Can five minutes of 5-MeO-DMT give you what spiritual practitioners spend decades trying to reach?
That question becomes much more interesting when you give a powerful psychedelic to people who have already dedicated their lives to exploring consciousness. YouTuber Dakota of Earth travelled to Varanasi, India, alongside a Mexican shaman, where several Hindu holy people were offered 5-MeO-DMT, commonly called sapo in some ceremonial contexts. Their reactions were dramatically different. One sadhu reportedly came out of the experience crying after having a vision of Vishnu sustaining the universe.
An Aghori woman called out to Shiva during the experience before declaring:
“Success, success.”
But the reaction that may contain the most interesting lesson came from Aghori Bavani Baba. He barely reacted at all. And what he said afterward raises a question that extends far beyond psychedelics.
5-MeO-DMT is an extremely potent psychedelic compound. It occurs naturally in several plants and is also famously found in the defensive secretion of the Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius). The experience can be remarkably fast. When inhaled, effects can begin within seconds and may include dramatic changes in perception, sense of self and ordinary awareness.
People sometimes describe experiences of:
Of course, not every experience is peaceful. The intensity can also produce overwhelming fear, confusion or psychological distress. But the profound states sometimes reported after 5-MeO-DMT have created an interesting conversation between psychedelic experiences and ancient spiritual practices. Because mystics have been describing states of unity and dissolution of the individual self for thousands of years. The methods were simply very different.
This is what makes the encounter in Varanasi so fascinating. A sadhu is someone who has renounced aspects of conventional life in pursuit of spiritual liberation. Their practices may include meditation, mantra, yoga, austerities, devotional practices and other forms of spiritual discipline. Some dedicate decades—or their entire lives—to this path. Then you introduce something capable of radically altering consciousness within seconds. What happens? Apparently, very different things. One participant reportedly emerged crying after experiencing a vision of Vishnu sustaining the universe. Another, an Aghori woman, invoked Shiva during the experience. But Aghori Bavani Baba’s response was completely different.
According to Dakota’s account, Bavani Baba was given what he described as an enormous dose of 5-MeO-DMT. And then… Almost nothing happened externally. Bavani simply sat there. Approximately five minutes passed. Then he opened his eyes. His response was essentially:
“Are you happy now?”
That alone is fascinating. A substance capable of completely overwhelming many people’s ordinary sense of reality appeared to produce relatively little outward reaction in someone whose life revolves around spiritual practice. But Bavani wasn’t dismissing the experience. His explanation afterward was much more nuanced.
Bavani reportedly described the psychedelic state as a genuine glimpse of “the light.” And he acknowledged that an experience like this could potentially have value for someone who needs proof that such a state of consciousness exists. But then he made the distinction that stayed with me:
“Sapo is one five-minute light, but it goes. Sadhu means light forever.”
That sentence contains an entire conversation about psychedelics and spirituality. Because there is a difference between experiencing a state and becoming someone capable of embodying what that state showed you.
Imagine climbing a mountain. Spiritual practice might involve walking the trail. Slowly. You struggle. You get lost. You learn the terrain. You strengthen your body. Eventually, perhaps you reach the summit. A psychedelic can sometimes feel more like being dropped onto the summit by helicopter. Suddenly you can see everything. For five extraordinary minutes, the landscape makes sense.
You might think:
“Oh. THIS is what everyone was talking about.”
But then the helicopter brings you back down. And Monday morning still arrives. Your relationships are still there. Your triggers are still there. Your nervous system is still there. Your habits are still there. Your ego may have temporarily disappeared. But now someone cuts you off in traffic. And suddenly… there it is again. This is where psychedelic experience and spiritual development can become very different things.
One of the biggest traps in psychedelic culture is confusing access with attainment. You can experience unconditional love without consistently loving people well. You can experience ego dissolution while still behaving from ego afterward. You can experience universal consciousness and still avoid apologizing when you’ve hurt someone. You can experience profound interconnectedness while continuing patterns that disconnect you from your community. The experience may be genuine. But experiencing something doesn’t automatically mean we have integrated it. And perhaps that is what Bavani Baba’s statement points toward.
The glimpse can be real without being permanent.
Maybe that’s the wrong question. A psychedelic doesn’t necessarily replace spiritual practice. It may show you something that practice can then ask you to embody. For someone who has never experienced consciousness outside their ordinary identity, a profound psychedelic experience can radically challenge assumptions about the self. It may open questions that previously felt abstract: Who am I without my thoughts? What happens when the boundary between “me” and everything else disappears? What does interconnectedness actually feel like? Can consciousness exist differently from the way I experience it every day? Those can be powerful questions. But eventually the ceremony ends. And then comes perhaps the harder question:
What are you going to do with what you experienced?
This is where integration becomes more important than collecting increasingly powerful experiences. If you experienced profound compassion during a psychedelic journey, does that compassion change how you treat people? If you experienced unity with nature, does your relationship with the Earth change? If your ego disappeared, are you able to notice your ego more clearly when it returns? If you felt unconditional love, can you practice that love when another human being irritates you? That is a very different spiritual challenge. And you don’t necessarily need another ceremony to work on it. You need life. Because life will give you opportunities to practice what the ceremony showed you. Again. And again. And again.
I don’t think Bavani Baba’s statement necessarily needs to be interpreted as anti-psychedelic. In fact, he reportedly acknowledged the experience as a legitimate glimpse of something meaningful. That distinction is beautiful. A glimpse can matter. Sometimes seeing what is possible changes the direction of someone’s entire life. But we should be careful not to confuse seeing the destination with arriving there. Psychedelics may temporarily disrupt our ordinary perception of ourselves and reality. Spiritual practices can ask us to cultivate awareness repeatedly, without depending upon a substance to produce the state. And perhaps these approaches don’t have to compete. Science can investigate what happens in the brain. Psychedelics can offer extraordinary alterations in consciousness. Ancient spiritual traditions can offer practices developed across generations. And direct experience can keep reminding us that consciousness remains much stranger than our explanations of it.
Psychedelic culture can sometimes become focused on intensity. The strongest medicine. The largest dose. The deepest breakthrough. The biggest ego death. But Bavani Baba reportedly received an enormous dose and responded with:
“Are you happy now?”
Maybe that’s the lesson. The depth of a spiritual path cannot necessarily be measured by how dramatically someone reacts to a medicine. And the value of a psychedelic experience cannot necessarily be measured by how far away from ordinary consciousness you travelled. A better question might be:
Who are you when you come back?
Are you kinder? More present? More honest? More capable of sitting with discomfort? More connected to your community? More respectful toward the Earth? More aware of your own patterns? Because eventually every psychedelic experience ends. The real practice begins when ordinary consciousness returns. Maybe 5-MeO-DMT can show someone the light. But Bavani Baba’s challenge goes much further:
Can you learn to live from it?
Educational note: 5-MeO-DMT is a powerful psychoactive substance with significant psychological and physical risks. Experiences described online should not be treated as evidence of safety or therapeutic effectiveness. This article discusses psychedelic experiences, spirituality and cultural practices for educational purposes and does not encourage psychedelic use.
