Honouring the Mystical: How to integrate entities and mystical-type experiences

FOREWORD

Of all the material a psychedelic practitioner may be asked to hold, mystical-type and entity-encounter experiences are among the most common and among the least written about honestly. A good deal of integration writing stays in the “safe” zone of set and setting, dosage and preparation. What people are actually sitting with afterwards, the sense of having touched something sacred, the being that seemed to communicate with them, the conviction that they briefly saw how everything connects, rarely gets a serious page of its own.

In my own practice at present, a considerable share of client requests follow experiences with 5-MeO-DMT, where mystical-type phenomena are common and intense. People arrive having had something that reorganised their sense of what is real, and what they want to know first is whether it was safe to have had it at all. A practitioner with no language for this material, or one who reaches too quickly for a spiritual or a clinical explanation, risks leaving that person alone with the part of the experience that mattered most to them.

One thread running through this territory deserves naming early, because clients often find it the hardest part to say out loud. A great many of these experiences involve death, though rarely in the literal or frightening form people expect. More often it is the sense that something ended: an identity carried a long time, a way of relating that had outlived its usefulness, sometimes something that never felt fully one’s own to begin with. Integration is frequently the slow work of noticing what died and learning to live without it.

This piece sets out a way to hold mystical and entity content that neither pathologises it nor explains it away. It draws on the mystical experience research from Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, on the acute-experience work from Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London, and on the recent literature about what helps people integrate these experiences. It takes no position on what any experience meant. It sets out why holding this material with skill is one of the core competencies this work requires.

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A gap, and why it opened

Some clinical practitioners avoid this territory, and their reasons are understandable. Say too little and the client is left alone with an experience that reorganised their sense of reality. Say too much and you risk imposing a cosmology on someone else’s private encounter, or pathologising something that was never a symptom to begin with. Others avoid it because their training never covered it, which is a defensible reason to stay out.

Griffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins have spent two decades demonstrating that mystical-type experience can be measured with reasonable reliability, using instruments like the Mystical Experience Questionnaire to capture features such as unity, sacredness, a noetic sense of encountering something truer than ordinary knowing, and the felt dissolution of the boundary between self and world. It is among the more replicated findings in the field. The practical question of what a practitioner says to a client who has just had one of these experiences is addressed far less often.

What the research supports, and what it does not

Across several trials, the mystical quality of a psychedelic experience predicts lasting benefit more reliably than its intensity does.

Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London tested this in a trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. They measured two dimensions of the acute experience: Oceanic Boundlessness, which shares features with mystical-type experience, and Dread of Ego Dissolution, closer to acute anxiety. Their hypothesis, borne out by the data, was that the occurrence and strength of Oceanic Boundlessness would predict long-term improvement while purely sensory or perceptual effects would carry little predictive weight of their own.

The same signal appears elsewhere. In the Johns Hopkins smoking cessation study, participants who achieved biologically verified abstinence at six months had scored significantly higher on measures of mystical experience than those still smoking, with no difference between the groups in the general intensity of drug effects. In the cancer trials at Johns Hopkins and NYU, mystical-type experience significantly mediated the reduction in anxiety and depression, and in the Hopkins data that relationship largely held when overall intensity of drug effect was controlled for.

Two cautions belong here. The samples are small, several trials are open-label, and mediation analysis is suggestive of causality rather than proof of it, as the researchers themselves note. The mystical experience is also unlikely to be the only mediator at work, and the NYU group observe that identifying one does not preclude others. The data support a strong working assumption rather than a settled mechanism.

The practical implication holds regardless. When a client brings you mystical or entity material, you are quite possibly working with a part of the experience that carries therapeutic weight.

What an entity encounter is

The term is used loosely, so it is worth being specific about what the research means by it.

A survey by Davis and colleagues at Johns Hopkins of more than 2,500 people who had encountered an entity after inhaling DMT gives a sense of both the shape and the weight of these experiences. Communication with the entity was commonly described as extrasensory or telepathic. More than two-thirds of respondents reported taking away a message, task, purpose or insight. Around eighty percent said the experience altered their fundamental conception of reality. Roughly seventy percent believed the entity continued to exist after the encounter ended, and fewer than one in ten said it had existed completely within themselves.

Among respondents who had previously identified as atheists, more than half reported some belief in a higher power afterwards. That figure is worth holding in mind before reaching for a purely neurochemical framing in the room.

Two things follow for practice. Entity encounters are common, they are not a marker of pathology, and having had one is no indication that something went wrong in the session. And clients arrive with an interpretation already formed, which will usually differ from yours: most respondents in that survey did not conclude the entity was a projection of their own mind. Telling them so in the first conversation contradicts their experience under the authority of your role.

Death, and what dies

The end-of-life research offers a direct empirical window into this. In trials of psilocybin with patients facing life-threatening cancer, participants showed rapid and sustained improvements in anxiety and depression and in their orientation toward death itself, with mystical-type experience as the mediating variable. Something in the encounter changed the relationship to dying, and the change persisted.

The pattern extends well beyond oncology. Death appears in these experiences constantly, and rarely in the form people expect.

Sometimes it is what the literature calls ego dissolution, described from the inside as a kind of dying: the self one had been maintaining simply stopped, and something continued anyway. Sometimes it is smaller and more specific, a version of the person ending in the session, an identity built around achievement, or vigilance, or being needed, one that had been running so long they had stopped noticing it was a strategy rather than a self.

Sometimes people describe something they struggle to put words to at all: the sense that what left the body was never theirs, a weight belonging to a parent, a lineage, or an event they were too young to have consented to. Clients reach for the language of energy leaving, or something old finally dying, because ordinary psychological vocabulary does not hold the shape of what they felt.

A practitioner does not need to take a position on whether that description is literally true, and the temptation runs in both directions. Endorsing the account as metaphysical fact commits you to a cosmology you cannot support. Translating it straight into intergenerational trauma or somatic release is also an interpretation, and it is yours rather than theirs. Both moves manage your discomfort at the client’s expense. The work asks something narrower: take the report seriously as a report, stay with it, and let the person find out over time what it turns out to have meant.

Framing integration as the work of noticing what died slows the process down, which is the point of it. Grief has its own tempo. If something genuinely ended in that session, what follows is the ordinary, unhurried work of learning that it is gone. Practitioners familiar with bereavement will recognise the shape of it, and clients often do not, because nobody told them a psychedelic experience might leave them mourning.

The trap: reaching for meaning too soon

The research carries a warning alongside the optimistic findings. A mystical-type or entity-encounter experience may predict good long-term outcomes while saying nothing about how quickly its meaning becomes clear.

Argyri and colleagues interviewed people who had struggled after psychedelic experiences and found that the common difficulty arrived after the session rather than during it: a persistent existential struggle, marked by preoccupation with meaning-making, which some participants described as being unable to think about anything else. Those who fared better found ways to stay with the material, through embodiment, through normalising conversation, through time, rather than forcing it into a fixed story in the first week.

A client who says “I met something ancient and it told me my purpose” is usually asking whether it was safe to have had that experience at all, rather than asking you to confirm the ontology. What they need first is permission to sit with something unresolved without treating the absence of resolution as a failure.

How differently this can look

Mystical-type experience takes several forms, and part of holding it well is refusing to flatten them into one. Among the reports practitioners commonly encounter:

A person meets what feels like a previously hidden part of themselves, present all along but never given room. Once met, that part can become something they return to deliberately in difficult periods, an internal reference point they did not have before. It is worth naming to clients as a possibility rather than a promise.

A person describes something closer to what religious language would call the divine within, a sense that whatever is sacred was never separate from them.

A person reports a felt sense of purpose or connectedness that outlasts the session by months, sometimes reorganising priorities in ways that look, from the outside, more like a values shift than a single insight.

A person encounters an entity, in the sense defined above. Some are described as benevolent guides. Others are frightening, occasionally to the point of feeling like possession, and those accounts sit in the literature too, including reports as old as Albert Hofmann’s second LSD experience. A practitioner prepared only for the benevolent version is unprepared.

The addiction data belong in this list, because they show how indirectly these shifts work. People do not typically loosen a grip that other approaches had not touched because a mystical experience supplied new facts about the substance. Where change happens, it tends to arrive through an altered relationship to self and to what feels worth protecting: something felt sacred enough, or connected enough, that returning to the old harm no longer fitted. The mechanism is slow and oblique, it does not work for everyone, and it should not be sold as though it does.

What a competent practitioner does with this

The competence at issue is the discipline to sit with a client’s account without either endorsing it as literal truth or reducing it to neurochemistry in order to manage your own discomfort. It requires no metaphysical position on entities, the divine, or the nature of unity.

In practice that means resisting the urge to interpret on the client’s behalf, asking questions open enough that they arrive at their own framing, and treating the experience itself, entity content and the sense of something dying included, as reported often enough in the literature that having had it is no evidence anything has gone wrong. It means recognising when integration is stalling into rumination rather than settling into understanding, a different problem from having had the experience at all. And it means telling the difference between a person moving through something and a person who needs more support than integration work can offer.

This is the kind of judgement PsyStandard’s verification framework is built to assess. Holding mystical and entity material well is among the more common things clients need, and among the clearer markers of whether a practitioner is equipped for the work they have taken on.

Want practitioner-level guidance on integrating mystical-type and entity-encounter experiences as it is published? Join the PsyStandard practitioner waitlist.

REFERENCES

Argyri, E.K., Evans, J., Luke, D., Michael, P., Michelle, K., Rohani-Shukla, C., Suseelan, S., Prideaux, E., McAlpine, R., Murphy-Beiner, A. & Robinson, O.C. (2025) Navigating groundlessness: an interview study on dealing with ontological shock and existential distress following psychedelic experiences. PLoS One, 20(5): e0322501.

Barrett, F.S., Johnson, M.W. & Griffiths, R.R. (2015) Validation of the revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire in experimental sessions with psilocybin. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 29(11): 1182–1190.

Carhart-Harris, R.L. & Friston, K.J. (2019) REBUS and the anarchic brain: toward a unified model of the brain action of psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews, 71(3): 316–344.

Davis, A.K., Clifton, J.M., Weaver, E.G., Hurwitz, E.S., Johnson, M.W. & Griffiths, R.R. (2020) Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 34(9): 1008–1020.

García-Romeu, A., Griffiths, R.R. & Johnson, M.W. (2014) Psilocybin-occasioned mystical experiences in the treatment of tobacco addiction. Current Drug Abuse Reviews, 7(3): 157–164.

Griffiths, R.R., Richards, W.A., Johnson, M.W., McCann, U.D. & Jesse, R. (2008) Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 22(6): 621–632.

Griffiths, R.R., Johnson, M.W., Carducci, M.A., Umbricht, A., Richards, W.A., Richards, B.D., Cosimano, M.P. & Klinedinst, M.A. (2016) Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized double-blind trial. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12): 1181–1197.

Johnson, M.W., García-Romeu, A., Cosimano, M.P. & Griffiths, R.R. (2014) Pilot study of the 5-HT2AR agonist psilocybin in the treatment of tobacco addiction. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 28(11): 983–992.

Lutkajtis, A. (2020) Entity encounters and the therapeutic effect of the psychedelic mystical experience. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 4(3): 171–178.

Roseman, L., Nutt, D.J. & Carhart-Harris, R.L. (2018) Quality of acute psychedelic experience predicts therapeutic efficacy of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 8: 974.

Ross, S., Bossis, A., Guss, J., Agin-Liebes, G., Malone, T., Cohen, B., Mennenga, S.E., Belser, A., Kalliontzi, K., Babb, J., Su, Z., Corby, P. & Schmidt, B.L. (2016) Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12): 1165–1180.