Recently while watching a hawk trying to catch a mouse outside my window one morning, I began having a very unusual effect happen with my vision. It was quite curious; when I looked a certain way or focused my eyes a certain way the grass of the lawn outside rendered itself into a rich mandala-like pattern. It was unmistakable, and it took me by surprise. It would go away as I moved my eyes but I found that it would also come back and I would see the same pattern. It looked as if the landscape had arranged itself in a very coherent pattern visually. I wasn’t under the influence of any substance like a psychedelic.
I have never taken DMT, however, years ago when I was new to awakening, I often saw patterns like this in my mind and they were very similar to what I would later learn are called a Yantra, a mandala made up of triangular geometry. When I saw images in Indian culture that reminded me of the same patterns I saw in my mind’s eye, I figured that this may in fact be tied to some inner effects that awakening can have and artists illustrated them in the spiritual iconography of the yogis and yoginis who were experiencing this phenomenon as a result. I considered also that it was quite possible that in awakened states we may release small amounts of DMT, a substance that is in many plants and is produced by the body. It is a powerful psychedelic and if you are familiar with Terrence McKenna or Joe Rogan, you are likely to have gotten an introduction to its use and its effects.
People describe experiences of enhanced perception both visually but also of seeing other worlds open up to the mind and visual cortex when larger doses are taken. DMT is also present in the mixture called ayahuasca. What is so interesting to me is how both the ayahuasca, DMT, and awakening experiences all have the effect of aiding in the release of stored emotional blocks. I have considered that part of awakening involves the production of dmt (along with a host of other chemistry clustered in the endocrine system).
In the wake of my unusual encounter with my hawk as it tried to capture a mouse in the grass outside (actually it looked like it was playing with it…it never looked like it had actually found the mouse but that the mouse was hidden under a layer of dead grass thus protecting it—the effect was like a cat playing with a mouse, never really serious about catching it and eating it), I watched a video of a Joe Rogan podcast dealing with Covid and in the suggested section was a video of a graduate student describing the geometry of the DMT experience. It is entitled “The Hyperbolic Geometry Of DMT Experiences” on Youtube. It was an oddly timed discovery as I would soon find out.
I skimmed through the video and I came to a slide describing the different visual effects at different dosage levels. What was so interesting is the description of one dosage level that was identical to something I had seen the day I was looking outside my window that morning with the hawk. I will show you how the grass looked in a screen capture of their slide below:
What I saw corresponded to a known dosage amount, which is 4-8 milligram. I have wondered if it was possible during awakening, particularly with kundalini, whether we are experiencing elevated levels of dmt production, perhaps enough to briefly cause effects like the one I had recently seen.
I have observed that kundalini has had a very tangible series of physiological effects on the body, namely the endocrine system (which consists of the sexual organs, adrenal gland, pituitary, pancreas, thyroid, and pineal). The pineal gland is one center where dmt is suspected to be produced in small amounts in the body. Since I wasn’t that informed about the dmt trip aside from a few descriptions in videos, I found it interesting to find through some research that naturally occurring dmt experiences can be induced through breath work and meditation. Here was one source that describes a few of the symptoms of the natural dmt experience:
Common symptoms are as follows: pressure in the middle of the head and behind the sinuses, flashes of light with eyes closed, the feeling of the body vibrating as if laying on top of train tracks, twitching of the limbs, and a feeling of heaviness of the body.
http://q4lt.com/dmt-making-101
These are all symptoms that can be experienced with kundalini. One is suggestive of a third eye activation (not to say the pineal is the third eye—the third eye is a chakra and thus part of the energy body’s inner senses). Additionally, “ego death” and loss of ordinary identity happens at the correct dosage, another possible symptom depending how far along in the process that you are. Bliss has been reported as well as being able to overcome emotional issues from earlier life (including enhanced problem solving and intuitive powers of the mind). These are also features of kundalini (or can be experienced). My sense has been that the dmt experience is an analog to kundalini. Named the “spirit molecule” it may well be that what we are dealing with here is an experience native to kundalini.
Finally, what I found was that I could see the patterns when my eyes were slightly “defocused,” something that was hard to determine how to repeat simply because being far-sighted myself, it was hard for me to defocus naturally. I would say that there was a very slight defocusing of the eyes when this happened. I thought I would bring this experience forward for all of you psychonauts who are interested in the spectrum of experience possible with kundalini in specific but also how it may in fact be related to how dmt may be involved.
While it was known that the pineal gland in rats had dmt in them, it was not clear whether human pineal glands did the same production of dmt. In a recent study it was found that trace amounts were found in the human pineal gland as well as in the neurons of the brain also. That study is linked here:
UPDATE: the morning after preparing this post, I looked out my window and found the same hawk doing the same thing it had been doing the week before. And like last week, I found myself watching the hawk and discovered that the landscape began to change in ways that were consistent with the video that I mentioned that described the different dosage points of dmt. This time, I had two different visual effects. the first was one in which the landscape began to appear to break up into a series of points, like clumps of grass. These clumps appeared very regular and I wondered over how I could be seeing this the way that I was. Was it just that the landscape was that regular? The sun came out and highlighted the landscape and the effect became more pronounced. I looked away and the effect went away. Then, a moment later, while watching the hawk the landscape bloomed into this “chrysanthemum” effect like it did last week, but only for a moment. What this reminds me of is the effect that I sometimes get with certain types of lighting that put out a particular wavelength of light, like sodium lamps. It is almost as if the light is polarized and moves along certain lines somehow, which then highlights certain parts of the scene along with the light, producing a strange radial effect. Whatever is happening, it is not permanent and seems to be tied less to my eyes as it is my perception, which I sense involves inner sensing as well as physical sensing.
I will add that a couple of months ago I had a hawk feather show up at the bottom step of the deck where I live, right in my path. Who knows really. Messenger?
DMT is a material that breaks down very fast in the body. It is one reason why dmt trips are of such short duration (unless when using ayahuasca which has an added ingredient that slows the breakdown of dmt in the body, thus extending its “lifespan” in the brain and body). Is it possible that as the body releases dmt that we can have very short bursts of visual phenomenon and changes in consciousness? I will say for the record that for the forty minutes prior to seeing this this morning, I was in a meditative state with off the charts high bliss. Who knows for sure, but it seems worth paying attention to.
Waking The Infinite 
Great post. I think that dmt may well be generated by the pineal gland and when it does, outs us into an altered state of consciousness.
Of course melatonin (which is also produced by the pineal gland) removes our conscious awareness by putting us to sleep and allowing us to produce often vivid dreams and landscapes.
Light also has the same effect. A few years back I took a “light trip” on a hypnagogic light machine (Lucia No. 3) which also gave me the vistas, shapes and colours you described above, as well as a sense that the doors of perception to another realm entirely was ajar.
That is very interesting! Lucia No. 3??
You know, when I was about nine years old, I read how you could induce trance states by taking ping pong balls cut in half, covering your eyes while using a red-colored light. I was all over it for about a week, was unable to find ping pong balls…and I was NINE, so my attention span was on to other things. Where did THAT come from? Your comment stirred that memory. I think I have had repressed Tibetan tendencies since I was a child, lol!🙃
It’s a few years since I delved into this kind of subject, but I would generally endorse the ‘informed speculation’ of the blog post! The classic book on DMT probably remains Dr Rick Strassmann’s ‘DMT:the Spirit Molecule’, and he talks about the connections between the pineal gland and DMT. Not kundalini, however.
Quite a few years ago I had several experiences with ayahuasca. Experientially, I find it difficult to come up with anything very coherent about any relationship between those voyages and what has happened since the kundalini energy arose in my life. At peak flow, kundalini will present a slight similarity, and those patterns you describe are indeed typical of low-level entheogenic trips in general, not just DMT. I, too, can experience such patterns, more or less spontaneously, for example looking at grass in the garden, or the pebbles and stones in the front driveway. Relaxing my focus – in fact focussing on nothing – and simple gazing seems to be the precursor to this mildly ‘other’ state of mind.
Since kundalini appeared, ingesting DMT or any other entheogenic/psychedelic substance has been the last thing I’ve wanted to do! I feel it could do great damage to the kundalini process. This feeling might change with time, if kundalini becomes a more completely ‘smooth’ everyday flow. But ayahuasca and DMT seem unpredictable (maybe less so in the hands of truly experienced shamans) and crazy, and feeding that into the kundalini energy sounds a potentially very destructive thing to do. Other people may differ, of course….
All of which is gloriously inconclusive! My overall feeling is that ‘higher states of consciousness’ are all connected, and maybe the pineal gland is a focal element in the body. Putting on my conspiratorial hat, I suspect that such knowledge was once far more commonplace eg amongst the ancient Egyptian civilisations, but has been removed from the public sphere for nefarious reasons.
Very interesting, Ian, thanks for your feedback. It is interesting, too, because just two days ago I was trying out a movie online that was partly set in Inverness.
I think if dmt were directly responsible for triggering kundalini, we might see instances of that, but I don’t think we do…but my sense has been that dmt production might be triggered by kundalini, or what we think of as that…or at least related in some way. I am beginning to suspect that it is at least tangentially related and not entirely in a coincidental way, but also possibly in an more overarching way that speaks to the broader issues that may be tied to consciousness itself. But I think you are likely in a similar-ish camp yourself.
I do note, though, that some people that I have gotten to know over the years who have had awakenings have pointed to their experience with ayahuasca as a trigger (or it was after taking it that they then had an awakening). Who knows if it was directly a trigger or if they were already at a stage where they just needed a nudge, any nudge, to get them over the hill and into the unitary state.
I have tended to eye the use of substances as legitimate for exploring consciousness but with the caveat that it always seems that when we do, we take amounts far in excess of what the body might produce naturally, even in a state of samadhi (not that we necessarily know what those amounts are-perhaps someone has done the research). Dopamine, which is the body’s own pain reliever and bliss factory has an analog in the plant kingdom with opium and its even more enriched cousin heroin. By taking it outwardly instead of relying on the body to do it naturally, we sidestep our biology and can create a path both to addiction and to imbalance chemically. It seems that the body has great potential that we barely ever use or are not even aware of. When I was on about the dopamine hypothesis related to awakening, I saw what I thought was a very interesting correlation to how opium soften physical and emotional pain and how dopamine was making it possible for me to release a host of stored emotions surrounding unpleasant memories that were painful. It was in that dopamine high, much higher than normal, that my mind just no longer cared about much of anything and with it came a cascade of releases and realizations about what I had been holding onto it. Well anyway…
About a year and a half ago, while being burned quite badly in the studio, an odd thought came into my mind while the burn was taking place, which was this: “I am not going to feel the pain of this burn….it is just going to go away.” I am nothing if not the experimenter. But I entered into a very calm silence as all of this was happening, about three seconds at the most with my contact on the hot iron, a silence much like when in meditation, and in about three seconds, what would have been howling pain turned instead into a completely different sensation. It was the difference between crunching down on a red hot chili and a peppermint. Instead of heat or this hard searing pain, it felt….cool. It remained that way until the burn began to crust over and heal. Even then, there was never a pain that I would associate with having had a burn. I was completely surprised, and pleased with my little experiment, even if this was a one-off (I haven’t tried to repeat this experiment!). But what it told me is that we have much more control over our body than we might believe or be aware of. Was there a sudden change in the chemistry at the point of the burn, or did I simply hijack my brain, coercing it into interpreting the data in a completely different way? Hard to know for sure, I wish I did know. I also think that how we choose to feel…the structure of our feelings in any given moment, appears to me to be reflected instantly in the production of a host of chemicals in the body in order to properly mirror that state which the mind is saying it wants to feel (even when it is a negative feeling…the body appears to be a loyal pup in following the “master” or mind around—some of these responses are on the order of fractions of a second in response to some new decision to feel a certain way). So what happens when we decide to change this? What more can we learn from this kind of thing? For the person on the street I think that thinking sounds a bit strange because we can’t really control how we feel, can we? It takes getting deep into that substratum of feeling and emotional landscape, I think, to get at what appears to me to be the source code where so much goes on in a more or less automatic way. Were we made to be automatons, or is there another way to be? When I see the some Chinese and Tibetan groups who are able to regulate the temperature of their bodies or how Swami Rama showed how he could change blood pressure in one hand while leaving the blood pressure normal in the other as hints at this capability. And of course this is where it seem Parker has now gone down some rabbit hole or another and is off on some far-flung diversion…except that I see all of this as interwoven, connected.
I can’t say for sure whether my body was producing a dose of dmt in those moments. What I do know is that I was getting this interesting mandala effect which was strong enough to seemingly alter normal visual perception, and in your reply I see you have done the same kind of thing. Is there a benefit to this? Does our nature have a preference for this artifact of what might be our physical chemistry (or maybe I am wrong and there is something about how the rods and cones in the eyes are constructed that will help to explain this)? Does it open up more perceptual doorways even though at its lower doses seem to only create mild innocuous effects that seem to have little discernible “meaning” to us? Not having ever taken dmt, I can’t really say. Anyway, interesting as ever, Ian, and thanks for your two pence on this.