Summary of How to Change your Mind

I read How to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan and wrote some thoughts, quotes & notes down about it. If you find it interesting, I highly suggesting picking up a copy of his book.

note: I wrote a lot of this for my personal reference and at times it might not be clear where an excerpt ends and where my notes begin.. enjoy!

Review

Michael Pollan has written an incredibly thorough and intriguing case for the general population to rethink their current relationship with psychedelic compounds. Pollan paints a detailed history of psychedelics, narrating the intricate tail of characters, timing and events that created the “counterculture” explosion that inevitably spooked the government into outlawing these compounds. Pollan goes beyond the immediate set of characters to detail dozens of people who worked in the background to do meaningful and thoughtful work and how their work continued underground when the government cracked down.

While narrating the social & political tale, Pollan weaves in the story of how scientists have been attempting to unite two world views which are so often opposed to each other — mysticism and materialism (scientific reductionism).

Adding to his credibility and power of his story, Pollan shares his recent personal exploration of various psychedelics, carefully detailing his journeys, the guides and culture around them. His descriptions and analysis of his journeys are approachable to both the staunchest conservative minds and those imbued with a deep sense of mystical truth in the Universe. Moreover, he makes the science accessible to those without a degree in Neuroscience. Pollan makes the case that if you’re generally interested in helping modern neurological maladies, there’s a number of really good reasons for supporting continued research and clinical trials to revive psychedelic assisted medicine from the 50s/60s. Pollan will definitely open your mind which proves to be an effective and pleasant way of changing your mind.

Prologue

How to Change Your Mind is the story of the renaissance of psychedelics in the 2000s.

Two molecules exploded in the West triggering decades of cultural and scientific revolutions.

1. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD): first synthesized by Albert Hoffman in 1938. Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz — their goal was to understand the chemical components of ergot as a way of stimulating circulation.
2. Psilocybin: produced by over 200 species of mushrooms. Called teonanácatl by the Aztecs (flesh of the gods). In 1955, a Manhattan Banker and amateur mycologist named R Gordon Wasson, traveling to Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca Mexico, sampled the mushroom and then wrote about it in Time magazine titled “mushrooms that cause strange visions”.

Scientific revolutions:

• Brain scientists studying the role of neurotransmitters
• Neurochemical understanding of psychosis & mental disorders.
• Psychotherapy techniques to treat alcoholism, anxiety and depression.

Cultural revolutions:

• The rise of the counterculture
• An independent rite of passage for the youth
• Moral panic

About the Author: Michael Pollan wasn’t heavily influenced by psychedelics growing up. Born after the first wave, he tried magic mushrooms once but otherwise was anxious and focused on his career until his 50s. 3 things convinced him to write this book:

1. In 2010, the New York Times published a front-page story titled “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again”. Doctors had been giving terminal cancer patients large doses of psilocybin to help them deal with their “existential distress”. Several patients reported loosing their fear of death completely. “Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states”.
2. Pollan and his wife Judith were at a dinner in Berkeley and a prominent psychologist mentioned her recent personal experimentation with LSD. She mentioned it being intellectually stimulating and of value to her work. It gave her insight into:

“how young children perceive the world. Kids’ perceptions are not mediated by the 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 and it is so much as they make educated guesses about it… 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.”

1. An email he received from Bob Jesse about a 2006 research paper published in Psychopharmacology titled, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance”. Pollan found the use of the words “mystical, spiritual and meaning” published in a prominent peer-reviewed scientific journal to straddle two previously irreconcilable worlds: science & spirituality. The key takeaway from the research account was the the “temporary dissolution of one’s ego — that may be the key to changing one’s mind”.

“I have never thought of myself as a particularly spiritual, much less mystical, person. This is partly a function of worldview, I suppose, and partly of neglect: I’ve never devoted much time to exploring spiritual paths and did not have a religious upbringing. My default perspective is that of a the philosophical materialist, who believes that matter is the fundamental substance of the world and the physical laws it obeys should be able to explain everything that happens. I start from the assumption that nature is all that there is and gravitate towards scientific explanations of phenomena. That said, I’m also sensitive to the limitations of the scientific-materialist perspective and believe that nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries towards which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiable dismissive.

Was it possible that a single psychedelic experience — something that turned on nothing more than ingestion of a pill or square of blotter paper — could put a big dent in such a worldview? Shift how one thought about mortality? Actually change one’s mind in enduring ways?

The idea took hold of me. It was a little like being shown a door in a familiar room — the room of your own mind — that somehow never noticed before and being told my people you trusted (scientists!) that a whole other way of thinking — of being! — lay waiting on the other side. All you had to do was turn the knob and enter. Who wouldn’t be curious? I might not have been looking to change my life, but the idea of learning something new about it, and of shining a fresh light on this old world, began to occupy my thoughts. Maybe there was something missing from my life, something I just hadn’t named.”

With these 3 events in hand, Pollan set out to write this book.

Fun facts:

1. there is only culture on earth without any known history of manipulating their consciousness. The Inuit because nothing psychoactive grows up there (yet).
2. Neither LSD nor psilocybin are addictive. In fact, no animal other than homo sapien will ingest either substance more than once willingly. Is it impossible to overdose with all injuries caused by people doing silly things while on “bad trips”.
3. 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.

“After more than half a century of its more or less constant companionship, one’s self — this ever-present voice in the head, this ceaselessly commenting, interpreting, labeling, defending I — becomes perhaps a little too familiar. I’m not talking about anything as deep as self-knowledge here. No, just about how, over time, we tend of 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 a 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… The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us from the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. 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 that I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.

What I’m struggling to describe here is my what I think of as 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? The premise of psychedelic research is that this special group of molecules can give us access to other modes of consciousness that might offer us specific benefits, whether therapeutic, spiritual or creative… expanding our repertoire of consciousness … there is value in cultivating a greater amount of what I’ve come to think of as neural diversity.”

Chapter 1: A Renaissance

Three unrelated events in 2006 triggered the renaissance.

1. Centennial celebration of Albert Hoffman. (fun fact: unlike most centennials, he was able to attend and fully participate!). Author of LSD, My Problem Child. Describing one of his first trips, “My ego was suspended somewhere in space and I saw my body lying dead on the sofa”.

“the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.”

1. U.S. Supreme Court unanimously voted that the União do Vegetal (UDV) or Union of the Plants, a religious sect that uses ayahuasca as its sacrament, could import the drink to the United States, even though it contains a schedule I substance dimethyltryptamine (DMT). The ruling was grounded in the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, only if the government has a “compelling interest” can it interfere with one’s practice of religion. UDV is a Christian spiritist sect founded in 1961 in Brazil by José de Gabriel da Costa. Ayahuasca is made by brewing two Amazonian plants together, Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis. This jurisprudence of “cognitive liberty” is still scant and limited to religion but now it has been affirmed, opening a new crack in the edifice of the drug war.
2. Roland Griffith published “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance”. Was perhaps the first rigorously designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical study in more than four decades, if not ever, to examine the psychological effect of a psychedic. Importantly, Roland gave reporters a lot of cover by inviting prominent drug researchers — some of them decorated soldiers in the drug war — to comment on the study. Commentators:
3. Herbert D Kleber. Former deputy to William Bennett , George H. W. Bush’s drug czar. Director of the Division of Substance Abuse at Colombia University. Applauded the paper for methodological rigor and acknolwedged there might be “major therapeutic possibilities” in psychedelic research meriting NIH support.
4. Bob Schuster, served as director of the National Insititute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) for two republican presidents noted that this research could be “field expanding” and spiritual experiences might prove useful in treating addiction.

Key culturally significant points of the paper:

1. Reinforced an important distinction between the classic psychedelics — psilocybin, LSD, DMT and mescaline — and more common drugs of abuse (opiates).
2. A problem other research trying to revive psychedelics have encountered is the distinction between these drugs being used purely for therapeutic purposes vs being used to gain spiritual end-roads into mind altering states. This “quest of experiences that free oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for universal truths and enlightenment” is an abiding element of our humanity that nevertheless “enjoyed little credibility in the mainstream scientific world”. The time has come, Harriet de Wit suggested, for science “to recognize these extraordinary subjective experiences … even if they sometimes involve claims about ultimate realties that lie outside the purview of science”.

Roland Griffith

Working at Johns Hopkins, he studied the mechanisms of dependence in a variety of legal and illegal drugs. Including the opiates, sedatives, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine. His career began to turn as he slowly explored his interest in phenomenology (the science of the subjective experience of consciousness). He found meditation very hard but started having experiences that he had a hard time explaining to his scientist colleagues. He was introduced to Bob Jesse by their mutual friend Bob Schuster. He possesses a large amount of “negative capability” — the ability to exist amid uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt without reaching for absolutes, whether in science of spirituality.

Bob Jesse

Vice President of business development at Oracle who made it his mission to revive the science of psychedelics — not for medicine but for spiritual development. A monk compared to Rick Doblin, preferring to work behind the scenes. Has a cool little cabin he build in the hills north of San Francisco. Out of his systematic exploration of Set up the Council on Spiritual Practice (CSP). Supported the UDV lawsuit. Believed psychedelics should be used for the “betterment of well people”.

Rick Doblin

A public, outspoken happy figure, founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Working to legalize MDMA (ecstasy). He mastered the FDA’s drug approval process and drew the blueprints for how to gain official acceptance that allows current psilocybin and MDMA research. This is step one, his next goal is to incorporate these drugs into American society and culture.

Myron Stolaroff

Silicon Valley electrical engineer turned psychedelic researcher.

Sasha and Ann Shulgin

Legendary Bay Area figures who held weekly dinners for a community of therapists, scientists, and others interested in psychedelics. Sasha was a brilliant chemist who held a DEA license allowing him to synthesize novel psychedelic compounds. He made synthetic MDMA for first time.

Huston Smith

Scholar of comparative religion and volunteer in the Good Friday experiment.

Stanislav Grof

Czech psychiatrist and pioneer of LSD assisted pyschotherapy. Scholar in residence at Esalen. Psychedelics would be for psychiatry what the microscope was to biology. When the feds banned psychedelics, he began teaching Holotropic Breathwork — a way of inducing psychedelic state of consciousness without drugs.

Bill Richards

A “master clinician” psychologist was recruited by Griffith to help with the research to guide psychedelic trips (for participants). Richards believes psychedelics have powers to unleash truths in our lives that we cannot put into words: “you have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back into his have. What does he say about his 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 he need fifty thousand different shades.”

Richards see’s all psychedelic experiences as having some key traits:

1. The experience of the sacred both by the great mystics and by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys are very similar and feel “real”.
2. People come back with the sense that what they experienced wasn’t something they generated but was instead something that was already out there waiting to be discovered.
3. The experience that consciousness is part of the universe, not our brains. “If you wanted to find the person who delivered the weather on the last night’s news report, you wouldn’t go looking for her in the TV”.

Bill Richards continued to do research at Spring Grove State Hospital until the late 1970s with lots of success outside the purview of Timothy Leary’s cultural glare. He research became more focused on leading a spiritual life than treating psychosis.

Other key tenants of spiritual/psychedelic trips:

From William James in The Varieties of Religious Experiences. His four “marks”

1. Subjects immediately say that it defies expression, that no adequate report can be given in words, “you had to be there”.
2. The noetic quality. “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”. “I’ve heard that said all my life but I never realized its full meaning into now” — what is merely known is now felt.
3. The transiency of this mystical consciousness — something about these states cannot be sustained although traces of it do persist afterwards.
4. The passivity of the experience, subjects claim their own will were in abeyance — grasped and held by a superior power — temporary surrender.

More on the “noetic sense”. Subjects feel as though they’ve been “let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from this conviction”. Pollan believes there’s two potential sources for this sense:

1. Perhaps the sense is actually true, “the altered state of consciousness has opened up the person up to a truth that the rest of us, imprisoned in ordinary waking consciousness, simply cannot see. Science has trouble with this interpretation , however, because whatever the perception is, it can’t be verified by sciences’ customary tools. Science has little tolerance for the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too. It is worth pointing out that there are cases where science has no choice but to rely on individual testimony — as in the study of subjective consciousness, which is inaccessible to scientific tools. Here, phenomenology is the all-important data. However, this is not the case when ascertaining truths about the world outside our heads. …. The problem with crediting mystical experiences is precisely that they often seem to erase the distinction between inside and outside, in the way that Bob Jesse’s “diffuse awareness” seemed to be his but also to exist outside of him.
2. When our sense of the 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?

I think this term, “noetic sense” is really interesting. It clearly has roots in religion as well — sounds exactly like what a priest of evangelist would take as “word directly from God” — completely convinced it was the truth. Once you have it, it’s clearly hard to shake and let go of. I’m curious how Buddhism would respond to this level of clinging to a strongly held assertion about reality. I’m reminded of the monks who, when someone comes to them with their latest meditation breakthrough with some new fact about how the world truly ‘is’, they say, “that’s nice, now let go of it and begin again”.

Paul Hughs

A critic of this research, argues that these experiences are a form of toxic delirium. The vividness of color perception, the merging of physical sensations, the hallucinations, the disorientation and loss of sense of time, the delusional joys and terrors that come and go evoking unpredictable feeling — are sadly familiar symptoms doctors are called to treat in hospitals every day”.

And yet most people who have psychedelic trips in the research done to date (apart from a handful of bad trips in the first studies), yield very positive results — its as if the same mental states can have very different emotional effects — one of being trapped and tortured, the other of being let free into a deeper truth of the universe. I’m curious if there’s a way to research how much of the brain activity is the same and , perhaps most importantly, where its different (and if its possible to translate them back and forth using neurological research techniques).

Chapter 2: Bemushroomed

“The true method of knowledge is experiment”

Roland Griffith asks Pollan, “are you aware that you’re aware?” And then hands him a coin with Psilocybe cubensis on it and this starts Pollan on his journey to try magic mushrooms.

I became increasingly curious to explore … the natural history of these mushrooms and their strange powers. Where did these mushrooms grow and how? Why did they evolve the ability to produce a chemical compound so closely related to serotonin, the neurotransmitter, that it can slip across the blood-brain barrier and temporarily take charge of the mammalian brain?

There were also the more philosophical questions posed by the existence of a fungus that could not only change consciousness but occasional a profound mystical experience in humans.

You can look at this two ways:

1. The mind altering power of psilocybin argues for a firmly materialistic understanding of consciousness and spirituality, because the changes observed in the mind can be traced directly to the presence of a chemical — psilocybin. What is more material than a chemical? One could reasonably conclude from the action of psychedelics that the gods are nothing more than chemically induced figments of the hominid imagination.

2. Yet most people of have had these types of 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”.

If the experience of transcendence is meditated by molecules that flow through tooth our brains and the natural world of plants and fungi, then perhaps nature is not as mute as Science has told us, and “Spirit”, however defined, exists out there — is immanent in nature, in other words, just as countless premodern cultures have believed. What to my mind seemed to constitute a good case for the disenchantment of the world becomes in the minds of the more psychedelically experience irrefutable proof its fundamental enchantment.

And so Pollan’s journey brings him to Paul Stamets, author of the 1996 field guide Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World. Stamets is a crazy-cool dude, mushroom guru, wears hats made of mycelium, has discovered 4 new species of psilocybes, does his own research, is who the government turns to when it has bio-terror fungus questions, teaches classes, believes 100% that fungi make up the “earths internet” making them “conscious” to some degree and that we need to learn from them.

Stamets takes Pollan mushroom hunting in Washington near the mouth of the Columbia river (either in Fort Stevens, Cape Disappointment or the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park. The “Stametsian Rule” for finding the correct psilocybes: Gilled mushroom with purplish brown to black spores and the flesh bruises bluish (the oxidized psilocin, it’s likely a psilocybe.

Do a spore print, within hours you can decide if its purplish brown/black OR if it’s rust colored then you have a deadly Galerina…

The history of how the west learned about psilocybes.

In 1953 Wasson made the first of 10 trips down to Mexico, focusing on Huaulta de Jiménez in Oaxaca. He was informed by a missionary that healers there were using mushrooms. The healers were initially very hesitant, which is no surprise given the Spanish were brutal in trying to crush the use of psychedelics. Back then, the Roman Catholic Church was the only way to spirituality and the thought of a mushroom that could give ordinary people a direct connection with a spiritual life was a threat to its existence the church could not tolerate.

It took an act of faith to believe that eating the bread and wine of the Eucharist gave the worshipper acmes to the divine, an access that had to be mediated by a priest and the church liturgy. Compare that with the Aztec sacrement, a psychoactive mushroom that granted anyone who ate it direct, unmediated access to the divine — to visions of another world, a realm of the gods.

Finally Wasson convinced Mariá Sabina, a sixty-one year old Mazatex and respected curandera in the village, to let him and his photographer not only observe but take part in the a ceremony. Wasson wrote up the 10 page expose in Time magazine and the flood gates opened. Hofmann, the chemist who isolated the active ingredient in ergot, LSD, isolated the active compounds in magic mushrooms, psilocybin and psilocin.

Stoned Ape Theory

Terence Mckenna’s theory: Psilocybin gave our hominid ancestors access to realms of the supernatural power, catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection and brought us out of the animal mind and into the world or articulated speech and imagination. Author of Food of the Gods (1992): Psilocybes.

Why would a fungus go through the trouble of making such a compound?

Lots of ideas but the best guess is that simply, mushrooms that produced the most psilocybin got selectively eaten and so their spores got more widely disseminated. This, of course, suggests that certain animals sought out the mind-altering experience to select for it. Research even found that several tribes used to feed the mushrooms to dogs to increase their hunting ability.

Depatterning

There are times 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 adaptation. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in the population.

Stamets believes that plants and mushrooms have intelligence and they want us to take care of the environment. “Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share. I no longer feel like I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.” Let the depatterning begin!

Alexander von Humboldt

An early nineteenth century scientist (colleague of Goethe’s) who revolutionized our understanding of the natural world. Humbolt believed that it is only with our feelings, our senses and our imaginations — that is, with the faculties of human subjectivity that we can ever penetrate nature’s secrets (that is how a German male scientist in the 1800s would put it…). Nature speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul. There is an order and beauty organizing the system of nature — a system that Humbolt , after briefly considering the name “Gaia”, chose to call “Cosmos” but it would have revealed itself of course a product of nature, of the very system it allows us to comprehend. The modern conceit of the scientist attempting to observe nature with perfect objectivity, as if from a vantage located outside it, is preposterous as “I myself an identical with nature”

Pollans’ experience with the Psilocybe azurescens aka “azzies” :

Him and his wife Judith ate them in classes of hot water one afternoon. After 20 minutes she started feeling things so they went inside their cabin and laid down. Pollan went outside again and felt “wide open emotionally, undefended”. He saw the trees as his parents and asked himself not “why would they be his parents” but instead “how did he ever see them as not his parents when they so clearly were”.

Pollan’s remarks:

The psilocin in the 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 to get cross-wired with my visual cortex as it was processing images the plants and trees and insects of my visual field. Not a hallucination, but more a “projection”. When we mix our emotions with certain objects that then reflect those feelings back to us so that they appear to glisten with meaning. T.S Eliot called these things and situations the “objective correlatives” of human emotion. Emerson had a similar phenomenon in mind when he said that “nature always wears the colors of the spirit” suggesting it is our minds that dress her in such significance.

I’m struck by the fact that there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perception that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invited nothing but merely italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in garden or wood, hidden in plain sight — another form of consciousness “parted from us” as Williams James put in, “by the filmiest of screens”. Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least in helping us open up and read them.

Chapter 3: The first wave

I’m skipping chapter 3 as it’s mainly history — name of people, places, things, events, connections etc. There’s a ton of info there but summarizing a list of chronological events isn’t too interesting 😅. Chapters 4–6 are the good stuff in my opinion.

Chapter 4: Journeying Underground

Pollan wanted to participate in above-ground experimental trials but no existing trials existed for “healthy normals” so he had to go underground. This meant finding guides. The psychedelic underground is a crazy place, he met Jungians, Reichians, Gestalt therapists and “transpersonal” psychologists, energy healers, practitioners of aura work, breath work, bodywork, EST, past-life and family constellation therapists, vision questers, astrologers and meditation teachers of every stripe — all lumped under the “human potential movement”. Although the federal authorities have shown no interest in going after people practicing psychedlic-assisted therapy, the community can be guarded especially when interacting with journalists so everyone Pollan mentions has fake names etc.

One of the best known underground psychotherapists is Leo Zeff (died in 1988). He ipublished a posthumous account of his work in The Secret Chief . In 2004, Zeff’s family gave permission to disclose Zeff’s identity and republish the book in The Secret Chief Revealed. When the feds outlawed psychedelic research in the 1970s, Zeff made the tough decision to take his work underground. There, he codified many of the protocols of underground therapy, setting fourth the “agreements” guides typically make with their clients — confidentiality, no sexual contact, obedience to the therapists instructions along with other rituals like taking the sacrament from a cup, “a very important symbol of the transformation of experience”. He also believes that guides should not try and manipulate the experience of the patient, rather let them be on their psychedelic journey.

Pollan didn’t know how many underground guides existed today until he went to a conference in 2010. That year, James Fadiman, a Stanford trained psychologist, attended the conference sponsored by MAPS. The conference was attended by about 1000 people, a mix of scientists, guides from universities and underground, lots of psychonauts. James convened an impromptu workshop for all “underground guides” and 100+ showed up! Soon after, a wiki page (I think this is it) was made. In 2011 he published The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. The wiki soon had:

A draft charter: to support a category of profound, prized experiences (those involving “unitive consciousness”) becoming more available to more people

Not only are these possible through consumption of psychedelics but also through meditation, breath work and fasting.

They put forth a code of ethics.

Perhaps most useful, they made a guidebook for guides and voyagers. These guidelines represent a compendium of a half-century’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom about how best to approach the psychedelic journey, whether as a participant or as a guide. It covers the basic of set and setting, mental and physical preparation for the session; potential drug interactions; the value of formulating an intention, what to expect, stages of the journey, what can do wrong and how to deal, the supreme importance of integration.

Trip One: LSD

Pollan found a guide, Fritz, in the mountains of the American West who lives off the grid. He studied the works of Jung and Wilheim Reich which lead to him to LSD which blew up his linear, empirical mind opening him up to possibility of past lives, telepathy, precognition, and sychronicities. Instead of having these experiences conflate his ego as they can often do with “gurus”, he was deeply humbled by them.

Before LSD, Fritz has Pollan do a session of holotropic breath work. The instructions were simple, “breathe deeply and rapidly while exhaling as strongly as you can”. At first it will unnatural and you’ll have to concentrate to maintain the rhythm but eventually the body will take over and do it automatically. Pollan quickly “went under” and was out for over an hour during which time he felt out of his body, felt animals deeply and lost control of his body. Afterwards he felt radiant and triumphant.

Day 2 was 150mg of LSD (a smaller dose). Fritz prepared Pollan for the worst saying “its like seeing a mountain lion, if you run, it’ll chase you. So you must stand your ground”. This is similar to instructions given at Johns Hopkins, instead of turning away from any monster that appears, move towards it, stand your ground, and demand to know, what are you doing in my mind and what do you have to teach me?

Pollan began hallucinating yet it was not as he expected, it was overpowering. The literal meaning of hallucination is to wander in one’s own mind. He maintained agency which was surprising to him, he was able to dictate his path. The music played a key (almost primary role) in guiding what he saw. An amazonian tribal song put him in the woods. The vertical architecture of the woods formed levels that rose one on top of the other, ever higher. Each level presented another phase in his life with Judith (his wife). There we were, ascending stage by stage through our many years together, beginning as kids who met in college, falling in love, living together in the city, getting married, having our son, becoming a family and moving to the country. At the top, he could see the next level being built but he couldn’t see what it had in stock. The only thing he could see was that it this next stage was being built by the same wooden scaffolding of earlier ones and therefore promised to be sturdy.

He continued to feel more open and undefended. Things that he previously known merely intellectually become vivid, a felt reality of which he had become a part.

Emotions arrive in their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny. Love is everything. Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. 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.

For humans, if we we are to ever get through the day, we need to put most of what we perceive into boxes neatly labeled “Known” to be quickly shelved with little through to the marvels therein, and “Novel” to which, understandably, we pay more attention. A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open an remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively drubbing them until they since one again with the light of first sight.

His trip was gentle, it reminded him of the hypnagogic consciousness that appears before sleep — where 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 gentle eruptions of imagery. As Aldous Huxley put it, “for the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way” (that hits close to home…ha) It seems true that a few years of psychotherapy condensed into several hours. Afterwards, his wife found him unusually chatty and available — no longer rushing off to do the next, next next thing.

Trip Two: Psilocybin

His second trip took him to Mary, more a shaman woman on the east coast. She was clearly very dedicated to the rituals passed down over 1000s of years while also maintaining a level of western professionalism and great compassion. Pollan ate 4x100g mushrooms which is the equivalent of 300mg of LSD, twice the dose he had with Fritz. (Mary’s friend grows the mushrooms, which she learned from Stamets).

His trip started off pretty bad, trapped in a computer plastic world. Sound again played a key role in determining the events that unfolded. He quickly found himself needing to ‘relax and float downstream’. Unlike his LSD trip in which he was firmly in control, now he felt like he was strapped to the front seat of a cosmic roller coaster.

In the middle, Pollan decided to try a well-known cognitive science experiment involving a 3d rotating face mask on a computer screen. As the mask rotates from convex to concave, the adult brain inverts the concave face because it tries to correct for the seeming error (all human faces it has ever encountered are convex). This auto-correct feature is a hallmark of our perception — there isn’t much use in trying to sit there and figure out why a face would be inverted, instead it just shortcuts and flips the face, literally changing our perception of reality based on it’s “known bins”. Instead of starting from scratch everytime it sees a face, it jumps to the first sensible perception. (this is known as Bayesian Inference, a good explainer video)

This raises an interesting question: is it possible that the perception of schizophrenics, people tripping on psychedelics, and young children are, at least. In certain instances, more accurate — less influenced by expectation and therefore faithful to reality — than those of sane sober adults?

As Pollan continued his journey ingesting more booster mushrooms as he went he began to feel the disillusionment of the self take hold. “Who was this “I” that was able to take in the scene of its own dissolution? In order to completely make sense of the divide that had opened up in my perspective, I would need a whole new first-person pronoun.”

The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backwards-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 my self. And although there was no self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, which was calm, unburdened, content.

Pollan believes this enduring awareness might have been the “mind at large” that Aldous Huxley described during his mescaline trip. The totality of the awareness, cosmic consciousness, the Oversoul, the Universal Mind. This is suppose to exist outside our brains — as a property of the universe, like gravity. Nothing in his experience lead him to believe this novel form of consciousness originated outside him, it seems just as plausible and surely more parsimonious to assume it was a product of my brain, just like the ego it supplanted. Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable gift: that we can let go of so much — the desires, fears, and defenses of a lifetime without suffering complete annihilation.

Now I understand 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. Through 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.

Trip Three: 5-MeO-DMT aka The Toad

The smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius). The “Everest” of psychedelics, its the fastest acting and most potent known. Roció, his guide, is from Sonora northern Mexico. She first found a guide online showing how to harvest the chemical from the toads which come out of the earth once a year during the winter floods. Go out a night with a flashlight, they freeze in the light, pick them up, gently squeeze the gland and the venom dries onto the plate. Inhale the vaporized crystals and for the next 30 minutes, you’ll be sent through the universe strapped to the front of a nuclear missile.

“I was out into an infinite realm of pure being. There were no figures in this world, no entities of any kind, just pure being”.

Then came a wave of gratitude for simply existing. In the phase “being alive”, it’s not so much the “alive” is the “being” that he felt grateful for.

Afterwards Pollan took the Revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30) to see how his experience stacked up to the research being done. He scored a “complete” mystical experience although he’s not sure that the questionnaire is best at capturing the insanity of the toad but perhaps to more controlled journeys like LSD or psilocybin.

Results: After this journeys, Pollan is far more open to there being alternative forms of subjective awareness/consciousness than just the limited version our ego’s naturally permit. The ego here facilitates the “reducing valve” that Huxley wrote about. “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. That’s why it fails to see that there is a whole world of souls and spirits out there, by which I simply mean subjectivities other than our own.

Perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when “all that 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 senses 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 matter. But it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.

Chapter 5: the neuroscience of your brain on psychedelics

How do you get from ingesting a compound created by a fungus or a toad (or a human chemist) to a novel state of consciousness with the power to change one’s perspective on things, not just during the journey but long afterwards.

3 molecules, psilocin, LSD and 5-MeO-DMT, are all tryptamine distinguished by the presences of two linked carbon rings, one with 6 atoms and the other 5. There are tons of naturally occurring tryptamines in nature and are used for signaling across cells. The most famous is 5-hydroxytryptamine aka Serotonin.

The psychedelic tryptamines have a strong affinity for binding to the 5-HT2A receptor which are most populous in the outer cortex of the human brain.

In 1998 Franz Vollenweider demonstrated that psychedelics work by binding to this receptor by giving them ketanserin that blocks the receptor. Patients administered with psilocybin experienced nothing.

What can the chemistry of psychedelics teach us about consciousness?

Sidenote: what do we mean by consciousness? Basic consciousness is just awareness — the ability to perceive and respond to the environment. Plants can do this but we don’t think plants have a subjective experience of “self”. As Thomas Nagel made the philosophical argument in “What is it like to be a bat?” — if there is something that it is to be a bat, then the bat is conscious.

Neuroscientists are torn on the topic, its known as the “hard problem” or “explanatory gap” — how do you explain the subjective quality of experience in terms of physical activity. Some say consciousness is an epiphenomena of the brain while others say subjective experience isn’t available to the reductions of science, a subset of these argue consciousness pervades the universe like electromagnetism and gravity.

Pioneering research on the use of psychedelics to map human consciousness is being done at the Center for Psychiatry at the Imperial College of West London with David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris (RCH for short). They inject patients with LSD and use fMRI and MEG to scan their brains. RCH read Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof and decided to use psychedelic drugs and modern brain-imaging techniques to build a foundation of hard science beneath the edifice of psychoanalysis. If Freud said dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, then he wanted to use psychedelics to build the superhighway.

After some interesting ways of getting funding and getting government approval, RCH began his research with the hypothesis that brains would experience increased activity when using psilocybin, particularly the emotional regions.

The initial findings went in the opposite direction, they saw decreases in blood flow (a correlate of brain activity). In particular, psilocybin decreased activity in the brain network known as the Default Mode Network (DMN). The DMN forms a critical and centrally located hub of brain activity the inks parts of the cerebral cortex to deeper structures involved in memory and emotion.

The DMN works as a seesaw with attentional networks that wake up whenever the outside world demands our attention; one when is active the other goes quiet and vice-versa. The DMN is most active when we are engaged in high-level metacognitive processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions (ego/self), moral reasoning and theory of mind — the ability to attribute mental states to others i.e. wondering what it is like to be someone else. It’s believed that the DMN is unique to adult humans.

The achievement of an individual self, a being with a unique past and a trajectory into the future, is one of the glories of human evolution, but it is not without its drawbacks and potential disorders. The price of the sense of an individual identity is a sense of separation other others and nature.

RCH’s finds that the steepest drop off in the DMN occurs when patients report “ego dissolution” during their trip.

RCH published his findings in 2012, Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin . Shortly after, Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale, noticed that his scans of experienced meditators looked a lot like the RCH’s brain data.

During the dissolution of the ego (either by drug or meditation) is a hallmark of the mystical experience which supports the idea that the self is truly an illusion as the Buddhists have been saying all along. An illusion created by the DMN.

RCH also believes that another key tenant of the mystical experience can be explained here as well. The noetic sense that insights are felt to be objectively true, relieved truths rather than plain insights. It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity (which is the thing being removed during a trip).

The DMN doesn’t only exert top-down control over the material arisings of the mind, it also helps regulate what is let into consciousness from the outside world (it is the guardian filter, the reducing valve) that only lets in a measly trickle of all the information that is out in the world. Why does the DMN do this? Most neuroscientists agree that the brain is basically a prediction-making machine. The processing of learning/growing up is to learn patterns so that the next time you’re in a situation, you can jump ahead, already knowing what to do. If you didn’t do this, then every morning you’d have to learn how to walk, chew, swallow, dress yourself, drive a car, speak, etc. There are obvious upsides so this, however there are some costs. This model of the brain suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories. Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations, a kind of controlled hallucination. This raises the question — how is normal waking consciousness any different from other, seemingly less faithful productions of our imagination — such as dreams, psychotic delusions or psychedelic trips? All of these mental states are imagined illusions — the only difference is that in waking consciousness the handshake between the data of our senses and our preconceptions is especially firm.

During trips, without the DMN there to run the show, the mind has to sense of the data rushing in and does so in interesting ways (seeing faces in the clouds for example, here we have prior information about faces — “top down” — being merged with new sensory information about visual clouds “bottom up”). During a trip these two systems go back and forth.

In 2014 RCH published “The Entropic Brain, A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs”. The question at stake: do we pay for a price for the achievement of order and selfhood in the adult human mind? RCH uses the term entropy to refer to uncertainty — thus, according to the prevalent theory that the brain is an uncertainty reducing computer, the brain is an entropy reducing computer. The brain, by suppressing entropy serves to promote realism, foresight, careful reflection and an ability to recognize and overcome wishful and paranoid fantasies. To do so requires containing cognition and limiting consciousness. The brain perhaps the maintenance of order to avoid chaos.

RCH believes that early humans had an archaic form consciousness called “primary consciousness” characterized by “magical thinking” — beliefs about the world that have been shaped by wishes and fears and supernatural interpretation. This was one way of reducing uncertainty but was less optimal for the success of the species. A “secondary consciousness” emerged, one with a DMN which pays deference to reality and diligently seeks to represent the world as precisely as possible.

RCH argues that psychological disorders are not the result of a lack of order in the brain but rather stem from an excess of order. When the grooves of self-reflective thinking deepen and harden, the ego becomes overbearing. This is perhaps most clearly evident in depression, when the ego turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality. This is most likely caused by an overly active DMN which can trap us in repetitive and destructive loops of rumination that eventually close us off from the outside world.

So some brains could stand to a little more entropy, not less. By quieting the DMN, these compounds can loose the ego’s grip on the machinery of the mind “lubricating” cognition where it has been rusted stuck. The grip of an overbearing ego can enforce a rigidity in our thinking that is psychologically destructive.

What does a high-entropy brain look like? During a trip, brain circuits disintegrate and become less specialized, thousands of new connections form, linking far flung brain regions that during normal waking consciousness don’t exchange much information. Traffic is rerouted from a relatively small number of superhighways onto a myriad smaller roads linking many more destinations.

This all makes the phase “consciousness expanding” , literally increasing entropy, not seem so “far out” after all!

Alison Gopnik

A developmental psychologist and researcher at Berkeley and author of The Philosophical Baby. Turns out that babies are full of entropy and have what she calls “lantern consciousness” while adults have “spotlight consciousness”. Lantern consciousness is a diffuse awareness that isn’t very efficient but is very effective at solving new problems. Her research has developed several tests which 4 yr olds are better at solving that adults are. She likens the learning models to current AI research where scientists use the terms “low temperature” and “high temperature” searches to for answers. Low temperature involves looking nearby for obvious shortcuts and easy answers. High temperature involves starting from scratch, not making assumptions and thus takes more energy but arrives at slower, more creative solutions.

Chapter 6: The Trip Treatment Psychedelics in Psychotherapy

Three parts: Dying, Addiction, Depression.

One: Dying

Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross are doing psychedelic assisted psychotherapy at NYU on terminally ill cancer patients to see if they can alleviate existential distress that come with impending death.

The story of one particular patient, Patrick Mettes, although there are several in the book with similar arcs: Bossis told Patrick what to expect, after 3–4 prep sessions of talking therapy, Patrick would receive two dosings, one the active placebo (high dose niacin to produce a tingling sensation) and another containing 25mg of psilocybin. Patrick’s phrase was “trust and let go” going into the session. Bossis told him to go wherever it takes you, always move towards, rather than try to flee. Dig your heels in and ask, “What are you doing in my mind? What can I learn from you?” Patrick had an amazing journey, saw him giving birth (to himself?, it wasn’t clear), saw God, the universe, his role to play with his family with the remaining time he had left. Found love in his cancer and experienced a brief death. “I am the luckiest man on the earth”.

Lisa (Patrick’s wife) was originally wary of the trial, thinking that Patrick’s desire to participate was a sign that he’d given up the fight to live. In the end, Patrick’s journey did the opposite. He came away convinced he still had much to do in his life — much love to give and receive — and wasn’t yet ready to leave it and, especially his wife. Patrick’s psychedelic journey had shifted his perspective, from a narrow lens trained on the prospect of dying to a renewed focus on how to best live the time left to him. Eventually his good days got fewer and fewer, he didn’t want to die but this wasn’t how he wanted to live. Patrick’s seeming equanimity in the face of death exerted a powerful influence on everyone around him. His room at the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai became a center of gravity in the hospital. Everyone, the nurses and the doctors, wanted to hang out in our room; they just didn’t want to leave. Patrick would talk and talk. It was like he was a yogi. He put out so much love. Lisa emailed Pollan a photo of Patrick from a few days before he died and it took Pollan’s breath away. Here was an emaciated man in a hospital gown, an oxygen clip in his nose, but with bright, shining blue eyes and a broad smile. On the eve of his death, the man was beaming. He said, “I feel like I have one foot in this world and one in the next. Honey, don’t push me, I’m finding my way. This is simply the wheel of life. You feel like you’re being ground down by it now, but the wheel is going to turn and you’ll be on top again.”

When Pollan asked Bossis what he made of his patient’s cosmic consciousness journeys, Bossis suggests that we “judge the mystical experience not by its veracity (truth), which is unknowable, but by it’s fruits — does it turn someone’s life in a positive direction?”. 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, it it helps people to die peacefully with their friends and family at their side, I don’t care if it’s real or an illusion”, David Nicols (founder of the Heffter Research institute).

“What about the miracle that we are conscious? Just think about it for a second, that we are aware and that we are aware that we are aware! How unlikely is that?” How can we be certain that our experience of consciousness is “authentic”. We cannot. — Rollan Griffith. We believe [the mystical experience] not because science can independently verify it but because a great many people have been convinced of its reality; here, too, all we have to go in the phenomenology.

The results of the study: in Dec 2016, a front page NYT article reported the dramatic results: 80% of cancer patients showed clinically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression. The effects endured for at least 6 months.

In 2017, Alexander Besler, a member of the NYU research team published a follow up paper analyzing the patient interviews in Patient Experiences of Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy published in Journal of Humanistic Psychology. He identified some key themes:

1. Patients developed a power feeling of connection to loved ones, “embeddedness”. A shift from feelings of separateness to interconnectedness.

2. Difficult passages during the journey were typically followed by positive feelings of surrender and acceptance.

Why do they think this works?

For many of these patients, a diagnosis of terminal cancer constitutes, among other things, a crises of meaning? Why me? Why have I been singled out for this fate? Is there any sense to life in the universe? Under the weight of this existential crisis, one’s horizon shrinks, one’s emotional repertoire contracts and one’s focus narrows as the mind turns in on itself, shutting out the world. Loops of rumination and worry come to occupy more of one’s mental time and space, reinforcing habits of thought it becomes ever more difficult to escape. Existential distress bears many of the hallmarks of a hyperactive default mode network.

Psychedelics can directly imbue otherwise irrelevant sensory information with meaning.

“that the medicine will show you hidden or unknown shadow parts of yourself; that you will gain insight into yourself and come to learning about the meaning of life and existence”

The sense of a cold and arbitrary universe governed purely by chance is banished.

To situate the self in a larger context of meaning, what it is — a sense of oneness with nature or universal love — can make extinction of the self somewhat easier to contemplate. Religion has always understood this wager, but why should religion enjoy a monopoly.

“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 with the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being” — Bertrand Russell

Two: Addiction

The overview effect

Edgar Mitchell, returning from the moon on Apollo 14 had, as he described, a mystical experience, specifically a savikalpa samadhi, in which the ego vanishes when confronted with the immensity of the universe during the course of a meditation on an object — in this case, Planet Earth. “The biggest joy was on the way home, in my cockpit window, every two minutes: the earth, the moon, the sun and the whole panorama of the heavens. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness … it wasn’t ’them vs us’ it was ‘That’s me!’. That’s all of it, it’s one thing”.

Pollan reflects on this “overview effect” when looking at the smoking cessation pilot study results. As one lifetime smoker put it, “smoking became irrelevant, so I stopped”. The study was directed by Matthew Johnson a protégé of Rolland Griffths’s. The study gave 15 volunteer smokers who were trying to quit several sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy followed by two or three doses of psilocybin. It was an open-label study meaning there was no placebo, they all knew they were getting the drug. Six months after their psychedelic sessions, 80% confirmed they were abstinent, at the one-year mark, 67% remained abstinent which is much better than the best treatments now available. (a much larger randomized trial comparing the effectiveness of psilocybin therapy vs a nicotine patch is currently underway).

One patient: Alice O’Donnell

Alice is a sixtyish book editor born in Ireland. Alice traveled the world in her session. “The universe was so great and there were so many things you could do and see in it that killing yourself seemed like a dumb idea. It put smoking in a whole new context … I had the image of tossing everything over the ledge, all the stuff I didn’t need anymore. And there most important thing of all is the breath. When that stops, you’re dead. You should cherish your breath.

Johnson refers to these realizations as “duh moments” and says they’re common with his participants. Smokers know perfectly well that that their habit is unhealthy, disgusting, expensive and unnecessary but under the influence of psilocybin that knowing acquires a new weight, becomes “something they feel in the gut and the heart. Insights like this become more compelling, stickier and harder to avoid thinking about. These sessions deprive people of the luxury of mindlessness — our default state, and one in which addictions like smoking can flourish.

Of course, this re-contextualization of an old habit doesn’t just happen; countless people have taken psilocybin and continued to smoke. If it does happen, it’s because breaking the habit is the avowed intention of the session, strongly reinforced by the therapist in the preparatory meetings and the integration afterward. The “set” of the psychedelic journey is carefully orchestrated by the therapist in much the same way a shaman would use his authority and stagecraft to maximize the medicine’s deep powers of suggestion. This is why it is important to understand that “psychedelic therapy” is not simply treatment with a psychedelic drug but rather a form of “psychedelic-assisted therapy” as many of the researchers take pains to emphasize.

“So much of human suffering stems from having this self that needs to be psychologically defended at all costs. We’re trapped in a story that sees ourselves as independent, isolated agents acting in the world. But the self is an illusion. It can be a useful illusion, when you’re swinging through the trees or escaping from a cheetah or trying to do your taxes. But at the systems level, there is no truth to it.”

There are other psychedelic therapies for alcohol and other addictions. In 2015 a pilot study at the University of New Mexico 10 patients received psilocybin combined with “motivational enhancement therapy”. The psychotherapy by itself had little effect on drinking behavior but after the psilocybin session drinking decreased significantly, and these changes were sustained during the 36 week follow up.

Do you see the world as prison or a playground? — Matt Johnson

Three: Depression

In 2017 when Roland Griffiths and Stephen Ross brought their initial findings to the FDA, the FDA shocked the researchers by asking them to expand their focus and ambition: to test whether psilocybin could be used to treat the much larger and more pressing problem of depression in the general population (moving from terminally ill cancer patients to general depression). The FDA saw enough “signal” that psilocybin could relieve depression given the enormity of the problem and the limitations of therapies now available.

A similar movement happened in Europe as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) responded to the work being done at NYU, Hopkins and Imperial College. They suggested a larger trial for treatment-resistant depression, which afflicts 800,000 Europeans out of the 40 million Europeans who suffer from depression.

Rosalind Watts, a young clinical psychologist began working for Robin Carhart-Harris to help with the labs first foray into clinical research. Watt’s interviews uncovered to major themes:

1. 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.
2. Several referred to living in a “mental prison” others to being “stuck” in endless circles of rumination they likened to mental “gridlock”.

Psychedelic therapy is a shock to the system — a “reboot” or “defragging” — they need to be repeated every so often.

We shouldn’t forget the irrational exuberance has afflicted psychedelic research since the beginning, and the belief that these molecules are a panacea for what ails us is at least as old as Timothy Leary. It could well be that the current enthusiasm will eventually give way to a more modest assessment of their potential. New treatments always look shiniest and most promising at the beginning. In early studies will small samples, the researchers, who are usually biased in favor of finding an effect, have the luxury of selecting the volunteers most likely to respond. Because their number is so small, these volunteers benefit from the care and attention of exceptionally well-trained and dedicated therapists, who are also biased in favor of success. Also, the placebo effect is usually strongest in a new medicine and tens 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 early 1980s. None of the psychedelic therapies have yet proven themselves to work in large populations; what successes have been reported should be taking as promising signals standing out from the noise of the data, rather than as definitive proofs of cure.

Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression draws more of a continuum across depression, addiction and anxiety. We should think of depression and anxiety as fraternal twins, depression is a response to past loss, anxiety is a response to future loss. All of these disorders involved learned habits of negative thinking and behavior that hijack our attention and trap us in loops of self-reflection.

Posterior Cingulate Cortex

Centrally located with the DMN, it links the prefrontal cortex — site of our executive function, where we plan and exercise will — with the centers of memory and emotion in the hippocampus. The PCC is believed to the locus of experiential or narrative self; it appears to generate the narratives that link what happens to us to our abiding sense of who we are. “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”. Getting overly attached to these narratives, taking them as fixed truths about ourselves rather than as stories subject to revision, contributes mightily to addiction, depression and anxiety. Psychedelic therapy seems to weaken the grip of these narratives, perhaps by temporarily disintegrating the parts of the default mode network where they operate.

When all is working as it should be, the ego keeps the organism on track, helping it to realize its goals and provide for its needs, notably for survival and reproduction. It gets the job done… occasionally the ego can become tyrannical and turn its formidable powers on the rest of us — overbearing, punishing and misdirected.

Buddhists believe that attachment is the root of all forms of mental suffering; if the neuroscience is right, a lot of these attachments have their mooring in the PCC.

To calibrate a baseline level of activity for my PCC, Judson Brewer (research study)projected a series of adjectives on the screen, “courageous” “cheap” “patriotic” “impulsive” etc. Simply reading the list does nothing to activate the PCC, which is why he told me now to think about how these adjectives either applied or didn’t apply to me. Take it personally in other words. This is precisely the thought process that the PCC exists to perform, relating thoughts and experiences to our sense of who we are. Brewer the leads several exercises in different ways of thinking to see how PCC activity changes with respect to baseline including a loving-kindness meditation. Pollan saw the most deactivation in his PCC when he recounted his psychedelic trips (just recounting them, not actually on them, they still had a huge effect).

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?

The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material” … the whole issue of spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical”. Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of the spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic — that is, more spiritual — idea of what matters in life. One in which a sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

Epilogue: in praise of neural diversity

In April 2017, the international psychedelic community gathered in Oakland organized by MAPS. “We are not counterculture [anymore], we are the culture” said Doblin (the founder of MAPS). The most sought after panel was called “The Future of Psychedelic Psychiatry”. The panel consisted of Paul Summergrad, MD, former head of the American Psychiatric Association. Tom Insel, MD, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health. Mediated by George Goldsmith, an American entrepreneur and health industry consultant (him and his wife Ekaterina are devoted to winning approval for psilocybin assisted therapy in the EU).

“There may be lots of promise here” Insel said, “but it’s really easy to forget about issues related to safety, issues related to rigor, issues related to reputational risks.” He suggests that psychedelics will probably need to undergo a rebranding in the public mind and steer clear of anything related to “recreational use”. He and Summergrad both warned that a single sloppy researcher or patient with a disastrous experience could poison the well for everyone. Nobody needed to mention Timothy Leary!

Goldsmith has already formed a company called Compass Pathways to build psychedelic treatment centers where patients will go for guided sessions.

The “betterment of well people” is on the minds of most researchers at the conference but they’re reluctant to discuss it on record. For them, medical acceptance is the first step toward a much broader cultural acceptance — outright legalization.

In 2016, the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) graduated its first class of 42 psychedelic therapists.

Pollan did one last psychedelic journey, this time on ayahuasca with a guide trained by Leo Zeff. A far more involved ceremonies experience, he had an interesting journey, felt as though the plant was trying to teach him something. Like other journeys, he felt everything he experienced to be absolutely true. It was more of a physical body than purely mental experience as he could feel the tea working through his body. “Mysteries abide. But this I can say with certainty: the mind is vaster, and the world ever so much more alive, than I knew when I began”