The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

by Jonathan Haidt

The experimenters collected detailed reports from all participants before and after the study, as well as six months later. They found that psilocybin had produced statistically significant effects on nine kinds of experiences: (1) unity, including loss of sense of self, and a feeling of underlying oneness, (2) transcendence of time and space, (3) deeply felt positive mood, (4) a sense of sacredness, (5) a sense of gaining intuitive knowledge that felt deeply and authoritatively true, (6) paradoxicality, (7) difficulty describing what had happened, (8) transiency, with all returning to normal within a few hours, and (9) persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior. Twenty-five years later, Rick Doblin tracked down nineteen of the twenty original subjects and interviewed them.24 He concluded that “all psilocybin subjects participating in the long-term follow-up, but none of the controls, still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives.”