A few years ago an overdose of LSD landed me in an emergency...

A few years ago an overdose of LSD landed me in an emergency mental ward overnight. I became clear enough the next day to call my parents to have them take me home. There they requested the prayerful treatment of a Christian Science practitioner, and clung to the truth of my real identity as the spiritual image of Mind, God, for the picture of mental and physical darkness was very alarming.

For a long while I couldn't even think, let alone read and study with them to begin to understand the many spiritual truths they, my parents, sister, and the practitioner, declared to me. But the light began to break through the painful confusion. I remember first really understanding when the practitioner pointed out that my period of heavy drug use was really a search in the wrong direction for a sense of identity.

The mind-expanding drugs were wrong because they based their potency on the false premise of life and intelligence in matter. They could only lead to more delusion and illusion, since that is the fleeting nature of material existence. A passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy describes the fruit of my beginning the search in the correct direction (p. 264): "When we realize that Life is Spirit, never in nor of matter, this understanding will expand into self-completeness, finding all in God, good, and needing no other consciousness."

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August 30, 1975
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