An Atheist's Encounter with Something That Felt Sacred
I have been an atheist for twenty years. I did not expect psilocybin to produce anything I'd describe as spiritual. Then it did.
I took two grams expecting a pleasant afternoon of enhanced sensory perception and interesting thoughts. I had no spiritual intentions. The concept of a 'spiritual experience' is not part of my framework.
At about two hours, something happened that I don't know how to describe in my existing vocabulary. Not a vision. Not a voice. Something more like the felt sense that everything around me was participating in something enormous, and that I was also participating in it, and that the participation was not metaphorical.
I want to be careful about how I describe this. I haven't become religious. I don't believe in a god in any conventional sense. But I can no longer locate in myself the confident disinterest in the question that I had before the experience. Something is there that I didn't have words for before and still don't have good words for.
What I've settled on: the experience didn't reveal something supernatural. It revealed something about the depth of reality that my default perception doesn't access. Whether that something is material, psychological, or genuinely metaphysical, I don't know. I've become comfortable with not knowing. That, by itself, is new.
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