>And in case of some substances like drugs if you reduce dosage or adjust protocol so that trip doesn't happen means that you also got rid of any significant effect it might have on the brain.

We agree. My point is that the evidence seems to be going in the direction of:

1. removing transcendence removes part of the benefit; and,

2. to complicate matters, many protocols fail to properly control for transcendent experience because a lot of control groups are placed in a quiet room, free of distraction, and invited to ponder life.

We're both materialists. Mine is a materialist position.

> We're both materialists. Mine is a materialist position.

I'm not quite sure about you because you are using words like transcendence. ;-) In my view the deep experience of the trip, what you call transcendence, is just another hallucination, just hallucination of meaning and understanding instead of simple images, sounds or sensations.

Transcendence is a qualia of experience; it says nothing about whether an immaterial substance is required to experience it.

Yeah. Seems likely that the subjective experience of the trip is simply what you feel when firing/rewiring the networks that cause the healing. There's no incompatibly between "it's the experience" and "it's the neurology" because they are one in the same.

But there are a lot of different ways to do the healing (e.g. consistent meditation as others mentioned) which will of course be coupled to different feelings/experiences. The "large psychedelic dose" method is just one end of the "works fast + feels strongly" spectrum. Of course as the science/technology develops we will find other points on the spectrum that balance the properties differently -- maybe even through placebo effect alone as suggested here.