You raise a tricky question about whether psychedelic revelation can be reconciled with a naturalistic philosophy.

I’m somewhere in the middle of the conflict between psychedelic mysticism and egoistic materialism. I’ve had enough mind-unveiling experiences just on cannabis to suspect that these kinds of experience are the sources of most foundational religious ideas and practices, that they’re revelatory, life-changing, and earth-shaking.

But having the theophany or the epiphany is very different from understanding and applying it. Interpreting the religious experience happens only when you’ve come back down to earth and begun to think it through in your more openminded ego.

There are dangers on both sides of this divide. Certainly, atheistic materialists and liberal humanists can rationalize selfish consumerism, by identifying with their narrow self and avoiding the bigger picture. But by repudiating that limited self, the brain-mind, or the thinker that’s also quite real, the mystic is liable to exploit the follower’s gullibility by explaining away skepticism, logic, and science to make room for some cult or con. (Arguably, Tolle is guilty of the latter. If he were to give away his many millions of dollars, that would go a long way to undercutting that doubt.)

My aim is to show how mysticism, a view of the narrow self’s role in a transcendent reality, is consistent with atheistic naturalism. The bridges here are cosmicism, pantheism, and existentialism.