> They common quality is that the experiences sound disconnected from reality. They try to explain the experience and are fully convinced they learned some fundamental truth but can't explain it in any way that makes sense.

$0.02 — psychedelics help you understand the way the world is by allowing you to temporarily experience the way the world isn't. most of these fundamental truths just get verbalized as platitudes because, well, they're widely-understood fundamental truths. the benefit is in examining them with a new parallax.

> there seems to be a lot of downside in breaking critical thinking in a lot of people's heads.

agreed inasmuch as psychedelics sometimes do induce long-lasting, harmful delusions. but...the upside of breaking critical thinking for a little while is that you get to experience its limits as a mode of engaging with the world. and you get to put it back together from its constituent parts, and occasionally find that one of those parts might not belong in there.