Ten Years of Meditation Practice Meets Psilocybin: What Changed
I've practiced Vipassana for a decade. I had long been curious about the relationship between meditation states and psilocybin states. This is what I found.
I want to be precise about what I brought to this: ten years of Vipassana practice, multiple long retreats, some experience with jhana states. I was not a beginning meditator when I took psilocybin for the first time. I think that preparation mattered.
The most striking thing: the psilocybin states were not unfamiliar. The quality of certain experiences — dissolution of subject-object boundary, awareness without content, equanimity with strong sensation — were recognizable from meditation practice, just arrived at by different means and with less control.
What psilocybin did that meditation doesn't: it removed the ego defenses I could still maintain in meditation. Even in deep meditation, there is some management happening. In the psilocybin session, at the depth I reached, there was no management available. The difference between watching the self and being without a self is larger than it sounds from outside.
After the session, my meditation practice deepened. Not because I had new experiences to integrate but because the session showed me experientially that what I'd been practicing toward was real and reachable. The practice became more motivated. The doubt that something was actually happening fell away.
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