On the banks of the Ganges, with cremation smoke drifting across the water at Manikarnika Ghat, an experiment took place that sits squarely in The Spore Report’s territory: what happens when the most intense psychedelic known to science meets a tradition that has spent two thousand years trying to dissolve the self without any chemistry at all.
The story comes from YouTuber Dakota of Earth, who documented a series of encounters between a Mexican shaman named Jose, carrying 5-MeO-DMT drawn from the Sonoran Desert toad (Jose calls it “sapo,” Spanish for toad), and a handful of sadhus and Agoris living along the river in Varanasi.
The setup
5-MeO-DMT is often described as the most powerful psychedelic available to humans, capable of producing something close to a complete collapse of the boundary between self and world. Dakota, who has sat with ayahuasca shamans in the Amazon and travelled through Mexico and Papua New Guinea chasing these states, has had the experience himself. In his own description, it is something close to dying.
He and Jose spent a week with sadhus and holy men, building toward a question: how does a substance built for ego dissolution land on people who have already spent decades dissolving the ego through their own means?
Three encounters
The first sadhu, Baba Raendra, reacted hard and fast. He gripped Dakota’s face, clenched his jaw until his teeth audibly slammed together, and after a few minutes came down crying. He described seeing a fully manifest Vishnu generating and sustaining the universe, and a realm where enlightened beings sit in meditation, still praying for humanity to wake up. He called the experience faster and more energising than his usual meditation practice, but said it cleared something different each time he took it, as if working through layers.
The second was an Agori woman, Mataji, photographed but not recorded by request. She made low sounds, called out to Shiva, opened her eyes and said only, “Success, success.” She has never discussed it with Dakota since.
The third encounter is the one that reframed everything.
Bavani Baba and the five minute light
Bavani Baba is an Agori, part of a sect known for meditating on impermanence in cremation grounds, wearing the ash of the dead, carrying human bones. Dakota expected the chemistry to be undeniable, even to a man this deep into renunciation. Jose packed an enormous dose, “enough to knock an elephant into space,” and Bavani cleared the pipe in seconds.
Then he simply sat. No twitching, no collapse, no visible reaction at all for nearly five minutes; an eternity by the standards of a substance this strong. Dakota had no idea whether anything was happening.
Then Bavani cleared his throat, opened his eyes, looked directly at him, and said: “Are you happy now?”
When pressed for detail, Bavani didn’t deny the experience was real or powerful. He called it a genuine glimpse, useful for people who need proof that “the light” exists. But he drew a hard line between that glimpse and what his own decades of practice produce: “Sapo is one five minute light, but it goes. Sadhu means light forever.”
In a follow-up video, Dakota shares audio of a longer exchange recorded weeks later, where Bavani goes further, challenging Dakota directly on attachment, ego and what he calls “YouTube brain”: chasing experience for its own sake rather than building anything durable from it. Bavani’s own claim is stark and, by his account, lived rather than visited: indifference to praise, fame and even his own death, oriented entirely toward what he calls God or “the one reality.”
Seeing versus becoming
What makes this worth covering here is the distinction Dakota lands on by the end: there is a real difference between seeing something profound in an altered state and becoming something profound through sustained practice. The psychedelic flash can deliver a real, even mystical, glimpse of unity or light. But a glimpse that requires refilling the pipe to return to is, by definition, borrowed.
This isn’t a new tension in psychedelic research either. It echoes ongoing questions in the literature about durability: whether single, intense peak experiences (5-MeO-DMT, high-dose psilocybin) produce lasting trait change on their own, or whether the lasting change comes from what’s built around the experience, the discipline, the integration, the daily return to practice. Bavani’s framing, that the medicine offers proof a “light” exists while the sustained path is what actually makes it permanent, sits comfortably alongside that research without needing to resolve in either direction.
Dakota is clear that without psychedelics he wouldn’t be who he is, but the real thing, whatever you want to call it, doesn’t need a refill. Whether you read that as a critique of psychedelic spirituality or simply a reminder of where the work really happens, it’s a fascinating piece of footage.
