RE: Atheists: have you ever had a religious experience and what did you make of it?
January 21, 2015 at 10:58 am
(This post was last modified: January 21, 2015 at 11:01 am by tantric.)
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.
My book, a setting for fantasy role playing games based on Bantu mythology: Ubantu
