• kromem@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yeah. A few years ago when very stoned I had a bizarre sense of divine communication (especially weird as an Agnostic), where I was playing a video game and had a moment where I felt like a confirmation dialogue would appear soon and if I said ‘yes,’ it would actually be answering a bigger question of if I agreed to have the mysteries of reality revealed. Soon a dialog appeared and I of course clicked yes.

    I’d generally have written it off as just being stoned other than that in the years since quite a lot of the rabbit hole it prompted me looking into has checked out in some wild ways, including eventually literal details about the ‘mysteries’ of antiquity, and the attribution by Atrapanus of Alexandria that the initial teacher of the mysteries was Moses (makes more sense in light of recent discovery of Aegean Iron Age presence in the Southern Levant).

    Which in turn tied back into cannabis use. It was just a few months after this experience that it turned out the earliest confirmed religious use of weed was in the holiest of holies of an 8th century BCE Judahite temple in Tel Arad which certainly recontextualizes divine communication through a burning bush, particularly with going into a tent after anointing oil where a cloud appears at the door during subsequent communication, very similar to the description of the Scythian anointing and tent hotboxing in Herodotus.

    There’s a Promethean quality to weed’s psychoactive effects being gated behind heating up, and while I’m generally a skeptic about most things, I try to remain skeptical of my skepticism as well, so who knows if there really is something to how a stoned brain processes the world such that it might be revelatory in some capacity.

    In any case, the conclusions it ultimately led me to were pretty dope and has me now largely believing that the nature of my reality is in line with the wildest hopes and dreams I had for it in my childhood.

    So my recommendation if ever posed the question of having mysteries revealed is to say ‘yes’ - it can get pretty weird, but overall for me ended up being rather cool.