Having experienced first-hand, and from my teens, stuff like NDE, OBE, Remote Viewing, Regressions (Past lives), a lot of hypnosis, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, Religious Inspiration, Automatic writing, and having been directly or indirectly involved with UFOs, Psychophonies, Ouija, mixed Spiritism, Card reading, Magic rituals, Homeopathy, Pendulum Dowsing, Energy healing, Chakras, Hand imposition, Horoscopes, The Urantia Book, Hermes Trismegistus, Gaia… and a bunch more that I’m surely forgetting…
I can tell you that you shouldn’t be open minded about any of it.
I won’t call those years “lost”, but all I got out of them is some Lucid Dreaming, some really cool internal experiences (without any drugs), some fun going to places (nothing beats a spring in a lost nook of a mountain forest at dawn), an extremely developed imagination, the ability to fall asleep whenever I needed (that I lost due to extreme stress overload a couple years ago), a much better understanding of the human brain, and a shitton of skepticism.
I could write a lot about my experiences, but the bottom line would be: mental skills are fine, but science rulez. Or as said by the Dalai Lama: “When science contradicts religion, accept science” (much respect).