consciousness and communication and information outside the ordinary
senses chance my religion. Since the age of 11 I'd been an atheist but I
was born into a traditional Asian family with strong cultural ties and
who lived a life with lots of religion in. I'd grown more steady in my
faith in the non-existence of god however I continued to read religious
texts because I enjoyed the stories and found more wisdom and ways to
help understand life than I got from science.
When I was thrown out of home during my GCSEs I ended up in a children's
home somewhere in Harlesdan. One night one of the people there chatted
to me to see how I was doing. He talked to me about god and he was
clearly a religious man. I explained my position: god didn't exist. He
explained that I could talk to god. It's the voice in my head. I didn't
understand what that meant.
I went through some unusual experiences before and after I was first
hospitalised. I heard the voice of god through a drum and bass tune.
Apparently I was on a mission, back then, and I flirted with the idea of
the existence of god during my delusion but I came out of it fairly quickly.
It was coming up to my last hospitalisation when I was coming off lots
of medication and starting to re-enter social life again (rather than
being alone in a room playing Sudoku) that I started to feel the
presence of another. I didn't call it "god" nor did I make the link till
a while later. I just started to become aware of another force or
entity, something that didn't fit with scientific causality, that was
influencing events and actions.
As the psychosis or 'delusion' escalated the profoundness of the belief
in this entity or other power (?higher power?) became intense and
overpowered years of rational book-learning-based belief. I didn't
ascribe the force or entity to any religious intepretation. In fact
there were times I experienced the feeling of control as coming from
people around me. I went through the usual suspects - secret government
or organisations, alien or non-human manipulation. These are how sane
minds attempt to rationalise and understand the experience when there
senses tell them something different to pre-psychosis days. This may be
described in other language as "startling phase".
I changed my religion to an antitheist: a person who knows that god
exists and knows why people, for thousands of years, have thought that
god or spirits or whatever existed, and hates it. It extended to a whole
"cult of one" system of beliefs for a while.
In all fairness the entity is both good and bad. If it is truly what
people call god then it is responsible for all the good that happens and
all the bad. Religions can often ascribe the good to god and the bad to
something else, but that is not true.
This doesn't make me very popular. The theists hate me because I hate
god. The atheists hate me because I used to be an atheist but believe in
god. The agnostics hate me because I tell them they have no faith. C'est
la vie.
My entity is still with me. We have had a prolonged time of peace but I
feel it's influence. Now I wonder if it is all just a delusion and all
just some biochemical abnormality. I remember what my senses told me and
I have an indelible reminder of the pain of the transition. If it is
just my unconsciousness that I was fighting then I am a fool, but the
experience was so real that it makes me doubt if there is any difference
between the unconscious and the god that people speak of, i.e. is the
unconscious the voice of god or is the voice of god the unconsciousness
speaking.
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