My thoughts on the philosophy of psychedelic research.
Note: I used artificial intelligence to edit my thoughts. It’s originally my thoughts, just edited. I was going to keep it as is, but ChatGPT did such a great job at editing it that I preferred that version.
I found this interesting video/lecture posted on the subreddit r/mysticism, and I had these thoughts as the lecture was progressing.
This researcher from a video titled “Philosophy of Psychedelics: Why Religion Matters” summarizes much of the research I have done independently. But his focus is the philosophy of psychedelics, whereas mine is broader and different in emphasis: the philosophy of God, the philosophy of mystical experience, and the sociology of spiritual experience across cultures and throughout history. That also includes the genealogy of religious experience itself.
To put it in my own words, and in an analogy that captures what many saints seem to suggest: psychedelics are like being given a tour of heaven. You may be permitted, for a time, to sit and speak with God, but you are not granted permanent residency there. Or, to borrow from Jedi Master Mace Windu’s line: “You are on the Council, but we do not grant you the rank of Master.”
That analogy is not meant to encourage elitism about mysticism or enlightenment. Quite the opposite. It is meant to preserve reverence for the divine wherever it appears, while also recognizing that the lightning cannot be captured in a bottle. It cannot be reduced to a scientific formula, a mathematical equation, a “theory of everything,” or a mushroom. The very desire to force the mystical experience into existence, as though it were a laboratory experiment, already misunderstands the phenomenon. In trying to reproduce it on command, one may prevent the very thing one seeks. The experience itself cannot be manufactured so easily, even if its phenomenology can be described from many different sources.
This is why something like DMT, the so-called “god drug,” can seem to me like a cheap and risky shortcut to the truth. I do not say that with hostility. I try to remain neutral and objective. Perhaps these plants and chemicals, whether natural or synthetic, can be approached reverently, even sacramentally. But it would be foolish to mistake them for the ultimate truth itself, because that would be a form of idolatry. It is one thing to revere an image of God, in one of its many forms, including no image at all, since all such forms may serve as representations of the infinite. It is another thing entirely to confuse the representation with God. That is the error.
Moreover, many saints and mystics seem to arrive at experiences with the same essential qualities reported by those who take psychedelics, but they do so by another route: through discipline, grace, surrender, contemplation, purification, or some deeper exercise of the soul. More importantly, they often appear better able to sustain the fruits of those experiences over time. The experience does not merely flash and disappear. It becomes integrated into life.
Anyone may encounter mystical experience, cosmic consciousness, or Oneness, but the means vary, and no one knows exactly how or why such things happen (or so they say). Sometimes it comes spontaneously. Sometimes a glimpse appears through long discipline and deep study. Sometimes it comes through drugs, hence psychedelics. Sometimes it comes through suffering, through epilepsy, through a near-death experience, through rupture, through grace. There are many doors, but the reality behind them may be one.
And this raises a question that matters to me: Is a glimpse enough? Is a glimmer enough? A spark? A twinkle? Is one brief contact sufficient, or is the deeper question whether the experience transforms the whole being?
A common phrase in psychedelic culture is “ego dissolution” or “ego death.” But I think there is a revealing question to ask here. What about someone who, before ever taking such a drug, already has little attachment to ego? Suppose there were a person who does not believe the ego is ultimately real, but sees it as a social construction. Suppose their sense of “I” never mattered to them in the same way it seems to matter to the other 99% of people who are committed to preserving identity, reputation, status, fame, and image. Could such a person experience “ego death” through psychedelics?
The question is almost rhetorical. If there is nothing to cling to, then what exactly dies? Such a person may already be far more prepared for spiritual, religious, or mystical experience than someone whose whole life is bound up in defending a self-image. Of course, the initial interpretation of the experience will still be shaped by one’s background. Language will differ. Symbols will differ. Religion and culture will color the description. But underneath those differences, something remains striking: across an enormous diversity of people, times, and traditions, the reports often converge.
That convergence suggests to me that different cultures may, in some deep sense, be pointing toward the same reality. They are speaking the same language by means of different vocabularies. Or rather, they are all straining toward what cannot finally be put into words at all: ineffability, no(n)-language, the unsayable.
Yet the fact that something is ineffable does not mean people have not spent centuries trying to describe it. Quite the opposite. There have been endless attempts by those with direct experience to articulate what happened to them, however partially, however imperfectly. As the philosopher Wes Cecil once joked, in discussing spiritual experience as someone who himself had not had such an awakening, for something called ineffable, those who experience it never seem to stop talking about it. The evidence is obvious enough: countless books on mysticism, countless books on religion, countless testimonies, commentaries, poems, metaphysical systems, confessions, sermons, and meditations.
And that is exactly where I stand. There is, to me, almost nothing more worth talking about. Or at the very least, it stands at the top of the hierarchy of questions. It feels like the final boss, the final level of existence, the furthest edge of inquiry. Everything else circles around it.
So I am left asking: is it possible that every relative truth points toward an objective one? That every partial symbol, every fragment, every cultural expression, every doctrine, every mystical testimony, however limited, is still orienting itself toward the same center?
What many dismiss as “New Age” often seems to be rediscovered through psychedelics. That is not to say the whole New Age world should be accepted uncritically. Discernment is still necessary. But it is interesting that atheists often dismiss religion outright, only to rediscover some form of religiosity through a material substance that induces a chemical reaction. Faced with something so immediate, so overwhelming, so direct, they can no longer ignore the possibility that reality exceeds their previous framework. Strangely and ironically, it becomes their version of testing God in a lab.
And that may be precisely why LSD, DMT, and similar substances seem especially fitted for the nonbeliever. Not because they prove God. Not because chemistry replaces revelation. But because for those unwilling to approach the divine through faith, tradition, contemplation, or prayer, they may offer at least one crack in the wall. They may force open, however briefly, the possibility that consciousness is deeper than the modern world has allowed, and that what religion, mysticism, and metaphysics have been trying to describe all along is not mere fantasy, but contact with something real.
My final thought (No AI): And so I leave this question for you to ponder: If someone can consistently be in a state of bliss, ecstasy, nirvana, moksha, etc., what use are psychedelics for them?
Random joke that I had that captures a mood I once saw on X.com. I want to get to the point in academia where all my footnotes and sources will just be: source: God.
Social Scholarly 