Preface To Visions: The Ugly Truth

Despite what I might say on my show tomorrow - & who knows what I will say? - I don't really believe people have visions.

Wait.  I need to qualify.  I believe people have visions.  I believe that they believe that they see things that aren't there which tell them things that they believe.  This is one of the definitions of vision: "The mystical experience of seeing something that is not in fact present to the eye or is supernatural."*

As I've probably said before, I don't have any supernatural beliefs.  But I do believe that people can hallucinate - I've done so myself - & yet, I don't believe there is much difference between a hallucination & a vision.  Ultimately, a vision is a hallucination one believes is real.

This is anecdotal & so has no real scientific backup, but I'll tell this story about the first time I did acid:

Before one takes acid, if one consults with people who've done acid, one gets an abundance of information.  How one will feel, what one will see, the things one will experience, etc.  One of my friends, a colleague at work named Eric, told me that the first time he tripped, he felt connected to everything through "the divine."  Eric was raised as a Christian & abandoned his religiousness in his teen years for a kind of hippie-like sense of a god of love surrounding & comforting all.

But you see, I was raised with no religion at all.  At an early age, I came to the conclusion that religions in general weren't much different from one another, so it seemed quite odd to me that one might pick one over another - the stories of the Greek myths, in my mind, seemed much more satisfying than the heroics of the Old Testament, but it didn't mean one was more true than another.

Indeed, as a child of the 1970s, the mystical coolness of The Force in the Star Wars movies seemed much more preferable than anything being espoused by adults or kids around me.  (I am glad that Grand Master Lucas chose to ruin it with midichlorians when I was an adult & couldn't give a fuck.)

The point is, without any religious indoctrination, my brain was free to explore the things that made up my belief system, & so my first acid trip was (unsurprisingly) untainted by anything supernatural.  I knew that everything happening to me was biological, chemical, & that there wasn't an "unseen world" that acid would lead me to explore.  & by the way, this was supported by future trips.  In all my experiences with acid, I never saw god, angels, devils, demons, or any of those things.  I think this was because I didn't believe they existed.

Does this mean the show about "visions" will be some kind of skeptic killjoy?  Nah.  That wouldn't be any fun, now, would it?

* Definition from the Free Dictionary.