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August 18 - December 29, 2019
Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place. Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever’s already going on both inside and outside one’s head.
What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one’s ego—that may be the key to changing one’s mind.
Psyilocybin
over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy.
the experience of the sacred reported both by the great mystics and by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys is the same experience and is “real”—that is, not just a figment of the imagination.
“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s
On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who 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. “If
Roland Griffiths points out that ours is not the first culture to feel threatened by psychedelics: the reason R. Gordon Wasson had to rediscover magic mushrooms in Mexico was that the Spanish had suppressed them so effectively, deeming them dangerous instruments of paganism. “That says something important about how reluctant cultures are to expose themselves to the changes these kinds of compounds can occasion,” he told me the first time we met. “There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”
All of the scientists doing psychedelic research today work exclusively with a synthetic version of the psilocybin molecule. (The mushroom’s psychoactive compound was first identified, synthesized, and named in the late 1950s by Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD.)
So here was a curious paradox. The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief.
Leary played an important role in the modern history of psychedelics, but it’s not at all the pioneering role he wrote for himself.
For many of the alcoholics treated at Weyburn hospital, the core of the LSD experience seemed to involve something closer to transcendence, or spiritual epiphany, than temporary psychosis.
Cohen also began to wonder about the status of the insights that patients brought back from their journeys. He came to believe that “under LSD the fondest theories of the therapist are confirmed by his patient.” The expectancy effect was such that patients working with Freudian therapists returned with Freudian insights (framed in terms of childhood trauma, sexual drives, and oedipal emotions), while patients working with Jungian therapists returned with vivid archetypes from the attic of the collective unconscious, and Rankians with recovered memories of their birth traumas. This radical
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To fathom Hell or go angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic. Osmond’s neologism married two Greek words that together mean “mind manifesting.” Though by now the word has taken on the Day-Glo coloring of the 1960s, at the time it was the very neutrality of “psychedelic” that commended it to him: the word “had no particular connotation of madness, craziness or ecstasy, but suggested an enlargement and expansion of mind.”
(It is one of the many paradoxes of psychedelics that these drugs can sponsor an ego-dissolving experience that in some people quickly leads to massive ego inflation. Having
It’s often said that in the 1960s psychedelics “escaped from the laboratory,” but it would probably be more accurate to say they were thrown over the laboratory wall, and never with as much loft or velocity as by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at the end of 1962. “We’re through playing the science game,” Leary told McClelland when he returned to Cambridge that fall. Now, Leary and Alpert were playing the game of cultural revolution.
Instead of interminable weekly sessions, the new mode of therapy called for only a single high-dose session, aimed at achieving a kind of conversion experience in which the customary roles of both patient and therapist had to be reimagined.
With its emphasis on set and setting—what Grob calls “the critical extra-pharmacological variables”—psychedelic therapy was also a little too close to shamanism for comfort.
Yet it was true that the mid-1960s saw a surge of people on LSD showing up in emergency rooms with acute symptoms of paranoia, mania, catatonia, and anxiety, as well as “acid flashbacks”—a spontaneous recurrence of symptoms days or weeks after ingesting LSD. Some of these patients were having genuine psychotic breaks. Especially in the case of young people at risk for schizophrenia, an
LSD trip can trigger their first psychotic episode, and sometimes did. (It should be noted that any traumatic experience can serve as such a trigger, including the divorce of one’s parents or graduate school.) But in many other cases, doctors with little experience of psychedelics mistook a panic reaction for a full-blown psychosis. Which usually made things worse.
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 at what other time in history did a society’s young undergo a searing rite of passage with which the previous generation was utterly unfamiliar? Normally, rites of passage help knit societies together as the young cross over hurdles and through gates erected and maintained by their elders, coming out on the other side to take their place in the community of adults. Not so with the psychedelic journey in the 1960s, which at its conclusion dropped its young travelers onto a psychic landscape unrecognizable to their parents.
out? R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.
Implicit in these documents, it seemed to me, was the recognition that these powerful, anarchic medicines can and have been misused and that if they are to do more good than harm, they require a cultural vessel of some kind: protocols, rules, and rituals that together form a kind of Apollonian counterweight to contain and channel
their sheer Dionysian force. Modern medicine, with its controlled trials and white-coated clinicians and DSM diagnoses, offers one such container; the underground guides offer another.
Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To resaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight. A
Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable gift: that we can let go of so much—the desires, fears, and defenses of a lifetime!—without suffering complete annihilation. This might not come as a surprise to Buddhists, transcendentalists, or experienced meditators, but it was sure news to me, who has never felt anything but identical to my ego.
Sigmund Freud wrote that “there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, our own ego.” Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists. The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything.
As mentioned, the default mode network appears to play a role in the creation of mental constructs or projections, the most important of which is the construct we call the self, or ego.* This is why some neuroscientists call it “the me network.” If a researcher gives you a list of adjectives and asks you to consider how they apply to you, it is your default mode network that leaps into action. (It also lights up when we receive “likes” on our social media feeds.)
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 mystical experience may just be what it feels like when you deactivate the brain’s default mode network. This can be achieved any number of ways: through psychedelics and meditation, as Robin Carhart-Harris and Judson Brewer have demonstrated, but perhaps also by means of certain breathing exercises (like Holotropic Breathwork), sensory deprivation, fasting, prayer, overwhelming experiences of awe, extreme sports, near-death experiences, and so on.
But however it happens, taking this particular network off-line may give us access to extraordinary states of consciousness—moments of oneness or ecstasy that are no less wondrous for having a physical cause.
Taken as a whole, the default mode network exerts an inhibitory influence on other parts of the brain, notably including the limbic regions involved in emotion and memory, in much the same way Freud conceived of the ego keeping the anarchic forces of the unconscious id in check.
To form a perception of something out in the world, the brain takes in as little sensory information as it needs to make an educated guess. We are forever cutting to the chase, basically, and leaping to conclusions, relying on prior experience to inform current perception.
This raises a question: How is normal waking consciousness any different from other, seemingly less faithful productions of our imagination—such as dreams or psychotic delusions or psychedelic trips? In fact, all these states of consciousness are “imagined”: they’re mental constructs that weave together some news of the world with priors of various kinds.
Our senses have evolved for a much narrower purpose and take in only what serves our needs as animals of a particular kind.
“That’s the brain doing what the brain does”—that is, working to reduce uncertainty by, in effect, telling itself stories.
outside. Huxley’s reducing valve contracts to zero. Carhart-Harris believes that people suffering from a whole range of disorders characterized by excessively rigid patterns of thought—including addiction, obsessions, and eating disorders as well as depression—stand to benefit from “the ability of psychedelics to disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior by disintegrating the patterns of [neural] activity upon which they rest.”
By quieting the default mode network, these compounds can loosen the ego’s grip on the machinery of the mind, “lubricating” cognition where before it had been rusted stuck. “Psychedelics alter consciousness by disorganizing brain activity,” Carhart-Harris writes. They increase the amount of entropy in the brain, with the result that the system reverts to a less constrained mode of cognition.*
world. With experience and time, it gets easier to cut to the chase and leap to conclusions—clichés that imply a kind of agility but that in fact may signify precisely the opposite: a petrifaction of thought.
A flattering term for this regime of good enough predictions is “wisdom.”
When, for example, I’m feeling especially generous or grateful, open to feelings and people and nature, I register a sense of expansion. This feeling is often accompanied by a diminution of ego, as well as a falloff in the attention paid to past and future on which the ego feasts. (And depends.)
there is a pronounced sense of contraction when I’m obsessing about things or feeling fearful, defensive, rushed, worried, and regretful. (These last two feelings don’t exist without time travel.)
The adult brain directs the spotlight of its attention where it will and then relies on predictive coding to make sense of what it perceives. This is not at all the child’s approach, Gopnik has discovered. Being inexperienced in the way of the world, the mind of the young child has comparatively few priors, or preconceptions, to guide her perceptions down the predictable tracks. Instead, the child approaches reality with the astonishment of an adult on psychedelics.
“Children are better learners than adults in many cases when the solutions are nonobvious” or, as she puts it, “further out in the space of possibilities,” a realm where they are more at home than we are. Far out, indeed.
Think of the children of immigrants, or four-year-olds confronted with an iPhone. Children don’t invent these new tools, they don’t create the new environment, but in every generation they build the kind of brain that can best thrive in it. Childhood is the species’ ways of injecting noise into the system of cultural evolution.”
Or drop a tab of LSD. Gopnik told me she has been struck by the similarities between the phenomenology of the LSD experience and her understanding of the consciousness of children: hotter searches, diffused attention, more mental noise (or entropy), magical thinking, and little sense of a self that is continuous over time. “The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”
Grob has written, “it will not be sufficient to adhere to strict standards of scientific methodology alone. We must also pay heed to the examples provided us by such successful applications of the shamanic paradigm.” Under that paradigm, the shaman/therapist carefully orchestrates “extrapharmacological variables” such as set and setting in order to put the “hyper-suggestible properties” of these medicines to best use. This is precisely where psychedelic therapy seems to be operating: on a frontier between spirituality and science that is as provocative as it is uncomfortable.
“People don’t realize how few tools we have in psychiatry to address existential distress.” Existential distress is what psychologists call the complex of depression, anxiety, and fear common in people confronting a terminal diagnosis. “Xanax isn’t the answer.” If there is an answer, Bossis believes, it is going to be more spiritual in nature than pharmacological. “So how do we not explore this,” he asks, “if it can recalibrate how we die?”
How can we be certain, he was suggesting, that our experience of consciousness is “authentic”? The answer is we can’t; it is beyond the reach of our science, and yet who doubts its reality? In fact, the evidence for the existence of consciousness is much like the evidence for the reality of the mystical experience: we believe it exists not because science can independently verify it but because a great many people have been convinced of its reality; here, too, all we have to go on is the phenomenology.
Existential distress at the end of life bears many of the hallmarks of a hyperactive default network, including obsessive self-reflection and an inability to jump the deepening grooves of negative thinking. The ego, faced with the prospect of its own extinction, turns inward and becomes hypervigilant, withdrawing its investment in the world and other people. The cancer patients I interviewed spoke of feeling closed off from loved ones, from the world, and from the full range of emotions; they felt, as one put it, “existentially alone.”
