This is needlessly judgmental. I know life-long meditators, 30+ of years disciplined practice who sometimes take psychedelics.
I'm not a fan of various aspects of the psychedelic scene, e.g. the spiritual bypassing and the narcissism that can sometimes come from it, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Usage of psychedelics can be profoundly healing and helpful.
I'm not dismissing spiritual practice, but psychedelics are entirely incidental to it and can be a snare for the unprepared mind. What's "profoundly healing and helpful" is always the spiritual part, not the means used to achieve it.
If you've found a drama-free spiritual community where everyone is deeply chilled and yet also adult and effective without losing a sense of humour, please let me know. That really hasn't been my experience.
In fact I think mindfulness, meditation, and so on confuse a kind of metaphysics of morality with what is probably some fairly basic brain mode switching.
Being "enlightened" for a brief period does not seem to create good people with any consistency or reliability. It doesn't even create consistently happier people. (Sometimes? Yes. More reliably and safely than other activities? Very likely not.)
It does seem to remove certain existential tangles, sometimes. But rather than being about "ego" - boo, hiss - perhaps those are more to do with easy/default vs less accessible modes of emotional cognition.
And actually - that's all.
Psychedelics are a tool, and the different doses you figure out are ways of using that tool. Ego death requires a fairly heroic dose, something on the order of 3-5 grams of mushrooms for most strains. This, to me, is comparable to the isolation and introspection without breaks to incur ego death in meditation.
Ego death, from my perspective, is also a tool. Done with knowledge of what will happen during and after let's the user experience the absence of ego and helps them live with their ego when it returns. Done without the knowledge of what will happen after, humans often fully embrace that ego as a new life based on wisdom. A false wisdom.
My point here is the medium in which you choose is largely irrelevant. How you use the tools and the knowledge you go into them with are the paramount pieces. It's honestly surprising to me that anyone who meditates would have such judgy and pithy opinions, but it's a big world out there.
I don't think most users of psychedelics view them as a "tool" for serious spiritual practice. They just think tripping is a lot of fun.
Psychedelics can be fun, but in my experience they're fun if your mind is in the right place. They act as a conduit for more deeply connecting with the world around you.
On the other hand, if you have work to do then those things have a chance to appear in your trip. That can be healthy, if you're ready to face something, or it can be incredibly terrifying. I've had both experiences through my own isolation and meditation before. As someone with years of trauma, including a year long stint in a war zone, I can attest that my trips were sometimes fun, almost always challenging, and sometimes terrifying. As time has gone on and I've done work to unpack my trips and connect them with my experiences and understanding when I'm sober my trips have averaged to being "more fun" and "connected". This is something I was not able to achieve with meditation alone.
Yes, and there's no guarantee that your bad trip or encounter with these entities will resolve itself without major effort. That ought to be enough to be seriously concerned about whether it is in any way appropriate to endorse this as some sort of ordinary, routine practice for the uninitiated.