What Actually Happens in a Psychedelic Journey - Part 4: The Mystical Experience
The part people struggle to put into words — and the part that seems to matter most
This is the fourth and final part of our series on what happens in a psychedelic journey. We have looked at the sensory, the emotional, and the mental and cognitive layers of the experience.
Each one is powerful. Each one matters.
But there is another layer that sits underneath all of them. It is harder to describe, and for many people it is the part they remember for the rest of their lives.
Researchers call it the mystical experience.
It is a clinical-sounding name for something that feels anything but clinical.
What is a mystical experience?
The words come out hesitant, almost apologetic.
People know how it sounds. It sounds… weird…
A sense that everything is connected. A dissolving of the line between self and world. A feeling of being held by something much larger. Deep peace. A certainty that what they are experiencing is more real than ordinary life, not less.
Often there are no words at all. Just a knowing.
Psychologists have been measuring these experiences for decades, and they tend to cluster around a few features:
a sense of unity,
a feeling of sacredness,
a sense of deep truth,
transcendence of time and space,
and a mood of peace and joy.
Awe shows up again and again — the feeling of being small in the face of something vast.
None of this is unique to psilocybin. People have described these same states for as long as humans have written things down.
Mystical experience in contemplative traditions
The mystical experience has a home in nearly every spiritual tradition.
Contemplatives across centuries have described union with the divine.
In the Christian mystical tradition, writers spoke of losing themselves in God.
In Buddhism, the dropping away of a separate self sits close to the heart of the path.
The Sufi poets wrote about it as love that erases the boundary between lover and beloved.
Meditators in many traditions describe states of self-transcendence that look, from the inside, remarkably similar.
What is new is that we can now watch some of this happen in the brain.
Studies comparing deep meditation and psychedelic states find overlapping signatures — particularly quieting in a brain system called the default mode network, the network most tied to our ordinary sense of being a separate self.
Different doors. Often a similar room behind them.
Ego death, or ego dissolution
The most intense version of this has a dramatic name: ego death.
It sounds frightening, and people sometimes are afraid of it before a ceremony.
The reality is gentler than the name suggests.
Ego dissolution is the temporary softening of the usual boundary between you and everything else — the felt sense that you are no longer a sealed individual looking out at the world, but part of it.
Neuroscientists have linked this directly to the quieting of the default mode network, the brain system that normally holds our self-image together. When its activity falls, the ordinary sense of "I" loosens its grip.
For someone living inside depression or anxiety — where the mind so often circles tightly around the self — this loosening can be a profound relief. It offers something rare: direct experience that the self you take for granted is not a fixed, permanent thing, but one possible way of being.
And if it is not fixed, it can change.
Why researchers pay attention to this
Here is the part that surprised the scientific world.
The mystical experience is not just a beautiful side effect. It appears to be one of the mechanisms through which psilocybin helps people change.
In study after study, the people who have a stronger mystical experience during their session tend to show greater and longer-lasting improvement afterwards — in depression, in anxiety, in how they relate to their own lives. And the depth of the experience predicts the depth of the outcome. And in some studies, mystical experience statistically mediates the benefit, meaning it is part of the causal path, not a coincidence beside it.
The science is still being worked out. Not everyone has a full mystical experience, and people who do not can still benefit.
But the pattern is strong enough that researchers no longer treat this as a curiosity. They treat it as central.
A sense that everything is connected. A dissolving of the line between self and world. A feeling of being held by something much larger. Deep peace. A certainty that what they are experiencing is more real than ordinary life, not less.
What this means for a ceremony
It means the goal is not to chase a mystical experience. You cannot force one, and trying tends to push it further away.
What you can do is create the conditions where it becomes possible: feeling safe, feeling prepared, feeling held, with nowhere you have to be and nothing you have to perform.
The set and the setting.
The preparation.
The trust.
The rest is not ours to control.
It belongs to you, to the truffles, and to whatever it is that so many people across so many centuries have tried, and mostly failed, to put into words.
Post by co-founder Ioana.
“Honestly, the retreat alone, even without the journey itself, would have been worth every cent. Ioana and Imke are extraordinary facilitators who guide the entire experience with authenticity, compassion, and genuine dedication. Under different circumstances, what I experienced might easily have been called a “bad trip.” But because of their loving guidance, I was able to surrender to it. I was allowed to feel the fear I carried inside me and to recognize that the pain I encountered during the experience was my own pain, pain that deserved to be felt.
And once I moved through that phase, it became something indescribably beautiful.”
— Rosa, Foundation retreat, November 2025 [read the full testimonial here]
If something in this series has stayed with you, the next step might be to experience it for yourself.
Our next Foundation Retreat takes place 23–26 July 2026, in the Dutch countryside — four days, a small group of ten, held with care from the first conversation to the last lunch together.
The journey begins the moment you reach out.
Ioana is a researcher, psychedelic facilitator, and coach whose work sits at the intersection of science, embodiment, and lived experience. She spent years inside academia studying psychedelics, health and wellbeing — and eventually decided the most useful thing she could do with that knowledge was bring it into the room with people, not just onto the page. These posts are her attempt to make psychedelic science accessible and honest — without flattening it into wellness copy or drowning it in jargon.
