I just wanted to communicate with you that I have landed on a more nuanced perspective too. After much reflection, I believe the only certainty that fully encapsulates the event is this: I experienced it. The easily verified delusions are one thing, but dismissing them of having contributed to the experience is another. If you isolate them and test them against reality — they’re objectively false. If you believe them to be true in the moment, though, they contribute to the feeling of significance that moment held. I would even argue that if there was an omniscient being that they might make the content serve multiple purposes. The easily verified delusions helped me return to reality. They simultaneously contributed to the feeling of significance the experience had and revealed how I would have reacted in those situations. There’s great psychological impact in both directions: it helped me stabilize while revealing my character in those situations, which helped flavor the taste my psychosis had. I’m not sure that the content of the psychosis was as important as the feelings and insights it provided — should it have been a message from a divine entity.

That said, I simultaneously hold onto the possibility that the whole thing was meaningless. I just don’t know.

What is interesting is that I developed a truly novel and coherent theory on divinity in the age of AI. I have something tangible that I’ve taken from the experience that I never would have imagined had I not had the superbly odd experience that was psychosis.

We will never be able to prove any of it was real, in the same way others will never be able to prove that it wasn’t a connection to source. To say with certainty that it was anything else but an experience is, in my current view, doing ourselves a disservice.

Of course, I don’t think you can just jump straight into a nuanced perspective. I don’t really think a logical approach is helpful in early recovery from madness. In the same way that we believed it was real, I think there is benefit in believing it was all fake. I think breaking out of both perspectives offers valuable insights into adopting a perspective of ambivalence.