Somewhere between the third breath and the moment your thinking mind finally gives up trying to control the experience, something shifts. The room you’re sitting in doesn’t disappear exactly, but it becomes transparent – like you’re suddenly seeing the scaffolding behind a movie set. Geometric patterns pulse where solid walls used to be. The sense that you’re a person inside a body starts to feel like a costume you can take off. And underneath it all, there’s this unmistakable feeling: this was built. This reality, whatever it is, has architecture.
This isn’t a fringe report from someone who took too many mushrooms at a music festival. It’s a description that shows up again and again across thousands of years of human experience, from ancient mystery school initiations to modern clinical trials at Johns Hopkins. People who enter deep altered states – whether through psychedelics, prolonged meditation, breathwork, or the strange corridor of a near-death experience – keep coming back with strikingly similar stories about what they found on the other side.
They say reality has layers. They say the ordinary world is a kind of projection. They say there’s a source code running underneath everything, and for a few hours or a few timeless minutes, they got to read it.
The Geometry Behind the Curtain
There’s a particular detail that psychedelic researchers have documented so consistently it’s almost become a cliché in the literature: geometric patterns. Not random shapes, but intricate, self-repeating, often fractal designs that people describe as the “underlying structure” of reality. Terence McKenna called it the “chrysanthemum” pattern that appears at the onset of a DMT experience. Researchers at Imperial College London, studying psilocybin with fMRI brain scans, found that subjects consistently reported perceiving a geometric grid or lattice beneath ordinary perception.
What’s strange about these reports is the language people use. They don’t say “I saw pretty patterns.” They say things like “I saw how it’s all organized” or “I could see the code” or “everything is made of the same repeating template.” It’s as if the visual cortex, freed from its usual job of rendering consensus reality, starts showing you the operating system instead of the desktop.
This maps onto something the Hermetic tradition has pointed at for millennia. The Kybalion’s Principle of Correspondence – “As above, so below; as below, so above” – suggests that patterns repeat across every scale of existence. The microcosm mirrors the macrocosm. What if these geometric visions aren’t hallucinations at all, but brief moments of actually perceiving the fractal, self-similar architecture that consciousness uses to generate the appearance of a physical world?
Modern physics has been circling this idea too. The holographic principle, which emerged from black hole thermodynamics and string theory, proposes that all the information contained in a volume of space can be encoded on its boundary – like a hologram where every piece contains the whole. When someone in a deep psychedelic state reports feeling that “everything is everything” or that each part of reality contains the totality, they might be describing a direct perception of something physicists are still working out the math for.
When the Self Dissolves and the Source Appears
Meditation traditions have their own version of this backdoor access, though it tends to be quieter and more gradual than a psychedelic journey. In advanced stages of concentration practice – what Buddhist traditions call jhana, or what certain Hindu lineages describe as samadhi – practitioners report a progressive dissolution of the sense of being a separate self located inside a body.
First the body boundary softens. Then the sense of being an observer watching experience starts to flicker. Eventually, in the deepest states, there’s just awareness aware of itself – no center, no periphery, no subject-object split. And in that space, practitioners often describe something remarkable: the constructed nature of ordinary reality becomes obvious. Not as an intellectual concept, but as a direct perception. The world of separate things and separate selves is seen as a kind of overlay, a story consciousness is telling itself.
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition has a practice called trekchö, which translates roughly to “cutting through.” The instruction is to recognize the nature of mind directly, without any conceptual overlay. What practitioners discover, over and over, is that the apparent solidity of the world is maintained by a continuous act of attention and belief. Stop believing in the story, and the story becomes transparent. You can see through it.
This is remarkably close to what simulation theorists propose when they talk about consciousness as the fundamental reality and the physical world as a kind of rendered experience. The meditation traditions aren’t using the language of computers and code, but they’re pointing at the same thing: what you take to be solid, objective reality is actually a projection maintained by consciousness itself. The screen is showing you a movie, and deep meditation lets you step back far enough to see the projector.
Neville Goddard, the mystic and teacher who spent decades exploring the creative power of imagination, put it bluntly: “Imagination creates reality.” Not metaphorically. Not as a motivational slogan. He meant it literally – that the inner world of assumption and feeling state is the cause, and the outer world of circumstances and events is the effect. When someone in deep meditation perceives that reality is “made of mind,” they’re experiencing what Goddard spent his life teaching.
The Near-Death Backdoor
Near-death experiences add another strange data point to this picture. People who have been clinically dead and revived – sometimes after being without a heartbeat for twenty or thirty minutes – frequently report experiences that sound like they briefly exited the simulation entirely.
The patterns are well-documented by researchers like Pim van Lommel and Bruce Greyson. There’s often a sense of leaving the body and seeing it from above. There’s the famous tunnel and light. But what’s less discussed in popular accounts, and more relevant to the simulation question, are the other common elements: a feeling that time doesn’t exist on the other side, that the “real world” is actually here and the physical world was the dream, and that everything is connected in a way that makes the separateness of ordinary life seem absurd.
Some NDErs describe what researchers call a “life review” – but it’s not just watching your life flash before your eyes. Many report experiencing it from the perspective of every other person they interacted with. You feel the impact of your words on the person you spoke to. You experience the joy or pain you caused from the receiving end. This suggests something strange about the architecture of consciousness: the boundaries between selves are more permeable than ordinary experience suggests. What looks like separate characters in a video game might actually be controlled by the same player.
A smaller but significant number of NDErs report something even more relevant to the simulation question. They describe seeing the “framework” or “structure” behind reality. One woman, interviewed by researcher PMH Atwater, described seeing “the grid” – an interlocking geometric pattern that she understood to be the scaffolding on which physical reality was projected. Another described reality as “a play” and said he could see “the stage machinery” while he was dead.
These accounts are anecdotal, and skeptics rightly point out that a dying brain might produce all kinds of strange perceptions. But the consistency of the reports across cultures, ages, and belief systems is hard to dismiss entirely. Something happens when ordinary consciousness is disrupted – whether by a drug, a meditation practice, or clinical death – that gives people a glimpse of something they weren’t supposed to see.
The Debugging State
Here’s where it gets practical. If these altered states really are offering temporary access to deeper layers of the reality structure, what does that mean for how you live?
First, it suggests that the ordinary waking state is a kind of default mode – useful for navigating the consensus reality, but limited. It’s like using a computer without ever opening the terminal or the source code. Everything works fine for basic tasks, but you have no idea what’s actually running underneath, and you certainly can’t modify anything.
Second, it implies that consciousness isn’t just something that happens inside your skull. It’s the medium in which reality appears. This is the core insight of non-dual traditions across the world, from Advaita Vedanta to Zen to the mystical heart of Christianity when you strip away the institutional layers. The Kingdom of Heaven isn’t a place you go after death. It’s the nature of consciousness itself, always here, usually obscured by the noise of ordinary thinking.
Third – and this is where people like Joe Dispenza and the Hermeticists converge – if consciousness is fundamental and the physical world is its expression, then the inner work you do isn’t just self-improvement. It’s reality modification. When you change your habitual state of being, when you sustain a new assumption about who you are and what’s possible, you’re not just thinking positive thoughts. You’re editing the code.
The altered states show you that the code exists. Daily practice is how you learn to work with it.
You don’t need to take some psychoactive concoction in a jungle or flatline on an operating table to access this understanding. The backdoor is always there. It opens a little every time you sit in silence long enough for the mental chatter to thin out. It opens a little when you catch yourself reacting to something and choose, just for a moment, to observe the reaction instead of being it. It opens when you feel into a state of gratitude or wonder so completely that the ordinary world flickers and something brighter shows through.
The mystics weren’t describing a special state reserved for saints and monks. They were describing the natural condition of consciousness before it gets buried under layers of conditioning, belief, and the relentless assumption that the physical world is the only thing that’s real.
What the Backdoor Actually Shows
Every tradition that has explored these depths comes back with a version of the same message: you are not a small, separate self trapped inside a physical world. You are the awareness in which the entire show appears. The world isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something that happens as you.
The psychedelic voyager who sees the geometric grid, the meditator who dissolves into boundless awareness, the NDE who watches reality’s stage machinery from behind the curtain – they’re all reporting different angles of the same discovery. The simulation, if that’s the right word for it, isn’t a prison. It’s a creative act. Consciousness is playing, exploring, pretending to be limited so it can have the experience of becoming unlimited again.
Alan Watts once said that the universe is “playing hide and seek with itself.” That’s not just a poetic metaphor. It might be the most accurate description of what’s actually going on.
The backdoor doesn’t show you something alien or otherworldly. It shows you what was always here, underneath the assumptions you didn’t even know you were making. The code isn’t hidden. It’s just that most of the time, you’re too busy running the program to notice you’re the programmer.
So here’s a small experiment for today: the next time you’re doing something completely ordinary – washing dishes, waiting in line, walking to your car – pause for just a moment and ask yourself, “What is aware of this?” Don’t try to answer it intellectually. Just feel into the question. Notice what happens to the sense of solidity around you when you do.
And if you want to go a little deeper tonight before sleep, try this: lie still, close your eyes, and imagine that the darkness behind your eyelids isn’t empty. Imagine it’s a screen. What’s projecting onto it? What’s the source? You don’t need to figure it out. Just rest in the not-knowing and see what shows up.
