scottishbastard

Well, the last few years I've adopted a sort of non-denominational, alternate form of Christian doctrine. I see the bible as a mix of misinterpretations, bias, and metaphors. But within these texts lie some very real truths. The one I want to talk about here is the idea of the Devil and Hell.

In my opinion hell is not a place you can be forever unless you choose to be there. I don't believe it's a part of the afterlife, but a part of human existence. For example, there's two Bad Religion songs "How could hell be any worse?" and "Fuck armageddon - This is hell". I guess that's sort of what I think about it. Look at all the serial killers, starvation, genocide, infantacide, negative eugenics, greed, murder, rape etc. Do you truly believe that anywhere else could be any worse than this? Especially the common depiction of hell. You know...Fire, brimstone, sulphur, worms, torture etc. I couldn't imagine anything worse than the shit that happens here (i.e. Andrea Yates, 9/11, The Holocaust, American Idol etc.).

And as for the devil/satan/lucifer/the dragon/the serpent/the dark angel etc. I truly believe that the devil is not a seperate entity, but is within us in the same way that god is supposidley within us. Haven't you seen other people who seemed "possessed"? Or haven't you ever felt that something you did was downright evil? I know that when I was going through certain aspects of bipolar disorder I believed I WAS the devil.

I started this thread because of a story I remember from a few months ago. In my opinion it was my face to face encounter with Satan itself. So here it is:

I had just quit heroin/benzos/cocaine and was doing pretty well, but my girlfriend was still into it. My mom who had also minorly abused opiates in the past had just gotten a large vicodin prescription. So one night I had a dream where I was living in some sort of converted garage and a friend called me and said he had a friend that was coming into town. This kid shows up and he sort of looked like Macully Culkin (which is weird enough as it is). He pulls out a big box and says "I'm selling peanut m&m's for cheap man. Wanna buy some?" and I was like "No, that's okay".
Then all of a sudden I was outside talking to my mom who was in a car, and I told her I had a little bit of crack and she asked me to teach her how to smoke it. So I reluctantly showed her how to smoke it off of tinfoil.
Then I was back in the garage with a few friends and this Macully Culkin type weirdo. He then starts to ask me if I can hook him up with a dealer and he would smoke me out (with cocaine). I was tempted but said "I can't.". He then asked me one more time, and yet again I was very tempted. But I said "I can't man. I'm sober". And so he stands up and puts on a black poncho with those "day of the dead" skulls on it. Then says "Aaalright" in a hesitant/arrogant kind of way. Then he puts on a black cowboy hat, tips it down so it's partially covering his eyes and says "bye then" and slowly walks out the door sort of looking at me and half smiling.
I woke up scared as fuck. I never wake up scared from dreams, but this one was different than anything I'd had before. It was more than lucid, it was prophetic. I told my girlfriend right then "I just met the devil".

So a few months go's by and I had gotten back on heroin and benzos (no coke though). My girlfriend had some kind of overdose (we think?) and wound up in the hospital in ICU for two weeks. I was scared to death, and felt extremely guilty. Negative energy was surrounding me.
After a couple days in the hospital she came out of her coma and I spent the night there at the hospital. But she kept having seizures and some kind of asthma attack. In the morning she had one more and a team of doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, lab people etc. rushed in the room and decided to put her back into an induced coma.
They said "Now would be a good time for you to go home, get some sleep, eat, get a fix, whatever you need to do, You won't be able to see her anyways".

This sounded very bad to me. I believed that she may die any moment and they didn't want me in the way. Bewildered, I left the hospital and sat out front. I started chain smoking cigarettes, and tried to collect the horrible thoughts and feelings that were eminating from myself and the situation. Guilt, fear, sadness, anxiety all consumed me. Right then a pacific islander looking dude wearing a hospital gown, with a face full of acne and spiked bleached hair came up and asked for a cigarette.
He asked "what are you here for?" and I told him my girlfriend overdosed, and that we were heroin addicts etc.
He said "Do you guys like to get high and fuck? Does that shit make you horny?".
I was totally caught off guard. I was in a moment of hell on earth, and this disgusting thing was asking horribly inappropriate questions (we were at a catholic hospital!).
He said "I'm a tweeker. I like it cause it makes you horny." and "I like to do tweek then get fucked in the ass...Most girls don't like that, but I do...I like getting fucked in the ass with big dicks, Do you have a big dick? I bet you do. You're all tall and skinny. Skinny guys always have big dicks" etc. etc. etc.
Firstly, I was disgusted and shocked by what this mutant was saying, but most importantly he said he was a SHE...I still have no idea if it was or not...But anyways...
He/She starts asking if I wanna go fuck somewhere. And I was like "No, I love my girlfriend." and he/she seemed to sort of understand.
Then a nurse came up and said "So and so...Are you talking about penises again? Don't make me strap you down to the bed again!" and he/she was like "It's okay, I'd like that". And the nurse took it back to it's cage.

As soon as it walked away I got the same cold feeling in my heart that I had right after my dream months before. I realized "This is the same entity that visited me in my dreams". I couldn't explain why I thought this. But I got the same feeling that I had from the "person" in my dream. And I had never had this feeling before, except in that dream.


Another thing was when I was going through a manic phase between the first time I quit (october 08 - when I had the dream) and the last time I quit (March 09) I believed that the devil had either taken me over, or that I was the devil. Soon after I started to see patterns in a sort of John Forbes Nash kind of way. Everything seemed connected. I believed that god had a sort of "ticker" constantly feeding information into my head. I began to connect christian doctrine, zen buddhism, anarchism, animal rights, the 100th monkey theory, the nash equilibrium, quantum physics etc.
In the middle of this my girlfriend's overdose happened and my second encounter with "the devil".

I have since been mentally stable and sober (still smokin' weed though!)...My girlfriend somehow came out of the coma and no one really knows what was wrong. They attributed it to an overdose of soma, xanax, and tylenol 3 but I suspect it was a bloodclotting problem since #1 She had a high tolerance to all those pills and didn't take that many of each and #2 She randomly formed two black eyes that wouldnt go away for weeks shortly before the incident.
But either way, I haven't had such an encounter since.

These two encounters scared the hell out of me. I know that between mental illness and drug addiction there is lots of room to argue that my mind was playing tricks on me, but I'm fairly coherent with my thoughts, even in the middle of mania/psychosis and I truly believe that these were contacts with divine/anti-divine entities.

These experiences also solidified my belief in some sort of higher power.

Just thought this story may be interesting...?:conf used:

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Yeah but you're going to do what you wanna do
No matter what I ask of you
You think you hold the high hand
I've got my doubts
I come from Chino where the asphalt sprouts
.....

And even if I have to go to Claremont
Well I guess I'll just have to go to Claremont
Let me go
Let me lie low

Yeah but you're going to do what you wanna do
No matter what I ask of you
And you send your dark messengers to tempt me
I come from Chino so all your threats are empty

- the mountain goats

msicidron

damn. interesting

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Center

umm...ok.

I just see a huge block of opinion with nothing tangible for us to measure against. What kind of response you looking for?

Interesting is a good word here.

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"As an organizer I start where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be." - Saul Alinsky

verklingen

that higher power is you

thanks for sharing man

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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Nug_King

Sounds like a good self realization, higher power or not.

If it was only your own mind and not a higer power that gave you these ideas/visions would it be any less important to you? I only ask because I have a reflex that makes me sckeptical of anything that is supposed to be superior to me, God or human.


Oh and why do you gotta drag worms into hell? They are just trying to get by like the rest of us!

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NASA found out in the beginnings of the space program that pens would not work in space. SO NASA spent millions of dollars and a good year and a half developing a pen that does not need gravity to draw the ink down.
The Russians just brought pencils...

verklingen

^ the way i see it man, something being superior, lower, or equal to you is just perception. god can take whatever quality you like.

it sits pretty well with me philosophically that reality, the universe, and existence itself is the accumulation of infinite potential. multiverse and all that. this offers a perception of myself -- the myriad arrangements of potentials which entice energy, matter and circumstance to create myself and my experiences -- that makes it an intrinsic, necessary part of all existence. i am everything, everything is me, and both would, without the other, cease to exist. knowing this it's hard to perceive levels or tiers of existence. god/the devil isn't in the heavens/hell, he's in the mirror. . . reflected in your life as you choose to perceive.

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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Grieves

perception is just a mirror...

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verklingen

what's it reflect?

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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Grieves

oneself

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verklingen

right on man that's interesting to think about, thanks. but is oneself anything more or less than his perception of self?

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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Grieves

and the mirror mirrors itself...Refracting splinters of all acquisition...

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scottishbastard

Well firstly, I wasnt looking for a response necessarily. I'm just posting a story that happened to me.

Secondly, I came out of the nihilist/agnostic/libertine sect of thinking so I totally understand the idea of yourself as a higher power. But now I'd consider myself somewhere between a Deist (having a personal god within you) and a pantheist (nature and god being synonomous).

I don't like using words like "god" because people assume I mean it in a dogmatic kind of way. My beliefs are a bit complicated and have to do with energy, quantum mechanics and so on... I won't get into it here, but I just wanted to say that I didn't mean god in the way most people do.

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Yeah but you're going to do what you wanna do
No matter what I ask of you
You think you hold the high hand
I've got my doubts
I come from Chino where the asphalt sprouts
.....

And even if I have to go to Claremont
Well I guess I'll just have to go to Claremont
Let me go
Let me lie low

Yeah but you're going to do what you wanna do
No matter what I ask of you
And you send your dark messengers to tempt me
I come from Chino so all your threats are empty

- the mountain goats

Grieves

All the dogmatic god is is a metaphor for understanding ones self...Only the righteous way can be attained by one that is self-aware...Hell is just the tortures that one goes through, being at conflict with ones self...

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scottishbastard

In short, my spiritual beliefs I try to back up with some kind of science. In this case I look at energy, and the presumption that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only rearranged.
I believe that "god" is the culmination of all of the energy and consiousness in existence, and seperate beings such as trees, humans, dirt, water etc. are just the seperation of this mass of energy and consiousness.
"Returning to the kingdom of god" is just a state where we can all tune into eachother again and realize we are one eternal being of energy.

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Yeah but you're going to do what you wanna do
No matter what I ask of you
You think you hold the high hand
I've got my doubts
I come from Chino where the asphalt sprouts
.....

And even if I have to go to Claremont
Well I guess I'll just have to go to Claremont
Let me go
Let me lie low

Yeah but you're going to do what you wanna do
No matter what I ask of you
And you send your dark messengers to tempt me
I come from Chino so all your threats are empty

- the mountain goats

scottishbastard

So therefore, I don't believe that god is a seperate entity, nor do I believe "I am god". I believe that we can all reach god through ourselves and eachother and through certain situations (i.e. Someone seeing an eclipse, or having a baby or whatever), but I don't believe any one of us has the entirety of god inside them. God is a culmination of all things, matter, counsiousness etc.

__________________


Yeah but you're going to do what you wanna do
No matter what I ask of you
You think you hold the high hand
I've got my doubts
I come from Chino where the asphalt sprouts
.....

And even if I have to go to Claremont
Well I guess I'll just have to go to Claremont
Let me go
Let me lie low

Yeah but you're going to do what you wanna do
No matter what I ask of you
And you send your dark messengers to tempt me
I come from Chino so all your threats are empty

- the mountain goats

Mydriasis

The perception of self is the perception of all. Thus implying self is all, and all is self. It's all one. One seperation.

Cuz this is all just a by product of the microcosm created from nothing to infinity[with infinity being birthed from nothing]. But we won't go into Mydriasis's understanding of the creation of the universe.

Interesting thread, some really good thoughts in here.

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wnfakind

I read half of it, but all im gonna say is... your either heaven or hell life is what you make it.. reading learning trying to understand where you or your so called ego has came from is whatever you fuking make it either you choose to be happy or your choose to live your life like shit.. heaven or hell simple as that.. pick or choose we all know what can or what will make us HAPPY.... THE BIGGEST PROBLEM PEOPLE HAVE IN LIFE WHY OR WHY AM I NOT HAPPY... just dont fall in love if u have that will fuck up the whole thing... but this whole discription of heaven and hell we all understand in my opinion is us trying to UNDERSTAND OUR OWN SELF not a fucking book... not a theory not some other reality YOUR OWN LIFE.... heaven and hell all ready exists and I love your definition of it man really dude the whole drug play WRITE A PLAYWRITE on what you just expressed... but it all comes down to what you make it.. the afterlife there is no afterlife... besides what you want... but right now the only moment is now so take what you feel and if you dont feel how you want to well.. guess what who the fuk is the only person who can do anything about it... YOU choose HEAVEN personally my hEAVEN was being in love... im sure alot of people's is.... that's the odd part of the who trade... lol trade... I love how i can say that when two souls connect.. souls I love how I said that fuking concept's I just think everyone hsould get the fuck over thierself and over thier so called addictions and habits and well wed all be fine