The following reflection in words and images was shared with us by Marwan, a journeyer at our April 2026 Self Contact Retreat. We are publishing it here with his blessing, with the hope that it may offer a glimpse into the mystical experience that can be found in 5-MeO-DMT.
My words here are but a humble attempt to gently touch upon a space that lies beyond the reach of our everyday language. What I share comes not from a place of ultimate knowledge, but from a deeply felt and transformative encounter with a profound medicine, a journey much like those whispered about by countless others who have similarly stepped onto this sacred path.
The experience, in its sheer intensity, exposed the limits of human expression with a sudden, beautiful clarity. It was a plunge into a timeless dimension of pure awareness, a state of unity where the familiar words we use – “beautiful,” “spiritual,” “intense” – feel woefully insufficient, almost a disservice to the whole truth. We must always remember that this reality is fundamentally one to be lived, to be undergone, for its essence to truly resonate within the heart.
Yet, a gentle whisper compels me to write. This sharing is an offering, a compassionate effort to draw a rudimentary map of the territory I was graced to travel. It is a search for structure and meaning within a reality that, in its boundless grace, completely dissolved my prior, finite notions of who I was, what existence meant, and the illusion of time. My sincerest hope is not the foolish task of describing the truly indescribable, but rather to humbly illuminate its potential as a gentle nudge toward deep healing of the soul. A soft awakening to one’s true spiritual nature, and a genuine, lasting transformation of heart.
The essence of the experience was an overwhelming, yet tender, merging with the very source of all creation; a momentary, yet eternal, glimpse into the fundamental truth of reality as infinite, unconditional love. This truth remains as a sacred, indelible memory, a grace that continues to lovingly reshape my perspective on the simple beauty of daily life.
The core of this revelation is Love. It is not merely a passing emotion, but a boundless, all-pervasive, and profoundly aware oceanic field; the very foundation, the universal ground of being. This field of selfless Love is our true, essential nature and our ultimate, gentle home. It is the sacred origin from which the smallest flicker of consciousness first emanates and the inevitable, loving destination to which we, in our own time, will all softly return. When we speak of this field, we must humbly accept that it transcends the physical boundaries of our observable universe. It is a dimension that lies utterly beyond the constraints of time and space; it is the eternal now, the infinite everywhere.
Within this boundless field reside the highest attributes of Love, yet they are not separate virtues. They are intrinsically woven together as unified energies. Peace, in its most profound sense, is the silence from which all creation softly springs. Compassion is the tender, unconditional understanding of our shared existence and our shared, human suffering. Joy is the spontaneous, heartfelt celebration of simply being. Kindness is the active, gentle manifestation of this inherent goodness, and empathy is the capacity to lovingly recognize and feel the deep interconnectedness of all life. These attributes are not a collection of traits, but a single, indivisible, unified field – the very fabric of all reality. This is the ultimate, non-dual truth: a conscious, boundless ocean of pure, selfless Love.
When the soul is immersed in this all-encompassing, oceanic field of love, the separate construct of the individual ego melts away, dissolving softly into the vast, infinite expanse. This dissolution allows for a profound, blessed union, where the previously separate self merges with the boundless whole, revealing a singular, ultimate reality. This state of transcendent oneness is the gentle heart of many spiritual and religious traditions across the world, each one offering its own sacred language to articulate this ineffable union.
In Sufism, this state is tenderly called Fana, meaning “annihilation.” It describes the systematic, compassionate dismantling and ultimate dissolving of the nafs (the lower self, or ego). Fana is the ecstatic, yet profoundly humbling, experience of total immersion into the Divine presence, a complete emptying of the self that is the necessary precursor to Baqa (subsistence in God). Baqa signifies a state where the individual, having surrendered the ego, now subsists through and in the Divine, seeing the world with a vision of God’s own boundless love.
Similarly, in Hinduism and certain schools of Buddhism, this profound union is termed Samadhi. This is the highest level of meditative concentration, where the restless mind is completely stilled and the separation between the observer and the observed vanishes. In Vedantic Hinduism, Samadhi represents the complete dissolution of the ego into the Absolute reality—Brahman or Shiva. In Buddhist traditions, particularly Mahayana, Samadhi can lead to the direct, non-conceptual experience of Sunyata (emptiness), realizing the ultimate lack of inherent, permanent self-nature in all phenomena. Both Fana and Samadhi are, in their essence, a journey toward the compassionate surrender and transcendence of the finite, illusory self.
It was within this field of ultimate reality that my individual story ceased, giving way to an experience of love so deep, so boundless, and so profoundly unifying. In that sacred space, no other reality held sway. There was nothing but love. Absolute, total, and pervasive. The sense of a physical body transcended, yet this oceanic field of love was not external; it permeated the very core, the entire structure of my being, like breath itself.
The experience was akin to being gently cradled within an ocean of pure, distilled love, yet this ocean was alive. It possessed an indescribable current – the very flow of life-force – propelled by infinite, rhythmic waves of grace. With each wave, I was effortlessly drawn into the various attributes that constitute the nature of Love itself.
Compassion was experienced not as a sympathetic feeling, but as a tender, palpable embrace of universal understanding. It was a boundless, active kindness, possessing the intrinsic ability to reach and soothe every atom and being in existence, unifying all pain into a singular, gentle stream of restorative energy.
Peace manifested as a humble, expansive field of being. In this field, the typical separation of stillness and movement was dissolved, revealing them to be two inseparable aspects of the same unified cosmic dance. This peace possessed the quality of a singular, unified consciousness. It is the fundamental ground of reality and the only thing that fundamentally exists.
As the journey deepened, marked by a final, complete act of surrender, the dissolution of my ego into the Divine became absolute. It felt as though all the intricate, disparate, and often conflicting parts that constituted my conventional “self” were not merely being discarded, but were actively being purified in a sacred fire of love.
An overwhelming, all-consuming sense of perfect necessity filled every recess of my consciousness. Everything – every event, every moment, every being is precisely and perfectly as it is meant to be. This profound and humble realization generated within me an ecstatic flood of astonishment and quiet wonder. In this ultimate surrender, I experienced the cycle of death and rebirth simultaneously. My old self, bound by fear and individuality, utterly perished, while the new self, liberated and united with the whole, was instantly reborn into a state of safety. It was the most exquisitely tender, protective, and profound sensation imaginable — a state of being I had never conceived was possible.
This sacred medicine, operating at the deepest level of the spirit, serves as a powerful agent of divine reconnection, capable of retrieving and re-integrating those essential, authentic parts of ourselves that have long been forgotten, fragmented, or perhaps were never before consciously remembered to exist. May this offering serve as a small light on your own path.