black metal
Greenlighter
Welcome, and thanks for your interest.
I wanted to make a thread those who are interested in Jesus Christ in addition to being enthused about psychedelic drugs. I saw a thread from years ago about a specific prayer, but I would like to invite a discussion that applies to Walking and tripping in a doggedly general manner.
Some food for discussion:
- Your favorite substance for prayer, meditation, experiencing the perennial forgiveness/renewal/resurrection of Christian life, etc
- Set and setting
- Preferred rituals
- Specific religious experiences under the influence
- Favorite pieces of Scripture to read, recite, or remember while tripping
- Works by sympathetic/relevant (Christian) authors
- Lasting impressions for your unique relationship with God
- Stories of healing, redemption, and salvation
- Ask a Christian respectful questions
- Reconciling drug-taking with "mainstream" polite-society religiosity
- "Synergy" with other faith traditions or belief systems
You get the idea.
Please, let's keep this thread about the intersection of the psychedelic experience with the revelation of God in Humanity, rather than the merits of organized or disorganized religion. Not all discussion has to be agreement, but let's play nice and try and learn something from each other, as well as lend support to our fellows in Identity and Liturgy.
A brief confession of my own faith:
Baptized Lutheran, I grew up basically nominally religious or irreligious. I did watch a lot of A&E dramatized documentaries about Jesus. My angsty streak hit in middle school, amid debates of Creationism v. Evolution and a strong anti-gay (and seemingly anti-everything else) streak, coming from a very vocal and extreme subset of the Christian Right. So I became very anti-religious. At the same time I fell in love with black metal. Often explicitly satanic or pagan, I admired the freedom of the sound and imagery and how little such expressions had to do with moral thought or action, despite the fears they aroused. I still love filthy satanic black metal to this day. (In fact many "evil" bands nowadays, like Ofermod, attest to a rightful place within the Cabballah, or Jewish mysticism.) I still think "Christian" black metal is kind of dorky. I give credit to this musick for destroying the proverbial "Wicked Church" in my mind.
But my mystic/spiritual side never left me. In high school, I got very into non-religious eastern thought-schools like Tao and (Zen) Buddhism. I loved their take-it-or-leave-it approach to the Truth. The emphasis on a Oneness that was characterized by dynamism (which could easily and understandably be perceived as dualistic) left a profound impression on me. Around this time I started taking psychedelics. It was all very artistic and fun, and it provided a modicum of philosophical meaning to satisfy me at that age. But the question that remained was how no matter how much intellectual evidence I found of unity/selflessness and of the link of suffering to desire, why did I still feel agonized and "stuck," here with little old me, myself, and I?
A breakthrough came last year, my first year at my nominally-Lutheran liberal arts college. Reading the Gospel of Matthew for my required Intro to Religion course (called Christian Vocation and the Search for Meaning), a certain verse spoke to me. Jesus says "Worship me in secret, and so shall my Father reward you (in secret as well as openly)." That's Matt 6:4. When I read this, stoned in my crummy dorm room, with the city and highway rumbling below my open window, it was like a record skipped. When it landed again on the groove, I realized I could hear this silent Voice that had indeed always been there. I finished that Gospel that week, and understood that suffering is... okay. I understood that there was a time when even God could not understand the mortal suffering/unfulfilled preference at the root of all human sin/folly. God decided to feel that suffering with us, so he could honestly forgive us. On the flipside, it validated the divine current that I knew flowed through me and others, but which I was disinclined to recognize because I had been relying on the "material world" to prove it to me. Don't get me wrong, it would get fairly close at times. But this was different.
Anyway, I took Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior because after years of earnest living, full of "right" and "wrong," I experienced the validation, as one Organelle in the Body of Existence, of the mutualistic operation of an (im)perfect God (Sum) and its imperfect, but utterly natural and forgivable, Constituent Parts.
How does this feel? Rarely spectacular as my verbiage might indicate, except for certain chance conversations with strangers made only possible by a certain Intuition, and other experiences which have made me tell people "I don't believe in coincidences." But now I feel I have a friend and teacher for life in Jesus. I feel at peace that I can be myself and in-touch with wisdom/truth without having to understand everything in the universe first. My potential and my limitations are no longer diametrically opposed.
I just feel so much better and more fulfilled, that any vocabulary I possess will not adequately communicate it. So instead I just say I am saved by God and his Son, Jesus Christ, because I have the Eternal Life through Faith he promised. Believe me, the eye-rolls I get are worth it.
Cheers.
I wanted to make a thread those who are interested in Jesus Christ in addition to being enthused about psychedelic drugs. I saw a thread from years ago about a specific prayer, but I would like to invite a discussion that applies to Walking and tripping in a doggedly general manner.
Some food for discussion:
- Your favorite substance for prayer, meditation, experiencing the perennial forgiveness/renewal/resurrection of Christian life, etc
- Set and setting
- Preferred rituals
- Specific religious experiences under the influence
- Favorite pieces of Scripture to read, recite, or remember while tripping
- Works by sympathetic/relevant (Christian) authors
- Lasting impressions for your unique relationship with God
- Stories of healing, redemption, and salvation
- Ask a Christian respectful questions
- Reconciling drug-taking with "mainstream" polite-society religiosity
- "Synergy" with other faith traditions or belief systems
You get the idea.
Please, let's keep this thread about the intersection of the psychedelic experience with the revelation of God in Humanity, rather than the merits of organized or disorganized religion. Not all discussion has to be agreement, but let's play nice and try and learn something from each other, as well as lend support to our fellows in Identity and Liturgy.
A brief confession of my own faith:
Baptized Lutheran, I grew up basically nominally religious or irreligious. I did watch a lot of A&E dramatized documentaries about Jesus. My angsty streak hit in middle school, amid debates of Creationism v. Evolution and a strong anti-gay (and seemingly anti-everything else) streak, coming from a very vocal and extreme subset of the Christian Right. So I became very anti-religious. At the same time I fell in love with black metal. Often explicitly satanic or pagan, I admired the freedom of the sound and imagery and how little such expressions had to do with moral thought or action, despite the fears they aroused. I still love filthy satanic black metal to this day. (In fact many "evil" bands nowadays, like Ofermod, attest to a rightful place within the Cabballah, or Jewish mysticism.) I still think "Christian" black metal is kind of dorky. I give credit to this musick for destroying the proverbial "Wicked Church" in my mind.
But my mystic/spiritual side never left me. In high school, I got very into non-religious eastern thought-schools like Tao and (Zen) Buddhism. I loved their take-it-or-leave-it approach to the Truth. The emphasis on a Oneness that was characterized by dynamism (which could easily and understandably be perceived as dualistic) left a profound impression on me. Around this time I started taking psychedelics. It was all very artistic and fun, and it provided a modicum of philosophical meaning to satisfy me at that age. But the question that remained was how no matter how much intellectual evidence I found of unity/selflessness and of the link of suffering to desire, why did I still feel agonized and "stuck," here with little old me, myself, and I?
A breakthrough came last year, my first year at my nominally-Lutheran liberal arts college. Reading the Gospel of Matthew for my required Intro to Religion course (called Christian Vocation and the Search for Meaning), a certain verse spoke to me. Jesus says "Worship me in secret, and so shall my Father reward you (in secret as well as openly)." That's Matt 6:4. When I read this, stoned in my crummy dorm room, with the city and highway rumbling below my open window, it was like a record skipped. When it landed again on the groove, I realized I could hear this silent Voice that had indeed always been there. I finished that Gospel that week, and understood that suffering is... okay. I understood that there was a time when even God could not understand the mortal suffering/unfulfilled preference at the root of all human sin/folly. God decided to feel that suffering with us, so he could honestly forgive us. On the flipside, it validated the divine current that I knew flowed through me and others, but which I was disinclined to recognize because I had been relying on the "material world" to prove it to me. Don't get me wrong, it would get fairly close at times. But this was different.
Anyway, I took Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior because after years of earnest living, full of "right" and "wrong," I experienced the validation, as one Organelle in the Body of Existence, of the mutualistic operation of an (im)perfect God (Sum) and its imperfect, but utterly natural and forgivable, Constituent Parts.
How does this feel? Rarely spectacular as my verbiage might indicate, except for certain chance conversations with strangers made only possible by a certain Intuition, and other experiences which have made me tell people "I don't believe in coincidences." But now I feel I have a friend and teacher for life in Jesus. I feel at peace that I can be myself and in-touch with wisdom/truth without having to understand everything in the universe first. My potential and my limitations are no longer diametrically opposed.
I just feel so much better and more fulfilled, that any vocabulary I possess will not adequately communicate it. So instead I just say I am saved by God and his Son, Jesus Christ, because I have the Eternal Life through Faith he promised. Believe me, the eye-rolls I get are worth it.
Cheers.
