Is It Necessary to Have a Mystical Experience With Psychedelics?
Unpacking the psychedelic experience: is cosmic enlightenment an essential milestone or merely a scenic side trip?
One of the biggest things psychonauts will tell you when trying to explain an experience on psychedelics is, “I can’t put it into words.”
This characteristic — “ineffability” — is a defining feature of “mystical experiences.”
As one study puts it:
“[T]he mystical experience is not, in and of itself, simply the experience of religious or spiritual insight … Mystical experiences are defined as a self-reported experience of unity accompanied by the additional dimensions of experience as outlined by Stace.”
Initial research is pointing to the importance of these events for ensuring success in clinical outcomes, but there’s a lot we still don’t know.
Here’s a snapshot of what we do know:
1. Within small trials, the mystical experience seems to correlate with successful outcomes
To standardize data and experiences, researchers developed a 30-item Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30).
These trials often use imperfect methods on small sample sizes and rarely offer more than a few dosing protocols or therapeutic procedures.
2. Mystical experiences from psychedelics result from several factors
This includes pharmacological, mental, and more.
Higher dosages may improve the chances of a mystical experience, but drugs are hardly the only thing to cause them. While we can prepare for mystical experiences, we can’t guarantee them.
3. Having a mystical experience doesn’t automatically improve someone, and it’s not inherently essential for psychedelics to be beneficial
Seeking psychedelics for mystical experiences without incorporating the messages into your life is a form of spiritual bypassing (more on this later).
While elements of psychedelics may enhance or encourage mystical experiences, these same qualities could exacerbate bad trips.
Spiritual Bypassing: When Mysticism Goes Wrong
If you don’t return to life, you aren’t bringing enlightenment back with you — you are merely visiting the place where enlightenment exists.
Or, as the Zen proverb puts it:
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
While the mystical experience is typically something people seek out, it can become a hindrance. When users seek the experience of mysticism over implementing the messages of those experiences, they run into the danger of spiritual bypassing — or psychedelic bypassing.
Bypassing involves hiding behind the practices or emotions of spirituality to elevate perceived status above others without implementing the messages within your own life. The practice looks for the rewards of spirituality without regard for any of the work.
Within the world of psychedelics, it’s likely even easier than it would be in religion since the substances can produce a reliably mystical experience. As a result, psychedelic enthusiasts face the risk of continually consuming psychedelic drugs and thinking their trip is a lesson in and of itself.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with taking psychedelics for fun, and recreational users don’t necessarily have to integrate every experience.
“Psychedelic bypassing” happens when users continually turn to psychedelics recreationally but act or believe they’re more spiritual as a result.
Being religious doesn’t make a person automatically exemplary, and having religious-type experiences doesn’t make a person more spiritual or “elevated” than others.
Psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers, and they don’t inherently make a person good (or even better).
Traditional Views of the Mystical Experience
Albert Hofmann and Richard Evans Schultes detailed the connection between psychedelics and indigenous cultures’ attempts to commune with the gods. They wrote the following in Plants of the Gods:
For the Huichol [indigenous peoples] of Mexico, the Peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii) … is not a plant but a god, a gift from the Earth Goddess to humans to assist them in attaining a connection to her in the mystical realms.
The Mazatec people of Mexico have a long history of using psilocybin mushrooms, which they refer to as "teonanácatl," which translates to something like "flesh of the gods." They believed the psychedelic experience induced by these mushrooms was a form of communion with the divine.
Indigenous cultures often looked to psychedelic and intoxicating plants for various reasons. Many — though not all — involved the mystical experience as a core part of the healing.
Explaining Rapid Changes in Personality
Psychologist William R. Miller calls “sudden, dramatic, and enduring transformations that affect a broad range of personal emotion, cognition, and behavior” quantum change.
According to him, there are two main types of changes that can occur:
The Mystical (Epiphany Type) 🤯 — May come as the result of a spiritual, dramatic event. “They are transient states of consciousness, usually lasting for only a few minutes and distinctly different from normal consciousness.” Miller doesn’t mention psychedelics directly but cites an unpublished doctoral dissertation from Harvard on the topic.
The Insightful Type 🧘♀️ — A “noetic element of sudden realization or knowing.” Whether intentional or not, Miller uses the same language found on the ASC scale.
Again, Miller never references drugs directly, but an argument exists for psychedelic-induced capability for both types of quantum change he presents.
Should You Chase the Mystical Experience?
It depends on your reason for taking psychedelics. If you want to change, improve, or contemplate some element of yourself, the mystical experience may make change more profound — according to preliminary research on the subject.
Conversely, if you’re planning to use psychedelics recreationally, you may or may not want the mystical experience. While the euphoria of these emotions is often enjoyable recreationally as well, sometimes psychonauts aren’t looking for an experience to floor them.
Psychedelics have profound potential to change deep elements of our personality and being, but they don’t inherently do so. Sometimes, it’s fine to take smaller or moderate doses of psychedelics when you want to work through problems less chaotically or simply watch your favorite trippy movie.
Whether you plan to:
Take a large or small dose
Have fun at a concert or meditate through your deepest trauma
Re-watch Interstellar, timing your peak for the black-hole scene, or listen to classical music in total darkness with a blindfold on
or any other reason, purpose, and setting you wish to take psychedelics in
The best way to take psychedelics is intentionally, confidently, and knowledgeably.
Further Reading: The Mystical Experience
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Credits & Shoutouts:
Article by J Gordon Curtis
Artwork by Diki Giyat
Edited By Justin Cooke