My first trip was at 18.
I reluctantly agreed to partake in two grams of mushrooms with a friend in his dimly lit, horribly messy Tel Aviv apartment. He and his friends were Juniors at Harvard, so what could possibly go wrong?
Not much, at least not this time. I spent the next ten hours in a state of wonder, laughter, dreamlike visuals, and total confusion about what was transpiring.
I’d recently been severely concussed in a scooter accident, and I was carrying around a low hum of sadness. Somewhere in those ten hours, it evaporated into a warm, soothing love. I wanted to hug everyone and everything. Could life always feel this good?!
Like a lot of people after their first trip, I walked away convinced psychedelics could and would change the world. That if everyone could feel this type of unconditional love, humanity would evolve past its caveman tendencies that were (and still are) wrecking ourselves and the planet. In other words: psychedelics could help us wake up.
Six years later, we’re finally getting the medicine. Not the awakening. At least not yet.
In July, Compass Pathways reported positive six-month results from its second phase 3 trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression (translation: the last, biggest round of testing before the FDA weighs in). If all goes to plan, it launches in the first half of 2027 and becomes the first classic psychedelic the FDA has ever approved.
This will be a massive step in the right direction.
Since selling my last company, I’ve had the rare freedom to explore topics I care about deeply, including psychedelics. For the last few weeks, I’ve been on calls with investors, founders, doctors, and researchers, trying to understand this field better.
I ask most of the questions on those calls. But they usually ask me one back:
“Why psychedelics?”
My immediate answer is the obvious one: healing. Psychedelics can treat trauma, addiction, and depression faster and more effectively than what we have now. In a 2023 MDMA study, 71% of participants no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis by the end. Mental illnesses are the low-hanging fruit of psychedelic medicine.
But what I’m most interested in is their potential to help us wake up: to reach a higher stage of consciousness that doesn’t always show up on a depression scale.
With full candor, I’ve watched this field for years, but mostly from the sidelines. Plenty of people in this space have far more experience than I do, and I admire that. But when I started The Neuron, I was an AI newbie too, and that’s exactly what made me good at explaining it to millions of other newbies. Fresh eyes ask the dumb questions.
(I’m very good at dumb questions.)
Also, I bring a lot of experience in a different but related discipline: meditation. I started practicing years before I ever ate a mushroom, and spent the last year going deep in the Tibetan traditions of Mahamudra and Dzogchen, experiencing many different states of consciousness, levels of awareness, and mind-body experiences.
So I came at psychedelics backward: cushion first, plants second. That order has turned out to matter a lot more than I expected.
Psychedelics (or, as Big Pharma has rebranded them, “rapid-acting neuroplastogens,” which is somehow both less fun and more terrifying) put you in new states of consciousness.
A state is just what’s happening in your experience right now. Normal waking consciousness is a state (hi, you’re in it, reading this). Dreaming is a state. On psychedelics, the menu expands a lot. People report visiting other galaxies, inhabiting new bodies, and meeting entities who seem weirdly confident they’ve met you before.
Every state also has qualities: what it actually feels like to be in it. On a good trip, people often describe bliss, oneness, total interconnectedness, unconditional love. Those experiences can be deeply healing on their own.
The problem is, the qualities you felt on shrooms usually don’t last.
You “come down”. You check your phone. You have 43 unread emails and a fading memory of loving everyone, including the guy who cut you in line at the supermarket.
The qualities of the trip that felt so automatic, so effortless, are gone.
The question many people have chased since the ‘60s is whether there was a way to not “come down.” Whether there was a way to exist in the world (or develop a permanent “trait” of consciousness) in which the qualities of the trip were always present.
You may have heard of Richard Alpert, the psychology professor who was fired from Harvard for running psilocybin research with Timothy Leary.
Alpert had the same qualm as many: hundreds of trips, but always back down to reality. So in 1967, he traveled to India to give Maharaj-ji, a Hindu guru, a heroic dose of LSD. And reportedly, nothing happened. Maharaj-ji later said the medicine lets you visit Christ for a couple of hours, but “it’s better to become Christ than to visit him.”
And that’s how Richard Alpert turned into a guy you’ve definitely heard of: Ram Dass.
So, Ram Dass had the same question my 18-year-old self did: could life always be this good? Could the qualities of a state (love, timelessness, interconnectedness, oneness, ego transcendence) become a part of your normal waking reality? Could a state become a trait?
The great news is, yes, they can!
The bad news is, it takes a lot longer than a ten-hour mushroom trip, it doesn’t look or feel the same as a mushroom trip, and most people have no idea where to start!
It’s not surprising that plenty of people have one revelatory trip and spend years chasing it, with more trips and bigger doses. This is certainly understandable; if you have only experienced unconditional love/peace/connection on LSD, you might assume that you need LSD to access those qualities again.
Ram Dass literally did LSD hundreds of times before admitting that something was missing.
So did the Buddha, funnily enough. Before he was the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama trained under two teachers who taught him the most refined bliss states meditation had to offer, not unlike what people describe on LSD. He mastered them. Then he left, because every time he came out, he was the same guy.
Bliss was a state, not a trait.
So how does a state become a trait?
By expanding your consciousness. I know that sounds like something off a yoga studio chalkboard. Let me explain.
Right now, you probably feel like a mini-me living inside your head. There’s “you” in here and the world out there. You want things from the world, the world doesn’t always deliver, and that gap is the root of a lot of our suffering.
But there’s another way to exist in the world. One where there’s no “in here.” Your awareness is everywhere and nowhere, and it feels less like you’re experiencing the universe and more like you are the universe experiencing itself.
If you’ve meditated a lot or done MDMA, that description might ring a bell. If not, it probably sounds like gibberish. You can’t think your way into this state, which is why spiritual traditions have spent thousands of years building practices (meditation, yoga, prayer, and yes, psychedelics) to show people it’s possible.
So what does this have to do with the qualities of a trip?
When your consciousness changes, the qualities of a trip become part of how you experience the world. On LSD, you feel interconnected. In a higher level of awareness, interconnectedness is simply right there in direct experience. It’s known.
The big difference is the intensity of the quality. On psychedelics, the love is overwhelming. In expansive awareness, it’s ordinary. Eventually, you realize ordinary is better because it doesn’t wear off. That’s what the Buddha figured out when he walked away from those bliss states, and what Ram Dass figured out after hundreds of trips.
I learned this in the opposite order.
I was a senior at Northwestern, walking across campus on a totally unremarkable day, when something strange clicked. The deep love, peace, and okay-ness I’d felt on that couch in Tel Aviv was right here, in ordinary waking consciousness. There was no separate self, no consciousness “in here”, but rather me existing as the entire universe. Everything felt deeply, deeply peaceful, like it had always been this way.
I started crying. Life really did feel that good.
But it wasn’t intense-good. It was sober-good. Calm, clear, completely normal.
Years later, when I started doing psychedelics again, I noticed something strange. A lot of the qualities that showed up on the trips were already familiar from meditation practice. The trip just turned the volume way up. Because I’d found it sober first, I knew what I was looking at, and I knew I could still find it when the trip ended.
That’s the job of a real spiritual path, whether it’s Theravada Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, or the Mahamudra and Dzogchen practice I’ve been doing this past year. Not to give you more special experiences, but to make this your normal life.
As Ram Dass put it, if you’re in Detroit, you don’t have to take a bus to Detroit.
So what do psychedelics have to do with any of this?
The meditation path (or “spiritual path” more broadly) is a very difficult sales pitch. You’re asking normal people to spend years on a cushion investigating their thoughts, for a payoff they can’t imagine because they’ve never tasted it. “Your normal reality might be kind of blurry” is a tough sell when your normal reality seems fine, thanks.
Psychedelics help solve the sales problem. They give people a sample so vivid and real that the blurry-reality argument meditation teachers make suddenly sounds believable.
This is what Maharaj-ji means by “visiting Christ”. You don’t get to stay. But now you know the room exists, and that’s a very good reason to start walking toward it.
Psychedelics can help after you start walking, too. This year I had a few intense, powerful trips, and afterward people kept asking me, “So, did it change your life? Are you a new person?”
I’m not a new person, no, because I knew that, despite occasionally experiencing remarkable bliss, those states were temporary. Describing the purpose of “bliss” on the spiritual path, Tsoknyi Rinpoche puts it well: bliss is a good friend but a bad home.
The trips reminded me: oh right, these qualities are real and always right here. They’re not a hallucination. As my meditation teacher said today, special states can give you confidence in the trait you’re already cultivating, because you’ve now recognized it clearly enough to trust it’s there.
Psychedelics showed me what my practice is already pointing at, just in HD.
Now, the uncomfortable part: psychedelics can help people wake up, but under the current setup, they probably won’t.
Integration is everything that happens after a trip to turn it into something that lasts. Everyone I’ve talked to has emphasized its importance, yet it seems to have become less of a priority for the industry.
In the early MDMA trials, therapists guided patients through preparation, the sessions, and a string of integration sessions afterward. This model was expensive, and after the FDA rejected MDMA in 2024, a lot of psychedelic companies moved away from it. One trial therapist said, “We went from being called therapists, to being called facilitators, to being called ‘monitors’. It feels like a demotion.”
Definium’s latest LSD trials gave a single dose with monitoring and zero required therapy.
And where integration does exist, it seems only to be built for healing, or “cleaning up”: processing trauma, shadow work, ongoing CBT, etc. This matters a lot. But nobody is talking about “waking up” integration, where the trip is a glimpse of what reality could become.
My hunch (and it is a hunch) is that most people guiding these sessions aren’t trained to distinguish between a state and a trait. This is nobody’s fault; it simply doesn’t seem to be a part of the job description yet.
This month, the FDA denied a petition asking it to recognize “higher states of consciousness” as a research area, calling the concept too vague to measure and unrelated to any specific disease. This is reasonable, but it means that waking-up integration won’t come from the FDA. It’ll have to come from the rest of us: teachers, communities, and whoever designs what happens after the dose.
If I were designing it, integration would include not just therapy and healing, but ongoing spiritual practice. A few ideas:
Four weeks of daily meditation leading up to the psychedelic experience, both to help with regulation if the trip gets bad, but also as a way to recognize qualities of consciousness.
More psychedelic therapists who have walked the spiritual path themselves. Not just people trained in safety and trauma, but people with serious contemplative practice who can say, “What you saw is real. Here’s how to find it sober.”
A handoff to spiritual containers. The trip should be a first step toward an integrated spiritual teacher and community.
We know how it ends when psychedelics aren’t integrated in the right ways.
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were running psilocybin research together at Harvard. Same starting point.
Leary decided that the drug was the path. He became psychedelics’ loudest evangelicalist, and to be fair, he gave us “set and setting”, but the rest of the story is not as pretty: arrests, years on the run, and a government that decided all psychedelics were dangerous, and research should be prohibited.
Alpert decided the drug was a gateway to a new way of being. He walked through it, came down, went to India, and spent the next fifty years doing the slow, boring work of practice and service.
Same drug, different integration.
When I was 20, my friend tweeted about the coolest technologies of the next decade, such as AI, VR, and mRNA. He missed one: Psychedelics.
I still think of them that way. Psychedelics are not just medicine, but they’re a technology, a portal that shows us what’s possible right here, in plain old sober waking consciousness. This technology is coming either way… the question is whether we use it to help people feel better for a few months at a time or to show them there’s an entirely new way to be awake in this world.
I’d like more people to find that out, ideally faster than I did.
“If you get the message, hang up the phone.” — Alan Watts
