Newsgroups: alt.drugs.psychedelics

While certainly the possibility exists that psychedelics can make one more 
cynical to religious beliefs, I believe, in most cases, including my own, 
that they have the opposite effect.

I was a die-hard atheist/rationalist/skeptic for about a decade.  After Trip 1,
I was convinced of the need to begin to meditate.  By trip 2  I had my
first honest-to-goodness spiritual vision, trips 3 and 4 reaffirmed my
connection to nature and the ectstasy of pagan rites, trip 5 showed me the
awesome potential of spirituality, yet warned me what would happen if I went
too far. Trip 6, I went too far, but learned a lot.  Trip 7 was my first on
shrooms and reminded me how screwed up everything was.  Trip 8 was a 
celebration of my having taken 5 classes, passed them all, as well as been 
completely enmeshed in psychedelics use.  Trip 9 was with a very close
friend where we reminisced about the past 'n' stuff, trip 10 was SUPPOSED to be
my farewell to acid for a long time.  Finally, much later, trip 11 reminded
me how I much acid has done for my life...it was also perhaps, my most profound
trip since number 2.  

Trip 2 was the ringer.  Breaking every rule, I ran out to the woods with 
nothing but a blanket.  They told me not to do it.  I never saw a person
until the tail end.  To this day I'm not exactly sure what happened, 
except that at one point I found myself on the top of a very tall, thin
tree, swaying in the breeze.  I was crying, caressing the tree like a
madman.  At one point a new thought flashed across my mind "Of COURSE trees
have spirits."  At that point the forest became alive.  I climbed down the
tree, found a sacred grove, collapsed, looked up, and saw a frog thing looking
back at me.  At first I thought it was just a boulder, but then it blinked,
and began turning skeletal.  Its face showed an infinite amount of emotion.
It wandered around in the woods like a woodland creature, eying me as would
a deer.  The trees became alive and skeletal too.  It was absolute ecstasy.
By the time I came around, I blinked, and it was night-time.  Scary.

Since then, I've never really been able to recreate the experience.  To
this day I can't even find the site where it happened.

What played with my mind, was that my first spiritual expereience, also 
happened to be my second acid trip.  The intersection is VERY rare as I
later found out the hard way.  But with isolation, fasting, and believing,
psychedelics can be a legit spiritual aid, used by shamans and tribesmen
for millenia.

People who knew me a mere year ago would have been aghast at how much I've
changed.  About the only thing that's stayed the same is that I'm still a
CS major, though not with the same future-o-phoric zeal I once had.
 
--Bengo