On par with new age crystal healing and chakra points.
I'm not saying that psychedelics are for everyone, or that anyone should take them on a whim and without preparation. However, it's just incorrect to equate their ability to change people's lives for the better to crystal healing or similar.
I first tried LSD about 10 years ago and have taken various forms of psychedelics once or twice a year since. Some of them were, without a doubt, the most profound experiences of my life. You're right about the vague transcendentalist nonsense. The problem is there are no words to describe it adequately.
Despite only having pleasant experiences myself, I would never encourage any friend or stranger to try them. That is something only they can decide with their own research and risk appetite. There are absolutely serious potential consequences.
I think the worst consequence for me is that I have started to like weird music like psytrance even when sober.
The universe does not know or care about our laws and they are incomplete.
For example, we have no idea how consciousness works, so at this point we stop at "I don't know", rather than inventing explanations.
I don't know if consciousness is computable -- I suspect it isn't.
If it is not computable then we cannot come up with laws to explain it.
Or maybe the whole universe is computable but its kolmogorov complexity is larger than its information capacity.
I agree that the universe doesn't care how we approximate these laws, but only that they clearly exist.
If these laws exist, they are certainly not material, unless you redefine material, and that is why I am no longer a materialist :)
However, I don't think any materialist would deny laws of physics exist. We might say that how materials interact with each other is an intrinsic property of material itself, just as an electron behaves as though it has a certain mass.
What definition of material would you use that separates it from its laws?
After all, asking someone what it was like to stand at the top of a mountain they'd just climbed, admiring the view, you're likely to get similar "hand-waving" answers about connection to something bigger than them, but you probably wouldn't argue that climbing a mountain and taking in the view is a worthless experience that amounts to nonsense.