I would recommend reading the thread linked below first, as it provides both the chronology of these experiences and more background context, including the specific protocol later in the thread:
Resurrection Protocols - A Shared Resonance Field with DMT + Eye Gazing + Quartz
Our next experience with another partial version of this protocol took place about a month later, in 2023:
The three of us arrived at a building-sized, extremely quartz-rich boulder in the morning and clamored up onto it. The tall forest was filled with lichen and moss covered boulders and cliffs, providing a stunningly beautiful setting. We took 50ug of LSD and relaxed. I had stayed awake the night before, and my companions had only been awake for 5 or 6 hours by the time we arrived (reasons for this are explained in my previous summary linked above, and Tony Wright’s work: Introduction | Raising The Dead ).
Once we had settled in, we began taking small hits from a DMT vape while holding a meditative gaze on the hand-sized amethyst crystals we had brought with us. After we felt comfortable and perception seemed pulled into noticeably greater focus, I took another hit from the vape and sat opposite my partner.
The moment our eyes met the psychedelic state was amplified several-fold. The question of whether there was some effect from eye gazing vs. looking anywhere else was undeniable. My entire visual field had shifted, and it seemed as if I could take it in all at once, instead of focusing on a single spot. Her face morphed into progressively more digital animal faces, and then more alien looking faces.
The air around her became filled with tiny spirals, or maybe concentric circles, slowly twisting in and out of existence. The energy around us would crescendo and then recede, kindling our euphoria with waves of perceptual focus that we seemed to be able to see and feel. Once we felt it had reached a coherence plateau where no more progress was being made, we took a break.
Later, my partner and our other companion began eye gazing together for their first time. Our friend was immediately blown away by how eye gazing instantly shifted her state of mind and visual field. After a few minutes, they also had reached a plateau and decoupled their gaze.
We took a long break, and then began taking small hits from the vape, followed by crystal-gazing. Once I made eye contact with our friend the experience instantly shifted to a cartoonish and dark quality. She looked indescribably bizarre and frightening in a way impossible to describe. This was not like the transient facial changes one might witness in a mirror - the degree of stability in this scary form she now took was utterly shocking.
Without enough medicines and practice crystal gazing first, our eye gazing experiences can sometimes get stuck in a state of distortion/decoherence, punctuated by death-themes and ghoulish faces. This proverbial “underworld” was where we seemed stuck. I tried to relax and sit with equanimity, allowing myself to let go so coherence could build, but I didn’t have much luck, and I think we needed to smoke more of the vape in retrospect. In hindsight, we had taken too little LSD as well - we had thought these tabs were 100ug, but they later turned out to be more like 50ug. Later we also realized the importance of all of us engaging in a bit of sleep deprivation to inhibit the ego/left hemisphere, and how helpful it can be to practice more with the amethyst before eye gazing.
Luckily I had heard that this type of scary energetic visage was a possibility, which eased my shock. A friend had twice witnessed his eye gazing partner go from a frighteningly real looking zombie, to slowly coming back to life and eventually glowing with divine, magnetic, archetypal radiance - making the theme of “resurrection” and “rebirth” that these techniques often fell under in ancient times seem incredibly literal. Knowing some of the possible terrain ahead of time made this much easier for me, and my partner and I were already familiar with some scary faces anyways. We broke our gaze, had a hug, and talked about the fears that held us back, along with how we could improve our approach.
5 or 6 hours into it, my partner and I decided to give it one last attempt. We hit the vape and crystal gazed first, which seemed to pull perception into much greater resolution. After a few minutes of that we made eye contact. Again the intensity of the psychedelic state ramped up once we connected. I could feel a greater perceptual focus building but felt myself resisting, as fear built and then threatened to over take me. I tried to stuff it down at first. My ego seems to resist these experiences at times - probably because, to the ego, a significant loss of control might as well be analogous to dying, and having your reality dissolved.
I looked at the resistance as a familiar signpost that it was beginning to work. In what felt like my ego’s last ditch effort to derail the experience, a scary concept emerged in my head in the words “dead doll faces”. I laughed at the absurd thought and could feel that these scary words and resistance was my frightened, decoherent ego trying to maintain control. I told myself to shut up and continued without worry. (I mention this silly part of the story for a reason I’ll get to towards the end)
The experience continued to build. At one point, I held the amethyst cluster next to my head and took another hit of the vape while maintaining eye contact. She did the same with a clear quartz geode. Coherence seemed to be building and euphoria was growing, but we hit a plateau before long. We then heard a bizarre sounding bird, and she laughed once we realized it was actually our friend making a funny sound as they explored the boulder around us.
As my partner laughed, I realized that her teeth looked like they were glowing a neon green color. This looked extremely realistic to me, so I explained to her what I was seeing. When she smiled, the obvious green glow was still there. Her teeth were glowing green? Wth? Then I realized that it wasn’t her teeth that were green, it was a glowing green field around her entire body - extremely stable and slowly fluxing like a standing wave of energy. Her white teeth had merely provided the proper contrast so that the neon field could stand out from the background of darker colors. I had seen the same field around her during our first session at this location using a microdose of mushroom combined with the vape, but the LSD seemed to add another layer of stability and far greater length to the experience.
I was excited and asked if she wanted to continue. We took another hit of the vape, and I held the crystal up near my head again. I slowed my breathing and began to calm my excitement (somewhat). The eye gazing went as it had previously, only this time the green field around her seemed to grow increasingly stable and strong. Another white translucent field encapsulated the green one, making the scene a beautiful mix of sci-fi, ghostly and angelic.
After a few minutes it seemed to plateau again and my partner wanted to take a break, so we broke our gaze. Still seeing the stable fields around her, I then looked around at my environment in absolute awe. The large clear quartz obelisk we had brought was glowing, with shimmering standing waves emanating off of it like a heat haze. I moved it around, looked away and looked back, and the fields emanating off of it remained stable. As I looked, it felt as if it was quickly amplifying the state I was in. My visual and perceptual resolution felt dialed to 11, and grasping it felt like touching a static electrical field (like an old TV screen)
I was even more dumbstruck when I looked at the quartz boulder’s surface, next to where we sat. A massive standing wave of energy appeared to be emanating off of it. It is impossible for me to describe this in a way that does it justice. It was a freakishly stable, slow moving, jeweled wave - like the back of some kind of divine serpent, or river - somewhat shipibo esque in pattern, velvety in texture, with lines of electric neon gold, orange and green moving along slowly within its mind blowing cymatic structure.
It felt incredibly alien to behold, yet oddly familiar and deja-vu inducing all at once, as if it was imbued with ancient power and a magnetic aspect that pulled on my perception and body physically. Our previous session here had been relatively deeper, but unstable. This was a new level of stability and just sheer jaw dropping realness that I would have thought impossible - an impression which consistently seems to be a distinguishing feature of resonance states, but is hopelessly difficult to convey in language.
This somehow seemed far more real than almost anything I had ever seen up to this point in 20 years of deep psychedelic exploration. I’d look away, look back, and the fields were still there. The more I looked at this standing wave, the more my psychedelic state was pulled into what I can only describe as the beginnings of a resonance state..
Eventually I did some yoga and felt reborn for the second time in a row on this boulder. I felt as if I was opening my eyes for the first time, and had been charged up to a new layer of awareness of my body and the blissful, unimaginably beautiful and mysterious reality we find ourselves seamlessly embedded within. I remember looking down at my bare feet on the moss, and suddenly feeling as aware of my legs and feet as I was of my arms and hands - a bizarre and amazing sensation, as if I was beginning to truly use my limbs for the first time, but it seemed more natural and functional than ever. I felt a sense of oneness with the rocks and universe around me that brought me to tears. It seemed as if my entire life up till that point had come into a much clearer focus.
Perception of resonance waves (or whatever the hell they are) around my partner, the rocks and crystals lasted for about another half hour, probably 35 minutes after my last small inhalation of DMT. There were no other normal psychedelic visuals to note, as if they had been a side effect of the medicines, or decoherent glimpses of resonance phenomena. Slowly the state began to fade, but a strong after-glow continued for months after this experience. I'm not sure it ever faded entirely.
Later that day, I told my partner about the resistance I had encountered during the beginning of our last eye gazing attempt, and how the ridiculous concept of “dead doll faces” had even popped into my head just as we had begun eye gazing that second time. She replied “I think I saw that!”, and said that during this same part of that eye gazing attempt, she had seen swirling vortexes all around my head made up of what she specifically interpreted as “dead doll faces” at the time. We had once again encountered the same random concept or archetype (or whatever) at approximately the same moment.
This wasn’t the first or the last time we would have what seemed like shocking levels of shared visual/physical/psychic content during these sessions, but it still felt re-assuring that there seemed to be a connection that was becoming consistently accessible. After reading books on ancient mythology like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, this sort of imagery seemed to make more sense. It is common for journeys within to first appear scary and dark, with themes of death and archetypal content as the ego’s illusory reality is essentially destroyed. But with a little persistence and surrender, what seems at first like a death can seamlessly transform into something illuminating, like a rebirth of a more connected sense of self.
This experience was only a partial glimpse of a resonance state in retrospect, not a “resurrection”, but even glimpses such as this were mind blowing and profound relative to many years of dedicated psychedelic exploration. I share this mostly to convey more of the chronology we experienced, and to set the stage for the more bizarre experience that followed.
This experience, and the one I shared before it, were with partial protocols. The next outdoor session was our first time doing the full protocol.
Resurrection Protocols - A Shared Resonance Field with DMT + Eye Gazing + Quartz
Our next experience with another partial version of this protocol took place about a month later, in 2023:
The three of us arrived at a building-sized, extremely quartz-rich boulder in the morning and clamored up onto it. The tall forest was filled with lichen and moss covered boulders and cliffs, providing a stunningly beautiful setting. We took 50ug of LSD and relaxed. I had stayed awake the night before, and my companions had only been awake for 5 or 6 hours by the time we arrived (reasons for this are explained in my previous summary linked above, and Tony Wright’s work: Introduction | Raising The Dead ).
Once we had settled in, we began taking small hits from a DMT vape while holding a meditative gaze on the hand-sized amethyst crystals we had brought with us. After we felt comfortable and perception seemed pulled into noticeably greater focus, I took another hit from the vape and sat opposite my partner.
The moment our eyes met the psychedelic state was amplified several-fold. The question of whether there was some effect from eye gazing vs. looking anywhere else was undeniable. My entire visual field had shifted, and it seemed as if I could take it in all at once, instead of focusing on a single spot. Her face morphed into progressively more digital animal faces, and then more alien looking faces.
The air around her became filled with tiny spirals, or maybe concentric circles, slowly twisting in and out of existence. The energy around us would crescendo and then recede, kindling our euphoria with waves of perceptual focus that we seemed to be able to see and feel. Once we felt it had reached a coherence plateau where no more progress was being made, we took a break.
Later, my partner and our other companion began eye gazing together for their first time. Our friend was immediately blown away by how eye gazing instantly shifted her state of mind and visual field. After a few minutes, they also had reached a plateau and decoupled their gaze.
We took a long break, and then began taking small hits from the vape, followed by crystal-gazing. Once I made eye contact with our friend the experience instantly shifted to a cartoonish and dark quality. She looked indescribably bizarre and frightening in a way impossible to describe. This was not like the transient facial changes one might witness in a mirror - the degree of stability in this scary form she now took was utterly shocking.
Without enough medicines and practice crystal gazing first, our eye gazing experiences can sometimes get stuck in a state of distortion/decoherence, punctuated by death-themes and ghoulish faces. This proverbial “underworld” was where we seemed stuck. I tried to relax and sit with equanimity, allowing myself to let go so coherence could build, but I didn’t have much luck, and I think we needed to smoke more of the vape in retrospect. In hindsight, we had taken too little LSD as well - we had thought these tabs were 100ug, but they later turned out to be more like 50ug. Later we also realized the importance of all of us engaging in a bit of sleep deprivation to inhibit the ego/left hemisphere, and how helpful it can be to practice more with the amethyst before eye gazing.
Luckily I had heard that this type of scary energetic visage was a possibility, which eased my shock. A friend had twice witnessed his eye gazing partner go from a frighteningly real looking zombie, to slowly coming back to life and eventually glowing with divine, magnetic, archetypal radiance - making the theme of “resurrection” and “rebirth” that these techniques often fell under in ancient times seem incredibly literal. Knowing some of the possible terrain ahead of time made this much easier for me, and my partner and I were already familiar with some scary faces anyways. We broke our gaze, had a hug, and talked about the fears that held us back, along with how we could improve our approach.
5 or 6 hours into it, my partner and I decided to give it one last attempt. We hit the vape and crystal gazed first, which seemed to pull perception into much greater resolution. After a few minutes of that we made eye contact. Again the intensity of the psychedelic state ramped up once we connected. I could feel a greater perceptual focus building but felt myself resisting, as fear built and then threatened to over take me. I tried to stuff it down at first. My ego seems to resist these experiences at times - probably because, to the ego, a significant loss of control might as well be analogous to dying, and having your reality dissolved.
I looked at the resistance as a familiar signpost that it was beginning to work. In what felt like my ego’s last ditch effort to derail the experience, a scary concept emerged in my head in the words “dead doll faces”. I laughed at the absurd thought and could feel that these scary words and resistance was my frightened, decoherent ego trying to maintain control. I told myself to shut up and continued without worry. (I mention this silly part of the story for a reason I’ll get to towards the end)
The experience continued to build. At one point, I held the amethyst cluster next to my head and took another hit of the vape while maintaining eye contact. She did the same with a clear quartz geode. Coherence seemed to be building and euphoria was growing, but we hit a plateau before long. We then heard a bizarre sounding bird, and she laughed once we realized it was actually our friend making a funny sound as they explored the boulder around us.
As my partner laughed, I realized that her teeth looked like they were glowing a neon green color. This looked extremely realistic to me, so I explained to her what I was seeing. When she smiled, the obvious green glow was still there. Her teeth were glowing green? Wth? Then I realized that it wasn’t her teeth that were green, it was a glowing green field around her entire body - extremely stable and slowly fluxing like a standing wave of energy. Her white teeth had merely provided the proper contrast so that the neon field could stand out from the background of darker colors. I had seen the same field around her during our first session at this location using a microdose of mushroom combined with the vape, but the LSD seemed to add another layer of stability and far greater length to the experience.
I was excited and asked if she wanted to continue. We took another hit of the vape, and I held the crystal up near my head again. I slowed my breathing and began to calm my excitement (somewhat). The eye gazing went as it had previously, only this time the green field around her seemed to grow increasingly stable and strong. Another white translucent field encapsulated the green one, making the scene a beautiful mix of sci-fi, ghostly and angelic.
After a few minutes it seemed to plateau again and my partner wanted to take a break, so we broke our gaze. Still seeing the stable fields around her, I then looked around at my environment in absolute awe. The large clear quartz obelisk we had brought was glowing, with shimmering standing waves emanating off of it like a heat haze. I moved it around, looked away and looked back, and the fields emanating off of it remained stable. As I looked, it felt as if it was quickly amplifying the state I was in. My visual and perceptual resolution felt dialed to 11, and grasping it felt like touching a static electrical field (like an old TV screen)
I was even more dumbstruck when I looked at the quartz boulder’s surface, next to where we sat. A massive standing wave of energy appeared to be emanating off of it. It is impossible for me to describe this in a way that does it justice. It was a freakishly stable, slow moving, jeweled wave - like the back of some kind of divine serpent, or river - somewhat shipibo esque in pattern, velvety in texture, with lines of electric neon gold, orange and green moving along slowly within its mind blowing cymatic structure.
It felt incredibly alien to behold, yet oddly familiar and deja-vu inducing all at once, as if it was imbued with ancient power and a magnetic aspect that pulled on my perception and body physically. Our previous session here had been relatively deeper, but unstable. This was a new level of stability and just sheer jaw dropping realness that I would have thought impossible - an impression which consistently seems to be a distinguishing feature of resonance states, but is hopelessly difficult to convey in language.
This somehow seemed far more real than almost anything I had ever seen up to this point in 20 years of deep psychedelic exploration. I’d look away, look back, and the fields were still there. The more I looked at this standing wave, the more my psychedelic state was pulled into what I can only describe as the beginnings of a resonance state..
Eventually I did some yoga and felt reborn for the second time in a row on this boulder. I felt as if I was opening my eyes for the first time, and had been charged up to a new layer of awareness of my body and the blissful, unimaginably beautiful and mysterious reality we find ourselves seamlessly embedded within. I remember looking down at my bare feet on the moss, and suddenly feeling as aware of my legs and feet as I was of my arms and hands - a bizarre and amazing sensation, as if I was beginning to truly use my limbs for the first time, but it seemed more natural and functional than ever. I felt a sense of oneness with the rocks and universe around me that brought me to tears. It seemed as if my entire life up till that point had come into a much clearer focus.
Perception of resonance waves (or whatever the hell they are) around my partner, the rocks and crystals lasted for about another half hour, probably 35 minutes after my last small inhalation of DMT. There were no other normal psychedelic visuals to note, as if they had been a side effect of the medicines, or decoherent glimpses of resonance phenomena. Slowly the state began to fade, but a strong after-glow continued for months after this experience. I'm not sure it ever faded entirely.
Later that day, I told my partner about the resistance I had encountered during the beginning of our last eye gazing attempt, and how the ridiculous concept of “dead doll faces” had even popped into my head just as we had begun eye gazing that second time. She replied “I think I saw that!”, and said that during this same part of that eye gazing attempt, she had seen swirling vortexes all around my head made up of what she specifically interpreted as “dead doll faces” at the time. We had once again encountered the same random concept or archetype (or whatever) at approximately the same moment.
This wasn’t the first or the last time we would have what seemed like shocking levels of shared visual/physical/psychic content during these sessions, but it still felt re-assuring that there seemed to be a connection that was becoming consistently accessible. After reading books on ancient mythology like Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, this sort of imagery seemed to make more sense. It is common for journeys within to first appear scary and dark, with themes of death and archetypal content as the ego’s illusory reality is essentially destroyed. But with a little persistence and surrender, what seems at first like a death can seamlessly transform into something illuminating, like a rebirth of a more connected sense of self.
This experience was only a partial glimpse of a resonance state in retrospect, not a “resurrection”, but even glimpses such as this were mind blowing and profound relative to many years of dedicated psychedelic exploration. I share this mostly to convey more of the chronology we experienced, and to set the stage for the more bizarre experience that followed.
This experience, and the one I shared before it, were with partial protocols. The next outdoor session was our first time doing the full protocol.
