How to Change Your Mind

elaborate Native American prayer. She invoked in turn the power of each
of the cardinal directions, the four elements, and the animal, plant, and
mineral realms, the spirits of which she implored to help guide me on my
journey.
My eyes were closed too, but now and again I couldn’t resist peeking
out to take in the scene: the squash-colored loft with its potted plants and
symbols of fertility and female power; the embroidered purple fabric
from Peru that covered the altar; and the collection of items arrayed
across it, including an amethyst in the shape of a heart, a purple crystal
holding a candle, little cups filled with water, a bowl holding a few
rectangles of dark chocolate, the two “sacred items” she had asked me to
bring (a bronze Buddha a close friend had brought back from a trip to the
East; the psilocybin coin Roland Griffiths had given me at our first
meeting), and, squarely before me, an antique plate decorated in a
grandmotherly floral pattern that held the biggest psilocybin mushroom I
had ever seen. It was hard to believe I was about to eat the whole thing.
The crowded altar also held a branch of sage and a stub of Palo Santo,
a fragrant South American wood that Indians burn ceremonially, and the
jet-black wing of a crow. At various points in the ceremony, Mary lit the
sage and the Palo Santo, using the wing to “smudge” me with the smoke—
guide the spirits through the space around my head. The wing made an
otherworldly whoosh as she flicked it by my ear, the spooky sound of a
large bird coming too close for comfort, or a dark spirit being shooed
away from a body.
The whole thing must sound ridiculously hokey, I know, but the
conviction Mary brought to the ceremony, together with the aromas of
the burning plants and the sounds of the wing pulsing the air—plus my
own nervousness about the journey in store—cast a spell that allowed me
to suspend my disbelief. I had decided to give myself up to this big
mushroom, and for Mary, the guide to whom I had entrusted my psyche
for this journey, ceremony counted for as much as chemistry. In this she
was acting more like a shaman than a psychologist.
Mary had been recommended by a guide I’d interviewed on the West
Coast, a rabbi who had taken an interest in my psychedelic education.
Mary, who was my age, had trained with the eighty-something student of
Timothy Leary whom I had interviewed and decided was a little too far
out there for me. One might think the same of Mary, on paper, but