Pastor Oden Fong gives His Testimony

Pastor Oden Fong gives His Testimony See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfYSB9z746o [Transcription of YouTube vid.* Astounding testimony of God’s grace: Hollywood LSD hippie (child of a Hollywood actor Benson Fong) to the Most High God, glory to Him]

I was raised in Hollywood, although I looked Chinese, I'm really not. I'm actually a Hollywoodite. My parents were both motion picture actors. My father, you know, was a motion picture actor, and my mother, raised in a Hollywood family, grew up around Hollywood and Beverly Hills with all the movie stars. I sat on the knee of most of the biggest movie stars that have lived, people like Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, June Allyson, and Fred Astaire.

Those are people that I grew up with at our house parties and hanging around my dad's restaurants. But I was one of those people that, even though I seemed to have everything, you know, the wealthy house at the top of the Hollywood Hills overlooking all of Los Angeles, and being raised kind of like a spoiled child with reservations, I came to a place where I realized that everyone around me, regardless of how high they climbed their ladders, they were never, ever content. They were never happy.

I was raised in a family where we didn't really know anything about God. We didn't believe in God. Our background was basically listening to my father teach us his own philosophy and also a little bit of Chinese philosophy here and there. So we always just believed, like everybody else, that we were born into the world by accident through a cosmic explosion that happened eons ago, and a giant burp happened in the universe, and then everything came into being. And we were just gonna do whatever we could to make our little dent on the planet and then go our way.

But something was hardwired into my heart early on that caused me to really question these things. So early on, I basically kind of just dropped out of the whole Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles scene and moved down to Laguna Beach.

At the time, this was during the counterculture revolution of the '60s, where African Americans were fighting for equal rights and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were in full swing. But there was another movement happening at the time, and that was enlightenment through the usage of psychedelic drugs. Coming from Hollywood, I started smoking pot when I was pretty young, but never experimented with anything harder than that until I got out of high school. After I left high school, I moved away from my home and started to experiment with psychedelic drugs.

It was during the time I was studying the usage of psychedelic drugs to find myself and to find some sort of a relationship with a type of God that I started to run into people who were very religious. I would study with people who were Tibetan Buddhists.

I would study and help establish the Hari Krishna temple in Laguna Beach and also worshiped with them and studied the Bhagavad Gita with the president of that particular house, a self-realization fellowship Paramahansa Yogananda spiel. These are all things that go way over most of your heads because you're too young to remember any of these things or even hear about them.

But there was one psychologist, I mean, he was a psychiatrist, by the name of Dr. Timothy Leary. You've probably heard about him in your infamous parts of your history book. When I came down to Laguna Beach, I became part of the subculture, and I was befriended, because of my guitar playing mostly and singing, by some musicians who lived out in the Laguna Canyon. So I went out there to jam with them, and I was kind of adopted into the Timothy Leary family. They called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

Now, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, on the outside, looked like just a bunch of wild little hippie people running around, long hair and all. If you see that old picture of me that comes up on the screen, it's a little embarrassing because I was probably 200 pounds lighter then and had hair, you know. But behind the scenes, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love was basically responsible for manufacturing most of the psychedelic drugs, LSD and other forms of psychedelic drugs, that were being distributed all over the world. And I became a part of that family.

Timothy got arrested early on, and so I used to take care of his wife, Rosemary. Rosemary had connections to everyone. In fact, she was like my backstage pass to any concert back in those days. I'd walk with her up to a Moody Blues concert, and they just opened the doors because she was Dr. Leary's wife.

But in that role, I had basically just found myself elevated into the same kind of funny place in society, but this is a subculture of society where we had hundreds of thousands of dollars to play with every single day because of the amount of drugs that we were manufacturing and selling. We used to smuggle marijuana across the border down here in Mexico regularly, and we were so rich we actually used to light our joints with hundred-dollar bills to blow people's minds.

But the point that I'm trying to make is that we got to the very pinnacle of where we were and there was nothing there, you know, all the movie stars and the rock stars and all the people that we hung out with when I was growing up. You get to the top of the lot, there's nothing there, and you see people like just totally blitzing out and doing funny things like you see in the media today. And the hippy movement, it was the same way. And so, I finally decided that I was going to really find out if there really was a God.

I took a vial of what was just the pure content of our product out to the high desert and snorted it all. It was about a hundred and fifty doses of what they call 'sunshine LSD.' And what transpired after, I can't even really explain. I do know that they couldn't resuscitate me. They couldn't get me breathing again. My heart stopped beating, and I did, yes, I did have one of those after or out-of-the-body experiences to a certain extent.

I basically was in a place of darkness, and everything that I had learned in the past told me that what I should do is look for the light. Look for the light, and then you're gonna go into your next incarnation. You'll just be reincarnated over and over again till you get it right, you know what I mean? It sounds fun, doesn't it? And so, I'm looking for the light. I'm looking at the light. There's no light. It's just total darkness, total blackness.

And all of a sudden, I started to realize that I was just in darkness forever, and I was a conscious living entity living within that darkness. And as I started to succumb to it, I started to sense the presence of other souls that were in that same place, screaming and crying out in agony. And all of a sudden, I started to realize that I was one of those voices. And I remember, I invoked every single name that you can imagine, every guru that I had studied under, all of their gods, every deity, every demigod that I could remember their name, and nothing happened.

In the very last name that I cried out to, because I never wanted to be a Christian, was the name of Jesus. I said, 'Jesus, if you're real, save me! If you're real, save me!' And I was screaming it at the top of my lungs. I couldn't bear it. If I were to start screaming right now, and all of a sudden, in that darkness, the darkness began to quake. Like the whole universe was shaking, and there were flashes of light, and brighter and brighter and brighter. And I actually came to in the middle of the desert, and I was alive. I was breathing. And there was a man standing in front of me whose countenance was so bright that I had to avert my eyes and my whole body away from him.

It was almost like it was noontime, and the sun was shining up above, and this person, the image and outline of this person was so bright that I couldn't look. And even when I turned around and I started to try to bury myself under the sand to get away from the sight of this person, I could still see him. And then I heard a voice that I'll never forget. I still remember it today. It makes me cry and shiver and rejoice and laugh all at the same time.

It sounded like the sound of many waters. It sounded, it filled every single molecule in the air. And he basically just said this. He said, 'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.' And I remember that after I heard those words, I waited for a long time, and then I turned around, and it was gone. Although there were little flashes of lightning and everything.

You know, I went back home, and I remember that I told some of the people about the experience, and they thought I just had a big psychedelic experience. And my old brethren from the Brotherhood that are still alive today say that Odin flipped out on LSD and became a Jesus Freak and never came back. That's my reputation. And it is true. They waited for me for years to come back. I still lived in Laguna.

But what ended up happening was I met some people from Calvary Chapel after my conversion, and they would come down and play music with me and preach in my backyard, right in the middle of Laguna Canyon where the whole Brotherhood lived. And this is the secret society that didn't want any strangers in the canyon.

We had three or four hundred people coming in and out every week to listen to people preach the gospel in the backyard. And so, all I have to say is, it's been over pretty close to thirty-seven years now when I firstcame to Calvary Chapel and that Pastor Chuck, and just if you would just give Jesus a chance, if you just give Jesus an opportunity to come into your heart and to show you that He's real, He will.

And it doesn't matter if you're young or old, if you're on the edge of death or if you're still living and breathing, if you just open up your heart, He will come in and you'll never be the same. I can attest to that. I'm living proof that with all of my wildness, God has taken me and transformed me into a whole different creature in creation. And it's only by the grace of God and because of His love for me and for you and for all of us. God bless you all.

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