Part IV: The Cosmic and Mental Frontiers
Chapter 17: Experiences Under Psychedelics (LSD, DMT, Ayahuasca)
Psychedelics occupy a unique and controversial position in the exploration of consciousness. They are, by far, the fastest and most dramatic way to experience non-ordinary states of awareness — but they also carry risks, legal complications, and the legitimate question of whether chemically induced experiences reveal genuine truths about reality or merely produce vivid hallucinations.
After studying the evidence, I believe psychedelics are genuine tools for consciousness expansion — not toys, not escapes, but tools — that when used with intention and respect, can produce insights identical to those achieved through years of meditation, out-of-body experiences, or past-life regression. But they are tools that demand caution.
The Stoned Ape Theory: Where Human Consciousness Began
Terence McKenna, in Food of the Gods (1993), made a provocative and well-researched argument: psychedelic mushrooms may have played a decisive role in the emergence of human consciousness itself.
McKenna's thesis is that our hominid ancestors, moving through the African grasslands, would have encountered psilocybin mushrooms growing in the dung of grazing animals. At low doses, psilocybin improves visual acuity — a distinct survival advantage for a hunter. At moderate doses, it stimulates sexual arousal and social bonding. At high doses, it produces profound 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."
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 transformed a clever primate into a self-aware, language-using, spiritually aware human being.
Whether or not you accept McKenna's 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."
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 returns to share what was learned with the community.
The central element 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 experiences visions of electric blue eels, approaches what the elder describes as "Venturi, the real world, the blue zone" — a realm that feels more real, more fundamental than ordinary reality. Sound familiar? It's exactly what OBE practitioners describe: a reality that feels more real than the physical world.
What Psychedelics Reveal
The experiences reported under psychedelics — particularly psilocybin (mushrooms), DMT (the active compound in ayahuasca), and LSD — are remarkably consistent 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 psychedelic experiencers 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 appears to vibrate with living energy. This matches the descriptions of reality during OBEs and the vibrational framework of the Kybalion.
Certainty that the experience is real: Perhaps 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. This is a fair objection — and if the experiences were random and chaotic, it would be decisive. 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 typically personal and disordered. These experiences are shared and structured. That distinction matters.
The Scientific Framework
Rupert Sheldrake, in Ways to Go Beyond, provides a scientific framework for understanding how psychedelics work as spiritual practices.
Rather than "creating" experiences (as the materialist view would suggest), Sheldrake proposes that psychedelics function 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 proposed by Eben Alexander to explain his NDE (the neocortex shut down, removing the filter) and by the antenna theory of panpsychism (the brain constrains consciousness rather than generating it). Psychedelics don't add something to consciousness. They remove a restriction, allowing consciousness to expand to its natural, unfiltered state.
Recent neuroscience research supports this. Brain imaging studies of subjects on psilocybin show decreased activity in the default mode network (DMN) — the brain region associated with the sense of separate self. Less brain activity, more consciousness. This is 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, references the use of plant medicines in ancient spiritual traditions — particularly in Egypt and among pre-Columbian civilizations. 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 tendency to use psychedelics recreationally — at parties, without preparation, without clear intention — strips away the safety structures that traditional cultures developed over thousands of years.
A Word of Caution
I want to be clear: I am not advocating that everyone go out and take psychedelics. They are powerful, they can be dangerous, they are illegal in many jurisdictions, and they are not appropriate for everyone. People with a history of psychotic disorders, severe anxiety, or certain medications should absolutely not use them. Yet I believe they're far less dangerous than alcool. You can take mushrooms or LSD and won't have headache, or vomit or anything like this. And they're not addictive. You'll be tired the next day as usually the journeys are intense, but you'll be fully functional and your liver won't suffer from it.
And for those who approach them with respect, preparation, clear intention, and ideally experienced guidance, psychedelics can provide — 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 temporarily unlocks a door. What's behind the door was always there.