What we mean when we talk about meditation
Meditation is one of humanity’s oldest practices, so widespread across time and cultures that it is impossible to date precisely. The Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary defines meditating as “applying thought with deep attention to the consideration of something, or reasoning about the means to know or achieve it.” Far from any mystical wrapping, that definition contains the essential: meditation is, above all, focusing attention.
Here, we will approach it from contemporary psychology, not because this view invalidates spiritual or contemplative readings, but because it offers a shared, verifiable language. Different schools—focusing on the breath, counting respiratory cycles, repeating a mantra, or holding a posture—share the same mechanism: directing mental energy toward a single object until everything else quiets down.
Equanimity: the goal, not the shortcut
The usual purpose of meditation is to cultivate equanimity: a way of observing what happens—both inside and outside oneself—without being dragged away by polarities. It is not indifference or emotional anesthesia, but a certain mental “maneuvering space”: the margin that allows one to live a situation in the here and now, maintain balance, and choose a response rather than simply reacting.
It is worth emphasizing this because that is exactly where misunderstandings arise. Equanimity does not consist of feeling less, but of not being held hostage by what one feels. And that, as anyone who has tried it knows, requires sustained training.
The single-seat cinema
One of our most unique capacities is metacognition: thinking about what we think, turning our attention toward our own mental contents, and attending to our inner world almost as spectators.
The original text proposed a useful image to understand this. Imagine your mind is a cinema with a single seat, where you are sitting. Images are projected on the screen: some come from outside (what you see, hear, smell) and others from within (ideas, memories, thoughts). Their origin does not matter; they are all projected on that screen where content comes into contact with consciousness. Meditative practice aims for something difficult: seeing the screen before anything is projected onto it, intuiting what some traditions call “witness consciousness.”
Separating content from container is not simple, because the brain receives, processes, and generates information without rest. Neuroscience also reminds us that neurons work in impulses—after each activation there is a refractory period—so the sensation of a continuous stream of consciousness is, to a large extent, a construction: a sequence of correlative pulses that appears continuous. Grasping what consciousness really is remains one of the great open enigmas of science and philosophy.
Where substances fit into that argument
The original article’s premise was provocative: if meditation seeks to “slip in” between frames to see the background of the screen, perhaps certain substances—cannabis, but also psilocybin, MDMA, or LSD—could temporarily facilitate that emptying of mental content and favor a state of greater detachment.
That text also launched a cultural critique worth rescuing with nuances. It denounced the paradox of a society that normalizes the use of psychopharmaceuticals—not always well-indicated—while stigmatizing other substances capable of analogous effects, and pointed to diagnostic inflation—the continuous widening of mental illness categories—as a symptom of the times. It is a line that connects with authors like Thomas Szasz or essays like The Myth of Mental Illness, and with the old suspicion of Antonio Escohotado regarding the shifting borders between medicine, drug, and poison.
That critique of over-medicalization has merit. But it is best not to resolve one simplification (“everything prescribed is good”) by replacing it with the opposite (“any substance is a legitimate shortcut to wisdom”). Both avoid the difficult question: what does each substance do, in whom, in what context, and at what cost?
A first-person account
The piece included a subjective testimony from the author, a psychologist and practitioner. He recounted having reached, with the help of psilocybin, a state of detachment that he struggled to achieve through meditation alone. He described how, while observing his own “verbal process”—that machinery that incessantly labels everything it perceives—he had the sensation that beneath language there was “something” ungraspable; and how, by pulling that thread, he arrived at a point “prior” to thought, without fear, joy, or pain, only calm and a sense of total understanding that immediately revealed itself as the understanding that there was nothing to understand.
From there, he drew his most interesting conclusion: that one can choose the labels with which one lives what happens. One does not choose not to suffer a bad experience, but one does choose how to name it and what to do with it. The author himself framed all of this as a totally subjective experience, traversed by a specific pharmacological process and filtered afterward by rationality. That honesty is the most valuable part of the account, and also the reason why it should not be read as proof of anything.
Critical reading
Taken as a human document, the text is suggestive. Taken as an argument, it should be handled with care:
- A testimony is not evidence. Experiences of ego dissolution or “total understanding” are intense and real for those who go through them, but they do not prove that the substance “improves” meditation. Research on psychedelics and well-being is promising and still ongoing; regarding cannabis and meditation, specifically, data is scarce and far from conclusive.
- Cannabis is not neutral for attention. A good part of contemplative practice trains precisely sustained concentration and working memory, functions that THC tends to acutely hinder. The “amotivational syndrome” is a debated and poorly defined construct, true, but it does not follow that consumption favors meditative focus.
- Set and setting rule. What is experienced under the effect of any psychoactive substance depends enormously on the prior mental state, expectations, and environment. What in a careful context can be an experience of calm, in another can lead to anxiety or discomfort.
- There are serious contraindications. Personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder, pregnancy, certain medications, or interactions (MDMA is especially delicate in combination with other drugs) completely change the risk equation.
- The legal framework exists. The status of these substances varies, and their possession or consumption can carry legal and health consequences.
At Psiconáutica, we do not provide consumption guidelines, dosages, or procurement advice: the point of disseminating these experiences is to understand them and reduce harm, not to encourage reproducing them. If anything is worth taking away from this text, it is its underlying question—who is sick, the people or the way of life demanded of them?—and the idea that the real work, with or without substances, is learning not to get trapped in one’s own reactivity. That part, meditation offers without contraindications.
