How to Change Your Mind

questionnaire that took me the better part of a day to complete. All of
which made me feel I was in good hands—even when those hands were
flapping a crow’s wing around my head.
Yet, as I sat there before the altar, it seemed doubtful I could choke
down that whole mushroom. It had to be five or six inches long, with a
cap the size of a golf ball. I asked her if I could crumble it into a glass of
hot water, make a tea, and drink it.
“Better to be fully conscious of what you’re doing,” she said, “which is
eating a mushroom that came from the earth, one bite at a time. Examine
it first, closely, then start at the cap.” She offered me a choice of honey or
chocolate to help get it down; I went with the chocolate. Mary had told
me that a friend of hers grows the psilocybin and had learned the craft
years ago in a mushroom cultivation workshop taught by Paul Stamets. It
seems there is only one or two degrees of separation between any two
people in this world.
On the tongue, the mushroom was dry as the desert and tasted like
earth-flavored cardboard, but alternating each bite with a nibble of the
chocolate helped. Except for the gnarly bit at the very base of the stipe, I
ate all of it, which amounted to two grams. Mary planned to offer me
another two grams along the way, for a total of four. This would roughly
approximate the dose being given to volunteers in the NYU and Hopkins
trials and was equivalent to roughly three hundred micrograms of LSD—
twice as much as I had taken with Fritz.
We chatted quietly for twenty minutes or so before Mary noticed my
face was flushed and suggested I lie down and put on eyeshades. I chose a
pair of high-tech black plastic ones, which in retrospect might have been
a mistake. The perimeters were lined with soft black foam rubber,
allowing the wearer to open his eyes to pitch darkness. Called the
Mindfold Relaxation Mask, Mary told me, it had been expressly designed
for this purpose by Alex Grey, the psychedelic artist.
As soon as Mary put on the first song—a truly insipid New Age
composition by someone named Thierry David (an artist thrice
nominated, I would later learn, in the category of Best Chill/Groove
Album)—I was immediately propelled into a nighttime urban landscape
that appeared to have been generated by a computer. Once again, sound
begat space (“in the beginning was the note,” I remember thinking, with a
sense of profundity), and what I took to be Thierry’s electronica conjured