Growing up as a child I believed in God because I was told that was the case, but then I also believed in Santa Clause. When I was about 13 and starting to form my own opinions on things I decided God was not real. I could see no proof of such a deity and until I did I was an agnostic. When I got clean at the age of 19 I was told to pray by my drug and alcohol counsellor. When I told him I didn’t believe in God his answer was unchanging. “you need to pray.” I didn’t have much else going on so pray to a God I didn’t believe in it was. On the second day of prayer a pink cloud of warm light came from the garden outside, through the window, under my bed and then through the mattress and into me. I felt the warmth and knew God. I had an energy for the word God. I stayed clean for a whole year after that.
When I was 25 I got clean again, but could not stay clean for longer than 1-2 months. I found a sponsor and he said. “You need a spiritual awakening as the result of the steps. Then you will stop relapsing.” I didn’t have much else going on so the steps it was and low and behold I stopped relapsing. As far as I was concerned it was a miracle. Faced with exactly the same situations as before, now I could stay clean. I didn’t feel any personal power or increased tools to beat my cravings I just simply didn’t have them strong enough to compel me to relapse.
I used that same higher power to quit smoking, overcome sex addiction, and anything else I needed power for. I felt love in my heart for God and having missed out on a father growing up, the guidance from a male energy was warmly welcomed. God was real, I could see the miracles in my life and what’s more I could feel his presence. I had someone to talk to, ask questions, and the more I followed the answers the better my life got. I thought atheist were void of spirit and therefore evil. How could they not believe in the presence of a higher power when all I needed to do was close my eyes and feel this energy whenever I wanted?
I started to question my belief a couple years ago when I started reading philosophy and astronomy. I don’t want to make this post a philosophical or scientific argument against God, so lets just say that with enough philosophy to make me dangerous, it was hard to believe in the contradictions of God. And when I came to understand how small we are in the universe and that the universe is likely only one of trillions of others I just couldn’t see a place for God. If you want to call God dark mater or anything we can’t understand that’s fine, but a loving and caring deist God didn’t seem to have a place in a universe where everything comes from destruction and returns to destruction. When I looked at percentages of philosophers who were atheists (over 72%) and scientists not far behind that it pushed me further to the atheist side.
There was some fear here because my higher power was the cornerstone of my recovery. If I ceased to believe in God would I lose the protection that I had been granted from my addiction all these years? I was not willing to utter the A word in case the obsession to drink or use heroin overtook me so for a year or so I was an atheist in denial. I technically didn’t believe, but I wouldn’t admit this to myself. I still prayed every morning and nothing changed. I still felt the presence of God, but deep down I was starting to think it was most likely my imagination. This raised an interesting point since I could still feel God and got guidance from such, God was real in a subjective sense and if it was my imagination, that was actually a bit more impressive. If my imagination and sub-conscious had been the power I had handed my will and my life over to, if my higher-self was in fact the power keeping me clean and giving me the answers to my prayers and guiding me it was even more impressive to me than God.
While not admitting atheism I did start to look to the power of my sub-conscious to solve my problems instead of praying. I had got myself into a challenging business situation where I was losing money pretty quickly. I had been in this situation a few times in the past, and on those occasions I bitched and winged to God. “You got me into this mess, please, please get me out.” God did get me out of the mess, but it was a tough process and I had avoided that sort of risk for almost ten years. Here I was again. But this time I was 42, I had almost 20 years of business experience, I had seen and done a lot. While my conscious mind was not yet sure what to do, I had a lot of faith that my sub-conscious mind had the answers. I went through this process of extricating myself from a failing business in a relatively good mood and much freer than I had a decade earlier. And this time I had more faith in my sub-conscious than I previously did in God. 3 months later, I had found a solution and was able to scale back the new business to a profitable model. It had worked, my intuition and mind had come up with a solution for me.
I was at peace with my spirituality, the idea that my higher power was my imagination was more interesting to me than a real deist God. I still prayed every morning and could feel the presence of God, I just was just becoming less and less convinced He was real. The utility of God, I had no doubt in. Prayer was real, faith was real and these could cause phenomena that were miracles, I had experienced these myself. In that hospital bed with the pink light experience, how could that have happened? I had taken a lot of LSD the year prior to that. Could that have been a flash back? Could the desire to reach out to a source of power I desperately needed put me in touch with the exact hallucination I needed? If that was the case it was even more impressive than God. This was truly a miracle. I remembered Bill Wilson had taken LSD in recovery and said it was very similar to his “white light” experience in the sanatorium. On further reading I found out he was under the influence of belladonna during that white light experience and that belladonna had been sold on the street as a cheap alternative to LSD. He was tripping balls, had a spiritual awakening, and then wrote a book that saved millions from degradation.
Further reading proposed that many spiritual and philosophical texts could have well been inspired by psychedelics, Mosses’ burning bush could have been DMT, Plato documented Socrates and his gang getting high on a rye concoction giving an LSD like experience, magic mushrooms references featuring in many ancient art, the list goes on. But the other thing in my research was that nearly all the people interviewed had said they had found God on LSD. I was about to embark on and LSD adventure and was slowly becoming an Atheist, would the LSD turn all that around? Would I see the light and become one with the universe and God? Was LSD a doorway into the reality of God or was LSD a doorway into the fiction of God? My purposes for taking taking LSD were not to find and external God, I was looking for a way to find my own empathy, but I was curious how I would feel about this question of God when I was tripping balls.
The first couple of trips I didn’t think much about God at all, I was too enthralled that I could be so high and not have the obsession and compulsion to use other drugs, and was able to have some real empathy and insight into my journey as an emotional and spiritual man. The third trip however I was all on my own and pondering the meaning of life. I looked at the ocean, it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, glistening in it’s life and vibrancy, I could feel the billions of living cells in front of me. It was beautiful, but completely random, there was no creative energy, there was no man in the clouds, no deist. As I looked into the sky and could comprehend the scale, the trillions of planets, trillions of universes and whatever was beyond that – the trillions of universes could be part of a larger entity that there are also trillions of. It was so big that what I saw in front of me could well have been random, what worked stayed, what didn’t disappeared, and here we end up with life on earth – natural selection.
My psychedelic predecessors had found God and unity amongst all living things, but I had found the complete opposite. I believed I had found the truth. Acid had removed the veil, the complexity of life was far more interesting than any concept of God. I could look at it like the most intricate piece of art or music and I could only ever understand less than 1% of it. The 99.9% that I couldn’t understand was a beautiful wonder, I didn’t have to label it God to find meaning in life, just living, observing and mimicking with my own creation was plenty.
I could feel the unity people experienced on LSD, the we are all one, the planet is one living breathing organism, but I knew it wasn’t true, the feeling was real, but what I observed was not unity. The LSD had merely taken away my ability to differentiate the boundaries of myself from the rest of the world, like a baby not knowing it is not the entire universe. I don’t want to make light of this, this is a powerful experience with lessons to be learnt, especially around empathy. But I could clearly see in front of me that none of the other billions of organisms felt the same way. The world is competition, everything competes for survival and co-operation is only a survival technique to out compete. There is no altruism, this does no mean you can not feel altruism, or your conscious motives may not be completely altruistic, the love and nurturing of a baby is the easiest example, but the sub-conscious motives underneath are always selfish. This is not bad, this is beautiful, this is truth and life.
There still remains a lot of things I would have previously attributed to God that I now needed to come up with an alternative for. In every case the alternative seems more practical to me than a deist God. Even if these alternatives are not true, the fact is they are more likely than God. The biggest one is coincidences, these happened to me every day and was proof to me that God exists. Sceptics will usually say that we just make connections where there aren’t any and I’m not ruling that out entirely, but I don’t think it’s particularly helpful. I have lived my life for the last 20 years looking for coincidences, omens, and signs from God, and when I have seen these I have followed the path. I felt like a row boat in a powerful river, being able to steer a little bit, but using the power of the river as my main momentum. Living life this way resulted in wonderful life, every year got better. So to deny these connections does not seem sensible if I want the next 20 years to get better.
So if coincidences aren’t God what are they? Two phenomena that helped me with this answer are the human consciousness project (HCP) and mental telepathy. The HCP suggests that peoples’ emotional energy can have a discernable impact on our physical reality. Yes, it might be bullshit, but it is less bullshit than a man in the clouds. Anyway, it could explain things like tarot cards, which I have found some help using, and certainly the toss of a coin, which I have used many times. The wonderful book, “The Alchemist.” He has his rocks Urim and Thummim. These are the same sort of thing.
Mental telepathy is not that far of a stretch, emotional telepathy is probably a better word. The physical boundaries of our bodies may be much larger larger than we see, phenomena like feeling when someone is staring at you is a good example. It is easy for me to conceive that peoples’ higher self, sub-conscious or intuition communicate with each other on an emotional level. Evolutionary it makes sense that this type of communication would not be conscious because it makes you too open to manipulation, or madness and that mutation would never fare well in the population.
So now peaking on acid I was a confirmed Atheist. There is no God only survival and replication. It was beautiful. The death and destruction, life and rebirth. It was the greatest art I had ever seen. But it left a bigger question. What is the meaning to life? Is it enough to just live for survival and replication? Is this the beginning of a decent into nihilism?
Red Pill Recovery 