at odds with this belief. My world became more and more mysterious as I
sat with people on psilocybin.”
During my last interview with Richard Boothby, toward the end of a
leisurely Sunday brunch at the modern art museum in Baltimore, he
looked at me with an expression that mixed an almost evangelical fervor
about the “treasures” he had glimpsed at Hopkins with a measure of pity
for his still-hallucinogen-naive interlocutor.
“I don’t blame you for being envious.”
• • •
MY ENCOUNTERS with the Hopkins volunteers had indeed left me feeling
somewhat envious, but also with a great many more questions than
answers. How are we to evaluate the “insights” these people bring back
from their psychedelic journeys? What sort of authority should we grant
them? Where in the world does the material that makes up these waking
dreams or, as one volunteer put it, “intrapsychic movies,” come from?
The unconscious? From the suggestions of their guides and the setting of
the experiment? Or, as many of the volunteers believe, from somewhere
“out there” or “beyond”? What do these mystical states of consciousness
ultimately mean for our understanding of either the human mind or the
universe?
For his part, Roland Griffiths’s own encounters with the volunteers in
the 2006 study reignited his passion for science, but they also left him
with a deeper respect for all that science does not know—for what he is
content to call “the mysteries.”
“For me the data [from those first sessions] were . . . I don’t want to
use the word mind-blowing, but it was unprecedented the kinds of things
we were seeing there, in terms of the deep meaning and lasting spiritual
significance of these effects. I’ve given lots of drugs to lots of people, and
what you get are drug experiences. What’s unique about the psychedelics
is the meaning that comes out of the experience.”
Yet how real is that meaning? Griffiths himself is agnostic, but
strikingly open-minded, even about his volunteers’ firsthand reports of a
“beyond,” however they define it. “I’m willing to hold the possibility these