DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
A PSYCHEDELIC JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF TIME
By now, virtually everyone has heard of the classic “near death experience,” or NDE, experienced by many of those teetering on the brink between life and death. The NDE often involves a light seen at the end of a tunnel, variously explained by mystics as a confrontation with one’s own essential nature, or “higher Self,” or possibly as an encounter with the radiant light of God, Jesus, Buddha, or some other deity or guide.
When I was nineteen, I had a psychedelic experience that shed new light on that concept for me.
I was a sophomore at the Art Institute of Chicago when a fellow classmate handed me a marijuana joint in the school cafeteria one afternoon with the cautionary comment, “This is powerful stuff, don’t smoke it by yourself!” I’d heard that sort of hype before and never took it seriously. This time, though, the warning turned out to be true.
I got together that night with my childhood friend Tom, and we proceeded to light up the joint, no pun intended. Before we'd even gotten past the first two puffs, the room began to swim wildly, like a Van Gogh painting come to life. For the next half hour or so—that's only a guess, since I still don't know how much time elapsed—the two of us struggled to keep our wits about us as the world seemed to careen out of control. Looking back on the experience years later, I came to believe the marijuana was likely laced with DMT, or something equally powerful.
At one point my friend seemed to fall ill and stumbled to the bathroom while vomiting, mumbling along the way, “I think this was poisoned.” I wasn’t sure what to think myself. Unlike him, I didn’t vomit, but a wave of anxiety flooded through me that was different from anything I’d experienced before. I began trembling and worrying about what might come next.
As deeply disturbing as this was becoming for me, the intensity of the experience so shattered the framework of my ordinary mental constructs that it allowed for certain insights to bleed through that I normally wouldn’t have access to. Each of those insights unfolded organically out of the other, like stages of a rocket. I took great pains after my experience to chronicle as many of those insights as possible in writing, but I’ll focus here on just one of those, which is directly related to my opening comments.
As the minutes went on, my mind became like a microscope whose magnifying powers were progressively amplifying, allowing me to peer ever more closely into the nature of time itself, into the heart of the NOW.
We normally experience the present moment as though it was a continuous, unbroken stream. But in that hyperaware state I saw that the NOW actually consists of thousands—possibly even millions—of finer “thought-moments.” A crude analogy would be a second of movie film, which seems to the casual eye like a fluid motion, when it actually consists of twenty-four individual snapshots moving by so fast it only seems continuous. It’s much the same with our experience of time, I realized: it also seems fluid but actually consists of many quicker, discrete thought- moments, but they’re largely unnoticeable because they pass by so rapidly. The difference for me was that, rather than just twenty- four frames a second, this seemed to me more like hundreds if not thousands of frames a second.
Buried deep in the heart of those spaces between two thoughts wasn’t simply darkness, as you might find between any two frames of film, but a light—a light at the end of the tunnel, I’m tempted to say—which I knew was actually the radiance of pure being itself. Each moment was like a stroboscopic flashing on and off rapidly, so rapid that we don’t even notice the light in between those cracks.
That’s a simple way of explaining it, anyway. Instead of my frames-per-second analogy of successive “on/off” moments, I could see that some of those frames were more obvious and gross, being closer to the surface of ordinary consciousness, while many more were extremely subtle, with the deepest and subtlest of those residing closer to that ground source of light. Our consciousness careens through this succession of thought-moments like a roller coaster each second, going up and down through the various levels of being, climaxing at the deepest point of that ride in the encounter with that luminous ground of being.
It was a while later that I came across Raymond Moody’s famous accounts of NDE’s, with their tales of individuals moving through a tunnel with a light at its end. That struck a chord for me, but in a far more immediate way than described in those accounts. Rather than occurring just once at the threshold of death, this encounter with the Self actually occurs each and every moment, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of times each second. We plunge into a naked confrontation with the source of being each and every moment.
Said another way, we're dying and are being reborn constantly.
Other insights occurred to me that evening, but that was the one which left its greatest imprint on me. I wouldn’t wish to ever relive the more unpleasant aspects of that night, which was the closest thing to a bad trip I ever experienced, but I can’t deny how it shaped my understanding of the world, and of time itself.
Postscript: Several years after this experience I discussed it with the mystic and yogi Shelly Trimmer. Knowing his long background in meditation, I was anxious to get his feedback about what I had experienced. He essentially validated the experience, but I also couldn’t help notice how it related to something he taught about the nature of time as well. We’re existing inside of God’s memory banks, he suggested, and our perception of ordinary time actually consists of many minute “frames” within those memory banks, which we string together in our own consciousness in a way that conveys the illusion of movement.
But Shelly went on to suggest a slightly different analogy that he felt struck even closer to the mark. Instead of a movie film with multiple frames per second, he likened the phenomenal changes of consciousness each moment to the fluctuations of frequency that occur in music. I had some idea what he was talking about, since I’d long been fascinated by how a seemingly continuous sound, like a singer holding a single note for a long time, could be encoded on the surface of a phonograph record as a multitude of minute peaks and valleys within the record grooves. As a kid, I would sometimes fiddle around with my mother’s record player, manually moving the turntable by hand, and hearing how that caused the sound to change. If I slowed the turntable down far enough, I heard how the sound was composed of many subtler, shorter sounds—hundreds or thousands of beeps and pops and clicks, rising and falling in pitch and duration. But because our ordinary perception is so slow, we only hear the cumulative effect of those frequencies strung together, with the result being the fluid music we hear.
The conclusion I drew from both my experience and Shelly’s teaching? Simply, that we may talk about “altered states” as if they're something special, but consciousness actually is altering all the time.
Excerpted from my book When the Stars Align (Inner Eye Publications, 2023).
Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, most recently In the Company of Gods and So, What Am I Doing Here, Anyway?