“The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.” — Matthew 6:22
There is a scene that belongs to the ages. On the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi — perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth, a place where the air itself vibrates with the weight of 2,000 years of unbroken spiritual practice — a group of sadhus gathered around a pipe. Inside it: 5-MeO-DMT, also called sapo, a substance secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad and considered by researchers at Johns Hopkins and NYU to be among the most intense psychoactive compounds ever studied. YouTuber Dakota of Earth and Mexican shaman Jose had brought it to the riverbank, curious about one of the more interesting collision experiments you could design: what happens when the most powerful known psychedelic meets a tradition of men who have already spent decades burning away the ego without it?
One sadhu wept upon seeing what he described as a fully manifest Vishnu sustaining the very fabric of the universe. An Aghori woman named Mataji simply said, “Success, success.” Both moving. Both undeniable.
Then came Bavani Baba.
An Aghori who meditates in cremation grounds — where most of us would bolt in blind terror — Bavani Baba took an enormous dose. He sat in total stillness for five minutes. When he opened his eyes, his first question was not about cosmic visions or divine architecture. He looked at Dakota and asked, with something between amusement and gentle pity: “Are you happy now?”
He acknowledged the experience was real. But temporary. “Sapo is one five-minute light,” he said, “but it goes. Sadhu means light forever.”
That distinction — between a borrowed light and a built flame — is one of the most important ideas you will ever encounter on a genuine spiritual path. And it is precisely what thousands of Reiki practitioners, meditators, and energy healers are quietly discovering: that as the practice deepens and the body’s own energetic coherence strengthens, the pull toward external substances — whether recreational, numbing, or even ceremonially sacred — gently, organically dissolves.
Not because someone told you to quit. But because you found the real thing.
The Neurochemistry of the Built Flame
Let us not hand-wave over the science, because the science here is genuinely fascinating.
5-MeO-DMT works primarily by flooding serotonin receptors — particularly the 5-HT2A receptor — with extraordinary force. Research published in the journal Psychopharmacology and conducted at institutions including the Imperial College London Centre for Psychedelic Research shows that this receptor is also implicated in ego dissolution, oceanic boundlessness, and the felt sense of unity that mystics across traditions have described for millennia. In other words, the compound is essentially hijacking a receptor that your own contemplative practice is designed to activate — more slowly, more sustainably, through endogenous neurochemistry.
Here is where it gets even more interesting. Studies by Dr. Andrew Newberg at Thomas Jefferson University using neuroimaging on long-term meditators show measurable reductions in parietal lobe activity during deep meditation — the same region associated with the sense of a bounded, separate self. The ego boundary actually softens on the scan. And research on Reiki from the University of Michigan and the Helfgott Research Institute shows statistically significant reductions in cortisol (the primary stress hormone), improvements in heart rate variability, and activation of the parasympathetic nervous system — the body’s “rest, heal, and integrate” state.
In plain English: deep meditation and consistent energy healing practice change your brain and body chemistry in the direction of precisely the states that substances temporarily force open. The difference is duration, depth, and — most critically — integration. A five-minute torrent of serotonin agonism is not the same as a nervous system that has learned, over years of practice, how to rest in expanded awareness.
Bavani Baba understood this intuitively. The neuroscientists are now catching up.
The Problem with Borrowed Light
Dakota’s takeaway from the Varanasi experiment was precise: there is a real difference between seeing something profound in an altered state and becoming it through sustained practice. A glimpse you must periodically refill is, by definition, borrowed. The durable version is not visited — it is built.
This is not a moral argument against ceremonial use or exploration. This is a practical, energetic observation about architecture. Consider the analogy of a river: you can flood a valley by breaking a dam (fast, dramatic, temporarily transformative), or you can slowly divert a channel until the water finds its own permanent course through the landscape. Both move water. Only one reshapes the terrain.
The Sanskrit concept of samskara — the grooves worn into consciousness by repeated action and thought — offers the same insight from the other direction. Every time you sit in meditation, every time you allow Reiki energy to move through tissue and trauma and old holding patterns, you are cutting a slightly deeper channel. You are making the expanded state structural rather than episodic. The visions become unnecessary, not because they lack value, but because what they were pointing toward has become available without the pointing.
Many longtime practitioners of energy healing describe this shift quietly, almost shyly, as though admitting they no longer need the substance feels like an act of ingratitude toward a teacher. But the teacher, if it was doing its job, was always pointing beyond itself.
Reiki and the Slow Alchemy of Cellular Patience
Reiki — from the Japanese rei (universal) and ki (life force energy, cognate with prana, chi, mana) — operates on the premise that the body carries an intelligent energetic field that, when interfered with by stress, trauma, suppressed emotion, or environmental toxicity, produces states of disease, craving, and disconnection. The practitioner acts as a conduit, allowing that universal field to flow through and reorganize the client’s (or their own) energy system.
What this looks like in practice is, admittedly, quiet. A table. Hands. Presence. Sometimes people laugh at it, which is their prerogative. They also laughed at the idea that washing hands before surgery could matter.
For those drawn to supporting their Reiki practice with tangible tools, crystals like black tourmaline, selenite, and amethyst have been used across shamanic traditions for centuries — for grounding, clearing, and expanding awareness respectively. Placing a dedicated crystal healing set on the body or around the treatment space during self-treatment adds an intentional physical anchor, giving the energetic work somewhere solid to land.
What practitioners consistently report over months and years of committed practice is a gradual shift in relationship to craving itself. Not through suppression or white-knuckling, but through something more fundamental: the underlying states that substances were managing — anxiety, dissociation, emotional numbness, the need to escape the relentlessness of ordinary mind — begin to yield. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But the way ice yields in March: quietly, continuously, without announcement.
Shamanic Wisdom and the Long Game
The shaman’s path has never been about the ceremony alone. Every genuine tradition — from the Huichol peyote rituals of Mexico to the Ayahuasca lineages of the Shipibo to the vision quest practices of North American plains peoples — embeds the ceremony within a much larger context of preparation, integration, dietary discipline, relationship to community, and ongoing practice. The medicine is one node in a much larger web.
What has gotten lost in the Western extraction of these practices (and the internet has accelerated this extraction to almost comedic speed) is precisely that context. The ceremony without the preparation is a door without a house. You can walk through it and come out the other side, but you have nowhere to live.
Bavani Baba is, structurally speaking, a man who has built the house first. He doesn’t need the door anymore because he lives in what the door was meant to reveal.
The shamanic concept of mesa — the ceremonial altar, the accumulated power objects, the physical map of a practitioner’s spiritual history — is instructive here. It is not built in a day. It is built by returning, again and again, to the practice. Each return lays another stone. For many practitioners, a hand-hammered Tibetan singing bowl becomes the anchor of that daily return — studies on sound healing show its frequencies move the brain into alpha and theta states, the very brainwave territory that meditation is designed to cultivate, far more quickly than silence alone. The healing traditions understood that the real ceremony is the daily one: the meditation at dawn, the gratitude at dusk, the willingness to sit with discomfort instead of chemically rearranging it.
The Astrology of Transformation: Saturn and the Long Transmutation
Astrologers will recognize the archetype here immediately: this is Saturn’s domain. Not Jupiter’s flash of sudden expansion, not Uranus’s bolt-from-the-sky awakening — but Saturn, the slow grinder, the master of earned authority, the planet that refuses to give you anything you haven’t built cell by cell.
Saturn in esoteric tradition rules chronos — not just time, but the quality of accumulated time. It governs bones, which are slow to form and extraordinarily durable. It governs karma in its most precise sense: not punishment, but consequence; the architecture of what you have actually built versus what you have merely glimpsed.
The psychedelic experience is, astrologically speaking, profoundly Neptunian or Uranian: oceanic dissolution, sudden illumination, the veils rent in an instant. Beautiful and genuinely useful, particularly early on the path. But the Saturnine work — the Reiki sessions that don’t feel profound, the meditation sits where the monkey mind runs riot for thirty minutes before settling for five, the slow recalibration of the nervous system toward equanimity — this is what produces what Bavani Baba was describing. The light that doesn’t go.
Every tradition has a word for this. In Yoga: tapas, the heat of sustained practice. In Kabbalah: the process of tikkun, repair — not through dramatic intervention but through consistent, daily rectification. In Hoodoo’s rootwork tradition: the long candle, the working that burns for nine days, the patience required when the conjure is slow.
What to Actually Do: Practical Steps for the Long Road
If you are at the beginning of this path, or if you are somewhere in the middle and finding the substances still calling more loudly than the practice, here is what the evidence — both scientific and thousands of years of accumulated wisdom — suggests:
Commit to a daily minimum. Even ten minutes of Reiki self-treatment or breath-focused meditation daily creates measurable neurological change within eight weeks, per Dr. Sara Lazar’s landmark Harvard study on cortical thickness in meditators. You are, literally, building tissue.
Treat the integration gap. The problem with powerful altered states is rarely the state itself — it is the absence of a container to integrate what was revealed. Journaling is one of the most underrated tools here: a structured spiritual practice log creates accountability, makes subtle energetic shifts visible over weeks, and builds the kind of self-knowledge that no single ceremony can shortcut. Body-based practices like yoga or conscious movement, and working with a skilled energy practitioner, round out that container.
Give it a year before you judge it. Bavani Baba spent decades. We are not all Aghoris. But the people who report the most profound transformations from energy healing and meditation are, almost without exception, people who gave it long enough for the body to trust the process. Three months is an introduction. A year is when the architecture begins.
The Light That Stays
Mataji said “success, success.” She was right — the experience met her. But the question Bavani Baba was really asking, with his patient, slightly amused eyes, was this: what happens on the morning when there is no pipe? What happens on the Tuesday in February when the sky is grey and the practice feels dry and the cosmic architecture feels very far away?
That Tuesday morning is the real territory. And the only thing that lights it, reliably, without borrowing, is the flame you built by returning — again and again, with patience and no guarantee — to the practice.
Reiki doesn’t promise visions. Meditation doesn’t promise fireworks. What they promise, and what the science increasingly confirms, is something quieter and far more useful: a nervous system that gradually learns to rest in its own luminosity, without needing the five-minute loan.
The sadhu is not against the light. He just knows where it comes from.
Ready to build the flame? Choose one practice this week — even ten minutes of Reiki self-treatment, a daily sit, or a single grounding ritual — and commit to it for thirty consecutive days. Note, without judgment, what shifts. Not in a blaze. In the way dawn does it: slow, inevitable, and permanent.
The work is the gift. Begin.
“The appearance of things changes according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.” — Kahlil Gibran
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