What Is It Like to Be God?

God, depicted here by Michelangelo, is freaked out by being God, and that’s why He/She/They/It creates our fractious world. Or so a drug trip led me to believe.

April 15, 2023. I love to read, talk and write about mystical experiences, which are encounters with God, Reality, Whatever. I wrote Rational Mysticism two decades to see if I could find common ground between the scientific worldview and mystical revelations, including my own. But that book didn’t get mysticism out of my system.

The immediate problem you face when studying mystical experiences is their diverse causes and outcomes. They can result from trauma, grief, prayer, meditation, music, walks in the woods, LSD—or they can strike like lightning out of a clear blue sky. And different mystics perceive radically different Whatevers.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, still the best study of mysticism, William James describes blissful visions of a loving, all-powerful spirit at the heart of things. But he also reports on “melancholic” or “diabolical” intuitions of a terrifyingly alien, heartless abyss.

Psychologist Adolf Dittrich divides mystical visions into three broad categories, or “dimensions.” Borrowing a phrase from Freud, Dittrich calls the first dimension “oceanic boundlessness.” This is the classic blissful experience, in which you feel yourself dissolving into a benign higher power.

Next is “dread of ego dissolution,” in which self-dissolution is accompanied by negative emotions, from mild uneasiness to full-blown terror. You think you are going insane, disintegrating, dying, and all of reality may be dying with you. It’s a bad trip.

Dittrich's third dimension consists of more explicit hallucinations, ranging from abstract, kaleidoscopic images to elaborate dream-like narratives starring Jesus and other religious figures. Dittrich summarizes these three dimensions as “heaven, hell and visions.”

During a drug trip in 1981, I experienced all three dimensions described by Dittrich. The trip took place between my junior and senior years of college while I was staying with friends at a house in Connecticut.

One friend, whom I'll call Stan, was an acid head with an unusual connection: a chemist who investigated psychotropic drugs for a defense contractor in North Carolina. The chemist had given Stan a teaspoon of a compound that supposedly resembled LSD. [See NOTE.]

On a sunny morning, Stan and I each ingested a matchhead-worth of the beige powder, a dose that Stan's chemist-friend had recommended. Within 30 minutes, I felt a volcano erupting within me. Sitting on a lawn, barely holding myself upright, I told Stan that I feared I had taken an overdose. Stan, who for some reason never got as high as I did, told me to relax and go with the experience. As Stan murmured reassuringly, his eyeballs exploded from their sockets, trailed by crimson streamers.

That was my last contact with “the real world” for 24 hours. Stan and others present told me later that during this 24-hour period I was completely unresponsive to them, although they could with some difficulty move me about. For the most part I lay or sat quietly, staring into space. Occasionally I flailed about while grunting or raving unintelligibly. For a while I stuck my arms out and hissed like a boy pretending to be a jet fighter: “Fffffffffffffff!"

My expressions tended toward extremes: beatific, enraged, lewd, diabolical, terrified. At one point I furiously clawed holes in the lawn. My eyes were for the most part wide open, the pupils dilated to the rim. My companions said I never blinked, not even when dirt from my excavations was visible on my eyeballs.

Subjectively, I was immersed in a visionary phantasmagoria. I became an amoeba, an antelope, a lion devouring the antelope, an ape man burying meat on a veldt (this might have been when I was digging holes in the lawn), an androgynous Egyptian king/queen, Adam and Eve, an old man and woman on a porch watching an eternal sunset.

At some point, I attained a kind of lucidity, like a dreamer who realizes he's dreaming. With a surge of power and jubilation, I knew that this is my creation, my cosmos, and I can do with it what I like.

I decided to pursue pleasure as far as it would take me. I became a bliss-seeking missile accelerating through an obsidian ether, shedding incandescent sparks; the faster I flew, the brighter the sparks burned, and the more exquisite my rapture became (this was probably when I was making the “Fffffff” noise).

After eons of superluminal ecstasy, I decided that I wanted not pleasure but knowledge. I needed to know why. I traveled backward through time, observing the births and lives and deaths of all creatures that have ever lived, human and non-human. At the same time, I ventured into the future, watching as the Earth, solar system and cosmos morphed into a vast grid of luminous circuitry, a computer dedicated to solving the riddle of its own existence.

I became convinced that I was coming face to face with the ultimate origin and destiny of existence, which were one and the same. I felt overwhelming, blissful certainty that there is one entity, one consciousness, playing all the parts of this pageant, and there is no end to this creative consciousness, only infinite transformations.

My astonishment that anything exists became unbearably acute. Why? I kept asking. Why creation? Why something rather than nothing? Finally I found myself alone, a disembodied voice in the darkness, asking, Why? And I knew there would be, could be, no answer, because only I existed; there was nothing, no one, to answer me.

I felt overwhelmed with loneliness, and my ecstatic recognition of the improbability--no, impossibility--of my existence mutated into horror. There is no reason for me to be. At any moment I might be swallowed up, forever, by this infinite darkness. I might bring about my own annihilation simply by imagining it. I created this world, and I could end it, forever. Recoiling from this confrontation with my own awful solitude and omnipotence, I felt myself disintegrating.

For months after this trip, I endured flashbacks during which wherever I happened to be—a classroom, restaurant, subway car--trembled as if projected on a wobbly movie screen. When I locked eyes with people, current surged between us, and I felt myself dissolving. Social interactions were painful. I considered dropping out of school and joining a monastery, where I could contemplate what was happening to me.

I feared I was going insane, but I was exultant, too, because I had discovered the secret of existence: There is a God, but He/She/They/It is not the loving, omnipotent patriarch in whom so many people have faith. Far from it. God is nuts, crazed with fear.

In fact, God created this wondrous, pain-wracked world as a distraction from His/Her/Their/Its cosmic identity crisis. He/She/They/It suffers from multiple-personality disorder, and we are the shards of that fractured divine psyche. Since my trip, I have found echoes of this insane theology in Gnosticism, the Kabbalah and the writings of Eckhart, Nietzsche, Jung and Borges.

Gradually I put the trip behind me and got on with my life, but I never stopped brooding about its meaning, and the meaning of mysticism. Which visions should we believe? The heavenly, blissful ones or the hellish ones? Or are both somehow true? The rational answer is: None of the above. The sensible, skeptical part of me knows that I am projecting my own fearful nihilism onto the universe, and onto God. Mystical experiences are delusions triggered by pathological brain states. Differences between our experiences—like differences between our dreams—reflect our diverse backgrounds and personalities.

But another part of me is dissatisfied with this dismissal. My drug-induced visions possessed a mythical, archetypal quality that my dreams lack. The visions seemed not absurd and meaningless, like most of my dreams, but almost too meaningful. They seemed too artful, too laden with metaphorical and metaphysical significance, to be products of my puny, personal brain. I felt as though I left my individual mind behind and entered a vast, transpersonal Mind.

For the most part, I'm a hard-core, skeptical materialist, but my experience—and those reported by others—makes me suspect that our minds have depths unfathomed by conventional science. And although I've reluctantly abandoned my crazy-god theology, I have an abiding sense of reality's weirdness. What William James says in Varieties still holds:

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… [T]hey forbid our premature closing of accounts with reality.

I understand why my fellow skeptics dismiss mystical experiences as delusions. The experiences can be dangerous, too; I’m lucky my trip didn’t permanently derail me. But aren’t you skeptics curious about these experiences? If you could do so safely, wouldn’t you like to visit these mystical realms? To see for yourself what heaven and hell are like? To know what it feels like to be God?

NOTE: After hearing me describe my trip, psychiatrist John Halpern, an authority on psychedelics, guessed I had taken 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ, or a related compound. BZ was developed as a chemical “incapacitant” by the U.S. Army in the 1960s. The Army stockpiled canisters of BZ through the 1980s, according to Wikipedia. Whatever the drug I took was, I do NOT recommend it.

Further Reading:

I describe my 1981 trip in The End of Science and Rational Mysticism. The trip also informs my recent writings, including my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment.