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

by Michael Pollan

“Mysticism,” he likes to say, “is the antidote to fundamentalism.”

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.

Hayes particularly recommends the experience to people in middle age for whom, as Carl Jung suggested, experience of the numinous can help them negotiate the second half of their lives. Hayes added, “I would not recommend it to young people.”

Roland Griffiths’s own encounters with the volunteers in the 2006 study reignited his passion for science, but they also left him with a deeper respect for all that science does not know—for what he is content to call “the mysteries.”

“The existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.” These alternate forms of consciousness “might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth.” He detected in such experiences, in which the mind “ascend[s] to a more enveloping point of view,” hints of a grand metaphysical “reconciliation”: “It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.” This ultimate unity, he suspected, was no mere delusion.

“How sure are you there is nothing after death?” he asked. I demurred, but he persisted. “What do you think the chances are there is something beyond death? In percentages.” “Oh, I don’t know,” I stammered. “Two or three percent?” To this day I have no idea where that estimate came from, but Griffiths seized on it. “That’s a lot!” So I turned the table back again, put the same question to him. “I don’t know if I want to answer it,” he said with a laugh, glancing at my tape recorder. “It depends on which hat I’m wearing.” Roland Griffiths had more than one hat! I only had one, I realized, and that made me feel a little jealous.

Roland Griffiths possesses a large measure of what Keats, referring to Shakespeare, described as “negative capability,” the ability to exist amid uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt without reaching for absolutes, whether those of science or spirituality. “It makes no more sense to say I’m 100 percent convinced of a material worldview than to say I’m 100 percent convinced of the literal version of the Bible.”

Reading amazing book all my smart middle aged friemds ahlould read.

I then read to him a letter from Huston Smith, the scholar of comparative religion who in 1962 had volunteered in Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment. It was written to Bob Jesse shortly after the publication of Griffiths’s landmark 2006 paper; Jesse had shared it with me. “The Johns Hopkins experiment shows—proves—that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. It uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity’s secularism. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a re-sacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that is our best defense against not only soullessness, but against religious fanaticism. And it does so in the very teeth of the unscientific prejudices built into our current drug laws.” As I read Smith’s letter aloud, a smile bloomed across Griffiths’s face; he was clearly moved but had little to add except to say, “That’s beautiful.”

It's a polarity to balance, not a choice to be made.

But Stamets’s aspirations for the fungal kingdom go well beyond turning petrochemical sludge into arable soil. Indeed, in his view there is scarcely an ecological or medical problem that mushrooms can’t help solve. Cancer? Stamets’s extract of turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes versicolor) has been shown to help cancer patients by stimulating their immune systems. (Stamets claims to have used it to help cure his mother’s stage 4 breast cancer.)

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that the religious impulse in humankind had been first kindled by the visions inspired by a psychoactive mushroom.

“Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand.” Why us? “We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.”

“I myself am identical with nature.”

I suspect that imaginative leap has become harder for us moderns to make. Our science and technology encourage us in precisely the opposite direction, toward the objectification of nature and of all species other than our own.

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.

Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think.

spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face.

that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a pre...

What a psychiatrist might diagnose as depersonalization, hallucinations, or mania might better be thought of as instances of mystical union, visionary experience, or ecstasy. Could it be that the doctors were mistaking transcendence for insanity?

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.”

Betty Eisner wrote that Cohen came to think of it instead as something he called “unsanity”: “a state beyond the control of the ego.”

Even “the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’” he tells us,

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 admits only “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” we need in order to survive.

Huxley also believed that at the base of all the world’s religions there lies a common core of mystical experience he called “the Perennial Philosophy.” Naturally, Huxley’s morning on mescaline confirmed him in all these ideas; as one reviewer of The Doors of Perception put it, rather snidely, the book contained “99 percent Aldous Huxley and only one half gram mescaline.” But it didn’t matter: great writers stamp the world with their minds, and the psychedelic experience will forevermore bear Huxley’s indelible imprint.

“People will think they are going mad, when in fact they are beginning, when they take it, to go sane.”

To fall in hell or soar Angelic You’ll need a pinch of psychedelic.

Hubbard believed that “if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies,” Abram Hoffer recalled, “he would change the whole of society.”

The psychedelic journey could, like the conversion experience, forcibly show people a new, more encompassing perspective on their lives that would help them to change.

Hubbard was the first researcher to grasp the critical importance of set and setting in shaping the psychedelic experience. He instinctively understood that the white walls and fluorescent lighting of the sanitized hospital room were all wrong. So he brought pictures and music, flowers and diamonds, into the treatment room, where he would use them to prime patients for a mystical revelation or divert a journey when it took a terrifying turn.

I realized that you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.”

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.”

Huxley immediately recognized the value of an ally as skilled in the ways of the world as the man he liked to call “the good Captain.” As so often seems to happen, the Man of Letters became smitten with the Man of Action.

clients said the experience had increased their ability to love, 71 percent registered an increase in self-esteem, and 83 percent said that during their sessions they had glimpsed “a higher power, or ultimate reality.” Those who had such an experience were the ones who reported the most lasting benefits from their session. Don Allen told me that most clients emerged with “notable and fairly sustainable changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, way above statistical probability.” Specifically, they became “much less judgmental, much less rigid, more open, and less defended.” But it wasn’t all sweetness and light: several clients abruptly broke off marriages after their sessions, now believing they were mismatched or trapped in destructive patterns of behavior.

That former SRI employee is Peter Schwartz, an engineer who became a leading futurist; he is currently senior vice president for government relations and strategic planning at Salesforce.com.

Schwartz eventually realized that “everyone in that community”—referring to the Bay Area tech crowd in the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the people in and around Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Network—“had taken Hubbard LSD.”

Why were engineers in particular so taken with psychedelics? Schwartz, himself trained as an aerospace engineer, thinks it has to do with the fact that unlike the work of scientists, who can simplify the problems they work on, “problem solving in engineering always involves irreducible complexity. You’re always balancing complex variables you can never get perfect, so you’re desperately searching to find patterns. LSD shows you patterns.

“It gave us permission to try weird shit in cahoots with other people.”

Listen! Wake up! You are God! You have the Divine plan engraved in cellular script within you. Listen! Take this sacrament! You’ll see! You’ll get the revelation! It will change your life!

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

To the extent that Ken Kesey and his Pranksters helped shape the new zeitgeist, a case can be made that the cultural upheaval we call the 1960s began with a CIA mind-control experiment gone awry.

You need a strong ego in order to let go of it and then be able to spring back to your boundaries.”

“These medicines have shown me that something quote-unquote impossible exists. But I don’t think it’s magic or supernatural. It’s a technology of consciousness we don’t understand yet.”

For what after all is the sense of banality, or the ironic perspective, if not two of the sturdier defenses the adult ego deploys to keep from being overwhelmed—by our emotions, certainly, but perhaps also by our senses, which are liable at any time to astonish us with news of the sheer wonder of the world.

Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience, and when it comes to faces, they have boatloads of experience: faces are always convex, so this hollow mask must be a prediction error to be corrected.

The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more, and there was no one left to mourn its passing.

I was present to reality but as something other than my self. And although there was no self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, which was calm, unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.

Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched conception of one’s self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version of Keats’s “negative capability”—the ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty.

some idea or resolution I could bring back and put to good use in my life. Mine, I decided, had to do with this question of being and what I took to be its opposite term, “doing.” I meditated on this duality, which came to seem momentous, and concluded that I was too much occupied with the latter term in my life and not enough with the former. True, one had to favor doing in order to get anything done, but wasn’t there also a great virtue and psychic benefit in simply being? In contemplation rather than action? I decided I needed to practice being with stillness, being with other people as I find them (imperfect), and being with my own unimproved self.

The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.

But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show, is wily and doesn’t relinquish its power without a struggle. Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment, whether in advance or in the middle of the journey. I suspect that’s exactly what mine was up to all through the sleepless nights that preceded each of my trips, striving to convince me that I was risking everything, when really all I was putting at risk was its sovereignty.

So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.” Wonders (and terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation.