73

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73rd Post

Posted 30 May 2016 at 03:30:00 EDT

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> When I was in high school, I liked dropping acid. One of my favorite books was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which tells the real-life story of a band of early acid-heads and proto-hippies called the Merry Pranksters, who invented a lot of what would become tropes of the 1960s such as dressing up in weird shit and riding around on a painted bus while stoned on drugs.
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> I was especially intrigued by an experiment which was carried out by the Pranksters in 1965. One day, a few of the Pranksters put a sign on the front gate of the group's compound that read, "The Merry Pranksters Welcome the Beatles." At the time the Beatles were the biggest band in the world, and the Merry Pranksters were largely unknown. Moreover, none of the Pranksters actually knew the Beatles or had any idea of how to contact the Beatles. Nor did they make any attempt to do so. For the Beatles to show up at their house in California was extremely unlikely. Despite all this, the Pranksters put this crazy banner out on their front gate. And they fully expected the Beatles to show up.
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> To understand the Prankster's behavior, you must understand the effects of LSD. This is true in a general sense and with specific regard to that banner. You see, sometimes when you take LSD, something strange happens, something beyond all the weird hallucinations and thought distortions. Sometimes you get the eerie feeling that coincidences are happening all around you. You might be listening to music while watching TV and notice that the pictures and the sound seem to synch up. You might open a book and notice that the opening passage has an odd, unmistakable relevance to the current moment you are in. At times, you almost feel like you are conscious of things before they actually happen. You imagine your friend walking through the door, and a moment later she does. You look at your phone, and a moment later it rings.
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> Sometimes these coincidences pile up so quickly that you get the feeling that there is something behind it all, that all the seemingly disparate and unrelated phenomena of your life are actually part of an underlying order (or pattern or structure) which is normally hidden. This order seems to be a cosmic phenomenon that pervades and controls all of existence, something which has always existed but which you have been blind to until now. The existence of this fundamental order comes as a revelation because it is completely different from the ordinary mechanism of cause and effect that you are used to, that science uses to explain things. This feeling, to me, is the essence of the LSD experience. LSD leads to a sudden awareness of meaningful coincidences which in turn gives rise to an awareness of an underlying cosmic order which is acausal.
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> The "acausal" part is important. A true coincidence is when two things happen which are clearly related but which cannot possibly be related by cause and effect. For example, let's you are watching a show on TV about zebras, then you walk out your front door and see a zebra trotting down the sidewalk, dropping zebra shit all over the place. The two events have an obvious connection, but it's hard to imagine how that connection could occur through cause and effect. It's not likely that your TV viewing choices caused that zebra to escape from the zoo, nor it is likely that the two events have a common cause, unless somebody is playing an elaborate prank on you. Such a coincidence could be considered meaningful if you believe that it is evidence of the aforementioned underlying order. Otherwise, it's just some weird shit that happened randomly.
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> During my high school years, because of my little LSD hobby, I became obsessed with meaningful coincidences. I was always looking for little signs from the cosmos and hidden connections between things which weren't causally related. I tried to predict things. I looked for symbols and tried to fit the events of my daily life into cosmic patterns. I got into Nostradamus, the I Ching, stichomancy, all sorts of shit.
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> Unfortunately, my attempts to ascertain the underlying structure of the cosmos were heavily clouded by my own immature narcissism. You'll notice that people who believe in past lives tend to see themselves as great figures of the past like Caesar and Van Gogh, rather than the anonymous turnip pickers and fishwives who actually populated most of history. Similarly, I was convinced that the cosmos was sending me indications my impending greatness, rather than portending my eventual descent into alcoholic mediocrity. Yes, it was revealed to me that the world would end soon, I would be a Christ-like figure of greatness in the coming apocalypse. I shit you not. I really believed this stuff. Luckily, blogs had not become popular yet.
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> Then I took my final acid trip. It was a bad trip. I don't want to get into the details, but let's just say that I saw some shit, and I never wanted to take acid again. All my life, I had been hoping to be visited with a grand revelation, and now I just hoped I was never visited by another one. It filled my head with all sorts of crazy shit. Not truth, just madness. I decided that whatever was underlying the cosmos could stay lying under the damn cosmos. I wanted no part of it.
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> Oh, I guess I should tell you what happened with the Beatles banner. In putting out that banner, the Pranksters had hoped that they could tap into the underlying acausal order of the universe by simply welcoming the Beatles, rather than by reaching out to the Beatles or pursuing them. But the Beatles never showed up. At least, they never showed up in a literal sense. A couple years later, the Beatles released The Magical Mystery Tour film, in which they all dressed up in weird shit and rode around on a painted bus while stoned on drugs, precisely as the Pranksters had done. So, in a sense, they did "come to" the Pranksters. Of course, this can all be explained by ordinary cause and effect. The Pranksters helped popularize a social movement which eventually spread to England. Or you can invoke a mystical explanation, saying the Pranksters somehow sensed that the underlying pattern of the cosmos would bring the Beatles around to their way of doing things.
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> After I stopped doing LSD, I started leaning away from notions of cosmic patterns, and I became more convinced that any understanding of the universe would have to rely on cause and effect. My earlier attempts at mysticism began to look like embarrassing folly. I came to regard all that meaningful coincidence stuff as bullshit. I figured that LSD just overstimulated whatever sort of coincidence detector might exist in the brain. You could dress it up in a fancy word like "synchronicity" and give it the imprimatur of Carl Jung or whomever, but it was nothing more than magical thinking, as old and stupid as stone age tribes.
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> I had been perceiving connections between things where none existed. There are no meaningful coincidences. A coincidence is only meaningful if you can find a casual relationship between the two phenomena, and if you can, it is no longer a true coincidence. The universe doesn't send people signs through the I Ching or Nostradamus or any of that silly shit. If there are rainclouds in the sky, it's a sign you should carry an umbrella. That's an actual sign from the universe. The other stuff is just a load of crap.
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> It was with this mindset that I entered AA years later.
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> AA is a god-centered program. The main idea is that you can get sober if you live according to god's will instead of your own will. People in AA often talk about watching for signs from god and listening to instructions from god and so forth. As you can imagine, I was less than impressed. I was appalled. I felt like I was being dragged back into this narcissistic mystical bullshit that I had thankfully left behind. I felt like I was being asked to roll back my little personal Age of Enlightenment and go back to the Dark Ages. Fuck that. I wasn't going to do it.
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> One night at a meeting, after months of listening to this spirituality shit, I made my feelings clear. I told them that spirituality was the hugest load of horse shit ever foisted upon human culture. Spirituality, I opined, was like a thought virus that gets passed on from one person to another. It was basically gonorrhea of the brain. And AA was one of the biggest fucking disease vectors I had ever seen. I told them they should be ashamed of themselves for preying on people who are in a vulnerable state just to convert them to their bullshit spiritual beliefs.
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> Rather than the stunned silence that is the dream of every r/atheism subscriber, they just told me to "keep coming back" and moved on to the next guy. It turned out that little rants like this are semi-regular occurrence.
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> Having no other good options, I kept coming back. I asked a lot of people why they believed in god. They almost invariably brought up meaningful coincidences or magical signs. I became more convinced than ever that it was all bullshit. I argued a lot with one guy in particular. In recovery, you meet a lot of people who are like Ned Flanders with tattoos, people who lived dirty and then cleaned up and became extra-square, but they still have their tattoos. This was one of those guys. He told me a story about how he was in prison, at the end of his rope, and he prayed to God to send him a sign. Just then a little bird alighted on prison window and sang him a beautiful little song. God, he knew at that moment, was real. I almost dislocated my eyes they rolled so hard. What a bunch of silly shit. How could a grown adult believe this crap?
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> I read the AA literature, mainly to bolster my arguments against the program. AA literature is very sneaky. It knows that most atheists follow the tradition of Western secular humanism, which values open-mindedness in contrast the close-mindedness of religionists. So the literature portrays atheism as close-mindedness. Atheists are encouraged to be more open-minded, more flexible, more willing to accept the idea that they don't know everything about the universe. I wondered if it was fucking opposite day. How were these spiritual nutcases going to portray spirituality as open-mindedness and atheism as close-mindedness?
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> I was simply asserting that in my entire life, I had never seen any convincing evidence of god. That wasn't close-minded. That wasn't presumptuous. It was the opposite. I was willing to accept the evidence presented to me by the world, unlike religionists who turn a blind eye to it. I told heavy-metal Ned Flanders that if the skies ever opened up to show me the majestic glory of god, then I would be happy to fall to my knees, because either god existed or I was in the presence of a technology advanced enough to be god-like. I told him that I was perfectly willing to believe in god, if I was ever presented with a shred of credible evidence for his existence.
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> Soon after, I was presented with precisely that.
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> Who knows. Maybe it was a coincidence.
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