You are God

You Are God

An Exploration of the Psyche

I’ve mentioned in previous articles that I was raised predominantly in evangelical Christian churches in the south U.S.A., although we did bounce around to various denominations over the years.

I was raised to believe that believing in Jesus, and the “cleansing blood” was the only way to make it into heaven. That we are sinful creatures, born into sin due to Adam and Eve eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and that nothing you do is good enough to gain salvation. Only through grace, through Christ, can you achieve purity to be allowed into heaven. On top of that, God is always watching you, and judging you, even your thoughts can be sin. Also, demons are real, and can possess you, especially if you get curious about the occult or other religions…and what else? Oh yeah, and you can lose your salvation at any point for backsliding, and spend eternity being tortured by the devil while burning in hell. All these concepts are wonderful things to teach children of course.

I was an adult before I even realized that some Baptists believe in “once saved, always saved”, but it didn’t explain why so many were absolute pieces of shit in their day-to-day lives, now that I think about it.

I tell you all this to give you a background on me, and my knowledge base of religion at that time. Even though I backslid during my teenage years and early twenties, I was still basically a Christian at heart, just not attending services or abiding by all the rules. Still self-loathing, but trying to be good in most cases. Mostly because I don’t believe I’m a bad person, but also because I didn’t want to be damned to hell, and Jesus knows my soul right?

I believe the night occurred in 2006, so I was probably 20 years old at the time, and I was with some friends when we decided to have a party. During that, someone suggested taking certain drugs, and I ended up doing a cocktail that included some psychedelics. I, thinking what I had taken was “bunk”, ended up taking more, thinking maybe my general tolerance was too high. I ended up doing this even though I had never taken this particular substance, but young people make reckless decisions.

The next eight or so hours literally felt like years. I say this now reflecting back on what I knew to be true at the time, but sort of like a dream these things fade, and the logical part of your brain attempts to rationalize them. This scene from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” sums up pretty accurately what my inner voice was telling me though.

I remember seeing my friends playing video games and seeing that same image of them playing while I walked around the room, like a still frame. I remember seeing tracers from lights and experiencing perceived time dilation. It’d feel as if I had lived for years and then I’d see that the clock ticked 2 minutes away from what it had been the last time I had seen it. At another point later in the night putting my head down on my knees for what seemed like a few minutes, to then raise my head and see that everyone who had been outside with me at that point had been gone and were inside watching a movie for half an hour or more.

I began to think there was more significance to the term “tripping” thinking I had gone to be somewhere else, as someone else, and that was the “trip”. Then the fear set in that I had basically broken my brain, and this was my new reality, seeing as how I have family members with schizophrenia, that maybe I had unlocked latent mental illness in myself. This of course sent me spiraling, and thankfully one of my friends could tell something was wrong with me so took me outside and tried talking me down. I didn’t want to end up like the guy from the movie SLC Punk who did too much LSD.

While out there I remember thinking he was some kind of shaman standing over me, and that we had both been here before, in previous lives, which was very comforting at the time. I also “realized” that I understood God.

My friend, the “shaman” said, “ok man, that’s great, now STOP”. I guess in an attempt to help me not lose my mind altogether, but these words reverberated with me down to my core.

Now remember, I only knew about Christianity, and even then only what was taught in church, and I had a vague idea about reincarnation existing as an idea in other religions. That knowledge was vague and only that reincarnation was some “misguided” idea, with jokes commonly being made by Christians about being reincarnated as a roach or fly, trying to point out the perceived ridiculousness of the concept.

This next part I jotted down on a piece of paper while still tripping, as an attempt not to forget, but the key factors I wrote down were:
“that all religions are right in certain aspects, telling the same story”,
“we are all God, and one person”, “this entire reality is a process of God purifying itself of evil/impurity of some kind”, and “that I had lived through every lifetime, time is different outside of this life”.
After writing all this down I remember a female friend said to my other friends that I was “freaking out”, and I quickly hid the notebook inside my desk, because I didn’t want them to think I was crazy, thankfully they were all also too high to care.

When I woke up the next day, after finally falling asleep in a sweat, I was too scared to even look at the notebook I had in my desk. It had this weird stigma around it of that night and my fear of mental illness. If you have any experience with psychedelics/hallucinogens you know unlike other drugs, you normally don’t want to just jump back into this sort of thing, and it was weeks before I had the nerve to look at it. When I did though, I remember thinking a lot of it sounded nuts, but some made sense, so I ended up just giving it away to a friend.

I more or less just put it out of my head, although over the following years, I did study Buddhism some, and opened my mind to looking into other religions.

The key point of that experience, even though much of it faded like a dream, was it left me realizing that the religion I had been raised in didn’t work with what I now, somehow at my core, believed there was some truth to.

Over the following year or so I never repeated that heavy of an experience, but did use some herbal hallucinogens a few times. The experience wasn’t the same, but I did experience “ego death”. This is basically an experience where your concept of “you” dissolves, and you just feel you are a disconnected entity, there’s no fear in the experience if you achieve it, because you aren’t “you”, a human, anymore. You just are. It’s almost like you can experience yourself from the outside, and see the events unfolding as something else. It brings up the philosophical question of what is it that is observing the experience, and is still aware of existing? This can be dismissed of course as just the ramblings of a drug-crazed mind, and that’s basically what I did for years.

I also see how experiences like this, if in the right set and setting can open someone more to spiritual experiences, or even just self-reflection and development as a person. I think this is a key point that is missing in our society, and why so many people are broken. Thankfully there has been some movement forward with working with people with PTSD, such as soldiers, by using psilocybin and other substances to help them work through what they’ve experienced. Studies widely show that people who have used psilocybin, in particular, have shown more empathy and less anxiety and depression.

In the years following this experience, I became completely sober, went to college and became a nurse, got married, moved out of my hometown, and bought a house. All the normal things that I had told myself when I survived that night that felt like years, that I would do.

It wasn’t until 2017 I believe, while working as a nurse on an overnight 12-hour shift that this experience really came back into my mind. My coworker was on his phone watching YouTube videos, and I could hear it in the background while I was on my computer typing in notes. The narration of the story began to line up way too much with what I had experienced in my “delusions” that night back in 2006, and it sent chills down my spine. I immediately asked him what he was watching so I could look it up as well.

The short story was called “The Egg” by Andy Weir, and the YouTube version I overheard was a live-action adaptation of that short story. I’ve linked the version I heard/watched in 2017 below.

After watching this video back in 2017 it piqued my interests in my own drug trip more, and it made me begin my deep dive into other religions as well to see what they believed.

I initially dove into Gnosticism and found verses like those from the gospel of Thomas that describe the Kingdom of God as being inside you, and around you. Then, the concept of Brahman in Hinduism, is that we are all part of God, like droplets of water that separate from the ocean but eventually go back to become one with it. The concept of Tao permeates everything, and is part of us as well.

Even in established Christianity the fact that God breathed life into mankind implies part of God is inside of us. In Buddhism and recent “simulation theory,” the idea that this reality is illusory also implies that we are part of something higher, and may have even decided to participate in this experiment of sorts.

Here is the original verse from the Canon Bible that backs up this idea.

The Gospel of Thomas expands on this verse more.

3. Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the (Father’s) kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father’s) kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

I’ve also read others’ experiences using various substances where they have perceived a reality that they said felt more “real” to them, like a “veil had been lifted”, and things were clearer there than here.

As you can imagine any of these experiences could cause issues for someone with underlying mental illness, so I’m not advocating for anyone to try them, especially not without proper medical and psychiatric supervision. As with any of my writing about religious or spiritual topics though I like to see the common threads between these various religions, and these experiences. I also think that many of the people who wrote these may have experienced things like this either through using herbs or meditative trances that achieved similar results.

With these ideas in place verses like “love your neighbor as yourself” take on a new depth of meaning, you literally could be treating yourself with either kindness or cruelty. If you ignore that hungry person, you yourself may be experiencing that in another life. Some could dismiss this as even an excuse to go ahead and be cruel since they’re only hurting themselves, but they aren’t actually internalizing this lesson, and perhaps just aren’t far enough along the journey yet.