Thanks ShamanisticVibes. I hope that you find strength to get through those challenges. Life can be really hard sometimes. I think that feeling at peace with God can play an important role in feeling at peace with life in general. I know that often it has felt that way for me.
For a long time now I have been thinking about God. And that has been intensified a lot over these last 8 days. It can be difficult to differentiate what is the true nature of God from what is just cultural baggage. The Bible feels like a mixture of divine inspiration and ancient culture. It can be very challenging to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. And it can be frustrating when the chaff sometimes seems to outweigh the wheat many times over.
As I said above in my first post, I am still thinking these things through a lot and making sense of it as best I can. But my understanding has been evolving in this direction (especially since the trip): I am coming to believe more and more that God is the intelligent consciousness of the universe. I believe that an innate characteristic of the universe is that it is conscious. It is conscious and intelligent. This aspect of the universe is what I believe "God" to be. God did not create the universe. God does not exist in some distant realm that is apart from the universe. But rather, "God" is a property of the universe. God is the universe's intelligent consciousness.
And I believe, in the deep trance like states that are brought about when we ingest psychedelic compounds, that our minds are opened and tuned in to be able to interact with God. Not in the direct way that you and I are now interacting with words. But rather through the re-wiring of our neural networks in ways that better align our intuition and thought processes to be more in line with the God consciousness of the universe. In whispers and fantastic imagery and mental rejumbling we are realigned to be more in tune with God. And sometimes it is even more than that. Sometimes it is almost as if God is shouting at us and saying, "Look! Look here at this! I'm showing you something!" The openness to receive these messages and be re-aligned comes from the ingestion of psychedelic plants. They make us much more open to God, so that the interaction can happen. That is why all the religions were founded by people who had deep visionary encounters with God. And that is why when the plants and visions were prohibited, the religions became spiritually dead and devoid of God.
There is much more to it. But roughly, this is what I am coming to understand.
IT WAS ALL A DREAM