How to Change Your Mind

matter? It turns out the very same molecules flow through the natural
world and the human brain, linking us all together in a vast watershed of
tryptamines. Are these exogenous molecules any less miraculous? (When
they come from a mushroom or a plant or a toad!) It’s worth
remembering that there are many cultures where the fact that the
inspiration for visionary experiences comes from nature, is the gift of
other creatures, renders them more meaningful, not less.
My own interpretation of what I experienced—my now officially
verified mystical experience—remains a work in progress, still in search
of the right words. But I have no problem using the word “spiritual” to
describe elements of what I saw and felt, as long as it is not taken in a
supernatural sense. For me, “spiritual” is a good name for some of the
powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted
or silenced. If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that
psychic construct—at once so familiar and on reflection so strange—
stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience,
whether of the world outside us or of the mind within. The journeys have
shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really
understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we
would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or
transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making
any spiritual progress.
But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental
show, is wily and doesn’t relinquish its power without a struggle.
Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment,
whether in advance or in the middle of the journey. I suspect that’s
exactly what mine was up to all through the sleepless nights that
preceded each of my trips, striving to convince me that I was risking
everything, when really all I was putting at risk was its sovereignty.
When Huxley speaks of the mind’s “reducing valve”—the faculty that
eliminates as much of the world from our conscious awareness as it lets
in—he is talking about the ego. That stingy, vigilant security guard admits
only the narrowest bandwidth of reality, “a measly trickle of the kind of
consciousness which will help us to stay alive.” It’s really good at
performing all those activities that natural selection values: getting
ahead, getting liked and loved, getting fed, getting laid. Keeping us on
task, it is a ferocious editor of anything that might distract us from the