It took me a long time to process and integrate my first mystical experience.

For days after the music festival, I felt like I was living in a haze, suspended between worlds. I wasn’t quite sure if the reality I was experiencing was actually real or some elaborate dream I’d constructed. Colors seemed more vibrant, and every time I looked at Zaira, I felt echoes of those infinite lifetimes we’d lived together, like memories that shouldn’t exist yet somehow did.

I kept touching things—the steering wheel of my car, the keyboard at my desk, my dog’s fur, just to confirm they were real.

Was I real? Or was I some universal mind temporarily embodied as Robert?

I searched online, trying to understand what kind of drug could have caused my experience.

“What drug effects last 12 hours?” I asked Google in the privacy of my condo. It returned “LSD.” “Lasting effects of psychedelics.” “Ego death experience.” “Feelings of oneness.” “Time distortion.”

The search results led me down rabbit holes of terminology I didn’t understand yet—set and setting, integration, unity consciousness, mystical experiences.

The next time I saw Molly, I asked her, “Hey, so that gummy bear at Bonnaroo… did that feel like normal THC to you?”

“I mean, it was strong,” she said. “Why?”

“I just… I had a really intense experience. Like, really intense.”

“Yeah, there was definitely something else in there,” she said thoughtfully.

“Dude, I felt like I was one with the universe,” I told her, the words tumbling out. “Like I wasn’t Robert anymore. I was everyone. Everything. I lived multiple lifetimes. I saw the entire arc of existence. It was—”

“Sounds like you had a really good time,” she said with a laugh.

But she didn’t get it. Not really.

She and Kevin and even Zaira had enjoyed the experience—they’d felt good, danced, connected with the music. But it hadn’t hit them the way it hit me. They’d gotten high. I’d experienced something else entirely. Something that felt less like intoxication and more like… revelation.

What I would come to learn later—much later, after years of study and experience—was the concept of set and setting, famously coined by psychedelic researcher Timothy Leary in the 1960s.

Set refers to your mindset going into the experience—your expectations, emotional state, beliefs, traumas, hopes, fears, as well as your own physiology, which can affect how your body processes drugs.

Setting refers to your physical and social environment—where you are, who you’re with, what’s happening around you, the music, the atmosphere, the safety or danger of the space.

Psychedelic medicines affect us all differently based on these factors. The same substance at the same dose can produce radically different experiences depending on set and setting.

For me that night at Bonnaroo, everything aligned in a way that created the perfect conditions for a mystical experience:

My set: I was in a vulnerable emotional place, newly back together with Zaira, questioning everything about my life and my beliefs. My divorce wounds were still fresh. I was searching for meaning after years of military service that had shown me death and suffering without offering much in the way of spiritual understanding. I was open, hungry for something beyond the material world, even if I didn’t consciously know it. I’d also been mixing alcohol and energy drinks with whatever was in that gummy bear. I had an incredibly low tolerance—the last time I’d consumed any drug was smoking weed over a decade earlier in high school. I was also incredibly sensitive to psychedelics.

My setting: I was surrounded by friends I trusted, at a music festival designed to be a sacred space of joy and connection. The music—particularly the electronic music with its repetitive, trance-inducing beats—acted as a sonic guide. The crowd of thousands, all experiencing altered states together, created a collective energy field. The visual spectacle of lights, lasers, and pyrotechnics primed my brain for the extraordinary.

And then there was the music playing throughout the night as I lay in that tent, keeping me tossing and turning in a dreamlike liminal state where the boundary between waking and sleeping dissolved. My consciousness never fully came back down—it just hovered in that expanded space for hours.

All of that combined to create a spiritual experience that I don’t think I could ever fully reproduce, even if I tried.

It was an experience that shook every foundational principle I thought I knew.

In the days and weeks that followed, I found myself asking questions I’d never seriously considered before:

What is time, really? If I experienced multiple lifetimes simultaneously, if past and future felt equally present, what does that say about the nature of temporal reality?

What is God? If I felt divine consciousness within myself, if I experienced myself as the creator and the created, what does that say about God? 

What is identity? If I dissolved into everything and everyone, if I couldn’t distinguish between Robert and Zaira and the crowd and the universe, then what does it mean to be “me”? Where do I actually end and the world begin?

What happens when we die? If consciousness can expand beyond the body, if I experienced myself as eternal and infinite, does death even exist in the way we think it does?

What is heaven? If I experienced paradise, bliss, divine love, and perfect unity with all of existence while still alive in a tent in Tennessee, then what are we waiting for? Why do we think heaven is somewhere else, sometime later?

What is real? If this profound spiritual experience can be triggered by a molecule interacting with receptors in my brain, does that make it less real? Or does it reveal that “reality” is far more malleable and mysterious than we’ve been taught?

These questions haunted me. Excited me. Terrified me.

And since I was still in the Army—still subject to drug testing, still living under the weight of military regulations and expectations—I couldn’t really talk openly about the experience. I couldn’t tell my commanders, “Hey, I took an edible at a music festival and experienced ego death and now I’m questioning the entire nature of reality.”

That wouldn’t have gone well.

I also didn’t know anything about psychedelics at the time. I didn’t know there was a whole field of research, centuries of indigenous wisdom, and communities of people who’d had similar experiences. I thought I was alone in this, possibly crazy, definitely confused.

So I had to process and integrate those awakenings by myself, in silence, in the privacy of my own mind.

Although I couldn’t really explain why at first, after that experience I had greater confidence and clarity about my relationship with Zaira.

The doubts and fears that had plagued me before—Is this moving too fast? Will the Army ruin this relationship like it did my marriage? Am I capable of love?—those anxieties simply… disappeared.

Because I had already witnessed our shared life. Multiple times over. In that expanded state, I’d seen us grow old together, raise children together, face challenges together, love each other through everything. It wasn’t hope or wishful thinking—it felt like memory, like certainty.

The fear evaporated because I’d already lived the answer.

My worries and anxiety about politics, my career, the future of the world—all of that melted away too. Because it became clear, in a way I can’t fully articulate, that everything was by perfect design. Not in a deterministic “everything happens for a reason” platitude kind of way, but in a deeper sense: that the universe was unfolding exactly as it should, that chaos and order were dancing together in perfect harmony, that even suffering had its place in the grand design.

I felt more empowered to express myself authentically. The masks I’d been wearing my whole life—the good soldier, the successful student, the competent commander, the person who always had it together—those masks felt less necessary. I could just be Robert, flawed and searching and imperfect, and that was enough.

Previous concepts and ideas I’d had about religion and spirituality all of a sudden seemed trivial, like children’s stories I’d outgrown. Because I had felt the loving spirit of God—or whatever you want to call that infinite consciousness, that universal mind—inside myself more fully than I’d ever felt in any church, any prayer, any scripture.

The divine wasn’t out there. It was in here. It was me. It was everything.

Of course, that intensity faded. Within a few weeks, I was back to being regular Robert—worried about my helicopter design capstone, stressed about the Black Lives Matter movement, frustrated by Atlanta traffic, annoyed by small inconveniences. The profound insights dimmed, became harder to access, felt more like memories than lived reality.

And although I still occasionally struggle with all my human shortcomings—impatience, fear, ego, attachment—that enlightenment, that glimpse beyond the veil, is still something I can return to when I quiet my mind in deep meditation and reflection.

It’s like having visited a foreign country. You can’t stay there permanently; you have to return to your regular life. But you carry the memory of that place with you. You know it exists. You know what’s possible. And that knowledge changes you, even after you’ve come home.