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December 1, 2019 - April 11, 2020
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,
People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.
animals, given the choice, will not self-administer a psychedelic more than once, and the classic psychedelics exhibit remarkably little toxicity.
“compassion for the infancy of science. The researchers had no idea what really was happening in my inner experiential world, of its unspeakable beauty or of its potential importance for all of us.”
conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it.
I saw that if I can name and admit a feeling, confess it to someone, it would let go.
“Nothing matters, nothing matters any more. I see the point! Nothing matters at all.”
the fungus produces the hallucinogen almost exclusively in its “fruiting body”—that part of the organism it is happiest to have eaten.
(The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)
Why wouldn’t plants just kill their predators outright? Perhaps because that would quickly select for resistance, whereas messing with its neurotransmitter networks can distract the predator
“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 felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time and that certain ideas I had long thought about and written about—having to do with the subjectivity of other species and the way they act upon us in ways we’re too self-regarding to appreciate—had
Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure.
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.”
“a transcendental feeling of being united with the world,”
most volunteers described sensations such as a new ability “to see oneself objectively”; “enhancement in the sensory fields”; profound new understandings “in the field of philosophy or religion”; and “increased sensitivity to the feelings of others.”
He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)
Now I cannot behave untruthfully toward anyone, and certainly not to myself.”
Man is about to make use of that fabulous electrical network
he carries around in his skull.
LSD truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind (the superego, ego, and unconscious)
The certitude and condescension for mere mortals that usually come with that key can render these people insufferable.
I had the feeling—no, the knowledge—that every single thing there is is made of love.
The most famous tryptamine in the human body is the neurotransmitter serotonin, the chemical name of which is 5-hydroxytryptamine.
This has led some scientists to speculate that the human body must produce some other, more bespoke chemical for the express purpose of activating the 5-HT2A receptor—perhaps an endogenous psychedelic
that is released under certain circumstances, perhaps when dreaming. One candidate for that chemical is the psychedelic molecule DMT, which has been found in trace amounts in the pineal gland of rats.
the default mode network isn’t operational until late in a child’s development.
The price of the sense of an individual identity is a sense of separation from others and nature.
Self-reflection can lead to great intellectual and artistic achievement but also to destructive forms of self-regard and many types of unhappiness.
psychologists identified a strong correlation between unhappiness and time spent in mind wandering, a principal activ...
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The more precipitous the drop-off in blood flow and oxygen consumption in the default network, the more likely a volunteer was to report the loss of a sense of self.
The transcendence of self reported by expert meditators showed up on fMRIs as a quieting of the default mode network. It appears that when
activity in the default mode network falls off precipitously, the ego temporarily vanishes, and the usual boundaries we experience between self and world, subject and object, all melt away.
The bee perceives a substantially different spectrum of light than we do; to look at the world through its eyes is to perceive ultraviolet markings on the petals of flowers (evolved to
guide their landings like runway lights) that don’t exist for us. That example is at least a kind of seeing—a sense we happen to share with bees. But how do we even begin to conceive of the sense that allows bees to register (through the hairs on their legs) the electromagnetic fields that plants produce? (A weak charge indicates another bee has recently visited the
flower; depleted of nectar, it’s probably not...
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This is perhaps most clearly evident in depression, when the ego turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality.
may be the result of a hyperactive default mode network, which can trap us in repetitive and destructive loops of rumination that eventually close us off from the world outside.
return us to the psychological condition of the infant on its mother’s breast, a stage when it has yet to develop a sense of itself as a separate and bounded individual.
the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), which is associated with self-referential processing.
“Even the germs (if there were any present) were beautiful, as was everything in our world and universe.”
love was the only consideration . . . It was and is the only purpose. Love seemed to emanate from a single point of light . . . and it vibrated . . . I could feel my physical body trying to vibrate in unity with the cosmos . . .
For many of these patients, a diagnosis of terminal cancer constitutes, among other things, a crisis of meaning. Why me? Why have I been singled out for this fate? Is there any sense to life and the universe? Under the weight of
this existential crisis, one’s horizon shrinks, one’s emotional repertoire contracts, and one’s focus narrows as the mind turns in on itself, shutting out the world. Loops of rumination and worry come to occupy more of one’s mental time and space, reinforcing habits of thought it becomes ever more difficult to escape.
sense of a cold and arbitrary universe governed purely by chance is banished.
Edgar Mitchell, returning from the moon on Apollo 14, had what he has described as a mystical experience, specifically
savikalpa samadhi, in which the ego vanishes when confronted with the immensity of the universe during the course of a meditation on an object—in this case, planet Earth.
