“Erick, James is here!”

A huge smile filled Brett’s red, sweaty face. He’s drunk, and hoping I’ll go make a scene he can laugh at. It’s 2009, I’m a senior in high school, and my friends love to watch me suffocate people’s belief in God.

Brett is hoping I’ll do that to James (he didn’t like James, about a girl I think).

I’m not sure how the reputation started, but I have a painful memory of making a local pastor’s daughter cry in class as her and I debated the existence of the Christian God. People were watching. I didn’t mean to make her cry. I don’t remember what I said.

I’m not sorry for what I said. I believed it to be true.

I’m ashamed for how psychologically insensitive I was.

What I did was brutal.

There’s a boy raised by wolves in me that hunts ideas. When someone tells me they know something like God, past lives, or conspiracies, wolf boy perks up.

If I’m not mindful, he’ll ruin an evening.

If you feed him mushrooms, he might ruin a mind.

For a long time, if someone said they believed in God, this part took over.

I don’t know why, but I didn’t go argue with James that night. Maybe it was Brett’s enthusiasm; what I was doing wasn’t a performance. It was earnest, spontaneous, and passionate.

I didn’t know it then, but the wolf boy was desperately looking for someone who could help us find God.

I tried finding God in psychedelics. During college, I did 40 to 50 significant incursions into psychedelia. I didn’t find God, but I definitely injured my mind.

I was one of those curious creatures who was an avid psychonaut, and also assuredly atheist.

It was Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way paired with Carl Jung’s Collected Works that changed me.

The wolf boy needed 100,000 words from Jung to accept what the subtly attuned artist can notice in childhood; that there is an intelligence in us, around us, as us, and beyond us that is trying to have a conversation with us. This intelligence need not a proof nor definition; it visits the artist regardless. The artist knows this intelligence. They live their lives in relationship with it.

This intelligence leaves nightly love letters we call dreams. And once I began learning the language of dreams, the atheism was fucking over.

It wasn’t a book, a fungus, or phenethylamine.

Through art and dreams, I know God.

I still remember the moment my college agnosticism shattered into a knowing that simply cries and laughs.

Its 2012. It’s the Texas summer. I am out walking. Completely sober, reading a book. It’s a book about the creator of Transactional Psychology, Eric Berne. As I finish reading a quote about how the best way to live life is to cast golden apples for others to eat, and for you to eat your apple on your death bed, I look up to turn down a new street.

And in the middle of the street is a single apple. It was one of those red and golden ones, and the part facing me was all gold.

There are no apple trees here.

There was no mom fishing groceries out of her van.

It was me, holding a book, slack-jawed, starring down a lone golden apple in the impossibly hot Texas summer sun.

The apple won the stare down.

The moment I saw the apple something in me beyond my logic and language changed forever. As soon as the photons from the apple were received by my eyes, and the electrons traveled from iris to brainstem, and my inner simulation produced the icon ‘apple;’ I was awash in awe that transformed into ‘feeling felt’ by another conscious creature. Then I began to mercurially morph between laughter and tears.

The thought that spontaneously frothed into consciousness was:

“I don’t understand anything.”

But I said it like I had just won the prize I had been seeking my entire life, as if I had just fulfilled my adolescent dreams of being a world champion.

“I don’t understand anything”

For some reason, I felt like I was confessing to something in the sky.

For some reason, I felt like it knew that I knew, that it was there.

It felt like another locus of consciousness was realizing that I was finally realizing it. It felt like it was interested in what happened to me and what I thought. And it felt like it had a sense of humor.

Well, I’m not an atheist anymore lol.

I’m not agnostic either.

I know God is, and I know God is not understandable.

It’s like looking at the ocean. As sure as I know it is there, I am awed by it’s immensity. I know it, and know I can't understand it.

And thankfully, I’ve grown enough to know that if I’m talking to someone who believes in a biblically literal version of God, that I should be gentle. I’m not talking to a psychological adult. I am talking either to a child or someone recovering from something they aren’t ready to face.

Now that I know God is, the more interesting question becomes, what ought one do?

One of the most elegant questions I know is “if so, then what?"

That question has saved me hundreds of hours of navigating sloppy cosmologies. Especially in our age of psychedelic adventuring, please, take this phrase and use it as often as you find it useful.

I think the answer to the question “what ought one do?” is best answered with a trinity.

Myths.
Science.
Experiments.

The myths agree, we have souls.

Two scientific concepts, Relevance Realization & Combinatory Explosion, I think, have found soul’s footprint.

The experiment; practice telling yourself the truth for 20 minutes everyday; at the end, ask yourself what you’re most resisting doing, then do that thing today.

Repeat this every day for a month.

Review your results.

I think this is what one ought be doing.

Regardless of your beliefs about God, this experiment will initiate you.

PS. Enrollment for MF5 ends tonight. ​

Song I'm Listening on Repeat

​Exodus - Amanati​

Quote I'm Enjoying

Weekly Journal Prompt

The experiment; practice telling yourself the truth for 20 minutes everyday; at the end, ask yourself what you’re most resisting doing, then do that thing today.

Repeat this every day for a month.

Review your results.