“And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the
molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners,
were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I
felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness . . . It wasn’t
‘Them and Us,’ it was ‘That’s me! That’s all of it, it’s one thing.’ And it was
accompanied by an ecstasy, a sense of ‘Oh my God, wow, yes’—an insight,
an epiphany.”*
It was the power of this novel perspective—the same perspective that
Stewart Brand, after his 1966 LSD trip on a North Beach rooftop, worked
so hard to disseminate to the culture—that helped to inspire the modern
environmental movement as well as the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that
Earth and its atmosphere together constitute a single living organism.
I thought about this so-called overview effect during my conversations
with volunteers in the psilocybin trials, and especially with those who had
overcome their addictions after a psychedelic journey—to inner space, if
you will. Several volunteers described achieving a new distance on their
own lives, a vantage from which matters that had once seemed daunting
now seemed smaller and more manageable, including their addictions. It
sounded as though the psychedelic experience had given many of them an
overview effect on the scenes of their own lives, making possible a shift in
worldview and priorities that allowed them to let go of old habits,
sometimes with remarkable ease. As one lifetime smoker put it to me in
terms so simple I found it hard to believe, “Smoking became irrelevant,
so I stopped.”
The smoking cessation pilot study in which this man took part—his
name is Charles Bessant, and he has been abstinent now for six years—
was directed by Matthew Johnson, a protégé of Roland Griffiths’s at
Johns Hopkins, where the study took place. Johnson is a psychologist in
his early forties who, like Griffiths, trained as a behaviorist, studying
things like “operant conditioning” in rats. Tall, slender, and angular,
Johnson wears a scrupulously trimmed black beard and oversized retro-
nerd black glasses that make him look a little like Ira Glass. His interest
in psychedelics goes back to his college days, when he read Ram Dass and
learned about the Harvard Psilocybin Project, but never did he dare to
imagine he would someday have a job working with them in a laboratory.
“I had it in the back of my mind that someday I wanted to do research
with the psychedelic compounds,” he told me when we first met in his
frankie
(Frankie)
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