Mapping the thresholds under N,N-DMT

The five thresholds

Threshold 1 - DMN loosening. The DMN doesn't become plastic, not the way it does with LSD: here, more sensory data comes up, top-down priors relax. The world becomes charged with something more, something hard to fully define. Vision sharpens, music breathes, textures inhabit.

Threshold 2 - DMN gives way. Perceptual systems fall apart. Something happens. The real becomes plastic, alien, it melts and reconfigures itself. The ego is dismantled.

Threshold 3 - Entity encounters become likely. This is the breakthrough threshold: presences defying laws that until now held firm, gazes, silhouettes, communication still allusive.

Threshold 4 - Breakthrough. Entity encounters near-certain. No longer a deformed world, but another world opening. Entities dwell there. The ego and the real become the anomaly. The experience here is absolutely alien to the world of Men.

Threshold 5 - At very high doses, or sometimes fortuitously at moderate doses when the system tips over - convergence toward a few stable features: disappearance of entities (they dissolve into something less individuated, or never appear at all), collapse of spatiality, even non-Euclidean spatiality, disappearance of the residual observer (at threshold 4 there almost always remains a thin witness; here, no one left to note that the self has vanished), what reports struggle to name as an ontological rather than spatial infinity. An existence without category, without subject-object distinction, without content. Strassman explicitly contrasts this unitive state with the DMT world he calls interactive, and keeps it apart from entity encounters down to the structure of his book; he reports that such states were very rare in his trials, one volunteer out of nearly sixty. Shanon devotes a full chapter of The Antipodes of the Mind to light, where he describes, at the strongest inebriations, the effacement of the boundary between individual and divine consciousness. Michael, Luke and Robinson (2021) note, across 36 breakthrough accounts, two with no encounter at all, six describing presences without imagery, and five an omnipresence rather than defined beings.

At this point, the N,N-DMT experience converges with that of 5-MeO-DMT: dissolution of form, unitive dissolution, absence of entities, pure non-duality. Some experienced users report very deep, very long, entity-rich breakthroughs without ever tipping into this unitive territory. Others reach it at modest doses. This may not be a matter of depth, but of an alternative neurodynamic trajectory.

Sources

• Carhart-Harris and Friston (2019), REBUS model and anarchic brain.
• Timmermann and colleagues, EEG signatures and phenomenology of DMT (2019, 2023).
• Strassman (2001), research on N,N-DMT and entities.
• Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience, Oxford University Press, 2002 (link to be confirmed).
• Michael, Luke and Robinson (2021), 36 breakthrough accounts at a controlled dose.
• Work on theory of mind and agency attribution (TPJ, medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus).
• Literature on brain entropy, the DMN, and psychedelic phenomenology.