Journal
The Night I Asked God Why I Was Down There
There are some experiences in life that are difficult to explain. Not because you don't remember them. Quite the opposite, in fact. You remember them so vividly that words are too inadequate to describe what happened.
My experience with ayahuasca was one of those moments.
I had arrived at the retreat carrying many years' worth of questions. Questions about life. Questions about spirituality. Questions about consciousness. Questions about why the world seemed to contain so much darkness when so many of our religious and spiritual teachings seem to point us towards love as the answer.
At the time, I didn't know what I was looking for and looking back, perhaps I wasn't even looking for anything because I was so lost. But something found me.
I have to be honest with you - the first night was rough. The experience finished somewhere around three or four o'clock in the morning, and I remember eventually lying down on an incredibly thin mattress on the floor.
I was exhausted. Hours of ‘purging’ can do that to you.
But strangely, I didn't feel as though I had received the profound revelation I had perhaps expected. If anything, I was underwhelmed by what had happened.
The next morning, after some much-needed sleep, we had some wonderful food and spent time talking about what everyone had experienced. People were sharing their stories about their journey and what had happened to them.
I sat and listened patiently, but I didn't feel as though I had too much to contribute. I remember thinking that perhaps I had somehow missed the point of it all because I had spent so much time purging.
There was a part of me that felt the experience simply wasn't for me and maybe I should just go home to save myself from any more embarrassment.
Then came the second night, and everything changed!
Before the second ceremony, I made a decision.
As I had been extremely sick the night before, I reasoned that perhaps I hadn't experienced much because I had brought the medicine back before it had time to take effect.
So this time I was determined to keep it down and see what happened.
We drank the activator first and, around half an hour later, consumed the ayahuasca itself.
The taste is difficult to describe. Perhaps imagine drinking a mixture of birch bark, soil and dried leaves. It was not pleasant. Almost immediately, I felt sick again and my head was spinning.
Several times I thought I was going to be sick, but I sat bolt upright determined to keep it down. I must have sat like that for at least an hour waiting or the nausea to pass. Eventually, it did, so I felt safe enough to lay down on my mat.
For what seemed like hours, I barely moved - I simply lay there completely still. Despite the ceremonial music in the background, I felt a sense of quiet and dare I say it, peace.
And then something started to happen. Bright, multi-coloured lines appeared before my eyes moving in different directions. As I lay there, I began to feel pressure building in my head. I felt as though my mind was quite literally being pulled out of my head.
It was a strange and unsettling feeling, so the instinct was to resist it. But then I remembered the guide telling me how important it was to surrender to the experience.
It was a little unsettling to contemplate going there – surrendering to something I had no experience of, nor any idea what might happen if I did give it all up in the moment.
The pressure continued to build in my head. I couldn't control what was happening and thinking rationally became difficult. It was a bit like being intoxicated, but felt a lot more physical – its difficult to describe accurately. One thing I realised was that I knew I couldn't fight it. I eventually had to let go.
So I did. And as I surrendered, something extraordinary happened. It felt as though my soul was released from my body.
What happened next is almost impossible to put into words. It felt as though every cell in my body was connected to every cell in the universe. There was no sense of separation whatsoever. No distance and no time. No boundary between me and everything else.
I could move, in an instant, from one side of the vast universe to the other. It wasn't a frightening experience however, it was joyous. It was peaceful. And it carried with it an overwhelming feeling of deep connection with everything outside of me connected to everything inside of me.
And somewhere within that experience came the encounter that ultimately became one of the central experiences within Love Is The New Religion. At one point, I found myself climbing a rock face. As I was climbing towards the top of a mountain, it felt hard work pulling myself upwards, trying to reach the summit.
That was, until I suddenly realised something - I didn't need to climb. I could fly! I was completely free. So I began to float and rise up towards the summit until I eventually reached the top. And there, I encountered a presence.
A deep voice. A figure that revealed itself to me as God.
Unafraid in that moment of deep peace, I remember asking God:
“Why am I down there and you're up here?”
And the answer came:
“You're not. We're one and the same.”
What happened next became one of the strangest and most profound experiences of my life. God told me he would prove the lack of separation to me. Instantly we swapped places - I became God and God became me.
Then we swapped back. He asked me if I understood. I said that I thought I did.
But I realised there is a difference between thinking you understand something and actually knowing it. So he proved it again. We swapped places for a second time before swapping back.
And at that moment, something changed inside me. At a cellular level, I felt as though I moved beyond intellectual understanding, into a place of knowing. It was a deeper recognition of something many spiritual leaders talk about. A feeling that somehow, beneath everything that appears to separate us, there is a fundamental unity. A knowing that we are part of the same whole.
The message I left with: God is within us and we are a fragment of God.
And before we go any further, I want to be really clear about what I am saying here. I am not claiming to be an enlightened master. I am not claiming that I have discovered some objective truth that everybody else must accept, or worse, adopt as their own faith.
And I certainly recognise that this experience occurred under the influence of a psychoactive substance, which makes it far easier for the skeptical to dismiss without question. Someone could quite reasonably read this account and conclude that I experienced an extraordinary hallucination and I’d be better off “not doing drugs” again in the future.
I'm completely comfortable with that because ultimately, we’re all entitled to our own interpretation of my experience. I am simply doing my best to find the words to describe what happened to me. And what happened during those fateful hours felt incredibly real to me.
Perhaps the most important thing I took from the experience was the difference between understanding something intellectually and knowing it experientially.
We can all read books about love. We can listen to people talk about spirituality. We can meditate. We can pray. We can study religious texts for our entire lives. We can intellectually understand the concept of oneness.
But there is a profound difference between understanding the words and experiencing the concept. That night, for a brief period of a few ecstatic hours, I felt as though I experienced it. The experience was not one of power. Nor was it about becoming God in some grandiose sense - it was almost the opposite. It was about dissolving the boundaries between the individual and the whole.
The ego wants to say: I am separate.
The experience said to me: We are all part of everything.
This unusual experience left me with another question - if we are all part of the same whole, why are we here as individuals?
Why would consciousness, God, or whatever word you choose to use, fragment himself into billions of apparently separate human beings, some of whom hate each other with a passion?
Perhaps one answer is experience. Maybe ‘oneness’ can only understand itself by experiencing the constant cycle of separation and unity.
Perhaps we come here precisely because this physical world, or realm as I have begun to refer to it as, gives us something that pure oneness cannot provide within its constant state of bliss, peace and tranquility – the individual experience formed through duality.
We can experience joy here. But we can also experience grief.
We can experience love. But we can also experience intense loss.
We can experience abundance. But we can also experience poverty and hardship.
We can experience friendship, family, connection and belonging. But we can also experience loneliness, rejection and separation.
There’s nothing unusual about this stance as many others have shared the same. Yet this is where taking the idea a little further becomes uncomfortable. Because if we accept, even hypothetically, the possibility that consciousness chooses to experience individuality, then perhaps we cannot simply categorise every experience as “good” or “bad”.
That stance doesn't mean suffering isn't real. Nor does it mean that terrible things don't matter. It also doesn't mean that we should tolerate cruelty or simply tell somebody who has suffered that it was somehow “meant to happen”.
I don't believe that’ the lesson. For me, the question goes much deeper. What if the purpose of this existence is not simply to avoid pain? What if we are here to experience the full spectrum of what it means to be human?
There is another idea that kept returning to me afterwards. Fear. Fear separates us. It makes us defensive and it makes us suspicious of people who are different from us.
Fear encourages us to choose sides, whilst also making us easier to manipulate. And if the opposite of fear is not simply courage, but love, then perhaps there is something much more profound happening when we choose love over fear.
There is a phrase often attributed to the Bible: “Do not be afraid.” A commonly repeated claim is that this phrase appears 365 times within the Holy book, although I have not independently verified that number.
Regardless, the main message is one which the spiritual traditions of humanity seem to return to: Don't live your life in fear. Trust. Have faith. And love. Perhaps that’s because fear is one of the greatest barriers to remembering who we really are.
When the experience eventually ended, I was left with something I hadn't expected. It was a responsibility etched into my heart.
I had gone to the retreat looking for answers. Instead, I came away with a story. More importantly, I came away with the feeling that I had something I needed to share. That was the beginning of the journey to writing Love Is The New Religion.
The book became my attempt to translate an experience that is almost impossible to describe into a story that somebody else could actually enter. I couldn't expect somebody to lie on a mat at a retreat and experience what I had experienced (nor would I want to tell them that they should).
But maybe I could tell a story that allowed them to explore some of the same questions? Questions like, who are we? Why are we here? What separates us? What unites us? And why are we so afraid?
And what might happen if we remembered that beneath all of our differences, we are not as separate as we might think?
Perhaps that’s the real message I brought back with me. Not to suggest to everyone that I had somehow become enlightened. And certainly not to suggest that I had found all the answers.
But that, for one extraordinary night, I experienced something that changed one burning question humanity has been asking since the beginning of time.
I stopped asking: “Where is God?”
And started asking: “What if God is already here — within all of us?”
