Dispatch from the Catskills: I Took Acid and Met God
My So-Called Psychedelic Jewish Homecoming
Hey everyone,
Shana tova! In honor of the rapture/Rosh Hashanah, I decided to share a post-trip download on my Labor Day weekend in the Catskills where I took LSD and saw synthetic God.
Speaking of, content warning: I talk about God and drugs in this newsletter. Like, a lot. I use the word “God” a minimum of 70 times. Consider this the only time I will ever get fanatical about God (but through the lens as an eccentric travel writer reporting back after a drug-induced spiritual trip). Anyway, if God isn’t your cup of tea or you’re on not-so-good terms with God right now (no contact even!), consider this newsletter one to skip! But aren’t you even just a little curious what God looks like?
Legal disclaimer: I also need to underscore that nothing in here is a professional recommendation—medically or otherwise. I am not a doctor. I am just a woman who took LSD (and saw God). Seek a professional before attempting stunts at home; existential objects are closer than they appear.
On a final note, I want to thank my retreat host Simone Ver Eecke of Thyme Space. She is a brilliant kitchen witch with a focus on food and nutrition as intentional medicine and healing, and was the Event Manager for the Julia Child Foundation’s 10-Year Anniversary Award Series. I highly recommend booking with her! (Also, she did not provide the acid FYI).
People are super touchy about God. And for good reason: Blood has been shed and people oppressed in God’s name century after century throughout history. People do fucked up shit ALL THE TIME in the name of God because God is scary and the scary people are made in God’s image, too. Religious fanaticism and drug-induced spirituality both carry baggage, and because of all this, talking about God can feel reckless. But being spiritual and being religious don’t always overlap and maybe that’s why I started wondering about alternate paths—like psychedelic Judaism.
Long story short: I know what I saw, and I saw God when I did LSD.
It wasn’t my first time doing LSD, but it was my first time finding God with it. It happened over Labor Day. As someone who was a child of working age reared in a post-Upton Sinclair, pre-apocalyptic unionized Chicago, Labor Day has become a spiritual American holiday for me to celebrate being completely unlabored and there was no better place to stick it to the man than touching grass in a mostly Wi-Fi-disabled environment on psychedelic drugs while trying to reconnect with meaning.
After a summer spent sick in July followed by a sprained ankle in August, by September I was overextended and mentally wrecked from a combination of FOMO, the current distress of existing on this planet, and the daily psychic assault of verbal and emotional abuse from strangers on the internet. With no relief in sight, the question kept coming up: what am I even fighting for, if not the will to live another day? Feeling directionless and unmotivated—symptoms that I now recognize as spiritual depletion—I was in need of some serious healing.
So, when I was invited last-minute to a femme-centered retreat in the Catskills for creative healers, I couldn’t have been more grateful to get the fuck out of Dodge and try to recharge my batteries. The invitation seemed both overdue and yet cosmically on time, as I was at my wits’ end and in existential turmoil. After all, how can I advise other people to go find a good time or live well when I feel so unhealed?
Obviously, other people working in creative healing spaces are feeling similarly strained to warrant such a gathering, and the whole experience of bonding with other women over a long weekend was so nourishing in ways I never could have imagined.
What I really wanted was permission to be completely fucking unlabored and self-absorbed. To reclaim my mental health and existential drive. That meant being disconnected from a bunch of bullshit and negative people making me want to die every day and instead rolling in a field, swimming in a pond, making watercolors of the mountains, and, unplanned, doing drugs that overpowered me with revelations of God.
This particular drug wasn’t part of the program, but came as a chance offering from a Burner with a penchant for pharmaceuticals and collective economic empowerment for women. Our Venn diagrams intersected on the chemical spectrum and I was given a golden ticket to embrace my spirituality and achieve enlightenment for a few hours as a reminder of why life is a gift. And it was there, under the clearest skies illuminating a glimpse of the limitless cosmos framed by the shadowy landscape of the Catskills mountains, that I bore witness to God.
I think I had been looking for God for a while but didn’t realize it. After all, I had been turned off by so many people telling me for years how and where to find God, what God looks like, what God wants for me, how I should talk about or spell God’s name—with a hyphen and a lowercase g, or God with a capital G, or by any other name. God can tell me Itself, can’t it?
Many feminists want to believe that God is a woman; others will argue God is trans. Mostly, that’s reclaiming God from patriarchy — or reasserting self-love after years of being labeled abominations. After witnessing God, I really don’t feel comfortable using pronouns to describe God at all because I am proud to announce that God is actually a giant pulsating tree organism thing with a million blinking eyes, so Its gender is kind of irrelevant.
I don’t think God cares how I spell Its name — but I do need to capitalize it because after all, God is the ruler of the universe: always there, always watching, but as a gigantic swirling pulsating tree organism thing with a billion eyes. It was everything: beautiful, terrifying, beyond human comprehension. I couldn’t look away then and I can’t stop thinking about it now.
The synthetic tree organism God deity is kind of monotheistic but also polytheistic because it’s a giant pulsating tree organism thing with a million blinking eyes blanketing the planet with power that transcends anything we could imagine. It is one, but made of many, in infinity.
Some might think that’s funny, I think, because they are not in touch with God. Or rather, they expect God to be something and are going to be very disappointed if God doesn’t show up the way they want. If God made us in Its image, am I just another one of the million eyeballs of the pulsating fractal tree organism thing?
I’ll tell you who God doesn’t look like: that image of Jesus plastered on the wall. I honestly blame Western religion for trying to make me believe that God is a person rather than a metaphor. There’s an arboreal octopus thing going on with God—which makes sense because I respect octopuses a lot and think they may be holy, particularly after watching all those escape videos where they squeeze through tiny holes and move between land and water. Besides, Octopuses are brilliant supernatural creatures that are probably messengers of God. (On that note, I couldn’t help but wonder if H.P. Lovecraft saw God, too, because there was something a little Cthulhu-esque about my pulsating fractal tree organism God encounter, but maybe a different kind of neutral-scary that was more beautiful and all-encompassing).
Judaism doesn’t tell you what God looks like, but I think references to “Lord our God, King of the universe” and the overall deference of male worship was a huge turnoff for me that I couldn’t really envision this higher power. Because Jews are a minority that do not proselytize, I’ve mostly heard the unsolicited word of God via Christians, who often will argue over whether Jesus had blond hair and blue eyes or was a Black man or a Palestinian, and expect me to think I’m going to be saved by this son of God as if I could ever rely on a man to show up for literally anything, including properly installing an air conditioner in my New York City apartment when being paid for it.
If anything, I was saved by morose Russian literature preparing me with a lifetime of disappointment with a certain sense of humor about it. Even then, those books acknowledged the confounding presence of God — even if 9 out of 10 times it was through the lens of Christianity, too.
At the same time, now that I know that God is a gigantic pulsating tree organism covered with billions of blinking eyes, technically, Jesus looks like God; we’re all made in the image of the gigantic pulsating tree organism. Honestly, this was the most enlightening revelation I’ve ever had about God, providing instant clarity about tree of life metaphors, a deeper understanding of why you shouldn’t stare at the sky, why head coverings are considered holy, why God is always watching, and, supporting my irrational rationale about why I can’t eat octopus anymore. I don’t think God cares that I’m neurotic.
Finding God mostly made me accept myself as I am. It made me grateful for the body I was born in and the complicated life I’ve led—for better or worse. Witnessing God renewed my sense of existentialism and ironically gave me more empathy towards religious people, even when they’re hateful adversaries acting out of ignorance. What a miserable waste of existence.
This isn’t a call to religion or prophecy, but an argument for taking a step back and asking yourself what exactly you’re fighting for if not faith in the human experience. In general, I’ve found that forgiveness is a real art that rewards the individual who can let go of the anger that eats them up inside and hurts long after whatever caused it. Seeing God made everything else feel so small and renewed my sense of gratitude for life.
God is just up there, looking down on all of us and watching us, but in this sort of non-interventionist yet deeply judgmental parental style of omnipresence rooted in extreme chaos. I fear God more than my parents. Like them, I have had an equally fair-weather relationship with few clear answers on an independent journey in accepting, forgiving, and learning to love anyway.
Regarding the drugs, doing LSD doesn’t guarantee bearing witness to God. The other person I did LSD with—the Burner who generously offered a tab as a kindness—did not find God and mostly found my report back kind of amusing but a little heavy with underlying trepidation and casual rationalizing citations from Johns Hopkins reports.
This is the same reception one might receive from those who consider themselves sane and “normal” because they’ve convinced themselves that being on pharmaceuticals and going to university is the key to social enlightenment—even if most of these people still look a little dead behind the eyes. I’m not arguing that medicine is bad—far from it. Some of these drugs are essential, even. But drugs aren’t a magic eraser for a life’s work, and they certainly don’t do the cleaning for you. I also suspect many drugs might tone down these experiences, which is why I have never done ayahuasca—a much more powerful psychedelic taken with intention and, usually by invitation, as part of spiritual ceremony.
I can’t stop thinking about my experience, and every time I do, I feel overcome with emotion. If you’ve been abused in the name of God, I know why you won’t trust this. History has plenty of atrocities committed under religious banners. Still, my experience left me with a complicated gratitude that felt worth naming.
From my own experience, finding God was a great reminder that we’re so lucky to be here and alive, even with all the messiness of the human experience that can feel so heavy, pointless, and helpless. For me, spiritual fulfillment looked like gratitude: an uneasy, humble recognition that being alive is a gift, even when nothing is certain.
Being here is a choice but it’s also a privilege, which includes the privilege of uncertainty and being terrified by what happens after death. If your suffering is structural or imposed, I can’t pretend prayer is a fix. But if your suffering is rooted in ego, small practices like gratitude or making amends can help.
Spiritual fulfillment renews your sense of gratitude, your capacity for forgiveness, your resolve to try. It made me accept myself more—despite years of outside voices telling me I was “fucked up” or “embarrassing.” God didn’t say those things; people did.
Many leftists are anti-God and believe this makes them more socially evolved and accepting. I’ve noticed that some progressives dismiss God-experiences as chemical hallucination, and maybe they’re right sometimes. But dismissing every outlier robs us of noticing how these moments can shift people’s lives.
Even after witnessing God, I still experience sadness, the perils of my own ego, and the depth of human emotion. That said, I’ll admit that most of my fear of looking for, accepting, or identifying with God was rooted in fear of social ridicule from secular friends who believe God is dead or irrelevant. The key for me is keeping an open mind and heart for whatever comes next.
Recent political trauma—especially around Israel—has made this conversation harder; I’ve had to explain my ethnoreligious identity in ways I never wanted to. (Though, this dilemma of struggling with God feels inherently Jewish). I’ve also been hesitant to share my half-formed views, worried they’d be judged or taken as representative of other Jews—but in the end, I don’t owe anyone my spiritual proof.
Everyone should find something that cracks them open; I found God with the help of LSD. God is greater than anything I could have ever imagined and renewed my gratitude for all our land, sky, and water. I wish we had abundance for all. That said, God’s presence doesn’t absolve us from environmental responsibility—the ash trees dying in the Catskills, climate change, and social unification are on us.
“Finding God” doesn’t necessarily restore reputational damage or absolve one of the problems they’ve created in their own life, even if it saves them from themselves to live another day (preferably a better one if they were enlightened).
Anyway, psychedelics are cool because they change your mind—but only if you want to change it. They allow you to be more open-minded, humble, and imaginative—but only if used responsibly. They’re not a daily habit. Integration work matters: therapy, rest, community—those are the things that translate a single trip into long-term change. I didn’t set to find God on drugs, but I’m so glad I did.
The worst part about achieving enlightenment over Labor Day weekend is that come Tuesday, you still have half-a-week to deal with—and all of it is stuff you just don’t care about it. By Tuesday, the inbox and chores return because life still needs to be lived; even the mundane moments. You can have my productivity; you can’t have my soul. I want to live another day and now I have more patience to try.
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Lucky.