There is a story told by a man named Justin about his DMT experience. What struck me was not the exotic imagery or the psychedelic symbolism.

What struck me was how closely his account follows the same inner structure we keep seeing in contemplative practice. Not identical. Not equal. But recognizably patterned. And this invites neither romanticizing psychedelics nor dismissing them. It invites careful listening.

The Light Starts

He lies down, inhales, and something curious happens. His thinking mind falls silent. The inner commentator stops narrating. What remains is presence. Awareness without effort. Many meditators recognize this terrain. The evaluative ego loosens. Something in the background begins to re-organize.

Then the light begins. Points. Grids. Mandalas. Movement. A cascade of geometry that feels lawful rather than chaotic. In our work, this corresponds to the early phases of phosphene unfolding: the mind revealing its own intrinsic architecture of vision. Not fantasy but form. It is as if the nervous system suddenly makes itself visible.

As the intensity rises, figures appear. Not as hallucinations one invents, but as presences one meets. They feel made of light. They guide, support, and carry him deeper into an inner world that feels shockingly coherent. Here we reach something we also describe in contemplative states: when the ego softens and luminous coherence stabilizes, the field of awareness stops feeling like “mine.” It begins to feel relational..

This is one doorway into what we have called the God-event. Not God as object. Not doctrine. Not metaphysical theory. Rather: light becoming presence. Coherence that addresses. A felt call toward unity instead of fragmentation.

And just as this unity stabilizes, something else enters: darkness. He sees death, decay, animal suffering, the brokenness of the world. But instead of panic, something very different happens. He allows it. He trusts. He lets it pass through. This is not unique to psychedelics. Mystical traditions describe something very similar: not collapse, but purification. Chaos giving way to a deeper order. The system reorganizing, not by suppressing pain, but by letting it be metabolized.

After the darkness comes release. He describes a waterfall of light and love that pours through him. Suddenly love is no longer an emotion. It feels structural. woven into the fabric of existence itself. In our language: the transition into high-coherence luminous states, where separation softens and the nervous system temporarily synchronizes into unity.

In that state, ethics is not commanded. It is obvious. Harm becomes incoherent. Compassion feels inevitable. Not chosen but recognized.

At one point he believes his leg is healed. Later, the effect vanishes. And here we must be sober. Visionary states can loosen trauma, reorganize perception, and temporarily modulate pain — but they cannot replace medicine. They reveal possibilities within the psyche. They are not guarantees in the body.

Toward the end, he experiences a kind of cosmic narrative: consciousness discovering itself. He does not claim certainty. Instead, he says something wiser: perhaps we profoundly underestimate the mystery we live inside. And this, for me, is the most important part. Mature mystical experience does not produce arrogance. It produces reverent unknowing. A humility born not of doubt, but of awe.

So what does Justin’s story tell us?

Not that DMT is a shortcut. Not that psychedelics are a path. Not that one must seek visions. But that the mind contains its own grammar of inner light, and that this grammar can unfold through contemplative practice , slowly, ethically, and gently, or violently through chemistry. The pattern, however, often carries a family resemblance.

What interests me is not the psychedelic spectacle. What interests me is that this structure keeps appearing across meditation, mysticism, near-death states, and now psychedelic experience. Something in the human organism is oriented toward coherence. Something in us recognizes unity as natural. Something in us knows, even before we have language for it, that love is not simply a feeling, but a way reality holds itself together.

And perhaps the quiet invitation is simply this: we do not need to force the door. There is a contemplative path that allows the same territory to open slowly, without destabilization, without intoxication, with ethics emerging as the companion rather than the afterthought. The God-event is not manufactured. It is revealed, when the mind becomes transparent, the heart becomes available, and light finally recognizes itself.

Closing reflection

Much of what Justin describes echoes what we have tried to articulate in our research: that the inner world is not random, and that luminous experience unfolds according to a recognizable grammar. In our papers we described phases of phosphene development, the emergence of luminous coherence, the collapse of the self-referential narrative, and finally the dawning of an ethical clarity that does not have to be taught, because it is seen.

DMT shows a compressed and unstable version of this trajectory. Contemplation reveals the same movement more gently, with integration, responsibility, and time for the heart to grow along with the vision. The task is not to chase extraordinary states. The task is to understand what they reveal about the structure of human consciousness, about how the mind becomes transparent, and about how light turns toward love when it finally recognizes itself.

This is the heart of our work: exploring the path where science, contemplative practice, and theology stop competing and begin describing the same inner territory from different angles. Not explaining God away. Not naively spiritualizing the brain. But learning how experience, physiology, and mystery can coexist without canceling one another.

Because when people like Justin return from luminous states, whether through meditation, illness, near-death, or psychedelics, they often say something remarkably similar……

Shunyam Adhibhu