thevoluntaryway wrote:I'm interested to know more about your meeting god experience from childhood. I keep mentioning this youtube channel but you might enjoy Anthony Chene productions. I'm glad you found Ayahuasca without the usual history of recreational influences. re: Explaining the weirdness - embrace what you can. And explore it. I hope you're still checking back here from time to time.
Hello, @thevoluntaryway lovely to meet you and thank you for your interest in my story.
I will keep checking back here. I have some plans to put in motion! And I will check out that youtube channel, thank you
The experience at 10 probably was not so much about "meeting god", that is just a shorthand way of explaining it.
I was laying in bed and I was listening to my parents sleep in the room next to me. I was listening to my brother sleep in our shared room. I thought about the fact that this moment is just one in a chain of moments that will stretch until my last moment alive.
I then thought about the fact my parents were much older than me, and my brother slightly. How they would have to face a final moment, and how that felt for me. The not only the knowledge that I would lose them, but the knowledge that they would have to go through the end of their lives not knowing what they would face there. I could not guarantee I would be with them at the end, nor could I go with them to keep them safe. A great and final separation, and a journey into the unknown for people I wanted to keep safe and protect.
Even if I took my own life as they died, I thought, they would still go alone, as I would. That separation was immutable... it could not be bridged. This was a powerful thought for my young mind. The inevitability had an awesome power.
I thought about what death must be like. If I died first, I could not come back and reassure them it was OK. If it was terrible, if I existed somehow on the far side of it I would have the knowledge also that they would then have to go through that awfulness. If life played out as it should, they would die, and potentially go through that awfulness and be on the far side of it in fear of me going through it.
With these feelings in my head, the only hope I had was to try to determine what death was like. That would reassure me, or let me live in the foreknowledge about what everyone I would ever love would some day face.
I laid in bed and thought "What is death like?", over and over. It became "Tell me what death is like." and "Show me what death is like." and then became "I ask the universe to show me what death is like."
It was after a few repetitions of the final phrase that something changed in the room. I felt a presence, and with my eyes closed I could feel a pull in front of me, like a gravitation pull that was not physical. I opened my eyes briefly and saw nothing, and closed them again for fear of visual stimuli ending the experience.
The sensation of being pulled grew - it was as though there was a black sphere in front of me pulling my mind. Consciousness being dragged upwards (laying on one's back this also felt like 'forward'
.
This feeling deepened and strengthened, along with the sensation of a tangible presence with me and around me, both the sensation of the sphere and of being in the presence of something.
I 'let' myself be pulled, and I could feel a disconnect of my consciousness from my body for a moment only, and I slipped upward/forward into the sphere.
Inside it was... hard to describe. I later came across a phrase, "Darkness and the absence of thought, forever." There was nothing. No me, no thought, no noise or sound or feeling. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I do not know how long I stayed in that moment, but it felt like a lifetime. Unspeakable duration. Who knows?
I was then without sensation or feeling suddenly back in my body, laying in bed. It was still dark. I did not have a clock or watch, so I did not know the time.
I cried and cried and cried to myself, quietly, so as to not disturb anyone, until I fell asleep.
I have had some other experiences since then, some of which make me a bit more comfortable with death. But I think I grew up when I was 10. People said I was "mature" for my age. I call it meeting God sometimes because I asked a question when I was 10 - I was desperate for knowledge that no mind can really have (understanding of death during life). I asked a question, I begged for an answer, I begged and directly named the universe itself to answer me, and it did. I feel like that, in shorthand, can only be God.