Psilocybin & Mycelium
When Science Meets the Mystical
For thousands of years, human beings have described experiences of profound unity. Mystics, meditators, religious practitioners and people undergoing extraordinary states of consciousness have used different languages for them.
Today, psychedelic researchers use another term: mystical-type experience.
Scientists cannot place spirituality under a microscope. But they can study human experience. Researchers can ask participants what they felt, measure changes in brain activity, and study whether an experience continues to carry meaning months afterward. Controlled studies show that psilocybin can occasion experiences people describe as profoundly meaningful or spiritually significant.
What Is a Mystical-Type Experience?
Researchers have developed validated questionnaires to examine characteristics traditionally associated with mystical experiences.
These can include a profound sense of unity, a feeling that ordinary boundaries of self have dissolved, a sense of sacredness, transcendence of ordinary time and space, a feeling that something deeply meaningful has been encountered, and difficulty putting the experience into words.
Not everyone experiences these things, and having such an experience does not prove any particular spiritual belief. But the experiences themselves are real psychological phenomena that science can study.
When the Ego Becomes Quieter
One frequently discussed psychedelic experience is ego dissolution.
Our ordinary consciousness maintains a remarkably consistent sense of identity: my history, my worries, my beliefs, my body, my future — me.
During some psychedelic experiences, that boundary can temporarily become less rigid. The separation between self and world may feel diminished. For some people, this is experienced as unity, interconnectedness, love, awe, nature, God, universal consciousness, or simply the feeling of belonging to something larger than themselves.
What Does Science Say?
Neuroscience can investigate the brain activity accompanying these experiences. Research has associated psychedelic states with changes in networks involved in self-referential processing, including the Default Mode Network.
But here we reach an important boundary. Science can tell us what changed in the brain. It can document what someone experienced. It can investigate whether that experience affected the person’s life afterward.
What science cannot currently determine is whether an individual literally contacted a divine intelligence, another dimension or universal consciousness. Those are questions of interpretation, philosophy and spirituality.
Two Languages For One Experience
Imagine someone says, “For a moment, I no longer felt separate from the universe.”
A neuroscientist might investigate changes in brain systems responsible for maintaining boundaries between self and environment. A spiritual interpretation might describe the experience as remembering that separation was an illusion.
Those statements are not scientifically equivalent. But they are two different attempts to describe the same extraordinary human experience. One asks: What happened in the brain? The other asks: What did it mean?
Perhaps we need both questions.
The Experience After the Experience
One of the most intriguing findings in psychedelic research is that some participants continue to describe carefully supported psilocybin experiences as personally or spiritually meaningful long after the acute drug effects have ended.
That does not mean the molecule automatically creates wisdom. An experience still has to be interpreted, integrated, questioned and brought back into ordinary life.
A moment of connection is one thing. Living differently because of what you learned from it is another.
A DSS Perspective
Perhaps spirituality begins where explanation ends.
Science can map receptors, measure networks, observe electrical activity and study behavior. But there remains an interior dimension of human experience — the meaning we assign to love, connection, consciousness, mortality and existence itself.
Maybe the most important question is not, “Was the experience neurological or spiritual?” Maybe it is: “What did the experience teach you about the way you live when you return?”
Selected Research
- Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance
- Fourteen-month follow-up of psilocybin-occasioned mystical-type experiences
Educational note: This article is for educational and research purposes and is not medical advice. Spiritual interpretations are presented as interpretations, not as established scientific facts.