podcast Transcripts

Just as the previous episode, this is a disclaimer that if you have not listened to the first two episodes of Season two, episodes eleven and twelve, I highly recommend you listen to them before proceeding forward with this episode or this episode will make little sense from a timeline perspective. Let’s get into it.

To start, just to further drive home the timeline of the experiences recounted in the previous two episodes, I had school Monday through Thursday. It was on a Thursday when I smoked the speed and either that early Friday or Saturday morning since I can’t remember the exact number of days when I experienced what to me appeared to be near or actual death, I slept finally, and it wasn’t until late Sunday when I awoke and needed to drive back home in West LA since I had school the next day.

Everything is somewhat of a blur as you can imagine. All I know is even though my mind felt like it was back in order, since I was back in the crowded campus of Santa Monica College, the same impressions that I explained were occurring while in the nightclub kept creeping up here and there, whenever I put any attention to it. So, I went about my days as cautious as I could, struggling with all my might to keep my thoughts in order, to think only of what I needed to think about and nothing else and not to give any attention to any thoughts I wasn’t consciously thinking.

I’m not sure how long it took, whether it was the next weekend, or two weekends after my death experience, but at either interval, it felt as if my mind had grounded itself once more, and regardless of the depth of experience I knew I had witnessed, the dumbass in me crept back in, the dumbass in me that needs to experiment and confirm, probably gained from a lifetime in school of the scientific method ingrained upon my mind. But I wanted to see if I could still smoke weed or not. I knew there was no way in hell I’d ever touch anything stronger than weed. I knew that for a fact then and there. But I’d been smoking weed for a long time already, seven years at that point and even though I never considered myself an addict, still will say that I wasn’t an addict since I’d periodically stop smoking weed and drinking while in high school and college when I knew I needed to get my shit together to get a paper done or pass a test or something, but I still didn’t really want to give it up entirely. Also, the skeptic in me returned. It was just a crazy drug experience, just like in the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas movie and book, nothing more. There’s not really a God. There’s not really a devil. There’s none of that. It was just drugs. And obviously, the dumbass experimenter that I was and unfortunately am, I told myself, lets test this, by smoking some weed.

I know I took one hit, I’m not that sure if I took two hits. Two years later I’d experiment again, and when I recount that, I’m certain it was only one hit. But at this moment, I know it wasn’t more than two, but it may have been, and it may have been one hit. All I know is I sat back into my sofa after the hit, or hits, and simply watched. I looked around my apartment, didn’t see anything pressing in through the walls, no weird voices, nothing. I even remember telling myself, see, smoking weed is fine. And then, all I remember is ever so slightly glancing up towards the ceiling in front of me. And there was the Vision again, the Mindstream ribbons piercing the fabric of space, coming in through the roof of my apartment, no apartment above it actually, and I was actually looking out into the night sky with the swirling vortex of the Vision right in front of me again. When I glanced at it, it began to perform the same actions as the ball of light I’d seen in the death experience, trying to suck me into looking at it and the extension of thoughts over eternal time in the present moment of now started, and time began to slow. A four letter bad word starting with the letter F, is all I thought. It didn’t last long though. Didn’t draw me in to gazing at it with the same gravitational pull as what occurred in the life review death experience, but I knew without a doubt that whatever this was that I was seeing was just as real a part of reality as anything else, and that smoking weed and doing drugs opened one up to it, or at least, since I’d already been opened up to it via this route, it was now always going to occur. By this point I was also thinking further of the experience having to do with judgment or having judgment passed upon oneself when one sees it, and essentially, I saw it in the negative sense and would only see it in the negative sense, especially if experienced through drug use, for quite some time afterwards, until my more recent mystical experiences.

I don’t remember what occurred after. The Vision just sort of went away. Or by looking away and telling myself I can’t do that again and acknowledging that this spinning vortex looking thing of eternal thought was real and that it had something to do with God and Judgment, I think I fell asleep. Only reason I say that is because I know it was daylight when I threw out my bongs, pipes, papers and the last sack of weed I ever possessed. Though I’ve drank liquor since then of course, at the time, I also poured out all the liquor that I had in my apartment, and I think I went close to a year without even drinking a drop of anything but church wine. . .