Why I Deleted My Acid Trip Hell Story
A Little Revisiting & A Lot of Revisioning
If you had never gotten the chance to read this titular “acid trip hell story” in question, and you’re seeing this like “Who the hell are you, and who cares if you deleted some barely-read Medium post?” Both fair questions. The first one I don’t rightly know how to answer; I am a weird individual. Hopefully someone will care, at least a little. It was one of my more popular articles on this site, for whatever that’s worth. Nonetheless, I wanted to address my removal of it and clarify some potential misconceptions about me, and my ideas, that it may have sparked.
Almost a decade ago now (wow, makes me feel old to say it like that), a handful of friends and I took some acid. Not expecting anything profound or serious, I stumbled into this psychedelic wormhole of unhealed trauma, self-awareness, and divine revenance that my naturalist/atheist worldview wasn’t prepared in the slightest to handle. In the fallout of this experience, I grappled with God and faith a la Jacob with the angel (Genesis 32:35). He let me live, but with a limp, for sure. For years, I had flashbacks that would send me into tearful panic attacks. I fervently believed I had a spiritual obligation to warn anyone and everyone I could about my experience, that they might avoid falling into such a wormhole themselves when they die and/or confront their own unaddressed traumas in their waking lives. I described this experience, what I interpreted to be glimpses of Hell, in excruciating detail, hoping that it might catch the attention of someone whose choices may carry them there, and divert them from that destination. However, in the years following that incident, I’ve struggled to find a good explanation for the levels of agony I experienced in those minutes I laid on the floor thrashing. Not just in a sense of “I didn’t deserve that!” but also in a sense of “Who the fuck possibly could? For Eternity?!”
That was honestly a big part of my problem with Christianity in the first place: this dogmatic insistence I grew up around that “Only believers in Christ will go to Heaven, everyone else will end up burning forever in the Lake of Fire.” Well, gee, I don’t know, that seems awfully convenient for us white Americans who have blatantly built a puritanical crackerized version of Heaven on Earth on the backs of enslaved Africans and their systemically abused descendants, and used the Bible as justification for doing so. Meanwhile, every Muslim, Sikh, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, and Rastafarian…no matter how devout, sincere, or loving? Eternity of torture and flames — sorry, better luck… next eternity?
Ironically, it was this experience, in conjunction with other synchronistic happenings, that made me a believer. One might hear that and interpret it as I was “scared into” believing in God, or that God is a big cosmic bully who gave me a Hell swirly because I was talking too much shit. At least, the latter is how I took the experience for a while. However, I’ve recently come to appreciate it in a new light.
Becoming a parent really does teach you about unconditional love in a new way. Really, truly unconditional love? There can be no greater suffering, no greater joy, and no greater willingness to do whatever it takes to secure and protect their future. How must have Christ felt when He cried out: “Father, why have you forsaken me?” I have to imagine it wasn’t entirely dissimilar. That sheer sense of abandonment and hopelessness is a feeling I’m all too acquainted with. That said, when I see the joy of my daughter’s smile, I get overwhelmed by the love I feel for her. There’s no pain that could be inflicted, lie that could be told, or loss that could be suffered that would make me stop loving her, even if she were somehow directly responsible.
Hell is a lot easier to present uniformly: nobody wants to be on fire or tortured indefinitely. Heaven, on the other hand, that’s a lot trickier to get a one-size-fits-all description. To me, Heaven might be a cosmic cruise ship with no racial or class distinctions, fully-automated menial tasks, sexy ladies galore, a below-deck cannabis farm, and all-you-can-eat buffets from around the world, but that might not suit everyone. Some people think weed is stinky. Some are picky eaters. Some get uncomfortable around beautiful women. Other people might have an idea of Heaven that would be supremely boring to me, and absolutely peaceful and beautiful to them. Some people’s idea of Heaven would basically be 1980’s suburbia, and that’s okay, too.
Religion is arguably just as good as money at obscuring what’s really important in life: love, family, building connection, trust, appreciating natural beauty… Some of the most materialistic and vapid people I’ve known in this life have purportedly been “Christians”: able to dedicate hours upon hours to the condemnation of others and exalting the righteousness of themselves, yet seemingly incapable of enjoying a sunrise, or admiring the fractal complexity within a tree’s branches.
While battling my own ego and banal desire to leave behind some kind of legacy is one of my major struggles, I certainly don’t want to be known or remembered as the guy who gave humanity the most accurate description of Hell they never asked for.
