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

by Michael Pollan

I began to understand what the volunteers in the cancer-anxiety trials had been trying to tell me: how it was that a psychedelic journey had granted them a perspective from which the very worst life can throw at us, up to and including death, could be regarded objectively and accepted with equanimity.

I asked her the question that gnawed at me whenever someone recounted such a mystical experience: “How can you be sure this was a genuine spiritual event and not just a drug experience?” “It’s an irrelevant question,” she replied coolly. “This was something being revealed to me.”

“It was like a holiday away from the prison of my brain. I felt free, carefree, reenergized.” “It was like the light switch being turned on in a dark house.” “You’re not immersed in thought patterns; the concrete coat has come off.”