1:20 pm Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, Michael Hoffman
The mystic trip: how psychedelic research fell for mysticism
Richard Saville-Smith & Sharday Mosurinjohn
July 17, 2026
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-026-07119-3
https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22mystic+trip%22+Sharday+Mosurinjohn
“This paper critiques the use of the term “mysticism” in psychedelic research, arguing its continued use is outdated and misleading.
“It highlights the confusion stemming from the historical context of “mysticism,” particularly through the works of Walter Stace and Walter Pahnke, whose ideas have shaped the psychedelic discourse despite being flawed and largely unexamined.
“The paper is divided into two parts:
“the first is an archaeology that re-evaluates these foundational texts that misled psychedelic discourse;
“the second is a genealogy that traces how the concept of “mysticism”, with its religious roots, became attached to “psychedelics” and became normalised in second generation psychedelic research.
“It advocates for rebranding the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) to the Psychedelic Experience Questionnaire (PEQ),
“emphasising that this change accords nicely with the idea of Psychedelic Experience which Walter Pahnke developed in his later research, as a five-part typology, and
“liberates the instrument from the hangover of a dubious legacy in which
“the correlation between therapeutic outcomes and mystical experiences invites psychedelic experiences to be shoehorned into a very particular and peculiar quasi-religious construct.”
Heading
I read papers about 1893 Swami Vivekananda. The origins & formation of modern neo-advaita.
Conclusion: The situation is worst-case. Pop Western modern Buddhism is sculpted and filtered purely based on buyers’ wallets; sheer demand-driven fabrication.
1000 aspects are replaced selectively by 7 aspects, ignoring and misrepresenting.
Every time someone discusses mystical experience and instantly jumps to “oneness, unity”, this is a particular, arbitrary, pop paradigm pretending to be reality.
“pop” ~= the ordinary state pretending to speak for the intense mystic altered state; exoteric esotericism
the “nondual unity oneness” model of mystical experience
vs. the psychedelic revelation of levels of control and two POVs on personal control power.
The Egodeath theory 