How to Change Your Mind

experiences may or may not be true,” he told me. “The exciting part is to
use the tools we have to explore and pick apart this mystery.”
Not all of his colleagues share his open-mindedness. During one of our
meetings, over breakfast on the sunporch of his modest ranch house in
suburban Baltimore, Griffiths mentioned a colleague at Hopkins, a
prominent psychiatrist named Paul McHugh, who dismisses the
psychedelic experience as nothing more than a form of “toxic delirium.”
He encouraged me to google McHugh.
“Doctors encounter this strange and colorful state of mind in patients
suffering from advanced hepatic, renal, or pulmonary disease, in which
toxic products accumulate in the body and do to the brain and mind just
what LSD does,” McHugh had written in a review of a book about the
Harvard Psilocybin Project in Commentary. “The vividness of color
perception, the merging of physical sensations, the hallucinations, the
disorientation and loss of a sense of time, the delusional joys and terrors
that come and go evoking unpredictable feelings and behaviors—are sadly
familiar symptoms doctors are called to treat in hospitals every day.”
Griffiths admits it is possible that what he’s seeing is some form of
temporary psychosis, and he plans to test for delirium in an upcoming
experiment, but he seriously doubts that diagnosis accurately describes
what is going on with his volunteers. “Patients suffering from delirium
find it really unpleasant,” he points out, “and they certainly don’t report
months later, ‘Wow, that was one of the greatest and most meaningful
experiences of my life.’”
William James grappled with these questions of veracity in his
discussion on mystical states of consciousness. He concluded that the
import of these experiences is, and should be, “authoritative over the
individuals to whom they come” but that there is no reason the rest of us
must “accept their revelations uncritically.” And yet he believed that the
very possibility people can experience these states of consciousness
should bear on our understanding of the mind and world: “The existence
of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical
states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.”
These alternate forms of consciousness “might, in spite of all the
perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of
the truth.” He detected in such experiences, in which the mind “ascend[s]
to a more enveloping point of view,” hints of a grand metaphysical