**TW: Childhood sexual abuse, parental death, psychedelic experience.**
**Note: I've changed the names in this story to protect my privacy.**
I don't even know where to begin.
Going into this experience, I was an atheist. I had so many questions about God, consciousness, religion, death, suffering, and the meaning of human existence.
Last night, I tried mushrooms for the first time.
What happened was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I'm writing this the following morning because I don't want to forget a single part of it.
I feel like a completely different person.
I'm not claiming that everything I experienced was objectively real or that I've discovered the secrets of the universe. I'm simply trying to explain what happened inside my mind and how profoundly it affected me.
**1. I felt like I left my body and met myself.**
At one point, I felt as though I existed outside my own body.
I was no longer Adam, the child I used to be, or Evan, the adult I had become.
I felt like an entirely different being, something beyond both identities.
I felt like a god, connected to every human being who had ever existed, living or dead. I felt like I was part of something infinite.
And then something extraordinary happened.
I began having conversations with two versions of myself.
Adam, the little boy.
And Evan, the adult.
I was somehow both of them and also the being observing them.
For the first time, I felt like I was looking at my entire life from the outside, not as a series of painful or happy memories, but as one complete story.
**2. I met the little boy I used to be.**
I talked to Adam about his childhood.
But it wasn't like remembering something. It felt like actually meeting him, listening to him, and understanding him.
We talked about my mother and father.
I realized something I had never fully appreciated before: my parents were human beings with their own stories long before I existed.
They had childhoods, dreams, fears, hopes, disappointments, and struggles.
They suffered so much.
They fought through life, and no matter how badly life beat them down, they kept standing back up.
They tried their best. Even when everything seemed impossible, they kept fighting, often with a positive attitude.
My mother is still fighting today.
And suddenly I realized something.
**That's where my resilience came from.**
It came from them.
Every time I stood back up after life knocked me down, I was carrying something they had passed on to me.
I felt overwhelmingly proud to be their son.
Then I asked Adam about his childhood.
And he surprised me.
He told me he was okay with it.
Not because everything that happened was good, but because he understood that his childhood had become part of his story.
He was glad he had lived his life.
He even forgave the people who hurt him.
He seemed to understand that human beings have emotions, histories, fears, and struggles of their own. People make terrible mistakes. People hurt one another. And although that does not excuse their actions, he felt that compassion and mercy were better than carrying hatred forever.
We even talked about something I rarely discuss.
As a child, I experienced sexual assault and rape by a cousin.
I expected that memory to be painful.
But Adam spoke about it with a surprising sense of peace.
He understood that what happened was terribly wrong. He wasn't defending it or pretending it didn't matter.
But he didn't want it to define him.
He didn't want to spend the rest of his existence carrying the actions of someone who had hurt him.
He seemed to have accepted that it happened without allowing it to determine who he would become.
I had never seen my younger self that way.
I felt proud of that little boy.
**3. Then I met the adult version of myself, and we talked about my father's death.**
My father died after suffering from a serious illness.
His death has always been part of my story.
But during this experience, I looked at it differently.
Evan, my adult self, told me that illness and death were natural parts of existence.
My father was born. He lived. He loved. He struggled. He had children. He experienced happiness and suffering.
And eventually, his life ended.
That was his time in this world.
For some reason, I suddenly felt at peace with that.
It wasn't that I loved him any less. It wasn't that losing him didn't matter.
It was that I stopped seeing his life only through the tragedy of his death.
He had an entire existence before that final moment.
And in the spiritual framework I was experiencing, I felt that he had returned to the interconnected nature of everything.
He had returned to the Creator.
To whatever it is that we all originally came from.
I don't know how else to explain it.
For the first time, I felt like I could appreciate his entire life instead of focusing only on how it ended.
**4. I felt like I had chosen my own life.**
While observing Adam and Evan, I experienced another strange realization.
I felt as though I had somehow chosen Adam.
And I felt incredibly lucky that I had gotten him.
I looked at this little boy and thought:
He's strong.
He's resilient.
He's a fighter.
He has suffered, but he has never stopped trying.
I felt that he was capable of accomplishing extraordinary things.
And I was so proud of him.
Then I began seeing my whole story.
My childhood, my family, my parents, my father's death, my struggles, my mistakes, my accomplishments, and every decision that had led me to that moment.
Everything felt connected.
It was as if I could finally read my own life like a book.
And I loved the story.
Not because it was perfect.
But because it was mine.
**5. I experienced different lives and began questioning reality itself.**
At different points, I felt as though I was living other lives.
Other people.
Other beings.
Other realities.
I started thinking about what it means for something to be real.
If a human being imagines a story, even a completely fictional one, doesn't that story still exist in some form?
It exists in human thought.
It exists in imagination.
It can create real emotions, influence real decisions, and change the lives of real people.
Maybe something doesn't have to physically exist for it to have a form of reality.
This led me into even deeper thoughts about consciousness and existence.
I felt connected to the entire world.
At one point, I felt like a god.
I felt like I could alter reality and achieve anything I wanted.
Nothing seemed impossible.
It was an overwhelming sense of possibility, freedom, and connection.
**6. I was an atheist, but suddenly God made sense to me in a completely different way.**
This was one of the most powerful parts of the experience.
I started thinking about souls.
If we all have souls, and our souls come from God, then perhaps we are all part of God in some way.
Perhaps we exist within Him, and He exists within us.
Perhaps every human being is one expression of something much larger.
And then I began thinking about prayer.
What if the reason human beings have always sought spiritual experiences is that we're trying to reconnect with whatever we originally came from?
What if prayer, meditation, yoga, religion, and spirituality are different human attempts to reach that connection?
What if, when we pray to God, we are trying to reconnect with the source of our existence?
I thought about Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, and other prophets.
And during the experience, I became convinced that perhaps they had gone through something spiritually similar.
I wondered whether the stories in the Quran and the Bible, the miracles, the prophecies, and the mystical experiences described throughout human history might contain truths about consciousness or existence that we don't fully understand.
I don't know whether any of those ideas are literally true.
But at that moment, they felt incredibly clear.
I felt like I finally understood why human beings seek God.
And for someone who had spent so much time questioning religion and existence, that feeling was extraordinary.
**7. I felt like I received a prophecy about my future.**
This part is difficult to explain.
I felt like I received a message that I was destined for great things.
That I shouldn't spend my life worrying so much.
That my problems were things I could face with strength, humility, patience, and resilience.
I felt that I needed to stop allowing fear and stress to control me.
But the message wasn't about becoming rich, powerful, or better than other people.
It was about helping them.
I felt that I was supposed to be kind.
To defend people.
To help people who are suffering.
To make others happy.
To give people reasons to enjoy their lives.
To use whatever abilities I have to make the world a little better.
And that realization leads to something I want to say about my future.
**8. I want to dedicate my life to studying and helping human beings.**
I've always been interested in understanding people, society, politics, history, and the world.
But now that curiosity feels even stronger.
I want to dedicate my life to learning about us.
Human beings.
Who we are. Why we behave the way we do. Why we love, suffer, hate, cooperate, fight, forgive, and search for meaning.
I want to study philosophy.
I want to study human nature, consciousness, religion, history, and the different ways people throughout time have tried to understand existence.
I want to keep reading and learning for the rest of my life.
And I want to become a lawyer.
Not simply because I want a successful career.
**I want to become a lawyer because I want to defend people who are disadvantaged, marginalized, or unable to defend themselves.**
I want to fight for people whose voices are ignored.
I want to stand up for those who have been treated unfairly.
I want to use my education, my opportunities, and whatever strength I have to help other human beings.
If every person has a story as meaningful as mine, then every person deserves dignity and compassion.
And I want my life to reflect that belief.
**9. I realized how meaningless hatred and racism are.**
During the experience, I felt connected to every human being who has ever lived.
And I kept coming back to one thought.
Hatred is stupid.
Racism is meaningless.
Why do we divide ourselves so much?
Why do we hate people because of the color of their skin, their appearance, their background, or the circumstances of their birth?
Every human being has a story.
Every person has been a child.
Every person has experienced fear, happiness, sadness, hope, and suffering.
Every person has dreams.
Every person is trying to make sense of the world through their own experiences.
And every person has a life that matters to them just as much as mine matters to me.
I felt that humanity had moved so far away from understanding this.
We created so many divisions, so much hatred, and so much unnecessary suffering.
I felt like we had forgotten what we originally were.
I experienced an overwhelming sense that all of us are extraordinary.
I felt supreme.
But not because I was superior to anyone.
I felt supreme because I existed, because I was conscious, because I was human.
And everyone else was equally supreme.
No matter their color, face, appearance, nationality, or background.
Everyone has a story.
Everyone has a life.
And if souls exist, everyone has a soul.
We should cherish that.
We should cherish ourselves and one another.
**10. We don't need alcohol or substances to appreciate existence.**
Something else became clear to me.
We have this extraordinary world around us.
Nature.
Mountains.
Trees.
Oceans.
Animals.
Other people.
Knowledge.
Art.
Philosophy.
Science.
History.
There is so much to experience, understand, and appreciate.
Why do we spend so much time disconnecting ourselves from it?
Why do we need alcohol or other substances to enjoy ourselves or escape our lives?
I understand the irony of having this realization during a mushroom experience.
But that's part of what made it so powerful to me.
**I don't want to spend my life chasing another altered state of consciousness. I want to experience the life that's already in front of me.**
I want to go outside.
Connect with nature.
Study.
Read.
Learn.
Exercise.
Help my family.
Meet people.
Understand them.
Enjoy the simple fact that I am alive.
I don't think I need mushrooms anymore.
In fact, I don't think I will ever do them again.
I feel like I got what I was looking for.
And now I want to take those feelings and use them to build a meaningful life without needing a substance to experience them again.
**11. I feel like a completely different person.**
I woke up this morning feeling changed.
Deeply changed.
I don't know how to describe it.
It's as if I had spent my entire life looking at the world through one window, and suddenly someone showed me another.
I felt like I understood everything.
Every question I had about life, God, suffering, death, human nature, and existence seemed to have an answer.
Everything felt connected.
Of course, I understand that I was under the influence of a powerful psychedelic substance, and that the certainty I experienced doesn't prove that all my conclusions are correct.
I want to continue studying, questioning, and learning.
But I also don't want to dismiss how meaningful the experience was to me.
Because the most important thing I experienced wasn't necessarily a revelation about the universe.
It was a new understanding of myself.
I met the little boy I used to be.
I looked at his suffering.
I listened to his story.
I forgave him for the things he blamed himself for.
I felt compassion for the people who had hurt him, without excusing their actions.
I understood my parents differently.
I felt proud of my mother and father.
I looked at my father's death with a sense of peace.
I saw my adult self and realized how much he had already overcome.
And most importantly, I felt an overwhelming sense of love for human beings.
I don't want to forget this.
I will never forget what I experienced last night.
I know the intensity of these feelings may change over time, but I want the lessons I took from them to shape how I live.
I don't need to be perfect.
I don't need to become better than anyone else.
I just want to become the best version of myself that I can possibly be.
I want to learn.
I want to love.
I want to understand.
I want to help.
I want to fight for people who need someone standing beside them.
And I want to appreciate every moment I have in this extraordinary world.
**I am the little boy who struggled.**
**I am the adult who survived.**
**And I am the person who gets to decide what happens next.**
I am proud of my story.
I am proud of where I came from.
And I want to dedicate the rest of my life to becoming someone who makes this world better for other people.
I was an atheist going into this experience.
I don't know exactly what I believe now.
But I know that I want to spend my life searching, learning, and trying to understand.
And I don't think I will ever look at humanity the same way again.