Ah, it's quite a daunting task to try to explain in words. Much of this might sound fairly obvious so forgive me if I sound patronizing at all. I've tried to find ways to make sense of it, and there are quite a few metaphors that are applicable. In cultures where shamanism is practiced, there must be some kind of indicating factor in an individual for he/she to be selected as a candidate to be a shaman. However, it happens to individuals in all cultures, only in non-shamanic cultures, the individual does not, of course, become a shaman; rather, one of two things tends to happen. One is that the individual loses all grasp on reality and is labelled a schizophrenic. The other is that, in someone who has already dealt with sufficient isolation and is familiar with schools of thinking that are outside the western reductionist paradigm, the contents of the experience are sectioned off into one component of the personality while the other uses his/her familiar cultural paradigm as an anchor (for more on this concept, look into Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger series and the idea of reality tunnels).
Lately I've been thinking about the categories of expressing what this experience is. So far I've come up with these categories: the poetic-mystical, the fundamentalist, the psycho-alchemical, the analytical, and the reductionist. The poetic-mystical is the expression of the experience through art and metaphor, think William Blake or Yogananda. This could even be broadened to included all inspired art or music. The fundamentalist is the traditional religious interpretation depending on what particular religion the individual is a part of - "God is speaking to me." The psycho-alchemical would include occult and magical thinking and its psychological interpretations as expressed in Jungian terminology. The analytical is something I've just scratched the surface of and can't say much about other than I feel like Hegel's ideas might be relevant. The reductionist is of course the scientific focus on aberrations in brain chemistry.
I can't say anything about which view is valid, I can just say that the experience is that of being not bound by culture, by physical body, by death. It might very well be something you have experienced; whether it was drug-induced or not isn't the most important thing to me - I'm of the "if it works, use it" mentality. It's hard for me to talk about because my skeptical side denies that what I'm talking about even existed at all - this duality is built into the nature of what I'm trying to describe. The closest thing I can relate it to is Carl Jung's The Red Book (the psycho-alchemical interpretation) but certain (Tibetan primarily) Buddhist concepts come close as well. The Bhagavad Gita was also crucial to the experience.
If I can distill it down to anything, its this: Envision everything that you want to be in life, everything that your ego would like to see itself as. Then, start going through your life as if you are, in fact, the opposite of this. This is why the alchemical metaphor is particularly useful. However, I don't advise anyone actually do this, because the trick is you have to really BELIEVE it, and the only thing that will get you through is the wisdom that you can use as an anchor on a very dark and foreboding sea - I believe it was Jung who referred to it as the "night sea journey." It's about being able to hold different reality tunnels (Robert Anton Wilson again) and dualities in some kind of balance, until the process has played itself out. And when it has, you'll find that some things about yourself have changed, and others have stayed very much the same, and whether to call this change "good" or "bad" becomes impossible, you've simply stepped up to another level, or even down a level, depending on which interpretation you use. I could say a lot more, but, its really just an ongoing process of trying to make sense of reality as a lived experience, I only used the term "awakening" in that poetic-mystical sense, referring to how dreams become clearer, the mind can separate from the body in sleep, synchronicities pile up, and a sense of peace lies warmly comforting beneath all mental activity. One also seems to become "eschatologized" as one has become familiar with the feelings which are likely to arise in the death process. The mushroom did play a part, but only once and towards the middle/end of the process, and probably had nothing to do with any of the odder occurrences. I never known what to mention and what not to mention as I never know what will seem familiar to people and what will seem totally nonsensical, so I guess I'll stop there.
