Interesting excerpts from the book The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, by Ashley Lande. It’s a memoir of her journey from psychedelics and new age to Christianity.
On the idea of “ego death,” considered a pinnacle experience for users of psychedelics:
“I thought I’d died so many times with psychedelics. So many deaths, every trip a violent yanking of my essence through the bottleneck of ego destruction so lauded by Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and the like. I thought my ego and all its trappings—all the things I was loath to label “sin,” but instead branded my “shadow self” in keeping with the Jungian-lite language that pervaded the New Age world—should have surely been adequately destroyed by the power of psychedelics. But it wasn’t. It was still there, ever resurgent, ever taunting.”
The facade drops:
“As I walked up, still warring with the mushrooms and the darkness that clung to its hold within me, the pastor was saying to Steven, “I get people who come to me here who are into all this New Age stuff that’s supposed to be enlightening them, but they’re tormented. They’re just tormented.” He issued the last word emphatically, and if he’d turned and looked at me in that moment I knew I would break. But blessedly, he didn’t. I nodded along with Steven in faux-agreement and sympathy for these poor lost souls. And the words I really longed to say, the words that were desperate and clawing for release, arrested in my throat: It’s me. I’m tormented. You’re talking about me.“
Clarity:
“…maybe it was just the dumpster fire of my grand disillusionment with psychedelics, with all things New Age and pantheistic. It was an increasingly loud conflagration behind me, roaring with hunger as each new piece of detritus was tossed on it: my once gilded philosophies that kept disappointing, kept revealing themselves as tautologous trash upon closer inspection.”
New age vagueness, versus the specificity of Christ:
“One evening it came to a head as Steven sat reading one of his yellowed paperbacks printed with the dusty words of some ancient Christian, Augustine or Athanasius or Origen, who spoke this secret language of blood and death and new life, of Jesus as God, a deeply personal reality rather than an amorphous life force. God become flesh and bones. It was unfathomable, and maybe even unconscionable—it narrowed God to a terrifyingly specific point. And with terrible specificity came accountability, came inescapability, came a piercing intimacy. You can easily turn away from a vague diffuse energy. You can only turn your face away with great dread, in fearsome flight, from a man who claimed to be God hanging tortured on a cross. “Like one from whom men hide their faces,” Isaiah wrote.”
God as abstraction, an extension of the ego:
“For years now, God had been a thing to be accessed through psychedelics—a shimmering reality fraught with both ecstatic bliss and great danger. A thing, not a person. For all my chatter about believing in God, for all my personification of LSD, for all my terror at the bad trips that took on a nightmarish narrative of their own—I still regarded God as a mutable thing, something that could be manipulated and, perhaps most revealingly, something that could be mastered.”
The beginning of surrender:
“More than anything, though, I didn’t want to be god anymore. I wanted God to be God, wherever he might be found.”
The change:
“I believed it all at last—not by intellect, not by certainty, but by some fantastic and mysterious movement of the Holy Spirit. I also knew at last and for good that nothing and no one else would do. Only Jesus—baffling, confounding, radical, indefinable Jesus. The truth had come in a rush no less shattering than my first ego-death on LSD, when I gaped and gasped and burned up in the annihilation of that atomizing light. But LSD’s death was harsh, even punitive. This revelation was unspeakably, soul-cleavingly tender.”