I've been on a spiritual quest, like everyone else I suppose. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian background, Southern Baptist, for a couple of years from 4 yrs.-6 yrs. My father had convictions that led him to more esoteric beliefs, true experience of the mystical nature of Christianity, so our family left the Baptist branch of Christianity and followed the non-denominational Charismatic movement. I always considered myself a Christian, mostly out of fear, partly out of a hope that someday I'd experience some of the, what I considered genuine, aspects of true worship and experience in the faith, that others talked about. There was a lot of doubt and fakery though. I never felt anything real when I'd be "slain in spirit" *cringe* and was incredibly bored sitting in sermons. I remember my parents had a book called Good Morning, Holy Spirit by Benny Hinn in my father's large library of random books. My mother told me once that if I ever wanted to get to know and speak with God that I should read that book. No pressure.
Years passed, and I never had any inkling about a deeper experience in the faith. I wanted something to alleviate the general miasma of self-identity issues of adolescence, but I found nothing. Being nearly completely isolated from normal social development, mainly because I grew up in Mississippi but mostly because our family was struggling financially and I was educated in home school, I didn't have any outlet for my angst. I developed a depression that lasted for a few years. I eventually decided that I'd give God a chance and opened the book that my mother pointed out to me years ago.
It was amazing. I felt a presence of pure love and ecstasy in my shower one morning that I'd never felt before and a thought that came as a feeling all at once saying to me that "It doesn't matter anymore" when I'd recoil, feeling unworthy and impure in such a pure feeling. The next year can only be described as indescribable. To try to distill any of the experiences that I had in what I believed was the presence of God wholly does injustice to it. It is as if you're never worried about anything and you want nothing more than to sit in that place within yourself of perfect peace and love. Loving people became easy. Working in a dead-end job that I had to became joyous.
Gradually, I came to a point, where I doubted that what I was experiencing was real. I mean, don't get me wrong, when you are in that place, it isn't a delusional feeling. It's as if there's something other than any other feeling that your brain has gone through in any other state of consciousness (and unconsciousness). There'd be no way of convincing me that what I was experiencing was unreal or synthesized from a delusional perspective. But, I came to doubt that I could know, in any way, that the framework within which I was experiencing God was actually real. My experience dried up, and I've been searching for years for a way back to that place where I felt that oneness with God, the universe, or whatever it is that you'd like to call the infinite. I would approach the feeling but felt that it wouldn't be genuine, so I'd back away. I just could not believe in Christianity anymore.
So, after a lot of research, I became what I'd consider an agnostic atheist, not to be fashionable, but because everything, and I mean everything, is explainable through some scientific framework. There seemed to be no room for God. But, the funny thing is that I've never been able to shake the reality of the experiences that I had. I mean, there is something completely foreign to oneself in the state of consciousness called religious ecstasy, and there may be a very simple scientific explanation for what's going on in one's mind in that place, a neoplatonic trance I think it's called. But even isolating the experience to a neurochemical and phenomenological explanation does nothing to shake the feeling of staring at absolute truth in the mind-space/spirit-space.
Being in that place is like seeing colors for a few minutes that no one else has the ability to see, but even though you've lost the ability to see them, you can always remember them. And, try explaining what those colors look like to anyone else. Good luck. It'd be like trying to tell someone what an apple tastes like if they've never had fruit, fruit-flavored food, or smelled a flower. Impossible. I wound up hanging out with a very diverse set of friends than what I had become used to. I worked in a natural food cooperative, met people in the New Age movement and felt their ideas were really silly though I was always open to be convinced, if there was a good argument, of any position that wasn't my own. I was generally against the use of drugs, having never used any and having no other mental recourse than the propaganda shown in the media and propagated by the word-of-mouth of non-users.
One of my best friends during college was this girl that I saw shoot up some Dilaudid when we were in Rome one night before we took a cab to see the Pantheon. It seemed so extreme and she was so skinny. She didn't seem happy, and she definitely had some life problems. Not a good representative of the entire scene. But, it wasn't really a harm to my eventual gaining of a better perspective, it actually helped in some way, showing me a danger of excessive reality escaping, rather than a delving deeper into reality goal. Anyway, I wound up talking with people who meditated. I went to a mosque several times during Ramadan and spoke with the Imam there who was a good friend of mine. I spoke with Buddhist friends of mine. Finally, I spoke with a friend who's really helped me on my path, an adherent to the teachings of Gurdjieff.
My talks with him, where I could exchange what was going on in my mind, really opened me up to the possibility that what I had experienced in prayer within the Christian framework was some genuine state of mind that transcended religion and even the more directly-meditation-oriented eastern philosophies. I read a lot about these other mystical traditions, about how Freud supposedly was able to induce mystical bliss in patients by having them concentrate on a vase. It really is amazing. And as I have been approaching the possibility that I could return to what I had lost, but this time without the filter and debilitating mental diseases of religion, I came to finally try smoking weed with friends. Not as peer pressure thing, not as a depressive mood-lifter, but to experience the true nature of my mind, to see what was possible with the human experience, to see what elements of my mind were inducible with chemicals. This kind of a path has many pitfalls and dangerous motivations, but I feel mine are rightly-motivated, borne of the natural search for truth. In my experience with weed, which I am told is a mild hallucinogen and on a lower level of experience than psychedelics, I have felt a sense an expanding awareness.
I've felt a larger picture, not just the enhancements of the senses, something that exists beyond language and the human-concept-land that we live in. One night I felt an unmistakable existential horror, looking at my hands, wondering "What the hell am I?" That experience wasn't entirely unpleasant. It just raised a series of questions that have persisted for a year now. I'm wondering what I can see within my mind. I want to see the interconnections between processes in nature, between social relationships. While smoking weed I could see my mind's eye become extremely vivid, I felt like I was speaking with myself in picture diagrams, able to see very clearly how any subject worked that my mind rested upon. I have never had a psychedelic experience, but as Terence McKenna has said, going from birth to death without having had a psychedelic experience would be like dying never having had sex. It'd be a great disservice to myself, especially given the path that I've been on. But I want to do it right. I've been researching intensely for a while, reading experience reports, trying to see what to expect. Listening to Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, Joe Rogan. But I want to know as much as possible.
I don't just want pretty visuals and an available "trip." I want what I experience to have some lasting, beneficial meaning to me. I'm sure that is unavoidable, but I want to extract as much possibility, safety, and meaning as I can from my future psychedelic experiences. And that's what has brought me to this forum. I hope I've been able to convince you of the genuine nature of my journey and inquiry. Thank you.