My confession
> A method of purification: to pray to God, not only in secret as far as men are concerned, but with the thought that God does not exist.
I admit it, I am an atheist. I find myself constantly without God, and it is a marvel to me that so many people are with Him—seemingly without breaking a sweat. The closest I’ve come has been face pressed to the floor with tears in my eyes and a chest full of sorrow. Even then I wouldn’t be confident in saying that I was with Him per se. The hadith goes, if I remember correctly, “Pray as if you saw God, because even you don’t see Him, He sees you.” This is a wonderful comfort to me and seems to overcome many difficulties, but I am left feeling foolish since I still have several questions. I am not sure, for instance, what it is to pray as if I saw God—I have never seen him, and so have no idea what that would be like.
Still I pray—and would you look at that, it’s time for Isha.
Face pressed to the floor, there I felt Him—at least in some sense, in the sense that “wherever you turn, there is the face of God.” In this sense, then I have just pressed my face against His. I have a sat a while afterwards and stared at Him in the candle, have sought Him in the egg left by its flame. I am not sure whether this succeeded, though I feel myself somewhat calmer than I was prior. Of course, was I communing or merely meditating? I am never sure whether to ask, or what; or whether to simply bare my heart in silence. I am not even sure what this would mean, though it certainly sounds very beautiful. The poetry of religion seems to me a sure testament, and yet I would never expect to find Him in mere words—or rather, no more or less than anywhere else.
I have even sought Him in psychedelics, from mushrooms and LSD to San Pedro and DMT. The last of these was most recent, and in this experience—then I was only presented with a fractal landscape in which stood an alien women with hands outstretched beckoning me. Soon concluding that this was not God, was more likely Satan or some manifestation of the nafs; then I felt myself close off to this woman’s seduction; at which, as if to confirm my suspicions, her hands quickly turned to tendrils that clawed through the air as if to get inside of me. When her power waned, my first thought was “there is no god but God”—at which I immediately grabbed a handful of soil, a blind man desperately feeling for His face.