“Pure awareness”: Inside the psychedelic that erases space, time, and self

Holding a Sonoran Desert toad and squeezing the slimy glands on its head to extract its toxic secretions is a strange experience. Far stranger is what one of the compounds within that mixture can do to the human mind. 5-MeO-DMT, or simply 5MeO, is one of the world’s most powerful psychedelics, capable of shattering your sense of space, time, and self within seconds. 

Like its molecular cousin DMT, 5MeO occurs naturally in various plants, with effects that usually fade within an hour. But unlike other psychedelics, 5MeO doesn’t flood the mind with intricate hallucinations. Instead, it tends to erase everything except for awareness itself.

For some, the result is more than a mind-bending trip. It’s a complete deconstruction of subjective experience itself — a glimpse, perhaps, into what lies beneath all our thoughts, sensations, and stories. 

A minimal model of consciousness

Our minds are constantly buzzing with stuff: thoughts, feelings, body sensations, images, scents, sounds. Naive intuition suggests this is all there is to the mind. But what if there is some bedrock of conscious experience upon which it rests?

For millennia, Buddhist traditions have described experiences that reveal a minimal state of mind — one of pure awareness. Accessing these raw, unadorned states of consciousness is a central motivation for many meditators. From the perspective of consciousness science, it also represents an attractive avenue to study the underlying mechanisms of human experience. The philosopher Thomas Metzinger, for example, has argued that a minimal model of consciousness — that is, awareness without the residue of thoughts, emotions, and the self — can offer a deep scientific understanding of the essence of consciousness. By examining its most basic form, we might learn how more complex forms are built upon those foundations or what the minimum necessary components for consciousness really are.

But reaching these states through meditation is difficult, if not impossible, for most. Some meditators never get there, despite decades of practice. Even among those who do report such experiences, their descriptions are often tangled up with the language and imagery of Buddhist texts, making it hard to separate genuine experience from suggestion.

5-MeO-DMT may offer a more practical way to access and study these stripped-down states of mind. As a scientist interested in consciousness, most of my previous research has focused on understanding how psychedelics act on the human brain. Then I stumbled across reports of individuals ingesting 5-MeO-DMT (or simply 5MeO), describing effects that sounded similar to those reported by long-time meditators. 

That 5MeO could induce these experiences was counterintuitive. After all, psychedelics tend to add stuff to the mind, not empty it. Most induce a wide range of subjective experiences, including colourful visual hallucinations, bodily sensations, changes in cognition and thoughts, and feelings of unity or connectedness with the world or others. For example, DMT — the key ingredient of the Amazonian psychedelic brew called ayahuasca — can thrust your subjective awareness into immersive visual worlds, often described as highly geometric and colorful, and sometimes populated by seemingly intelligent beings. But with 5MeO, something completely different happens: It radically deconstructs all possible worlds, sparing only awareness.

It’s no wonder that 5MeO has been dubbed the “Mount Everest of psychedelics,” and fittingly, its experiences are often referred to as “whiteouts.” But beyond its ability to eliminate the sense of space and time, its most interesting effect lies in the way it dissolves the self. This is key. The question of whether the self is necessary for consciousness to occur has been debated by philosophers for thousands of years — and it remains unsettled. 

No limits, no objects, no dimensions

Driven by the idea that 5MeO might offer a unique window into consciousness, we set out to test whether it truly induces states of pure awareness — and might serve as an important tool for consciousness science. Rather than studying the effects of 5MeO in the artificial confines of the lab, we decided to first study its effects in the real world. We wanted to get a sense of the range of experiences the compound produces at different doses and in different settings. So we attended retreats where individuals were already planning to ingest 5MeO, then measured their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) caps. As a tool that measures brain rhythms, EEG helps neuroscientists characterize different states of consciousness, such as sleep, anaesthesia, and vegetative conditions. Understanding how these brain rhythms operate under 5MeO could provide a basic understanding of the mechanisms underlying pure awareness.

But first, we needed to confirm whether these experiences truly reflected a state of deconstructed consciousness with awareness still intact. To do that, we conducted detailed interviews with participants using a microphenomenological technique. This approach helps people vividly relive their experiences, rather than simply recalling them from memory. That distinction matters — naive recollection often blurs our actual lived experiences with our current interpretations, leading to distortions or confabulations. Microphenomenology helps reduce those biases, which is why it has become an increasingly popular tool in consciousness research.

Our results revealed that the 5MeO experience consisted of several stages. Just seconds after smoking the substance, individuals felt a rapid onset of effects, characterized by the body or the visual field crumbling, collapsing, or shattering. This was followed by an immersion stage, during which thoughts started to gradually disappear. At this point, many individuals felt that they were becoming the emotions rather than simply feeling them.

This was followed by the abstract stage, where participants began to feel that their bodies were dissolving entirely. All capacity for thought vanished. At this moment, participants described their experience in abstract terms.  “There were no limits or no objects. No dimensions even,” one participant said. “I had no thoughts. I had no senses … But I had some feeling of … like a pyramid or something … it was more kind of a feeling of the space.”

Only 29% of individuals reached the peak of the 5MeO experience — a stage we dubbed everything and nothing. These individuals experienced awareness without self, time, or space. There was no distinction between subject and object, or even the capacity for thought and reflection. But at the same time, the experience felt full, containing everything while also evoking a sense of void. “I was not there,” one participant said. “It was like I was accessing ‘whiteness’. Quiet, blissful, enormous whiteness … I was everything … There was no controller, or observer … It was not ‘me.’ I don’t know what happened. I somehow had a glimpse of … of … of the wholeness.” 

This description provided strong hints that we were onto something meaningful. A state of fully deconstructed consciousness that preserved awareness. A glimpse into the minimal model of consciousness outlined by Metzinger. It seemed that 5MeO could be a potential avenue for us to induce states of pure awareness without having to rely on the reports of advanced meditators with thousands of hours of practice. But the potential advantage goes even further. By understanding how 5MeO interacts with various receptors in the brain, we could gain a detailed understanding of how changes in brain activity give rise to these experiences. 

The EEG data we collected complemented these subjective reports, revealing a reduction of alpha and beta brain rhythms. These rhythms help coordinate signaling between higher and lower regions of the brain. High-level regions process abstract thoughts linked to our sense of self, which often become more prominent when we close our eyes and think about ourselves, our relationships, and our place in time. We also found a reduction in beta rhythms, a change that our previous research has linked to feelings of disembodiment during both psychedelic experiences and meditation. Together, these neural patterns seem to fit with what many participants described: the fading of bodily boundaries and the narrative sense of self.

Reductions in alpha brain rhythms reflect a state where neurons fire more freely. But how could a state of deconstructed consciousness — without any contents except for awareness itself — arise from a state of disinhibition? A closer look at our phenomenological results offers an intriguing possibility. Rather than reflecting an experience devoid of anything, the experience of everything and nothing reveals a state of consciousness that’s overflooded, overriding the capacity of attention to capture any meaningful information from the experience.

Still, these findings are preliminary, and the experiences did not take place in a controlled laboratory environment. Other researchers recently reported somewhat different brain results in a study also conducted in retreat settings. We are currently seeking to settle these potential differences in a controlled study where we will administer 5MeO while capturing brain activity in greater detail and with a wider range of participants.

Eliminating the burdens of the mind

One of the most striking elements of our findings was that experiences of deconstruction induced by 5MeO were commonly linked with feelings of bliss and well-being. Meditators have reported a similar phenomenon of intense feelings of pleasure once they’ve reached advanced stages in their practice. 

Why does pure awareness lead to bliss? We still don’t know, but it opens fascinating questions about the relationship between consciousness and mental health. It is possible that our everyday onslaught of thoughts, sensations, and feelings constrains and burdens the mind. Eliminating those burdens may free the mind to simply appreciate awareness itself, and in that simplicity, find refuge. Similar claims suggest that excessive self-focus can fuel psychological distress. Psychedelics offer unique ways to potentially relieve suffering by loosening that rigid self-focus. 

But while 5MeO may induce feelings of bliss, it can also trigger elevated states of anxiety during its effects, and we still don’t fully understand why this is the case for some people. It’s also possible that the compound reduces suffering through other means. Research suggests 5MeO can promote neuroplasticity in a rapid and enduring way, with recent findings showing it increased the number of spines (parts of neurons that enable connections with other neurons) in the medial prefrontal cortex of mice — an area that plays a crucial role in several mental health conditions and the sense of self.  

Future research will be key in clarifying exactly how 5MeO affects the brain and its potential benefits for mental health. What’s becoming clear is that this psychedelic may be a reliable gateway into models of consciousness that most people would otherwise never reach — experiences stripped of the thoughts, sensations, and feelings that normally flood the mind. It’s a glimpse into the bare awareness that lies quietly beneath every waking moment.