“My cousin said this is really strong,” Zaira said as she unwrapped the little green gummy bear, holding it up to examine it in the fading sunlight. “So we should probably split it up.”

“Do you want some?” she asked, holding it out to me.

We were at Bonnaroo, the legendary three-day music festival in Tennessee—a sprawling temporary city of tents, art installations, and about 80,000 people who’d all come to lose themselves in music for a long weekend. It had been over a decade since I’d touched any type of illegal drug or substance. A full decade of being straight-edge military, of random drug tests and the weight of responsibility that came with wearing the uniform.

But I was in graduate school now, on a two-year sabbatical from the Army. The next drug test was still a year away. And I was at the festival with people I trusted—my girlfriend Zaira, and our two friends Molly and Kevin. Plus, I’d already been drinking, so I had a nice buzz going. The stars were coming out. The bass from distant stages pulsed through the ground like a heartbeat.

Why not, I thought.

“Sure,” I told her.

She carefully divided the gummy bear up like a surgeon performing a delicate operation. I got the head. Kevin got the feet. Zaira and Molly split the torso between them.

I looked at the little gummy bear head sitting in my palm—barely the size of a Flintstone vitamin. This little thing is supposed to get me high? I thought, skeptical. It seemed almost comically small.

Down the hatch. Washed down with a few sips of Corona as we enjoyed the last bit of golden hour at our campsite, the Tennessee sky turning shades of orange and purple above us.

We settled back into our camping chairs, letting the gummy bear work its way through our systems, when a guy in his twenties with a flannel shirt and a friendly smile wandered up to our campsite.

“Hey, how’s it going?” he said casually, as if he was about to ask us about the weather. “You guys need any molly or K?”

It was so matter-of-fact, so casual—like he was offering us a beer or asking if we wanted to buy a bottle of water. At Bonnaroo, drugs were as omnipresent as the music itself. All weekend, we’d watched our friends and fellow festival-goers partake in everything—substances I’d heard of during D.A.R.E. classes two decades earlier, and plenty I hadn’t.

“Nah, we’re good, man. Thanks though,” I said with a polite wave.

He nodded, completely unfazed. “Cool, cool. Have a great night!” And just like that, he moved on to the next campsite, probably making the same offer.

“How many times do you think people are talking about you when they are actually talking about molly, the drug?” Kevin asked.

She rolled her eyes at him.

Zaira broke the awkward moment. “What’s K?”

“Ketamine,” I explained. “Special K. It’s horse tranquilizer.”

Her face scrunched up in disbelief. “Wait—horse tranquilizer? Like, for actual horses? Why would anyone want to try that?”

I shrugged, laughing at her expression. “I don’t know, I’ve never tried it.”

“That’s insane,” she said, shaking her head.

She wasn’t wrong. Bonnaroo was its own universe with its own rules—or lack thereof.

“Okay, where do you guys want to go first?” Molly asked, holding out the crumpled festival schedule, ready to move on from the drug dealer interlude.

“I want to see Lionel Richie,” I said confidently.

“Lionel Richie? Isn’t he like super old Motown?” Zaira said, making a face.

“Yeah, but he has a new album out. It’s supposed to be good.”

Zaira looked doubtful, but Molly chimed in supportively. “That could be cool.”

“How about Lauryn Hill?” Zaira offered as a counter-proposal.

“Nah, she wasn’t that good last time I saw her with my ex-wife,” I said, immediately trying to retract the words. Too late. Zaira rolled her eyes, and I felt that familiar pang of having said exactly the wrong thing.

“Whatever you guys want to do,” Kevin said with a shrug, just happy to be there.

I could see that no one was going to step up and make a decision—classic group paralysis. My military training kicked in automatically. Sometimes you just need someone to make the call.

“Alright, let’s start with Zedd, then Lionel Richie, then Frank Ocean, and close out the night with Kaskade at the main stage.”

Everyone shrugged in agreement. Good enough. A few minutes later, we were weaving our way through the festival grounds toward the first stage.

The bass pulsed through the ground, resonating in my chest as I stood among thousands of dancing festival-goers. The three-day music festival had transformed the Tennessee forest into a surreal spectacle of light and sound. Lasers cut through the night air like liquid geometry, creating impossible patterns above the crowd that seemed to breathe and shift with the music.

As we danced under the stars, I was both intoxicated and fatigued from nearly forty-eight hours of nonstop celebration. My legs should have been tired. My body should have been screaming for rest. But I didn’t feel tired at all. Instead, an unprecedented euphoria took over, fueled by the music and the electrifying energy of the massive crowd. The music didn’t just flow around us—it flowed through us, and our movements synchronized perfectly with each beat without conscious thought.

Gradually, I began to feel a subtle change moving through my body. It started as a gentle tingle in my hands and feet—like the pins-and-needles feeling when circulation returns, but pleasant somehow. Then it spread inward toward my core, wave by wave, until my entire body hummed with energy.

As we walked through the crowd toward the next stage, I began to feel weightless. I felt as if I needed to consciously force my feet down to the ground to counteract their desire to float into the air. It was as if gravity had loosened its grip on me, and I might just drift away if someone gave me a gentle push. The world around me started to blur and soften at the edges.

Oh, I thought with sudden clarity. That’s what the gummy bear does.

Music has always had a special relationship with psychedelics. From the ancient icaros—healing songs—of indigenous shamans, to the meandering guitar riffs that defined the Grateful Dead’s legendary concerts, to the modern natural tribal ambient sounds of artists like East Forest, music becomes something else entirely when consciousness expands.

That night, my soundtrack alternated between the soulful R&B of Lionel Richie and Frank Ocean—all smooth vocals and emotional depth—to the house and electronic beats of Zedd and Kaskade, with a few other artists mixed in. Each genre opened different doorways in my mind.

Eventually, we ended up back at the main stage where Kaskade was playing. For those unfamiliar, imagine waves of sound washing over you—progressive house music that builds and builds until the drop hits and the entire crowd erupts as one organism.

We’d lost Molly and Kevin somewhere between Lionel and Frank. Now it was just me and Zaira. I was feeling high as fuck and good—really good. She held me by the hand, pulling me through the crowd closer to the stage, navigating the sea of bodies with purpose.

As the music pulsed through the crowd, it wasn’t just a sound anymore. It was a living, breathing force that connected everyone around me, an invisible web of shared experience.

I looked at Zaira—her hair catching the stage lights, her joyful smile, the way she moved. As she pulled me forward, I looked down at our intertwined hands.

Which hand is mine? I thought, genuinely confused. I couldn’t distinguish where I ended and she began.

I looked up at her face. Is that me? Am I Robert or am I Zaira?

The question wasn’t philosophical—it was literal. I had genuine difficulty distinguishing which one of us I was.

As we found a spot closer to the stage and I wrapped my arms around her from behind, I began to dissolve completely. I was no longer just Robert. I was Robert and Zaira, both of us, fully and completely.

And as I continued to fall deeper into the music and the dance-like trance, I dissolved further still.

Who was I in this crowd?

I looked at a shirtless man with sunglasses and a trucker hat, hands raised to the sky in pure ecstasy. Was I him?

A young woman with flower pasties covering her breats, face painted with more flowers, wrists full of beaded bracelets, perched on her boyfriend’s shoulders, screaming with joy. Was I her? Was I the DJ on stage, looking out at this crowd?

Yes. I was all of them. All at once. I contained multitudes.

It felt as though I had tapped into something infinite and universal—a connection that transcended time and space. I was no longer just one person in a crowd. I was part of something much larger, something that encompassed everyone and everything, everywhere, all at once.

The usual boundaries between myself and others completely dissolved. I sensed a deep connection with everyone around me—even the trees at the edge of the field, the earth beneath my feet, and the stars overhead seemed to pulse with the same vital energy.

This wasn’t metaphorical. It was visceral. I felt the earth, the air, and the crowd just as clearly as if they were physical extensions of my own arms or legs. I lost my individual sense of identity and gained something far more profound. In that moment, I couldn’t have told you who I was, because I was everyone and everything.

As my consciousness expanded, my sense of time began to unravel. What once felt like fleeting moments stretched out, expanding until each second seemed to last for hours, then years, then centuries. It became impossible to discern where one moment ended and the next began. It was as if I had been plucked from the normal flow of time and placed in a space where time was no longer linear—where past, present, and future blurred together into a single, continuous experience.

It was surreal, dreamlike.

I looked at Zaira, her face glowing in the shifting lights of the stage, and felt a connection deeper than any I’d known. In that instant, visions of our future—a home, children, a lifetime of growth and love, as well as heartbreak and suffering—flashed before me with absolute clarity. These weren’t mere hopes or dreams but certainties. I could see them as clearly as I could remember eating breakfast earlier that day.

In what felt like a few heartbeats, I lived our entire lives together. My life from birth to death. Her life from birth to death. All the love, the pain, the joy, the sorrow—all of it. Living each lifetime thousands upon thousands of times over and over again, like a film reel stuck on repeat but somehow never boring, always beautiful.

Not only did I see our lives, but I saw the entire lives of others as well—not as an observer watching from outside, but as if I had lived every moment as my own. All of their pain and suffering, their happiness and joys, became mine. The young mother worrying about her kids back home. The college kid experiencing his first festival. The middle-aged couple who’d been coming to Bonnaroo for a decade. I was all of them, simultaneously.

Eventually, slowly, I began to slip back into my individual consciousness. Like waking from a dream but in reverse—becoming smaller, more contained, more singular.

We looked at our watches. Nearly 1 AM. The night’s performances would be winding down soon.

“Should we head back to camp?” Zaira asked, her voice sounding both far away and intimately close.

I nodded, still not entirely sure I could form words.

We walked back to our campsite—an easy walk just on the other side of the tree line, close enough to hear everything but far enough to have some peace. We were still feeling euphoric, sweaty, physically exhausted but mentally electric.

We settled into our camping chairs. I opened one more beer, and we shared some fruit and beef jerky. Then we crawled into our tent, ready to call it a night. The music was still playing, bass still thundering through the ground and into our bodies.

We looked at our phones, checking the time. “They should be finishing soon,” I said.

That’s when we heard Kaskade’s voice boom across the festival grounds: “Bonnaroo! Who’s having a good time!” The crowd erupted in a roar. Lasers, lights, and flames were still visible, filtering through the tree line like a distant war being waged in celebration.

“We’re going to play until the sun comes up!”

I looked at Zaira in shock. She looked back at me with wide eyes.

“Should we go back?” she asked.

I was also physically exhausted. My body had been dancing for hours. My feet ached. My throat was dry from shouting and singing.

“I think I’m done,” I said, surprising myself with the admission.

We crawled into our tent and zipped it shut, creating our own little world within the larger world. But the music and the alcohol made sleep restless. I tossed and turned for the next five hours in a trance-like state—not quite asleep, not quite awake, the effects of the gummy bear still dancing through my neural pathways.

During that liminal time between sleep and waking, I felt a profound connection to the consciousness of the physical world itself. The forest surrounding the festival. The trees rooted deep in Tennessee soil. The soil itself. Even the Earth as a whole—all of it seemed to pulse with awareness, with aliveness.

My perception expanded to encompass the tiniest atoms vibrating in air and the vast expanse of the cosmos spinning overhead. In that moment, I perceived existence across all of time—past, present, and future melded into a singular experience. I felt as though I had become the universe in its entirety, catching a glimpse of the true nature of existence.

It was beautiful.

As the night progressed toward dawn, I gradually returned to my ordinary state of consciousness. The transition wasn’t easy. At times I felt an alluring pull to remain in that expanded state, to stay dissolved in the cosmic everything, to die and leave my body behind.

However, I was drawn back to my human form by an intense desire to share this newfound knowledge and experience with the world. Layer by layer, I descended through interstellar planes of elevated consciousness, slowly finding my way back through a haze of profound insights that were already beginning to fade like dreams in morning light.

Ultimately, it was my connection with Zaira that anchored me to reality. I could feel her breathing beside me in the tent—a physical and spiritual tether to our shared existence. The desire to be there for her, to live out the marriage and long life that I knew we were destined to share. This mixture of love and purpose became the gravitational force that drew me back to my human form, back to being just Robert instead of everything everywhere all at once.

As dawn broke and the music finally, mercifully faded, I fell into a deep, sleep.

Eventually we woke up—stiff, dehydrated, covered in a thin layer of festival dust. We packed up our tent and camping gear, loaded everything into the car, and returned to our normal lives.

But that moment, that experience, stuck with me forever.

For years afterward, I would ask myself: What the fuck was that?

***

It took me a long time to process and integrate that experience.

For days afterward, 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. Sounds had depth and texture I’d never noticed before. 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 solid, that I was still here, still embodied, still Robert.

But who was Robert, really? That question kept surfacing, uninvited and unsettling.

I searched online obsessively, trying to understand what had happened to me. Forums. Reddit threads. I read about THC experiences, looking for something that matched what I’d felt.

Nothing came close.

“What drug effects last 12 hours?” I asked Google in the privacy of my condo “LSD” “Lasting effects of psychedelics.” “Ego death experience.” “Feeling like the universe.” “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 reaction. 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, your emotional state, your beliefs, your traumas, your hopes and fears.

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.

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 art installations primed my brain for the extraordinary.

My physiology: I’d been mixing alcohol 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, and still am, incredibly sensitive to psychedelics.

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.

But more importantly, 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, does that mean God isn’t some external being in heaven but something else entirely?

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—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.

 

After years of searching, of philosophical inquiry, of studying everything from Zig Ziglar speeches to books about quantum physics, of hiking to sacred caves on Native American reservations, to learning how to sit in deep meditation, here is what I’ve come to understand about that experience and what it revealed:

There are a series of illusions that we carry with us in our human form. Four great illusions that create the experience of separation, of being an individual navigating a material world. And when these illusions dissolve—through psychedelics, through meditation, through near-death experiences, through whatever portal opens the door—we catch a glimpse of what lies beneath.