How to Change Your Mind

people watched, cheering for my death. I felt drenched with guilt, just terrified. I was in a hell ...

tighten in some way. But if I then consciously remind myself to relax, to let myself go into the experienc ...

triumphant reawakening, as if a new day were dawning after a long and harrowing night. • • • AT THE SAME ...

already known. I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, i ...

climax of her journey, she had an encounter with a god who called himself “I Am.” In its presence, she recal ...

instead of just believing.” She had turned Bill Richards’s flight instructions into a manual for living. Richa ...

Colorado to study Zen. He had had a meditation practice before psilocybin, but “now I had the motivation, b ...

at odds with this belief. My world became more and more mysterious as I sat with people on psilocybin ...

experiences may or may not be true,” he told me. “The exciting part is to use the tools we have to explo ...

“reconciliation”: “It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our di ...

institutional support for the study of psychedelics, and never before has an institution of Hopkins’s reputation ...

there are so many other descriptions. It could be a beginning! Wouldn’t that be amazing?” This is when ...

“The Johns Hopkins experiment shows—proves—that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion ...

CHAPTER TWO NATURAL HISTORY Bemushroomed AT THE END of my first meeting with Roland Griffiths, the session in his Joh ...

On one level, a mushroom medallion made perfect sense: the molecule that Griffiths and his colleagues have ...

temporarily take charge of the mammalian brain? Was it a defense chemical, intended to poison mushroom eate ...

I hoped that getting to know the psychoactive LBMs (mycologist shorthand for “little brown mushrooms”) at ...

Over the years, we’ve found ourselves at some of the same conferences, so I’ve had several opportunities ...

long ago have become a vast, uninhabitable waste heap of dead but undecomposed plants and animals. ...

and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it’s also true that ...