Psychedelics and Faith

I was brought up in a religious tradition where every time I questioned something that did not make sense to me, I was told to have faith. Faith was a kind of escape hatch when logic couldn’t sustain the argument. I’m afraid that for me, the idea of having faith became an ordeal of telling myself something I couldn’t believe, but having to to believe it anyway. Things didn’t work out very satisfactorily.

Psychedelic faith is based on experience, if a rather distant one. It’s more like memory. I remember understandings and openings I had when I was in the different state of consciousness that the medicine gives me, and though I am not in that state now I do recall that I was there. I recall that certain experiences happened, and rumour has it that they happened to me.

Through an act of faith I cling to - call it - a five dimensional state of being with these three dimensional hands and fingers. I trust that what took place in that other reality was indeed real and living. Faith says, if I were to return to that place, my trust will be verified and I may experience ( or perhaps endure?) that state again.

Psychedelic faith then, is the capacity to recall something of higher consciousness while in a state of ordinary consciousness. By that recollection, we are percolating something from the beyond into our regular here and now. And we do that recollecting by opening our hearts and caring about what is most important and about what comes from the most high. As William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Apparently Eternity is in love even with us and all of our wild shenanigans.