For as long as I can remember, I was a proud atheist. So much so that when I attended my sister’s communion as a teenager, I stubbornly stayed seated, unwilling to walk up to the front to partake in the ritual. My grandfather gave me a furious look. My whole family didn’t understand why I couldn’t just play along for the sake of my sister’s ceremony. It felt existential.

That’s how deeply I had ingrained my identity as a non-believer. Throughout my youth and early 20s, I was exclusively interested in science and the material world. I had no doubts that at the end of human life, what awaited us was simply “lights out”.

My worldview has obviously evolved a lot over the past five years.

It’s evolved for one reason, and one reason only: I got new evidence.

The thing about mystical experiences (psychedelic and non-psychedelic ones alike) is that they are experiential. Contrary to religion, which teaches beliefs that you may choose to adopt or not, spirituality teaches through personal experience.

So, if, like me, you have a deep-rooted aversion to anything related to organized religion, please do not let that stop you here. There is a lot of nuance. And if you are deeply religious, please stay and don’t let my (past) aversion get in the way between you, me, and the Divine.

The Divine Nature of Plant Medicine

In some ways, the hardest thing to integrate about the psychedelic experience is not the trauma it brings up, the stuck emotions it helps you process, or the beliefs it can reveal.

In some ways, the hardest thing about the psychedelic experience to make sense of is the fact that these substances exist to begin with. Not only do they exist, they exist abundantly in nature.

You can eat, drink, or smoke a plant, fungus, or animal secretion that produces an altered state of consciousness that may trigger the following experiences:

• Hyper-personalized memories that have left an emotional imprint on your psyche come up