Psychedelic Trips Defy Words—That's the Key to Unlocking Higher Consciousness, Scientists Say

Yahoo

03-05-2025

Under the care of a traditional Peruvian healer, serial entrepreneur Mark Gogolewski took a powerful Amazonian psychedelic as part of his healing process from alcoholism. As the Ayahuasca ceremony deepened, Gogolewski felt himself pulled to the brink of death, but also felt an encouragement to just let go and jump, he says. But something caught him—and it was 'infinite love,' he says. 'Like, you can imagine anything you might want—the beautiful, loving light, the source, whatever word you use—we touch it. It's not just ineffable. It's everything.... And I will never forget it, because it was beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I can't give you exact words, but I remember the feeling of those words.'
Gogolewski's struggle to put the experience into words touches on a larger mystery: why do so many people who undergo altered states of consciousness find themselves unable to explain what they felt? Studies are revealing that these states may be fundamentally outside the bounds of human language. Or perhaps language itself is a filter—a cage, even—that blocks us from grasping deeper truths.
Dr. Dave Rabin, Ph.D., a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies psychedelics and trauma, believes the disappearance of language in psychedelic states is not a glitch—it's the point. 'Psychedelic experiences—whether they're accessed through medicine augmentation, deep meditation, breathwork, or other non–drug-induced methods—can result in states of extraordinarily high levels of presentness,' Rabin says.
In those moments, he explains, the mind shifts away from ego and the past and enters a mode of 'just listening to what's happening in the moment,' he says. 'Our language center requires higher cortical levels of processing [parts of the brain involved in planning, memory, and conscious thought] that draw from our past knowledge and experience,' Rabin says. 'So, when we find ourselves in states of extraordinary presentness—whether psychedelic drugs are involved or not—these states can leave us with an absence of words, or what we call ineffability.'
This beyond-words feeling doesn't hit us because language is broken, Rabin suggests, but because it's temporarily irrelevant. Describing an experience, especially in the peak psychedelic moment, actually removes us from the experience, because 'we're putting it through a filter in our minds to describe it, to attempt to define it.'
Yet, it's through language that we've built laws, literature, religion, and reason itself. Human civilization depends on our ability to preserve and transmit knowledge through structured, symbolic communication. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote, 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.' Which, in a way, goes both ways. Language expands our reality—or quietly narrows it, too.
A 2024 study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science found that language doesn't just express ideas; it encodes and spreads our attitudes across cultures and centuries, even the ones we don't realize we have. Another 2024 paper, published on the preprint server arXiv and titled The Age of Spiritual Machines, offers striking evidence that reducing attention to language may itself induce altered states of consciousness, even in artificial intelligence (AI) models. When researchers dampened the language-processing functions of AI systems, the models began to resemble disembodied, ego-less, and unitive states—in short: the AIs tripped.
Michael Valdez, MD, a neurologist, addiction specialist, and medical director of Detox California, agrees that altered states reshape how language functions, but from a different angle. 'Whether it is achieved through meditation, psychedelics, sleep deprivation, or trauma … language becomes less literal and more symbolic or metaphoric, as words become links to emotions that are felt rather than thought of.' He notes that during an altered state of consciousness, the experience of time, space, and reality can shift dramatically. So can the way people speak, leading to 'fragmented and disjointed thoughts.' But in Valdez's view, this is not linguistic failure—it's a poetic reorientation.
In these moments, language stops being strictly logical and begins to resemble emotion in verbal form—metaphoric, symbolic, and affective, Valdez says. And while the words may sound jumbled on the surface, at their core they may open a path toward insight: 'A new way of seeing, and perhaps, a new way of being,' Valdez says.
For Gogolewski, who wrote the book How to Be OK (When You're Supposed to Be OK But You're Not), the challenge of expression didn't end with the February 2024 ayahuasca ceremony. For the last eight years, he has been studying Kabbalah and Buddhism, and he has found that words often fail in the face of symbols and metaphors rooted in ancient traditions. 'The Buddhists would use these phrases that were impossible to understand purely with the mind. You'd have to wrestle with them before you could get an answer. Like, one I love right now is: 'How you do one thing is how you do everything.''
It could be Buddhism, Sufism in Islam, or Christian mysticism—'it doesn't really matter,' Gogolewski says. What matters is the 'spiritually rigorous vocabulary' that helps people in groups talk about things that might otherwise remain beyond 'commoner' everyday language.
He has spent years trying to find better ways to describe what he experienced in that psychedelic ceremony—and still can't. 'I'm just going to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out better words,' Gogolewski says.
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