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

by Michael Pollan

“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.”

For his part, 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 idea that we can now approach mystical states of consciousness with the tools of science is what gets Roland Griffiths out of bed in the morning.

neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: “The true method of knowledge is experiment.”

don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is 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 premature closing of our accounts with reality.”

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.

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.

They found a surprisingly sympathetic ear in Senator Robert F. Kennedy, whose wife, Ethel, had reportedly been treated with LSD at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver—one of Al Hubbard’s outposts. Grilling the FDA regulators about their plans to cancel many of the remaining research projects, Kennedy demanded to know, “Why if [these projects] were worthwhile six months ago, why aren’t they worthwhile now?” Kennedy said it would be a “loss to the nation” if psychedelics were banned from medicine because of illicit use. “Perhaps we have lost sight of the fact that [they] can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly.”

Osmond, the unfailingly polite Englishman, his teeth now in full revolt, declines to use the word “mistake.” “What I would say is . . . you could have seen other ways of doing it.”

confronts the elephant in the room, turning to Leary to say, “We were a little disturbed at some of the things you were doing that [were] making it more difficult to carry on legitimate research.”

Then, turning to Osmond: “And we need people like you, to be reflective about it and to study it. And little by little, a slight movement is made in the totality.

Clearly these medicines—as guides both above- and belowground invariably call the drugs they administer—powerfully stir the psychic pot, surfacing all sorts of repressed material, some of it terrifying and ugly.

While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation.

“People who are addicted know they’re harming themselves—their health, their careers, their social well-being—but they often fail to see the damage their behavior is doing to others.” Addiction is, among other things, a radical form of selfishness.