How to Change Your Mind

toad experience, for which it wasn’t designed, after all. Because when I
used the same survey to evaluate my psilocybin journey, the fit seemed
much better and rating the phenomena much easier. Reflecting just on
the cello interlude, for example, I could easily confirm the “fusion of [my]
personal self into a larger whole,” as well as the “feeling that [I]
experienced something profoundly sacred and holy” and “of being at a
spiritual height” and even the “experience of unity with ultimate reality.”
Yes, yes, yes, and yes—provided, that is, my endorsement of those loaded
adjectives doesn’t imply any belief in a supernatural reality.
My psilocybin journey with Mary yielded a sixty-six on the Mystical
Experience Questionnaire. For some reason, I felt stupidly proud of my
score. (There I was again, doing being.) It had been my objective to have
such an experience, and at least according to the scientists a mystical
experience I had had. Yet it had brought me no closer to a belief in God or
in a cosmic form of consciousness or in anything magical at all—all of
which I might have been, unreasonably, expecting (hoping?) it might do.
Still, there was no question that something novel and profound had
happened to me—something I am prepared to call spiritual, though only
with an asterisk. I guess I’ve always assumed that spirituality implied a
belief or faith I’ve never shared and from which it supposedly flows. But
now I wondered, is this always or necessarily the case?
Only in the wake of my journeys have I been able to unravel the
paradox that had so perplexed me when I interviewed Dinah Bazer, a
NYU cancer patient who began and ended her psilocybin experience an
avowed atheist. During the climax of a journey that extinguished her fear
of death, Bazer described “being bathed in God’s love,” and yet she
emerged with her atheism intact. How could someone hold those two
warring ideas in the same brain? I think I get it now. Not only was the
flood of love she experienced ineffably powerful, but it was unattributable
to any individual or worldly cause, and so was purely gratuitous—a form
of grace. So how to convey the magnitude of such a gift? “God” might be
the only word in the language big enough.
Part of the problem I was having evaluating my own experience had to
do with another big and loaded word—“mystical”—implying as it does an
experience beyond the reach of ordinary comprehension or science. It
reeks of the supernatural. Yet I think it would be wrong to discard the
mystical, if only because so much work has been done by so many great