Stealing Fire
Part Nine of a Multi-Part Series “Towards Religion and Meaning”
Note: This is a multi-part series, if you haven’t read the previous posts, I highly recommend checking them out to catch-up before proceeding, here.
- Part One: Why I Turned Away From G-d
- Part Two: Declaring My Atheism
- Part Three: The Repugnancy of Religion
- Part Four: The Superficiality And Thoughtlessness of Religion
- Part Five: The Silencing of Religion
- Part Six: It’s Cool To Be An Atheist
- Part Seven: “Culturally Jewish”
- Part Eight: I Am The Seeker
In my second semester of my Sophomore year, a close friend (Sam) propositioned me with the idea of taking shrooms with another mutual friend (Evan) of ours. None of us had ever done psychedelics before, so we would have someone there to watch us and would make sure to control the entirety of the situation. If I was going to ever do these, it was going to be with these guys, so I was in.
There we were, three young adolescents on a Saturday evening, weighing out our respective doses for our first-ever psychedelic experience. Evan and Sam took 3.5 grams and Evan figured that it made sense for me to take 7 given my size / stature. The next few hours would entail sitting in a blacklight room, playing smash, listening to reggae, and almost constant laughter. We even had a tape recorder so that we could go back and relive the whole experience!
On shrooms, my mind felt completely out of control. At one point, I was looking in the bathroom mirror and thought that I was my father. That hallucination really fucked with me and was the beginning of the end for me ever desiring to take shrooms again. I couldn’t stay kooked up in that apartment for much longer, so I implored that we go outside.
They obliged my request and this is when the real mind-altering magic really showed itself. Nature was breathing. The trees were no longer trees — they were a dazzling symphony of thousands of independent leaves all working in beautiful harmony. Alarmed, I asked Evan and Sam if they were seeing the same — surely enough, they were. We were all in a deep state of shock and awe at the beauty before us.
“But they all do sort of the same thing, and that is rearrange what you thought was real, and they remind you of the beauty of pretty simple things. You forget, because you’re so busy going from A to Z, that there’s 24 letters in between… You turn on… tune in… and you drop out…”
Timothy Leary
After a few hours, we began to come down and retreated back indoors to begin unpacking what exactly had just happened. I recall us Sam questioning whether or not what we had was a religious experience and me laughing at such an idea. There was NO WAY someone could feel what we just felt without a psychedelic aid — I don’t care how devout you are.
So, why spend your life devoted to a religion when you could connect to the universe with a much greater sense of awe and gratitude by taking a little fungus? These thoughts would echoed some years later in a segment on NPR (or some other news source, I don’t recall) discussing the use of psychedelics by certain religious leaders as a means of upping their level of spirituality / connectedness.
After that night, a wall was broken down in my mind. Psychedelics were not the scary / life-ruining substances that I had always been taught they were. To me, they were now a means of gaining a greater level of connectedness to the universe. Who needs G-d when you have psychedelics?
As great as my first experience was, it would pale in comparison to what was to come from my experiences at Phish concerts.
