From Fundamentalism to Enlightenment

[Reclaimer]

I grew up in the Southern US very much bought into the conservative Christian dogma that my parents and community members proclaimed. 

It wasnt until I started living in a different country at the age of 19 that I started questioning things, and that's what led me to Leo's videos. 

I'm 24 now and just moved to the Western US. I also found a guide to start Psychedelic Assisted Therapy and had my first break-through experience. 

First off, i found my guide through a guy's post on reddit. Id never met this guy or known anything about him before. I know this might seem sketch, but I was not willing to go to a conventional therapist to get on drugs that would merely numb the problem vs. allowing me to go to the root cause of it. 

Well, our first session happened on Tuesday, July 10th, and instead of going straight into MDMA, we decided to start me off with a high dose of weed.

For about two hours, the weed made me extremeley vulnerable. The first thing I became very aware of was my mortality. I realized how small I am in the vast cosmos. Then I started thinking and telling my therapist all of my family history, how and why my parents were so sold into religion, how I've been afraid of hell for most of my life, and all kinds of othee traumas and fears came to center focus. 

Eventually I started having other realizations. I saw how there's really no reason to be afraid of death, and I experienced life and death as natural and calm as an inhale and an exhale. 

A creepy thing was when I began to experience a more subtle experience of consciousness that I can not really explain, my therapist understood where i was at and said "this is what is real. Everything that is happening isn't."

 

Because of that comment and the overall experience, I was left feeling ungrounded for a few days after that. Now that a week has past, I feel that I'm a bit more at equinimity, but i definitely see what we think of as reality as merely a collective agreement.

 

Reality feels a whole lot more fragile than before. I'm also left with some dispair because I see now how many problems and issues I have, and humanity has at large. However, my therapist tells me not to attach myself so much to these emotions. 

This first post has been very quickly written because I should be focusing on my work, but there's so much going on right now that its difficult to be interested in the humdrum of my current job.

I will try to input some more thoughtful entries in the future, but for now i just wanted to get this out there. 

 

 

 

 

[Reclaimer]

Here's a red flag about my guide that I wanted to hear what others have to say: 

During our first session while I was extremely high, i started getting really paranoid that he was trying to convince me to leave my faith. Here I thought I had gotten rid of most of my Christian beliefs, but it became evident that I still have a lot to work through. 

When I looked at him, it looked like the white parts of his eyes started turning black. Not necessarily in a demonic way. I think it was actually because it was already dark outside and the weed made my sight very hazy. 

Still, this freaked me out, and I remember shielding my eyes with my hands. To make matters worse, he told me this was an early sign of schizophrenia. I really freaked out and started internalizing the fact that I was probably schizophrenic. I was already thinking about how I was going to go the rest of my life with such a serious mental illness. 

It wasnt until the day after that I messaged him and brought up the 'early sign of schizophrenia' that I had experienced the night before. He told me not to worry, that it was only a symptom and didnt necessarily mean that i would develop schizophrenia. He did say though that if i had stayed in the religion for longer then having a mental illness like this would have been more probable. 

Even though i feel like i learned a lot about myself from our first session, this little ordeal makes me seriously question his wisdom and maturity. I understand tough love, but making a patient unnecessarily worry seems a bit much, even if it wasnt on purpose. 

Thankfully, I think this night was a very important initial step on my journey toward enlightenment, however I'm wondering if this guide is going to be someone whos going to push me in the right direction or possibly cause harm.