You can alter your state of conscious many ways, but not all are beneficial or real. Meditation alters the structure of the brain. Also LSD experiences are not uniform. Means if i take LSD, i could be singing raggae with Bob Marley in Jamaica or rooting Heidi Klum in a state of bliss lol. Meditation repeats the
same experience, regardless of race/color/creed/religion. Meditation has long last health benefits too, read the harvard experiment of meditative monks! that's been one of the more remarkable stuff where the monks slowed down the metabolism by 64% percent and control the body temperature under extreme weather.
The findings are still medically astounding. If you control your mind, you control your body. Go visit Sikkim once, you will see the meditative power of the monks, they can sit and meditate for 24 hours straight! yep...even more.
Meditation was woo woo some 50 years ago, science is only coming to terms with it recently. Still brain scans and EEG's can only tell you so much, the real experience is nothing LSD like
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/meditation-changes-temperatures/
The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. “It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result,” Benson exclaims.
To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation. Benson believes that such a capability could be useful for space travel. Travelers might use meditation to ease stress and oxygen consumption on long flights to other planets.
In 1985, the meditation team made a video of monks drying cold, wet sheets with body heat. They also documented monks spending a winter night on a rocky ledge 15,000 feet high in the Himalayas. The sleep-out took place in February on the night of the winter full moon when temperatures reached zero degrees F. Wearing only woolen or cotton shawls, the monks promptly fell asleep on the rocky ledge, They did not huddle together and the video shows no evidence of shivering. They slept until dawn then walked back to their monastery.