instead of just believing.” She had turned Bill Richards’s flight
instructions into a manual for living.
Richard Boothby did much the same thing, converting his insight
about letting go into a kind of ethic:
During my session this art of relaxation itself became the
basis of an immense revelation, as it suddenly appeared to
me that something in the spirit of this relaxation, something
in the achievement of a perfect, trusting and loving openness
of spirit, is the very essence and purpose of life. Our task in
life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and
expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact
of the present.John Hayes, the psychotherapist, emerged with “his sense of the
concrete destabilized,” replaced by a conviction “that there’s a reality
beneath the reality of ordinary perceptions. It informed my cosmology—
that there is a world beyond this one.” Hayes particularly recommends
the experience to people in middle age for whom, as Carl Jung suggested,
experience of the numinous can help them negotiate the second half of
their lives. Hayes added, “I would not recommend it to young people.”
Charnay’s journey at Hopkins solidified her commitment to herbal
medicine (she now works for a supplement maker in Northern
California); it also confirmed her in a decision to divorce her husband.
“Everything was now so clear to me. I came out of the session, and my
husband was late to pick me up. I realized, this is the theme with us.
We’re just really different people. I just got my ass kicked today, and I
needed him to be on time.” She broke the news to him in the car going
home and has not looked back.
To listen to these people describe the changes in their lives inspired by
their psilocybin journeys is to wonder if the Hopkins session room isn’t a
kind of “human transformation factory,” as Mary Cosimano, the guide
who has probably spent more time there than anyone else, described it to
me. “From now on,” one volunteer told me, “I think of my life as before
and after psilocybin.” Soon after his psilocybin experience, Brian Turner,
the physicist, quit his job with the military contractor and moved to