MY PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE:  I ingested a half of a stamp of microdot that a friend gave me one night and spent the evening alone in my room listened to my favorite music. Before I took the acid, I was feeling very good anyway and had no problems on my mind. The acid multiplied these good feelings and made the music which I was listening to (Eagles, Poco, James Taylor, etc.) virtually come alive. I was totally immersed into the music and experienced it in a way I never have before. I spent hours with my eyes closed fantasizing and being the music. It is just a completely different level of awareness and feeling.

AN ANALOGY TO DESCRIBE MY "BORN-AGAIN" EXPERIENCE:  Imagine the universe - your reality - as though there is nothing else. God and heaven are fantasies of weak minds. For the sake of the analogy, label this kind of reality as a bubble which you had lived all your life -  in a bubble - the universe - the only reality. You are certain there is nothing outside of this bubble. Period. Anyone who said differently was either lying, on drugs, or crazy. Then, something inspires you  to read a well-known fairy-tale book just out of curiosity. As you read it, the fantasy tale starts to make sense to you. It begins to reveal secrets to you which you know are true that have never been expressed before. You begin to think this information comes from a reality you never experienced before. It is speaking to your very soul and makes complete sense to your heart and mind. You no longer believe it is a fantasy book, but the very words of God. You can't put it down until you read the whole thing. While this is going on, something is happening to your bubble but you keep reading. When you finish it, you realize that you just read the secrets of the universe but the whole world thinks it is a fairy tale book. When you are done and look up from the book, you realize that the bubble is gone. It popped. And now you are living in an entirely different world - even though it just looks the same. But more importantly, a different person is now in your body. The one who was in it before is gone. Now, you want to put on your white robe and sandals and climb the mountaintop to shout the Gospel and wait for Jesus to come.

AN OBSERVATION OF A RELIGIOUS VISION:  I was discussing the Book of Revelation in my apartment with a good friend who was becoming interested in Christianity. While I was talking about the second coming of Jesus, my friend's eyes got really big in fear and he fell to the floor. I asked him what was wrong. He saw Jesus enter my apartment by walking through the front door. It was a brief but powerful vision because I knew he was sincere. But I didn't see a thing. I believe it was his born again experience.

AN OBSERVATION OF A GROUP RELIGIOUS VISION:  They were driving out of town and into the barren countryside when, in the distance, they saw a man standing on the side of the road. By the time they passed him by, they were stunned because the man looked and was dressed like Jesus, complete with white robe and beard. Because they were out in the barren countryside, it was very unusual for anyone to be out there - not to mention a man looking like that. They were so baffled by what they saw that they had to turn the car around to get a second look. But the man was nowhere to be found. The man had vanished. Combined with our previous discussion about prophecy and the second coming of Jesus, I believe what they experienced was a group conversion experience.

MY MANIC DEPRESSIVE PSYCHOTIC HALLUCINATIONS:  After weeks of being depressed, I was growing increasingly paranoid and began having delusions. At this time, I didn't know what was happening to me, I didn't know I had an illness. Because of my fundamentalist beliefs at the time, I thought I was under attack by demonic forces. I thought I was having a personality problem which brought on this spiritual battle with my mind. Delusions and hallucinations ,such as, hearing voices in my mind that were not mine, reading the minds of people around me, people could merely look at my face and know what I was thinking, and coincidences that would occur which seemed to reinforce my delusions.

Trying to sleep was a living hell, so I went for days without sleep. Trying to sleep meant being assaulted by what I thought were "demons" (I believe now they were earthbound human souls), contemplating homelessness and even suicide, Jesus appeared in my mind and the assault on my mind stopped. I had been laying in bed for days with no energy to do much else but hug my pillow and fight a battle in my head. Finally, I decided to just give up fighting completely and I knew this would mean demonic possession of my body and mind. But something else happened instead:

Important note:  It took Jesus to appear in my mind before I would seek help. Admitting to yourself (and maybe even family members) that something is wrong with your mind and you need a psychiatrist is the biggest hurdle a mentally ill person - or anyone - ever has to make. Once you are able to acknowledge or understand the problem, the recovery process begins. Then, you can receive medications that will immediately help you sleep and be less anxious. Antidepressants take longer to work, but other medication can ease much of the problems associated with depression. After admitting the problem, the rest of the way becomes much easier by comparison - believe me.

Dr. George Ritchie's near-death experience excerpt of hell's battlefield which is a good description of my battle with "demons" during a psychotic hallucination. It was a psychotic depression that caused me to hallucinate very frightening religious images. But mostly it was a battle for my very sanity and for what I thought was the possession of my soul:

"So far in our journeying we had visited places where the living and the dead existed side by side: indeed where disembodied beings, completely unsuspected by the living, hovered right on top of the physical things and people where their desire was focused.

Now, however, although we were apparently still somewhere on the surface of the earth, I could see no living man or woman. The plain was crowded, even jammed with hordes of ghostly discarnate beings; nowhere was there a solid, light-surrounded person to be seen. All of these thousands of people were apparently no more substantial than I myself. And they were the most frustrated, the angriest, the most completely miserable beings I had ever laid eyes on. "Lord Jesus!" I cried. "Where are we?"

At first I thought we were looking at some great battlefield. Everywhere spirits were locked in what looked like fights to the death, writhing, punching, gouging. No weapons of any sort, I saw as I looked closer, only bare hands and feet and teeth. And then I noticed that no one was apparently being injured. There was no blood, no bodies strewed on the ground. A blow that ought to have eliminated an opponent would leave him exactly as before. If I suspected that I was seeing hell, now I was sure of it. These creatures seemed locked into habits of mind and emotion, into hatred, lust, destructive thought-patterns.

Even more hideous than the bites and kicks they exchanged, were the sexual abuses many were performing in feverish pantomime. Perversions I had never dreamed of were being vainly attempted all around us. It was impossible to tell if the howls of frustration which reached us were actual sounds or only the transference of despairing thoughts. Indeed in this disembodied world it didn't seem to matter. Whatever anyone thought, however fleetingly or unwillingly, was instantly apparent to all around him, more completely than words could have expressed it, faster than sound waves could have carried it. And the thoughts most frequently communicated had to do with the superior knowledge, or abilities, or background of the thinker.

"I told you so!" "I always knew!"

"Didn't I warn you!' were shrieked into the echoing air over and over. With a feeling of sick familiarity I recognized here my own thinking. In these yelps of envy and wounded self-importance I heard myself all too well. Once again, however, no condemnation came from the presence at my side, only a compassion for these unhappy creatures that was breaking his heart.

What was keeping them here? Why didn't each one just get up and leave? I could see no reason why the person being screamed at by that man with the contorted face didn't simply walk away. Or why that young woman didn't put a thousand miles between herself and the other one who was so furiously beating her with insubstantial fists? They couldn't actually hold onto their victims, any of these insanely angry beings. There were no fences. Nothing apparently prevented them from simply going off alone.

Unless - unless there was no alone in this realm of disembodied spirits. No private corners in a universe where there were no walls. No place that was not inhabited by other beings to whom one was totally exposed at all times. What was it going to be like, I thought with sudden panic, to live forever where my most private thoughts were not private at all? No disguising them, no covering them up, no way to pretend I was anything but what I actually was. How unbearable. Unless of course everyone around me had the same kind of thoughts - Unless there was a kind of consolation in finding others as loathsome as one's self, even if all we could do was hurl our venom at each other.

Perhaps this was the explanation for this hideous plain. Perhaps in the course of eons or of seconds, each creature here had sought out the company of others as pride and hate-filled as himself, until together they formed this society of the damned. Perhaps it was not Jesus who had abandoned them, but they who had fled from the light that showed up their darkness. There were beings arguing over some religious or political point, trying to kill the ones who did not agree with them. I thought when I saw this: "No wonder our world is in such a mess and we have had so many tragic religious wars. No wonder this was breaking Christ's heart, the one who came to teach us peace and love." (Dr. George Ritchie)

Rev. Howard Storm's near-death experience excerpt of hell's battlefield which is a good description of the hand-to-hand combat with harmful earthbound souls I fought in my mind during a psychotic hallucination:

"Finally, I told them that I wouldn't go any farther. At that time they changed completely. They became much more aggressive and insisted that I was going with them. A number of them began to push and shove me, and I responded by hitting back at them. A wild orgy of frenzied taunting, screaming and hitting ensued. I fought like a wild man. All the while it was obvious that they were having great fun. It seemed to be, almost, a game for them, with me as the center-piece of their amusement. My pain became their pleasure. They seemed to want to make me hurt – by clawing at me and biting me. Whenever I would get one off me, there were five more to replace the one.

By this time it was almost complete darkness, and I had the sense that instead of there being twenty or thirty, there were an innumerable host of them. Each one seemed set on coming in for the sport they got from hurting me. My attempts to fight back only provoked greater merriment. They began to physically humiliate me in the most degrading ways. As I continued to fight on and on, I was aware that they weren't in any hurry to win. They were playing with me just as a cat plays with a mouse. Every new assault brought howls of cacophony. Then at some point, they began to tear off pieces of my flesh. To my horror I realized I was being taken apart and eaten alive, slowly, so that their entertainment would last as long a possible.

At no time did I ever have any sense that the beings who seduced and attacked me were anything other than human beings. The best way I can describe them is to think of the worst imaginable person stripped of every impulse to do good. Some of them seemed to be able to tell others what to do, but I had no sense of any structure or hierarchy in an organizational sense. They didn't appear to be controlled or directed by anyone. Basically they were a mob of beings totally driven by unbridled cruelty and passions.

During our struggle I noticed that they seemed to feel no pain. Other than that they appeared to possess no special non-human or super-human abilities. Although during my initial experience with them I assumed that they were clothed, in our intimate physical contact I never felt any clothing whatsoever.

Fighting well and hard for a long time, ultimately I was spent. Lying there exhausted amongst them, they began to calm down since I was no longer the amusement that I had been. Most of the beings gave up in disappointment because I was no longer amusing, but a few still picked and gnawed at me and ridiculed me for no longer being any fun. By this time I had been pretty much taken apart. People were still picking at me, occasionally, and I just lay there all torn up, unable to resist.

Exactly what happened was ... and I'm not going to try and explain this. From inside of me I felt a voice, my voice, say, "Pray to God." My mind responded to that, "I don't pray. I don't know how to pray." This is a guy lying on the ground in the darkness surrounded by what appeared to be dozens if not hundreds and hundreds of vicious creatures who had just torn him up. The situation seemed utterly hopeless, and I seemed beyond any possible help whether I believed in God or not.

The voice again told me to pray to God. It was a dilemma since I didn't know how. The voice told me a third time to pray to God. I started saying things like, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want ... God bless America" and anything else that seemed to have a religious connotation. And these people went into a frenzy, as if I had thrown boiling oil all over them. They began yelling and screaming at me, telling me to quit, that there was no God, and no one could hear me. While they screamed and yelled obscenities, they also began backing away from me – as if I were poison. As they were retreating, they became more rabid, cursing and screaming that what I was saying was worthless and that I was a coward.

I screamed back at them, "Our Father who art in heaven," and similar ideas. This continued for some time until, suddenly, I was aware that they had left. It was dark, and I was alone yelling things that sounded churchy. It was pleasing to me that these churchy sayings had such an effect on those awful beings.

Lying there for a long time, I was in such a state of hopelessness, and blackness, and despair, that I had no way of measuring how long it was. I was just lying there in an unknown place – all torn and ripped. And I had no strength; it was all gone. It seemed as if I were sort of fading out, that any effort on my part would expend the last energy I had. My conscious sense was that I was perishing, or just sinking into the darkness.

Now I didn't know if I was even in the world. But I did know that I was here. I was real, all my senses worked too painfully well. I didn't know how I had arrived here. There was no direction to follow even if I had been physically able to move. The agony that I had suffered during the day was nothing compared to what I was feeling now. I knew then that this was the absolute end of my existence, and it was more horrible than anything I could possibly have imagined.

Then a most unusual thing happened. I heard very clearly, once again in my own voice, something that I had learned in nursery Sunday School. It was the little song, "Jesus loves me, yes I know ..." and it kept repeating. I don't know why, but all of a sudden I wanted to believe that. Not having anything left, I wanted to cling to that thought. And I, inside, screamed, "Jesus, please save me."

That thought was screamed with every ounce of strength and feeling left in me. When I did that, I saw, off in the darkness somewhere, the tiniest little star. Not knowing what it was, I presumed it must be a comet or a meteor, because it was moving rapidly. Then I realized it was coming toward me. It was getting very bright, rapidly. When the light came near, its radiance spilled over me, and I just rose up – not with my effort – I just lifted up. Then I saw – and I saw this very plainly – I saw all my wounds, all my tears, all my brokenness, melt away. And I became whole in this radiance" (Rev. Howard Storm).