People try drugs because they want to be released from the world they are living in. They open an escape route out of awareness of one's surroundings or out of oneself. Those trapped in such psychic pain have an obvious and understandable motive to seek this release. Yet even those who are comfortable with themselves, those on friendly terms with the world they live in, may sometimes feel suddenly and disturbingly estranged from it. The appeal of a mind-altering drug may be its ability to repeat or intensify that estrangement, that alienating yet alluring sense of being somebody else or somewhere else.
Spirituality can produce the same effect.
Mystical experience is a rush that reveals to the mystic that the known world is not the real world. Mysticism humbles ordinary knowledge and ordinary social adjustments. Better put, an openness to seeing the world humbled, reduced in the mind's perceptions, is a precondition for mysticism. The same openness, then, is also a condition for religion, since behind every religious tradition there stands a mystical moment. Indeed, the intuition that this world is not our true home, and that we ourselves are not what we seem, is cherished and cultivated in many religious traditions.