My Personal Encounter With God

Today I’m going to talk about my deepest personal encounter with God, which was during my first acid trip, and which forever destroyed my scientific dogma and changed how I think about God.

I’m going to share my insights into what God really is, from a non-biblical, non-dogmatic, mystical, embodied, directly apprehended perspective, which is accessible both through contemplative practice and with aids, such as psychedelics.

Disclaimer: The information here is strictly educational. I’m not responsible or liable for any damage you cause yourself while using psychedelics. These substances can potentially be very dangerous and even lethal. If you use them, please do so carefully and responsibly.

Background + Heads Up

As a meditation teacher and long-term practitioner, I’ve had a lot of sudden spiritual experiences both on and off the cushion, and I have a fairly stable spiritual connection and insight. But by far the deepest personal encounter with God I’ve ever had was on acid. It left me in no doubt that God is real, and also that most people have no idea what it really is.

I’m not talking about the biblical God, often portrayed as a great man in the sky, and I’m not talking about Christian dogma. This has nothing to do with belief. I was not born Christian or any other religion, my family is not Christian or any other religion, and for my whole life I was basically a scientific dogmatist, a Stephen Hawking fan boy. I still believe he is a miracle and recognise he has done incredible work in his field, but I thought science was everything, and that it had answered the deepest questions. I was to discover that it’s still in its infancy.

I did my first acid trip alone, in my house, with no stimulation. That means no music, no TV, no mobile phone, and no other form of stimulation. It was just me and the experience, and I felt completely at ease and ready to fully let go. I think this was one of the reasons I had such a deep experience.

My Personal Encounter With God

So what was this personal encounter with God like? The things I describe might not make sense if you’ve never experienced them, but I’m going to try my best to explain them.

My ego, my usual sense of self with all its associations, and opinions, and models, and theories, and philosophies, slowly started getting torn away from me about 1 hour after I took the acid.

This trip, like most of my trips, released a lot of blockage from my body. I remember wriggling, having body highs, doing a lot of stretches and yoga to help release it.

And around four hours into the trip, all of a sudden I was shown very clearly what God is.

To be clear: this was not a hallucination. I wasn’t seeing any visuals. When I say “shown” I mean that this is an embodied, direct apprehension of God. It went way beyond visuals. It penetrated right to the heart of my identity and sense of self, my entire life put into context. All my friends, my family, my likes, my dislikes, all of it was put into this great, big, beautiful context

I was so in contact with God and how my life relates to God that, essentially, I’ve never been the same since. I do feel in contact with it, or him, or her, very often, but not to the level that I was during the trip.

I ought to mention that “God” is just a word for something. I could use any other word or placeholder. It’s just that at the time the word God seemed most relevant, so I’m going to stick to it for now.

What I Realised In My Personal Encounter With God

What did I realise about God? All of these insights are subject to revision, but they seemed extraordinarily clear at the time. As I realised these things, I was the happiest I’ve ever been. The joy was just unimaginable.

• God is who I really am, who I’ve always been. Deep down, in my heart, in my most essential nature, it’s who I am. Yet I’ve completely forgotten.
• In that sense, my life is like a kind of story that veils my true nature. It’s like a giant play written by God.
• God is absolute undividedness. Even though as humans we feel separate, contracted, distant from others, distant from the world, even our family, this is really an optical illusion. All of that is just a mirage in the sea of God.
• We already have perfect knowledge of God. We’re already in the sea of God. How couldn’t we be? 
• Our apparent ignorance of God is only apparent, a kind of veil. All our scientific denial of God is really just God tricking himself.
• I looked at photos of people I knew and kept saying “Wow, they know God.” “Wow, even my DAD knows God!”
• There is nowhere to go, there’s nobody to die, there’s nowhere else you could possibly be, but in God.
• Life is like a game in which you’re put “against the clock” to find God. If you don’t, there’s no judgement involved. It’s you versus you, in a sense. If you don’t want to know God, it’s fine, but you’re postponing the inevitable and going through a lot of pain in the process. The pain of not doing so is what drives us to eventually find Him.

I’m guessing that this intense spiritual experience lasted about thirty minutes. After about 6 hours, the eventually the acid wore off, and I was having body highs and felt a lingering sense of joy and fulfillment. Yet I knew that this would never leave me.

Looking back, it hasn’t left me. And I see it as just a brief glimpse of what we will all eventually come to experience, perhaps later in life, perhaps when we die. That sheer direct apprehension of our deepest, undivided nature, once we’ve lived for a while in the state of separation and contraction and ignorance.

I’m not saying psychedelics can replace a dedicated spiritual practice, but for me they’ve been very humbling, have shown me things so clearly and so abruptly. They can give you brief, deep insight into the deepest truths of life.