The Profile
Name: Kosta
Nationality: Bulgarian
Lives in: London, UK
Age when taken psychedelics: 25
Job: Founder
Psychedelic of choice: DMT
Place of ceremony: London, UK
What was your intention?
I tried not to have one and wanted to be open to whatever was going to happen.
If I’m being honest, a lot of my drug experiences were through parties and it was quite a few years of that before I actually got into those different experiences. It was not until 2016 that I started to take a much more thoughtful and conscious approach to psychedelics.
Why did you take it?
It was just an exploration. For me, most psychedelics are about getting a different perspective on things.
Very often, I find people take these substances to look for answers and they find them but sometimes these answers are true for the world they were in where they took it and not the world they go back to. And so, the integration of that can be challenging. Even if you go through the whole immersive experience with shamans, the truth you learn there might not correlate to the truth here.
So, for me it was always about explorations and getting a different perspective. And once I understand that perspective I can then come back and say “OK, this is what I saw there. This is what I believe here. How do I then personally integrate and think about these 2 things in unison.” For me it’s never the fact that there is some kind of truth you go and discover. It’s an alternative truth.
I did it together with a friend I met during a vipassana retreat. It was a great, well-grounded person who said this was an interesting thing to do. I knew it was an active ingredient in Ayahuasca, so I was curious. We had a hike around Richmond Park for 2-3 hours, then sat down and did a meditation before taking the DMT. We took it as a chemical without a ceremony around it but it was still a very spiritual-esque experience. We smoked it – it lasted about 20 min.
What were you most afraid of?
Nothing. I trusted the person I was with and myself in terms of general resilience and ability to handle whatever came back. I was able to do it because I think I just had life experience – when you go through hardships, you can learn about yourself. I feel confident to be able to take whatever comes my way. I always try to remember this line someone once said: “you are the sky – you can contain the weather that comes your way. You are greater than the sum of your emotions.”
I think this is sometimes the trap people may fall into, which is they go with a very clear intention of what they want to solve or get clarity over and then they go “actually, the solution isn’t here and now I’m even more confused because now I’ve completely reinterpreted that horrific or wonderful experience that I went to try and get answers on.”
You can also ask the wrong question.
It’s a challenge going in with an expectation and attachment.
What did you most look forward to?
It’s always been around explorations.
Subconsciously, there are always some thoughts or parts of your life that are more prominent at given moments, e.g. going through a great period at work, I feel excited about the prospects, going through a slightly rough patch with my family, therefore I’m worried about x, y, z, or going through a mediocre period with my partner at the time – there’s all these undercurrents naturally existing in the background but there was not one particular river I wanted to follow on this journey.
What was the hardest bit about the experience?
Inhaling DMT is a complicated and painful process. You take droplets of the liquid, you put it on cotton, you heat up the cotton to a certain temperature that you inhale but naturally a bit of the cotton gets burnt in the process and so you have to inhale and hold quite a few rounds until you get to the point where the level of DMT allows you to have an out of body experience. So, that was pretty challenging because you basically end up getting burnt cotton in your mouth while doing all that.
The most bizarre thing during the trip was the pure sensory experience. I felt like I was seeing my visions with my eyes but also that I was feeling things as if I was touching them with my hands. It was a crisscross of all experiences, of all the senses – that was completely different and quite frightening initially until I let go of my expectations. Originally, I was like “Wow, I’m in this new place, this doesn’t quite feel right. Why is everything different?” There was this split moment where I thought if I build up anxiety here, this could be a totally different experience, so I just decided to accept it and follow the energy.
What was the best bit about the experience?
The experience in itself was actually interesting – I did 3 rounds of it just because every part of it was a story that was unveiling, and I didn’t get to see the conclusion until the end.
After the 1st round I felt like: “Do I want to do this again? Is it some form of addiction? Is curiosity a bad thing?”
After the 3rd time I had an appreciation that I got what I needed out of that experience but it was quite an interesting dynamic with the 1st and the 2nd time and me asking myself if I should go or stay here and what’s my motivation for the trip. Does it come from a place of greed and wrongful desire or from a place of curiosity? That was an interesting dynamic throughout all the 3 parts of the trip.
The way it worked is that you take the DMT and you hold it in. As I was sitting up, I fell back onto my back and there was this beautiful tree that was the tree of life. I ended up walking up and down it and on the various branches were different celestial beings. The crazy thing about all of this was that I knew my body was back on earth, but I was just in a different universe.
I started off going out there and meeting 2-3 different celestial beings. They all had a different energy and each one of them was trying to pull me in a different direction and I got lost and didn’t know what to do and who to follow. It was very strange and I snapped back out of it.
The 2nd time, I saw there were actually 4 celestial beings still trying to pull me in a different direction. But then I was able to see that they were a part of the same tree of life – they were just different sides, or masks, or perspectives of the same thing. Again, that left me confused about how these things connected.
So, I went in the third time and I understood these 4 beings were divided into 2 positive and 2 negative ones: that’s the kind of energy I was picking up. The 2 positive ones were slightly diaposed positives: 1 was joyous, compassionate and the other was more ambitious, creative and driven. And the negative ones: 1 was sorrow, sadness, and pity and the other one was anger, lust, and betrayal. So, it was like 2 polar opposites and within that, split into 2 different interpretations. All these things came together on that trip and I understood I was connected to the tree of life and as I was coming out of my last experience, I was slowly disconnecting from the tree of life but as I was doing it, I saw there was the sun there and the thing that made this divide between positive and negative was the fact that one side of the tree was receiving a lot of sunlight and the other one was cast in shadow.
What did you get from it?
Insight. As I was stepping away from the tree of life, I realised that the message was “You are the energy you bring to the world around you.” In many ways you are the sun and whatever energy you bring, you will either have a positive or negative effect.
We can intellectualise the world around us but it’s a different thing to be emotionally experiencing that world. Emotions are so much stronger than logic just because the part of the brain they come from is much older and much stronger in the human brain architecture.
So, I received what I received and I’m grateful for it.
How did it impact your life?
I have become a lot more empathetically conscious of the energy that I bring into people’s lives. That’s something I was already making steps with in my journey but this solidified it.
For me, the most powerful experience was MDMA – the very first psychedelic I took. It had the most profound shift in my trajectory and my understanding of altered states of consciousness, being able to connect logic and reason with emotions at a completely different level. So, MDA brought me into this world but since I have been in this world, DMT has had the most drastic experience that has had a positive effect.
MDA opened u 2 things for me: it made me connect with my emotions – at the time it was difficult just because of the different things happening in my life. In some ways it created a much stronger connection between what I think and what I feel, which was really beneficial and was like a kick to a closer alignment of these 2 parts of my being.
The 2nd thing it did is it made me appreciate the strange human condition that is when you have unique experiences on an emotional level with different people, the bonds you create with these people are just deeper. We always look for the things that connect us and in many ways the stranger, more peculiar, more illegal, more nuanced these thigs are that we as a collective can relate to, the deeper those bonds and the deeper that connection. There’s that old joke which is that a Liverpudlian and a Londoner meeting in the UK would hate each other but if they met in France, it would be great. We are different in this context but similar in another. I guess we tend to look for the places with the brightest contrast, either positive or negative.
What did you struggle with after?
Not much. The difficult part was in the moment of choosing to go there again and going at it the third time. It had a lot of baggage and analysis.
DMT is not moorish – you do it once and it’s not like you need to go to that place again, which is quite different than some other drugs. I guess it was largely driven by curiosity and seeing the end of the story. It was very much an emotional decision on my part.
What improved?
The challenge with these things is that we adapt so quickly that it’s hard, particularly at an emotional level, to feel or measure what the difference is. Is it at a 7 or a 10? Maybe it has had an impact but if you truly integrate something, it becomes ingrained with your identity. It becomes invisible.
What do you need to work on?
After something like that, I think you become more conscious of things and you inherently seek more congruence: what you think, what you feel, what you say, what you do – all those things being consistent and authentic. I guess when you have a deep experience that affects your feeling centre, you become more aware to align all this stuff.
There is this interesting framework where you have actions, you group them and they form habits, you group habits and they form beliefs and beliefs form identity. In order to change identity, you need to start at the bottom and work your way up. I want to be / am a healthy person, therefore I’m going to start eating slightly differently, exercising more and I form these habits. With psychedelics, they shift the identity straight away and everything has to follow.
What would be your advice if you were to do it again?
Just do what you did. I did it with a great friend in a great surrounding with good energy. There’s nothing I’d do differently – I had no expectations.
Kosta is a true psychonaut: no expectations, just explorations and look at how much he got out of it having spent only 20 min each time! He's also probably the master of meta thinking - I don't think I have spoken to many people who questioned their own thought process as much as he did! "I want to go back. But why do I want to do that? Is it greed? Is it curiosity? Is it the right thing to do?"
I'm glad he decided to go for it as being an intelligent person, you can very easily get yourself pulled into an intellectual vortex and frankly, never come back (there have been cases of mathematical geniuses going insane as they pondered the subject of infinity for instance).
All this intellectualising may be fun for a while but that's not life - life is experiential and emotional and sometimes, we just need to jump right into it, head first. Remember, you are the sky...
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