The book "Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience" fosters a dialogue between philosophy and psychedelic studies. It examines foundational, ontological, and epistemological questions raised by psychedelic experiences, such as the hard problem of consciousness, the metaphysical nature of the self, and the aesthetic meaning of the sublime. The work explores prevailing metaphysical frameworks, epistemic belief structures, and modes of inquiry, bringing together multiple dialectics, practices, perspectives, and methods.
A critical response to Hauskeller's monograph argues that while his socio-political critique of psychedelic psychotherapy under neoliberalism is valuable, it underestimates how psychedelics challenge reductive biomedical models. Indigenous knowledges, combined with emerging sciences, can engage ethnomedicines less harmfully and reveal how psychedelics achieve therapeutic change through transpersonal experience. This offers a revisioning of Western psychology and cognitive science, overturning deficit models of psychopathology and expanding understanding of mind-body relations. Such an approach implicitly challenges the pharmaceutical industry and neoliberal globalization.
A single dose of psilocybin, but not MDMA, produced short-term psychological changes in healthy adults: reduced neuroticism, increased extraversion, and improvements in mindfulness and connectedness one week after dosing. Psilocybin also induced stronger mystical experiences than MDMA, and the magnitude of those experiences correlated with changes in connectedness and mindfulness, though not with personality changes. Participants preferred larger group settings for MDMA than for psilocybin. The findings suggest that psilocybin's psychological effects may be mediated by mystical-type experiences.
Third-wave cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has misconstrued mindfulness interventions as cognitive restructuring and behavioral modification because it fails to engage with mindfulness's embodied dimensions. When the mind-body relationship is understood through embodied cognition, mindfulness's process of change becomes clearer. Mindfulness, as a skillful mode of embodied social cognition, cultivates operative intentionality by attending to the lived body and internal representations, allowing intervention in the mind-body system's complex feedback structure to influence cycles of organismic self-regulation. Mindfulness-based exposure therapies are understood not cognitively or behaviorally but through insights from the practitioner's orientation toward internal representations and how these habituated patterns transform their pre-reflective enactment of self and world perception.