American psychedelic advocates received a great disappointment a couple months ago when the Food and Drug Administration refused to approve MDMA (ecstasy) as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The disappointment was great enough to lead Jules Evans of the Ecstatic Integration Substack to ask: “Is the psychedelic renaissance over?“

It seems silly to me to read too much into this one decision. It is not final; a new application could be made in a few years. More importantly, it is one decision, about one substance, by one agency in one country – for one purpose. (It was also a great disappointment for us in Massachusetts that our state voted down the ballot question to legalize psychedelics, but it too is just one state, where the question was extremely poorly promoted; Oregon and Colorado have proceeded with decriminalizing psilocybin.) If the entire “psychedelic renaissance” hung on the outcome of one agency’s decision or one state referendum, it would have been a shallow “renaissance” indeed. Even within the US there are already many other avenues for improving the legal status of psychedelics.

That said: Michael Pollan’s book How To Change Your Mind probably did more to kick off the supposed current renaissance than anything else, and one of Pollan’s most important takeaways in the book was, let’s not screw this up. Psychedelics were famously popular in the 1960s, but the messages around them were dominated by overenthusiastic salespeople like Timothy Leary, who had little sense of caution. The resulting backlash was so strong that it created the ignorant world I grew up in, in the 1980s and 1990s, where even video games felt the importance of including a heavy-handed “don’t do drugs” message – extending even to cannabis. What the FDA ruling should remind us of, is the importance of avoiding the mistakes of the ’60s – so that the renaissance can lead to an enlightenment, if you will.

Avoiding the ’60s mistakes means approaching matters with more caution and nuance. Government systems of pharmaceutical review are there for a reason, and for better or for worse, those systems are cautious about approving any treatments. If we think that psychedelics hold great psychiatric potential (which I do), then we need to keep making slow, steady, careful cases for each treatment in a way that can show demonstrated results to approving agencies – and the US agency doesn’t have to be the first.

I am no expert on neuropsychiatry, so I’m in no position to make further statements beyond that. What I do know something about is comparative mysticism – which, thanks to the experiments of Roland Griffiths and other researchers at Johns Hopkins, has played its own significant role in the psychedelic renaissance. But there too, I think some caution is called for.

Inhaling smoked 5-MeO-DMT, a psychoactive substance secreted by the Colorado River toad, can relatively reliably produce a state where one’s sense of self and the world both drop away: an experience much like the Pure Consciousness Events catalogued by Robert Forman. A friend of mine who has tried 5-MeO-DMT multiple times recently commented that she had read works of mystics from multiple traditions and was amazed by the similarities – and asked, “why has nobody written about this before?”

My answer was: they did, and like Leary, they got overenthusiastic. Not about 5-MeO-DMT itself and often not even about psychedelics, but about commonalities between mystical experiences – commonalities I’ve been excited about myself. The 1960s were also the heyday of comparative mysticism, like W.T. Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy, which tried to establish a commonality in mystical experience across multiple traditions and argue based on that commonality that what they were perceiving was real. Stace’s ideas are alive today in none other than Griffiths, who used Stace’s work as the basis for a questionnaire establishing similarities.

But Stace’s work is not in itself very careful; it goes quickly and easily between traditions in a way that doesn’t establish his comparative case. And far less care was taken by later thinkers like Ken Wilber, who tried to claim that the “universal core” of all the great wisdom traditions had to do with the “states of consciousness” they unlocked. That claim of Wilber’s is hogwash; long ago I wrote an article explaining why. Those sorts of claims put Wilber in a league with Leary: you’re just making the claims that you want to be true, not the ones that actually stand up to careful examination.

For a long time, the implausibility of claims like Wilber’s had put me in the anti-mystical camp. By the time I started my PhD in the early 2000s, the idea of a common mystical core had become something of a scholarly laughing stock. When I took a course with Robert Gimello in grad school, I was fertile ground for his anti-mystical views, articulating them in a course paper I put online as recently as 2012. I claimed then that there wasn’t much point in seeing similarities across traditions. I now see that Gimello’s views, and those of his fellow critics like Steven Katz, have problems of their own – and so two years ago I recanted that paper. I think there is value in finding similarities across states of consciousness, traditional and psychedelic.

The point is just that – here as in the medical trials – we need to be careful! When we have a powerful mystical experience, it’s really tempting and easy to believe that the Buddha and Śaṅkara and ibn ‘Arabī (and if we’re really out there, even Confucius) must have had it too. But they are not us. It’s a dangerous game to believe you’ve got the secret truth that figures everything out. To really establish similarities across reported experiences – including reports attributed to the sages – requires close and careful individual examination of the reports, paying attention to the places where they do differ.

Now having said all that, if we do make that careful examination and then actually succeed in showing meaningful similarities, then I think we stand ready to unlock something really powerful, important and significant. If it turns out that a 5-MeO-DMT experience really is identical in the most important respects to Sufi fanā’ or the eighth Buddhist jhāna, that indicates that the spiritual potential of the substance is huge and just beginning. But we have to make the case that it actually is. Stace didn’t succeed at that, and there’s a lot that a quantitative study based on Stace can miss.

As Pollan argued, the psychedelic culture of both the 1960s and 2020s provided a great opportunity. We screwed it up in the ’60s. Let’s get it right this time.