Geral Blanchard, LPC, is a psychotherapist who is university trained in psychology and anthropology. Formerly of Wyoming and currently residing in Iowa, Geral travels the world in search of ancient secrets that can augment the art and science of healing. From Western neuroscience to Amazonian shamanism, he has developed an understanding of how to combine old and new healing strategies to optimize recovery, whether from psychological or physical maladies.
MDMA and Timelessness
Geral T. Blanchard • August 20, 2023
“Where did all the time go?” That is the ubiquitous question every patient asks after a treatment.
They ingest the medicine at 9 a.m. and, after what seems like perhaps an hour or so but was actually five or six, and once the eye mask comes off there is bewilderment as to just how much time has passed. Of course, this is all built on the bedrock notion in Western culture that time is a straight line and linear manifestation. And that there is such a thing as time! Stepping out of existing paradigms, even if for a brief “time” can be eye opening while your eyes are closed.
Traditional Native American cultures have long believed that time is a circular phenomenon. Remotely like the movie Groundhog Day suggests, every day is very similar and reoccurring like the last. In indigenous worldviews, the sun rises and the sun sets, routinely; we always have a predictable reset of sorts, the start of what we call a “new day,” or what Arapahos called “sleeps,” both reflecting measurements of time. The “past” creates the “present” which presumably builds a “future.” Maybe all three are interlinked, all three are one. So, in a sense, the future has already happened, indeed, because the past is still happening, now.
And from this perspective the predictive visions of Crazy Horse before the Battle of Little Bighorn, at least by our standards, was an “outside the box” visionary (altered state) phenomenon. His normal quantum thinking still breaks many laws of science. Contemplating circular time from archaic ways of thinking, pondering them in the now, are very futuristic. So, help me out; why do we all want Apple watches?
When Indigenous people refer to Creator, Wakan Tanka, or the Great Mystery, this spirit-force is a flow of consciousness (thoughts) arriving from an energetic field far, far beyond this planet. Our comparatively small version of consciousness is perceived as something comprised of matter (not spirit or mind) that exists on a personal level, somehow involving our individual minds and brains. Immanuel Kant, you may recall, asserted how time is a mental construct that only comes into existence with an individuated consciousness. Yet, whether you apply indigenous thinking or quantum physics to modern thinking, much of today’s “wisdom” is poppycock.
Human minds, while engaging their brains, are merely transducers of enormously vast energy waves. Humans are receivers (like a TV) of signals emanating far beyond us -- field energies that had no known start and are thought never to stop. We are all part of an interconnected One, the Big Thinker, never separated. And with that, ponder quantum entanglement, originally a Native American concept.
It is impossible to measure spirit-force like physical forces or objects, according to quantum physics, because to observe and measure it changes it. From a one-with-all Native perspective, we are it, it is us. All forces are intertwined.
Spirit force is not outside us and, from this principle, it is impossible to get outside of ourselves to measure it/us, the All. We are always looking along with it. And when we look, it is looking though us. To separate humans from spirit is like measuring infinity…preposterous.
Meister Eckhart, the German theologian writing in the 13th century (a long time ago?), grappled with what is at our most basic energetic essence, the universal and timeless soul manifesting in one discrete skinsuit that now wears a timepiece. His thoughts: “...no yesterday or day before, no morro or day after (for in eternity there is no yesterday or morrow); there is only a present now; the happenings of a thousand years ago, a thousand years to come, are there in the present and the antipodes [opposites] the same as here.” He appears to have suggested that spirit-force has a quality of timelessness (as experienced with MDMA) and that notions of the past, present, and future are merely feeble constructs of the human mind. Us trying to make sense of enormous things with our puny brains that exist amidst vast incomprehensible galaxies that we feebly try to describe --like that’s gonna work!
This may not make sense to everyone, unless you’ve had a non-ordinary state like a “near-death experience,” or perhaps one, two, or three MDMA treatments “over time.” And when you attempt to describe your journeys with the limits of language originating from human consciousness as an “awakening,” it begs the question, “From what into what?” Little time into Big Time? From alienation to unity?
From this brief experience of timelessness engaging with your enlarged consciousness, you might conclude there is a larger consciousness out there, the likes of which you can vaguely get a grasp of. But what is noticed and felt by you may end up being described with conviction as being “realer than real.”
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“You could say that everyone who has undergone this shift [in perspective] has transcended present-day human beings’ normal state of alienation form spirit-force and is now living in constant connection to – an awareness of – it.”
- Steve Taylor, in Spiritual Science
“Beam me up Scotty.”
- Attributed to William Shatner
“As soon as the objective world of reality is considered, the passage of time disappears like a ghost in the night.”
- Paul Davies, physicist, in Space and Time in the Modern Universe
“…the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.”
- Albert Einstein
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Other Topics
Basics of MDMA
Rituals and Ceremony
Brain and MDMA
Trauma
Heart
Energy Movement
Quantum Physics
Native Cosmologies
Nature
Spirituality/Enlightenment
Kogi Tribe
Books written by Geral T. Blanchard
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Just as we have started to witness the reality of individual post-traumatic growth (PTG) – not just bouncing back after trauma but bouncing forward – could we entertain the concept of intergenerational growth (IG) – in other words, thriving from generation to generation?
There can be two levels at which trauma is processed. The first tier may be a time of quiet denial or the dissociation of nearly all thoughts of how painful the past was. The body feels it, but the mind does not speak it. On the second level a person awakens to the entirety of it, often an unpredicted and sudden onslaught of previously suppressed details with extensive associated pain. When trauma is reconstituted at the second level it often happens unwillingly. A person may be swept away by an awakening that seems very ugly. It feels like too much to absorb in its entirety. The result is often to feel afraid, even shattered – at first. Now with everything out in the open, what must be done with it?
At the second level of awareness, it is almost impossible to go on pretending that everything is fine. No longer can the visuals and emotions be kept submerged. One wonders, “Damn it, will I ever get better?”
Traumatized persons, with their pervasive pain, typically seek mood altering experiences. This can include ascetic restrictions, hedonistic over-eating, chemical dependency, sexual dependency, sexual anorexia or celibacy, romance addiction, relationship dependency, compulsive gambling, TV or movie binging, rock climbing, auto racing, reliance on antidepressants and/or antianxiety medications, religious addiction, and so much more that can serve to pacify, distract, and avoid unpleasant thoughts and feelings. By thrill-seeking, the higher the risks being engaged, the greater mood alteration one can experience. It’s a big dopamine splash and more.
These are the adult versions of childhood thumb sucking, according to Dr. Harvey Milkman, the author of Craving for Ecstasy (the feeling of ecstasy, not the drug). Harvey pointedly said, “Growing up consists of finding the right substitute for your thumb.”
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It is one thing to imagine how another person feels. Psychopaths, despite what the general public believes, are very good at empathy on an intellectual level. Even criminal psychopaths can put themselves in another person’s position and understand their perspective. It is bigger, better, and far healthier when empathy, in its deepest sense, allows us to “feel with” other people by recognizing a sense of oneness with them, what’s called unity consciousness. To hurt others would be to hurt ourselves.
It’s impossible to talk about projection without incorporating a discussion about Sigmund Freud and Donald Trump. In this article I will skip Donald but throw in a little Carl Jung. Freud, of course, named several distinctive defense measures – reality distorting strategies to keep us safe. Two of the big ones are displacement and projection.
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