How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

mystical experience occasioned by a drug was no different from any other kind.

What’s left to do the doubting if not your I?

If everyday waking consciousness is but one of several possible ways to construct a world, then perhaps there is value in cultivating a greater amount of what I’ve come to think of as neural diversity.

psychedelics once again. “In the big picture,” he told me the first time we met in his home office, “these drugs have been around at least five thousand years, and many times they have surfaced and have been repressed, so this was another cycle. But the mushroom still grows, and eventually this work would come around again.

“Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides.”fn1 The guidelines

The 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 nature or the universe.

“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”

The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. 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 expe

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