People like this always fill me with a particular mix of frustration, envy, and pity. Frustration that they are so deluded and confident in that delusion. Slightly envious that they have it all figured out. And not a little sorry for them that they are living in a fantasy land where poor ignorant people are sated by the fantasy that all the suffering they incur in this life will be rewarded in some sort of candy mountain spiritual DisneyLand on the other side. But that fictional god, invented by people with limited imaginations is not the one I was thinking of the other day on my walk through Grand Central amid all those other silently chattering minds thinking of God knows what. It was the God I 'knew' existed for a few hours after ingesting something that made me convinced there was an afterlife. It was an external voice but one I implicitly trusted. It was knowledge like the kind that's imparted in a dream. It doesn't follow the path knowledge usually takes but when it arrives it's a given that it's true. 'This world is not the end'. And I believed it fully for as long as I was high then it faded to near invisibility in the years since.  But it hasn't disappeared completely. Then it resurfaced again in Grand Central as I listened to a cheesy Donovan song of all things. And I remembered the comfort of that sensation. A bullet-proof calm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jle9zuUlk1s