How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

On one side was a quartet of tall, slender, curving Psilocybe cubensis, one of the more common species of magic mushroom. On the back was a quotation from William Blake that, it occurred to me later, neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: “The true method of knowledge is experiment.”

Hayes particularly recommends the experience to people in middle age for whom, as Carl Jung suggested, experience of the numinous can help them negotiate the second half of their lives.

“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”

The website (csp.org) offers an excellent bibliography of psychedelic research and regular updates on the work under way at Johns Hopkins.

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

The default mode network appears to be the seat not only of the ego, or self, but of the mental faculty of time travel as well. The two are of course closely related: without the ability to remember our past and imagine a future, the notion of a coherent self could hardly be said to exist; we define ourselves with reference to our personal history

(This is the same discomfort scientists feel about using placebos. It suggests an interesting way to think about psychedelics: as a kind of “active placebo,” to borrow a term proposed by Andrew Weil in his 1972 book, The Natural Mind. They do something, surely, but most of what that is may be self-generated. Or as Stanislav Grof put it, psychedelic

No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it,

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.