So I was reading a post on TrueAtheism about the boy who now admits that he made up the story about going to Heaven during a NDE, and one of the comments I read stated that, "No Christian ever has an NDE and sees Allah,". Perhaps not, but I had something sort of like that happen, and I've been wanting to tell my story for a while, so here goes. I will do my best to recall the details as accurately as possible:
My (short) Backstory I was raised in an evangelical Christian family, with a father who was a DTS educated minister. The Bible was shoved down my throat several times a week for the entirety of my childhood and teens. I actually longed for it to be true (prior to reading for myself what a monster Jehovah was), but was conscious of the fact that Jesus never spoke back to me. Distraught by that fact, at age 16 I went on a missions trip to Haiti in a misguided attempt to get closer to God.
I ended up watching in horror as starving voodoo children weren't allowed into the gated compound where we stayed (which had DSL internet, satellite TV, multiple refrigerators, A/C, fruit trees, hot showers, and a million other things that Haitians don't get to experience often). I watched competing religions deny each other food by wasting it on ritual sacrifice or by only giving it to those who "converted". I ended up becoming a secular humanist by the end of the trip and realized that not only was Jesus not working his magic inside of me, he damn sure wasn't intervening in Haiti (unless it was via pure sadism). The moment I realized I was no longer a Christian was huge for me, I could write a thousand words on that event alone, but for brevity's sake I'll get to the point.
I went home and began researching all sorts of world religions that I had previously lumped into the Satanism category (LOL), and ultimately ended up growing and consuming psychedelic mushrooms, which I fancied as a sort of mana, or tool given to mankind as a way to contact the supernatural planes of existence. I was something of a cosmic-consciousness subscriber at this point, and due to an incredible ego-death experience I had whilst tripping, was positive that I knew the truth about what happens after we die. I was a gnostic. God was not a being who intervened in human actions, god was the ocean of consciousness we all return to after our individual raindrops of conscious finish their fall.
The NDE incident Years later in my early twenties I went to an apartment party for a UFC fight. To make a very long story short, I ended up being attacked by a piece of shit with a knife and his much bigger friend. I got cut a few times on my blocking arm at the beginning of the fight, and also got stabbed very superficially in my torso a couple times. I fought these two thug-life pussies in a tiny kitchen for at least two minutes before my friend dragged me out kicking and screaming (I had just acquired a large kitchen knife that I wanted to kill them with).
I lost a lot of blood by the time we got to the hospital. I felt distant from my senses but could still tell my adrenaline was pumping hard and that I had an extreme thirst going on. I remember hearing the woman behind the ER counter tell my friends not to give me the water I was pleading for b/c I'd bleed out faster. She gave my friend a piece of ice to give to me instead, but when my friend turned around and looked at me she shouted, "OMG he's turning grey!" Just as she said those words, I felt myself collapse (I am not sure if I actually fell down, or if I was being loaded onto a gurney).
This is where things got interesting; As I looked up at my friends, my vision became unfocused and my ears perked up in a way that I'd experienced many times before, under the influence of psilocin (the active ingredient of psych shrooms). After a few seconds of this my eyes refocused, and covering the two females who accompanied me was the most intricate, beautiful, psychedelic Valkyrie armor I could possibly imagine. Helmets (no horns), swords, wings, chest plates, etc. I think I was more amazed at that point than confused, but I consciously recognized that the experience felt eerily similar to tripping, albeit a much more detailed and realistic version of it. I have later come to suspect that it was an endogenous release of NN-DMT, although there is no empirical evidence supporting that belief yet.
I was moving now, on the gurney, my face staring up at the ceiling tiles, but it wasn't over. I felt like I was being pulled on. I can't say that I heard a drum beat so much as I felt it (separate from my heartbeat), but it was unmistakably there. And I saw no light in the tunnel nor faces of gods, but I sensed that I was being called to Valhalla, and I had this feeling that if I let go of my consciousness right then I would die; my soul would be transported to the eternal battlefield. I chose to stay. To not lose consciousness. Seconds later I came out of the hallucination with an IV in my arm and no recollection at all of being removed from the gurney.
After thoughts It wasn't hard for me to process what had happened, but in stark contrast to losing my faith during my missions trip experience, this time I did not want to admit or accept the bits of truth I had witnessed, because they shit all over my gnosticism, and so I found it troubling instead of fantastic.
It was/is clear to me that my NDE was a tryptamine-based hallucination (chemicals similar in construct to psilocin, LSD, serotonin, and DMT). I even knew why it was Norse mythology based. I had formed a concept in my head while studying world religions that Vikings who died in battle would be escorted by Valkyries to an afterlife of never ending battle in Valhalla. My brain had projected this while I was bleeding out. Why? Because it slowed my pulse and got my adrenaline to quit pumping. My brain was attempting to save my life b/c it knew I was losing blood, and so it projected what it pulled up as my religion, even though in reality it was just a religion that I had a concept of.
There is lots of debate among people who trip about whether ones experiences while hallucinating are real, meaning they take place in some other plane of the objective universe, or if they are merely fantasies, outward projections of the contents of the subconscious that only take place in subjective reality. This moment was a deciding factor in that debate for me. I did not, do not, and could not accept the laughable premise that Thor and Odin were calling me to Valhalla, so it became clear to me that this was simply a subjective experience. But that made me reconsider my beliefs about my ego-death experience too, b/c the NDE was equally convincing in visual composition and relativity to my preconceived notions about the afterlife.
In the end I came to the only reasonable conclusion I think there is: All of it is subjective. All of it depends on the ideas you fill your mind with, and the set and setting in which you are hallucinating. This is why Muslims see Allah/Mo, why saddhus see Krishna, why Christians see angels or Jesus or whatever.
The only question about any of it that still haunts me is: What if the Valkyries had been angels, and the presence that called to me had been Jesus? Would I have still had the mental fortitude to realize that it was hallucinatory in nature, or would I have taken it as the sign from God that christian-me had psychologically craved for the better part of a decade? I hope it would be the former, but I remember what cognitive dissonance is like I can already imagine the fallacies and circular reasoning it might have revived.
Once I accepted the separation between subjective and objective reality, and came to appreciate the ability of our minds to create subjective realities that appear to be every bit as real as our shared objective reality, I realized that atheism is the most likely answer to the question of god. And after studying the arguments for and against it, I now no longer believe in a soul, either.
That's pretty much it, I'll try to answer any questions y'all have.
TL;DR - Despite growing up Christian I hallucinated Norse mythology during a NDE that was sparked by blood loss from a knife fight. My recognition that it was based on my concept of afterlife being different for those who die in battle led me from gnosticism to atheism.
Edit - Typos
