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Something unusual happened on the ghats of Varanasi recently. A Mexican shaman named Jose arrived in the holy city carrying a pipe, a lighter, and a small quantity of dried secretion from the Sonoran Desert toad. The substance he carried is known in contemporary psychedelic circles as 5-MeO-DMT, widely described as the most intense psychoactive compound available to human beings. What made this story worth retelling is not the chemistry. It is what happened when that chemistry met three Indian holy men who had spent their lives developing their own methods for dissolving the ego.
The story comes from filmmaker Dakota, who accompanied Jose through a week of pilgrimage around the sacred city. Their question was simple but profound. When a molecule famous for dissolving the sense of self encounters a tradition that has been doing the same thing without chemistry for two thousand years, what does the tradition have to say about it?
The answer turned out to be more nuanced, and more humbling, than anyone expected.
The Sonoran Toad Meets the Ganges
5-MeO-DMT is a tryptamine found in the parotoid glands of Incilius alvarius, a toad native to the Sonoran Desert. When vaporized and inhaled, it reliably produces a dissolution of subject and object that practitioners often describe as indistinguishable from a mystical experience. Clinical research at Johns Hopkins has begun studying these effects in controlled settings, with early data suggesting potential for treating depression and trauma.
Varanasi is perhaps the least neutral backdrop one could choose for such an experiment. The city sits on the Ganges and hosts the Manikarnika cremation ghat, where bodies burn continuously and the smoke drifts across the river. Hindus consider dying in Kashi, as the city is traditionally called, to be sufficient for moksha or final liberation. Sadhus, the wandering renunciates of India, gather here in huge numbers. Many practice disciplines that have been refined across roughly two millennia of documented yogic tradition.
The experiment, then, was not casual. Three holy men, three smoking sessions, three radically different responses.
The First Sadhu’s Cosmic Vision
Baba Rajendra was the first to sit with Jose. The intensity landed quickly. He slammed his palms against the ground, shouted, and leaned in so close that his jaw audibly clicked against itself. For a moment it looked like the encounter might turn physical. Then the peak eased and he settled into a softer state.
What he reported afterward is worth paying attention to. He described seeing Maha Vishnu in full manifestation, the sustainer deity of the Hindu cosmos, actively generating and holding the universe together. He also described a dimension where all the enlightened rishis continue their tapas, their disciplined spiritual practice, praying for the awakening of the rest of humanity. This vision made him weep.
He was open about the novelty. Comparing the experience to his own meditation, he said the substance produced similar territory but arrived there quickly, like an express route. He also reported that repeated use cleared the negative impressions he had initially felt, leaving a sense of cleanness by the third inhalation.
For most observers this would be the end of the story. A holy man validated the medicine. The traditions agree. Write the article, publish the video, move on. That is not what happened.
Mataji’s Quiet Acknowledgment
The second participant was an Aghori woman known as Mataji. She asked that the session not be filmed. Her response was brief. She made some sounds, called out to Mahadev, opened her eyes, and said the word success twice. She has never discussed the experience since. Whatever she saw, she is keeping it.
The Aghori are a small subsect of Shaivite renunciates best known for deliberately violating purity taboos. They meditate in cremation grounds, wear human bone ornaments, and cover themselves in the ash of burned bodies. The practice is intentional. If all phenomena are ultimately Shiva, then nothing can be impure in any final sense, and the Aghori test this proposition experientially.
The Aghori Who Was Not Impressed
Bavani Baba was the third sitter, and the one Dakota had been most excited about. The two had known each other for some time. Dakota had been telling him in advance that the medicine would blow his mind, that chemistry was simply more powerful than traditional contemplation, that he should prepare himself for a breakthrough.
Bavani Baba cleared the pipe in one long inhalation. Jose had loaded it heavily. What happened next was nothing.
For five full minutes, Bavani Baba sat still. He did not twitch, did not vocalize, did not rock or shake. He simply sat. The cremation smoke drifted past him from Manikarnika across the water. The Ganges kept flowing. A man trained in sitting inside his own nervous system did what he always did.
Then he cleared his throat, opened his eyes, looked at Dakota directly, and said four words.
Are you happy now.
Sadhu Means Light Forever
The rest of Bavani Baba’s commentary is the real substance of this story. He did not dismiss the experience. He said the medicine produces a genuine glimpse of something real, that it has value for people who need proof that the light exists at all. For someone who has never touched the transcendent, a chemical that reliably delivers a taste of it is a useful thing.
But then he asked the question that reframes everything. After ten minutes, where is the light now? Where is the power? The glimpse is honest, but it does not stay.
His formulation was precise. The difference between the medicine and a sadhu, he said, is that the sadhu means light forever. The medicine shows you the light. The sadhu becomes the light. The distinction is not rhetorical.
This is the question that any serious practitioner of plant medicine eventually has to sit with. Research on long-term meditators led by Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has documented structural and functional brain changes in monks with tens of thousands of hours of practice. Those changes persist. They are not peak states that fade in ten minutes. They are baselines. Something in the wiring itself has reorganized, and it stays reorganized whether the practitioner is meditating at that moment or washing dishes.
A five hour ceremony cannot do this. A twenty minute toad medicine session certainly cannot do this. Whatever is achieved on that scale is a visit, not a move.
Seeing Something Versus Becoming Something
The Aghori’s teaching forces a distinction that most psychedelic discourse elides. Seeing a profound state and becoming a profound state are not the same event. A chemical can reliably deliver the first. Only sustained practice can produce the second.
This matters because the plant medicine community, of which Dakota himself is a committed participant, often treats the intensity of the experience as if it were the accomplishment. A person who has seen the unified field during a ceremony can genuinely confuse the seeing with an arrival of their own. The vision is real. The arrival is illusory. The substance did the work, and it takes the insight with it when it leaves.
None of this is an argument against plant medicine. Dakota himself is careful to say that his years of work with ayahuasca, mushrooms, and 5-MeO-DMT have shaped who he is in ways he would not undo. The emerging clinical literature on psychedelics supports the view that these compounds have genuine therapeutic and developmental value. Veterans with post traumatic stress, patients with treatment resistant depression, people at end of life wrestling with existential dread. The evidence is real.
The argument is about what you do with the glimpse after the glimpse fades. This is where the Aghori’s question cuts. If the chemistry is the only time you meet the light, and you need to schedule another session to meet it again, something has not been transferred from the state to the trait. The door opens, the door closes, and you are still standing where you started.
The Pivot to Discipline
What Bavani Baba offered Dakota was not a rebuke but a reframing. The medicine is a door. Walking through the door and staying on the other side is a separate skill, and it is not one that any substance teaches. That skill has a name in every serious contemplative tradition. Hindus call it sadhana. Buddhists call it bhavana. The Greeks called it askesis. The word discipline is the English approximation, though it sounds drier than the thing itself.
The practical implication for anyone working with plant medicines is worth stating plainly. The ceremony is not the practice. The practice is what you do on the days when there is no ceremony, no substance, no facilitator, and no cue to enter an altered state. If your spiritual life consists mostly of waiting for the next retreat, the Aghori’s question applies directly. Where is the light now.
For readers interested in what sustained practice actually does at the level of the nervous system, there is genuine research supporting the traditional claims. Studies of experienced meditators have shown altered default mode network activity, reduced reactivity to stressors, and measurable changes in grey matter density in regions associated with attention and emotional regulation. The tradition is not operating on faith alone. It is operating on a slower and more demanding timeline than a ceremony, but the receipts are there. For a deeper look at how this works, see our earlier piece on the neuroscience of contemplative practice.
Varanasi has been holding this question for a very long time. The smoke from Manikarnika does not stop. The sadhus keep sitting. The medicine came, and the medicine went, and a man covered in ash in a city that thinks about dying more than any other place on earth simply asked whether anyone was paying attention to what does not leave.
That question is the whole teaching. The real thing, as Dakota put it afterwards, does not require refills.
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