Experience Details:
Experiencer: Peter Machete, scuba diving guide from Mexico.
Psychedelic: 5-Meo-DMT (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine), likely the most potent psychedelic in the world. It’s a natural psychedelic found in certain plants and most famously, the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius). Often called the "God molecule", it causes almost instantaneous ego-death and profound mystical experiences.
Source: Personal conversation, 2023.
Experience Report:
This trip report was another odd synchronicity. It came from a personal conversation I never expected, which may have started this entire research. It was December, 2023. I was in Riviera Maya, Mexico, going to scuba dive with my dad and cousin. We were in a truck getting a ride from the scuba diving master, Peter Machete—who had a bunch of tattoo, had a thick accent from Spain, and was deep into conspiracies and alternative healing practices.
Here’s a picture of us after the cenote dive. The people in from left to right: Bruno (myself; green shirt); Peter Machete (scuba guide & experiencer; black shirt), Carlos (cousin; light blue shirt), Armando (dad; dark blue shirt). It was December 29, 2023. We were Puerto Aventuras, Mexico.
Me inside cenote Angelita, one of our dives.
On the way to the cenote cave dive, I saw a billboard about “Bufo,” the toad with the venom containing 5-Meo-DMT, that all the gringos came to Mexico to do. So, curious, I asked Peter Machete about it, and unsurprisingly, he said he’d done it himself! I recently heard of the ego-death psychedelic experiences from interviews with my Instagram audience, so I asked him if he had one of those.
“I was gone. I died,” he told me. He said you “lose consciousness” and that “you are no longer there.” At least, the you that you know, with body and typical sense of human self.
“So what happens after?” I asked. What remains after the ego has died? “Light and energy” he said. Interesting, the same as the other experiencers say! I inquired further. I asked him if he was the light, or separate from the light. “I was it” he responded.
He seemed like at a loss of words. One thing I do remember, is precisely that he told me it was “hard to even remember or recollect” the experience — perhaps because of its intensity, or the ego-death.
But he did say it was “like being born again.” He said, “when you wake up, it’s as if you came back from the dead.” (This “re-born” theme is one I’ve noticed from religious mystics like Jesus in John 3:3, and in Hermeticism with ancient texts like the Corpus Hermeticum with the “Sermon on Rebirth”).
That’s pretty much all that’s in my notes about his experience. The weird thing was, when we got to the cenote where we were diving, I experienced another synchronicity. The divers behind us mentioned “Bufo,” “DMT,” and “the light.” One of them said something about DMT being released during death and how in near death experiences people also see a bright light. This was the first time I ever heard any of these kinds of connections.
I told Peter about overhearing this convo, and he jokingly said, “the light is calling you.” I laughed. Looking back though, I’m realizing perhaps there was some truth to it. But, not for me to experience it myself.
Instead, I feel so deeply called to the process of piecing all of these experiences of the light together — from psychedelic experiences, near death experiences, past life regressions, mystical experiences in the world religions, and more. So thanks Peter, and cenote DMT theories dude! Perhaps we wouldn’t be here without that nudge…