hello Andrew, and welcome to our forum. Indeed, the questions you ask are the questions we're after. To my knowledge, I am not aware of any research that can provide answers to your questions, but such research should be undertaken. The problem resides in the construction of the protocol. Say you're doing an fMRI experiment... how do you know that your subjects are experiencing 'vastness' and 'time dilation'? Would it be drug-induced or otherwise-induced? How would you quantitatively (or semi-quantitatively) measure 'vastness' and 'time dilation', in order to correlate it with brain activation patterns (or BOLD responses)? All of these questions, and more, must be fully addressed by any protocol before it could be seriously taken under consideration. But if someone were to draft together a protocol without fully addressing these questions, then it would never get approved, and the person suggesting the protocol would probably the butt of jokes for a while. The scientific method for addressing your questions demands quantitative methods and reproducibility... without these, it no longer is science, and cannot get funded or approved. It may be unfortunate, but it's necessary to keep our standards high to prevent pseudo-science or worse. Knowing the rules of the game (of science), we must learn how to utilize these rules to get what we want, which in this case, is coming up with answers to the type of questions that you've proposed. It's not impossible, but it is difficult.... so much so, that it hasn't yet been done by anyone, at least not to my knowledge.

I've placed a lot of hints regarding the methods I use and have used. It's difficult to flat-out answer your question, in part because everyone is different and the methods I use are not guaranteed to work for everyone. Also, I hesitate to be open about these things, not only to protect myself, but also to protect other people who might try to replicate what I've done.... I would not want other people to do what I have done, for their own good (they must create their own path).... because what I did and experienced is very difficult, to say the least, to try to integrate back into 'everyday life' and society. I sometimes look back, with the benefit of retrospect, and am utterly amazed that I was able to integrate what I did, but I don't doubt for a moment that there's much that I have not integrated, in part because it's impossible for me to re-experience what these other forms of consciousness that I experienced were like in my current mind-states except in the vaguest terms, where they present themselves as emotionally-charged, albeit dimly-lit, memories.

I will say, however, that pharmacological methods are highly effective. Not alone, but when used in conjunction with proper understanding and responsible use, and which require a certain pre-existent strength of mind in order to be used effectively.

Also what is useful is being able to control and manipulate your attention, at will, ranging from one-pointed meditation involving intense, focused attention, to the other extreme of diffuse attention, where you are aware of your environment and of yourself as a totality without allowing your attention to focus on any one particular thing. Attention takes many different forms. It is useful to explore these different forms, and to be mindful (or aware) of your attention.

One of the most useful things is just learning to see things in different ways. I don't know how well others can do this, since I'm limited to my own experience, but for me, I think of it in terms of Gestalt psychology.... think of the necker cube, which you can perceive in one of two ways.... well, try to generalize that to everything you perceive. If you do this, you'll (hopefully) become convinced that everything that we perceive is merely a construct, but more importantly, that this mental construct can be deconstructed and reconstructed in different ways, to yield different Gestalts. You might think that this says nothing about state-of-mind, since ones mindstate apparently remains the same during these changes in what we perceive, but this is not always the case. Ones mindstate is also a mental construct, and is also able to be transformed in such a manner. It takes practice, and also a certain 'plasticity' and fluidity in ones way of thinking and of perception/conception. It is well known that certain drugs enhance neural plasticity, and this seems to coincide with an increase in 'mental fluidity'.... perhaps this is more than coincidence.