u/PanaceaNPx

I’ll be honest, I had never even heard of DMT until like 2 years ago. Never heard a single cultural reference in movies or any other kind of media. Never heard a politician talk about it. Never heard someone getting busted for having it.

I’m someone who feels like I know a little bit about everything but even still, it took a while to even come across this community.

To this day, I don’t know a single person in my orbit who even knows what it is. When I’ve brought it up I only get blank stares.

I’m not complaining because I’m not sure I want everyone I know blasting off regularly. It’s not that I want to gatekeep but it’s almost a sacred thing that I feel you have to seek out if that makes any sense. Maybe DMT reveals itself to you when you’re ready to find it.

It’s truly fascinating how hidden in plain sight this thing is for such a mind blowingly powerful molecule that it is.

My background and entire worldview is shaped by 30+ years as a devout and orthodox Mormon followed by a painful 4-5 years of radical deconstruction out of religion entirely.

For me, spiritual experiences once required worthiness. You couldn’t just expect god to give you a transcendent spiritual experience or gift, you had to be worthy to receive it.

What’s interesting to me about DMT and other psychedelics is that it doesn’t seem to discriminate. The only requirement is that you’re human.

But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe there actually is a requirement. Sure, some people are just handed it from a buddy. But for many of us, you kind of have to be on a journey to search it out and be ready for the moment.l when it finds you.

So in a way, you do have to be worthy. It’s just that you have to be the kind of person that is looking for its gifts in the first place even if you didn’t know you were on that journey at the beginning.

Seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.

Look, I spent 30+ years defending the church, trying to prove I was a Christian to others, thinking about my relationship with Jesus Christ, imagining him appearing to the Nephites, and on and on and on.

Every testimony meeting is an attempt to convince yourself that you have this special relationship with Jesus. At times it felt so real. Other times you’re just gaslighting yourself for the vibes.

But this war between Mormons and Christians will never end. It will never be settled. No one is going to win because it’s a winless debate.

It’s like debating about whether the end of rainbows have a treasure chest with gold coins or a box of lucky charms.

No one can actually ever get to that treasure chest because it doesn’t exist. That’s not how rainbows works.

No one gets to decide who is a Christian because it’s impossible to go back in time and ask Jesus what he really meant. The guy never even wrote anything down.

So you want to know who’s really at fault here? God himself.

I am so disappointed that the supposed god of Christianity is so utterly incompetent at his job as a god that billions of adults have to spend their entire adult life combing through scriptures, listening to podcasts, and praying to a voicelsss stranger to try to figure out WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN THIS UNIVERSE.

Like, it’s gods fault for this confusion. Not us. He deserves all the blame for making this fucked up religion that has spawned thousands of denominations. (None of it is real)

So, ENOUGH! Let’s move on to more important things as a civilization (science, progress, human happiness) rather than debating complete and total nonsense that has no absolution.

I have the most abstract memory of a movie I would have seen anywhere between about 1994 and 2000.

The only fragmented memory I have is that one or two men had all of these little balls like what you would find in a McDonalds play pen that were sent floating down a rooftop gutter system.

These men were potentially hoarders with stacks of newspaper in their house.

I was just a kid so I have no recollection of actors.

It wasn’t a kids movie because I saw it with my adult aunts and uncles. Seems like it was set in the UK, Europe, or some Eastern US city.

I once volunteered to clean the Rexburg temple with my wife about 15 years ago.

She spent the 2 hours dusting while I vacuumed (no dust was observed in her rags when finished).

I’ll never forget how much work went into the vacuuming and being floored when I was asked to then rake out the vacuum lines.

This memory just popped into my head and made me think about the absurdity of how much human time is wasted in these temples doing not just ceremonies for dead people but essentially deep cleaning them EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.

That same process has been taking place THOUSANDS of times since by BYU-Idaho students. Then multiply that by a couple hundred temples.

It’s just such a massive waste of everyone’s time.

From about 2012-2020, I can recall several times where I said to myself “I’ve got to recommit to this church I know and love. Starting today, I’m going to start reading the scriptures more intently and attending the temple with absolute devotion.”

So I’d crack my scriptures open and start reading again and again. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants were total and complete nonsensical.

There were too many problems everywhere that I identified independently which bothered me long before I listened to podcasts and was given the language to understand what I was feeling.

One time I even hurled my scriptures across the room and audibly yelled out in frustration at how underwhelming the Book of Mormon is. PROBLEMS! EVERYWHERE!

The same was true with the temple. I wanted this thing to be true. Desperately. But every time I went, I walked out dumbfounded.

I suspect there are thousands of people like me who didn’t want to become an exmormon. I gave it my full and sincere effort.

Now, on the outside and years after leaving the church, I no longer would want it to be true even if it were true.

My point is that the church’s narrative that people are just looking for ways to sin is complete nonsense. I did everything in my power to stay but simply couldn’t.

Imagine if there were no bananas. Then suddenly someone discovered a single banana tree deep in the forest and cultivated it for the world to eat.

It would be everyone’s first time experiencing that flavor and texture combination. But up until the point of discovery, no one could have imagined it as a flavor.

Or what if a single cocoa tree existed in the Amazon and someone finally figured out how to make chocolate in 2026.

What if there were millions of other potential fruits that just never came to be but had they evolved, we would have that flavor profile and it would have shaped culture completely differently.

The same is true with psychedelics. We have DMT, Psilocybin, LSD, and Mescaline in the same way we have apples, mangos, guava, and kiwis. We HAVE those compounds because they just so happen to be produced by plants or we’ve learned to synthesize them.

But what if the plants had created other compounds? What if there are millions of different theoretical compounds, each with a dramatically different experience for humans as shrooms are from DMT?

Like how do we know the limits on what a human could experience?