Psychedelics may help generate the perceptual shifts needed to imagine and pursue social transformation under alienating conditions, but their revolutionary potential risks being co-opted by economic structures. They could be instrumentalized to regulate individuals into unjust systems, redirect usage toward productivity, distract from systemic control, turn non-ordinary states into self-care, or commodify psychedelic experience. However, psychedelics also resist co-option by challenging industrial society's assumptions, provoking alternative epistemologies, expanding selfhood to ecological constructions, and offering enriched phenomenological insight into self, other, and world—potentially sparking the desire for collective emancipation.
A critical response to Jylkkä's argument that psychedelic-induced unitary experiences reveal an epistemic gap between experiential and relational knowledge. The authors argue that Jylkkä's comparison between psychedelic nondual experiences and Buddhist contemplative states requires more rigorous characterization, as such parallelism risks conflating distinct traditions. They highlight internal tensions in Indo-Tibetan conceptions of nonduality, the dangers of decontextualizing culturally embedded practices like ceremonial ethnomedicine, and the potential of psychedelics to reduce introspective bias in phenomenological inquiry.