"I had one of those visions which colors forever the way you hold certain attitudes and ideas. And the vision was that I, being an academic, have academic visions and I was writing on this huge blackboard a very complicated and very sophisticated analysis of reality as I understood it with the help of psychedelics. And God came in and looked at this and said that it was just wonderful and then erased it all. And I said with a little bit of concern, why have you erased it? And he said, "Well, that was just wonderful, I just loved that, and I certainly hope you'll do others." And I realized that what I was being told is that the chances of you in this body in this lifetime with these languages in this civilization really understanding reality are zero - but it is extraordinarily entertaining and kind of nourishing. This is a good thing, to invent these theoretical castles in the air.
And the transformation for me was that I from that point on was not committed to my deepest core beliefs because I began to see that my deepest core beliefs were among the beliefs that I was changing and that, if I looked back a few years, there was a real shift in the beliefs that I now felt were core. So, since I was letting go of some core beliefs every few years, I had no reason to assume that the core beliefs I had now were going to last any longer.
And so there was a certain relief, a kind of letting go of pretentiousness and so that's been partly I think my career of not being too attached to any given ideological stance was really clarified in that particular session, which is different from the experience that all systems are valuable that lead towards this fundamental experience. It's a different way of looking at it. This was more looking at my own personal take on things was always going to be personal, subjective, limited, and inaccurate." -James Fadiman
No comments:
Post a Comment