So I've never actually broken through before and I have a suspicion that I'm holding myself back. I've smoked multiple times and only once did I ever get distinct closed eye visuals of vibrating, pulsating squares and circles. One pharmahasca day I was lying in the grass looking at the sky and decided to close my eyes. After what felt like a sort of emotional/thought dance between myself and vaguely female entity, the blackness of the back of my eyelids began to glow dark red and pink and began to cover my vision. I felt as if I was going to throw up, sneeze, shit my pants, and die simultaneously. I opened my eyes and my friend looked at me and said "welcome back?"

I have the feeling that there is this world on the other side, and I was afraid to pass through whatever I needed to to get there. What strikes me is that it was completely under my control; I had to feel/think a certain way, almost like "trying" to go to sleep. And then I willfully stopped when it got too intense.

I guess I have two questions: is this just breaking through and I wasn't ready for ego death? Does anyone else get the feeling they have to let themselves, or try to break through?

On low to moderate doses of pharma/aya and on low doses of vaporized spice, a certain amount of control is possible – resistance will have an effect. But at higher doses, in particular high doses of vaporized spice, there is no choice but to break through.

It sounds to me like you had a sub-breakthrough experience that was maybe approaching a breakthrough and that your resistance to the experience altered it.

At a proper breakthrough dose, you don’t have to “try” to break through. It simply happens.

(And yes, there is a world on the other side.)

Terence McKenna once said that one of the dangers of taking psychedelics is taking too little of them. At first, I couldn't understand how this was practical advice, I mean it sounded to me at the time that this was a very irresponsible thing for him to recommend. However, this relates directly to what your talking about. With a smaller dose, the ego retains some control over the situation and can, almost as a reflex, begin to struggle against the experience. I've had situations where I've been a bit timid and lowered my dose right before a take off and this almost always results in a type of bad trip experience. One time, I was fighting desperately to cling to physical reality, and when I finally broke through it was mentally painful for me and resulted in a very confusing experience.

First of all, what are you using to smoke/vape DMT and how do you have it set up?

It also sounds like the closed eye visuals you had were quite weak, even for sub-breakthrough standards. My recommendation to you would be the next time you take pharma (or even just the MAOIs, you don't even have to ingest any DMT if you don't want to), about an hour or so after ingesting the MAOIs, I would take a healthy rip or two of DMT out of whatever you smoke it out of, and if you're not being blown away, you're probably doing something wrong on the smoking end.

Aye, get a GVG - those things are frighteningly efficient at blasting you through the veil! Happy journeys