If this blog is about the road to transconsciousness, than I must share that my own road began with spirituality and meditation over 10 years ago. At some point psychedelics joined in, and I feel like there’s a a kind of symbiosis between the two, each of them affecting the other. But before I go deeper to the relationship between them, lets talk about meditation. The most simple and beautiful explanation I’ve encountered is by a Buddhist monk and teacher named Pema Chodron:

“Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to all these things. It’s seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.”

The point here being, meditation is not about trying to become happier, calmer or better. Meditation is about teaching ourselves to see reality (and ourselves within it) as it is. Experiencing things without labeling, judging or trying to change them. In my opinion, this quality of just being a silent observer is not only crucial on the road to transconsciousness (both parts of it), but also quite beneficial when it comes to psychedelics.

During the many years of meditation practice I’ve learned a lot about myself and reality and acquired a bunch of useful skills – I learned to contain difficult emotions and experiences as they are without trying to run away from them, to experience reality as it is, beyond language, and also to be skeptical of my own thoughts and experiences. But it’s not just the practical skill of meditation that I practice, but also the teachings around it – seeing the nature of reality and the self being in constant flux, unpredictable and unfathomable. I’ve found these things to be very handy when I started doing psychedelics.

The ability to experience difficult emotions without freaking out has been crucial during difficult (“bad”) trips – I feel like some things I’ve experienced on psychedelics would’ve been so much harder for me if I did not have a background in meditation. Also, the ability to see reality beyond language and being skeptical of my own thoughts and experiences kept me much more rational and grounded during some crazy experiences. It allowed me to focus on the experience as it is, instead of detaching myself from it by trying too hard to understand what’s going on, not to mention it allowed me to have a healthy skepticism of the things I experienced during trips, which is sometimes an underrated quality in the psychedelic community.

The teaching framework has also been very beneficial in my understanding of mystical experiences and ego dissolution during trips. Ego dissolution is always scary, but after having several glimpses into it while meditating, as well as having the “theoretical” background about the illusion of the self, it’s not as frightening any more. The familiarity with spiritual teachings has helped me put my own mystical experience into perspective – ego dissolution as a glimpse into my true self, drowning in a sea of endless love as a practical lesson of loving kindness etc.

But I also found out it works both way – psychedelics have benefited my meditation practice and spiritual growth. They made some very difficult concepts much more accessible through direct experience. Lessons I’ve learned about myself through meditation have been enforced through psychedelics. The increased plasticity of the brain caused by psychedelics has allowed me to integrate insights from meditation much faster into my everyday life.

But then there’s another layer – my meditation practice helped make the most out of the insights I’ve experienced during psychedelic trips into my everyday life. Meditating on these insights and experiences has been a great aid in processing and integrating them into my day-to-day life.

A lot of meditation practitioners dismiss the value of psychedelics as mind-altering substances, while a lot of psychonauts underestimate the value of meditation as a complementary tool to psychedelics. I feel like meditation and psychedelics have been complementary tools on my own personal journey, almost symbiotic, and I strongly recommend anyone who is into one of them to find a way to integrate it with the other.

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In his talk about his study, Anthony Bossis said they trained the participants that “whatever comes up during the psilocybin trip – move into it”. I think that’s truly the lesson that psychedelics and meditation came to teach us – we should stop running from difficult experiences and instead allow ourselves to move into them, truly immerse ourselves into them – and truly immerse ourselves into life itself.