RE: Atheists: have you ever had a religious experience and what did you make of it?
January 21, 2015 at 11:34 am
(January 21, 2015 at 10:58 am)tantric Wrote: Way back, I decided I wanted to be the next William Burroughs. I even had an "Interzone" t-shirt. So I went and very deliberately got addicted to morphine. It turns out that I can write really beautiful stuff in the 'zone, but the price to life just wasn't worth it. I switch to methadone, but that was still slavery. I read about ibogaine and decided to try a related compound. I wanted until I was in withdrawal and dosed. First, the pain went away. Next, it seemed like everything was lit by an inner light. Then I started to realize thing about myself and my surrounding, making connections I'd never seen - delusions of references, partially. Much of it was honestly insightful. Next, a painting I had on my wall, a Mayan style jaguar, became HUGE in my mind. I started to think along with him. He told me that sometimes rationalization is just a lie we tell ourselves to make the world easier to deal with. Humans aren't capable of understanding everything in nature or life - such things are all around us. According to Dreaming Jaguar, it was my nature to rationalize away things, to hide behind them and that if I wished, tomorrow, I could explain everything happening to me now and forget about it, or I could accept a mystery in the universe, an unknown, and cherish it. Then I blacked out, but when I woke up, I was totally free from the addiction, with no withdrawal, and stayed free. He was right, I did rationalize it, but I also cherish the mystery. Cognitive dissonance is a fine wine for a complex mind. Woo or not, getting off junk that easy isn't anything to sniff at.
That's probably the most insane thing I've ever heard of, aspiring to be the next William Burroughs. I have to say, though, I like you already.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
