How to Change Your Mind

something about her manner, her sobriety, and her evident compassion
made me more comfortable in her presence.
Mary had practiced the whole grab bag of New Age therapies, from
energy healing to spiritual psychology to family constellation therapy,*
before being introduced to medicine work when she was fifty. (“It created
the glue that brought together all this other work I’d been doing.”) At the
time, Mary had used a psychedelic only once and long ago: at her twenty-
first birthday party while in college. A friend had given her a jar of honey
laced with psilocybin mushrooms. Mary immediately went up to her
room, ate two or three spoonfuls, “and had the most profound experience
of being with God. I was God and God was me.” Friends who had been
partying downstairs came up to knock at her door, but Mary was gone.
As a child growing up outside Providence, Mary had been an
enthusiastic Catholic, until “I realized I was a girl”—a fact that would
disqualify her from ever performing the ceremonies she cherished.
Mary’s religiosity lay dormant until that taste of honey, which “catapulted
me into a huge change,” she told me the first time we met. “I dropped into
something I hadn’t felt connected to since I was a little girl.” The
reawakening of her spiritual life led her onto the path of Tibetan
Buddhism and eventually to take the vow of an initiate: “‘To assist all
sentient beings in their awakening and their enlightenment.’ Which is
still my vocation.”
And now sitting before her in her treatment room was me, the next
sentient being on deck, hoping to be wakened. I shared my intention: to
learn what I could about myself and also about the nature of
consciousness—my own but also its “transpersonal” dimension, if such a
dimension exists.
“The mushroom teacher helps us to see who we really are,” Mary said,
“brings us back to our soul’s purpose for being here in this lifetime.” I can
imagine how these words might sound to an outsider. But by now I was
inured to the New Age lingo, perhaps because I had glimpsed the
potential for something meaningful behind the well-worn words. I’d also
been impressed by Mary’s intelligence and her professionalism. In
addition to having me consent to the standard “agreements” (bowing to
her authority for the duration; remaining in the room until she gave me
permission to leave; no sexual contact; and so on), she had me fill out a
detailed medical form, a legal release, and a fifteen-page autobiographical