development, which I confessed was still fairly rudimentary; I told him
my worldview has always been staunchly materialist.
“Okay, then, but what about the miracle that we are conscious? Just
think about that for a second, that we are aware and that we are aware
that we are aware! How unlikely is that?” How can we be certain, he was
suggesting, that our experience of consciousness is “authentic”? The
answer is we can’t; it is beyond the reach of our science, and yet who
doubts its reality? In fact, the evidence for the existence of consciousness
is much like the evidence for the reality of the mystical experience: we
believe it exists not because science can independently verify it but
because a great many people have been convinced of its reality; here, too,
all we have to go on is the phenomenology. Griffiths was suggesting that
insofar as I was on board for one “miracle” well beyond the reach of
materialist science—“the marvel of consciousness,” as Vladimir Nabokov
once called it, “that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape
amidst the night of non-being”—maybe I needed to keep a more open
mind to the possibility of others.
• • •
IN DECEMBER 2016, a front-page story in the New York Times reported on
the dramatic results of the Johns Hopkins and NYU psilocybin cancer
studies, which were published together in a special issue of the Journal of
Psychopharmacology, along with nearly a dozen commentaries from
prominent voices in the mental health establishment—including two past
presidents of the American Psychiatric Association—hailing the findings.
In both the NYU and the Hopkins trials, some 80 percent of cancer
patients showed clinically significant reductions in standard measures of
anxiety and depression, an effect that endured for at least six months
after their psilocybin session. In both trials, the intensity of the mystical
experience volunteers reported closely correlated with the degree to
which their symptoms subsided. Few if any psychiatric interventions of
any kind have demonstrated such dramatic and sustained results.
The trials were small—eighty subjects in all—and will have to be
repeated on a larger scale before the government will consider
rescheduling psilocybin and approving the treatment. But the results