Part IV: The Cosmic and Mental Frontiers
Chapter 14: Experiences Under Psychedelics (LSD, DMT, Ayahuasca)
Psychedelics sit in a strange and controversial spot in the study of consciousness. They're by far the fastest and most dramatic way to reach non-ordinary states of awareness, but they also come with real risks, legal headaches, and a fair question hanging over them: do chemically induced experiences reveal something true about reality, or just produce vivid hallucinations?
After going through the evidence, I think psychedelics are genuine tools for consciousness expansion (not toys, not escapes, but tools) that, used with intention and respect, can produce insights identical to what people reach through years of meditation, out-of-body experiences, or past-life regression. But they're tools that demand caution.
The Stoned Ape Theory: Where Human Consciousness Began
Terence McKenna, in Food of the Gods (1992), made a provocative and well-researched argument: psychedelic mushrooms may have played a decisive role in the emergence of human consciousness itself.1
His thesis is that our hominid ancestors, moving through the African grasslands, would have run into psilocybin mushrooms growing in the dung of grazing animals. At low doses, psilocybin sharpens visual acuity, a clear survival advantage for a hunter. At moderate doses, it stimulates sexual arousal and social bonding. At high doses, it produces intense visionary experiences that may have catalyzed the development of language, art, and religious awareness.
"A particular family of active chemical compounds, the indole hallucinogens, played a decisive role in the emergence of our essential humanness, of the human characteristic of self-reflection."1
McKenna wasn't being metaphorical. He argued that the specific neurochemical effects of psilocybin, particularly its impact on the brain's language centers and its ability to dissolve the boundaries of the ego, could have been the catalytic spark that turned a clever primate into a self-aware, language-using, spiritually aware human being.
Whether or not you buy the evolutionary hypothesis, his broader point stands: psychedelic substances have been part of human spiritual practice since the very beginning.
Shamanism: The Oldest Spiritual Practice
McKenna traces the lineage of psychedelic use back to shamanism, which he identifies as "the Upper Paleolithic tradition of healing, divination, and theatrical performance based on natural magic developed 10,000 to 50,000 years ago."1
Shamanic cultures around the world (from Siberia to the Amazon, from Africa to Australia) have used psychoactive plants and fungi as central elements of their spiritual practice. The shaman enters an altered state (through plant medicines, drumming, fasting, or other techniques), journeys to non-ordinary reality, communicates with spirits, receives healing knowledge, and comes back to share what was learned with the community.
The heart of shamanism, McKenna notes, is ecstasy, not in the modern sense of mere pleasure, but in the original Greek sense of ekstasis: standing outside oneself. Stepping beyond the boundaries of ordinary consciousness.
Whether the shaman is an Arctic Inuit using Amanita muscaria mushrooms, an Amazonian ayahuasquero using the ayahuasca brew, or a Mazatec curandera using psilocybin mushrooms, the core practice is the same: ingesting a substance that dissolves the ego's boundaries, entering a visionary state, interacting with non-physical intelligences, and returning with knowledge or healing.
McKenna documents a vivid example: a young man named Raongi undergoing a shamanic initiation with an elder called Mangi. After ingesting the plant medicine, Raongi sees visions of electric blue eels and approaches what the elder describes as "Venturi, the real world, the blue zone", a realm that feels more real, more fundamental than ordinary reality.1 It's exactly what OBE practitioners describe: a reality that feels more real than the physical world.
What Psychedelics Reveal
The experiences people report under psychedelics, particularly psilocybin (mushrooms), DMT (the active compound in ayahuasca), and LSD, line up remarkably well with the non-ordinary experiences described throughout this book:
Dissolution of the ego: The sense of separate self dissolves, replaced by a feeling of unity with all existence. This matches the Law of One's teaching, Newton's descriptions of the soul's true nature, and the Hermetic Principle of Mentalism.
Encounter with non-physical intelligences: Many people report meeting entities, beings of light, geometric forms with apparent consciousness, guides and teachers. These encounters parallel the spirit guides described in PLR, the entities met during OBEs, and the advanced beings channelers communicate with.
Access to universal knowledge: Under psychedelics, people commonly report sudden, overwhelming access to vast amounts of information, understanding the structure of reality, the interconnection of all things, the nature of consciousness. This mirrors the Akashic Records access described in the previous chapter.
Perception of energy and vibration: Colors become more vivid, sounds become visible, the boundaries between senses dissolve (synesthesia). Everything seems to vibrate with living energy. This matches the descriptions of reality during OBEs and the vibrational framework of the Kybalion.2
Certainty that the experience is real: Maybe most importantly, psychedelic experiencers, like OBE and NDE experiencers, consistently report that the experience feels more real than ordinary reality, not less. This isn't the hazy confusion of a dream. It's a crystalline clarity that makes normal waking life feel like the dream by comparison.
The materialist counterargument is straightforward: drugs alter brain chemistry, and altered brain chemistry produces altered perceptions. You're hallucinating, not perceiving deeper truth. It's a fair objection, and if the experiences were random and chaotic, it would settle the matter. But they're not. The same entities, the same geometric patterns, the same dissolution of self, the same overwhelming sense of "more real than real", reported independently by thousands of people, across different substances, different cultures, different centuries. Hallucinations are usually personal and disordered. These experiences are shared and structured. That distinction matters.
The Scientific Framework
Rupert Sheldrake, in Ways to Go Beyond, offers a scientific framework for understanding how psychedelics work as spiritual practices.3
Rather than "creating" experiences (as the materialist view would suggest), Sheldrake proposes that psychedelics work by temporarily disrupting the brain's filtering mechanism, the same filter that, under normal conditions, reduces the vast ocean of consciousness to the narrow stream we experience as waking awareness.
This is the same mechanism Eben Alexander used to explain his NDE (the neocortex shut down, removing the filter) and the same idea behind the antenna theory of panpsychism (the brain constrains consciousness rather than generating it).4 Psychedelics don't add something to consciousness. They remove a restriction, letting consciousness expand to its natural, unfiltered state.
Recent neuroscience backs this up. Brain imaging studies of subjects on psilocybin show decreased activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain region tied to the sense of separate self.5 Less brain activity, more consciousness. That's the opposite of what you'd expect if the brain generated consciousness, but exactly what you'd expect if it filtered consciousness.
Ancient Plant Medicine Traditions
Drunvalo Melchizedek, in The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, points to the use of plant medicines in ancient spiritual traditions, particularly in Egypt and among pre-Columbian civilizations.6 These weren't recreational drugs. They were sacraments, sacred substances used in controlled ceremonial contexts, under the guidance of trained practitioners, for the specific purpose of expanding consciousness and accessing higher knowledge.
The distinction between sacred use and recreational use is crucial. Every traditional culture that used psychedelic plants treated them with extreme respect: specific preparation rituals, dietary restrictions, ceremonial settings, trained guides, and clear intentions. They knew it was a tool for accessing extra knowledge, or for healing (traumas or illnesses). The modern habit of using psychedelics recreationally (at parties, without preparation, without clear intention) strips away the safety structures that traditional cultures built up over thousands of years.
A Word of Caution
I'm not telling everyone to go out and take psychedelics. They're powerful, they can be dangerous, they're illegal in many places, and they're not for everyone. People with a history of psychotic disorders, severe anxiety, or certain medications should absolutely stay away. That said, I believe they're far less dangerous than alcohol. You can take mushrooms or LSD without getting a headache, vomiting, or anything like that. And they're not addictive. You'll be tired the next day since the journeys are usually intense, but you'll be fully functional and your liver won't suffer from it.
And for those who come to them with respect, preparation, clear intention, and ideally experienced guidance, psychedelics can offer, in a matter of hours, the same fundamental insights that years of meditation, OBE practice, or past-life regression work toward: the direct, experiential knowledge that consciousness is primary, that you are not your body, that you are connected to everything, and that love is the fundamental nature of reality.
The mushroom, the vine, the molecule, they're not the source of the experience. They're the key that briefly unlocks a door. What's behind the door was always there.
Sources
- Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (Bantam, 1992). Presents the "stoned ape" hypothesis on psilocybin's role in human evolution and traces psychedelic use back to Upper Paleolithic shamanism. First published 1992; later paperback editions 1993. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8353432W/Food_of_the_gods
- Three Initiates, The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece (Yogi Publication Society, 1908). Source of the Hermetic Principles of Mentalism and Vibration referenced here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kybalion
- Rupert Sheldrake, Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices for a Scientific Age (Monkfish, 2019). Discusses psychedelics such as ayahuasca among practices for tuning into more-than-human realms of consciousness. https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/ways-to-go-beyond-and-why-they-work
- Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Alexander's account of vivid consciousness during a meningitis-induced coma, interpreted as the brain's filter dropping away. https://ebenalexander.com/books/proof-of-heaven/
- R. L. Carhart-Harris et al., "Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(6), 2138-2143 (2012). Imperial College London fMRI study finding reduced activity and connectivity in the default mode network under intravenous psilocybin. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1119598109
- Drunvalo Melchizedek, The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Volume 1 (Light Technology Publishing, 1998). Edited transcript of the Flower of Life workshops (1985-1994) covering sacred geometry and ancient Egyptian spiritual traditions. https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-119