How to Change Your Mind

path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is
literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of
unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain
has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a
near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of
anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I’m seldom
surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.
What I am struggling to describe here is what I think of as my default
mode of consciousness. It works well enough, certainly gets the job done,
but what if it isn’t the only, or necessarily the best, way to go through life?
The premise of psychedelic research is that this special group of
molecules can give us access to other modes of consciousness that might
offer us specific benefits, whether therapeutic, spiritual, or creative.
Psychedelics are certainly not the only door to these other forms of
consciousness—and I explore some non-pharmacological alternatives in
these pages—but they do seem to be one of the easier knobs to take hold
of and turn.
The whole idea of expanding our repertoire of conscious states is not
an entirely new idea: Hinduism and Buddhism are steeped in it, and
there are intriguing precedents even in Western science. William James,
the pioneering American psychologist and author of The Varieties of
Religious Experience, ventured into these realms more than a century
ago. He returned with the conviction that our everyday waking
consciousness “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about
it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of
consciousness entirely different.”
James is speaking, I realized, of the unopened door in our minds. For
him, the “touch” that could throw open the door and disclose these
realms on the other side was nitrous oxide. (Mescaline, the psychedelic
compound derived from the peyote cactus, was available to researchers at
the time, but James was apparently too fearful to try it.)
“No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves
these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
“At any rate,” James concluded, these other states, the existence of
which he believed was as real as the ink on this page, “forbid a premature
closing of our accounts with reality.”