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In recent years, “psychiatry has gone from being brainless to being mindless,”
“So how do we not explore this,” he asks, “if it can recalibrate how we die?”
(Krystallia Kalliontzi)—would
The idea was to use psychedelics to escape the prison of self. “We wanted to provide a brief, lucid interval of complete egolessness to demonstrate that personal intactness was not absolutely necessary, and that perhaps there was something ‘out there’”—something greater than our individual selves that might survive our demise.
“I was being told (without words) not to worry about the cancer . . . it’s minor in the scheme of things . . . simply an imperfection of your humanity and that the more important matter . . . the real work to be done is before you. Again, love.”
“A high-dose psychedelic experience is death practice,”
Here we bump into one of the richer paradoxes of the psilocybin trials: while it succeeds in no small part because it has the sanction and authority of science, its effectiveness seems to depend on a mystical experience that leaves people convinced there is more to this world than science can explain.
“If it gives them peace, if it helps people to die peacefully with their friends and their family at their side, I don’t care if it’s real or an illusion.”
psilocybin’s “egolytic” effects—the drug’s ability to either silence or at least muffle the voice of the ego.
And what comes through that opening for many people, in a great flood, is love.
These medicines may help us construct meaning, if not discover it.
Especially in the absence of faith, these medicines, in the right hands, may offer powerful antidotes for the existential terrors that afflict not only the dying.
Bertrand Russell wrote that the best way to overcome one’s fear of death “is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
“Addiction is a story we get stuck in, a story that gets reinforced every time we try and fail to quit:
after most drug experiences, we’re fully aware of, and often embarrassed by, the inauthenticity of what we thought and felt while under the influence.
the same regions in the visual cortex light up whether one is seeing an object live—“online”—or merely recalling or imagining it, off-line.
“So much of human suffering stems from having this self that needs to be psychologically defended at all costs.
psychedelics, with the help of a good therapist, give us an opportunity to propose some new, more constructive stories about the self and its relationship to the world, stories that just might stick.
“Whatever we’re delving into here, it’s in the same realm as the placebo. But a placebo on rocket boosters.”
“Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?”
Addiction is, among other things, a radical form of selfishness.
awe is a fundamental human emotion, one that evolved in us because it promotes altruistic behavior.
the overwhelming force and the mystery of awe are such that the experience can’t readily be interpreted according to our accustomed frames of thought.
volunteers depicted their depression foremost as a state of “disconnection,” whether from other people, their earlier selves, their senses and feelings, their core beliefs and spiritual values, or nature.
“It was like when you defrag the hard drive on your computer . . . I thought, ‘My brain is being defragged, how brilliant is that!’”
the depressed patient’s incessant rumination constricts his or her emotional repertoire.
the depressive keeps emotions at bay because it is too painful to experience them.
More than half of the Imperial volunteers saw the clouds of their depression eventually return, so it seems likely that psychedelic therapy for depression, should it prove useful and be approved, will not be a onetime intervention.
the placebo effect is usually strongest in a new medicine and tends to fade over time, as observed in the case of antidepressants; they don’t work nearly as well today as they did upon their introduction in the 1980s.
“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.” Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense.
in a process he describes as a form of “inverse learning.” “Every time we respond [to a stimulus], we strengthen the neural circuitry that prompts us to repeat” the same destructive thoughts or behaviors.
“Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.”
So many of the volunteers I spoke to, whether among the dying, the addicted, or the depressed, described feeling mentally “stuck,” captured in ruminative loops they felt powerless to break.
responsible for the narratives that link our first person to the world, and so help define us. “This is who I am.” “I don’t deserve to be loved.” “I’m the kind of person without the willpower to break this addiction.”
Psychedelic therapy seems to weaken the grip of these narratives, perhaps by temporarily disintegrating the parts of the default mode network where they operate.
the various forms of mental illness that psychedelic therapy seems to help most: all involve a disordered ego—overbearing, punishing, or misdirected.*
it is finally the loss of ego or self (what Jung called “psychic death”) they’re suggesting is the key psychological driver of the experience.
Is it any wonder we would feel one with the universe when the boundaries between self and world that the ego patrols suddenly fall away?
Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.”
HOW CLOSE ARE WE to a world in which psychedelic therapy is sanctioned and routine, and what would such a world look like?
Why would it invest in a pill patients might only need to take once in a lifetime?
hopes someday to establish a “psychedelic hospice,” a retreat center somewhere out in nature where not only the dying but their loved ones can use psychedelics to help them let go—the patient and the loved ones both.
“A spiritual experience does not by itself make a spiritual life.” Integration is essential to making sense of the experience, whether in or out of the medical context. Or else it remains just a drug experience.
“That was a very different time. People wouldn’t even talk about cancer or death then. Women were tranquilized to give birth; men weren’t allowed in the delivery room! Yoga and meditation were totally weird. Now mindfulness is mainstream and everyone does yoga, and there are birthing centers and hospices all over. We’ve integrated all these things into our culture. And now I think we’re ready to integrate psychedelics.”
antinomian.
“Let’s say you have some nineteen-year-olds taking mushrooms at a party. One of them has a profound experience. He’s come to understand what God is, or his connection to the universe. What do his friends say? ‘Oh, man, you had too much last night! No more mushrooms for you!’
there are moments in the life of an individual or a community when the imaginative novelties proposed by altered states of consciousness introduce exactly the sort of variation that can send a life, or a culture, down a new path.
I found myself thinking about things like death and time and infinity, but less in angst than in wonder.
After a month or so, it was pretty much back to baseline.
