- seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
Such changes are reminiscent of Huxley’s idea of the reducing valve, with users’
minds remaining more open for some time. But these effects are hard to classify.
Has someone who is changed by taking a major hallucinogen now in a permanently
altered SoC, or does their new state become the norm against which other ASCs can
be judged?
And are any of these drug-induced ASCs valid, truth-giving, truly spiritual experi-
ences? When people say they transcended duality, did they really see the world in
a way that banishes the hard problem and the great chasm? Or are these all just
the ramblings of poisoned minds?In the famous ‘Good Friday Experiment’, Walter Pahnke, an American minister
and physician, gave pills to twenty Boston divinity students before the tradi-
tional Good Friday service in 1962: ten received psilocybin and ten an active
control (nicotinic acid). Whereas the control group experienced only mild reli-
gious feelings, eight out of ten in the psilocybin group reported at least seven
of Pahnke’s nine categories of mystical experience, developed through work
giving LSD to prisoners and the terminally ill: unity, transcendence of time and
space, positive mood, sense of sacredness, noetic quality, paradoxicality, inef-
fability, transiency, and persisting positive changes in attitudes and behaviour
(Pahnke, 1963, 1967). Nearly thirty years later, most of the psilocybin group
remembered their experiences with clarity and described long-lasting positive
effects (Doblin, 1991).Psilocybin was used again in a double-blind study with thirty-six people who
had never had hallucinogens before but who participated regularly in spiritual or
religious activities. A high dose of psilocybin or a placebo was given in support-
ive surroundings over two or three sessions and participants were encouraged
to close their eyes and direct their attention inwards. Once again, the drug pro-
duced experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences, and
at a 14-month follow-up, these experiences were considered by volunteers to be
among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives
(Griffiths et al., 2008). (You can find more on Pahnke’s work and other exceptional
human experiences on our website.)When we have looked at more ASCs, on the borders of reality and imagination
(Chapter 14) and in sleep, dreams, and exceptional experiences (Chapter 15), we
shall return to James’s question of how to regard them (Chapter 18).MEDITATION
In Chapter 7, we learned how profound the attentional effects of different kinds
of meditation can be. But does meditation induce an ASC? Some definitions
imply so: ‘Meditation is a ritualistic procedure intended to change one’s state of
consciousness by means of maintained, voluntary shifts in attention’ (Farthing,
1992, p. 421), and ‘meditation can be regarded as a slow, cumulative, long-term
procedure for producing an altered state of consciousness’ (Wallace and Fisher,
1991, p. 153).Some forms of meditation, such as transcendental meditation (TM), do emphasise
the importance of achieving altered states, but others do not. In Zen, the aim of‘What I experienced was
a God that was inside of
me’
(Good Friday participant H.R., in
Doblin, 1991, p. 19)