Reading over my first blog post is damning. Who am I arguing with? In my mind, probably my roommate. He has a "piss n' shit worldview" (his words), and my recent mental and psychic explorations are either offensive or pointless to him. So... I must argue my points in order for them to feel valid.
But I don't truly wish to argue. What I am going through right now is on a deeply personal level, and even if all the specifics are wrong, the quest of the thing opens up a new world of real possibilities [of life experience and knowledge].
Here is a brief story that holds all facets of the newfound quest:
During my trip, I perceived in my matter the greater universe, and suddenly all the religions, prophecies, science, mysteries, and philosophies I have ever mulled and dismissed unified into a coherent whole whereby the universe's structure and processes are both weirder and more complex than I could have ever imagined on my own. In my last post, I said no one knows The Truth, but what I really should have said is that the billions of Truths out there are all fragments of Totality.
So was I whacked out or what? In previous trips, I have made great personal discoveries, abandoned my fear of death, saw the Earth from space, etc... but I never ventured outwards. But this time, by the end of the night I started to believe in things that I never could before. A meaningful, full, complex universe full of unknown (but explorable) dimensions. The death of my parents at a young age eliminated all meaning besides perceivable, mechanical process. A purposeless universe made sense to me, because their deaths were very purposeless. Not to say there was no joy: at the very, very least I came from nothing to exist for awhile before the inevitable return to nothing. Joyful existensialism was what I called my philosophy (although it wasn't so joyful during my long and frequent bouts of despair and depression).
Anyway, this caused my a lot of anxiety in the following days. I was going to have to give up my sardonic irony and nihilism to embrace sincere, real beliefs. Were the mushrooms truly "mind-expanding" or was I just experiencing bizarre neurochemical interactions? Was the profound Truth I experienced during the trip real in any empirical way?
Reading Daniel Pinchbeck, Stanislaus Grof, and a couple other advocates for psychadelics made me take the idea seriously - these were people in similar situations who have compiled a large body of writing on the subject. The ideas matched up in very convincing ways - the spiraling, fractal nature of time, the approaching "new age" (bleh, too many connotations with that phrase, but close enough), the oneness of it all. Similarly, talking with Jeff about the experience made me realize even during that strange night, I was not alone in following impossible thoughts. But still... I wanted a sign. A real, unambiguous sign like I'd read about that if I opened my senses and consciousness, the universe would manifest to me.
I had a dream:
I was at a party thrown by the Christian God of the Old Testament (at my Godmother's house). Wild revelry, drunken spectacle, late into the night. Eventually the party wound down, and I made my way downstairs to the basement with a man and a woman.
The basement was filled with mutilated corpses. As we stood there, God came down the stairs and shot his arm T-1000-style into the chest of the man and ripped out his heart. I knew I was safe, and so did the woman, but all three of us (woman, God, and myself), knew that what he had done was wrong.
As we sat silently, suddenly my cellphone rang. I took it out of my pocket and looked at the caller ID. It said, bursting with "meaning":
DETECTIVE
217 - ..............
I could only make out the area code. I answered, and a voice told me he was coming for God. God glared at me with blazing eyes, and I knew in that moment that He wanted to kill me.
I woke up sweating. I rarely remember my dreams, but I had asked for a sign, and I had received a name and number. I wrote them down and fell back asleep, thinking that I would find 217.
Two days later, I lay in my girlfriend's bed, looking at her bookshelf. On it was a Bible, and I figured that it would be worth looking at, considering all the Christian imagery in the dream. I flipped to page 217, but there was nothing there - not that I was expecting there to be, page numbering was too arbitrary. My mind wandered to a conversation I had with my Grandmother the night before. I had never humored her borderline fundamentalist beliefs before, but before the call ended we had gotten into a conversation about Acts of the Apostles - she was going to Bible Study that night, and it was the book they were analyzing. If there was one book I should check (before I ran to the bus to get to work), it would be that one, my inner something said. I found Chapter 2, Verse 17 and an electric shock ran through me:
Acts of the Apostles 2:17 And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.
There could not be a more meaningful or unambiguous passage to describe what I was going through.
The meaning of the dream became clear. I was the detective, and I must do what a detective does: search for truth.
It could be a coincidence. As I've said, none of us know. But... if it is a coincidence, it is the most profound of my life, right when I asked for it.
Now what?
Blogging, I guess.
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