There is a deep longing beneath the growing fascination with psychedelics, altered states, and emotional breakthroughs. Many people are not simply looking for entertainment or escape—they are searching for relief, meaning, connection, transcendence, and ultimately love. In this episode of Exploring Bhakti, we explore whether experiences induced by substances like ayahuasca, LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, ecstasy, and microdosing practices are truly spiritual from a Vedantic and Bhakti perspective. We look compassionately and honestly at why these experiences can feel profound, why they often leave such a lasting impression, and why intensity alone is not the same as genuine spiritual realization. Most importantly, we explore the deeper fulfillment the heart is actually seeking: a living relationship with the Divine that endures beyond the experience.
This isn't Real Awakening
Ethan wants to know if insights that come from using drugs like ayahuasca, LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, and ecstasy, or Molly, are spiritual.
In addition to trying to achieve spiritual states by taking these drugs, therapists and doctors are using some psychedelics to treat mental health conditions, with some success. I won’t be getting into the medically supervised use of psychedelics.
I have recently become aware of the new development to microdose with these substances as a self-improvement tool, or to avoid a completely overwhelming experience, and also to perform better in creative aspects and tech, along with other intentions. It seems we want to adjust our experience of life more gently. There are a variety of reasons people take full doses of these drugs. But in either case, we are only temporarily modifying the surface of our experience.
As we continue to examine whether these experiences are spiritual, here’s a motto to help us distinguish between material and spiritual experiences: Matter is temporary; spirit is eternal.
Let’s remember that as we go forward.
Now we will zoom out and consider a few underlying drives people have to use drugs.
We want to:
- Relieve anxiety, pressure & emotional overwhelm
- Connect to others, to self, to something meaningful
- Escape from numbness, dissatisfaction, or inner noise
- Enhance in a way that makes life feel more vivid or manageable
What is striking is that many of these substances are trying to simulate or shortcut experiences that are actually natural potentials of consciousness:
- longing for connection → relationship with the Divine
- desire for relief → shelter, dependence, being held
- altered states → glimpses of expanded awareness
- emotional openness → softened heart
Why Psychedelic Experiences Feel Spiritual
They can open a window to the self, but they do not build the capacity to live there. When we are grounded in spiritual truth, we have access to all these inherent states of the self. Many of these experiences feel spiritual because, in a way, they are touching the borders of something real, and many people feel they are remembering something true.
I know several people who experimented with psychedelics and had experiences that convinced them of a reality beyond our normal purview. From this experience, they took up a spiritual path. If an experience leads you into a genuine practice that brings you into contact with true, lasting states, then that is positive.
People can interpret their experiences as “spiritual” because these states mirror –although poorly – real spiritual experiences.
Sometimes people experience a:
- Unity that echoes oneness/ interconnectedness
- Love that hints at divine love
- Ego loss that resembles transcendence of false identity
- Awe that resembles reverence
These can be very moving, and for these reasons, a person may naturally conclude: “I touched something spiritual.”
Such experiences may soften or loosen the usual filters – especially the egoic sense of self – and the user may feel a deeper connection, love, or a sense of the vastness of reality. These confirm a greater reality than we are accustomed to, but oftentimes people don’t learn how to evaluate whether the reality they experienced is spiritual, or how to relate to that reality and stay in it.
Ayahuasca Ceremonies, Ego Dissolution, and the Search for Awakening
Among the drugs, ayahuasca carries the idea that taking it and its effect are spiritual because the ceremonial setting feels meaningful. A shaman, or guide, who is seen as having access to unseen realms, evokes a sense of confidence and mystery. The user has an intense experience of ego dissolution, visions or encounters, or perhaps insights into archetypes. And also the language used about the experience in ayahuasca circles appears to shape a sacred narrative. Further, there is community reinforcement.
These drug-induced experiences can feel like breakthroughs, healing, or awakening – and depending on the person and how they respond to the information, they can be. Such as for the friends who took up a spiritual life afterward. In general, though, we notice that after the trip patterns return. The experiences don’t produce ongoing relationships enriched with the unity and love they felt. And there aren’t stable transformations of the heart because the capacity to live spiritually wasn’t built— only a semblance of it was temporarily accessed.
It seems people tend to equate intensity with transcendence. But just because something feels powerful or overwhelming doesn’t mean it’s true or grounded in truth. After all, the mind under the effects of these substances becomes highly suggestible and engages in meaning-making and symbol-generating. So a person can feel like: “I touched ultimate reality.”
In the early 1970s, anthropology student Carlos Castaneda wrote best-selling books recounting what he claimed was a true account of his encounter with Don Juan, a shaman who introduced him to peyote and mushrooms. From that, he claimed, he has spiritual experiences.
Carlos Castaneda’s books convinced millions of people that they were reading real accounts of spiritual training through psychedelics. The experiences described were vivid, meaningful, and internally consistent enough to feel true. For a solid decade or more, millions of thoughtful, intelligent people believed these were real spiritual accounts, and they fueled the counterculture’s pursuit of spiritual visions through psychedelics. That’s not because these people were naive—but because the experiences felt coherent, meaningful, and profound. Over time, it became clear that much of what Castaneda wrote was fictional or impossible to verify.
What Real Spiritual Experience Actually Is
I met him at the Los Angeles airport around 1978 and gave him a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. He appeared quite depressed. He looked at the Gita and told me, “Maybe this will help.” The look on his face, the energy of his presence, and his posture proved to me that he had not found truth.
Castaneda’s work is a perfect example of how an altered-state experience or narrative can feel profound, coherent, sacred, and spiritually authoritative – yet remain ungrounded in actual spiritual reality. Castaneda’s story isn’t just about a hoax. It reveals something more universal: that the mind can generate convincing worlds, that meaning can be constructed and felt deeply, and that authority can be assumed without grounding.
Which means we need something more than intensity, more than meaning, more than even insight…we need a way of knowing that is stable, relational, and true beyond the moment. This is possible through association with genuine saints and hearing revealed texts.
From a Vedantic lens, because the experience of a drug is generated through a material substance that acts on the brain, which is also matter, the experience belongs to the realm of matter—even if it opens us to something that feels beyond it. Because these experiences are mediated by a substance acting on the brain, they arise within the material and subtle layers of our being—not from direct contact with the self or the Divine, which are the spiritual realities we hanker for and that sustainably transform us.
Bhakti and the Fulfillment of Spiritual Longing
When we actually touch ultimate reality, we will be completely and permanently changed. It is nothing like touching the material energy, which is the only thing we are accustomed to.
According to Vedanta, spirit is consciousness. We are a unit of consciousness, and our Source is the Whole Consciousness. When we can fully access our Self and our Source, then that is a spiritual experience. And this experience is only possible by a direct, unmediated contact with spirit, or consciousness. If we saw the self and, after the drug’s effect wore off, were self-realized, then that would be a genuine spiritual experience.
True self-realization completely changes us. There is no anxiety, no fear, no boredom, no loneliness–nothing to escape from because the self is an eternal, pure being full of unbounded joy. For a self-realized soul, life is vibrantly alive in every second.
A spiritual revelation shows us lasting truth, beauty, and happiness in connection with the Whole of reality. And give us the insight, determination, and strength to do the actual work of removing contaminations from the heart and develop permanent good qualities like compassion, humility, self-love, and much more.
Though these substances sometimes seem to open a door for a moment, that is not the same as coming home, which happens through a transformational process we cannot bypass.
Ultimately, our great need is for unconditional love. That love will solve all our problems. We want a relationship where we are loved just as we are, where we can find ultimate shelter and release into full protection, free from any harm.
We need a living connection with our Source. Through practices like chanting, prayer, and remembrance, something gradually and steadily begins to shift. Our heart expands and softens. Our sense of isolation eases. The presence of our Divine Friends becomes perceptible.
We grow in a tangible relationship of mutual affection with our Source, who has accompanied us in the heart for many lives and will never abandon us. And we come to understand that the connection that could fulfill all our needs and desires was never dependent on or enhanced by an altered experience.
In summary, while these substances can create powerful experiences and give some insight, they can’t produce genuine spiritual realization. At best, they may hint at or echo something real, but only through a chemically altered state that a person cannot reliably access, understand, or live from. Because the experience is induced through intoxication, it carries both physical and psychological risks, and perhaps more subtly, the risk of misunderstanding the nature of spiritual life itself.
When we begin to trust insights received in a distorted state of consciousness, we build our understanding of an unstable foundation. True spiritual experience is grounded, relational, repeatable, and deepens our clarity, humility, and capacity to love over time.
Bhakti invites us into a life that is not a few peak moments, but a living, breathing exchange of divine love that develops into ever-expanding, ever-present, unending peak moments. What you’re longing for is real. Bhakti does not deny that longing; it deeply fulfills it.
