How to Change Your Mind

leave ’em alone!” he tells Stolaroff.) Guides should also be willing to drop
the analyst’s mask of detachment, offering their personalities and
emotions, as well as a comforting touch or hug to the client undergoing a
particularly challenging trip.
In his introduction to The Secret Chief Revealed, Myron Stolaroff
sketched the influence of underground guides like Leo Zeff on the field as
a whole, suggesting that the legitimate psychedelic research that resumed
in the late 1990s, when he was writing, had “evolved as a result of
anecdotal evidence from underground therapists” like Zeff, as well as
from the first wave of psychedelic research done in the 1950s and 1960s.
Psychedelic researchers working in universities today are understandably
reluctant to acknowledge it, but there is a certain amount of traffic
between the two worlds, and a small number of figures who move,
somewhat gingerly, back and forth between them. For example, some
prominent underground therapists have been recruited to help train a
new cohort of psychedelic guides to work in university trials of
psychedelic drugs. When the Hopkins team wanted to study the role of
music in the guided psilocybin session, it reached out to several
underground guides, surveying their musical practices.
No one had any idea how many underground guides were working in
America, or exactly what that work consisted of, until 2010. That was the
year James Fadiman, the Stanford-trained psychologist who took part in
psychedelic research at the International Foundation for Advanced Study
in Menlo Park in the early 1960s, attended a conference on psychedelic
science in the Bay Area. The conference was organized by MAPS, with
sponsorship from Heffter, the Beckley Foundation, and Bob Jesse’s
Council on Spiritual Practices, the three other nonprofits that funded
most of the psychedelic research under way at the time. In a Holiday Inn
in San Jose, the conference brought together more than a thousand
people, including several dozen scientists (who presented their research,
complete with PowerPoint slides), a number of guides drawn from both
the university trials and the underground, and a great many more
“psychonauts”—people of all ages who make regular use of psychedelics
in their lives, whether for spiritual, therapeutic, or “recreational”
purposes. (As Bob Jesse is always quick to remind me whenever I use that
word, “recreational” doesn’t necessarily mean frivolous, careless, or
lacking in intention. Point taken.)