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

by Michael Pollan

Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.

William James, the pioneering American psychologist and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, ventured into these realms more than a century ago. He returned with the conviction that our everyday waking consciousness “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

Ineffability is of course a hallmark of the mystical experience.

It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered.

“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”

Holotropic Breathwork

hypnagogic consciousness.