When I was growing up in the Church, I was always told that Jesus lived inside of my heart. I believed that to be true, but I always wondered why I couldn’t feel his presence there. Surely if the Son of God lived inside of my heart, I would be able to tell. It wasn’t that my relationship with God didn’t have an impact on my life. My relationship with God was meaningful and transformative, yet I never found any experiential evidence of Jesus’ residence within me, and as I grew older the phrase became cliche. Other Christians would talk about their experiences of God, and while I thought that they were telling the truth, I was skeptical and didn’t believe that anything like that would ever happen to me.
When I was baptized in college, I was still holding out hope that it would be at that moment that I would feel the Spirit of Christ enter into my heart. I wondered if it was only at baptism that Christians were given the Spirit, just as it was at Christ’s baptism that the Spirit descended upon him. But though the experience was meaningful to me, I felt no different after my baptism than I had before. I apparently was not meant to experience the presence of God within my heart.
Around the same time, I was spending a lot of time walking in the woods on starry and moonlit nights, enjoying the silence and reflecting on the splendor of God’s creation. As I stared up at the sky, I would often feel overwhelmed with the presence of something transcendent, as if God himself were hiding behind the tapestry of the heavens. It was a poignant feeling, but tinged with sadness as I felt that I was somehow disconnected from whatever that thing was. Yet I knew that it was there and I was determined to reach out to it, and so my search for God began…
People search for God in many places: relationships, power, religion, and money being the most common, but in my search for a connection with God, I looked to psychedelic drugs. This might seem like the last place for a conservative Christian to look, but for a host of reasons, I felt desperate for a deeper connection with the transcendent. I didn’t know much about psychedelics, but I had heard from people who I trusted that they were a reliable way to make contact with that transcendent reality, After a year of research and pondering I decided that for better or worse this was the route that I would take.
This launched my life down an unbelievably difficult–yet beautiful and transformative–path, and led to a journey that I couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
At first my psychedelic experiences were entirely positive. They were fun and interesting, with lots of creative thoughts, odd visual distortions, and insights into my self, relationships and religious ideas. But quickly, they grew more difficult as I was faced with deeper and more challenging personal issues that I hadn’t even been aware of. Dissatisfaction with my career and relationships, an ignoring of my creative interests for fear of failing, and an almost all-consuming desire to find acceptance from those around me. My struggle with these issues lasted several years, but at the end of that period of transformation, the changes in my life were almost unbelievable to me. I was now working for myself doing things that I loved, had more deep relationships with people who I cared about, and was working on several creative projects just for myself. Things were going very well indeed, but I still didn’t have a felt sense of the presence of the Spirit within my life. I was interested in exploring psychedelics further, now thinking that I had put the most challenging parts of my journey behind me.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
After I had gone through many of my personal issues, it was time for me to face the existential issues that plague us all: life, mortality and the ultimately unexplainable nature of reality. These were all brought up on my next psychedelic experiences, with a few more personal issues thrown in for good measure. I struggled with these issues for several months, and it was even more intense than it had been before. For a while, I didn’t think that I’d ever recover.
But once again, with some hard work and perseverance, and a lot of help from God, I was able to grow, moving past these issues and continuing with my journey. This all came together for me on an Easter Sunday service when during communion I came face to face with God in the deepest religious experience that I have ever had. This was so powerful that it answered the questions that I had been wrestling with–or more accurately, it made those questions seem unimportant–and fundamentally changed the way that I related to God.
Previously, I had believed in God, meaning that I intellectually assented to the idea that it was more likely that God existed than that he did not. Now I no longer needed to believe in God–I knew. I knew that God was not only real but the most real thing that I had ever encountered. Although the idea of submitting myself to this God and having a relationship with him was terrifying, it was also the thing that I most wanted and needed.
At the same time, I wanted my relationship with God to be real, meaning that the God that I was to relate to needed to be God as I understood him to be. A relationship with the God that my family believed in or that my Christian friends believed in–or even the God that the apostle Paul believed in–was not going to suffice. I saw God a certain way, and in order to give myself to him fully, it had to be the God that I knew and no one else’s. I do believe that this God is the God of the Bible, but again, the Bible as I interpret it, not as the Church fathers interpreted it or as Paul interpreted it. I look to the opinions and wisdom of men in order to inform my own beliefs, but at the end of the day, it is my relationship with God that matters to me and looking to anything less would be idolatry.
At first, I felt guilty about the idea of seeking God as I knew him to be. I had learned growing up in my family and in the Church that I had to submit to other people’s ideas about God in order to find acceptance. But the experience that I had of God made me realize that the only acceptance that I needed was God’s, and obviously that had to be the God that I actually believed existed and had a relationship with.
So I decided that I would pursue my own relationship with God, and that has been the most healing and freeing decision of my life. I not only feel that I have submitted myself to the living God in a way that I have never done before, but I also now have a sustaining sense of his presence in my life. If I am still and meditate, I can feel that there is a presence within that was never there before. And this presence is not just a feeling, but a guide that I can listen to and, in a manner of speaking, converse with. It is often difficult to tell whether this sense of presence and connection is myself or God–I suspect that it is a bit of both and that only as I pursue a relationship with God will I find out where the end of self lies and where God begins. In any case, it is from this relationship that I have found peace and acceptance, and from which I choose to live my life and continue exploring this world. With any luck, the journey ahead will be just as beautiful and exciting as it has been so far, and my relationship with God will continue to grow and deepen.
Note:
Psychedelics are certainly not necessary for these kinds of transformations, nor are they something that one should look to for spiritual answers. I would caution anyone reading this to approach psychedelics with caution if at all, but I cannot deny that they played their part in my journey. Whether they continue to do so or not, I will always be thankful for my experiences with them.
24-bit eggplants 