How to Change Your Mind

For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of
consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation. I’m
speaking of a certain cognitive space that opens up late in a trip or in the
midst of a mild one, a space where you can entertain all sorts of thoughts
and scenarios without reaching for any kind of resolution. It somewhat
resembles hypnagogic consciousness, that liminal state perched on the
edge of sleep when all kinds of images and scraps of story briefly surface
before floating away. But this is sustained, and what comes up can be
clearly recalled. And though the images and ideas that appear are not
under your direct control, but rather seem to be arriving and departing of
their own accord, you can launch a topic or change it, like a channel. The
ego is not entirely absent—you haven’t been blasted into particles, or have
returned from that particular state—but the stream of consciousness is
taking its own desultory course, and you are bobbing and drifting along
with it, looking neither forward nor back, immersed in the currents of
being rather than doing. And yet a certain kind of mental work is getting
done, and occasionally I have emerged from the state with usable ideas,
images, or metaphors.*
My psychedelic adventures familiarized me with this mental territory,
and, sometimes, not always, I find I can return to it during my daily
meditation. I don’t know if this is exactly where I’m supposed to be when
I’m meditating, but I’m always happy to find myself floating in this
particular mental stream. I would never have found it if not for
psychedelics. This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience
they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.
Just because the psychedelic journey takes place entirely in one’s mind
doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It is an experience and, for some of us, one of
the most profound a person can have. As such, it takes its place as a
feature in the landscape of a life. It can serve as a reference point, a
guidepost, a wellspring, and, for some, a kind of spiritual sign or shrine.
For me, the experiences have become landmarks to circle around and
interrogate for meaning—meanings about myself, obviously, but also
about the world. Several of the images that appeared in the course of my
trips I think about all the time, hoping to unwrap what feels like a gift of
meaning—from where or what or whom, I cannot say. There was that
steel pylon hovering over the landscape of self. Or the image of my
grandfather’s skull staring back at me in Mary’s mirror. The majestic but