How to Change Your Mind

work at hand, whether that means regulating our access to memories and
strong emotions from within or news of the world without.
What of the world it does admit it tends to objectify, for the ego wants
to reserve the gifts of subjectivity to itself. That’s why it fails to see that
there is a whole world of souls and spirits out there, by which I simply
mean subjectivities other than our own. It was only when the voice of my
ego was quieted by psilocybin that I was able to sense that the plants in
my garden had a spirit too. (In the words of R. M. Bucke, a nineteenth-
century Canadian psychiatrist and mystic, “I saw that the universe is not
composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence.”)
“Ecology” and “coevolution” are scientific names for the same
phenomena: every species a subject acting on other subjects. But when
this concept acquires the flesh of feeling, becomes “more deeply
interfused,” as it did during my first psilocybin journey, I’m happy to call
it a spiritual experience. So too my various psychedelic mergings: with
Bach’s cello suite, with my son, Isaac, with my grandfather Bob, all spirits
directly apprehended and embraced, each time with a flood of feeling.
So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space
that opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.” Wonders
(and terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness;
the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us,
our senses can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays,
proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The
gulf between self and world, that no-man’s-land which in ordinary hours
the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate
and more connected, “part and particle” of some larger entity. Whether
we call that entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. But
it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its
sting.