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Every peak experience is impermanent
Peaks fade
A drug wears off, and what remains is a memory that can be fairly dim, like trying to remember a dream. It still shows that a way of being exists that differs from the default, one that is better and psychologically healthier. For one 18-year-old who had never found meaning in the word meditation, a first MDMA experience proved that examining the mind from the inside was worth doing.
What they reveal
Such an experience shows that there is a there there and that unconditional love is possible. What everyone really wants, whether they know it or not, is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness: free attention and unconditional love in a human life that is potentially chaotic and psychologically fraught.
Beyond the drug
That person went 25 years without psychedelics once meditation proved to be delivering the goods, with no need to keep seeking peak experiences on drugs. Repeated psychedelic journeys can be part of the project, though it cannot involve being high all the time, so whatever is extractable from an occasional trip has to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness.
Where did the idea of peak experiences come from?
The psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced the term in the early 1960s and gave it full treatment in his 1964 book Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. He described them as moments of heightened wholeness and joy that he found in ordinary people, not only in mystics. Maslow collected accounts by asking people to describe the most wonderful moments of their lives. He considered such moments common across religious and nonreligious people alike.
How does MDMA produce feelings of closeness?
MDMA reverses the action of the serotonin transporter, flooding the synapse with serotonin, and it also raises norepinephrine and dopamine. Studies in people have found that MDMA raises blood levels of oxytocin, a hormone linked to social bonding. Brain imaging has shown reduced activity in the amygdala, a region involved in fear, after MDMA. The drug was first synthesized by Merck in 1912.
How do peak experiences hold up over time?
In a 2006 study in Psychopharmacology, Roland Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins gave volunteers psilocybin in a controlled setting. At a two-month follow-up, about two thirds ranked the session among the five most meaningful experiences of their lives. Many also rated it among the most spiritually significant. The volunteers were screened beforehand and supervised throughout the session.
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