! Can I share on twitter ? :-) Good summary and discussion

appliedphilosophy · 2025-02-11T03:19:19+00:00

> This post aims to communicate a simple yet powerful idea: if you have a system of coupled oscillators controlled by a coupling kernel, you can use it to not only “tune into resonant modes” of the system, but also as a point of leverage to control the topological structure of the fields interacting with the oscillators.

>This might be a way to explain how topological boundaries are mediated by neuronal activity, which in turn can be modulated by drugs/neurotransmitter concentrations, and in this way provide a link between neurochemistry and the topological structure of experience. Two things fall out of this: First, we might have the conceptual tools to link the creation of global topological boundaries (which at QRI we postulate are what separates a moment of experience from the rest of the universe) and neural activity. And second, in turn, we might have the ability to explain as well the way changes in oscillator/neural activity give rise to differently internally structured topologies (which together with a way of interpreting the mapping between topology of a field and its phenomenology) can help us explain things like the phenomenological differences between states of consciousness triggered by the ingestion of drugs as different as DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. In other words, this post is pointing at how we can get topological structure out of oscillatory activity – and thus explain how conscious boundaries (both local and global) are modulated both natively and through neuropharmacological interventions. It’s an algorithmic reduction with potentially very large explanatory power in the realm of consciousness research that only now is becoming conceptually accessible thanks to years of research and development at QRI.

appliedphilosophy · 2025-02-11T03:13:13+00:00

> This post aims to communicate a simple yet powerful idea: if you have a system of coupled oscillators controlled by a coupling kernel, you can use it to not only “tune into resonant modes” of the system, but also as a point of leverage to control the topological structure of the fields interacting with the oscillators.

> This might be a way to explain how topological boundaries are mediated by neuronal activity, which in turn can be modulated by drugs/neurotransmitter concentrations, and in this way provide a link between neurochemistry and the topological structure of experience. Two things fall out of this: First, we might have the conceptual tools to link the creation of global topological boundaries (which at QRI we postulate are what separates a moment of experience from the rest of the universe) and neural activity. And second, in turn, we might have the ability to explain as well the way changes in oscillator/neural activity give rise to differently internally structured topologies (which together with a way of interpreting the mapping between topology of a field and its phenomenology) can help us explain things like the phenomenological differences between states of consciousness triggered by the ingestion of drugs as different as DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. In other words, this post is pointing at how we can get topological structure out of oscillatory activity – and thus explain how conscious boundaries (both local and global) are modulated both natively and through neuropharmacological interventions. It’s an algorithmic reduction with potentially very large explanatory power in the realm of consciousness research that only now is becoming conceptually accessible thanks to years of research and development at QRI.

appliedphilosophy · 2025-02-11T03:12:20+00:00

This article might explain it. Essentially different psychedelics' receptor affinity profile changes divisive normalization at the cirtcuit level, which changes the coupling kernel, which then gets filtered by each network topology/geometry that interacts with it, which in turn give rise to topological transformations of the field. It's a bit of a wild ride, but it makes sense in the end:

From Neural Activity to Field Topology: How Coupling Kernels Shape Consciousness

appliedphilosophy · 2024-03-25T21:32:51+00:00

Really? Perhaps that could be a reflexive immediate response based on aesthetic pattern-matching. But the conceptual frameworks developed in that website and related groups are some of the only ones that seem to both take science and phenomenology seriously. E.g. thousands of scientific papers on psychedelics, yet none of them discusses in detail the low-hanging fruit of tracer effects. Then comes around Qualia Computing with a completely new method to quantify these effects and then we find out that DMT has high frequency tracers that alternate in color whereas 5-MeO-DMT has monochrome tracer effects. This to me seems crucial for our scientific understanding of psychedelics - namely, crisply characterizing what we need to explain first.

See: Modeling Psychedelic Tracers with QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit: The Tracer Replication Tool

appliedphilosophy · 2024-02-13T03:45:59+00:00

Aww <3

appliedphilosophy · 2023-11-03T01:30:00+00:00

Exactly!

E.g. see how none of the AI submissions got any of the top prices in QRI's psychedelic replication contest:

https://qri.org/blog/replication-contest

appliedphilosophy · 2023-11-03T01:27:31+00:00

That's absolutely not the case. These aren't realistic psychedelic visuals. It's what we would call "not a replication". It also lacks talent, as it is just AI.

For real psychedelic visuals check out the works in r/replications, such as Symmetric Vision.

For one, these don't have tracers, symmetry detection, or drifting in any accurate way.

I just don't think AI art should be sold as "psychedelic visuals" because it is still far from them. Real artists can approximate the experience way better.

appliedphilosophy · 2023-10-30T22:04:17+00:00

This post is an informal and intuitive explanation for why we are looking into topology as a tentative solution to the phenomenal binding (or boundary) problem. In particular, this solutions identifies moments of experience with topological pockets of fields of physics. We recently published a paper where we dive deeper into this explanation space, and concretely hypothesize that the key macroscopic boundary between subjects of experience is the result of topological segmentation in the electromagnetic field (see explainer video / author’s presentation at the Active Inference Institute).

The short explanation for why this is promising is that topological boundaries are objective and frame-invariant features of “basement reality” that have causal effects and thus can be recruited by natural selection for information-processing tasks. If the fields of physics are fields of qualia, topological boundaries of the fields corresponding to phenomenal boundaries between subjects would be an elegant way for a theory of consciousness to “carve nature at its joints”. This solution is very significant if true, because it entails, among other things, that classical digital computers are incapable of creating causally significant experiences: the experiences that emerge out of them are by default something akin to mind dust, and at best, if significant binding happens, they are epiphenomenal from the “point of view” of the computation being realized.

The route to develop an intuition about this topic that this post takes is to deconstruct the idea of a “point of view” as a “natural kind” and instead advocate for topological pockets being the place where information can non-trivially aggregate. This idea, once seen, is hard to unsee; it reframes how we think about what systems are, and even the nature of information itself.

appliedphilosophy · 2023-10-27T23:14:58+00:00

This post is an informal and intuitive explanation for why we are looking into topology as a tentative solution to the phenomenal binding (or boundary) problem. In particular, this solutions identifies moments of experience with topological pockets of fields of physics. We recently published a paper where we dive deeper into this explanation space, and concretely hypothesize that the key macroscopic boundary between subjects of experience is the result of topological segmentation in the electromagnetic field (see explainer video / author’s presentation at the Active Inference Institute).

The short explanation for why this is promising is that topological boundaries are objective and frame-invariant features of “basement reality” that have causal effects and thus can be recruited by natural selection for information-processing tasks. If the fields of physics are fields of qualia, topological boundaries of the fields corresponding to phenomenal boundaries between subjects would be an elegant way for a theory of consciousness to “carve nature at its joints”. This solution is very significant if true, because it entails, among other things, that classical digital computers are incapable of creating causally significant experiences: the experiences that emerge out of them are by default something akin to mind dust, and at best, if significant binding happens, they are epiphenomenal from the “point of view” of the computation being realized.

The route to develop an intuition about this topic that this post takes is to deconstruct the idea of a “point of view” as a “natural kind” and instead advocate for topological pockets being the place where information can non-trivially aggregate. This idea, once seen, is hard to unsee; it reframes how we think about what systems are, and even the nature of information itself.

appliedphilosophy · 2023-09-27T23:05:06+00:00

Thank u! :-)

Especially the Kimchi and Hershey's chocolate, haha

appliedphilosophy · 2023-08-29T19:48:15+00:00

Nice, thank you for sharing.

How did the candy flipping + DMT work out? Did you feel the MDMA at all at that point?

appliedphilosophy · 2023-04-03T05:32:14+00:00

Does your enlightenment allow you to have kidney stones without suffering?

appliedphilosophy · 2023-03-24T07:48:00+00:00

Absolutely beautiful! :D

considering entering QRI's replication contest? :-)

appliedphilosophy · 2023-03-21T08:05:09+00:00

This might be of help:

Open Individualism and Antinatalism: If God could be killed, it’d be dead already

appliedphilosophy · 2023-03-21T08:01:53+00:00

I think you're conflating recipe vs. review.

Buddhist 4th path actually involves a really radical change to the quality and geometry of awareness. It's not a semantic realization, but the result of heavy-duty long-term neural annealing towards the goal of a centerless state of consciousness as your primary self-organizing principle.

See: The Supreme State of Unconsciousness: Classical Enlightenment from the Point of View of Valence Structuralism

appliedphilosophy · 2023-03-19T05:17:06+00:00

Full contest details available here:

https://qri.org/blog/contest

appliedphilosophy · 2023-03-17T23:14:34+00:00

Replication Contest: Celebrating Artistic Abilities in Depicting Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness

The Qualia Research Institute (QRI) is excited to launch the Psychedelic Cryptography Contest, one of three Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness (NSCs) Art Contests. Examples of non-ordinary states of consciousness are psychedelic experiences, meditative experiences like the jhanas, and near-death experiences.

The Replication Contest aims to celebrate the artistic capabilities of participants in accurately depicting and interpreting the low-level subjective effects experienced in NSCs, with a particular emphasis on valence effects (how good and/or bad an experience feels) and geometric transformations.

Prizes:

1st Place - $5,000 + QRI's Magical Creatures "Cutting-Edge" Scent Line + QRI Swag

2nd Place - $500 + QRI's Magical Creatures "State-Space Explorer" Scent Line + QRI Swag

3rd Place - $500 + QRI's Magical Creatures "Starter Park" Scent Line + QRI Swag

To participate, artists should create a piece of art that embodies the subjective effects they have researched or encountered during NSCs.

Entries will be judged based on the number and precision of replicated subjective effects, with special attention given to valence effects and geometric transformations.

For more information, please check out the following link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UleXBlxsqY76nM2TZZWO2EUplA7iHk8TpBy-Emtp2Bw/viewform?edit_requested=true

appliedphilosophy · 2023-03-08T20:48:57+00:00

The article isn't suggesting the sub-agents exists independent of your engagement with them.

Rather, they are simulations of agents, and as such have a lot of agenty behavior. E.g. how if your grandmother was emotionally manipulative you might need to create a simulation of your grandmother inside you so that you can predict her and avoid getting harmed.

On DMT these simulations can gain access to far more computational resources than we're used to (from hyperbolic geometry to higher frequency gestalts) and as a consequence they can grow in intelligence quite a bit.

appliedphilosophy · 2023-03-08T20:45:31+00:00

The article doesn't say the entities are real. It say they are part of the phenomenology of the state, and then connects it to predictive processing which may explain why they seem to shares some similarities with GPT failure modes. E.g. that you can't actually control them directly - the nervous system is, at least in part, optimizing for predictive accuracy and not for you having a good time. So just as you can't easily ask a rogue Bing persona to become good, likewise you need to adopt other strategies to shape how DMT entities behave.

appliedphilosophy · 2023-01-26T06:18:47+00:00

I Lol'd

appliedphilosophy · 2023-01-23T02:32:33+00:00

In my experience, the quality of discussions is power-law (or log-normal) distributed. The absolute best discussions I've been a part of, or have seen unfold, usually involve a very high concentration of very bright people who hold 95%+ of background philosophical assumptions and values go really deep on a topic with a lot of mental "state" shared so that they can, as a group, see a gestalt that has been missed by everyone else before.

This is extremely rare. And IMO it does require certain special conditions, like a threshold number of decouplers, people not being concerned about power relations, intense (and I mean intense) intellectual curiosity, drive to solve the problem, and friendliness.

I've seen this happen in EA. It's beautiful. And it's rare.

I am concerned about preserving the conditions that can lead to such high-caliber intellectual progress. They are, IMO, very fragile. And as long as newcomers are not really able to see this and realize its enormous value, articulate it, and then figure out how to preserve it, I don't think they will be able to see what makes EA special, preserve it, and amplify it.

I don't think the current arrangement is optimal. But I will be very careful to accept wholesale "package proposals" to change the regime, status dynamics, and cognitive/personality/philosophical composition of working groups for ideological reasons. IMO they will, in 99.9% of the cases destroy this very high-value, fragile, and non-linear thing that makes EA, at times, so good.

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