I was raised secularly in a highly traumatizing childhood. Wasn't given therapy after my mom died, and my father hurt me in many ways in the storm of the aftermath. I spent a lot of time playing video games, and in the magickal thinking of my early adolescence, I drifted in a fantasy world of my own creation, using the characters I played on screen with to fill in the gaps of my understanding of reality. While even into college, where I first adopted the label "militant atheist," in stark contrast the the southern culture I entered, originally hailing from New York, I still believed many things no one else did. This helped contribute to my college breakdown, and would ultimately lead me to my current schizoaffective diagnosis.
This is a worst case scenario. And yet, because of my devotion to truth over bullshit, while I spiraled for a few years as I descended into drug use and general unscrupulousness, I never stopped trying to figure out "why?" This led into my robust love for philosophy, which would lead me to Wittgenstein, whose later work opened me to a possibility I had not considered; the language that defines this n that spiritual doctrine or dharma or what-have-you could be being used differently than I was originally assuming.
Y'know, given the "bless your heart" cockamamie I was forced to endure being traumatized, unsocialized, and maladapted in Christian society, I had grow to strawman something like "God" to mean "magick sky wizard," which even in the present day, the sorts of idoltarers that have such a simple explanation of reality and use it to justify hate and more pisses me off just as much as it always has.
But, in the sort of fantastical thinking one has being neurodivergent, I found it very easy to stretch this. I could understand if there was an advanced alien species, or higher dimensional beings, or perhaps a whole other metaphor I did not know. Yet, because of my ire and disdain for Christianity at the time, I went east to investigate Buddhism. It started with Alan Watts, and I would this sutra n that poem here n there, but at the same time, the weird druggie in me also simultaneously started investigating Terence McKenna and others of that ilk.
And I can say I let my mind free a little bit, to discover acid and mushrooms being an idiot on dating sites and Reddit, which changed my world view enough to figure out that learning to juggle would fix all my problems, and it has! It allowed me to get out there and give myself exposure therapy to heal myself and meet people to network with, which likewise healed me. Then much happened. It's complex to describe and would make me sound crazy, but that IS the medicine; a lil bit of madness.
If you believe you're trapped in a room, even if there's a hidden door to easily escape, you won't try to find a way out. We get trapped in our patterns of behavior and our perspectives and biases and delusions and cognitive dissonance. We're human, and it is one of the most human things, being limited by our incredibly complex meatsponge in our heads. And yet, it offers ways to break out of habit and limitations, as there are alternate cognitive states and features that I was wholly ignorant to in my youth.
For instance, there's Joint Synchronized Attention, which if you that incredible article from my friend, will highlight that perhaps not all those things people have called magick over the years were hogwash. There's another state I was in for six years following a particular fateful acid trip, which that same friend named the Synchronicity Slip Stream.
A synchronicity is a feature of the human cognition. This is what a burning bush is in the Bible, and what white rabbit was to Neo in the movie steeped in symbolism of Judeo-Christian mysticism; the "whispers of God." It's not a hallucination. In Bruce Almighty, when Bruce asks God for a sign while driving, and then the truck full of signs pulls in front of him, that's a synchronicity. Carl Jung describes this phenomena as when the inner and outer world align in some way, and I can tell you it depends on at least two factors in the brain: free association and what's in the short-term memory.
The Synchronicity Slip Stream, definitively caused by the psychedelics of that night, changed the narrative I believed to be true. This changed how I freely associated stimuli in my environment to be as if God was parting the Red Sea and leading me on a cosmic mission. My cup was full, and by that I mean I had infinite motivation to bust my ass to do whatever seemed like the right thing to do at the time for my mission, with the idea of getting famous and helping the world with the educational art project I now do here on Lemmy World.
Likewise, I tried all sorts of new things. This led to some temporary set-backs that I would have foreseen coming but went through with anyways because my faith in the magick of my ever-changing narrative. Y'know, some days I thought the CIA was training me. Others, I was joining the Illuminati. But I was always communicated with by a nebulous "They," I felt. You can see all this in my autobiographical character I go in and out of playing on here and previously on Reddit. But, those bumps in the road all were temporary.
What I gained was permanent. I am more kind, more moral, more skillful, more knowledgeable, more compassionate, and more socialized now from all the reconditioning work I did for myself. Younger me would have never recognized me as I am now. There's a depth to reality that there wasn't before. I'm happier than I've ever been, and I've learned so much and my journey has led to me now developing a theory of how to define polyplexic axiomatic systems via topological matrix and expand on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. And that's all I have to say.