The Healing Power of Mystical States
Focusing on neural correlates is a mistake.
Psychedelic medicine clinical trials indicate that the stronger the mystical or spiritual experience in the psychedelic state, the more therapeutic the outcome, such as a greater reduction in depressive, anxious, or addictive symptoms (1-6).
In other words, having a psychedelic mystical or spiritual experience heals you.
Okay, okay, I know – correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. But I think it can be reasonably stated that the psychedelic mystical or spiritual experience plays an important part in therapeutic healing. What a concept! What does that imply about healing? About subjective experience, our health, our beliefs or worldviews – and how these all tie together? Wait…what even is a mystical experience?
People who have experienced mystical/spiritual states report sensing unity and interconnectedness, merging with the Universe/God/ultimate reality, as well as a sense of profound meaning. They might say things like:
“… I bowed to this force…It was more about reverence. I was showing my respect. I was humbled and honored to be in this presence... it felt more real than any reality I have experienced. And it was a familiar place too. One I had felt before. It was when I surrendered to this, that I felt like I let go. I was gone... I was in the void. This void had a strange and indescribable quality to it … this feeling of unconditional and undying Love. It felt like my soul was basking in the feeling of this space…Time and space did not exist there …”
– Participant in psychedelic research trial (7)
Nowadays, mystical experiences can be measured by six aspects(8):
Sacredness: a sense that what is encountered is holy or sacred.
Noetic quality: imbued with an aspect of meaning and a sense of encountering ultimate reality that is more real than usual everyday reality.
Deeply felt positive mood: joy, ecstasy, blessedness, peace, tenderness, gentleness, tranquility, awe.
Ineffability: difficult to put into words.
Paradoxicality: to explain the experience, one seems to have to describe the co-existence of mutually exclusive states or concepts.
Transcendence of time and space: traditional notions of time and space have no meaning.
These experiences can be powerful enough to turn atheists into non-atheists. Some studies report that more than two-thirds of those participants who identified as atheist before a psychedelic mystical experience no longer identified as atheist afterwards, and a significantly larger percentage of respondents reported belief in ultimate reality, higher power, God, or universal divinity after the experience than before (9, 10).
What?! How can atheists become believers after a psychedelic trip?? And how do these states help us heal?
In previous newsletters, I’ve discussed how psychedelics allow unconscious, sometimes traumatic, material to be brought to consciousness for processing, which can lead to catharsis and healing. There’s also the neuroscientific perspective of a rewired brain that heals after a psychedelic experience (or other non-ordinary states that can induce mystical experiences, such as meditation and prayer (11), sensory deprivation (12), deep music listeners (13, 14), breathwork (15), including the wildly popular Wim Hof breathing method). But the experience of mystical states in particular results in enhanced and dramatic outcomes. So, why?
No one knows for sure. However, since mystical states increase the perception of meaning in those who experience them, it’s been theorized that meaning can facilitate healing by inducing unknown physiological and psychological repair mechanisms (16-18). While the mechanism is unknown, a plethora of philosophers, scholars and thinkers throughout human history have written about how essential it is to have meaning to live a fulfilled and healthy life.
If having meaning in life (i.e. viewing one’s life, and maybe even the cosmos, as significant, purposeful, directed) can be healing, we’re probably in trouble given our culture of meaninglessness, and the meaning crisis we find ourselves in – but I digress.
It’s difficult to approach the study of mystical states from the typical reductive, objective perspective because they are by nature subjective experiences. While our current-day scientific paradigm has tended to discount internal, personal, and subjective experiences, should we do that when it’s been shown these subjective, meaning-imbuing mystical experiences have the power to change core personality traits, illness, worldviews, and quality of life?
We warn about the tendency of some psychedelic users to become almost evangelical or religious about what they have encountered in the state. Instead of identifying this overzealous and unshakable conviction as needing to be isolated, fenced off, and separated, what if we took it as a wake-up call to take subjective experience seriously? In other words, our subjective experience should matter and shouldn’t be brushed off as just a silly mystical fantasy constructed by our brains. That silly mystical fantasy might be what helped you heal and improved your life. We need to understand why. We don’t have to necessarily believe the content of such experiences as ultimate truth. But, as a phenomenon, the fact that such fervor can be kindled and can cause such dramatic changes in the individual speaks to something deeply human and important.
Subjective experience and objective changes in physiology are tightly linked and can be difficult to disentangle. That’s probably why the two have been largely broken off into separate fields: psychology and neuroscience. I may be going off the deep end here – and as a traditionally-trained neuroscientist, I never would have thought this way before reading the impressive psychedelic literature – but, I believe we should be putting just as much effort into identifying how the subjective experience of a mystical state can cause such profound healing as we do for identifying pharmaceutical versions of psychedelics that “heal” but don’t cause mind-altering effects. But if pharma is funding the pharmaceutical studies, who will fund the research on subjective experiences as medicine?
Why do these experiences feel more real than everyday reality? Why is there a sense of sacredness? How are they so imbued with life-altering meaning? How in the heck does all that help someone heal?
The trend these days can be to use neural correlates to explain away these experiences, but I want to strongly push back here on something forgotten in nearly all pop neuroscience content I hear these days: providing neural correlates for behaviors and experiences does not explain why the behavior/experience exists in the first place. Reductionist explanations only explain how the behavior/experience is expressed in physiology. Subjective experiences could come first before neural changes, like how you implement a meditation practice and then see structural changes in your brain. It is a mistake to solely focus on neural correlates.
Mystical experiences, like those elicited by psychedelics, hint at an expanded space where you can pop in, let new perspectives float in, dissolve your entrenched ways of thinking, and provide just a flicker, a flash, a tease of the underlying essence of the meaning of being human.
In the sciences, and Western society more generally, we feel the need to justify intellectual investigation with practicality, productivity, and usefulness. So, we start by explaining that psychedelics (or any non-ordinary state of consciousness) can heal – they’re useful, we promise! They can lower healthcare costs! Solve our mental health crisis! Et cetera, et cetera…
But, throw all that away for a second. How about this: non-ordinary states of consciousness show us how narrow our thinking has become, and illuminate a different way of being human (or if you prefer, experiencing consciousness). Sometimes, they gift us with answers to questions we didn’t realize we were desperately seeking that lead to healing. We need to understand how and why they do this, but in the meantime, maybe that’s enough.
1. Garcia-Romeu A, Davis AK, Erowid F, et al. Cessation and reduction in alcohol consumption and misuse after psychedelic use. J Psychopharmacol 2019; 33: 1088–1101.
2. Ross S, Bossis A, Guss J, et al. Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized controlled trial. J Psychopharmacol 2016; 30: 1165–1180.
3. Griffiths RR, Richards WA, Johnson MW, et al. Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later. J Psychopharmacol 2008; 22: 621–632.
4. Griffiths RR, Richards WA, McCann U, et al. Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology (Berl) 2006; 187: 268–283.
5. Grob CS, Danforth AL, Chopra GS, et al. Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients With Advanced-Stage Cancer. Arch Gen Psychiatry 2011; 68: 71–78.
6. Johnson MW, Garcia-Romeu A, Johnson PS, et al. An online survey of tobacco smoking cessation associated with naturalistic psychedelic use. J Psychopharmacol 2017; 31: 841–850.
7. Barrett FS, Griffiths RR. Classic hallucinogens and mystical experiences: Phenomenology and neural correlates. In: Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences. Springer Verlag, 2018, pp. 393–430.
8. Stace WT. Mysticism and philosophy. New York: MacMillan Press, 1960.
9. Davis AK, Clifton JM, Weaver EG, et al. Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects. J Psychopharmacol 2020; 34: 1008–1020.
10. Griffiths RR, Hurwitz ES, Davis AK, et al. Survey of subjective ‘God encounter experiences’: Comparisons among naturally occurring experiences and those occasioned by the classic psychedelics psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, or DMT. PLoS One 2019; 14: e0214377.
11. Newberg AB, D’aquili EG. The neuropsychology of religious and spiritual experience. J Conscious Stud 2000; 7: 251–266.
12. Hood RW, Morris RJ, Watson PJ. Quasi-Experimental Elicitation of the Differential Report of Religious Experience among Intrinsic and Indiscriminately Pro-Religious Types. J Sci Study Relig 1990; 29: 164.
13. Gabrielsson A, Lindström S. Strong experiences with music. In: Handbook of music and emotion: Theory, reserach, applications. Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 547–574.
14. Penman J, Becker J. Religious Ecstatics, ‘Deep Listeners,’ and Musical Emotion. Empir Musicol Rev 2009; 4: 49–70.
15. Grof S, Grof C. Holotropic breathwork. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010.
16. Miceli McMillan R. Prescribing meaning: hedonistic perspectives on the therapeutic use of psychedelic-assisted meaning enhancement. J Med Ethics 2021; 47: 701–705.
17. Moerman DE. Meaning, Medicine, and the ‘Placebo Effect’. Cambridge: Cambridge Universy Press, 2002.
18. Wießner I, Falchi M, Palhano-Fontes F, et al. LSD, madness and healing: Mystical experiences as possible link between psychosis model and therapy model. Psychol Med 2021; 1–15.