ego-disruptive = non-toxic/ ego-reinforcing = toxic

realitysandwich | Since my normal presentation (which is mostly about my theory for a quantum nature for the transpersonal entheogenic experience that I outline in my book Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad) takes at least an hour, and since I was considering 'non-duality' to be another way of describing the 'classical' mystical experience of 'transpersonal Oneness' that occurs with the complete dissolution of Ego and Identity ('the loss of all opposites'), I decided to talk about a subject that I had been thinking about more recently, namely the correlation between the effect a 'drug' has on the Ego (one's personal sense of 'I') and its relative toxicity.

So for this conference, rather than discussing my usual subject (the endogenous entheogens, DMT and 5-MeO-DMT), I decided to consider the broad spectrum of different 'mood-enhancing' compounds available, and rather than considering how each particular 'drug' affects our bodies or our 'mental well-being' as most scientific studies would, I would instead rank each compound on how it affected our sense of Ego, our sense of "I". Since the total loss of Ego and the sense of "I" is the core of the transpersonal mystical experience (and I am an experiential-mystic at heart), I decided that I would assign each 'drug' its own 'Mystical Value', with the compounds that can induce the transpersonal state of total loss of Ego and Identity having the highest value (most value to an experiential mystic), while the compounds that reinforced or inflated the sense of the Ego would have the lowest. After ranking the various compounds (according to experiential reports in literature, EROWID, etc), it was obvious that the scale naturally descended by the chemical class of the compound -- tryptamine, phenethylamine, opiates, amphetamines, alcohol -- and that this corresponded to a noticeable increase in physical toxicity. My conclusion from ranking these various compounds by their unique 'Mystical Value' and then comparing their relative toxicity could then be expressed quite simply (as):

Oroc's First Law of Entheogens: The more a compound disrupts the Ego (the sense of 'I'), the physically safer (less toxic) that compound will be, while the more a 'drug' reinforces and inflates the sense of Ego, the more physically harmful (toxic) that compound will be.

For the purpose of elucidation, here is how I ranked the various compounds, along with my personal commentary on the effects of each compound, the relative toxicity, and a brief summary of its human history.

Warning! This table ranks PHYSICAL TOXICITY, and DOES NOT consider the well-documented potential PSYCHOLOGICAL SIDE-EFFECTS of psychedelic compounds that can occur for psychologically fragile people, from being unprepared for the psychedelic experience, or from taking too-high dosages of psychedelic compounds. All compounds in this table (other than alcohol) are currently illegal in the USA and most other countries.