the first time I smoked DMT it was 200mgs yellow crystal on top of high-grade marijuana, I cleared it in a single hit. I remember feeling like I was at the bottom of a foggy mountain with dirt roads, I was overcome with an intense feeling of panic and deja-vu, I felt like a lost child, everything I knew about who I was or my life or earth seemed like a distant dream, like I dissolved out of existence, I interpreted this as dying, I knew that I was dead, and I was emotionally overwhelmed while confronting the event of my death....I could not tell if I was breathing or not, I would take air in, but couldn't feel it, then noticed a pain in my chest, a giant mantis like being had its claws in my chest, it proceeded to tear open my chest and stomach removing all my organs and insides, I was about to go into shock when I saw a bright green light flash over my shoulder, it nearly hit me, it then became a beautiful geometric object, morphing and color changing, like a jewel from hyperspace, the mantis then put this object in my torn up body, he began to make billions of these objects, each one unique and radiating beautiful colored light ans he filled my body with them, then I was sealed up and propelled into an orange light where I was resurrected...then I felt as if I was being pushed through a membrane, I was being born....then back to reality....those who were there said in reality I curled up into a ball and began to cry for 20 minutes, I was wondering why my face was wet, because it felt like I had actually just went through being born...any way the immense deep spiritual and psychological implications of this experience left me for ever transformed, reborn as a new person entirely, it was the single most meaningful thing that has ever happened to me
-eg

I'm not sure if dosage is in fact such an important factor. My first experience of DMT was with 60 mg with breakthrough and total ego loss. Since then I've found 35 mg is normally sufficient for breakthrough although it's even happened at 25 mg.

Regarding ego loss I think this has far more to do with attitude as you enter. You have somewhere (don't ask me where!) the choice to fully enter into the experience, accept everything, in which case ego disappears. You also have the choice to be a witness to the experience which in my opinion is surrender with one hand on the lifeboat (in case you want to change your mind later). And then there's fighting the experience - just don't go there

The value of complete ego loss, in my humble opinion, is that it absolutely robs you of any context. All these problems we hang on to, anxiety / fears / depressions / etc, get their fuel from the belief that our life is real. The wonder of losing all context for this life is that we see (it is seen) that what we thought of as real is simply a version, an interpretation, a convenient method of looking at things in order to survive. OK, so a lot of that is going to return after the experience but it's never going to be 100% believed again. Use all kinds of dosages to explore this. No harm in taking three/four different doses in an afternoon with much reflection in between (but don't let anyone know I said that )

[...]
3 days before my DMT breakthrough I saw two copper colored spheres in the sky, I was dead sober, I'm not going into that, but after I saw them my life was thrown in to synchronistic novelty, impossible strings of coincidences, impossible interconnections...life got fucking weird! And on the 3rd day I had a transformative event facilitated by DMT...

So many people can take DMT and get nothing from it, it doesn't transform them, it doesn't induce spiritual realization or enlightenment, it doesn't induce peak experiance (what the Sufi would call fana, or what's known as beatific vision...arjuna in chapter 11 of the gita is a perfect example...) what happened to me is NOT the norm...
[...]

While it was entertaining to consider the notion that your experience transcended linear time sufficiently to project a marker (the copper spheres) into 'the past', the importance of what you say here really struck me - that psychedelic substances show up as incidental markers to states of transcendence, projected into this 'reality' from wherever else as red herrings, with the irony that material substances appear to act as gateways to the incorporeal.

Is this how dear Albert Hofmann failed to discover LSD the first time around? This other world of (divine) transformation is at hand at all times and the seeming activity of our beloved visionary compounds is merely a continuation of the grand cosmic joke, being precisely as useful as watching television...?

As I've said, Swiss and German chemists have a reputation -- today and back then -- for being absolutely meticulous. If we had gone into Albert's lab at Sandoz in 1943, we would probably have found everything in its place, organized in an obsessively neat manner. No dirty glassware, no trash on the floor, meticulous. How in the world did a meticulous Swiss chemist get 50 to 75 micrograms or more of LSD into his body? We don't know.

Another fact: I've made LSD in my lab on many occasions for research purposes, possibly in not so meticulous a manner as Albert Hofmann. Nothing ever happened. I had several graduate students who made LSD as an intermediate for projects. No accidental ingestion of LSD ever occurred. A technician in my lab makes it routinely because we use it as a drug to train our rats. He's learned by experience that he never gets high, nothing ever happens. And yesterday I was talking to Nick Sand, and Nick said, "I made a solution of LSD in DMSO…" -- DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) is a chemical that greatly enhances absorption of other chemicals through the skin -- he says, "…I painted it on my skin. Nothing happened." A concentrated solution and nothing happened! How did this very meticulous Swiss chemist get the LSD into his body? I don't know.

The other fact we need to think about is when Albert was a child, he had a spontaneous mystical experience. Now depending on whether you're a psychologist or a psychiatrist or whatever, we could say that Albert had a predisposition to altered states of consciousness.

So what facts do we know? I'm going to formulate a hypothesis. He took a dose that by your consensus should have lasted certainly more than two hours, but it only lasted two hours. He was a meticulous chemist -- a Swiss chemist. Anyone I know who's worked with LSD -- and Nick Sand painted a solution of it on his arm -- didn't get high. This doesn't make sense. And what is this peculiar presentiment? Why the 25th in the series? Inexplicable! And, he was predisposed to altered states of consciousness.

The only hypothesis I can come up with that's consistent with all of these facts is that on April 16, 1943, Albert Hofmann did not get LSD in his body at all. He had a spontaneous mystical experience!

Now if I were working in the lab with a new chemical, and I started having kaleidoscopic visions of wonderful colors and patterns, my first thought wouldn't be that I was having a spontaneous experience. My first thought would be, "What was that new chemical I was working with? I need to tell Sasha about it." [laughter]

I think that's what happened, that's the hypothesis. We can't test that hypothesis, but when I saw Albert in Basel a couple years ago, I presented that particular hypothesis to him and said, "What do you think?" He said, "It's entirely possible." So, that's our little experiment, and I think most of you really didn't think seriously about the discovery of LSD, but it puts a different light on it.

Now one aside to that we could then bring up is this. If the force that caused him to have this peculiar presentiment -- and very peculiar it is -- is the same force that induced him to have this mystical experience, which caused him to focus on this chemical, we can hope it might happen again.

https://erowid.org/gener...indstates4_nichols.shtml

Recurrent Depression: A SPECT Study.
Sanches RF1, de Lima Osório F, Dos Santos RG, Macedo LR, Maia-de-Oliveira JP, Wichert-Ana L, de Araujo DB, Riba J, Crippa JA, Hallak JE.
Author information
Abstract
Ayahuasca is an Amazonian botanical hallucinogenic brew which contains dimethyltryptamine, a 5-HT2A receptor agonist, and harmine, a monoamine-oxidase A inhibitor. Our group recently reported that ayahuasca administration was associated with fast-acting antidepressive effects in 6 depressive patients. The objective of the present work was to assess the antidepressive potentials of ayahuasca in a bigger sample and to investigate its effects on regional cerebral blood flow. In an open-label trial conducted in an inpatient psychiatric unit, 17 patients with recurrent depression received an oral dose of ayahuasca (2.2 mL/kg) and were evaluated with the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale, the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, the Young Mania Rating Scale, and the Clinician Administered Dissociative States Scale during acute ayahuasca effects and 1, 7, 14, and 21 days after drug intake. Blood perfusion was assessed eight hours after drug administration by means of single photon emission tomography. Ayahuasca administration was associated with increased psychoactivity (Clinician Administered Dissociative States Scale) and significant score decreases in depression-related scales (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale, Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale) from 80 minutes to day 21. Increased blood perfusion in the left nucleus accumbens, right insula and left subgenual area, brain regions implicated in the regulation of mood and emotions, were observed after ayahuasca intake. Ayahuasca was well tolerated. Vomiting was the only adverse effect recorded, being reported by 47% of the volunteers. Our results suggest that ayahuasca may have fast-acting and sustained antidepressive properties. These results should be replicated in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26650973

Our results suggest that ayahuasca may have fast-acting and sustained antidepressive properties. These results should be replicated in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials.

The DMT was not special, the experiance facilitated by it was!
-eg

I think it's the "shock" that may be benneficial in a way...

I suffered from mild depression until 2012 when I smoked DMT for the first time...



Since this experiance , absolutely no depression has returned, and I have had a renewed love for life, I also gained deep insight into death.

I have heard many similar stories of depression or anxiety disappearing after an intense DMT flash...

...however it's usually an intense flash, it's a shocking flash...

Maybe the "shock" is necessary?



-eg

shamanic abilities are generally brought on by a personal crisis, such as illness or sudden shock. where this is not naturally forthcoming, initiation designed to produce the effects of such a state are used to bring about rebirth as a shaman - J. Mathews;the shamanism bible

Although direct causation cannot be established, these data suggest that regular use of psychedelic drugs could potentially lead to structural changes in brain areas supporting attentional processes, self-referential thought, and internal mentation. These changes could underlie the previously reported personality changes in long-term users and highlight the involvement of the PCC in the effects of psychedelics.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP. All rights reserved.

Abstract
Psychedelic agents have a long history of use by humans for their capacity to induce profound modifications in perception, emotion and cognitive processes. Despite increasing knowledge of the neural mechanisms involved in the acute effects of these drugs, the impact of sustained psychedelic use on the human brain remains largely unknown. Molecular pharmacology studies have shown that psychedelic 5-hydroxytryptamine (5HT)2A agonists stimulate neurotrophic and transcription factors associated with synaptic plasticity. These data suggest that psychedelics could potentially induce structural changes in brain tissue. Here we looked for differences in cortical thickness (CT) in regular users of psychedelics. We obtained magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images of the brains of 22 regular users of ayahuasca (a preparation whose active principle is the psychedelic 5HT2A agonist N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT)) and 22 controls matched for age, sex, years of education, verbal IQ and fluid IQ. Ayahuasca users showed significant CT differences in midline structures of the brain, with thinning in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a key node of the default mode network. CT values in the PCC were inversely correlated with the intensity and duration of prior use of ayahuasca and with scores on self-transcendence, a personality trait measuring religiousness, transpersonal feelings and spirituality. Although direct causation cannot be established, these data suggest that regular use of psychedelic drugs could potentially lead to structural changes in brain areas supporting attentional processes, self-referential thought, and internal mentation. These changes could underlie the previously reported personality changes in long-term users and highlight the involvement of the PCC in the effects of psychedelics.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP. All rights reserved.