Narratives of the mystical among users of psychedelics

Introduction

Mystical experiences have long been central to religious and philosophical accounts of human meaning, and recent clinical revival around psychedelics (for example LSD and psilocybin) has placed such experiences back at the centre of scientific interest. Classical dimensions of mysticism—ineffability, noetic quality, unity or loss of ego, and altered sense of time and space—are repeatedly reported in studies of psychedelic administration, yet most empirical work has been clinical and limited in examining how users outside therapeutic settings make sense of these events. There is also an ongoing debate about whether mystical experiences are universal in their core features or are culturally mediated by narrative resources available to the experiencer. Pedersen and colleagues set out to explore how people in Norway narratively construct and explain mystical experiences occasioned by psychedelics. Using a narrative identity framework, the study examines which cultural storylines participants draw on—particularly contemporary ecological and political themes—to render the ineffable intelligible and to account for reported personal changes following psychedelic use. The authors therefore aim to document both archetypal patterns of mystical experience and the culturally specific storylines that shape their interpretation.