The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 83 of 125
Meltdown in God
As I write this, true recall of what I felt, the existential suchness of it, has gone. But like the other no-boundary states that summer, what I do remember perfectly is its overwhelming self-evidence. I was everything. It was as simple as that. Nor was this something I had just become, I always had been everything. What was really difficult to understand was how I could ever have thought I was anything else. There was a roaring in my ears, and I was trembling with the energy pouring through me. Way back in my mind I could hear a voice as distant as it was shrill. Wait! Wait! You are saying you have become God! This is classic psychosis! Effortlessly sweeping that aside, the revelation surged back a second time. There is only me. Whatever I perceive I am. What else could I be? Though, gazing around, I had to admit I had never seen anything remotely resembling these woods. Again the trees seemed to be made of some kind of quartz or mineral, but compared to this, the vision in the glade had been mere prettiness. Magic had been eclipsed by mysticism. The intensity of is-ness these woods radiated was not to be endured. Their beauty was appalling. This was meltdown in God. I thought I was going to black out. Providentially, there was a bench under a small holly tree (or under what had once been a holly tree), and I sank down. The revelation came in waves, and I just had time to catch my breath before it flooded through me a third time. It is all me! I am this wood! I am sitting in myself! But that was the last of the great surges of it . . . and over the next few minutes I could feel the intensity begin to ebb, gradually at first, then faster, and it was gone. Far from falling to my knees in gratitude and awe, which surely would have been the appropriate response, my identification with my mind began to reinsinuate itself immediately. Surely that couldn’t be what it had so self-evidently seemed to be? The Presence of God? The direct proof that religion was true? You’re kidding yourself, I said. You’re off your face on drugs. Fortunately I still had enough wits about me to wonder at my own vehemence: at why I felt so threatened by the thought that God was real and could be known directly. Why was even the possibility of this so . . . so taboo?