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to terminal cancer patients as a way to help them deal with their “existential distress” at the approach of death. These experiments, which were taking place simultaneously at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and New York University, seemed not just improbable but crazy. Faced with a terminal diagnosis, the very last thing I would want to do is take a psychedelic drug—that is, surrender control of my mind and then in that psychologically vulnerable state stare straight into the abyss. But many of the volunteers reported that over the course of a single guided psychedelic “journey” they reconceived how
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They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”
Specifically, the psychologist felt that 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; as adults, she explained, our minds don’t simply take in the world as it is so
“mystical” and “spiritual” and “meaning” that leaped out from the pages
Hopkins paper, fascinated. Thirty volunteers who had never before used psychedelics had been given a pill containing either a synthetic version of psilocybin or an “active placebo”—methylphenidate, or Ritalin—to fool them into thinking they had received the psychedelic. They then lay down on a couch wearing eyeshades and listening to music through headphones, attended the whole time by two therapists.
high dose of psilocybin could be used to safely and reliably “occasion” a mystical experience—typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe.
participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable “to the birth of a first child
top five “most spiritually significant experiences” of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives.
volunteers reported significant improvements in their “personal well-being, life satisfaction and positive behavior change,” changes that were confi...
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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.
die from an overdose of LSD or psilocybin, for example, and neither drug is addictive.
use by people robs the drugs of their effect.fn2 It is true that the terrifying experiences some people have on psychedelics can risk flipping those at risk into psychosis, so no one with a family history or predisposition to mental illness should ever take them.
beginning in the 1990s, nearly a thousand volunteers have been dosed, and not a single serious adverse event has been reported.
If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up!
The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing.
my default mode of consciousness. It works well enough, certainly gets the job done, but what if it isn’t the only, or necessarily the best, way to go through life?
give us access to other modes of consciousness that might offer us specific benefits, whether therapeutic, spiritual, or creative. Psychedelics are certainly not the only door to these other forms of consciousness—and I explore some non-pharmacological alternatives in these pages—but they do seem to be one of the easier knobs to take hold of and turn.
most attention from scientists—psilocybin and LSD—which means that other psychedelics that are equally interesting and powerful but more difficult to bring into the laboratory—such as ayahuasca—receive less attention.
“entheogens”—from the Greek for “the divine within.”
Despite the 1960s trappings, the term “psychedelic,” coined in 1956, is etymologically accurate. Drawn from the Greek, it means simply “mind manifesting,” which is precisely what these extraordinary molecules hold the power to do.
When he walked out into his garden after a spring rain, “everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if newly created.”
