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For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, many in the psychiatric establishment regarded LSD and psilocybin as miracle drugs.
wonderfully italicized version of the familiar reality.
critical influence of “set” and “setting.” 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.
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.
LSD gave her insight into how young children perceive the world. Kids’ perceptions are not mediated by expectations and conventions in the been-there, done-that way that adult perception is;
LSD appears to disable such conventionalized, shorthand modes of perception and, by doing so, restores a childlike immediacy, and sense of wonder, to our experience of reality, as if we were seeing everything for the first time.
Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five “most spiritually significant experiences” of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives.
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.
to enrich the collective imagination—the culture—with the novel ideas and visions that a select few people bring back from wherever it is they go.
Since the revival of sanctioned psychedelic research beginning in the 1990s, nearly a thousand volunteers have been dosed, and not a single serious adverse event has been reported.
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.
If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country.
This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt.
We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.
The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.
(Today LSD devotees celebrate “Bicycle Day” each year on April 19.)
the experience of psychedelics is powerfully influenced by one’s expectation; no other class of drugs are more suggestible in their effects.
the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.
when our sense of a subjective “I” disintegrates, as it often does in a high-dose psychedelic experience (as well as in meditation by experienced meditators), it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is subjectively and objectively true. What’s left to do the doubting if not your I?
(Telling them apart was not difficult, rendering the double blind a somewhat hollow conceit: those on the placebo sat sedately in their pews while the others lay down or wandered about the chapel, muttering things like “God is everywhere” and “Oh, the Glory!”)
psychedelics “would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for astronomy.
“You have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’ Maybe he has an intuitive sense there was some sort of significance or order to the scene. But there are words we need that don’t yet exist. We’ve got five crayons when we need fifty thousand different shades.”
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.
these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.
consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains.
it is hard to find a contemporary experiment with psychedelics that wasn’t already done in Maryland in the 1960s or 1970s.
“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”
the European researchers I interviewed all failed to see as many instances of mystical experience in their subjects as the Americans did in theirs.)
had the overwhelming sense of infinity being multiplied by another infinity. I joked to my wife as she drove me home that I felt as if I had been repeatedly sucked into the asshole of God.
remember repeating to myself again and again, “Nothing matters, nothing matters any more. I see the point! Nothing matters at all.”
The first and, to his mind, “handiest” is ineffability:
“You had to be there” was a regular refrain.
The noetic quality is James’s second mark: “Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge
someone having a mystical experience, such an insight acquires the force of revealed truth.
What was the philosophy professor’s compelling insight? “Love conquers all.”
“that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. ‘I’ve heard that said all my life,’ we exclaim, ‘but I never realized its full meaning until now.’”
the third mark of mystical consciousness, which is “transiency.”
fourth and last mark in James’s typology is the essential “passivity” of the mystical experience. “The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”
permanently transformed.
“I would not recommend it to young people.”
many cases the psilocybin experience had led to lasting changes in their personalities.
The majority of volunteers who had a mystical experience reported that their fear of death had either greatly diminished or completely disappeared.
On the first interpretation, the mind-altering power of psilocybin argues for a firmly materialist understanding of consciousness and spirituality, because the changes observed in the mind can be traced directly to the presence of a chemical—psilocybin.
Yet, surprisingly, most of the people who have had these experiences don’t see the matter that way at all. Even the most secular among them come away from their journeys convinced there exists something that transcends a material understanding of reality: some sort of a “Beyond.”
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.
we are closer, genetically speaking, to the fungal kingdom than to that of the plants.
this man’s life—his brain!—has been utterly taken over by fungi;
(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.)
Psilocybes are saprophytes, living off dead plant matter and dung. They are denizens of disturbed land, popping up most often in the habitats created by ecological catastrophe, such as landslides, floods, storms, and volcanoes. They also prosper in the ecological catastrophes caused by our species: clear-cut forests, road cuts, the wakes of bulldozers, and agriculture.
