Psychedelics, Meditation & Enlightenment - Part 1

Psychedelics can be a gateway to incredibly profound experiences, many of them matching closely to what mystics have proclaimed throughout the ages: a deeply felt peace and joy, interconnectedness between all things, undifferentiated awareness, and the sense of transcending both time and space. Whilst these experiences are often felt to be deeply ‘true’ and ‘real’, perceptions can appear paradoxical, and impossible to express in words. 

As science slowly turns its gaze towards this area, similar peak experiences have been studied as religious epiphany, meditative trance and ‘flow states’ in sport and performance, and recently, fascinating correlations with psychedelic experiences are being uncovered at institutions that include Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London and Kings College London. For some, these events can be life changing catalysts, and there strong hope emerging that these substances will assist people in overcoming addiction and depression and other treatment resistant disorders. They may even offer a renewed sense of meaning to those facing life-threatening illness. 

But there is another category far less studied, indeed often viewed with suspicion as to if it even exists: the state of a continuous day to day experience sharing many of the features mentioned above. Such reports can range from a simple background feeling that everything is OK, to a complete falling away of any sense of individual agency or boundary. Rather than being a temporary peak state, it is reported as the way a person experiences their everyday existence, whether deep in meditation or whilst making a sandwich, and can persist over the course of weeks, months or an entire lifetime.  

“Real peace is when your mind goes 24 hours a day with no fear, no anxiety” - Dalai Lama

If such a way of experiencing life is indeed possible, it is a natural intuition amongst many psychonauts that psychedelics should assist in moving towards it. If a substance lends itself to a temporary glimpse of an altered state, surely it should contribute to this becoming an altered trait as opposed to an altered state? As it turns out, the story is a little less straightforward.  

Today, we examine the characteristics and evidence for ongoing experiences. Next month, in Part 2, we’ll discuss the extent to which psychedelics might either help or hinder the pursuit of such states. From Part 3 onwards we’ll introduce a series of podcasts and reports from individual mystics, meditators, psychonauts and researchers that dig into the many ways people combine psychedelics with other practices in the quest for fundamental changes to our baseline experience. Let’s begin!

Do permanent shifts in experience really exist, and if so, what are they? 

Throughout history many traditions have placed certain transitions in perception as the ultimate goal of existence, with labels such as enlightenment, awakening, realisation, non-dual consciousness and countless more. These terms are often so loaded with culturally specific beliefs, assumptions and hierarchies of attainment, that they tend to be so controversial and unhelpful in rational discussion. 

Instead, it seems more useful to focus on the range of phenomenological reports of contemporary individuals, and to leave aside any associated claims to these being ‘higher’ states of being, or associated with objectively deeper levels of reality, be it theological or scientific truth.  

In other words, I’m focusing on what does this feel like, and not whether it is a better way to live, or linked to any objective truth. 

There is surprisingly little scientific research in this area, but exceptions include Steve Taylor and Jeffrey Martin. Both have independently attempted to outline a variety of features reported in people’s sense of self, cognition, emotions, memory, and perception. 

They find that similar to temporary flow states and mystical experiences, people may report a deeply felt peace and joy, irrespective of the immediate circumstances. With increased attention on the present moment, thoughts can be reported as greatly diminished or absent, with any arising notions of past or future seen as a projection or memory, a kind of hallucination that can only ever occur ‘now’.  

In contrast to an epiphany or peak experience, there is no hyper-arousal in the nervous system (elevated heart beat, unusual breathing patterns), nor the greatly reduced arousal of deep trance or absorption, both of which would interrupt normal everyday functioning. It is in this sense that the psychologist Abraham Maslow distinguishes between a peak experience and a plateau experience. 

There may be the feeling of synchronous flow, of everything being perfectly in the right place, and of reality having an underlying ‘being’ that doesn’t depend on its form. 

The sense of individualised self may be diminished, absent, or absorbed into the surroundings in a way that is difficult to describe. This shift may arise gradually, or in a sudden transition as described by popular spiritual teacher Adyashanti: 

“There was a deeply felt kinesthetic sense of being everything and at the same time nothing. I knew with my whole being that who I really was wasn’t even the oneness, it was the emptiness prior to the oneness, forever awake to itself. This knowing has never changed or faded in any way.”

Rather than being one uniform experience, countless variations are possible, with potentially no two experiences of this nature being exactly alike. 

But is there any evidence?

I acknowledge any enduring skepticism is valid. People making such claims are potentially delusional, disassociated, or perhaps promoting a self image and wilfully deceiving others. 

However, Neuro-imaging research is adding at least some validity to such claims, indicating that the patterns of brain behaviour in long-term meditators is significantly different to the broader population, both throughout the day and even during sleep.

Some of these observations match the kinds of patterns that we see in individuals undergoing psychedelic trips. Richard Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin found that meditators show less mind wandering, less self-obsessed thoughts, improved working memory, brain and hormonal indicators of lowered stress and inflammation, and a weakening of circuitry for attachment. The most advanced meditators even display a resonance of brain and heart rhythms not seen in the rest of the population.   

In simple language, they are significantly more chilled out.

An increasingly well known example is Gary Weber, thanks to being the subject of several studies. Gary says his mind is now almost totally silent of thoughts and his day to day experience rooted in the bliss of the present moment.

After doing a lot of meditation, a lot of yoga, I found myself one morning doing a yoga posture, and I went up into it one way, and came back down and my referential narrative ‘bla-bla’ had just stopped. Completely zero. It’s been that way for 14 years now, except when my blood sugar gets very low or I get very tired. But that’s how my life goes, its just completely still inside, and yet I can still pass for being functional.

When scanned by neuroscientists at Yale, his brain patterns did in fact resemble those seen during psychedelic trips and meditative trance, even when he isn’t meditating. 

Sounds impressive. What’s the catch?

It's worth pointing out that such transitions can come with challenges, especially amongst those not embedded in a tradition that accepts and supports them. There can be a period of loss of motivation, a reduction in useful self-reflection, a sense of alienation from mainstream concerns, and depending on the culture, these individuals may be granted a status and authority for which they are not well-suited. 

Contrary to popular imagination, it’s possible that attaining some aspects of these experiences does not lead to any additional wisdom, maturity or insight relevant to normal social behaviour or organisation. In other words, experiencing ongoing bliss does not mean someone is going to give great advice or make wise and ethical life choices. This may be a factor that would partly explain the abundance of poorly behaved gurus and other spiritual teachers, assuming they are not all complete charlatans. 

Perhaps most curious of all, when encountering someone from your own culture reporting this experience, you’re unlikely to notice anything different about them. In contrast to most assumptions, shifts in perception can leave behaviour relatively unchanged. 

Its that thing that is happening NOW

An important distinction between a temporary and the persistent experience, is that the ongoing experience doesn’t refer back to something that happened in the past. A profound mystical experience can change someone’s beliefs, their life choices and their very sense of meaning, this is often in reference to something they saw, felt or understood back then. 

In this persistent experience the reference point is this moment “now”. It does not depend on the past for validation, or on entering an altered state or seeing entities and other unusual phenomena. It exists with the ordinary experience of reading these words, hearing whatever you are hearing, feeling whatever you are feeling. 

Scientific research in this area is still in its infancy, and if you still have doubts, I wouldn’t blame you. Blind faith has its merits, but the Buddha himself exhorted followers to not trust tradition or report, but to investigate for themselves the validity of his claims based on their own felt experience. 

Personally, I’ve experienced enough temporary glimpses of similar states, lasting anything from a few minutes to a few weeks, that I’m inclined to believe that deeper and more continuous versions of the same experience are possible. 

Whilst sharing and participating in many techniques that are known to shift perception in this direction, I have also have witnessed dozens of others experience both temporary and ongoing shifts of perception which appear very genuine to me. 

So, I’m intrigued to continue discovering - if you share this curiosity, please tune for Part 2 where we discuss to what extent psychedelics might help or hinder such pursuits.