Psychedelic chemicals don't speak narrative; the answer is far more boring of a story than "ego-busting". In my non-expert opinion, it's something roughly like

Psychedelic chemicals don't speak narrative; the answer is far more boring of a story than "ego-busting". In my non-expert opinion, it's something roughly like this: People have a surprising amount of path-dependence to their personality and behavior. That's like, the entire point of childhood - to figure out what kind of person you are, what kind of society you're in, and how to live up to expectation. These experiences will crystallize people's patterns of thought. How psychedelics broadly work is they shake up people's typical thought patterns and make them experience new ones. Not better ones, not necessarily "ego-busting", just new. This lets people shake things up and clear out some over-adaptation. As a bonus model prediction: since the average thought pattern is adaptive, "too much" is bad for people as it makes them under-adapted for the world they inhabit.