Post-Something

Yea, I used to like dissociatives. I actually overdosed and was hospitalized for DXM - dextromorphon. It;s the stuff in robotussin that people robo-trip too. I used to just order the powder from an industrial supplier, I'd throw a bs header on my order saying I was a chemistry proff and never had a problem.
Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

2
Anyway, I don;t know if church or religion is right for you.
I'd recommend Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, its easy to read and a thrilling story from the leader of the 3rd Viennese school of psychology about how he came up with his idea's while in a Nazi concentration camp.
It must have been an incredible shock to meet yr mother at 18! I can't imagine. I'm lucky I have an outlet to express my self in art - what do you do with all yr feelings?
I actually got into psychology so I could intellectualize my pain and not have to feel it. Avoiding suffering is what really hurts and I'm an expert at running away! I struggle with relationships and trying to have a meaningful connection with people. It's terribly painful when you don't know how to love or be loved.

Well, I love Kirchner. I'm really into a lot of the symbolists like Odilon Redon,James Ensor, Rouault, Klee, Giacometti, Kubin, Munch, Miro, Gorky, Matta, and my fav Max Beckmen.

Ketamine! Thats such a bizarre drug. Are you using it to induce a mystical experience?
I used to buy it a hundred bottles at once, we'd be cooking it up all night, back then it was dirt cheap, depending if it was red top or not. My buddy would inject K 24/7, eventually he lapsed into a psychosis where he thought he was god.
Actually, my best friend when I was 16 did K and he mixed it with H, he was odd, and one night the mixture killed him.
I don't know if religion is the way to go. Nothing in the Bible, except the resurrection of Christ, is in my opinion factual.
This is how my church 'reads' the bible :
'spiritually, ascetically, allegorically, poetically, but never just literally'

part 4
As for me,
I was deep into heroin and coke, but I also drank about a 5th of vodka a day plus pills. I got busted with 2 pnds weed 2 pnds coke 5 vials acid. I do have some training in psychoanalysis, but working in institutions among the mentally ill proved very unhealthy for me, in fact I recently had a break down and just got out of the mental ward 8 months ago. Even sober, I'm still not too stable, I got deep into gambling these past 2 yrs and am in the hole 10's and 10's of thousands, but I feel better and am staying away from the cards.
What are you reading Freud and Jung for? I find some of the concepts are easier to grasp in biographies about them. Do you like any particular art? I got in a gallery awhile ago with some other artists.

PART 3
Personhoodʼ is constituted entirely through oneʼs relationship with their family
and tribe. Instead of the self deciding to believe in God, or not, early Christians (and their Jewish forbearers) understood that their persons, their selves, were not defined via interiority, but by relationally; through their relationality with God, with neighbor, and with their environment. There was no existent self independent of these
relationships. And, pre-modernity, they understood that “God is not bound by any
external rational truths” Thus, ethically, the only thing that constituted Reality
was how one behaved relationally.
It can only be apprehended subjectively and relationally within the context of community. As for actual individual experience, Some might argue that a religious experience can be considered epistemic knowledge, in a foundationalist sense and with Cartesian certainty, but I don't get that deep.

PART 2
Modernity was an post-Enlightenment advancement on the Pre-modern where Reality was described primarily in terms of a revealed historical telos leading toward salvation for the whole world through Jesus Christ. The seventeenth century Enlightenment, through Descartes, introduced a dualism previously not imagined between matter and God, mind and body, the real and the unreal. Both modernity and post-
modernity are ʻprojectsʼ of the Enlightenment movement. Religion, as we imagine it today was not really ʻinventedʼ until the Enlightenment. In pre-modernity, the self is only constituted through an interior relationality with God. The person does not really exist outside this relationship. Likewise, pre-modern Reality was believed to be an advancement on the Biblical where Reality is described in terms of a
historical telos leading toward salvation revealed to a chosen people, Israel, by their god, YHWH. Persons still do not have a ʻself.ʼ

ONE Well, a postmodernist would view religion as one narrative among many, of which science is one, in which a person can frame their experience. A jungian would might see religion and religious symbols as mediating devices between the subjects ego and the subjects true Self - in other words a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious, and Jung believed in a universal unconscious. A logo-therapist, such as Victor Frankl would view religion in terms of meaning. Mr. Frankl survived Auchwitz by giving his experience meaning by framing the experience in terms of his belief. Some would bring up transrationality -which is non-rational but not irrational. I view belief in God in relational terms, you see, In modernity, the self exists as an autonomous, self-directed being, entirely constituted through the interiority of the person.

PART 3
Then I read that book Being as Communion and I thought, from a philosophically perspective, not that it makes it true, but IF Christianity was true, it would solve so many philosophical conundrums with what I consider a breath taking elegance.
Then I read the desert fathers, which aren't the judgmental pricks that many Christian are, I like them. It all eventually lead me to communism via beryaev, then through Jung (whom I mostly reject) and William James it lead me to the mysticism of the Orthodox Church.Add a bit Kierkegaard and Unumuno, and I realized belief must come first.
And I've remained sober, a miracle, have a framework that I consider elegant and rigorous, and I've even had my little experiences, which are personal - although no voices or burning bushes. I know it's bizarre, irrational, and absurd, but ...in a nutshell, that is why I believe. It wasn't by way of analysis or logical apprehension, it was by way of desperation.

PART 2
At the same time I read alot of philosophy, although I hate post-modernism. I was really influenced by Heidegger's ideas of how subjectivity exists, and his ideas that because we exist within the gap between objectivity and subjectivity, we are 'guardians of the universe' in that sense, since this gap creates the something from the void. Then I read about Hegel's idea that an "I" can only exist with a "you" with creates a third term : "we." I know I'm bastardizing this terribly, but his idea that there must be 3 referents for something to exist, and only than it exists relationally.Well, this is the basis for a triune god, not even God can exist by himself, he IS a community. tbc...