Editor's Note: Jason Louv is Webmaster of the excellent site King Mob. Check out his Grant Morrison interview "Flick The Switch."

So my brain unfolded last April and I went into a higher dimension. We talk about mystic experiences like they don't exist, and if they do exist that they are the soul province of mountain-sitting Tibetan monks and deluded, drug-crazed hippies. But the world's not a TV show, and the agony and the ecstasy can hit you anywhere, anytime, and leave nothing but a calling card.

I thought I was pretty normal until a gigantic quantum butterfly opened its wings in my parietal lobe and, for a few hours, I lived in a limitless reality where there's no such thing as time. That tends to change how you look at daily existence, and help you to start to question exactly what it is that you've been accepting as daily existence.

I only experienced it for a few hours, but it remains one of the happiest experiences of my life. Now, I've never been one prone to any kind of hallucination or vision; chemical, religious, or otherwise. I grew up as an overly cynical, bitter Southern Californian, more than ready to sneer at anything mystic, New-Agey or otherwise sappy. Just like everyone thinks before this kind of thing happens to them, I didn't believe in visions.

Well . . . it was the sunny coming of Spring, in the UC Santa Cruz dorms. My first year in college had been an unpredictable roller coaster of highs and lows, and a predictable haze of beer, sex, weed, indie rock and alternative-newspaper deadlines. I had been having one of the best weeks ever, laying in the sun with my friends and just dopily grinning all day long. It all seemed to be leading up to something.

I'm not sure exactly what caused it, if anything. For the last two quarters I had been studying Tae Kwon Do, which certainly was opening up new vistas for me. I had smoked with some of my friends early in the day–and it's been my experience that THC tends to both sensitize the self and to exaggerate all emotions (which is why I have had as many bad experiences with it as good ones) but marijuana does not spontaneously create sensations like the following one. This was not a drug experience. This was something else.

I was alone in my room, typing at the computer and something hit me. I suddenly realized. I was suddenly overflowing with ecstasy and euphoria, I could barely contain all of it. I was sitting in my chair and suddenly perceived something I had thought about first when I was sixteen and staying overnight in the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel. I could see the sense of linear time in my brain as a physical thing.

A bit hard to put into words, but it was like I could see time itself as my brain perceived it. It was a kind of aggregate of associations and beliefs, all the images I associated with linear time–-ventilation shafts, rivers, roads, metal corridors, and they all added up to something it was easy to see as a snake or a worm. I also perceived that either it was not meant to be there, like a parasite–-put there by somebody or something-–or that it was something that I had outgrown. Instead of trying to go about removing it from my brain, which I felt would be too destructive and probably wouldn't work, I decided to approach it shamanistically, like it was a caterpillar, and coax it into turning into the butterfly of quantum perception. All it took was will and imagination.

I hatched it and I could see it like a huge, shimmering cross between a butterfly and an electron cloud. It fluttered slow, and I was suddenly struck by the depth, the texture of the world; the infinite possibilities of interaction between me and everything around me. Imagine being a character in a two-dimensional TV show who suddenly remembers that he is an actor in the three-dimensional world. I remembered, I think, a higher dimension. I suddenly was able to see the moment, the infinite possibilities around me, that I really could do anything without the chains of narrative and linear time.

I saw my friends in the hall and when I embraced and talked to them it was like light dancing into itself, infinite love with no suspicion or hesitance. I was operating as a full human being, not imposing limits. It was love light, love light.

I went out into the sun. It's a blur from there. Love light.

After a day or so, it faded, slowly at first, and then altogether, as I slipped back into the old patterns, still radically altered but without that catastrophic bliss overload, leaving me trying to piece together what had happened so that I could get back.

The psychic trigger was the growing realization–extrapolated from my Tae Kwon Do work–that both the past, and even more so the future, are fictions that we use to limit ourselves. Pop-psychology and pop-occultism harp on about how we interpret the past, but that isn't the problem at all. The problem is that we think we can see the future and predict future events, which amounts to locking ourselves in chains. I would like to eradicate the idea of the future in my mind. Then the situation will really become clear and action will become much freer and truer.

We labor in our minds over what we can and cant do, which is laziness. It's not up to us to determine the results of our actions, it's up to the world. Otherwise we are fastening our ankles to stones, and not living human lives. No future! No future! No future for you!

I remain altered. It was this experience that really awakened that feeling that I had an energy field for lack of a better term. I also walk around now with a constant, low-grade feeling of physical euphoria, which, although nowhere near the level of my experience, is still always there. It also awakened basic psychic abilities; that is, I soon realized that in conversation with other people, the most important thing was not what you said but the intent in each person's mind, that what each person was thinking was just as important if not more important than what was being said to good communication. Several other revelations followed; it was one of several experiences I had that year in which I could step back and say "I've grown up."