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."
- "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
5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics
6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy
Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity
