Psychedelics and Awakening

Does it matter how the door opens?

A person spends twenty years meditating and experiences a profound sense of unity with everything around them. The ordinary separation between self and world falls away. There is stillness, clarity and a deep sense of peace.

Another person takes psilocybin and experiences something remarkably similar. The ordinary sense of self disappears. Everything feels deeply connected. For several hours, life is experienced with an immediacy and clarity they have never known before.

But what exactly is the difference?

For many people, the idea that psychedelics could have a place in spirituality is almost a contradiction. Spiritual awakening is supposed to come through meditation, prayer, yoga, discipline, devotion or many years of inner work. Psychedelics appear to offer a chemical shortcut, and shortcuts are regarded with suspicion.

Some religious and contemplative traditions reject them entirely. In Buddhism, for example, the fifth precept is commonly understood as an instruction to avoid intoxicants that lead to heedlessness. The concern is understandable. An altered state can produce confusion as easily as clarity. People can become fascinated with extraordinary experiences, mistake temporary states for enlightenment or emerge with enormous certainty about ideas that may not be true.

Psychedelics can also simply be used for entertainment. Someone may enjoy the colours, sensations and strangeness of the experience without the slightest interest in spiritual awakening.

None of this is in dispute.

But it still does not answer the central question: does the way an experience was reached determine whether it can have spiritual significance?

What makes an experience authentic?

Meditation changes our state. So do fasting, chanting, prayer, breathwork, yoga, music, dancing, sensory deprivation, extreme physical exertion, grief, love and encounters with death. Every one of these has an effect on the body and brain.

We do not usually dismiss an experience produced by fasting because low blood sugar and altered body chemistry contributed to it. We do not call the stillness reached through controlled breathing artificial because changing the breath changes the nervous system. We do not reject an experience of profound connection brought about by music because the music caused it.

Why, then, should an experience become spiritually meaningless simply because a psychedelic substance helped bring it about?

This does not mean that a psychedelic state and a meditative state are exactly the same. Meditation itself does not produce one single state, and neither do psychedelics. There are differences between substances, doses, people, circumstances and practices.

But there is considerable overlap in the territory people describe.

The familiar sense of being a separate self may weaken or disappear. Thought may become quiet, or it may be seen from a distance rather than experienced as an unquestionable description of reality. Time may lose its ordinary importance. The boundary between the person and the surrounding world may soften. There may be an extraordinary sense of immediacy, unity, love or acceptance.

People have reported similar experiences through meditation, yoga, prayer, extreme sport, spontaneous spiritual awakening and psychedelics. The routes differ, and the experiences will never be identical, but they need not be divided into one authentic category and one counterfeit category.

When psychedelics begin the search

For many people, a psychedelic experience is the beginning of a spiritual journey rather than the end.

Someone who has never questioned the ordinary sense of self may experience it disappearing completely. Someone who has always believed that thoughts accurately describe reality may suddenly encounter life without the usual stream of explanation. Someone who has felt separate from everything around them may experience profound connection for the first time.

Whatever explanation they later give to it, they now know that their ordinary way of experiencing life is not the only one possible.

That discovery can be deeply unsettling, but it can also begin a process of questioning that might never otherwise have started.

This is not merely a claim made by psychedelic enthusiasts. In one controlled study, 58 percent of participants rated their psilocybin experience among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives fourteen months later, while 67 percent placed it among their five most spiritually significant experiences. In another study, psilocybin used alongside meditation and other spiritual practices was associated with lasting changes in meaning, gratitude, interpersonal closeness and other measures of psychological and spiritual well-being. Research comparing spontaneous spiritual awakenings with other altered states has also found strong similarities with experiences produced by psilocybin and DMT.

These studies do not prove that psychedelics reveal God, another dimension or the ultimate nature of reality. They do, however, make it difficult to maintain that psychedelic experiences have nothing to do with spirituality.
(Griffiths et al., 2008; Griffiths et al., 2018; Corneille and Luke, 2021)

What happened, and what does it mean?

A person may experience complete unity with God. Another may describe an apparently similar experience as ego dissolution. Someone else may call it pure awareness, connection with life or a temporary change in perception.

We do not have to choose between these explanations.

The experience is true as experience. The person experienced unity, timelessness, divine presence, complete love or the disappearance of the self. That should not be dismissed or explained away.

But what the experience proves about God, the universe, consciousness, previous lives or the nature of reality remains open to interpretation.

Keeping this distinction does not take the beauty or depth away from the experience. It allows us to respect what happened without immediately turning it into a belief that everyone else must accept. No belief has to be joined, and none has to be left behind.

Approaching the experience with care

Psychedelics can open experiences of extraordinary depth and beauty, but their intensity can also become difficult or overwhelming. This is why they should not be approached casually. Good preparation—understanding what may happen, considering one’s physical and psychological circumstances, choosing an appropriate setting and having trustworthy support—can greatly reduce the risks and make it easier to meet whatever arises.

The same care is needed afterward. A psychedelic journey may last only a few hours, but what it brings into view can continue unfolding for days, weeks or much longer. Integration means giving this process space through rest, reflection, conversation and attention to what changes in ordinary life. If the experience remains confusing or unsettling, appropriate support can help.

Preparation helps someone enter the experience with care. Integration helps them carry something useful back from it. Neither can guarantee what will happen, but together they create far better conditions for a psychedelic experience to contribute to spiritual growth rather than remain merely an extraordinary event.

An experience is not yet an awakening

There is another distinction that matters just as much.

A profound experience of awakening is not necessarily the same as living an awakened life.

A person may experience complete unity on Saturday and be fighting with everyone around them again on Monday. They may briefly become free of the familiar self and then build a new identity around being spiritually advanced. An experience that loosens certainty can even produce new certainty: I have seen the truth. I now understand what reality really is.

This possibility is not unique to psychedelics. Meditation, religious experience and spiritual practice can also become sources of pride, identity and escape. But the speed and intensity of psychedelic experiences may make the confusion especially tempting.

Psychedelics can open something very quickly. They cannot decide what happens afterward.

The more important questions begin when the experience is over. Has anything changed in how the person meets life? Are they less controlled by fear? Less identified with every thought that appears? More able to meet uncertainty? More honest with themselves? More compassionate toward other people? More at peace with what is?

This is where an experience becomes part of a process.

So, do psychedelics have a role?

Psychedelics are not inherently spiritual. Neither, for that matter, is sitting cross-legged with closed eyes. The appearance of a spiritual practice does not determine what is happening within it.

Psychedelics can be used for amusement, escape, healing, curiosity, self-exploration or spiritual inquiry. They can produce insight and confusion, love and fear, humility and inflated certainty. They do not guarantee awakening, and they cannot replace the way someone lives when the experience is over.

But they can interrupt the ordinary organisation of experience. They can temporarily loosen the boundaries of the familiar self and reveal that life can be experienced differently. For some people, this becomes the first opening in a process that continues through meditation, contemplation, therapy, daily life or simply a more attentive way of being here.

We do not have to claim that every psychedelic experience is spiritual. We only have to stop declaring that none of them can be.

A door may open through meditation. It may open through prayer, grief, love, yoga, exhaustion, beauty or a brush with death. And sometimes it opens through a psychedelic experience.

What matters is not only how the door opened.

What matters is what happens when we walk through it.