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

by Michael Pollan

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.