Some people believe in God for intellectual, cultural or religious reasons. They believe through faith, consoled by Christ’s saying to doubting Thomas after his resurrection, “blessed are they who have not seen and yet believed” (John 20:29).
Some believers believe that you cannot see God and live anyway (Exodus 33:20). What could seeing God even mean, considering “God is Spirit” (John 4:24)? And as theologians are at pains to remind us, God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. How can you “see” Spirit or Being itself?
Strange as it may sound to sober ears, people do actually report seeing God on high dose psychedelic trips. They won’t be able to describe the experience in a convincing or even comprehensible manner, but it doesn’t seem to bother them – they know what they’ve seen.
Another strange psychedelic experience is seeing death. How can you see death? As Epicurus argued many years ago, it is irrational to fear death, since death cannot be experienced, being by definition the end of consciousness. Yet psychonauts commonly report experiencing death, or at least approaching it closely enough so as to “see” it.
Seeing death is unsurprisingly associated in the psychedelic experience with darkness, with silence, with emptiness and with the vanishing point of consciousness on falling asleep. There is also usually some anxiety and resistance present, which is also unsurprising. The will to life is strong enough that we generally don’t want to die, just in case!
Whether or not we actually see God or just imagine it, or whether we actually see death or just imagine that, the high dose psychedelic experience is profoundly existential, by which I mean that God and/or death are deeply felt in the core of our being. It’s not just belief in God or the thought of death as concepts, in the abstract, but actually seeing God and seeing death. Not literally, of course, but existentially.
“In the midst of life we are in death”, as the Book of Common Prayer has it. This is the basic existential insight. We are mortal and we will die, which you know as well as I do. But it’s one thing to know it intellectually and quite another to know it existentially.
So what? What’s the point? Is there any value in seeing death? Well, to put it somewhat poetically, so light shines in the darkness, music sings in the silence, and life blossoms in the grave.
Just as “our heart is restless until it finds its rest in God” (Augustine) so is our life restless until it finds its rest in death. We do not know who we are until we know God, and we do not know what life is until we know death.
We don’t know that we don’t know until we see it. And it should go without saying that it’s irrelevant whether you believe me or not.
bread of life 