Ego dissolution is the easy part. What are you supposed to rebuild toward?
Hi. I recently gave a talk (then published as an essay) at a psychedelics conference. I'm doing a philosophy PhD focused on psychedelics, and this is the first time I've put my more academic work out there publicly. Psychedelics have been a huge part of my life for about a decade (I even wrote a book about my own experiences with it), and I figured this sub would be a good place to share it.
Most of the field is stuck in a false dichotomy, typically viewing the mystical experience has nothing but brain dynamics (relaxed priors, default mode network, etc), or it's evidence we need to revise our metaphysics toward something like idealism/panpsychism etc (tldr mind having some more fundamental role and against materialism). Both sides quietly agree on something I think is wrong, that the experience is a proposition to be scored true or false, a report on whether you contacted something real out there. I'd argue that's not actually how cognition works. Meaning is co-constructed between agent and world rather than simply found or projected, so a "mystical" state is better described as a shift in disclosure, in what shows up as mattering, than as a metaphysical claim awaiting a verdict.
That reframing matters most in the part of the field I think gets underweighted: what happens after the self loosens. Dissolution gets almost all the attention, understandably, it's the dramatic part and there's ofc decent neuroscience behind it. But dissolution just flattens existing structure, and a flattened structure can reorganize in more than one direction, toward something healthier, back to the old pattern, or into something novel but still pathological (the person who keeps doing psychedelics, keeps feeling like they're leveling up, and is quietly getting worse, as sometimes pops up here). None of this is visible from the neuroscience alone, a real insight and a confident delusion run on the same machinery. So the honest question isn't just "did the self dissolve," it's "reorganize toward what," and nothing in the pharmacology answers that.
What actually seems to answer it for me is attention, and specifically that attention is morally loaded, not just a spotlight you point at things. Attention functions as precision-weighting that structures the whole field of what counts as relevant to you moment to moment, and since we're social animals that field gets shaped by other people's cares too. I lean on Weil and Murdoch here, who argued attention is less something you force and more something you become receptive to, letting go of ego enough that the real, other people especially, shows up undistorted instead of through your own projections. Murdoch's specific claim is that moral change comes from attention whose result is a decrease in egoism and an increased sense of reality. This is the same 4E picture that makes set and setting causally powerful in the first place: cognition is world-involving, so both what you register as relevant and what the drug experience amounts to are shaped by agent and environment together, not generated by the molecule alone.
Put together, I think "the sacred" is best understood not as a supernatural object but as whatever sits at the top of that attention hierarchy, your highest concern, the thing that orders everything else you attend to. That's one piece of a larger dissertation argument, but it's a meaningful chunk of the overall direction I'm taking. I think it also bears on two things the field tends to shrug at: why some people get nothing from a full dose (in the sense they don't heal), and why effects fade over time (even if they heal, they return to their pathological state). This aspect of both context during the experience + integration through attention-mediated cultural system what can likely improve both.
I'd love feedback from anyone more philosophy-inclined, but I'm especially interested if any of this maps onto your own experience, not just a single trip, but the longer arc of what psychedelics have actually done in your life. When you hear the word "sacred," what actually comes to mind for you? Does it make sense to you that a trip isn't really "true" or "false" but somehow beyond the dichotomy itself?