Tom Facchine – I Think I Saw God

			Some people take drugs. Some people take psychedelics and they have experiences. And they want to
say that these experiences are divine right. And this is well known within left culture, leftist
culture, then North American Europe, right? You start to get interested in Buddhism, you start to
get interested in Eastern religions, you take some psychedelics, and then you have your experience
with God, how do I know that that's not the same experience that the prophets had or the saints had
or stuff like that? Well, let's leave it an open ended question. How would you know? How would you
know that it is, there's a sort of emotionalism and a sort of empiricism that's at play here. And we
		

			need to be sure that we put our sensory experience within the right scope, okay. sensory experience
is extremely important. It's the basis of a lot of our knowledge and a lot of our ability to come to
conclusions about things, but it's not everything. Okay. Just because you feel something doesn't
mean it's really there. There's all sorts of things that we can perceive centrally, that either
aren't there at all. Okay, or maybe we're misinterpreting that. Okay. And I would put it to the
person who has the psychedelic trip. Okay. How do you know that? That's not the devil? How do you
know that it's God that you were in communion with. And there's many, you know, apocryphal stories
		

			we have we have one story in our tradition, I think. I'll call that a Gilani. And I don't know if
this is authentic or not, but the story is sort of amusing. And it's also instructive, right? The
lesson was instructive. So we can treat it as a fable, where he had a dream, okay, or a vision. And
there was this figure that appeared to him and claimed to be either the Prophet Muhammad SAW them or
claimed to be Allah, and told the shape, you know, you have reached such a high level of worship,
that you don't have to follow the Sharia anymore. You don't have to pray anymore. You can go ahead
and drink wine, and go ahead and you know, fornicator sleep around and all this sort of stuff. And
		

			the sheikh knew right away that that was the devil, okay. And he called a mountain he had his ways
of how he fell. And that devil was shocked is like, how did you know? And he said, I've tricked so
many holy men with the same line? How did you know that I was actually the devil. Right? And the
point of the story, for our purposes is how do you know, right? That's like, one of the most tricky
things for a human being is the neffs. As the ego as the self, a law says, in the end of sort of
Kath, who's the biggest loser, the person who spends their life thinking that they're doing good,
but in reality, they're not. So to put all our eggs in one basket, and to double down on sort of our
		

			sensory experience and our empiricism and our sort of subjective experience to put too much credence
and that is very dangerous, because we have a conflict of interest, right? Human beings with their
egos have a conflict of interest. It serves the self to interpret those things as being close to
God, having experience like prophets having an experience like the saints, okay, and it would be
embarrassing and against the self to say, maybe this is a red herring, maybe this is a dead end.
Maybe this is a false pathway. Maybe it seems like I'm benefiting. It seems like I'm progressing
spiritually, but really, it's just another trap. So we need to be very careful. And at the end of
		

			the day, all true faith is about submission. It's not about the elevation of the ego. It's about the
submission of the ego, okay, it's in following it's not in leading Sutton pioneering a new path.
It's and following and submitting and true faith is a happy medium between affirmation and
challenge, okay. It's not just about telling you that everything that you feel and everything that
you experience is sacred and good. It's got a healthy dose of you need to change. You need to think
about it differently. You need to step up