Time Part Five

Past, present, and future merge together into a timeless moment, the now of eternity. Time stops, inasmuch as it no longer "passes." There is existence, but it is not dependent upon time. Now and then, before and after, all combine into this exact point. On the relative level, short periods of time encompass enormous amounts of experience (p. 234).

Very little is known about the nature of these changes. However, the repeated theme of temporal distortion amongst many archives of psychedelic experiences (e.g., Hayes, 2000; Siebert, 2004; Strassman, 2001) strongly supports the notion that psychedelic drugs do, in some way, impact the underlying neurochemistry of time perception. Describing an experience with the psychedelic plant Salvia divinorum, Daniel Siebert (2004) writes:

The last words to pass through my head went something like, "Just as I thought. This stuff is inactive. I'll go toss it in the trash." Then quite suddenly I found myself in a confused, fast moving state of consciousness with absolutely no idea where my body or my universe had gone. I have little memory of this initial period of the experience, but I do know that a lot was happening and that it seemed quite literally like an eternity, when in fact it must only have lasted a few minutes… In this state, all the points of time in my personal history coexisted. One did not precede the next. Apparently, had I so willed it, I could return to any point in my life and really be there, because it was actually happening right now.

These experiences raise questions regarding the very nature of existence and of the mental universe. Since the work of Einstein, distortions of the fabric of space-time have been commonplace in discussions of the speed of light, relativity, and cosmology. Likewise, subjective accounts of psychedelic experiences often include perceptual distortions that include insights about cosmological questions like "What was God doing before the beginning?", "How did the universe begin?", and "What is the nature of time?"

There are few illustrations of the cosmological-psychedelic link as specific as the following recent report of viewing a total lunar eclipse after consuming LSD (Dawson, 2001):

As the eclipse became total, with the sun behind us as we viewed the moon in front of us, only a point of light remained on the moon. Completely without warning, the bright rays of light from this point seemed to attach to my head, lift it off my shoulders, and physically move it … to the edge of the moon where I was given a clear view of the entire Milky Way extending outward from my head! It seemed to flow through my head at the level of my eyes.

Consistent with the astronomical associations of such experiences, it has recently been proposed that models used in astronomy and mathematics can also be used to better understand the non-ordinary mental time of psychedelic experience (Saniga & Buccheri, 2003). Metod Saniga (an astrophysicist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences) employs advanced concepts that appear in chaos theory to model psychedelic experience. In providing a workable mathematical model of subjective experience, Saniga raises mental experience to a par with physical reality. As Siebert (2004) writes:

I had the sudden realization that although I had managed to pull myself back into my body I had somehow ended up back in the wrong spot in the timeline of my physical existence. I was convinced that I might be stuck in this situation and would have to continue my life from this point in my past.

From A Psychedelic Neurochemistry of Time by Kim A Dawson PhD

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