How to Change Your Mind

of what happened by telling the story of my trip and hearing her thoughts
about it. What you’ve just read is the result, and the beneficiary, of that
work, for immediately after the journey I was much more confused by it
than I am now. What now reads like a reasonably coherent narrative
highlighting certain themes began as a jumble of disjointed images and
shards of sense. To put words to an experience that was in fact ineffable
at the time, and then to shape them into sentences and then a story, is
inevitably to do it a kind of violence. But the alternative is, literally,
unthinkable.
Mary had taken apart the altar, but we sat in the same chairs, facing
each other across a small table. Twenty-four hours later, what had I
learned? That I had had no reason to be afraid: no sleeping monsters had
awakened in my unconscious and turned on me. This was a deep fear that
went back several decades, to a terrifying moment in a hotel room in
Seattle when, alone and having smoked too much cannabis, I had had to
marshal every last ounce of will to keep myself from doing something
deeply crazy and irrevocable. But here in this room I had let down my
guard completely, and nothing terrible had happened. The serpent of
madness that I worried might be waiting had not surfaced or pulled me
under. Did this mean it didn’t exist, that I was psychologically sturdier
than I believed? Maybe that’s what the episode with Bob was all about:
maybe I was more like him than I knew, and not nearly as deep or
complicated as I liked to think. (Can a recognition of one’s shallowness
qualify as a profound insight?) Mary wasn’t so sure: “You bring a
different self to the journey every time.” The demons might rouse
themselves the next time.
That I could survive the dissolution of my ego without struggle or
turning into a puddle was something to be grateful for, but even better
was the discovery that there might be another vantage—one less neurotic
and more generous—from which to take in reality. “That alone seems
worth the price of admission,” Mary offered, and I had to agree. Yet,
twenty-four hours later, my old ego was back in uniform and on patrol, so
what long-term good was that beguiling glimpse of a loftier perspective?
Mary suggested that having had a taste of a different, less defended way
to be, I might learn, through practice, to relax the ego’s trigger-happy
command of my reactions to people and events. “Now you have had an