Talking to God on Psychedelics (Part Three)

Original monotheism and finding my religion

No God or spirit has ever written a book. All books are written by humans (or AI).

In all my encounters with the spirit world, no spirit ever spoke to me in words. It was always through images and feelings, through “knowing”. I never “heard” a voice. The communication was silent.

According to

Iain McGilchrist

’s hemispheres theory in The Master and His Emissary, “connection” to Spirit — and to our own bodies and other people and living things — lateralizes to the right hemisphere. Language — words, reading, and writing — lateralize to the left hemisphere, while non-verbal communication — body language, facial expressions, tone of voice — are right hemisphere functions.

The spirits connect to us through our wordless right hemispheres. When our left hemisphere is listening to the right — it isn’t always — the left hemisphere then translates this information into our spoken language. The information is filtered through our schemas, our existing mental models of the world. Our prejudices, our biases, our cultural experiences, our language.

For example, when the entity I took to the be the Great Spirit “spoke” to me and touched my hand, the words “Suck it up” appeared in my head in response to my cowardly reaction. If I spoke a different language, or were slightly more poetic in my own, different words would have appeared to signify the same emotion. The Spirit didn’t literally say to me “Suck it up”, but sent me a feeling akin to that.

Spiritual “messages” are run through the schematic filters of the people who receive them and put them down in words.

The right hemisphere can receive divine inspiration, but the left hemisphere produces the words to create a holy text. Even in the best-case scenario — where the author is sincerely trying his or her best to convey the meaning of their spiritual interaction into language and isn’t adding anything out of self-interest — they inevitably will do so imperfectly. All writers know the difficulty of producing language to accurately describe what they are picturing or feeling, the intention of their work. Further confusion arises when language is then filtered again through the “reality tunnels”¹ — the schemas, biases, and cultural experiences — of each reader.

Like a game of telephone, there will always be distortions, and some meaning will be lost in translation.

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The “Bad Trip”

In his Cosmic Trigger series, Robert Anton Wilson describes people seeing a being of light very similar to the one I saw the night of my “bad trip” (described at the end of part two). Depending on the individual’s “reality tunnel”, interpretations vary. Some people think they’ve seen an angel. Some people think they’ve seen Jesus. Some think a deceased relative or ancestor. Some, might think an alien.

I asked the being who he was, and received a feeling of love in response. And so I thought I’d telepathically connected to my husband, Zach, who was out of town at a retreat and taking psilocybin on the same day.

I’m pretty embarrassed by this, because I think it’s considerably crazier than assuming the being of light was Jesus or even an alien.

But in a way, I’m also grateful, because Zach was able to verify that it wasn’t him. Whereas if I’d taken the being to be Jesus or a dead relative, there would have been no way to disprove that belief.

A few weeks later, Zach insisted I get a Jungian analysis of my experience from ChatGTP. The AI reported that the being of light was … me.

The humanoid being of light with no face is a powerful symbol of the Self, Jung’s concept of the fully integrated psyche.

Your own light form running toward it suggests a yearning for unity, self-discovery, or divine connection.

The barrier of light separating you may symbolize the veil between the conscious and unconscious mind, or the perceived separation between the human and divine realms.

Specifically, it was a manifestation of my animus, or the masculine side of my personality, whereas the feminine light-being I’d taken to be me in the vision was my anima.

In Jungian psychology, we often project our own inner spiritual guide onto real people, and in this case, you project it onto your husband.

This could mean that your Animus is becoming more conscious, moving beyond external relationships and toward a direct, spiritual connection with your own wisdom.

ChatGTP “Carl Jung” interpreted the warning about “vices” and a new pandemic coming as follows:

The being warns that people’s vices will weaken them—this could symbolize a personal and collective Shadow, where unconscious habits and addictions lead to suffering.

In Jungian terms, vices (e.g., sugar, alcohol) may represent self-sabotaging behaviors that keep parts of the psyche in a lower state of consciousness.

The pandemic warning could be interpreted in two ways:

A literal prophetic vision (some psychedelic experiences can feel precognitive).

A metaphorical vision of inner sickness—where the “disease” represents humanity’s detachment from spiritual truth and authentic living.

Now, this last part was interesting to us. While Zach confirmed he did not “speak” to me telepathically on January 19, 2025, he did take a high dose of psilocybin (4.5 grams, or about 4x what I took that day), and he had multiple spiritual encounters on his trip. One included a message about the recent colds and RSV going around, and a feeling that this had to do with dishonesty. He interpreted this as meaning that people were getting respiratory viruses because “we aren’t speaking our truths.”

Again, these messages from psilocybin spirits never come in words, only feelings and images. They are easy to misinterpret. (I pointed out that our baby and three-year-old both had a cough; the baby can’t talk yet, so she can hardly be blamed for not speaking her “truth”, and the three-year-old proclaims her truths both loudly and constantly).

According to ChatGTP Jung I freaked out because the experience was cut off when my mother-in-law came into the room and demanded I join everyone for dinner. In my vision, I fell away from the “being of light” into a dark hole.

This sudden descent into fear/panic suggests that the experience was part of an individuation process—an attempt to integrate new spiritual awareness—but was cut off too soon.

The dark hole represents the unconscious—instead of returning to daily life with clarity, you were thrown into fear and existential anxiety.

When I sent out the apology email on January 20th, I assumed it was all in my head. However, the next day, Zach reminded me of something weird. He’d had a dream four days before the “bad trip” that I’d posted something insane on Substack and lost about 100 subscribers. He told me about it at the time, and I told him it was just a dream, and forgot all about it.

I have, as of this writing, lost about 100 subscribers due to the weed psychosis on January 19 and the last two posts about “Talking to God on Psychedelics” (I have also since gained well over a hundred new subscribers — Hi! I swear I am not usually this weird).

Of course, it could just be a coincidence. Maybe Zach just picked up on my exhaustion and the fact that I was pressuring myself to get back to writing months after giving birth.

I do consider it a possibility that every “spirit” I’ve seen on psychedelics, including the “Great Spirit”, wasn’t real — a “hallucination”, a figment of my imagination. I have also considered the possibility that they were just archetypes from my imprinted cultural experiences and “ancestral memories” stored in my DNA — this was actually my first interpretation, in 2020, that “God” (or “Gods”, or “Elohim”) was in our DNA, the collective unconscious of the human genome. That’s one of the reasons I was so shocked when I started to “see” spirits open-eyed in 2022 after I quit using fluoride toothpaste. While I’ve received information on mushrooms that I don’t think I could have figured out on my own, it’s possible that it was stored in my DNA and the mushrooms just helped me access it. Or they just helped me put together puzzles I already had collected the pieces for.

But it’s still weird that Zach predicted my “insane” posts, just as it’s weird that the “dark spirit” I saw appeared at the same time my WiFi cut out, and disappeared at the same time my music resumed streaming, immediately after I lit palo santo. And if the “Great Spirit” I saw wasn’t real, I don’t have a good explanation as to why I felt it touch my hand or why I was so incredibly, supernaturally exhausted afterward. And it feels wrong to assume everything came from within me, when it felt like I was being guided by the divine.²

It’s also weird that Zach and I both received the feeling of respiratory viruses and deception during our mushroom trips on the same day, which I took to be some sort of international conspiracy, and he took to be a message that people were getting sick because people aren’t being honest with each other and suppression and self-censorship lead to illness.

It seems possible to me that these were different interpretations of the same message.

Marijuana has a “trickster” spirit. Another possible interpretation of my “bad trip”, therefore, is that the spirit world was playing a trick on me.

They likely did this because of the message I had been ignoring — in the month preceding my “bad trip”, almost every time I ate a magic mushroom, I received instructions to write about my experiences with psychedelics, my belief in God or a higher consciousness, and to try to convince people to stop using fluoride and take steps to decalcify their pineal glands, so that they could begin to feel the presence of the spirit world and be influenced by God.

I didn’t want to do this because I was worried my readers would think I was crazy. So instead of writing about that stuff, I wrote a sloppy-by-my-standards essay about moral narcissism and literary nerds, which repeated many of the arguments I had better presented in previous essays.

Zach had his dream the day before I published this essay. A couple of days later, I temporarily went mad after a strong hit from my brother’s weed vape and published the series of insane posts on Substack.

And so my fear of being seen as “insane” was abruptly confronted, and vanquished. The spirit world had forced my hand. Now I had nothing to lose by writing the essay you are currently reading.

Using this interpretation (which I quite like), my recent experience was a bit of a Jonah-being-swallowed-by-the-whale moment.

The first two part of this essay received quite a lot of comments, some from people who were concerned about my psychedelics use/abuse, others from people urging me to seek God (or Jesus) through organized religion.

I promised I’d get around to writing about that. It took me more time than I would have liked (March ended up being very busy, I am sleep-deprived and a bit stupid because of the baby), and, to be honest, I struggled to find the words, but here’s my go at it. It’s not exactly what I envisioned, but it’s the best I can do right now.

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The Case for Original Monotheism

A couple of months ago, a reader commented on one of my notes and mentioned the theory of “Original Monotheism”, assuming I was familiar with it. I wasn’t, so I looked it up.

I found this documentary and watched it:

The documentary presents evidence that the most primitive hunter-gatherer tribes across the globe tended to be monotheistic, and worship a “high God” somewhat similar to the Judeo-Christian God. This is one of the reasons why Christianity was so readily adopted by these tribes; much of what Christianity taught already aligned with their existing beliefs. Polytheism evolved out of monotheism as tribes became more complex.

“A moral creator in no need of gifts, and opposed to lust and mischief, will not help men with love-spells, or with malevolent ‘sending’ of disease by witchcrat; will not favour one man above his neighbour, or one tribe above its rivals, as reward for sacrifice which he does not accept, or as constrained by charms which do not touch his omnipotence. Ghosts and ghost-gods, on the other hand, in need of food and blood, afraid of spells and binding charms, are a corrupt, but, to man, a useful constituency. Man being what he is, man was certain to ‘go a whoring’ after practically useful ghosts, ghost-gods, and fetishes which he could keep in his wallet or medicine bag. For these he was sure, in the long run, first to neglect his idea of his Creator; next, perhaps, to reckon Him as only one, if the highest, of the venal rabble of spirits or deities, and to sacrifice to Him as to them. And this is exactly what happened!”

— Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, pages 261-262 (quoted from The Case for Ancient Monotheism)

The comments section on the video is filled with people from different cultures around the world agreeing with the premise, and sharing beliefs from their communities that support the author’s thesis.

Different schemas, different language, different interpretations of what is perhaps the same God.

“Truth is one; sages call it by various names. It is the one sun which reflects in all the ponds; It is the one water which slakes the thirst of all; It is the one air which sustains all life; Systems of faith may be different, but God is one.”

— Rig Veda

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Finding My Religion

I’ve read and listened to a lot of people who have left religions and become atheists — in particular, Christianity or Islam. They always have very good reasons for doing so. I’ve also read and listened to a lot of Jewish atheists.

I was raised without religion in a very secular liberal suburb of Vancouver, Canada, so these experiences are very different from my own. I grew up with the story of how my mother’s adoptive parents had to elope as teenagers, because my grandmother’s WASP parents were prejudiced against my Catholic Southern Italian grandfather. (My grandmother pled with her mother, “Aren’t we all children of God?” “Yes,” my great-grandmother replied, “But you don’t see a sparrow mating with a crow.”)

I viewed religion as something that separated people, and led to hatred between groups, akin to racism.

A general trend I’ve observed is that atheists and ex-believers usually take issue with religious texts, religious leaders, and the behaviours, beliefs, and prejudices of (some) religious people — that is, with humans and books written by men, with interpretations of who “God” is by other human beings.

“The literal believer in Christianity worships a book, not a god:”

—

J. Daniel Sawyer

, “I Literally Can’t Even: Turning the Heart of Man into a Machine”

One of the reasons I became so obsessed with psychedelics is that I suffer from what theists refer to as the “God-shaped hole”, which has some overlap with “The Great Empty” I referred to in a previous essay.

I keep experimenting with psychedelics because I am seeking God — I want to believe in God. I wish I could say I do believe, but I am a skeptic and an agnostic at heart and far too high in the personality trait of “Openness” to ideologically commit; I wish I could provide a mathematical proof that God exists, but the closest I can get to that is some mumbo-jumbo about how it intuitively seems probable to me that God exists “because of fractal geometry and emergence theory.”

My first inclination was to explore theism on my own, drawing my own conclusions and looking for patterns across various religious traditions. However, I’m wary of spiritual narcissism, which seems to be all too common among those who describe themselves as “spiritual” and believing in “Gaia” or “God” without the structure and limitations of organized religion (no, I am not saying that all independent spiritual seekers are like this, but many are). As well, my recent “bad trip” indicates that I need to develop a relationship to God and a spiritual practice without using psychedelic drugs.

In early 2024, my husband, Zach, and I took a class on Kabbalah taught by a rabbi. We found ourselves longing for more religious community — and Zach, in particular, for Jewish community — and started attending synagogue semi-regularly in the summer of 2024.

We’ve noticed that many of the “revelations” we’ve had on psilocybin are, in fact, already written somewhere in Jewish scripture (others turn up in Hinduism, or another wisdom tradition, or in one book or another on psychedelic experiences — nothing has turned out to be new).

Even the stuff about the left and right hemispheres, which I originally learned about from Iain McGilchrist’s work, has cropped up — albeit with far less scientific and historic backing — in much older works.³

For example, the Zohar has this passage in it:

“The Holy One, blessed be He, created man so he would strengthen himself in the Torah and walk the way of truth, staying on the right side and avoiding the left. Because men should walk on the right side, they have to increase love between them, As love is of the right side, and avoid hatred among them, as hatred is of the left side, so as not to weaken the right, which is the place to which Yisrael cleave.”

The “right” side here might refer to the right hemisphere of the brain; the “left” to the left hemisphere.

According to McGilchrist, the left hemisphere (LH) is more “narcissistic” than the right, which is more relational, implicit, and intuitive. The LH is more power-obsessed, reductionist, mechanistic, competitive, explicit, bureaucratic, and categorical — more likely to break things and people up into parts and to lump them into categories.

From The Master and His Emissary (page 93):

“I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation. It is deeply attracted to, and given life by, the relationship, the betweenness, that exists with this Other. By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.”

The right hemisphere is the part of our brains that primarily processes love and connection to other people, to animals, to nature, and to God / Spirit.

“Where the left hemisphere’s relationship with the world is one of reaching out to grasp, and therefore to use, it, the right hemisphere’s appears to be one of reaching out — just that.”

— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, page 127

Ideologies and movements associated with left hemisphere dominance and right hemisphere dysfunction include the Protestant Reformation (especially sects such as Calvinists), the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism, (at least some types of) feminism, and wokeism.

Love is of the right side … hatred of the left.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that I’m considering converting to Judaism. I say considering because I intend to take the conversion classes and then decide at the end of them. I am in the process of discussing this with a conservative rabbi, and the classes start in the fall.

My reasons are as follows:

• My husband and children are ethnically part-Jewish. If I converted, my children could convert too, and be considered “fully Jewish”. I think this is something they might appreciate — we already attend synagogue, my older daughter is in Hebrew school, and we celebrate the Jewish holidays.

• While I don’t consider Judaism to be the only true religion, neither do (most) Jews. It is also perfectly acceptable within Judaism to learn about and believe in the truths and wisdoms of other religious faiths. Judaism does not claim that being Jewish is the only pathway to God, which I strongly agree with.

• I don’t have any cultural connections to other faiths which appeal to me, and I think it would be weird if I tried to adopt, for example, Hinduism or an Indigenous belief system, when pretty much all of my ancestors going back a thousand-plus years would have been Christian — and the rest would have most likely been Muslim or Jewish.

• The other two Abrahamic faiths are less appealing to me for a variety of reasons, but a relevant one here is that I believe the “messianic age” is a metaphor for widespread enlightenment, and that there has never been and never will be one person who could be considered the “messiah”.⁴

• I also already have a big aquiline nose, a high-ish verbal IQ, a love for Jewish a cappella, and a tendency toward outspokenness, so I figure I’ll fit in pretty well.

• I’ve decided to believe in God. Among other things, I think believing in God motivates me to become a better person, to take better care of my health (because if we are all part of God’s microbiome, then when I do things that harm my own health, I also hurt God / Spirit — and my family, as well). This doesn’t mean I rule out other explanations of my psychedelic experiences — including the possibility that the consciousness I’ve communicated with is something other than “God”, such as the collective unconscious coded in human DNA — but given that this is the reality tunnel I’ve naturally gravitated toward, it’s clearly the one that works for me. As I said before, I want to believe in God. So I choose to.

• The “God” I believe in, as discussed in Part One, is both masculine and feminine but neither male nor female, both singular and plural, and in a fractal relationship to us akin to our relationship to our gut microbiome. Scholars have identified four authorial voices in the Torah, one of which is the “Elohist”, who uses the name “Elohim” for “God”. Elohim is a masculine plural of a feminine noun and means “gods”, but is used to refer to God in the singular. While I’ve used “God” throughout this essay, it would technically be more correct to write Elohim.

• I do not think Elohim is all-powerful, although powerful beyond our comprehension. For one, humans have free will. I believe that God’s power is fractal to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Observer Effect; I’d try to explain this, but I think I would fail miserably. I also believe that math is the language of Elohim. If you are unwilling to try a high dose of psilocybin, try watching a Mandelbrot zoom and this documentary, which might help you understand what I’m getting at.

• I believe the universe is a living consciousness (beyond our comprehension), the highest (?) fractal level. However, I do not think the consciousness I interacted with was the “universe” but the planetary consciousness. I think mushrooms open up communication channels one fractal level up and down (the planet and our microbiome), and given how intensely I reacted to the planetary level of God, I suspect the universal level would literally blow my mind. Zach says this is aligns with Kabbalah, but honestly, every time I try to read about Kabbalah I get confused.

• I also do not believe in a literal interpretation of the Torah. I think many of the stories are metaphors (e.g. Cain and Abel as a metaphor for the conflict between farmers and herders)⁵, others are exaggerated versions of real events, and others are pure allegory.

Humour me for a second and assume that Elohim is real and that the theory of original monotheism (or at least henotheism⁶ — the belief in a Great Spirit but also lesser spirits / gods) is correct. It seems improbable to me that Abraham (whether he was a real person or a metaphorical representative) would have been the first human to communicate with Elohim. However, given that polytheism was rampant at the time, it makes a narrative sort of sense to me that Elohim “chose” Abraham / the ancient Hebrews to carry the “truth” of ethical monotheism and the Great Spirit through the era of polytheistic colonizations. I imagine they were selected for traits such as stubbornness, high verbal intelligence, and a powerful semantic memory — not necessarily because they were the kindest or most ethical people. Just the best ones for that particular job — the people most likely to survive relentless persecution and violence with their stories intact.

It’s a compelling story, anyway.

And something I’ve always believed in is the power of stories.

And this is the one I’ve chosen to tell myself.

I’ll return to my usual type of content after this. Thank you for reading.

With love,

Meghan

1. The concept of “reality tunnels” was coined by Timothy Leary and popularized by Robert Anton Wilson. “Reality tunnel is a theory that, with a subconscious set of mental filters formed from beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently.” For more on this, see Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising (1983).

2. I binged Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger series on audiobook recently, and was amused to learn that according to Anton Wilson, almost every researcher and writer who messes around a lot with psychedelics and/or Kabbalah starts to believe that some sort of higher consciousness or spirit is guiding them and influencing their lives. When you start to notice the spirit world, the spirit world notices you.

3. I discussed Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, which came out a decade before McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, and includes a similar theory about the hemispheres — albeit one with far more obvious issues — in a previous essay. Robert Anton Wilson also discusses the right and left hemispheres in his Cosmic Trigger series and in Prometheus Rising, but incorrectly claims — as was commonly believed in the 1970s — that the right hemisphere is “usually silent” or inactive. He argued that psychedelics activate the right hemisphere, and this is responsible for the spiritual encounters many people have on them.

4. Back in July 2024, I wrote an essay for Future of Jewish where I entertained the belief that Jews made a mistake in founding Israel in 1948 because they weren’t supposed to return to Israel until the Messianic Age — and the world didn’t seem to be particularly “enlightened.” I’ve come to reconsider this; it occurs to me that a necessary precursor for widespread global enlightenment would be mass communication, and Zionism and the founding of Israel did co-occur with the introduction of such technologies. (In Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas sings to Jesus “If you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation / Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication.”) That being said, I don’t think “enlightenment” is certain — I think this is something that is possible, but that the people of Earth must work together to achieve. I would like to be a small part of nudging the world toward enlightenment — because, should the spiritual revolution fail, I fear we are headed toward darkness.

5. I’m sure readers will not be surprised to learn that I favour the “stoned ape” theory of human evolution — the argument that the rapid brain expansion that created modern humans 200,000 years ago was the result of us eating a bunch of magic mushrooms. I think the Adam and Eve story might be a metaphor for this events, and the “fruit of the tree” was magic mushrooms. Eve’s punishment — pain in childbirth — reflects that as our heads grew to accommodate our new big mushroomed brains, childbirth became far more painful and dangerous. As women would have been responsible for “gathering”, it is most likely that women would have been the first to collect and eat magic mushrooms, and then would have shared them with the men (just as Eve ate the fruit of the tree first).

6. As I do believe in other spirits, henotheism might be a better description for my stance. I tend to think the lesser spirits are more local, specific to a certain place, plant or plant species, or people. I have met Mother Ayahuasca, after all.