If so, what triggered it and what was it like?
I was raised in a religious house. I went to church every Sunday until I was about 20. I played guitar for the church. Everyone else always talked about “feeling” the holy spirit, especially when I specifically played the music for the church.
I tried so, so hard, but never once in my life did I feel a damn thing. I prayed and prayed and prayed, but nothing. I was good friends with the pastor, and he would give me tips on listening for what God was telling me, but I never heard anything.
And eventually I gave up.
Only on acid - my buddies and I got lost in a maelstrom and clung to a raft to survive. Two of us woke up on a serene island and made a beautiful community with the indigenous peoples of the island.
The other two found another island and created a futuristic industrialized society.
The ideological differences eventually formed physically into a great barrier called The Schism. They began polluting our lands and forced us into a hundred year war and many lives were lost.
Peace was found when emissaries from both tribes travelled to the caldera of the great volcano at the center of our island and met with the Keeper of the Scrolls who revealed to us that The Schism was invisible - we took that to mean that the only thing truly separating our people was our perceived differences.
But we were really, really trippin
Mine was also on acid, only ever done it once and now you can miss me with that shit… I fucked up hard. I did it solo but also ended up 4 or 5 brownies deep along with drinking all night. It was going great at the start but after a few hours it all went wrong, I’m not sure if I passed out and was dreaming or just walking around but I was no longer human. At one point I was mold in a petri dish and so was my wife and when we grew and touched each other we made a mutated mold and that was our kid… anothet point I was ink and my life was being drawn on a page and as time passed the page turned and me, the ink was drawn. The worst part which was unbearable and I think lasted the longest was that I was a everything and everything that had ever existed or would exist all happening at the same time, kind of hard to explain this one, I wasn’t really a physical entity at all, more like time and space but all in a tiny dot. Needless to say not being a person for what felt like forever was kind of a big ego death… not sure how i kept a job down I was basically psychotic for the next 18 month. I wasn’t sure if I was real, I wasn’t sure if my kid was real. I never got suicidal but I was constantly afraid I was slowly losing my mind and I could become suicidal, there were days that’s all I could think.
Definitely not my jam
One perspective I’ve heard before and I find interesting is (paraphrased) that we, as humans, are the result of a universe yearning to know itself. (I’m sure there’s more but that’s the jist of it.)
It could be that our consciousness isn’t specifically human, it just inhabits the bodies best able to experience and learn about the world we exist in.
Kind of? I was in college walking on campus in broad daylight. I pass under this skywalk, with nobody in my general vicinity. As I do, I feel what feels like someone was walking past me coming from the opposite, locking their arm into mine. I got pulled back enough to stumble.
Sure enough, nobody nearby, no objects right near me or anything I could have accidentally gotten caught up on. Still have no idea what happened there. And for the record, this was before I ever had tried alcohol and I don’t really do drugs, so I can’t blame those.
How did that affect you?
It was weird, but I haven’t really made heads or tales of it. Hadn’t really encountered anything like that before and haven’t since, but it was just bizarre.
I mean, right then, at the second after it happened
Oh lol. Well I was certainly confused. Had to do a double take to make sure I wasn’t just so zoned out I walked into something, and after I confirmed I didn’t I just had no idea what to think. It was truly unexplainable, at least for me.
I’d like to think that that 5 second interaction kept you from getting run over or something later on
One cannot have a “spiritual” experience without having a shared definition of spiritual that isn’t just a deepity.
I would urge anyone who wants to share their “spiritual” experience to give a solid definition for the term first.
I upvoted you but I totally disagree - the idea that one can’t share their own “spiritual” experience without defining and agreeing (with others) on the definition doesn’t hold water for me.
Spirituality is inherently subjective - my wife feels it when she gives gratitude…my comment above is for sure more stupid but still valid
I was in college, it was night, and several friends and acquaintances of mine had lugged a case of beer to a giant empty wire spool that sat next to our campus at the time. The spool on it’s side made for a good table.
Having completed an entire class about world religions, we were set to debate whether Buddhism or Taoism was a more reasonable philosophy.
The girl to my right was definitely engaged in the conversation, but she hadn’t said anything yet. I asked her “so what do you think about all of this?” She looked at me, crossed her arms, and fell backwards into the ground. I immediately said, “holy shit, did you guys just see that?” Nobody else saw the girl. As it happened, the wire spool was on the lawn between the campus and a graveyard.
Maybe I’m nuts or maybe I saw that. Never saw anything like that again though.
How did that affect you?
At the time, I approached it from the perspective that consciousness in some capacity was possible after death while acknowledging that I had no evidence on the questions of how, why, how frequently, for what duration, etc. I hypothesized that ghosts were whorls of consciousness like the whirlpools in water after the passing of an oar.
I was raised Lutheran, but had been approaching my understanding of existence from what I thought of as a logical perspective. For example, I reasoned that heaven, if it existed as a joyful reward state, must either be essentially finite in duration or must involve eternal dementia based on the notion that eventually you would run out of novel or interesting thoughts or experiences. To remain joyful, heaven would have to either have the individual be dissolved back into the universe/almighty or would require forgetting earlier novel experiences.
These days I tend to just anthropomorphize the universe itself, as the wants of an omniscient and omnipotent being would be indistinguishable from the natural rules of the universe. To quote Roger Waters: “what God wants, God gets (God help us all)”. I figure God wants matter to be attracted to other matter and for electromagnetism to be a thing (amongst other rules of the universe).
I had a weird revelatory experience when I was 14 or so about the nature of God, and how in order to define something you must include certain characteristics and exclude certain characteristics. From that I drew the conclusion that any definition of God must be woefully incomplete, as how can one exclude characteristics from the definition of a thing that is all things and entirely beyond comprehension. From there I decided that any way of acknowledging something greater than ourselves is as valid as any other way, and that’s guided my spirituality since then.
Interesting, about half a year ago I asked to myself why echo chambers could possibly happen. After this I’ve been discovering multiple unrelated books and have been reading them, each with different relatively unconnected topics, but eventually their knowledge all fitted together perfectly, even supported by examples in my own life, and eventually I reached the same conclusion.
Knowledge has a dark side, what we know and say about something (definition) decides the very way we look at it. Everything we define can never encompass every case, and every system we build can never encompass all of reality. Just look at the system of language, just saying the sentence “This sentence is a lie” leads to a paradox, and paradoxes are just the signs of an incomplete system. Therefore, if God is everything, God escapes our definitions.
I suppose reaching for God is then seeking out the great undefinable, in love, in experience, in knowledge, or whatever else, and broadening your own limits.
I’ve had experiences with religious people trying to force me to have a spiritual experience. Would not recommend.
Was this at a Linux user convention?
Hiking in the superstition mountains in Arizona made me feel like there was a god
