DOSE:

1-2 bowl

smoked

Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

This story comes in 3 parts; each is a separate experience I’ve had while under the influence of marijuana that has led me towards God. My understanding of God, and my outlook on life has evolved through these experiences.

Since the very first time I ever smoked marijuana, my life has never been the same. This is the story of my journey through enlightenment, riding on the wings of Mary Jane.

One – Summer 2004

I had recently finished my freshman year of high school, when I was introduced to smoking weed in the winter of 2003. I was on a church trip in St Cloud, MN. One of the other kids there also smoked, so every opportunity we got we would sort of sneak into the parking garage (we weren’t supposed to leave the hotel without an adult) and smoke a bowl. We met a couple other guys smoking in there too, so getting high was never a problem, although we didn’t have a whole lot of free time.

On one day, we had to go to one of the mass meetings in the afternoon, where everyone gathers together to sing songs and play games and other such Christian stuff. Beforehand, we had smoked about 2 or 3 bowls (around 1.3 grams or so), so I was quite stoned. I still have something of a low tolerance, but back then ‘low tolerance’ was an understatement. I was a one-hit wonder. So I was sitting near the back, listening to these people on stage yakking on about Jesus Christ, donations to the church and etc, and I remember being struck so suddenly and profoundly by a realization, that it felt like someone had set off a grenade inside my head. This is ludicrous—INSANE, I realized. This is a cult, I thought. These people actually believe this rubbish? What the hell is the matter with all of you people? This is the biggest load of shit I’ve ever heard! I thought.

Before then, I had never questioned the existence of God. It was what I had been brought up to believe, so strictly conditioned that any other option seemed alien to me. But mostly I believed in God because I didn’t want to go to hell: proof through fear. Now that fear was gone. The idea that God did not exist now seemed less like an idea, and more like a fact. It was evident to me that Christian dogma was nowhere near the reality of the world… just a hocus-pocus load of fairy tales and lies (Christians, don’t be offended, just keep reading). I felt so enraged at how, for my whole life so far, I had been led, like a beef cow, only to the grass I was supposed to eat, instead of the greener stuff on the other side. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I left the assembly.

Later, I decided to choose agnosticism, rather than pure atheism. I had no true belief in God, but I was prepared to accept proof. I was convinced that nothing short of a religious experience would make me believe in God. Well, I was right.

Two – August 2006

Given my ‘anti-religious’ experience, I continued going to church, even being confirmed. I would have simply stopped going, but I didn’t want to disappoint my parents by telling them I no longer subscribed to their Savior. I love my parents (I suppose back then I both loved and hated them), and I didn’t want to see them unhappy. So it was that I found myself in Atlanta, GA, the stickiest place on earth, on yet another church mission trip. This time around, I was the oldest junior member of my church, because no one else from my confirmed class came to Atlanta. In fact, at 17 I was the oldest kid from any of the churches that attended this mission.

For the entire week, I was completely miserable. I wasn’t exactly friends with any of the other members of my church, since they were all younger than me. I was as much the black sheep here as I was in most other places, especially since I was probably the only agnostic in the whole bunch. Let’s just say that I wore black and they wore white.

Ultimately, the only place I had to turn was the impoverished pre-school kids we were schooling. Of course, since all of them were Georgian, they all spoke in a childish southern drawl, and ultimately, being from the Midwest I couldn’t understand most of what they were saying. Mostly they just embarrassed me at basketball, or had me running around the playground giving all of them underdogs on the swings.

To top it all off, I had no weed, since we had flown there. I didn’t want to risk getting caught, so I decided to save myself the trouble and just wait a week. Taking a week break under normal circumstances is no usually no bother, and I’ve gone several months without smoking before.

Anyway (because this is getting really long-winded), I saw a lot of things and met a lot of people that really should’ve touched me, but somehow none of it did. When I finally got home from the airport, I smoked a celebratory bowl or two, and turned on the TV just in time for MASH. By the time the episode was over, I was at about the peak of my high. I turned off the TV and turned on the radio, and immediately filling my room was Pink Floyd – Dirty Girl. I remember saying, “Fuck yeah,” turning up the volume, and spacing out looking at the wall. I was looking around my room, thinking about how cool it looked, when a feeling struck me. It wasn’t quite as explosive and to-the-point as my first ‘revelation’ had been, rather it sort of snuck up on me.

The walls and ceiling of my room are completely covered in posters. Bands, skateboarders, nature posters, and other various miscellaneous crap. As I was looking at all these posters and pictures, I suddenly felt very sad. It suddenly occurred to me how utterly pathetic it was that I spent so much of my time in my room by myself, and how utterly pathetic and fake my life had been. An indescribable feeling of sadness filled me, and I began to cry. My eyes kept wandering, and then stopping on more and more depressing things: a creepy painting, the h-bomb mushroom cloud, the various animal skulls and bones on my dresser. The more I looked, the harder it hurt, and the harder I wept. It was the most depressed and hopeless I’ve ever felt in my entire life.

But then, a less intense song came on, and I forced myself to look at more positive things, like the big plant I had in the corner, the American flag, the frog pattern on my bedspread, etc. This put me in a better mood, and soon, I was actually crying in joy, rather than despair. The high had pulled a complete 180 on me.

That’s when the signs started appearing. My eyes landed on a stack of DVDs on top of my TV, and the title of the movie on top was “Life is Beautiful” (good movie, btw). The words seemed to bore into my mind, and indescribable joy suddenly filled me. Life IS beautiful, I thought.

Once I had calmed down a little bit, I decided to start unpacking my stuff from the trip and shake off this weird high. So I opened up my bag, and the first thing sitting right there on top was the t-shirt I had gotten from the mission trip, with “Youthworks,” the program’s name on the front. It was like a sign from God, and I spontaneously began to cry again, sobbing into the shirt, thinking about what amazing and inspirational work the program was doing across the country.

Looking into my bag again, the next thing I saw was, lo and behold, the Holy Bible. I already felt so buried in divine influence that it seemed like too much of a coincidence. No way, I thought. I don’t believe it. Then another voice in my head, at once my own and yet not my own, said, believe it.

Then I pulled out my “devotional” book I had to fill out in Atlanta, and on the front was the slogan for the week: Open Your Eyes. And with those words it seemed like my world was suddenly set in stone, like there could be no possible explanation for this experience other than that I was actually communicating with God. I kept repeating the words over and over again, and I slowly turned limp and lay back on my bed, dropping the book. After that point, EVERYTHING I saw felt like it was part of some kind of message from God. EVERYTHING. Whether or not I tried to deny it.

For the longest time, I felt as if my mind had snapped. Taken directly from my journal: “I don’t know whether it was a religious experience, a bad trip, or a nervous breakdown. A part of me refuses to believe the existence of god, and yet another part of me desperately wants to believe. … I shiver every time I look at my walls. Tears prick my eyes every time I think about what happened. … Everything makes SO much sense, and yet at the same time…NOTHING makes sense anymore.”

Three – January or February 2008

Eventually I became fairly content and sane in my belief of God. I was still somewhat on the agnostic side, but I now felt as if I had definitive proof. But, I was still depressed. I broke up with my high-school sweetheart before I moved away to college, which was a bad mistake, and since then I had been on an unlucky streak with women. Also, my roommate, I began to slowly realize, was one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever known. And, on top of a weak love life and a bad roommate, I had no money and no job.

However, I was still having fun in my first year of college, and I really had nothing important to complain about. In any case, what happened early in 2008 caught me quite by surprise.

I smoked two bowls of some very high-quality pot, and was reading a chapter from my sociology book, when I started to slowly dawn on a realization. The way the textbook was talking about society, I began to realize that humans seem to almost subconsciously function as a whole; individuals coming together to create a cohesive and progressive group. Thus, the chain of reasoning was created.

The thought dug deeper into my mind, and I began thinking about the implications of this idea. Humans come together in a city almost in the same way as cells do to create a body. Or chemicals to create cells. Or atoms to create chemicals, or subatomic particles to create atoms! Then it went the other way… And the elements of nature come together to create the earth, and the sun… and the whole solar system, and the galaxy, and galaxy clusters, and superclusters!! It seemed almost as if I had found the ultimate pattern of the universe, a pattern that could be applied anywhere. I realized how everything is connected: all are one, and one is all.

The revelation was my most profound one yet. It seemed as though, finally, all the pieces of the puzzle had come together. I kept thinking and thinking and thinking about it, and one after the other, I began solving all the most important questions to myself. Why are we here; what is our purpose? Why is there so much injustice in the world? I saw how evolution applies not only to biological life, but to everything. The mountains and the seas change and evolve. Individual people and ideas evolve. I saw how the diversity of life all stems from the same ancestor. I saw the ultimate purpose of Life: Oneness. All must consciously come together to form the pantheistic One.

I kept thinking for hours, but eventually I had to try to get some sleep. Yet, since my second revelation, for some reason good weed gives me insomnia, rather than sleep-aid. It seemed that I just can not turn my brain off at night. So, rather than sleeping, I spent several more hours just lying on my bed, thinking some more. With each new answer I gave, dozens more questions kept popping up, and I kept trying to answer them all. Finally, I realized the subtle essence of this Truth I had uncovered. I realized I had only just barely scratched the surface of it all. I realized that even if I spent the rest of my life solving the mysteries of the universe, I would not even have begun to see the real picture that each puzzle piece revealed. Slowly, the cascade of thoughts in my head slowed to a trickle, then just a drip, and it finally stopped as I slipped away into unconsciousness.

That’s my story. Understand that I’ve left out quite a bit that would take too long to explain, and some things that I cannot explain in words. I suppose if I could write it all it would probably fill an entire shelf of novels.

Exp Year: 2004-2008	ExpID: 74397
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: May 24, 2021	Views: 397
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