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Introduction
From my mid teens onwards, I was into anarchism and hardcore punk, which morphed into cannabis smoking, psychedelics, the jungle and festival scenes, and superficially, the occult via a few Chaos Magician friends of mine including the author Nicholas Hall, and some new agers and Wiccans I met briefly. I started developing a strong interest in psychology from the age of 19 or so. After 10 years of psychological addiction to cannabis, and several failed attempts at stopping for more than a month or two at a time, I finally quit in 1995 when I became an evangelical Christian. Below I will try to summarise my experience with Christianity and why I moved away from it after 17 years, more into philosophy.
Exposure to Christianity
I had been exposed to evangelical Christianity a few times between the ages of 20 and 25. The first time in 1991 I was a student and a Christian evangelist randomly approached me outside the student union building and talked his way into scheduling a date to visit me at my halls of residence which I agreed to mainly because of assertiveness issues and had completely forgotten about it. I was listening to some Black Flag and other punk bands in my room with a friend of a friend and we were dividing up some weed on my desk and I heard this knock at the door and the Christian guy was there and I had a WTF moment and remembered and invited him in and my friend made his excuses and left and the Christian had a funny shocked expression on his face when he saw all the weed. After 30 minutes of being extremely bored, he left.
I had previously been living above a Rastafarian Jamaican family in 1993 and used to visit them to hang out and buy and smoke Sensei, so it is possible that they had some sort of theistic influence.
I knew a 16 year old Christian girl at work at my temp job in 1994 who was on work experience. I didn't take her very seriously but she told me some stories about her Church, Holy Trinity Brompton, in London, and how people there would make animal noises during the services, and I thought it sounded amusing so I said I would go along. I elected to go on an Alpha Course at that church rather than just go to a service, on her recommendation, and went along expecting to be entertained in an ironic way, but I really enjoyed it, even though I didn't literally believe in what was said. Everyone else there was a few years younger than me. There was something attractive about it although I felt extremely uncomfortable when there was a group prayer and I was expected to ask for something in the prayer and I asked for 'guidance'. I got on well with one of the girls there. Around this time I would lie awake at night debating about whether God existed or not and it was driving me crazy, and it was right before the Alpha weekend which was from what I understood a full pressure environment (even more pressure than the course) so I decided to quit the course half way through.
Over the rest of 1994 and 1995 I drifted away from any interest in Christianity, quite the opposite, I was in a cultish martial arts school which emphasised bullying and strength, and felt trapped in that environment, and was listening heavily to Rollins era Black Flag and other LA hardcore punk bands, and constant Jungle, had been reading Henry Rollins' Get In the Van book and had gained an unhealthy glee from it all, which gave me an adrenaline buzz. I was under constant adrenaline with the martial arts school too, and felt that when I instructed students I wanted to 'destroy' them. My brother at the time was loosely Christian inspired by my old Jamaican neighbours and I used to talk to him about him and try to destroy his belief in weakness and one time when arguing about it on the phone with him I felt very strange and disembodied that I was momentarily hovering above myself, it felt good and empowering but very weird.
Conversion To Christianity
In the end of 1995 I went to speak to my Christian neighbour in the ground floor flat of my building, to give her a women's self defence class leaflet from the martial arts school I was attending, which I was told to do, and was sure it would be received well. We had never spoken much at all prior and I had no idea she was religious, I had assumed she was a yuppie. She first gave me a lecture on why it was Satanic, which I thought was a ridiculous thing to say, and then when we were debating it, she invted me in to continue the discussion, and went into a long monologue about Christianity. I was initially totally uninterested in what she was saying, but oddly became increasingly unable to comprehend anything she was saying, until I literally couldn't understand a single sentence. I could hear the individual words but something in my head was stopping me being able to connect them into sentences so I could barely understand anything. At the same time, the walls started vibrating and moving around and her face was changing shape, expanding into grotesque shapes.
I thought this was an interesting experience and that I'd just sit there and soak it up and see what happened next. She sensed something wasn't quite right as I looked perplexed and just carried on with her monologue. I then felt an overwhelming urge to run away and get as far away from the woman as possible, but I resisted it and just sat there. All of a sudden these psychotic-type symptoms disappeared and I felt a sense of mental clarity return and a feeling of a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders. I told my neighbour about all of this and she was very excited. So she put the question to me whether I wanted to become a Christian or not, and I thought let's try it. Whether or not I believed it intellectually, I cannot say, but it felt like I needed to do it on an emotional level. She was however not impressed at all that I chose not to kneel down but instead said I'd just continue to sit on the chair whilst we do it, implying I had an attitude. She also gave me grief about still saying I was going to continue to use Chinese medicine for my poor health at the time.
Life as a Christian
I had been unable to connect with certain sides of my psyche, especially the more emotional sides previously, except when I stopped smoking cannabis, and becoming a Christian was a way to reconnect with that side and to have the necessary leverage to stop drinking and smoking cannabis. In hindsight I think it was a step sideways, reconnecting with some parts of oneself but suppressing others, but a welcome change nonetheless as I lacked the tools to change from where I was.
I felt like I was relearning the whole purpose of life. After carrying on smoking weed and listening to reggae for a week or two, trying to enjoy the best of both worlds, I gave up smoking so was effectively straight edge for a number of years afterwards, and thought it probably a good idea to start meeting other Christians and going to church, and after talking to my neighbour briefly about it - she went to Kensington Temple - much to her dismay I said I was going to try going back to Holy Trinity Brompton again which she thought was too middle classed.
So I started going back to Holy Trinity Brompton and joined a home group where I got along with everyone quite well. I felt slightly uncomfortable at times, especially during prayer, and was never speaking in tongues like everyone else. I was always trying to do the perfect Christian and felt extremely insecure about it. The members of the group stated on multiple occasions that our group was being attacked by Satan. I always felt that I had to keep conditioning myself to 'top up' my faith or it would trickle away. I kept it quiet from my martial arts friends, and dropped my previous social circle of stoner friends without telling them what was going on as I didn't have the confidence. I felt like I was living a double life and I had an awkward moment when bumping into my Christian friends on the tube whilst with my martial arts friends. I was unable to evangelise with the rest of my home group on the street as I was too embarrassed to profess my faith to people.
I went to see Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames, a play, at the Kensington Temple, on recommendation from my neighbour, which I took a quasi-Catholic quasi-new ager friend to see, and we were both rather appalled that it was a cynical and sensationalist attempt to scare children and convert them to Christianity, which it seemed very successful at doing.
I attended another Alpha course at the same church in 1996, and got along with everyone quite well, although somehow it felt a little underwhelming compared with the previous time, and I didn't attend the Alpha weekend, as I had scheduled a week's work experience with my old Chaos Magician friend who was a tree surgeon in Somerset. I knew it was going to be challenging. I got there feeling exhausted, discovering he not only had pets but his cat and had a dozen kittens, and I was allergic, and then they were immediately smoking hash after my arrival, and I just thought I don't think I can handle this so I just started smoking with them. We had a great week overall and plenty of lad's banter, mocking each other, a little sparring, climbing trees, trying out his chainsaw and briefly smashing up his old car. We went to visit a few stone circles and unknown to them I would go around looking at any signs of magic having been performed and try to destroy them. I would mention seeing something and we would both slag it off, his opinion being that they were idiots or posers but me not sharing my reasons. A few times I felt an unpleasant icy chill going up my arm when I touched the purple ritual items in question.
Unknown to me, the living room I was sleeping in was his ritual room, and had these strange dreams every night that he or another person were talking me out of my religious faith. I also could hardly sleep because of the kittens madly scurrying around all throughout the night and felt exhaused and emotionally battered. So I spent the rest of the week sleeping in a tent in his allotment. I returned to London again and did not smoke any more hash and was quite relieved although I became extremely sick afterwards with a blood infection and when I went to visit my parents as I was so ill, to get some TLC, my brother practically threw me out of the house as he said I had some spiritual entity or energy attached to me and couldn't handle it at all. He was extremely spiritually sensitive at the time and unable to tolerate very much of anything.
I started attending the home group led by the Alpha course leader, although the vibe wasn't the same as the previous group and it felt slightly disappointing somehow, perhaps as they were more conservative in their faith and were generally slightly older.
I fairly quickly synthesised my ideas and rudimentary understanding of NLP and psychology with my own Christian faith. I always felt an outsider in the various congregations I joined since moving out of London, finding it hard to relate to them, and never stuck around for very long in each one. After fusing my newfound interest in career, work, fitness and extreme sports with religion, I found it increasingly hard to relate to Christians I spoke with, although I couldn't relate to any of the people I met in work or social circles either, nor the old drug taking crowd. I felt like I was doing all the hard work of being a Christian but without enjoying any of the fruits.
In 1997 I decided to go contact my old neighbour's church The Kensington Temple, as I felt slighty insecure about my faith and thought maybe there was some residual spiritual baggage from when I was hanging around with my occultist friends, having slept a few nights in this one friend's ritual rooom, and visiting stone circles etc. So I arranged an appointment to see their resident 'exorcist' and I was expecting something profound to occur but was rather disappointed when the first thing we did was argue about martial arts and Chinese medicine, which he said I had to give up or it wouldn't do any good. I said I would consider it seriously and he said a prayer or two for me and touched mmy head a few times and sent me on my way, feeling rather underwhelmed.
I felt the need to change and control the world around me and took it personally when the world around me did not adopt my same values. I felt judgemental and narcissistic. I cannot really say that I felt truly happy as a Christian as it caused as many problems as it solved, and it didn't really address some of my underlying personality flaws, such as narcissism, OCD, gullibility and paranoia. In a sense it buried them further or even gave them spiritual and righteous justification.
Christian Conspiracy Theorist
I became heavily emersed in the Christian conspiracy internet scene from 2004 to 2008, after my father introduced me and my brother to 'the Illuminati' and 911 theories, which took my narcissism and paranoia to new heights, and even then I found it hard to totally relate to anyone else in the scene, who were either too religious or I just didn't agree with their personal interpretations. After that, I started engaging in religious and esoteric studies, partly prompted by a general interest in creating a web site to document what I was learning about Christianity and Gnosticism. This gradually changed my relationship with and view of God for the better I believed. Then when introduced to LHP Gnosticism by a Myspace friend of mine from a health group, who had formerly been a Wiccan, who I only befriended to influence her towards Christianity initially.
Delusional Disorder
I developed an interest in holistic health and started using a pendulum in 2012. Narcissism, OCD and gullibility encouraged me to believe whatever information I 'found' using the pendulum, and reinforcing it, whereupon my whole reality spiralled out of control and went psychotic for 3 months. The delusional disorder took on conspiratorial, religious and esoteric themes, and increasingly occult themes, and after 2 months of having paranoid and grandiose ideas about myself and the world, and suffering from auditory hallucinations, going from being ecstatically happy and laughing for hours on end to being totally heartbroken and suicidal, and decreasingly believing in the idea of Jehovah and Jesus, I gradually started to work my way out of it, by trying to peel back the unreality of my situation, until I eventually figured out that it was all false and I had been psychotic. This realisation was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. In hindsight I believe the predisposing factors also included cannabis psychosis from my mid teens. I began to look at everything in psychoanalytical terms and became an Atheist. After several months I decided that Atheism was no longer a rational position for me personally, and became an agnostic.
Analysis
I look back at my conversion to Christianity as a metaphoric experience rather than a literal one. Exactly why I experienced all those hallucingenic symptoms is hard to say. Perhaps my brain somehow producing an effect (a type of involuntary invocation) to encourage me to find a path of least resistance out of it. Or perhaps I was predisposed to psychosis after having started using cannabis and the woman's conversation and my low key interest in Christianity were a trigger and context for a brief 15 minute delusional episode. One group of associates suggested that she was putting some 'spell' on me, which could be probably considered true only in the sense that preaching to someone is a form of suggestion. I would tend to interpret it one of the above manners than as a literal spiritual experience as I like to see a large amount of evidence before I believe wholeheartedly in anything. Until then an idea is merely plausible or somewhat likely. To wholeheartedly throw oneself into a belief system because of emotional need based on a small amount of subjective suggestive evidence and a feeling that it is right is not something I would do now, and such a way of being renders one more susceptible to psychosis. That's not to say that such a belief system isn't true necessariy but it's just an unknown. I tend not to subscribe to simplistic unifying theories of the universe where everyone revolves around oneself any longer.
I believe that if I had had help in tackling my self esteem issues directly, and perhaps had some CBT sessions on narcissism, assertiveness, stress and OCD, it would have likely lead me more directly to where I wanted to be, without sacrificing any of myself, but then again, it has been interesting to understand how I experienced Christianity and has helped to understand others, and I would not have stopped smoking cannabis as quickly if I hadn't undergone such a conversion. Evidently one of the key points was to change my social circles to ones that did not entirely revolve around drugs and music with no other positive interests, and I achieved that almost immediately when becoming a Christian.
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