Introduction

My name is Robin Hartings. I’m 35 years old and live in the Netherlands.

From a young age, I was exposed to non-dual teachings. Instead of bringing clarity, they mostly left me confused. Something in the message felt deeply true, yet at the same time it didn’t fully add up. That tension became the starting point of a long search for truth.

My personality is such that I need to understand things thoroughly. I have a strong drive to get to the bottom of whatever I explore, because I want absolute certainty in what I think and how I live. This inner demand led me to read, listen to, and watch an enormous amount of material over the years.

I studied the work of Rupert Spira, Bernardo Kastrup, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Donald Hoffman, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Chris Langan, and many others. I also explored channeled teachings from Abraham Hicks, Bashar, and similar sources. All of them claimed to speak the truth, yet they often contradicted each other on fundamental points: some said free will exists, others said it doesn’t. One teacher claimed there is only a Self, while another insisted there is no self at all.

This constant contradiction frustrated and confused me deeply.

To move beyond theory, I attended a Vipassana retreat, sat with several non-dual teachers, and — as the culmination of my search — worked extensively with 5-MeO-DMT. This is one of the most powerful psychedelic substances known, often described as inducing a complete ego death, a total dissolution of the self. Over the years I used it more than fifty times, ranging from very small doses to very large ones, determined not to miss or misinterpret anything.

These experiences brought many profound insights and answers.

Because I struggled with these questions for so long myself, I now want to share what I have learned over the past fifteen years with others who are on a similar path.

Don’t expect an “enlightened” person like you typically see. I’ve come to realize that there are two valid paths to follow, namely one from experience and one from logical reasoning. And that, in itself, turns out to be a beautiful starting point.

Because here we already meet the fundamental tension between logical reasoning and experience — two very different foundations from which people try to build a coherent model of reality. These two approaches often lead to radically different conclusions.

In the blogs and on this website, we will explore exactly that and more.

Let's go to the first one: My 5-MeO-DMT experiences