On the night of October 6, 1998, Shepard was approached by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson at the Fireside Lounge in Laramie; all three men were in their early 20s. McKinney and Henderson offered to give Shepard a ride home. They subsequently drove to a remote rural area and proceeded to rob, pistol-whip, and torture Shepard, tying him to a split rail fence and leaving him to die.
In states of expanded consciousness, the right hemisphere of the human brain in its holistic, nonlinear and nonverbal mode of functioning acts as the primary matrix or receptor for this holographic input while, by operating in phase or coherence with the right brain, the left hemisphere provides the secondary matrix through its binary, computer-like method of functioning to screen further the data by comparison and reduce it to a discreet, two dimensional form.