A hard and beautiful read. For me, this had a little of the feel of those dreams assembled of reshuffled impressions from waking life. A dear friend of mine walked a strangely parallel path: a literal genius and rationalist, divergent thinker; broad experimentation with psychedelics; deep immersion in nitrous specifically; several psychotic breaks; a deepening downward spiral circa 2018-2021. He too saw the face of God, and couldn't stop reaching for it. Unlike you, he never exited the spiral, and died alone in a hotel room. (A freak biological accident connected to the nitrous: something about the B12 deficiency stopped his heart.)
Not trying to make it about someone else - just sharing a little about why this one resonates so strongly! People don't realize what a serious thing nitrous can be. Let alone (I include myself here) what a compelling thing it is to see the face of God, and what a struggle it is to turn away. Addiction as terribly malformed faith.
Knowing the throughline from this story to the book, I'll be reading eagerly. All the best to you in your recovery.
I'm so sorry to hear about your friend. It's unnerving to know how easily that could have been me ... dying from nitrous is rare, but certainly less rare than I thought at the time.
"Getting sober meant accepting that all of these costs really had been for nothing. No big surprise debit from God was going to show up and balance the ledger. I would never get resolution, or closure; it would never feel okay."
The paradox is that acceptance of this is the only way to make it untrue. Because the ledger doesn't get balanced in a way you can control or predict (or possibly even comprehend), but the "surprise debit from God" is predicated on becoming willing to never get it.
This is, of course, just one of the deeper formulations of grace.
That hit me, too. There's a similar idea in Buddhism; a misunderstanding of karma applied to the Just Universe Fallacy. All this suffering is EARNING me something, dangit! I had better have SOME credit ringing up, at least in the next reincarnation! But ultimately, karma is one's own struggles against Samsara. A fight we cannot win, only escape. How? That's grace.
This is very profound and I’ve personally experienced this various times in the forms of what I’d describe as miracles just when I had accepted my own fate
Your essay reminds of this passage from a C.S. Lewis essay:
“When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will be come. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once.”
Duuuuuude! What a write up. As someone who saw the horrors of this all close up, this really paints a picture of what you were going through - from your lens - better than you’ve ever explained before. Also lol at “haunting God” what a great way of putting it.
Man this has made me very grateful that my Experience Of Presence happened pretty gently, when I was 14, in the bath. I wrote about it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0745dyg - also I think some very good advice from Spinoza about what to do after the experience is over. Returning from the lofty realms of the eternal and infinite, this is how he described the good life:
“No deity, nor anyone else, save the envious, takes pleasure in my infirmity and discomfort, nor sets down to my virtue [my] tears, sobs, fear, and the like… Therefore… it is the part of a wise man to refresh and recreate himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbour.”
This aptly describes how I've always felt coming out of psychedelic experiences: wanting to ground, thoroughly enjoying coming back to the normals of life as home. It has always seemed like a natural thing to me, but perhaps it's just a matter of receptor bindings that shape that. And when you combine all kinds of stuff, plus a certain mind, you lose the balance
Thank you for sharing! Your story reminds me, oddly, of Pierre Bezukhov from War and Peace (and by proxy of Tolstoy himself). He spends the first part of the novel wandering and well-meaning, intending good to others but unable to execute it or cope with his own sudden change in fortune when he inherits money, and so he’s drawn to the intense, sort of psychedelic experience of the Freemasons. But as soon as he leaves, he can’t recreate the high of certainty he felt when he was initiated by them, and he chases it unsuccessfully. I found his character so compelling because I think that a lot of conversion narratives (especially in modern Christian circles) assume it’s an easy, linear transition from doubt to faith. I think Pierre is a well-drawn picture of how circular enlightenment can feel- certainty relapsing back into doubt and apathy. Maybe eventually it’s a spiral leading to a god-shaped hole at the center rather than just a circle.
As someone who has gone deeply insane, multiple times, after glimpsing God on psychedelics, this was so, so, so relatable. I've also been in a fugue state of addiction most of my life and became much more dysfunctional once I started self-inquiry and awakening stuff. I'm only now coming out of the dark forest. It's so beautiful to hear your closure. I haven't been able to make much sense of those insane/bliss states I had, but I do feel like they give you a weird superpower and allow for radical non-judgment. Like, how can you actually sit around and judge people when you have literally been broken down in your entirety in front of God? It's much harder now, though the mind still finds a way, hehe. God truly is a mindfuck. Thank you for writing this post, it made me feel more connected and inspired. Sending lots and lots of love <3. (Also I think its completely understandable and normal to cry watching physical asia :v)
Repeatedly knocking on the Heaven's door is the ultimate test of agency — “Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate” (”How to be more agentic”, https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic)
You may already know this—maybe you write about it elsewhere: your goal of seeking evidence for God and getting him to reveal Himself was the resurgence of the inner narrator / “left brain” trying to reassert control after a transcendent experience.
The peak experience, the falling-through, the opening of the seam, the pure sense of being: that experience had an object. That object is named God. The idea this object can be taken away from that place, away from the transcendent mental state in which it was experienced, and transplanted into the mundane world to change the workings of that world: this was the central error that caused so much damage.
The experience is real. There is a state where every tickle of distinction, difference, habit, value, explanation—everything we use to make sense and get by in life: all of it turns upside down and reveals its empty side. What rushes in is pure Being. We no longer feel limited by ourselves, the limitation of “I” being just another distinction revealed as empty.
But given that the experience is potentiated by this great ripping-apart, this great unbinding, how can we then return to the world of bound things and attempt to find what we could only access in the unbound space, that presence, that object called God? Clearly, it is a contradiction. But it is a contradiction that sustains long-lasting errors.
As the mind cools again after a peak experience, as the forces of the inner narrator come rushing back in, the experience takes shape into one of its mundane forms according to the particulars of the circumstance: as an anecdote, a delusion, a doctrine, a revelation. The experience is absolute. It’s the interpretations that differ.
This is because the self is accidental. In the peak experience we share in the universal. We share in what we have in common with a cosmic being: the pure awareness beneath thought. But we do not and cannot experience the thought of a cosmic being. We are not cosmic beings. No “trip” will ever reveal the shape of galactic filaments whose light has not yet reached Earth.
The experience is divine, by which I mean the experience illuminates the “wovenness” of our condition, it shows us that we are within and not apart from something of great power. At the same time, if that “thing” is a mind, if it has a will, I strongly conclude that its will is exactly what already is. You look around and see suffering; you would never assert that God is unaware of what you can see. The world is already God’s will. To attempt to distil God’s will from divine communion and then go forth to enact that will onto the world: that impulse is not divine. It is mundane, a conceit, and even a path to evil. The will that is real is already here. It suffuses the mundane, even the mundane you, and is its true face.
I always find it hard to read these accounts of meeting God (I’m glad I read yours) because to me in my youth, “God” *was* the inner narrator. “God” was the voice telling me what to do, what to think, what was worthwhile and what wasn’t. Reason was the escape valve from this. But before escaping from religion through reason, many times I had experiences that felt so real, like yours. I felt God speaking to me. Even after giving up my faith, the experiences continued, even as I tended to interpret them differently.
But in the long arc of things I recognized the distinction. The God of my youth was an authority figure who laid down laws. The other God, what I am calling “the object of peak experience”, imposes nothing. It offers no salvation or revelation. It only invites you to notice what is already here.
This was a very beautiful and thoughtful essay. One way of understanding it could be that you saw a glimpse of the divine and you wanted to engage with it in a particular way: through drugs, reason, agency, rationality, control. You wanted to bring it back in a way *everyone* could understand—through some perfect paragraph of explanation that would work better than all the work of all the mystics and contemplatives of all the religions through human history to prove God was real, all by yourself, without recourse to anyone or anything else. You literally wanted to wrestle with God; to beat Him in an argument. God, not surprisingly, said no. You lost. He left.
But…is there any reason at all to believe that is the end of the story? Aren’t you now just in the position of everyone who has ever had a mystical experience in the past—they come by grace, you’ll never fully understand the thing you’re seeking, and the path back to them is slower and quieter and has more to do with being in community with other people than it does with being in possession of a unique and magical secret ?
If it got you sober, got you into community, and taught you what happens when you reach your absolute limits and how to surrender (twelve step language) to something bigger than yourself…how could it possibly be right to say it was all for nothing? Maybe I’m not quite understanding how you’re using the word God here, but to me just because the electrifying feeling is absent now doesn’t mean nothing you felt then was real, or precludes it from coming again, if in a different, and perhaps subtler form.
"It’s not an exaggeration to say I think I lost 50 IQ points — to be clear, when I wasn’t high. I think most of them came back eventually, but I was noticeably diminished for more than 2 years."
I can see why this would have been such a tough piece to complete. Remarkable what the body can be subjected to and then recover from (at least to some extent).
GRATEFUL your brain and your writing and your amazing insights from "haunting god" are here for us to read. You are a rare snowflake.
And thank you for the "Pascals Mugging" reflections, pondering that.
"I spent three months trying to tune into that signal by tweaking the combination of drugs, and felt it getting stronger. Occasionally, I wondered if I was just imagining it, but the feedback felt so clear, it was like a children’s game of hot and cold. The signal grew until I felt myself unambiguously on a precipice."
Thank you for writing this. The first time I got high, it was like being a newborn wrapped in my mother's chest, warm and covered in love. I spent too long trying to see if I could experience that feeling again, and it took too much from me. I'm glad you're still here to talk about it. I hope you don't find yourself staring over that precipice anymore.
Same. I call it the "walled garden" feeling; all the bogeymen are out of sight and mind, and I can actually relax. Brought my creativity back to life...and kept it smothered. Because you can't stay there, and the shortcuts drugs provide just make it harder to cut the permanent path. I want to feel...I'm not going to measure high and sober states of happiness. But I want to feel that level of security. Of freedom from neuroses and overthinking.
Your editor could not be more wrong. I connected deeply to this piece, and I think many others will too. It's my favorite post of yours so far. Hope you write more like this, and thanks for sharing.
I say bravo for chasing proof of “God”and also bravo for deciding to come back when you knew you weren’t gonna get it. Well done and keep leaning forward.
Wow, I feel like this essay swallowed me - and I came out totally transformed, but in a subtle and ineffable way I don’t really even feel like trying to describe. So many sentences were so perfect, thank you for so generously and honestly taking us into what this was like for you, to the extent that you could. Leaving me with much to ponder, so glad you are where you are with this all today 🌹
A hard and beautiful read. For me, this had a little of the feel of those dreams assembled of reshuffled impressions from waking life. A dear friend of mine walked a strangely parallel path: a literal genius and rationalist, divergent thinker; broad experimentation with psychedelics; deep immersion in nitrous specifically; several psychotic breaks; a deepening downward spiral circa 2018-2021. He too saw the face of God, and couldn't stop reaching for it. Unlike you, he never exited the spiral, and died alone in a hotel room. (A freak biological accident connected to the nitrous: something about the B12 deficiency stopped his heart.)
Not trying to make it about someone else - just sharing a little about why this one resonates so strongly! People don't realize what a serious thing nitrous can be. Let alone (I include myself here) what a compelling thing it is to see the face of God, and what a struggle it is to turn away. Addiction as terribly malformed faith.
Knowing the throughline from this story to the book, I'll be reading eagerly. All the best to you in your recovery.
I'm so sorry to hear about your friend. It's unnerving to know how easily that could have been me ... dying from nitrous is rare, but certainly less rare than I thought at the time.
Wow: "Addiction as terribly malformed faith." I wonder how much of addiction is just this.
"Getting sober meant accepting that all of these costs really had been for nothing. No big surprise debit from God was going to show up and balance the ledger. I would never get resolution, or closure; it would never feel okay."
The paradox is that acceptance of this is the only way to make it untrue. Because the ledger doesn't get balanced in a way you can control or predict (or possibly even comprehend), but the "surprise debit from God" is predicated on becoming willing to never get it.
This is, of course, just one of the deeper formulations of grace.
That hit me, too. There's a similar idea in Buddhism; a misunderstanding of karma applied to the Just Universe Fallacy. All this suffering is EARNING me something, dangit! I had better have SOME credit ringing up, at least in the next reincarnation! But ultimately, karma is one's own struggles against Samsara. A fight we cannot win, only escape. How? That's grace.
This is very profound and I’ve personally experienced this various times in the forms of what I’d describe as miracles just when I had accepted my own fate
Your essay reminds of this passage from a C.S. Lewis essay:
“When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will be come. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once.”
Oh.
Duuuuuude! What a write up. As someone who saw the horrors of this all close up, this really paints a picture of what you were going through - from your lens - better than you’ve ever explained before. Also lol at “haunting God” what a great way of putting it.
Instead of a God-haunted world...
Man this has made me very grateful that my Experience Of Presence happened pretty gently, when I was 14, in the bath. I wrote about it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0745dyg - also I think some very good advice from Spinoza about what to do after the experience is over. Returning from the lofty realms of the eternal and infinite, this is how he described the good life:
“No deity, nor anyone else, save the envious, takes pleasure in my infirmity and discomfort, nor sets down to my virtue [my] tears, sobs, fear, and the like… Therefore… it is the part of a wise man to refresh and recreate himself with moderate and pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbour.”
Beautiful!
This aptly describes how I've always felt coming out of psychedelic experiences: wanting to ground, thoroughly enjoying coming back to the normals of life as home. It has always seemed like a natural thing to me, but perhaps it's just a matter of receptor bindings that shape that. And when you combine all kinds of stuff, plus a certain mind, you lose the balance
Thank you for sharing! Your story reminds me, oddly, of Pierre Bezukhov from War and Peace (and by proxy of Tolstoy himself). He spends the first part of the novel wandering and well-meaning, intending good to others but unable to execute it or cope with his own sudden change in fortune when he inherits money, and so he’s drawn to the intense, sort of psychedelic experience of the Freemasons. But as soon as he leaves, he can’t recreate the high of certainty he felt when he was initiated by them, and he chases it unsuccessfully. I found his character so compelling because I think that a lot of conversion narratives (especially in modern Christian circles) assume it’s an easy, linear transition from doubt to faith. I think Pierre is a well-drawn picture of how circular enlightenment can feel- certainty relapsing back into doubt and apathy. Maybe eventually it’s a spiral leading to a god-shaped hole at the center rather than just a circle.
"Maybe eventually it’s a spiral leading to a god-shaped hole at the center rather than just a circle." 🙏
As someone who has gone deeply insane, multiple times, after glimpsing God on psychedelics, this was so, so, so relatable. I've also been in a fugue state of addiction most of my life and became much more dysfunctional once I started self-inquiry and awakening stuff. I'm only now coming out of the dark forest. It's so beautiful to hear your closure. I haven't been able to make much sense of those insane/bliss states I had, but I do feel like they give you a weird superpower and allow for radical non-judgment. Like, how can you actually sit around and judge people when you have literally been broken down in your entirety in front of God? It's much harder now, though the mind still finds a way, hehe. God truly is a mindfuck. Thank you for writing this post, it made me feel more connected and inspired. Sending lots and lots of love <3. (Also I think its completely understandable and normal to cry watching physical asia :v)
Hahaha the last line :D
Repeatedly knocking on the Heaven's door is the ultimate test of agency — “Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate” (”How to be more agentic”, https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/how-to-be-more-agentic)
That was my thought too: there is something incredibly agentic about this. About a lot of insanity, probably.
You may already know this—maybe you write about it elsewhere: your goal of seeking evidence for God and getting him to reveal Himself was the resurgence of the inner narrator / “left brain” trying to reassert control after a transcendent experience.
The peak experience, the falling-through, the opening of the seam, the pure sense of being: that experience had an object. That object is named God. The idea this object can be taken away from that place, away from the transcendent mental state in which it was experienced, and transplanted into the mundane world to change the workings of that world: this was the central error that caused so much damage.
The experience is real. There is a state where every tickle of distinction, difference, habit, value, explanation—everything we use to make sense and get by in life: all of it turns upside down and reveals its empty side. What rushes in is pure Being. We no longer feel limited by ourselves, the limitation of “I” being just another distinction revealed as empty.
But given that the experience is potentiated by this great ripping-apart, this great unbinding, how can we then return to the world of bound things and attempt to find what we could only access in the unbound space, that presence, that object called God? Clearly, it is a contradiction. But it is a contradiction that sustains long-lasting errors.
As the mind cools again after a peak experience, as the forces of the inner narrator come rushing back in, the experience takes shape into one of its mundane forms according to the particulars of the circumstance: as an anecdote, a delusion, a doctrine, a revelation. The experience is absolute. It’s the interpretations that differ.
This is because the self is accidental. In the peak experience we share in the universal. We share in what we have in common with a cosmic being: the pure awareness beneath thought. But we do not and cannot experience the thought of a cosmic being. We are not cosmic beings. No “trip” will ever reveal the shape of galactic filaments whose light has not yet reached Earth.
The experience is divine, by which I mean the experience illuminates the “wovenness” of our condition, it shows us that we are within and not apart from something of great power. At the same time, if that “thing” is a mind, if it has a will, I strongly conclude that its will is exactly what already is. You look around and see suffering; you would never assert that God is unaware of what you can see. The world is already God’s will. To attempt to distil God’s will from divine communion and then go forth to enact that will onto the world: that impulse is not divine. It is mundane, a conceit, and even a path to evil. The will that is real is already here. It suffuses the mundane, even the mundane you, and is its true face.
I always find it hard to read these accounts of meeting God (I’m glad I read yours) because to me in my youth, “God” *was* the inner narrator. “God” was the voice telling me what to do, what to think, what was worthwhile and what wasn’t. Reason was the escape valve from this. But before escaping from religion through reason, many times I had experiences that felt so real, like yours. I felt God speaking to me. Even after giving up my faith, the experiences continued, even as I tended to interpret them differently.
But in the long arc of things I recognized the distinction. The God of my youth was an authority figure who laid down laws. The other God, what I am calling “the object of peak experience”, imposes nothing. It offers no salvation or revelation. It only invites you to notice what is already here.
This was such a fascinating read Cate. Thank you for writing it!
This was a very beautiful and thoughtful essay. One way of understanding it could be that you saw a glimpse of the divine and you wanted to engage with it in a particular way: through drugs, reason, agency, rationality, control. You wanted to bring it back in a way *everyone* could understand—through some perfect paragraph of explanation that would work better than all the work of all the mystics and contemplatives of all the religions through human history to prove God was real, all by yourself, without recourse to anyone or anything else. You literally wanted to wrestle with God; to beat Him in an argument. God, not surprisingly, said no. You lost. He left.
But…is there any reason at all to believe that is the end of the story? Aren’t you now just in the position of everyone who has ever had a mystical experience in the past—they come by grace, you’ll never fully understand the thing you’re seeking, and the path back to them is slower and quieter and has more to do with being in community with other people than it does with being in possession of a unique and magical secret ?
If it got you sober, got you into community, and taught you what happens when you reach your absolute limits and how to surrender (twelve step language) to something bigger than yourself…how could it possibly be right to say it was all for nothing? Maybe I’m not quite understanding how you’re using the word God here, but to me just because the electrifying feeling is absent now doesn’t mean nothing you felt then was real, or precludes it from coming again, if in a different, and perhaps subtler form.
"It was all for nothing" doesn't describe my current view, but my view at the time I got sober.
"It’s not an exaggeration to say I think I lost 50 IQ points — to be clear, when I wasn’t high. I think most of them came back eventually, but I was noticeably diminished for more than 2 years."
I can see why this would have been such a tough piece to complete. Remarkable what the body can be subjected to and then recover from (at least to some extent).
GRATEFUL your brain and your writing and your amazing insights from "haunting god" are here for us to read. You are a rare snowflake.
And thank you for the "Pascals Mugging" reflections, pondering that.
"I spent three months trying to tune into that signal by tweaking the combination of drugs, and felt it getting stronger. Occasionally, I wondered if I was just imagining it, but the feedback felt so clear, it was like a children’s game of hot and cold. The signal grew until I felt myself unambiguously on a precipice."
Thank you for writing this. The first time I got high, it was like being a newborn wrapped in my mother's chest, warm and covered in love. I spent too long trying to see if I could experience that feeling again, and it took too much from me. I'm glad you're still here to talk about it. I hope you don't find yourself staring over that precipice anymore.
Same. I call it the "walled garden" feeling; all the bogeymen are out of sight and mind, and I can actually relax. Brought my creativity back to life...and kept it smothered. Because you can't stay there, and the shortcuts drugs provide just make it harder to cut the permanent path. I want to feel...I'm not going to measure high and sober states of happiness. But I want to feel that level of security. Of freedom from neuroses and overthinking.
Your editor could not be more wrong. I connected deeply to this piece, and I think many others will too. It's my favorite post of yours so far. Hope you write more like this, and thanks for sharing.
I say bravo for chasing proof of “God”and also bravo for deciding to come back when you knew you weren’t gonna get it. Well done and keep leaning forward.
Wow, I feel like this essay swallowed me - and I came out totally transformed, but in a subtle and ineffable way I don’t really even feel like trying to describe. So many sentences were so perfect, thank you for so generously and honestly taking us into what this was like for you, to the extent that you could. Leaving me with much to ponder, so glad you are where you are with this all today 🌹