How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

by Michael Pollan

against LSD, which he blamed for the fact his

Charles “Bob” Schuster,

entheogens

Richards,

Richards

born in 1940.

whose father had been killed in the war, had regressed to childhood to find himself sitting on his father’s lap.

Pahnke suggested Richards try one more time, but in a room with soft lighting, plants, and music and using a higher dose.

Richards emerged

three unshakable convictions.

The ...

“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered.

Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.

third, that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains.

mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it.

how reluctant cultures are to expose themselves to the changes these kinds of compounds can occasion,” he told me the first time we met. “There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”

What is it like to have a legally sanctioned, professionally guided, optimally comfortable high-dose psilocybin experience?

Many of the volunteers I spoke to reported initial episodes of intense fear and anxiety before surrendering themselves to the experience—as the sitters encourage them to do.

The guides go over the instructions with the volunteers during the eight hours of preparation all of them receive before commencing their journeys.

The flight instructions advise guides to use mantras like “Trust the trajectory” and “TLO—Trust, Let Go, Be Open.” Some guides like to quote John Lennon: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”

Volunteers are told they may experience the “death/transcendence of your ego or everyday self,” but this is “always followed by Rebirth/Return to the normative world of space & time. Safest way to return to normal is to entrust self unconditionally to the emerging experiences.” Guides are instructed to remind volunteers they’ll never be left alone and not to worry about the body while journeying because the guides are there to keep an eye on it. If you feel as if you are “dying, melting, dissolving, exploding, going crazy etc.—go ahead.” Volunteer...

ans...

seems, the Hopkins psilocybin experience is the artifact not only of this powerful molecule

but also of the preparation and expectations of the volunteer, the skills and worldviews of the sitters, Bill Richards’s flight instructions, the decor of the room, the inward focus encouraged by the eyeshades and the music (and the music itself, much of which to my ears sounds notably religious), and, though they might not be pleased to hear it, the minds of the designers of the experiments.

“You’re going way out there to take it all in and engage with whatever you find there, but you can be confident that we’ll be here keeping an eye on things.

the shudder of liftoff and strain of escaping Earth’s gravitational field can be wrenching—even terrifying.

Then I remembered what they told me, that whenever you encounter anything scary, go toward it.

So instead of being afraid of dying I got curious about what was going on. I was no longer trying to avoid dying.

Instead of recoiling from the experience, I began to interrogate it. And with that, the whole situation dissolved into this pleasant floaty feel...

Soon after, he found himself “in a large cave where all my past relationships were hanging down as icicles: the person who sat next to me in second grade, high school friends, my first girlfriend, all...

I thought about each of them in turn, remembering...

our relationship. It was a review—something about the trajectory of my life. All these people had...

“The visual I had was from the 1800s and I was up on this stage. Two people next to me were slipping a noose around my neck while a crowd of people watched, cheering for my death. I felt drenched with guilt, just terrified. I was in a hell realm. And I remember Bill asking, ‘What’s going on?’

Early on I began to perceive that the effects of the drug respond strikingly to my own subjective determination. If, in response to the swelling intensity of the whole experience, I began to tense up with anxiety, the whole scene appears to tighten in some way. But if I then consciously remind myself to relax, to let myself go into the experience, the effect is dramatic. The space in which I seem to find myself, already enormous, suddenly yawns open even further and the shapes that undulate before my eyes appear to explode with new and even more extravagant patterns. Over and over again I had the overwhelming sense of infinity being multiplied by another infinity.

At the depths of this delirium I conceived that I was either dying or, most bizarrely, I was already dead. All points of secure attachment to a trustworthy sense of reality had fallen away. Why not think that I am dead? And if this is dying, I thought, then so be it. How can I say no to this? At this point, at the greatest depth of the experience, I felt all my organizing categories of opposition—dreaming and wakefulness, life and death, inside and outside, self

and other—collapse into each other . . . Reality appeared to fold in on itself, to implode in a kind of ecstatic catastrophe of logic. Yet in

the midst of this hallucinatory hurricane I was having a weird experience of ultra-sublimity. And I remember repeating to myself again and again, “Nothing matters, nothing matters a...

James

offers four “marks”

ineffab...

noetic quality

“Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of

John Hayes, a psychotherapist in his fifties who was one of the first volunteers at Hopkins,

had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, including the distinct sense that death was illusory, in the sense that it

is a door we walk through into another plane of existence, that we’re sprung from an eternity to which we will return.

Karin Sokel,

life coach and energy healer in her fifties, described an experience “that changed everything and opened me profoundly.” At the climax of her journey, she had an encounter with a god who called himself “I Am.”

James

third mark of mystical consciousness,

“transi...