The Buddha Molecule

We Thus Gone: Completing the Journey to Wholeness

Toke by @tomaskengen

“This body is not me. I am life without boundaries. I’ve never been born and I’ve never died. Since before death and before time, I’ve been free. Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, sacred thresholds. Birth and death are a game of hide and seek.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

So we have arrived now at the destination of our shared journey to wholeness. At the start, I set out to prepare you for this final transmission by laying out the 3D requisites:

• Drugs (Panpsychedelica);

• Death (River Styx); and,

• Dharma

In explaining the first two, I’ve conveyed a pretty good sense of my own Dharma path, so no need for an entire installment on that. But I do want to be clear here before continuing to the conclusion, as I will be making some rather startling Dharma claims: I am not a well-qualified Dharma teacher. I’ve had the great good fortune to have received extensive teachings from some of the most qualified Dharma teachers in the world - which is why I know it’s important for me to qualify my assertions in this way.

At the same time, in addition to 25+ years of disciplined practice under excellent teachers, and 45+ years of regularly meditating, I did a deep dive into Buddhist studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies under the tutelage of the late, great Dr. Steven Goodman in the Asian Studies Department. I even had the privilege of teaching on the 3 turnings of the Wheel of Dharma in an Eastern Philosophy course while at CIIS. Which means my tombstone could well read:

Taught Buddhist philosophy at the same school Alan Watts taught at!

In any case, while I love sharing the Dharma, at the very most I might be considered a high aptitude Dharma student. So please don’t take any of what follows as gospel! I’m sharing and baring my soul here.

Set and setting complete, let me now attempt to give voice to the unspeakable splendour of what some have labeled the God Molecule, but which I contend can more accurately be described as... the Buddha Molecule.

Artist: Lisbeth Cheever-Gessaman

Entering the Circle

For the uninitiated, sacred medicines are best shared in sacred circles. 5-MeO-DMT lends itself particularly well to this setting because the effects last no more than 30 minutes total, so that a sacred circle of 5-7 participants can be completed in 3-4 hours.

I was invited to enter the circle under a full July moon in 2019. I was also tasked with holding down the fort while other circles were happening that day. This turned out to be a key advantage. It allowed me to be in silent retreat mode, and to ‘self-generate’ as White Tara, my yidam (heart deity/practice), in preparation for this experience (generation stage tantra is where we’ve been given permission and instructions for imagining ourselves as the deity).

As I would soon learn, this medicine is incredibly responsive to intention. So it’s important to state what my own intention was going into the circle. I hadn’t done a ton of research, but what I did learn in advance was that encounters with 5-MeO-DMT were most often described as Near Death Experiences.

Great! As a Buddhist, I’m all about practicing for death.

So my intention was to go into the ceremony prepared to die. This wasn’t just fantasy, either - I was 62 years old, and I’d recently had some cardiorespiratory attacks brought on by hot house yoga. Describing these to one of my favorite yoga teachers outside of Bernice’s Bakery in Missoula one sunny Saturday, Pam advised me to see a specialist. It sounded to her like I had a “widow maker” heart (the kind where your first attack is fatal).

However, upon reflection, I decided not to follow up after all, because that’s actually the way I’d like to go. I hate being sick. I’ve never liked goodbyes. And I’m ready to die. In fact, as a long time Buddhist practitioner, I look forward to death. The Dalai Lama says all Buddhist practices are preparations for the actual moment of death, and I’m ready to seize that opportunity. Maybe the shock of this medicine would be the catalyst for that occasion. Not a bad way to go!

And so, after a day of dedicated practices, I self-generated and entered the circle doing White Tara mantra - secretly, in my mind - on infinite loop.

OM TARE TUTTARE TURE MAMA AYUH PUNYA JNANA PUSHTIM KURUYE SVAHA

The 5-MeO Dharma Medicine Transmission

And now I will do my very best to describe the indescribable...

First, let me say that it is perfectly understandable to me why people would relate this to a Near Death Experience. If nothing else, it definitely brings you right up to that unfathomable abyss. Then it asks if you’re ready to jump: “Are you ready to let go of every idea you’ve ever had about who you are?” In the sense that whoever or whatever that is will no longer exist, will never exist again, and will be permanently erased from the record as if he or she never had existed in the first place.

It is that kind of gravity we are talking about being pulled by here. It’s almost nihilistic.

Understandably, then, it’s easy to imagine that 99 out of 100 people will instinctively recoil, exhibiting a perfectly normal reflexive response that is referred to in Buddhism as “self grasping.” All fear is based on this instinctive self-grasping. It’s the very root of cyclic existence, and deeply engrained in our psyche. It can only be rooted out with a lifetime of dedicated practices. It’s why Buddhism is not for everyone ; )

The beauty of the 5-MeO experience is that if you are that one in a hundred who is ready to let go of every and any notion of self you’ve ever had or cherished, the reward is instantaneous death to that old trouble maker, ego. It turns out not be as final as it seems in the moment, the ego being quite resilient in the end, but it is rather complete and glorious during the experience itself.

And here’s the absolute kicker that is my motive for sharing all this and the reason I’ve been so meticulous in the set up for it: if you’re able to go through with it, if you have the full catharsis, there is nothing “Near” about this ‘Death Experience.’ You will definitely cross over to the other side of life and experience death-qua-death. It changes everything...

Now let me back up. It took me a minute to approach that abyss and be presented with the option of jumping into the unknown.

In many respects, I think the most shocking part of what I have come to refer to as the “Dharma Medicine Transmission” (DMT) was the very first instant after I inhaled the full, ‘shamanic’ dose, which for someone of my size turns out to be 13 mg.

Pillows were arranged in advance, there was some very loud, very groovy next world music being blasted, and the effect from inhalation was almost immediate. You’re instructed to hold it in as long as you can, and then as soon as you involuntarily begin to let the vapor out of your lungs, you are already free falling...

And everything in the world that is false falls away.

Like a finger snap! It all just disappears as if it had never even existed, and it is self-evident that it never really did - not in any reality-check way. You’ve now entered a realm that is unquestionably, beyond even a flickering doubt, true unfabricated reality.

This kind of knowing is direct, nondual and nonconceptual; i.e., Gnosis (‘gnowing’).

The shock lies in realizing that the world you have just left behind is a dream world!! You’ve just woken from what you never really suspected was a dream. It’s just like this:

While dreaming, a dreamer is completely immersed in his or her dream and only upon awakening realizes it was a dream. Similarly, the worldlings, absorbed in a dream produced by their ignorance, hold the illusory as real; however, the buddhas have awakened from that dream and freed themselves from the fetters of ignorance.

from the Maha Vaipulya Sutra

Something else was happening as this instantaneous gnow-ledge hit me. As I said, I was silently reciting Tara mantra as I took the medicine. In that next moment of truth, the loud music also fell away. I was no longer doing mantra - I WAS mantra. Resoundingly so. The Tibetan word for mantra can be translated as “heart sound,” - the sound that spontaneously emanates when a buddha first awakens.

And that’s what I became in that realm. No, not a buddha. A heart sound that was in accord with Truth, or Dharma.

I think in that first moment as well, which felt like an eternity, another part of the direct download was this rather startling realization: everything I’d learned from the Buddha Dharma was literally true - not just figuratively true, as I’d assumed a lot of it to be.

For example, in spite of how that sutra passage (supra.) reads, I’d been taught that life was like a dream, but not actually a dream. Some schools of Buddhism teach that the 3rd turning of the Wheel of Dharma, concerning Buddha mind, is provisional - meaning that it’s teachings are not to be taken literally. But in that apocalyptic revelation there was no room for such quibbling - it was all literally true. We’re just not really equipped to take it in that way. But...

In a conscious universe, Buddha mind is the one reality, and everything ELSE is provisional. Like the observer effect on the scale of a universe!

But please, don’t take my word for this. I’m just sharing my experience with you here, for what it’s worth. In Buddhism, we don’t take anyone’s word at face value. We’re required to come to our own conclusions. So should you.

So we’re like one nano-second into this experience of the Buddha Molecule!

Art by Alex Grey

Where to now?

Unlike LSD or other forms of DMT, 5-MeO does not trip the lights fandango. In fact, it was the exact opposite of hallucinating. As Lama Yeshe, who brought Tibetan Buddhism to America at the height of the 60’s, used to say to his hippie students: “Why do you want to do drugs, deary? You are already hallucinating all the time!”

Turns out he was being quite literal!

But unlike some accounts I’ve read, what I directly perceived wasn’t nothing, it wasn’t blinding, nor was it so diffuse as to be undiscernible. What I believe I perceived in that cosmic moment of truth was nothing other than the expansively nonlocal, atemporal, perfect implicate order of the entire uni/multi-verse.

To be more precise. Verse: “in the sphere or realm of.” Let’s describe this realm as the cognitive sphere (cogniverse?). Because while there is not really active conception going on here, there is definitely cognition. And there sure seems to be a valid cognizer at this point.

I remember sensing the near presence of this realm in my Gnostic mystical days of meditating at great length in nature, when my “I” would dissolve into an altered state of consciousness in which there’d be a strong sense of all questions being answered in a single moment of time. But it’d all vanish like a dream when awakening with a start as I’d fall back into my body/self. It was that enticing tease of meditative bliss that became the gravamen of my spiritual path early on.

In Christian mystical traditions, it is sometimes referred to as “the wall of paradise.” Holed up in a cabin in torrential rains for 3 days of fasting and meditating in Eden (Aotearoa), the closest I came to scaling that wall was consciously experiencing that same implicate order through an auditory experience that was more conscious than what I’d previously experienced - the distinct cacophony of a wellspring of time that opened up beneath me.

Interestingly enough, that was preceded by a voice that said, quite simply and forcefully: “Do not be afraid.”

In this first instant of 5-MeO, I beheld that and much more, in all its splendor, healing light united with mellifluous sound - the transcendent ground of being that all appearance arises from, surging and relentless. I was, in the words of the Kalachakra Tantra for experiencing the dharmadhatu, or realm of suchness, vibrating in splendour.

Merging with the Clear Light Nature of Mind

Now the Dharma Medicine really started taking hold...

In the next instant, still cognizant of my existence as some kind of an enthralled entity beholding the cosmos, I suddenly sensed with great certainty that I was dying. Sounds grim, right?

In the next instant, the heart of bodhicitta (literally, ‘awakened consciousness’) filled me with a joy beyond measure, not just an indescribable love for all, but also feeling a deep sense of privilege that I was about to pass on from this mortal coil.

Because for some unknowable reason, it was as clear to me as the first light of Edenic day reflected in diamond dewdrops that this passing away of my former self on this particular occasion was necessary from the standpoint of the whole, which I was enraptured with, and this ‘necessity’ was intimately entangled with the very same indescribable, bursting joy of that awakened heart which was now filling the entirety of my beingness.

In simpler words, it was clearly beneficial to all sentient being, as a single form of entity, for my focused being to pass away. And the prospect of merging with all that made the sacrifice of my small self identity seem like a, well, no-brainer.

It’s said of the 5-MeO experience that “... the world shatters into white light and then your body does too.”

But that’s not quite how I was experiencing it. Instead, again I’d relate it to those teachings of the Buddha Dharma I’d been exposed to that were now directly understood as literal truth. At the moment of death, it’s said by all the buddhas and bodhisattvas, all the high lamas who are able to steer the ship of mind through the perilous straits of the death/rebirth ocean, that the “clear light” of awakened mind dawns in our own mindstream for just a flash after we’re lifted out of our body.

As dedicated practitioners, this is the moment we’ve been preparing for with all of the teachings and all of our sadhanas all of our life - assuming we’ve been paying attention. Because if we have peace of mind at the moment of death, and if we can recognize that clear light as our very identity, if we are able to merge with what is sometimes referred to as the “mother light,” then this “child light” bypasses the bardos and is instantly reborn in a pure land; that is, a cognitive and formless realm manifested by a Buddha’s intention where we receive all the teachings we’ll ever need to be of highest benefit to all beings in any world system we incarnate in.

It is the whole point of Mahayana practice, really - the famed Bodhisattva path. And I should add here that Buddhist cosmology is in accord with modern cosmology - there are (literally!) trillions of world systems we might transmigrate to in order to be of such benefit. So it could be Earth, if both our karma and Earth’s karma are ripe for that. Or it could be any other realm where sentient beings have better collective karma than our own. In fact, I’ve come to view this Earth in its current dire straits as an ideal training ground for Bodhisattvas.

After much integration, which I’ll get to, I’m of the belief that this Dharma Medicine Transmission permitted me, at a minimum, to directly experience the ‘clear light’ nature of mind - not “my mind” here, just mind - that awaits us all at death. This is tantamount to a “pointing out” instruction, in which a highly realized lama is able to induce a glimpse of the nature of mind in a student who is ready to experience it.

But this revealed nature of mind was not “clear” in the way that term is understood. Instead, just as what we perceive as the clear light of the sun in fact contains all the colors of the rainbow, as revealed through a prismatic lens, so this “clear light” of mind in death should more accurately be understood as “Vairocana’s Tower of Adornments” from the third turning of the Dharma Wheel:

“A state of perfect intermingling and yet of perfect orderliness” comprised of all that is beautiful to behold, like “great mani-jewels emitting exquisite rays of light [that] fill the spacious Tower as far as it extends.”

But within this same tower, “all these [other] towers beyond calculation in number stand not at all in one other’s way; each in perfect harmony with all the rest.”

“The Tower symbolizes the entire Dharmadhātu, the realm of Suchness, wherein the All interpenetrates the all — the entire macro and micro cosmos.”

Literally. And it’s said that in this abode one perceives that the principle of suchness “prevails in all beings, in all things, in all the Buddhas, in all the lands, and in all the vows.”

Thus giving rise to that immense, boundary-less and universal love that eclipses the small sense of self identity, or the limited sense of love of one’s self or another.

This is very much how I experienced the realm that I entered and began merging with upon assimilating, or being assimilated by, the synthetic toad venom. It had an infinitely vast and fractally pure, spinning cosmic wheel feel and look to it, all embedded in a single heart sound, each node stretching out to infinity, all together reflecting all five hues (red, green, blue, yellow, white), but in my case at least tilting towards the eye-watering orange/yellow/gold end of the spectrum.

Not that I was looking or even seeing. It was more like direct sensing, pure cognition without any need to look or see, because you beheld it all and it was beyond any temporal or spatial fabrication or construction. It wasn’t like some moving picture show, either, as with hallucinogens. It was perfectly stable and immutable, in fact. All this out-of-experience conceptualization is just my carefully integrated and considered translation.

All that light and sound, however, while experienced in its purest energetic and expansive form, seemed rather beside the point! It is “clear light” only in the sense that it is this adamantine realm of spectral life/love force that illuminates all; that is, where everything is made clear. As The Great Tantra of Vajrasattva puts it:

“[E]verything that was not clear will be made clear, in Unity.”

And what is being made clear comprises the more ineffable aspect of the gnosis, where words tend to come up short.

Om... Ahhh... Hummm... PHAT!

It is like that. And that is all there is.

But for our purposes here, on this journey to wholeness, we will nonetheless forge onward.

In the next instant...

I now sensed a measure of agency over the interval preceding the impending moment of death. Somehow, I remained aware that I was in a circle of friends, and there was real concern over how my death might impact them!

By my intention to make clear the beauty of these ecstatic final moments the mantra emanating from my bodhi-heart switched of its own accord from White Tara mantra to the Heart Sutra mantra, and was now finding expression in the mudras (hand positions) I was exhibiting, prostrate there on the bed, for the benefit of those whom I was about to leave behind.

In meditation practice, we discover and learn to rely on a kind of detached awareness we sometimes think of as our inner “spy.” It’s rather like that sober awareness I was fascinated by in my youth during physically impaired states approaching death. Something like that spy was present during this experience of clear light mind as I anticipated total absorption into the Dharmadhatu, or field of Maitri:

“Maitri (buddha love) is a field of experiences unified in the profound awareness of being one with everything that is alive.”

(Sophia Stril-Rever)

What remains indescribable about this aspect of the experience - that there could actually be a powerful sense of agency - is nonetheless not inconsistent with this description from Psychedelic Times: “The concept of ‘I’ disappears as the boundaries between internal and external disappear, you lose all sense of self...”

Both of these were true at the same time, and neither was true, giving rise to that sense of omniscience that has led others to describe this as becoming the mind of God. Buddha also was said to speak and act spontaneously, without conception.

I suppose it would not be inaccurate, then, to say that White Tara was orchestrating this, though there was no longer any present sense that “I am White Tara.” Perhaps the most accurate way to describe it is to denote a literal translation of the term that sets Buddhism apart from all other beliefs: anatman. While it is commonly translated as “no self,” a more accurate translation is “other than self.”

In the experience of being something other than self, we become identified with all that is other. This “other than self” itself seemed to be the agent of my experience!

In the next instant...

How many eternities had passed now? - or maybe there was just the one eternal now, interpenetrating all instantaneously, which certainly complicates the effort to construct a linear narrative out of the experience... anyway...

I once again felt subsumed by sound, by vibrating in splendour, and now by these subtle hand mudras as well. There was, it seemed, an animated corpse on a mattress somewhere in a dream gesturing comically from beyond out of loving concern and spontaneously arising from the Heart Sutra mantra in this perfectly ordered cognitive sphere:

“Gate. Gate. Paragate. Parasamgate. Bodhi svaha.”

(Gone. Gone. Gone Beyond. Gone WAY Beyond. Bodhi - like that.)

With this resounding vocalization, nobody could possibly mistake my death with anything sad or tragic, only pure joy and immense gratitude, tears streaming from the corners of my eyes, for all that had led up to this moment forever. (note: none of this vocalizing was actually happening on the other side, according to my subsequent inquiries).

Commentary: The Heart Sutra, exemplary of the dharma’s hologrammatic nature, is comprised as 100,000 verses, which are then summarized in 21,000 verses, which are then simplified in 8,000 verses, and then that is distilled down to 108 verses — the version that is chanted — and it’s all encoded into the mantra, the “equal-to-the-unequalled mantra,” the mantra that is said to contain all truth, perfectly conveying the meaning of the full 100,000 verses. Cool, huh?

In my dying experience, my being was so completely absorbed by the heart-sounds of the mantra that they, that I, that neither nor both I and the sounds, embodied all the meaning of the clear light which I was now actively dissolving into the taste of. I needed to get this joyous sense across quickly, before I was gone completely beyond!

And still, there was room for some levity in this, where “I as other than self” laughed at the absurd notion that this dissolution into clear light, this unitary experience of leaving the body behind to merge with our true nature, is what mere mortals label “death!” HA!

It was so vibrantly clear to me now, even more so than at the start, that death is just waking up from the dream of reality we call ‘life’, the construct of a presumed, conventional reality - and waking into the truth and harmony and love of what is really real. So ironically, when done right, what we call death is about becoming alive!

This great cosmic joke that is being played on homo sapien sapien! How can we be so unwise?? Surely, even the whales understand this!

In the final instant, the experience becomes ever more intensely indescribable. The moment of cathartic dissolution is now right there. You can almost reach out and touch it.

There is something universal that opened up right then, again with a sense that is beyond all aggregate senses. In that opening-up, I remember having this sense of looking up into the “Mother light.” It would be the bookend, I suppose, of the first time an infant looks up into its mother’s loving gaze, and is beheld by that universal, perfectly unconditional love.

Beyond playwords...

After years of integration, I have come to conclude that it is this ultimate truth, this universal love force, that permeates all contrary and complimentary appearances.

What is impressed on the heart-and-mind stream in the thrall of that momentary glimpse into eternal truth, however, is just the total awe of beholding and being beheld eternally in immutable perfection. Maybe just describing it as the child light merging with the Mother light is as far as words can really take us in this mirror neuron sphere of blissful cognition.

(Unlike all the previous heart resounding, this next part was in accord with what was observed).

With hands suddenly thrust aloft in the wish-fulfilling jewel (prayer) mudra — “AHHHH” — the final willful embrace of complete surrender, then hands drawing that light of love down forcefully to the heart — “LOVE!” — then hands falling outwardly open like falling tree limbs, arms extended outward into the cosmos with total recognition and dissolution — “DONE!” — and, the final mudra/gesture on this material plane, turning my hands over, face down, with my last exhalation/expiration embodying the word — “Bye...”

And with that, under that full July moon of 2019, I died.

Gone beyond. Fully merged for all eternity with the Dharmadhatu - the nonlocal, zero-point field of Maitri - which really is love - love really IS all there is in the final analysis - if one is just able to consider what we really are referring to with that insufficient four-letter word, and then expand it outward to embrace and to penetrate all that is, all at once, immutably.

Just as it is said that “Ah” is the sound from which we emerged,

“Love” is like the symbolic seed syllable that “cosmos” and “being” and “life” and “light” all merge back into beyond the time horizon, that beautiful and blindingly brilliant white hole on the other side of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

My Final Testament

The experience of full cathartic release and total mergence from synthetic 5-MeO-DMT (please avoid the ‘organic’ bufo alvarius version, due to drug cartels now moving in to exploit and endanger the poor toad) renders one speechless for some time. In fact, the shock of finding myself back in my body rivaled the shock of all that is false falling away in the first instant. The experience transcends time and space, and thus requires a long period to fully integrate and make conceptual sense out of it.

In fact, I remember my astonishment that everyone else did not have the same experience I did! It all seemed so unitary, whole and incontrovertible. Now I realize that you have to be ready to die in order to step over to the other side. Not everyone has the intention to embrace death!

While I wrote about this experience not long afterward, at the urging of friends, what I’ve recorded here is more fully integrated. That involved taking it into the wilderness - including the Olympic Peninsula days later, and the Alpine Lakes Wilderness during the pandemic - taking it into my sadhanas, and continuing to contemplate the immensity of it all with awe, gratitude, and wonderment...

My integration process seemed to culminate a little more than two years later with my first lucid dream. Once I became lucid and proving to myself I was dreaming (jumped off a balcony ; ), there was no question what I wanted to do next. I blasted right off into that same merged state of unity consciousness. I awoke, still dreaming, and again merged - this time by coming into union with Gaia, in the form of a mute Vedic woman with clear awareness in her eyes - the only one in the dream who wasn’t a dream being.

The lucid dream affirmed the reality of that cognitive sphere to me - similar to how I returned to non-dual states of consciousness through meditation years after giving up hallucinogens. It is said that in dreamless sleep we can also experience the clear light nature of mind (dream yoga). Life has shown me that the power of the human mind is vast and largely untapped. I’m convinced it is that super-power that will save us from ourselves in the end.

This may well be a dream. But we are not the dream’s only inhabitants. Gaia is here, too. Let us remember the words of Tilopa to Naropa on the banks of the Ganges River:

Know dreams as dreams,

and constantly meditate on their profound significance.