Kindernaut: A portmanteau of kindergarten and psychonaut that I made up.

Another oldish post of mine, written a year ago:

When I was a kid (like 5 and 6), I would frequently experience astral projections which I could induce intentionally and accidentally. I would be sitting on the couch, watching TV, and then all of a sudden I would experience myself looking at myself that’s sitting on the couch from the corner of the ceiling. I would see both selves, the one on the couch and the one in the ceiling corner. I could also experience myself as different people; I could be a Native-American man in his 50s, a Hispanic woman in her 20s, etc. I was floating through different minds. These experiences made me question the fabric of reality. If I myself am real? If I’m actually situated in the house I’m living in? What if I’m actually inhabiting someone else’s body? Or what if I’m dialing in from another dimension? I haven’t astral projected in forever and I don’t know if at this moment and time, my mind is pliable to do that.

These weren’t the only instances of mind-altering experiences. While I had a lot of friends as a child, deep down I desired to leave my body and traverse multiple universes. Similar to the astral projections, I would “zone out” and go into these semi-deep trances, and this especially happened when I was swinging on the swings while listening to my Walkman. The swinging motion and being high off the ground enhanced the ‘high’ feeling of the experience. I gained a lot of inspiration from the books I’ve read and the tv shows and films I watched, and what I often did was recombine characters and storylines in my head from various mediums and create my own universe(s). Or I would just zone out and be deeply rooted in the moment. I wouldn’t think, I would just be, and that’s when the greatest insights and inspirations would emerge. I unwittingly was in a deep meditation during those times, so deep that these must’ve been proto-psychedelic experiences.

In middle school, these experiences started to wane considerably but I still had meditative states, though most of my states were tinged with religious symbolism. And these were especially potent when I was in mass. I would often meditate on the crucifixion of Christ, and how this was the greatest expression of love and surrender to ever occur. My religious meditations were also very sexually oriented, of a sadomasochistic nature actually (which led me to discover Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose names inspired the terms sadism and masochism respectively). Even then, as a virgin and not having a boyfriend yet, I knew that sexual surrender and religious surrender were of a similar nature – both involved the dissolution of ego boundaries and an ecstatic union. But the ultimate nature of these religious sadomasochistic fantasies wasn’t of morbid violence but a desire to reach a mystical boundlessness. I was attracted to extremes – extremes of excess and asceticism, of purity and debauchery, of piety and heresy, etc. We often modulate our lives towards the middle of these extremes, but I was a creature greedy for fringe experiences. And this led me to another insight: Christianity and the concept of goodness cannot exist without evil. Without evil, the moral high ground of the Church would lose its power and potency. Judas who betrayed Jesus, Jesus’s executioners, the torturers who executed the martyrs were all necessary in the propagation of goodness. And this lead me to another insight: without the concept of evil, God isn’t particularly necessary. God damned humanity from the start, it wasn’t Adam and Eve. God knew what would occur and yet still “let” it happened. If all was perfect in the world, we wouldn’t pay much mind to God aside from passive recognition of his goodness and providence. But if sin and evil were introduced into the world, there’s more of a explicit need for God’s providence and salvation through his grace. It’s no wonder that the Gnostics considered the God of the Bible to be an evil demiurge. It’s only through our intent and dependency that God has power. It was this revelation that led me away from Catholicism.