What is the relationship between psychedelics and meditation?

What is the relationship between psychedelics and meditation? Experientially, they seem to cover similar ground and have significant overlap, suggesting they may be two different vehicles to get to the same place. At the same time, there are important ways in which these techniques can complement and support each other.

Meditation and psychedelics are united in the mystical experience. This is a state of consciousness that involves the transcendence of time and space, a sense of sacredness, and unity — often, this includes the collapse of previously established dualities, such as between self-other, inner-outer, and sacred-profane. These experiences, which can come about spontaneously or as the result of a contemplative discipline such as meditation, have been described by mystics and experienced meditators for millennia.

In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley reported having such an experience after ingesting mescaline. As soon as he published this influential report, religious scholars began debating whether this could be considered a true mystical experience. Illumination could come as a gift of grace or as the result of years of discipline, but to some the idea that such an experience could be induced by ingesting a minute amount of a compound seemed to cheapen and detract from the experience.

Alan Watts is an excellent case study for the question of drug-induced mysticism. A passionate student of the psychology of religion, he became deeply immersed in the study of Zen Buddhism for a significant part of his life and, through lectures and writing, made Eastern spiritual philosophies accessible to the Western mind. He underwent more than one mystical experience prior to trying psychedelics, giving him a unique vantage point for the experimentation that was to come.

Following his first psychedelic experience, he remarked that it had been quite interesting and largely aesthetic, though certainly not a spiritual experience. Shortly after, he was convinced by a psychiatrist that his experience may not have shown him all there was to see, and that a certain degree of skill in the use of these substances was needed to reach the states described by Huxley and others.

Taking this into consideration, he opted for a second session, about which he later said: “And lo and behold, I had what I simply could not deny being an experience of cosmic consciousness, the sense of complete, fundamental, total unity, forever and ever with the whole universe. And not only that, but […] that the energy behind the world was ecstatic bliss and love. Well, I was very embarrassed by this, because I thought, ‘Gee, you can’t get mysticism out of a bottle. That’s degrading it!’ But yet I couldn’t deny the fact that it had happened.”

The mystical experience is not the only experience one can have on a psychedelic, but it does happen. A 2008 article in the Journal of Psychopharmacology reported that nearly 60% of participants given a high dose of psilocybin during a study had a “complete mystical experience.”

To be sure, the preparation and setting afforded to participants in these studies undeniably contributes to the prevalence of these transformative experiences. They take place in a clinical setting with the assistance of a highly trained psychotherapist. Nonetheless, one thing does seem certain: the experience of mystical consciousness reported by these participants is the same as that reported by the mystics of our past and present. As philosophical authority on mysticism, W. T. Stace said about the drug-induced experience, “It’s not a matter of its being similar to mystical experience; it is mystical experience.”