I have had the following experiences on psychedelics:

1) Thinking that a community of gods was inviting me to join them and all I or anyone else had to do was simply to decide to do so.

2) The experience of regressing back through all stages of my life down to the fetal and beyond to the cellular level.

3) Having the very strong feeling that under the influence of the acid I was somehow radically "in a different place" where logic was superceded.

4) The experience of wandering the streets of a residential neighborhood at 4:00 am with 2 other guys, trippin' balls, singing a rock song that mentions a famous person and then right as we were singing that very line meeting that same famous person who turned out to live in that small town even though none of us knew that or had any idea we were in her neighborhood. (One of those guys later earned his MFA with a poem based on that experience).

5) Feeling at one with the audience at a Grateful Dead show in an unusually deep way that I have never experienced anywhere else.

6) Believing that I was having great intellectual insights while my brain was processing at a million miles per hour under the influence of LSD.

7) Being so entirely focused on the music at a Grateful Dead show that it felt absolutely cosmic -- so focused that neither me nor my buddy who was at the concert with me could remember a single song that was played. Some will laugh and say it was the drugs but its actually something that happens from being entirely focused on the present in a Buddhist kind of way. You're too busy experiencing to record the experience.

8) Seemingly having the power to control other people's minds. On two occasions while tripping, I decided to focus my attention on making a strange woman come have sex with me and it seemingly worked. And believe me that is highly unusual -- I normally have to put a lot more effort into getting laid than that.

In one case (the same night I thought I could become a god) she was the opening act for a major rock band. I sent vibes for her to come to me and lo and behold when her set was over, rather than hang out back stage with her band, she came into the crowd and sat in the seat next to mine.

In another case, me and a friend were tripping while driving through Northern California, picked up a hitchhiker, and ended up crashing at her friends' house. She was sleeping in the next room and I told my friend I was going to use my acid-driven mental powers to make her ask me to have sex with her. A little while later she came out and said I could sleep in her bed if I wanted even though there had been no flirting between us beforehand.

9) Paranoid experiences, for example I once strongly suspected that many of the people at a Dead show were actual witches and warlocks in disguise. Another time I thought an animal on the side of the road was an evil spirit following me.

All things considered, I believe that all of the above can be explained as matters of coincidence, drug-induced charisma, the increased speed of thought caused by drugs, and overdriven pattern recognition modules in the brain.

People like GW claim these experiences aren't the real thing but how the hell would he know? Those experiences bear a strong family resemblance to many of the claims of mystics but in my case were clearly induced by chemicals -- the same chemicals swimming around in the brains of all mystics, binding to the same receptors they were evolutionarily designed to bind to in all humans, including all mystics.

You can easily see how without sufficient critical thought you could attribute experiences like those to all kinds of supernatural processes. But knowing that these kinds of experiences can be reliably produced by the right chemicals ("entheogens"), where the hell does a guy like GW get off asserting conclusively that his experiences -- whether induced by meditation or whatever -- are not the product of the same neural mechanisms? That is obviously the simpler explanation.

These experiences have total validity as experiences. They really felt like that. But that doesn't mean that I interpreted the reality of those experiences (to the extent that I actually thought they were real) correctly at the time.

To some extent I think I really did have some philosophical insights. And an overdriven pattern recognition module may produce a lot of false positives but also may produce some interesting true positives. The trick is being able to distinguish between the two after the experience fades away.

And that is where people like Wilber and other mystics fail miserably. Until about the middle of the 20th century, there was no way to know any of this stuff, so mystics from the past have some excuse. Mystics in the 21st Century do not.