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

by Michael Pollan

Hubbard understood intuitively how the suggestibility of the human mind during an altered state of consciousness could be harnessed as an important resource for healing—for breaking destructive patterns of thought and proposing new perspectives in their place. Researchers might prefer to call this a manipulation of set and setting, which is accurate enough, but Hubbard’s greatest contribution to modern psychedelic therapy was to introduce the tried-and-true tools of shamanism, or at least a Westernized version of it. • • •

The experience put the author’s 1953 mescaline trip in the shade. As Huxley wrote to Osmond in its aftermath, “What came through the closed door was the

realization . . . the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.” The force of this insight seemed almost to embarrass the writer in its baldness: “The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains.”

Long before Leary, the shift in the objective of psychedelic research from psychotherapy to cultural revolution was well under way.

As with Hubbard and Huxley and Osmond before him, psychedelics had convinced Leary that they had the power not just to heal people but to change society and save humankind, and it was his mission to serve as their prophet.

“Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.”

OTHER POWERFUL DRUGS subject to abuse, such as the opiates, have managed to maintain a separate identity as a legitimate tool of medicine. Why not psychedelics? The

If all such lines are manifestations of the Apollonian strain in Western civilization, the impulse that erects distinctions, dualities, and hierarchies and defends them, then psychedelics represented the ungovernable Dionysian force that blithely washes all those lines away.

Where Leary and the counterculture ultimately parted ways with the first generation of researchers was in deciding that no such container—whether medical, religious, or scientific—was needed and that an unguided, do-it-yourself approach to psychedelics was just fine. This is risky, as it turns out, and probably a mistake. But how would we ever have discovered this, without experimenting?

But the biggest thing we might have learned is that these powerful medicines can be dangerous—both to the individual and to the society—when they don’t have a sturdy social container: a steadying set of rituals and rules—protocols—governing their use, and the crucial involvement of a guide, the figure that is usually called a shaman. Psychedelic therapy—the Hubbard method—was groping toward a Westernized version of this ideal, and it remains the closest thing we have to such a protocol. For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences.