It took me quite a few years to get it. Thirty of them, to be more precise. The Cosmic Joke; and just because I’ve laughed myself to tears at the punchline, doesn’t mean that there aren’t still plenty of moments — a majority of them, even — where the joke falls flat, the timing is off, it seems almost vulgar in the (HA!) face of the many existential threats (HA HA!) that we’re facing as a species. Even while writing, though, I can’t help but smile at the silliness — the absurdness — of it all. What threats? Global warming? Ha. Cancer? Ha, ha. Discomfort, fear, of being small, insignificant, irrelevant? Stop it. You’re killing me.

My tutelage in the numinous began with LSD: As I imagine it goes for many of us who are less spiritually inclined, who perhaps, like me, were disillusioned by institutionalized religion — that ultraviolet black bulb that so seductively captivates the moth as he flutters, haltingly, towards the light — and, having been lied to about God, thought we could wash our hands of brimstone and teeth-gnashing, of original Sin, of Election, of sola scriptura and the Virgin Birth. I was only six years old when I accepted Christ as my personal Lord & Saviour, under my father’s gentle guidance, between my second and third servings of Hamburger Helper.

As a teenager, I denied God, denied Christ. I became an atheist, or at least my understanding of what an atheist was. In truth I suspect I had less of an understanding of atheism than my six year-old self had had of the saving grace of the lamb of God. Even my denial, though, provoked a fear in me that precluded true atheism. I was no Richard Dawkins; I was Peter warming myself by the fire. “I don’t know the man!”, and the cock crowed. To my credit, I denied through the fear that had been programmed into me by the church; when Christ looked at Peter with what I imagine as a sort of wounded reproach, the scriptures say he wept bitterly. I glared back, trying to look mean, before losing my nerve and looking away. He started it.

Shooting my first speedball felt divine, but I wasn’t God. I felt like a god. I felt god-like. There was no awe to it, no mystery. There could be no answers from it, because it asked no questions. Only during some close brushes with death and overdose — as the taste of cocaine filled my mouth, as the scathing, devastating ecstasy of it rendered me near-incapacitated — did I even stop to wonder: do I smell wax and feathers burning? Have I flown too close to the sun? Once, after spending most of the previous day and night awake, shooting dope and blow, I overdid it in the bathroom of my shared apartment. In the shower, I expected to die. And into his arms, I commend my spirit! Better safe than sorry. There’s something about an atheist and a foxhole. Heroin and cocaine were the opposite of psychedelic; instead of falling to my knees in awe of the sacred holiness of life, of the moment, they left me rolling my eyes, yawning at eternity.

My addictions to heroin and cocaine led me back to the search for God; not through the official, canonized Christian church, but in its culty little brother, Alcoholics Anonymous. Welcome. You are powerless (for apart from Me you can do nothing). Come to Believe, and turn your Will and your Life over to God, as you understand Him. As I understand Him, with a capital “H”? What a tiny God! What a limited understanding! Still, though. We have to start somewhere. So God become a God of my (mis)understanding, a personal God who would listen to my prayers, who would deliver me from evil and not into temptation. Like so many recovering addicts in twelve-step programs, I was guilty of misunderstanding correlation with causality; I was praying to stay sober and — praise Jesus! — it seemed to be working!

Drat! Imagine my frustration when my personal God didn’t remove my cravings for two of the most addictive substances known to the human race. Again it is written, thou shalt not test the LORD thy God, which is a pretty lucky thing for Him. If it had been a test, I would have had to scribble a big red “N.P.” by God’s name. If God had been testing me, on the other hand, I would probably have wound up as a pillar of salt. So at the end of the experiment, I deduced that perhaps my Higher Power was little more than an imaginary friend; if he was in any sense corporeal, he was on a long-term hiatus.

In Hinduism the ashramas are the four “stages” of life — brahmacharya, a kind of long childhood where we learn dharma (morals and duty), grihastha, when we grow up and start families, nurture careers, and serve our communities (artha), then retire to the vanaprastha, where we are free to withdraw from our societal responsibilities, and to finally start thinking about God. The focus of life shifts, from dharma and artha, to moksha: liberation. Finally, after a lifetime of doing one’s duty, we are released to reassess, to debrief, to ask questions.

The fourth and final ashrama is called sannyasa. In this phase we have achieved a kind of enlightenment. We have attained a deeper understanding of God, of the brahman and the atman, the ultimate reality and its existence in each of us. Moksha, again: release, emancipation, freedom from the bondage of self. Aldous Huxley called LSD the “moksha medicine”, because of its remarkable ability to do precisely that: to unshackle us from the disenfranchising fetters of the ego.

Six-hundred micrograms, a little over half of a thousandth of a gram of the medicine is all it took. Some might call it cheating, to bypass a lifetime of seeking and devotion and jump straight to it — to being not one among many, but being only One. My wife worried about me in my communion: Are you alright? she asked. I don’t want to come back, I told her, not knowing what it was that I didn’t want to come back to, or where I wanted to stay.

I don’t want to come back. What do you mean, you don’t want to come back? Was I depressed? Under the magic of the moksha, were my inhibitions so lowered that I was letting slip some suicidal ideation? I don’t want to come back. Like the sanyassin, I had no desire to don my mask again, to become a self, with all the accompanying trappings.

I did come back; the acid trip emulates the four ashramas, a lifetime, in a little under half of a day. The earth rotates once on its axis, and we live it: the bliss of youth, seeing the world through the eyes of a child. The swollen blossom of the poppy swaying in fractured sunlight and the cumulus drifting through the atmosphere like a lazy river barge; everything is new under the sun.

The moksha medicine — a few grains of the sands of time — and suddenly the mask is gone, the persona cast aside, the veil parted. The first time is strange and uncanny. All is illuminated: I see links of chain in the flickering firelight, smell the dankness of rotting cave. The shadows I have named call out to me. They are tired of dancing. The horrifying song of God is crooned into my ears, a whisper that scorches and a howl that rattles my being.

The song is a new testament of an old commandment: Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God. The first verse is ten millennia of brutal, thrashing chaos, singing death, famine, and fear. The melody is wailed by starving infants through shattered teeth, and after a measure the bass! — the thundering hooves of every war horse that ever was and their every whinnied terror. To be so afraid of a man that you spill his blood; it is a sinister music, indeed.

A harmony: the keening of their mothers, the simultaneous pleading and rebuking of the gods, their vocal cords shuddering a magnificent timbre under the sawing bow of grief. The percussion of the masters’ whips on the backs of slaves is as jarring and regular as a metronome. An eternity of it before the mothers lungs fill with salt and they drown in their own tears. The dove brings an olive branch but the savior brings a sword. The song crescendos: a golden calf brays like a mule and the nucleus of an atom is severed. A flash of light like a star dying and the shadows on the limestone walls of the cave contort like marionettes, but the apparition is not its silhouette.

The fire is extinguished and the phantoms wink into darkness. The silence is light-years, the stillness is the grave. The fallacy of understanding is broken like a covenant — like the plasma of dying flame, the vanity of sin flickers and ceases in the vacuum of utter being.

Moksha! Did Eve’s apple taste half so sweet? When Adam supped on the knowledge of good and evil, did he hear the tick, tick, tick of the clock? Because if there was an Eden, surely it must have been this: the eternal moment, infinite presence, the instant of creation and conception which was not witnessed but was experienced, and as quickly forgotten. To be banished from the garden to a tense: the present perfect is the antithesis of the perfect present.

Oh, moksha! Oh, moment! Free me from the bondage of self, and burn it as an offering to a deeper understanding!

The first couple of trips seemed self-encompassing. They were experiences in and of themselves, too bizarre and utterly alien to represent meaning in my day-to-day, consensus reality. I tripped; it was amazing. Moksha. One day I took a little more. I was rebuked — you want to experience the moment, do you? the medicine seemed to say. You will experience it, then. Taste, says the serpent. You will not surely die.

Feel the pain in your belly as it struggles to turn death into life. I will wring you out like a sponge. If existence is a series of undulations, of contractions and compressions followed by openings and lengthenings — if it is inhalations and exhalations — then you will experience the constriction as it is, not as your mind and body allow it to seem in order that you might retain some semblance of sanity, that you might not go mad. Your mouth will open and close like a fish on the riverbank. You will flail and struggle, then your gills will drown you in air.

The madness came like suffering: hold on to who you are, it whispered, the implication of a sly smirk. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Holding on hurt. I gritted my teeth, could have ground pearls into dust. My abdomen caught but did not release. Cold sweat enveloped me like a shroud. Hold on to your hurt. I gripped with my puny hands a hiltless blade. Stay back. I can kill you with this.

Holding on hurt; holding on to my hurt hurt worse. I wept with shame, I thought. I wept with grief for this suffering. Slowly, though, imperceptibly — an eternity, a moment — I passed it like a kidney stone, passed myself like a camel through the eye of a needle, a baby birthed, my essence distilled through the pit of a clenched jaw. I was a droplet of water. This is how I died: and then I wept not for the suffering of being, but the ecstasy of union, the grace of oneness with God, who is all things, who is nothing, who is the mirage.

The trip ended, but instead of being thrust back into my body I was placed there, gently. My bones were caressed before they straightened; my organs tenderly adjusted before flesh was zipped back up around them. I was installed back onto a clean disk. Here are your eyes, so see. See, feel, hear, smell, taste, and think. Be. Don’t be afraid that the world is no longer how it seemed. It is the illusion; it is maya. Wear your mask, if you must, but do not mistake it for your face. Act your part, as you should, but do not forget that it is play.

As the music of my consciousness began to quiet, I went outside, into the parking lot outside of my apartment. A floodlight shone on the cracked concrete. In its beams swirled a hundred humble lives, gnats and moths worshipping in the only way they knew, slamming themselves against the glass, some achieving their own moksha, which seemed somehow truer than mine.

On the ground, from a crack, sprang a tiny weed, its limbs unfurling tentatively over pavement. It, too, grew towards the light.