To be honest, I have no idea what 'spiritual' means outside the context of theistic belief systems. I value the introspective aspect of tripping, and I feel that I learn something, whether big and life-changing or small but useful, every time I trip. That said, I would rarely (if ever) acquire, plan and use psychedelics if I expected the experience to be unpleasant. Tripping is certainly a distinct category of action for me than, say, deciding to spend the night drinking and smoking (which would, of course, be purely social/recreational), but I don't think I can separate the 'valuable' part from the 'fun' part and weigh the importance of each in my decisions to trip. Tripping is one experience that serves both purposes, and I trip for the experience.
That said, I chose #2. I have become somewhat more cynical regarding the "spiritual" value of psychedelics over the years. Like most, I started my forays into psychedelia with the belief that every trip imparted profound insights into the nature of consciousness and reality, which were simply very hard to integrate and remember. Since then, I've come to the belief that the 'difficulty' remembering these concepts is due to the fact that they were never fully developed concepts in the first place; tripping allows fragmented thoughts to appear complete and blurs the line between thought and feeling. Based on this, I now view the post-trip analysis as much more significant than the trip itself for introspective purposes; the analysis does not merely allow one to integrate and recall what you already discovered during the trip itself; it is the process by which you interpret the raw, confusing bliss of the trip into ideas and concepts that will be of value to your egoic existence. In other words, integrating a trip is not just taking the wisdom you have already received from the trip and putting it into usable form; it _creates_ wisdom, and without analysis, the trip itself has no meaning or wisdom to speak of (although I can't imagine how it would be possible to have 0 analysis of an event as significant as a trip). This reflects my general philosophic move away from a sort of transcendental postmodernism to the more analytic tradition of psychoanalysis.
