How to Change Your Mind

experiences” that left them with the unshakable conviction that there was
something more to this world than we know—a “beyond” of some kind
that transcended the material universe I presume to constitute the whole
shebang. I thought often about one of the cancer patients I interviewed,
an avowed atheist who had nevertheless found herself “bathed in God’s
love.”
Yet not everything I’d heard from these people made me eager to
follow them onto the couch. Many had been borne by psilocybin deep into
their pasts, a few of them traveling all the way back to scenes of
unremembered childhood trauma. These journeys had been wrenching,
shaking the travelers to their core, but they had been cathartic too.
Clearly these medicines—as guides both above- and belowground
invariably call the drugs they administer—powerfully stir the psychic pot,
surfacing all sorts of repressed material, some of it terrifying and ugly.
Did I really want to go there?
No!—to be perfectly honest. You should know I have never been one
for deep or sustained introspection. My usual orientation is more forward
than back, or down, and I generally prefer to leave my psychic depths
undisturbed, assuming they exist. (There’s quite enough to deal with up
here on the surface; maybe that’s why I became a journalist rather than a
novelist or poet.) All that stuff down there in the psychic basement has
been stowed there for a reason, and unless you’re looking for something
specific to help solve a problem, why would anyone willingly go down
those steps and switch on that light?
People generally think of me as a fairly even-keeled and
psychologically sturdy person, and I’ve played that role for so long now—
in my family as a child, in my family as an adult, with my friends, and
with my colleagues—that it’s probably an accurate enough
characterization. But every so often, perhaps in the wee-hour throes of
insomnia or under the influence of cannabis, I have found myself tossed
in a psychic storm of existential dread so dark and violent that the keel
comes off the boat, capsizing this trusty identity. At such times, I begin
seriously to entertain the possibility that somewhere deep beneath the
equable presence I present, there exists a shadow me made up of forces
roiling, anarchic, and potentially mad. Just how thin is the skin of my
sanity? There are times when I wonder. Perhaps we all do. But did I really
want to find out? R. D. Laing once said there are three things human