Woowoo
04-09-2007, 09:14 PM
e·piph·a·ny
n. 1. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.
2. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.
I'd like to share a story of something that happen to me years ago... This story is a trip and I swear that every word of it is true. I'm not trying to evangelize anybody here, just telling you what happened to me. Here goes ...
So the year was 1993 or so. I had been clean of heroin for several years and had become a real "granola hippie" ... I don't eat de meat, I don't smoke de crack, living the clean life. But you know how these thoughts have a way of creeping into our heads ... and a friend of mine who lived in Miami was getting the real righteous blow ... the rocky stuff where the dealer cuts off your eightball with a KNIFE cuz it's so solid and scaley, and you drop it in water and *poof* it vanishes, no discernable cut, no need for heat. You get the picture.
So me and my drug addled mind starts to spin its wheels and pretty soon I decide that all I need to do is make a few phone calls and get hooked up with two eightballs of this killer coke. A quick drive up to West Palm Beach and I walk out with a bunch of fresh 1cc rigs.
Only thing left to do is go down to Miami to score. While I'm driving in my car I pop in a tape of my favorite musical troupe, the Grateful Dead. I'm listening to the singer Brent, who happened to have died a few years prior. The newspapers reported "an overdose of morphine and cocaine" but let's face facts, you don't overdose on both drugs. One of them killed him, and I think we all know which one. He did a little too much coke and had a heart seizure plain and simple. So as I'm driving down the highway I am becoming acutely aware of this irony, listening to this dead man sing.
I suddenly was overcome with a strong emotion ... it's like one of those intuitive feelings. All my life I've felt lucky when it comes to drugs, sort of felt invulerable. But I had this god-awful feeling that my luck wasn't with me that day. I just knew that if I went through with this something bad might happen. I really started to think things like "This could be the day that I die."
So I did something that I never did before in my entire life ... I prayed. Understand I'm not a religious person but it was sort of a "Pascal's Wager" type thing. If I pray and nobody's listening, then what harm has it done me? But if somebody actually is listening, then great!! So I awkwardly assemble a prayer that went sort of like this, and I said it out loud, to the windshield of my car:
Uh... God?? I know I'm not your most perfect human specimen but I don't ask You for much, but today I got something to ask of You. I feel like I really might be making a mistake here. If You in Your wisdom could find someway to help me survive this day, well, you know ... maybe I'll learn to do the right thing one day...
OK so it wasn't the Lord's Prayer quality, but it was sincere. Now here's where things started to get trippy. As soon as I was done, the accellerator to my new car stopped functioning. The car was just coasting and even if I floored the pedal, nothing. I couldn't give the engine a drop of gasoline.
My car coasted right to the side of the road and I got out immediately, with my tye-die shirt and my long shaggy hair, and it was a genuine epiphany as defined above. Suddenly I knew, this couldn't just be a coincidence. I had a new problem on my hand--how to get my car to a mechanics shop, and to make matters worse I was the kind of freak that few people would stop to help (save another freak).
So I'm standing there on the side of I-95, with light beaming out of my head and everything, and sure enough, a van pulled over within about a minute, filled with freaks. But I could tell from the bumper sticks on their van they weren't drug freaks--they were JESUS FREAKS.
They immediately gave me a ride where I could use a telephone and I'll spare you the details, but an incredible string of very lucky events allowed me to get my car back up north to a mechanic within less than an hour. (A friend I hadn't seen in years was nearby and he happened to own a tow truck! How's that for lucky??) It's as if there was a wall preventing me from going to Miami that day, but freely encouraging me to go back to my home up north.
When I get home I call my connect in Miami and he says "Where the fuck are you?? Don't leave me holding the bag!" I calmly explained to him that I had a religious epiphany and I can't be seeing him today. He thought I was out of my mind, and I guess I was.
Incidentally it turned out that a doohickey called a "fuel pump relay" must have been a factory defect and that's what caused my car to stop. So everything in this story can be explained with normal physics and a large degree of coincidence. But from my point of view it's like this: I've prayed one time in my entire life, and it was answered in spades. I honestly believe I'd be dead today were it not for divine intervention.
So whenever I'm feeling down I try to remember that day, and remember the feeling I had when I was stranded on the side of I-95. There's more to this world than meets the eye...
n. 1. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.
2. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization.
I'd like to share a story of something that happen to me years ago... This story is a trip and I swear that every word of it is true. I'm not trying to evangelize anybody here, just telling you what happened to me. Here goes ...
So the year was 1993 or so. I had been clean of heroin for several years and had become a real "granola hippie" ... I don't eat de meat, I don't smoke de crack, living the clean life. But you know how these thoughts have a way of creeping into our heads ... and a friend of mine who lived in Miami was getting the real righteous blow ... the rocky stuff where the dealer cuts off your eightball with a KNIFE cuz it's so solid and scaley, and you drop it in water and *poof* it vanishes, no discernable cut, no need for heat. You get the picture.
So me and my drug addled mind starts to spin its wheels and pretty soon I decide that all I need to do is make a few phone calls and get hooked up with two eightballs of this killer coke. A quick drive up to West Palm Beach and I walk out with a bunch of fresh 1cc rigs.
Only thing left to do is go down to Miami to score. While I'm driving in my car I pop in a tape of my favorite musical troupe, the Grateful Dead. I'm listening to the singer Brent, who happened to have died a few years prior. The newspapers reported "an overdose of morphine and cocaine" but let's face facts, you don't overdose on both drugs. One of them killed him, and I think we all know which one. He did a little too much coke and had a heart seizure plain and simple. So as I'm driving down the highway I am becoming acutely aware of this irony, listening to this dead man sing.
I suddenly was overcome with a strong emotion ... it's like one of those intuitive feelings. All my life I've felt lucky when it comes to drugs, sort of felt invulerable. But I had this god-awful feeling that my luck wasn't with me that day. I just knew that if I went through with this something bad might happen. I really started to think things like "This could be the day that I die."
So I did something that I never did before in my entire life ... I prayed. Understand I'm not a religious person but it was sort of a "Pascal's Wager" type thing. If I pray and nobody's listening, then what harm has it done me? But if somebody actually is listening, then great!! So I awkwardly assemble a prayer that went sort of like this, and I said it out loud, to the windshield of my car:
Uh... God?? I know I'm not your most perfect human specimen but I don't ask You for much, but today I got something to ask of You. I feel like I really might be making a mistake here. If You in Your wisdom could find someway to help me survive this day, well, you know ... maybe I'll learn to do the right thing one day...
OK so it wasn't the Lord's Prayer quality, but it was sincere. Now here's where things started to get trippy. As soon as I was done, the accellerator to my new car stopped functioning. The car was just coasting and even if I floored the pedal, nothing. I couldn't give the engine a drop of gasoline.
My car coasted right to the side of the road and I got out immediately, with my tye-die shirt and my long shaggy hair, and it was a genuine epiphany as defined above. Suddenly I knew, this couldn't just be a coincidence. I had a new problem on my hand--how to get my car to a mechanics shop, and to make matters worse I was the kind of freak that few people would stop to help (save another freak).
So I'm standing there on the side of I-95, with light beaming out of my head and everything, and sure enough, a van pulled over within about a minute, filled with freaks. But I could tell from the bumper sticks on their van they weren't drug freaks--they were JESUS FREAKS.
They immediately gave me a ride where I could use a telephone and I'll spare you the details, but an incredible string of very lucky events allowed me to get my car back up north to a mechanic within less than an hour. (A friend I hadn't seen in years was nearby and he happened to own a tow truck! How's that for lucky??) It's as if there was a wall preventing me from going to Miami that day, but freely encouraging me to go back to my home up north.
When I get home I call my connect in Miami and he says "Where the fuck are you?? Don't leave me holding the bag!" I calmly explained to him that I had a religious epiphany and I can't be seeing him today. He thought I was out of my mind, and I guess I was.
Incidentally it turned out that a doohickey called a "fuel pump relay" must have been a factory defect and that's what caused my car to stop. So everything in this story can be explained with normal physics and a large degree of coincidence. But from my point of view it's like this: I've prayed one time in my entire life, and it was answered in spades. I honestly believe I'd be dead today were it not for divine intervention.
So whenever I'm feeling down I try to remember that day, and remember the feeling I had when I was stranded on the side of I-95. There's more to this world than meets the eye...