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

by Michael Pollan

To the extent I regard the experience as veridical—and about that I’m still not sure—it tells me that consciousness is primary to the physical universe. In fact, it precedes it.”

But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation. William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction. As James wrote, “Dreams cannot stand this test.” No doubt this is why some of the people who have such an experience go on to found religions, changing the course of history or, in a great many more cases, the course of their own lives. “No doubt” is the key.

The most straightforward and yet hardest to accept explanation is that it’s simply true: the altered state of consciousness has opened the person up to a truth that the rest of us, imprisoned in ordinary waking consciousness, simply cannot see.

1995), Jesse set up a nonprofit called the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP), with the aim of “making direct experience of the sacred more available to more people.”

Esalen, the legendary retreat center in Big Sur, California.

the Esalen Institute was founded in 1962 and ever since has been a center of gravity for the so-called human potential movement in America, serving as the unofficial capital of the New Age.

Abraham Maslow

“Abe was a natural Jewish mystic. He could just lie down in the backyard and have a mystical experience. Psychedelics are for those of us who aren’t so innately gifted.”

Richards emerged from those first psychedelic explorations in possession of three unshakable convictions. The first is that the experience of the sacred reported both by the

great mystics and by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys is the same experience and is “real”—that is, not just a figment of the imagination. “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. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion. (Partly for this reason Richards believes that psychedelics should be part of a divinity student’s education.) And third, that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains. On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist ou...

“That says something important about 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.”

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.”

The supreme importance of surrendering to the experience, however frightening or bizarre, is stressed in the preparatory sessions and figures largely in many people’s journeys, and beyond.

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.

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?

Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.

He writes in his book that mycelia—the vast, cobwebby whitish net of single-celled filaments, called hyphae, with which fungi weave their way through the soil—are intelligent, forming “a sentient membrane” and “the neurological network of nature.” The title of his book Mycelium Running can

For years now, Stamets has been talking about the vast web of mycelia in the soil as “Earth’s natural Internet”—a redundant, complexly branched, self-repairing, and scalable communications network linking many species over tremendous distances.

Experiments with slime molds have demonstrated these organisms can navigate mazes in search of food—sensing its location and then growing in that direction. The mycelia in a forest do link the trees in it, root to root, not only supplying them with nutrients, but serving as a medium that conveys information about environmental threats and allows trees to selectively send nutrients to other trees in the forest.* A forest is a far more complex, sociable, and intelligent entity than we knew, and it is fungi that organize the arboreal society.

Psilocybes are saprophytes, living off dead plant matter and dung.

The blue pigment is in fact evidence of oxidized psilocin,

one of the two main psychoactive compounds in a Psilocybe. (The other is psilocybin, which breaks down into psilocin in the body.)

It replaced a rickety old farmhouse on the site that, when Stamets moved in, was slowly succumbing to an infestation of carpenter ants. Stamets set about devising a mycological solution to the problem. He knew precisely which species of Cordyceps could wipe out the ant colony, but so did the ants: they scrupulously inspect every returning member for Cordyceps spores and promptly chew off the head of any ant bearing spores, dumping the body far away from the colony. Stamets outwitted the ants’ defense by breeding a mutant Cordyceps-like fungus that postponed sporulation. He put some of its mycelium in his daughter’s dollhouse bowl, left that on the

floor of the kitchen, and during the night watched as a parade of ants carried the mycelium into the nest—having mistaken it for a safe food source. When the fungus eventually sporulated, it was already deep inside the colony and the ants were done for: the Cordyceps colonized their bodies and sent fruiting bodies bursting forth from their heads.

Psilocybe azurescens

Stamets says that like many psilocybin species “azzies are organisms of the ecological edge. Look at where we are: at the edge of the continent, the edge of an ecosystem, the edge of civilization, and of course these mushrooms bring us to the edge of

consciousness.”

So Sandoz, the pharmaceutical company for which he worked at the time of his discovery, did something unusual: in effect, it crowd-sourced a worldwide research effort to figure out what in the world Delysid—its brand name for LSD-25—might be good for. Hoping someone somewhere would hit upon a commercial application for its spookily powerful new compound, Sandoz offered to supply, free of charge, however much LSD any researcher requested.

Early researchers reported a range of disturbing symptoms in their LSD volunteers, including depersonalization, loss of ego boundaries, distorted body image, synesthesia (seeing sounds or hearing sights), emotional lability, giggling and weeping, distortion of the sense of time, delirium, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and, in the words of one writer, “a tantalizing sense of portentousness.” When researchers administered standardized psychiatric tests to volunteers on LSD—such as the Rorschach ink blots or the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test—the results mirrored those of psychotics and, specifically, schizophrenics. Volunteers on LSD appeared to be losing their minds.

The emphasis on what subjects felt represented a major break with the prevailing ideas of behaviorism in psychology, in which only observable and measurable outcomes counted and subjective experience was deemed irrelevant.

The work with psychedelics would eventually spark a revival of interest in the subjective dimensions of the mind—in consciousness.

Yet when Cohen finally tried LSD himself in October 1955, he “was taken by surprise.” Expecting to find himself trapped inside the mind of a madman, Cohen instead experienced a profound, even transcendent sense of tranquillity, as if “the problems and strivings, the worries and frustrations of everyday life [had] vanished; in their place was a majestic, sunlit, heavenly inner quietude . . . I seemed to have finally arrived at the contemplation of eternal truth.” Whatever this was, he felt certain it wasn’t a temporary psychosis. Betty Eisner wrote that Cohen came to think of it instead as something he called “unsanity”: “a

state beyond the control of the ego.”

developed first and proved especially popular in Europe and with the Los Angeles group identified with Sidney Cohen, Betty Eisner, and Oscar Janiger. Coined by an English psychiatrist named Ronald Sandison, “psycholytic” means “mind loosening,” which is what LSD and psilocybin seem to do—at least at low doses.

The supreme virtue of the psycholytic approach was that it meshed so neatly with the prevailing modes of psychoanalysis, a practice that the drugs promised to speed up and streamline, rather than revolutionize or render obsolete.

The big problem with psychoanalysis is that the access to the unconscious mind on which the whole approach depends

is difficult and limited to two less-than-optimal routes: the patient’s free associations and dreams. Freud called dreams “the royal road” to the subconscious, bypassing the gates of both the ego and the superego, yet the road has plenty of ruts and potholes: patients don’t always re...

BACK IN SASKATCHEWAN, Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer had taken a very different path after the collapse of the psychotomimetic paradigm, though this path, too, ended up complicating their own relationship to science. Struggling to formulate a new therapeutic model for LSD, they turned to a pair of brilliant amateurs—one a famous author, Aldous Huxley, and the other an obscure former bootlegger and gunrunner, spy, inventor, boat captain, ex-con, and Catholic mystic named Al Hubbard. These two most unlikely nonscientists would help the Canadian psychiatrists reconceptualize the LSD experience and develop the therapeutic protocol that is still in use today.

The name for this new approach, and the name for this class of drugs that would finally stick—psychedelics—emerged from a 1956 exchange of letters between Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley. The two had first met in 1953, after Huxley wrote to Osmond expressing interest in trying mescaline; he had read a journal article by Osmond describing the drug’s effects on the mind. Huxley had long harbored a lively interest in drugs and consciousness—the plot of his most famous novel, Brave New World (1932), turns on a mind-control drug he called soma—as well as mysticism, paranormal perception, reincarnation, UFOs, and so on.

“It was without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision,” Huxley wrote in a letter to his editor shortly after it happened. For Huxley, there was no question but that the drugs gave him access not to the mind of the madman but to a spiritual realm of ineffable

beauty. The most mundane objects glowed with the light of a divinity he called “the Mind at Large.” Even “the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’” he tells us, before dilating on the beauty of the draperies in Botticelli’s paintings and the “Allness and Infinity of folded cloth.” When he gazed upon a small vase of flowers, he saw “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence . . . flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged.” “Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind.”

For Huxley, the drug gave him unmediated access to realms of existence usually known only to mystics and a handful of history’s great visionary artists. This other world is always present but in ordinary moments is kept from our awareness by the “reducing valve” of everyday waking consciousness, a kind of mental filter that ad...

The idea of a mental reducing valve that constrains our perceptions, for instance, comes from the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson believed that consciousness was not generated by human brains but rather exists in a field outside us, something like electromagnetic waves; our brains, which he likened to radio receivers, can tune in to different frequencies of consciousness.

psychedelic.

Osmond’s neologism married two Greek words that together mean “mind manifesting.”

“Psychedelic therapy,” as Osmond and his colleagues practiced it beginning in the

mid-1950s,

1950s, typically involved a single, high-dose session, usually of LSD, that took place in comfortable surroundings, the subject stretched out on a couch, with a therapist (or two) in attendance who says very little, allowing the journey to unfold according to its own logic. To eliminate distractions and encourage an inward journey, music is played and the subject usually wears eyeshades. Th...

But though this mode of therapy would become closely identified with Osmond and Hoffer, they themselves credited someone else for critical elements of its design, a man of considerable mystery with no formal training as a scientist or therapist: Al Hubbard. A treatment space decorated to feel more like a home than a hospital came to be known as a Hubbard Room, and at least one early psychedelic researcher told me that this whole therapeutic regime, which is now the norm, should by all rights be known as “the Hubbard method.” Yet Al Hubbard, a.k.a. “Captain Trips” and “the Johnny A...