First Experience of God

It wasn't until about a year later that I thought to myself I had better make good on my promise and I started where most Westerners would probably start: by picking up a copy of the bible. I read the Gospels, and although I found myself drawn to a lot of the teachings of Jesus Christ, I never considered what I was reading to be any more than a book. One night I was up late reading in bed, and I came to a passage in one of the Gospels that to this day I wish I had earmarked, but I think it was either in the book of Matthew or the book of John. I found myself reading and re-reading this one piece of writing, stopping in between to try and process exactly what I was reading but drawing a complete blank. I felt as if there was something just beneath the level of my conscious perception that I was missing out on, that despite reading this particular passage multiple times I was still missing out on the real meaning contained therein, and that there was something potent lurking beneath the relatively banal surface-level layer of literal meaning. You know when you check your watch and then realise after that you didn't register the time? It was exactly like this. I decided to stop, put the book down, and say a prayer to God. "I can sense that there is something in this writing, but I cannot see what. If it is your will, if I am at all worthy, bless me with an insight to see what is really written. Amen." I turned my lights out and went to sleep.

I should add that at this stage despite praying, I was not a believer in God: I was however open to the prospect that a reality represented by the word God might actually exist, and I was offering a prayer with an open mind and an open heart and literally seeing what happened.

Sometime in the early hours I was awaken by a strange phonecall. My phone was on the table next to my bed, and I answered it almost immediately. "Hello?" I said, "Hello?" said the voice on the other end of the phone. "Who's this?" I asked, "Who's this?" was the mocking reply, imitating my tone of voice. "Yeah what?", I was now more than a little annoyed at the obvious prank caller, "yeah what?" came the reply, just managing to finish before I slammed the receiver down in a half aggrevated, half too-tired-to-care manner. I was living in student digs at the time, and prank calls of one nature or another were relatively common among the internal phones that every room had. More significant to me though, was the fact that I had been woken out of a very deep sleep in just such a way that I was aware of what I was dwelling on once I fully regained waking consciousness, something which rarely happens, to me at least (I often cannot recollect upon waking exactly what the deep levels of my mind were mulling over only a few seconds previously). Allow me to elaborate: the moment the first ring of the phone went off, I "awoke", but I awoke within my deep level of sleep, within my unconscious mind if you will. It took a few seconds and a few more rings of the phone for me to fully "ascend" out of deep unconsciousness and into a full waking state, and as I gradually ascended, I equally gradually lost my grip on whatever it was that my mind was dwelling on, so that by the time I fully awoke, I was left with only an imprint and a vague memory of the thing that I was previously fully connected with. I hope I have explained that well enough to understand.

The thing itself is something that cannot be put into words. As far as our relatively puny consciously controlled minds go, it was something so significant and meaningful and powerful as to be able to exist only in conceptual form; but in my deep levels of sleep, while my waking mind was dormant and an older more venerable part of my mind was doing the business, I was fully aware of it and fully connected with it. I only remember thinking right before I fully awoke and lost it for good, "If only I could tell people about THIS!". It was monstrously epic, and profoundly positive. Beyond that, I have no waking recollection of it to speak of.

That day marked the first day of my true believer status. I experienced something profoundly life-changing, and have walked the earth ever since with a sense of something I can't quite put my finger on.

What was it? This "thing" that can exist only as an ungraspable concept in the waking mind I am using to type this blog? I do not know, for certain, but it was something very deep and very powerful and profoundly positive and pure. Was it God? Was it the Holy Spirit? It was certainly a revelation, and it was as real as the socks on your feet, or the monitor you're looking at to read this blog.

Date experienced: Approx. Winter 2003

Going back to my roots...

Where did my belief come from? I was born and raised an atheist in a completely secular household, i can count the number of times I ever visited church on the fingers of one hand and all of those were at christmas time to sing songs and hold funny contraptions which in previous lives were once oranges. I had no religious organisation to my life whatsoever, at any time, and no religious influences. I was not interested in spirituality, the notion of God, or anything of the kind. At best I was an agnostic, although a better word would have been an apathetic: I simply didn't care one way or the other and the concept of God or anything spiritual simply never entertained a second of my thoughts.

When I was 19 I experienced what some people would refer to as a Near Death Experience. I was very ill and spent somewhere between a week and two weeks at the bottom of my health levels. One night I experienced a dream which was so vivid and real that it left an impression on me that would in some respects shape my life thereafter. I am reluctant to refer to it as a dream because even now it was so much stronger and more immediate than a regular dream that I would personally classify it as something else entirely. It was heavily laden with universal or archetypal symbolism and themes, and felt more real and significant often than waking reality does. I was "there".

I floated up through what looked like I was coming out of it like a large rabbit or badger hole, and started to look around me to see a landscape resembling the English countryside at night, with slightly rolling hills, grass, hedgerows and bare trees. The scene was very gothic and the sky was very black, although everything was entirely realistic in proportion, colour, appearance etc.

As I floated just a few feet above the grass a creature that can only be described as a bulldog on steroids, possessing a serious attitude problem and a formidable set of drawl-covered teeth, barked and snapped at me, jumping up and locking its jaws around one of my ears (I can't remember which one). It held on and shook its head briefly but I managed to escape and continue floating upwards out of its reach, feeling relieved as I looked down on it jumping and snarling but unable to now reach me. I remember feeling startled at the prospect that this creature wanted to cause me so much pain and had so much refined aggression for me, with me having never before seen it in my life.

I landed some way away, with the threat of the dog now gone the dog itself seemed to have disappeared, and I found myself stood in the middle of a meadow, looking towards a patch of high ground perhaps a few hundred metres away, with the landscape rolling away from me. Two figures stood completely still in a field on the near side of this undulation, with their garments blowing in the wind, otherwise they were completely still and completely silent. How best to describe these figures? Imagine the ring-wraiths from the first movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, black garbed riders on horseback with frayed robes and large hoods sitting atop jet black steeds, and you have precisely the image of these figures. I felt intuitively that where their hoods drew over their heads, where their faces should be, there was a vacuum: a black hole of empty nothingness. No skull or disfigured face like in the horror movies, but an impossible void of non-existence. That was a prospect that shook me to the core and filled me with a profound and overwhelming sense of pure and very heavy despair, the likes of which I have never experienced in waking life.

I turned to my left and walked towards the outside of a tree-lined path, the trees lining it had grown in such a way so as to arch over the path and meet atop in the middle so as to create a tunnel lined all around by thick tree branches, and there was a small break in the trees just in front of me. The path itself led in both directions, and as I stood on the side I leaned precariously over the path and into the tunnel, looking both left and right, and seeing that it was dead straight and it faded into complete darkness in both directions. This was the archetypal "long dark tunnel", and I could sense that the darkness in both directions was the same void that filled the hoods of the grim black figures on the hill. I teetered on the edge of the void for a few moments, and then withdrew with a step back. I drew immediate inspiration from the fact that I had not actually set foot on this path, I had only stepped right up to the edge of it and taken a good look; however, the overarching feeling that accompanied this experience was one of a despair and deep deep darkness too pure and extreme to put into words.

I awoke shortly after in my bed and was in a state of uncontrollable fear and disturbance. I prayed heavily for the first time in my life and asked that God let me live long enough to see the next sunrise, as I had a feeling that I was at a crossroads, and if I could just make it through the immediate hours I would begin to move away from danger and start on the road to recovery. In my desperation I offered a deal of sorts, as I imagine many have done in similar circumstances, I pretty much said "Let me live through this and come out the other side and I will promise to seek you out". I'm not sure such deals are the best way to go about communicating with the all powerful creator of life but I have decided this much as a result of my experiences since: if you make a promise to God in one of your prayers, you will be called to account for it whether you have any intention of delivering or not, and it will be on God's terms, not yours.

Well, as evidenced by me typing this blog, I did recover, and I thank God for that. But when I woke up the next morning, feeling truly blessed to be alive and filled with a positive feeling that the worst was now behind me, I still did not necessarily "believe" in God, "believe" that there was a God, or "believe" that he had tipped the balance in my favour as my future hung by a thread in the deep of the previous night, I only knew that I was awake, alive, and starting to think positively for the first time in a number of weeks, and I felt in my heart of hearts, that I had "been somewhere" the night before, to a place where my physical body could not follow, and to a place that had touched me at a previously untouched depth of my being. It was my first mystical experience; a taste of the shadowlands that lay between this life and whatever comes next, complete with archetypal "rabbit-hole", trans-realm guard dog, grim-reapers and the classic of classics: the long dark tunnel. This was to be my first taste of the mystical experience, but not my last.

Date experienced: Approx. February 2003

Introduction, disclaimer and smallprint

Welcome to my blog. I am at the time of writing a 26 year-old male living in the UK, blogging under a pseudonym purely to avoid any unwanted awkwardness if potential employers were ever to web-search my name and stumble upon this blog. I have no doubt whatsoever that it will contain some very fringe ideas, experiences and perspectives that could appear to the layperson to be far-fetched, psychotic and highly undesirable in today's materialist-driven society, and apart from anything else it will be composed entirely of very personal content the likes of which I would usually only ever share with a close friend over a drink or on an evening walk, if at all.

I hold my hand on my heart and promise from the outset to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.