How to Change Your Mind

climax of her journey, she had an encounter with a god who called
himself “I Am.” In its presence, she recalled, “every one of my chakras
was exploding. And then there was this light, it was the pure light of love
and divinity, and it was with me and no words were needed. I was in the
presence of this absolute pure divine love and I was merging with it, in
this explosion of energy . . . Just talking about it my fingers are getting
electric. It sort of penetrated me. The core of our being, I now knew, is
love. At the peak of the experience, I was literally holding the face of
Osama bin Laden, looking into his eyes, feeling pure love from him and
giving it to him. The core is not evil, it is love. I had the same experience
with Hitler, and then someone from North Korea. So I think we are
divine. This is not intellectual, this is a core knowingness.”
I asked Sokel what made her so sure this wasn’t a dream or drug-
induced fantasy—a suggestion that proved no match for her noetic sense.
“This was no dream. This was as real as you and I having this
conversation. I wouldn’t have understood it either if I hadn’t had the
direct experience. Now it is hardwired in my brain so I can connect to it
and do often.”
This last point James alludes to in his discussion of the third mark of
mystical consciousness, which is “transiency.” For although the mystical
state cannot be sustained for long, its traces persist and recur, “and from
one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in
what is felt as inner richness and importance.”
The fourth and last mark in James’s typology is the essential
“passivity” of the mystical experience. “The mystic feels as if his own will
were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held
by a superior power.” This sense of having temporarily surrendered to a
superior force often leaves the person feeling as if he or she has been
permanently transformed.
For most of the Hopkins volunteers I interviewed, their psilocybin
journeys had taken place ten or fifteen years earlier, and yet their effects
were still keenly felt, in some cases on a daily basis. “Psilocybin awakened
my loving compassion and gratitude in a way I had never experienced
before,” a psychologist who asked not to be named told me when I asked
her about lasting effects. “Trust, Letting go, Openness, and Being were
the touchstones of the experience for me. Now I know these things