How to Change Your Mind

Prologue: A New Door

• Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, shortly before physicists split an atom of uranium for the first time.
• Psilocybin had been around for thousands of years, though no one in the developed world was amare of it.
• The impact of these two molecules is hard to overestimate. The advent of LSD can be linked to the revolution in brain science that begins in the 1950s, when scientists discovered the role of neurotransmitters in the brain. that quantities of LSD measured in micrograms could produce symptoms resembling psychosis inspired brain scientists to search for the neurochemical basis of mental disorders previously believed to be psychological in origin.
• 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.
• 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.
• The Hopkins study demonstrated that a 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 the universe.
• There is not a culture of earth (except the Inuit) that doesn't make use of certain plants to change the contents of the mind, whetheras a matter of healing, habit, or spiritual practice.
• Shaking the snow globe - 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.
• Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we're confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) 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! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt.
• We approach experience much as an 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.
• One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful - wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It's so inefficient!)

1. A Renaissance

• LSD is one of the most powerful psychoactive compounds ever discovered, active at doses measured in micrograms (1/1000 of a milligram)
• Today, LSD devotees celebrate "Bicycle Day" each year on April 19 after Hofmann cycled home on acid.
• The Good Friday or Marsh Chapel Experiment in 1962, conducted by Walter Pahnke. 10 divinity students are given psilocybin and 10 an "active placebo". Pahnke concluded that the experiences of those who received the psilocybin were indistinguishable from, if not identical with the classic mystical experiences reported in the literature.
• Grof: Psychedlics "would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for astronomy. These tools make it possible to study important processes that under normal circumstances are not available for direct observation.
• Bob Richards: "You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It's not something we generate; it's something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers."
• Whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.
• Boothby: "I felt all my organizing categories of opposition - dreaming and wakefulness, life and death, inside and outside, self and other - collapse into each other... Reality appeared to fold in on itself, to implode in a kind of ecstatic catastrophe of logic. Yet in the midst of this hallucinatory hurricane I was having a weird experience of ultra-sublimity. And I remember repeating to myself again and again, 'Nothing matters, nothing matters any more. I see the point! Nothing matters at all.'"
• James' marks indicating a mystical experience:
  • Ineffability - The subject immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.
  • Noetic - Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge... They are illuminations, revelations full of significance and importance... and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.
  • Transiency - The mystical experience cannot be sustained for long, but its traces persist and recur.
  • Passivity - 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. The person may feel as if they have been permanently transformed.
• Boothby: "Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.
• John Hayes: "sense of the concrete destabilized".
• James: "It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity." This ultimate unity, he suspected, was no mere delusion.

2. Natural History: Bemushroomed

• 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.
• "The Universality of the Mycelial Archetype" - an intricate tracery of blue lines on a night sky, the lines representing at once mycelium, roots, neurons, the Internet, and dark matter.
• The Wassons had a theory that each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either mycophobic (the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Scandinaviansà or mycrophilic (the Russians, Catalans, and Slavs.
• Wasson: "I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life."
• Terence McKenna's stoned ape theory that psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors access to realms of supernatural power, catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection, and brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. This last hypothesis about the invention of language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the sense that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin, numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on. Language he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts.
• Samorini hypothesizes that during times of rapid environmental change or crisis it may avail the survival of a group when a few of its members abandon their accustomed conditioned responses and experiment with some radically new and different behaviors. Much like genetic mutation, most of these novelties will prove disastrous and be discarded by natural selection. But the laws of probability suggest that a few of the novel behaviors might end up being useful, helping the individual, the group, and possibly the species to adapt to rapid changes in their environment.
• Samorini calls this a "depatterning factor." There are time in the evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adoption. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a population.
• The psylocin in that mushroom unlocked the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2-A receptors in my brain, causing them to fire wildly and set off a cascade of disordered mental events that, among other things, permitted some thoughts and feelings, presumably from my subconscious (and, perhaps, my reading too), to get cross-wired with my visual cortex as it was processing images of the trees and plants and insects in my field of vision.
• Not quite a hallucination, "projection" is probably the psychological term for this phenomenon: when we mix our emotions with certain objects that then reflect those feelings back to us so they they appear to glisten with meaning.
• Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything." Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child's-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, or ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face.

3. History: The First Wave

• The evolution of terms:
  • Psychotomimetic - A mind drug that mimicked psychoses.
  • Psycholytic - Mind loosening.
  • Psychedelic - Mind manifesting. In 1956, the word "had no particular connotation of madness, craziness, or ecstasy, but suggested an enlargement and expansion of mind."
  • Hallucination = To wander in one's mind
• "Unsanity": "a state beyond the control of the ego".
• Drugs like LSD and psilocybin promised a better route into the subconscious (than Freud's royal road of dreams)
• Cary Grant had more than 60 sessions of LSD therapy and by the end declared himself "born again".
• Al Hubbard was the first researcher to grasp the critical importance of set and setting in shaping the psychedelic experience.
• Steve Jobs often told people that his experiments with LSD had been one of his two or three most important life experiences.
• Several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. "You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help."
• Schwartz: In engineering, "you're always balancing complex variables you can never get perfect, so you're desperately searching to find patterns. LSD shows you patterns.
• How much does cyberspace, an immaterial realm where one can construct a new identity and merge with a community of virtual others, owe to an imagination shaped by the experience of psychedelics? Or for that matter virtual reality? The whole notion of cybernetics, the idea that material reality can be translated into bits of information, may also owe something to the experience of LSD, with its power to collapse matter into spirit.
• The Concord Prison Experiment in 1961 purported to show much lowered recidivism for inmates who were given psilocybin.
• Especially in the case of young people at risk for schizophrenia, an LSD trip can trigger their first psychotic episode.
• Psychedelics introduced something deeply subversive to the West that the various establishments had little choice but to repulse. LSD truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind (the superego, ego, and unconscious) and going on from there to society's various structures of authority and then to lines of every imaginable kind: between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health, self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material. If all such lines are manifestations of the Apollonian strain in Western civilization, the impulse that erects distinctions, dualities, and hierarchies and defends them, then psychedelics represented the ungovernable Dionysian force that blithely washes all those lines away.
• Before 1943, our society had never had such powerful mind-changing drugs available to it.

4. Travelogue: Journeying Underground

• To become more "open" - especially at this age, when the grooves of mental habit have been etched so deep as to seem inescapable - was an appealing prospect.

LSD

• A decades-long spiritual quest that eventually "blew my linear, empirical mind," opening him up to the possibility of past lives, telepathy, precognition, and "synchronicities" that defy our conceptions of space and time.
• "These medicines have shown me that something quote-unquote impossible exists. But I don't think it's magic or supernatural. It's a technology of consciousness we don't understand yet."
• Hyperventilation: Breathe deeply and rapidly while exhaling as strongly as you can.
• 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.
• What is the the sense of banality, or the ironic perspective, if not two of the sturdier defenses the adult ego deploys to keep from being overwhelmed - by our emotions, certainly, but perhaps also by our senses, which are liable at any time to astonish us with news of the sheer wonder of the world. If we are ever to get through the day, we need to put most of what we perceive into boxes neatly labeled "Known", to be quickly shelved with little thought to the marvels therein, and "Novel", to which, understandably, we pay more attention, at least until it isn't that anymore. I psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art. It seems to me there is great value in such renovation, the more so as we grow older and come to think we've seen and felt it all before.
• The hypnagogic consciousness, just before sleep, when the ego seems to sign off a few moments before the rest of the mind does, leaving the field of consciousness unsupervised and vulnerable to gently eruptions of imagery and hallucinatory snatches of narrative. Imagine that state extended indefinitely, yet with some ability to direct your attention to this or that, as if in an especially vivid and absorbing daydream. Unlike a daydream, however, you are fully present to the contents of whatever narrative is unfolding, completely inside it and beyond the reach of distraction. I had little choice but to obey the daydream's logic, its ontological and epistemological rules, until, either by force of will or by the fresh notes of a new song, the mental channel would change and I would find myself somewhere else entirely.
• This, I guess, is what happens when the ego's grip on the mind if relaxed but not eliminated, as a larger dose would probably have done. "For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way," as Aldous Huxley put it in the The Doors of Perception. Not entirely out of the way in my case, but the LSD had definitely muffled that controlling voice, and in that lightly regulated space all sorts of interesting things could bubble up, things that any self-respecting ego would probably have kept submerged.
• I had had a psycholytic dose of LSD, one that allowed the patient to explore his psyche in an unconstrained but still deliberate manner while remaining sufficiently combobulated to talk about it. For me it felt less like a drug experience - the LSD feels completely transparent, with none of the physiological noise I associate with other psychoactive drugs - than a novel mode of cognition, falling somewhere between intellection and feeling.

Psilocybin

• Relax and float downstream. This was not at all like previous trips, which had left me more or less the captain of my attention, able to direct it this way or that and change the mental channel at will. No, this was more like being strapped into the front car of a cosmic roller coaster, its heedless headlong trajectory determining moment by moment what would appear in my field of consciousness.
• It turns out that Bayesian inference breaks down in some people: schizophrenics and, according to some neuroscientists, people on high doses of psychedelic drugs, neither of whom "see" in this predictive or conventionalized manner. (Nor do young children, who have yet to build the sort of database necessary for confident predictions.) This raises an interesting question: Is it possible that the perceptions of schizophrenics, people tripping on psychedelics, and young children are, at least in certain instances, more accurate - less influenced by expectation and therefore more faithful to reality - than those of sane and sober adults?
• "I" now turned into a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its, and they were being scattered to the wind. But the "I" taking in this seeming catastrophe had no desire to chase after the slips and pile my old self back together. No desires of any kind, in fact. Whoever I now was was fine with whatever happened. No more ego? That was okay, in fact the most natural thing in the world. And then I looked and saw myself out there again, but this time spread over the landscape like paint, or butter, thinly coating a wide expanse of the world with a substance I recognized as me.
• For what was observing the scene was a vantage and mode of awareness entirely distinct from my accustomed self; in fact I hesitate to use the "I" to denote the presiding awareness, it was so different from my usual first person. Where that self had always been a subject encapsulated in this body, this one seemed unbounded by any body, even though I now had access to its perspective.
• The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more, and there was no one left to mourn its passing. Yet something had succeeded it: this bare disembodied awareness, which gazed upon the scene of the self's dissolution with benign indifference. I was present to reality, but as something other than my self. And although there was no self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, which was calm, unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.
• To put words to an experience that was in fact ineffable at the time, and then to shape them into sentences and then a story, is inevitably to do it a kind of violence. But the alternative is, literally, unthinkable.
• That I could survive the dissolution of my ego without struggle or turning into a puddle was something to be grateful for, but even better was the discovery that there might be another vantage - one less neurotic and more generous - from which to take in reality.
• Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched conception of one's self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version of Keats' "negative capability" - the ability to exist amid doubts and mysteries without reflexively reaching for certainty. To cultivate this mode of consciousness, with its exceptional degree of selflessness (literally!), requires us to transcend our subjectivity or - it comes to the same thing - widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves, other people and, beyond that, all of nature. Now I understood how a psychedelic could help us to make precisely that move, from the first-person singular to the plural and beyond. Under its influence, a sense of our interconnectedness - that platitude - is felt, becomes flesh. Though this perspective is not something a chemical can sustain for more than a few hours, those hours can give us an opportunity to see how it might go. And perhaps to practice being there.

The Toad

• Being on the outside of a rocket after launch. I'm holding on with both hands, legs clenched around it, while the rapidly mounting g-forces clutch at my flesh, pulling my face down into a taut frimace, as the great cyclinder rises through successive layers of clouds, exponentially gaining speed and altitude, the fuselage shuddering on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from Earth's grip, while the friction it generates as it crashes through the thinning air issues in a deafening roar.
• The other metaphor was the big bang, but the big bang run in reverse, from our familiar world all the way back to a point before there was anything, no time or space or matter, only the pure unbounded energy that was all there was then, before an imperfection, a ripple in its waveform, caused the universe of energy to fall into time, space, and matter. Rushing backward through 14Bn years, I watched the dimensions of reality collapse one by one until there was nothing left, not even being. Only the all-consuming roar. It was just horrible.
• And then suddenly the devolution of everything into the nothingness of pure force reverses course. One by one, the elements of our universe begin to reconstitute themselves: the dimensions of time and space returned first, blessing my still-scattered confetti brain with the cozy coordinates of place; this is somewherei And then I slipped back onto my familiar "I" like an old pair of slippers and soon after felt something I recognized as my body begin to reassemble. The film of reality was now running in reverse, as if all the leaves that the thermonuclear blast had blown off the great tree of being and scattered to the four winds were suddenly to find their way back, fly up into the welcoming limbs of reality, and reattach. The order of things was being restored, me notably included. I was alive!
• And yet as I felt myself reconstitute as a self and then a body, something for which I now sought confirmation by running my hands along my legs and squirming beneath the blanket, I felt ecstatic - as happy as I can ever remember feeling. But this ecstasy was not sui generis, not exactly. It was more like the equal and opposite reaction to the terror I had just endured. less of a divine gift than the surge of pleasure that comes from the cessation of unendurable pain. But a sense f relief so vast and deep as to be cosmic.
• I felt for the first time gratitude for the very fact of being, that there is anything whatsoever. Rather than being necessarily the case, this now seemed quite the miracle, and something I resolved never again to take for granted. Everybody gives thanks for "being alive", but who stops to offer thanks for the bare-bones gerund that comes before "alive"? I had just come from a place where being was no more and now vowed never to forget what a gift (and mystery) it is, that there is something rather than nothing.
• True, one had to favor doing in order to get anything done, but wasn't there also a great virtue and psychic benefit in simply being? In contemplation rather than action? I decided I needed to practice being with stillness, being with other people as I find them (imperfect), and being with my own unimproved self. To savor whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it. (Huxley struggled with the same aspiration during his mescaline journey: "If one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.")
• For me, "spiritual" is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that psychic construct - at once so familiar and on reflection so strange - stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience, whether of the world outside us or of the mind within. The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as would see if it would just shut up. and that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.
• The ego, that stingy, vigilant security guard admits only the narrowest bandwidth of reality, "a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive." It's really good at performing all those activities that natural selection values: getting ahead, getting liked and loved, getting fed, getting laid. Keeping us on task, it is a ferocious editor of anything that might distract us from the work at hand, whether that means regulating our access to memories and strong emotions from within or news of the world without.
• So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when "all mean egotism vanishes." Wonders (and terrors) we're ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our sense can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between self and world, that no-man's-land which in ordinary hours the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more connected, "part and particle" of some larger entity. Whether we call that entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. but it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.

5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics

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6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy

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Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity

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