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   ARTICLES : : TRIPZINE
Moving Beyond God

by James Kent

Special Excerpt: Psychedelic Information Theory

When discussing entheogens and the role of psychedelics in religion, it is often said that the highest or most desirable aspect of the entheogenic voyage is becoming one with God. This union may be literal or it may be figurative; it may happen via channeling the voice of God; by awakening the presence of god within; via merging into the one-light of the universal mind; or sometimes you actually get to have an audience with the almighty himself, a good old-fashioned face to face chat.

Some people experience God on every single psychedelic trip, some people never have this experience. Some people experience God once and then are never able to repeat the experience no matter what variety of drug combinations and doses they try. Some people try many trips and get nothing, but then one day when they least expect it they finally tap into the Godhead and "get it". For people who use the term "entheogen" as opposed to "psychedelic", the concept of "awakening the godliness within" is placed as primary over all other aspects of psychedelic use.

The exact nature of the Godhead state has been debated for at least a couple thousand years now, but to me it seems to be a highly active, highly focused, highly attentive state with resonant EEG coherence spikes in the high beta and gamma ranges. As opposed to the transient high-speed "pulse" and "attention" consciousness that we typically experience via our multi-threaded parallel neural sense-processing network (brain), the high synaptic activity and rate of recurrent feedback stimuli facilitated by psychedelic excitation creates something more like the idealized solid-state "field consciousness" we would expect to see when talking about spiritual awakening, expanded consciousness, enlightenment, Godhead, and the like. But that is just my opinion.

To be clear, this Godhead state is very different from Zen states of deep meditation or the highly-tuned physical "flow" states where mind and body become one. While Zen and flow states are clearly representative of classic mystical experiences, my own personal description of the Godhead state is synthesized from years of experimentation and research with psychedelic drugs and mystical technique, but I consider this description to be fairly accurate and extremely reproducible under everyday circumstances, so I'm sure forward-looking research will bear me out or correct me on this description in short order. But whatever the most accurate description of the Godhead state might be, it is still one of the most fascinating mysteries of the mind, and arguably one of the most important influences on Human culture to this day. And to be clear here, everyone in some way or another desperately wants to "get it", even though they might not really understand what "it" is.

Over the course of my psychedelic experimentation I have been lucky enough to "get it" more than a few times, and each time I "got it" it left me wanting more. You see, the funny thing about becoming one with the mind of God is that it is really awesome, so awesome you want to do it again and again and again. And since I had armed myself with a head full of knowledge and a handful of powders, pills, plants, and potions, when I came knocking on heaven's door God was always home, and we would chat. Oh how we would chat.

Although I didn't get to visit very often I really enjoyed the time I spent with God. God would show me secrets about the universe; let me see how the little things worked; he'd tell me things about myself I didn't know; scold me for being selfish; praise me for being kind and noble. God would also relentlessly hit on me, often taking the form of nubile young females and other objects of desire just to get some traction off my action. Looking back over the history books I have discovered that this is actually one of God's favorite tricks, though you don't hear about it much anymore.

Yes, those were good times, very good times, but one day something interesting happened. I was having my usual visit with God -- sitting on his throne, basking in his infinite wisdom, running my fingers through the sands of time -- when I suddenly wondered what there was beyond God. The thought had seriously never occurred to me, even though I had studied philosophy and ontology and epistemology and metaphysics and all the other schools of thought that proclaim there is always another beyond beyond beyond.

So I got up off God's throne and walked beyond, beyond God, beyond the tower of infinite wisdom, beyond the gates of omniscience, and out into what lie beyond. And as I passed through the boundaries of God's kingdom I turned back to see something odd. When viewed from a distance of beyond I could see that God's eternal palace was nothing more than a two-dimensional set fabricated of plywood and chicken wire; and God himself nothing more than a mute statue upon a rickety throne. God, heaven, the eternal kingdom... the whole thing was obviously a set-up, a sham perpetrated by someone obviously far more powerful and imaginative than God. But who could that be?

I walked away from the holy ghost out into the darkness, wondering what could possibly be out there beyond God. If God was just a creation, then who had created God? And as I asked myself this question I came upon a window hanging in space; but it was not a window, it was a mirror. And as I looked into the mirror and pondered the notion of who could possibly be more powerful than God, I found myself staring back at myself, ad infinitum.

And then I woke up.

After all God had taught me, after all he had given me, he decided to teach me one more lesson. He taught me that he was only an illusion, fabricated by me for myself. He was an amalgam of everything I had ever been taught about God, but tailored just to my liking. He always had me all figured out and always had just the information I needed. He was the idealized version of me; the elder me; the me who was wise and had all the answers; the me who felt no physical or temporal limitations holding me back. He was the essential me, the eternal me.

And so that's how I discovered that I am God, just as you are God, just as we all create our own personal God in our own image. And many of us simply take for granted that God is a higher power, yet the whole time the trick has been on us. We are the higher power, and when we are praying to God we are really praying to ourselves, praying to the God within. For as a wise person once said, that is where all true change comes from.


Tags : psychedelic god
Posted on: 2007-02-06 21:00:26