I was born into a Mormon family in a predominantly Mormon community. I thought of God as my spiritual father, a tangible person like my own biological father but perfect and all-powerful. He lived on another planet far away and could see and hear everything that happened on Earth through the Holy Ghost. I believed that my purpose in life was to obey God so that after I die he would make me like him and I would have my own spirit children. I had to accomplish this by obeying his commandments and asking for forgiveness when I broke them, so that I could be made clean again through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The way to know his commandments was by listening to the leaders of the church. I could also pray when I needed help from God for my personal issues but mostly I just needed to do what the prophets and apostles said. I believed that Satan is an evil spirit that lives on Earth with his other spirit followers and they are constantly trying to get God’s children to sin.

I believed all of this fully until I was 22 years old. I spent countless hours in church meetings, in personal scripture study, seminary lessons, youth activities, and family discussions all centered around this belief system. I had spiritual experiences where I felt truly connected to God and overcome with joy and peace. I even devoted two years to preach about it to strangers full-time. Naturally, the only force that was able to crack this fortress of belief was love.

The Mormon church teaches that romantic love and sex are a gift from God and an integral part of our purpose on Earth. They also claim, however, that romantic love and sex between two men or two women is sinful. For a while this made sense to me since only a male and a female can reproduce. I thought that God must be angry when we don’t have sex for that purpose. I eventually realized, however, that sex between a husband and wife was never considered a sin even if they weren’t able to have children. I also knew there were people that had sexual and romantic attractions exclusively to the same sex. I knew this because I was one of those people. At this point I saw two possibilities: either the attraction I felt to other men was just a temptation from Satan that I had to resist my entire life (as I had been doing since puberty), or it was a perfectly normal variation of romantic attraction that the church condemned because it didn’t fit their narrative. The first scenario didn’t jive very well with my view of God. It seemed like a rather cruel joke to play on us, giving Satan that kind of power. It certainly didn’t seem like the action of a God who loves unconditionally and wants all his children to pass his test. As I was leaning towards accepting the second possibility, I became aware of more troubling information about the church’s teachings and history that quickly widened that crack in my faith until the entire structure came tumbling down.

I had been deceived my entire life. I had believed what I couldn’t confirm with my senses because I had been conditioned since I was born. I had resisted facts that contradicted what church leaders taught. I had carried a huge burden of guilt for supposed offenses against God that didn’t harm a single soul. I had spent a large part of my life learning about God’s plan for me only to discover that it was all a fiction.

God was a disappointment. He was no longer necessary. He didn’t create the world like the Bible said. He didn’t create humans. Humans evolved. Science discovered that. Science was reliable. I didn’t need to believe that there was any reality but that which we can observe. Anything else was just wishful thinking.

This new materialist worldview served me well. I felt free. No more prohibitions on who to love, what to eat or drink, or how to spend my time. No more fear of supernatural forces trying to bring me down. I could define my own moral values based on principles like fairness and compassion. I felt a newfound curiosity about the world and especially the people who inhabit it. I traveled to unfamiliar countries and had exhilarating new experiences. I found love and began a committed relationship. I didn’t believe there was an afterlife but I was mostly ok with the idea of ceasing to exist at death.

My intellectual curiosity led me to question everything. I read books about the true origins of Christianity and about the bases of human morality. I learned about the evolution of life and what physics has shown us about the nature of matter and space-time. I studied linguistics at university and began to understand that we have only scratched the surface of understanding the nature of human language. I came to understand that a language is not a static thing, not just a set of words and rules, but a complex adaptive system. It is a cultural organism that inhabits the minds of its speakers. What a word or sentence means always depends on the immediate context. It is built up in a child’s mind piece by piece using cognitive abilities in an unconscious way. Language is how we break the world into separate things by assigning symbols to concepts. There is no doubt that language is, in large part, what makes us human. But what is language made of? It is manifested in the world through sound waves in the air or symbols on a page or screen, but that isn’t really its essence. Language is information. It’s in the mind.

This realization that language and culture are very real yet immaterial things led me to explore even deeper philosophical questions. I started learning about Buddhism and found that it resembled very little the western religions I was familiar with. It started not from assumptions about the existence of an all-powerful deity but with simple facts about the human experience. The Buddha discovered the nature of reality through introspection. He observed that everything in the world is impermanent, that from one moment to the next the universe changes, whether in dramatically large or imperceptibly small ways. He saw how everything in the world is interconnected, how every event is conditioned by the circumstances leading up to it. He understood that the suffering of living beings is a result of clinging to impermanent things and that the way to end suffering is by letting go of those attachments and focusing attention on the present moment. Buddhism really opened my eyes to the fact that what I think of as reality is a purely subjective experience that changes as time passes, and that my perception of myself as an unchanging being is an illusion. I began to practice meditation and saw positive effects on my mental and physical wellbeing.

A few years after leaving Mormonism, I was presented with the opportunity to try a psychedelic drug. I was somewhat apprehensive because of all the anti-drug rhetoric I had been fed my whole life, but I did my research and found out that there was little danger; it causes no harm to the body and is not addictive. I had already used marijuana regularly by this point and had discovered that it was not the dangerous gateway drug I had been told it was, so I knew that legality was not the best moral compass. I took the plunge and had a profound and enlightening experience. It was like someone had taken a filter off my eyes. It made me aware of many assumptions and biases in my thinking. I realized that our normal waking state of mind is a very filtered perspective that blocks out much of the information that is all around us. I also recognized that we have undergone so much cultural conditioning, even in our secular society, that we have become greatly disconnected from nature, the source of our existence. I listened to music and felt like it was the first time really hearing it as it penetrated my soul. This was the first of many psychedelic journeys which further expanded my consciousness. Much of what I experienced is impossible to put into words.

Such experiences with altered states of consciousness made me realize that there is much more to being than just material existence. I came to understand that although science is an excellent tool to figure out the physical world outside of us, and even how our bodies and brains work mechanically, in the current paradigm it cannot fully explain our subjective experience as conscious beings. In fact, many scientists today admit this. Quantum physics has found that matter is only stable when it is observed, meaning that there is not really an object without a subject. It seems that consciousness is at the very core of the universe; it is the field in which all matter exists.

My continued interest in consciousness led me to the teachings of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. He recognized that human beings share not only the same basic physical form; we also inherit a psyche which is not completely devoid of content but contains basic elements shared by all humans. He illustrated this by surveying the myths and stories of different cultures all over the world at different times and finding recurring patterns, different symbols that represented a certain way of being. He called them archetypes, and they are found in the mind of every person. They appear in our dreams, we embody them in certain circumstances, and we project them onto the people we interact with. They are part of being human as much as breathing air. Although they don’t exist in a material sense they are alive in the field of consciousness. They affect what we think and feel. When I realized this, I understood why people for millennia have believed in spirits. Ever since the human species developed a complex level of consciousness that made us aware of our own awareness, we have been trying to make sense of our inner experience. We make names for the powerful emotions we experience and the abstract ideas of our imagination and call them gods. We make stories to explain the changes we see as we traverse time in three-dimensional space. We seek after experience that connects us and makes us feel at one with each other and the rest of the universe.

I believe, as I did as a youth, that personal experience can teach you things that no other person can, but now I understand that these experiences should be personally and thoughtfully interpreted. That is where the Mormon church and many other organized religions lead people astray, they hijack your spiritual experience and tell you how you should interpret it. If your interpretation doesn’t align with the doctrine or what a priesthood authority says, then you are wrong or have been deceived by the devil. A positive spiritual tradition should provide you with the tools to experience altered states of consciousness and guidance in interpreting them, but not dictate to you what they mean and prescribe to you how you should live your life. You also shouldn’t take them to be absolute truth. We can learn much from “primitive” shamanistic cultures that developed traditions over millennia which use entheogenic plant medicines and other rituals to evoke spiritual experiences. They may not have achieved the technological advancement that our modern materialist society has, but they understand much better the human psyche and how to live in harmony with the rest of nature.

I now understand how important spiritual understanding and practice is for my wellbeing. The way a person explores and engages with spirituality should be a personal and informed decision; for me it takes the form of practicing daily yoga and meditation, meeting with a psychotherapist, mindfully using psychedelic medicines, learning from wise teachers both ancient and modern, reading uplifting and insightful books, meeting with a supportive community, spending time in nature, appreciating art, and spending time with the people I love. These are the things that really give my life meaning.

My life is much more meaningful now than when I was Mormon. My mind is expanded. I know that I could be wrong about anything and I don’t shy away from doubt. I use reason and logic to find the truth and ethics to determine what is good and fair. I feel more compassion for all living beings and a deeper connection with Mother Earth.

If we deny the existence of a metaphysical reality and write off all religious and spiritual traditions as just outdated superstitions, then we turn our backs on the collective wisdom our species has been amassing since time immemorial. We are complex psychic beings, an amalgamation of different mental processes that mostly occur unconsciously, outside of our immediate awareness. Unless we make them more conscious and uncover what’s driving them, we can be taken hostage by harmful ideologies. Our world today is full of such ideologies. Many people have made money their god and make amassing it their life’s purpose. Others accept the claim that their nation or group is superior to all others. It is true that our history is full of conflict between groups as we fought for resources, but fortunately we’ve reached a stage in our evolution where we can recognize that we are not really separate from each other. We are one interconnected web of life and we can move past those divisions.

I don’t fully understand the nature of reality or what exactly lies beyond this life I know, but I continue to seek understanding. I know that not everyone cares about spiritual things and are content with seeing the universe as inanimate. I won’t try to convince them otherwise. But for me, the world is more beautiful when I see the magic in it.