Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea recently told the Los Angeles Times his story of finding God after years of battling drugs and being ditched by his bandmates. He explained:
“For me, music is the voice of God. I grew up virulently anti-religious, and there came a time in the early ’90s, right around when I turned 30, I got really sick with chronic fatigue. I’d been a drug-taking madman — party all night, play basketball all day. I just thought I was Superman. And all of a sudden, it was like all the energy got sucked out of my body. I was like; I can’t go on tour; I feel too shit. And I was cut off from my friends because I wasn’t partying.”
The bassist explained how he would use drugs to calm his anxiety. In 1993, when he turned 30 and saw three of his friends die from drugs, being a father convinced him to break the habit. He even wrote about his experiences in an article for Time Magazine in 2018 as part of the Opioid Diaries series to document the effects of the prescription drug crisis in the US.
But before Flea could give up his drug addiction, a self-help book helped him realize that even if he was not a religious person, God might have been the answer. He said:
“So I read this self-help book by this guy Jon Kabat-Zinn where he talked about how if you strip away all your thoughts and actions — your pain, your pleasure, your memories, your hopes — what’s the thing that’s left? And it really struck me because I’d been so caught up in the external. I started thinking about that emptiness; at that moment, God made perfect sense. I mean, like I said, I’ve still never been religious. And I’ve tried — I’ve been to churches.”
You can read Flea’s interview with Los Angeles Times here.
