When Rosalind Watts's research team asked participants in a psilocybin trial for treatment-resistant depression how the treatment had worked, they were looking for insight into mechanisms. What they found instead was a word. Of the seventeen patients who endorsed the treatment's effectiveness, every single one pointed to the same thing: a renewed sense of connection — to themselves, to others, to the world (Watts et al., 2017). Not the molecule. Not the therapy. Connection.

If you think about it from within the standard framework of how clinical treatments work, this is strange. Therapies are supposed to correct distortions, resolve conflicts, build skills. Connection doesn't sound like a mechanism. It sounds like an outcome or a byproduct. And yet Carhart-Harris and colleagues (2017) have proposed it is the key, the underlying factor that explains not just the treatment of depression but the apparent breadth of psychedelic therapy's reach across addiction, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. A treatment that works across so many disorders is probably not targeting any of them specifically. It's likely targeting something more fundamental.

Something that all of them share.

That something, I want to suggest, is a particular kind of rupture — a severance from the relational fabric within which a person might otherwise find themselves embedded.

The most potent version of the psychedelic experience has been operationalized, somewhat awkwardly, as the mystical experience: unity, self-transcendence, a felt sense of sacredness, a quality of knowing that resists articulation afterward.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have been measuring these features for two decades, and what their data consistently shows is that the occurrence of a full mystical-type experience is among the strongest predictors of sustained therapeutic benefit (Griffiths et al., 2011). A study of 288 individuals found that those who met criteria for a complete mystical experience reported more positive changes across every measured domain — attitudes, values, wellbeing — than those who did not (Griffiths et al., 2011). Paterniti and colleagues (2022) found that those same individuals also scored higher on pro-environmental behavior.

This second finding is peculiar enough that it deserves more attention than it usually receives. A person goes through an intense psychological experience oriented around healing — and afterward, they behave differently toward the living world. They don't just feel better in themselves. They relate differently to what is beyond themselves. Something in the quality of the experience has reorganized their orientation outward.

There is a long philosophical argument about what mystical experiences actually are. The constructivist position — associated with philosopher Steven Katz — holds that they are shaped by the concepts and beliefs the person brings to them: a Buddhist mystic experiences Buddhist unity, a Christian mystic experiences Christian union. The experience is culturally molded, not culturally transcendent. Robert Forman (1988) pushed back on this account, noting that it fails to explain why mystical experiences so consistently generate novelty — surprise, bewilderment, the sense of having encountered something that could not have been anticipated from within the person's existing framework. His alternative model holds that mystical experience involves something closer to a massive forgetting: the habitual cognitive structures that ordinarily construct the sense of self, and with it the sense of a world divided into bounded objects, temporarily drop away. What remains is not the content of the mystic's tradition. What remains is whatever was always there before the machinery of ordinary cognition organized it.

This maps, more closely than is usually acknowledged, onto what the REBUS model describes at the neurological level (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019). The "relaxed beliefs" in REBUS are not arbitrary beliefs. They are specifically the hierarchical top-down priors that ordinarily suppress incoming information — the predictive structures organized around the ego-centered self that ensure experience remains coherent, stable, and continuous. When these loosen, bottom-up information flows more freely. What was perceptually filtered out becomes available. What was backgrounded becomes foreground.

And what consistently appears in the foreground, when the ordinary predictive machinery relaxes, is something relational. Connection. Aliveness. The felt sense that the boundary between self and world was thinner than it seemed. People describe "no real separation between humanity and the natural world," "seamless consciousness," "feeling one with nature," the recognition that the self is not a discrete entity so much as a convergence point in something much larger (Irvine et al., 2023). This is not a culturally specific report. It appears across clinical trials, naturalistic surveys, and traditions with no historical contact. The content varies; the direction is the same.

One way to make sense of this consistency is through what researchers now call ecospirituality. Billet and colleagues (2025) have identified it as a distinct psychological construct: the perception of nature as spiritually significant, as possessing a quality that transcends ordinary instrumental valuation. The ecospiritual person does not merely appreciate nature — they experience it as carrying a kind of worth that refuses to be compared, traded, or bargained with. Intriguingly, this orientation is widespread across cultures, political affiliations, and even levels of formal religious belief. Even atheists report above-midpoint levels of ecospirituality. What this suggests is that the perception of the living world as something more-than-resource is not the exclusive property of any tradition or ideology — it may be a latent human capacity, one that ordinary modern life rarely activates.

The mystical experience, in this light, may be less a departure from ordinary cognition than a temporary dissolution of the particular cognitive habits that suppress an orientation human beings inherently have access to. The forgetting Forman describes is a forgetting of the automatizations — the perceptual shortcuts and self-referential structures — that normally keep the world organized as a collection of objects available for use. When those automatizations relax, what becomes available is something more relational, more animated, more participatory. Not a vision of another world. A different way of inhabiting this one.

The healing implication runs deeper than the memory reconsolidation account usually reaches. That account — that the mystical experience creates a powerful juxtaposition with entrenched self-defeating beliefs, destabilizing them and enabling new cognitive organization — is compelling and probably correct as far as it goes. The felt experience of belonging to something vast and interconnected does produce extraordinary cognitive dissonance with beliefs like "I am worthless" or "I am fundamentally alone." The neural "unfreezing" that follows — the neuroplasticity window associated with these states — does appear to allow those beliefs to update. This is genuine.

But what is the content of the contradicting experience? It is not merely the experience of a smaller or diminished self. It is the experience of a larger relationship. A participant remaining in remission three months after a psilocybin trial described it simply: "this connection, it's just a lovely feeling… we are all interconnected" (Watts et al., 2017). What is being described is not a psychological state but a perceived relational reality. And the question of what that reality is — whether it is something that the experience merely feels like or something the experience briefly permits the organism to perceive — has consequences for how we understand healing and being.

Disconnection, after all, is not simply a subjective feeling. It is a condition — a way of being organized in the world — that generates suffering at multiple levels simultaneously. The clinical literature is arriving at this slowly. Carhart-Harris and colleagues (2017) propose that disconnection may be a core factor underlying a wide range of psychological disorders, and that what psychedelics treat, in each case, is the rupture rather than the specific symptom-pattern the rupture has produced. This is a significant claim. It means the unit of analysis for healing is not the disorder but the relationship — between self and self, self and others, self and the living world.

What reconsolidates after the experience depends on what the person returns to. This is the part that the therapeutic model, in its current individualized form, tends to miss.

The "forgetting" that Forman describes does not last. The habitual cognitive structures re-form. What shapes their reformation is the environment into which the person returns — the relationships, the physical setting, the cosmological frame, the quality of attention they subsequently cultivate. An ecospiritual orientation is not automatically installed. It has to find ground to grow in. Researchers have noted that natural settings appear to amplify and prolong increases in nature-relatedness following these experiences (Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2025). The experience opens something; what opens it further, or closes it again, is the context that follows.

This is why the question of what integration means is not primarily a clinical question. It is a question about what kind of life is being returned to and built. The most honest way to ask it isn't what did this experience mean to me — it is what relational demands does this experience place on how I live? Those are not the same question. The first locates the meaning inside the individual. The second understands it as pointing outward, toward the networks of life and community and land within which the individual participates whether or not they perceive themselves doing so.

Humans have always found ways to perceive nature as spiritually significant. The evidence suggests this isn't a mystical aberration but a recurring feature of human perception, present across cultures and persisting even when religious frameworks that once organized it have faded. What modernity has perhaps most successfully suppressed is not the capacity itself but the conditions under which it activates.

The mystical experience is one such condition. It is not the only one. But it is a particularly reliable one — a brief, intense de-automatization of the cognitive habits that keep the relational world at arm's length. The person who comes through it changed is usually not different in their beliefs so much as in their orientation. Something has been briefly remembered. The work of what follows is to not forget it again.

These questions — about what mystical experiences reveal, what they demand, and how to build a life around them — are at the center of everything we do at Psygaia.

If you want to explore them, we gather twice each month for free community breathwork ceremonies. Join Psygaia’s Circle to join us and participate.