How to Change Your Mind

Under the influence of the psychedelic, however, volunteers attributed
marked and lasting personal meaning to the same songs.These medicines
may help us construct meaning, if not discover it.
No doubt the suggestibility of the mind on psychedelics and the
guiding presence of psychotherapists also play a role in attributing
meaning to the experience. In preparing volunteers for their journeys,
Jeffrey Guss speaks explicitly about the acquisition of meaning, telling his
patients “that the medicine will show you hidden or unknown shadow
parts of yourself; that you will gain insight into yourself, and come to
learn about the meaning of life and existence.” (He also tells them they
may have a mystical or transcendent experience but carefully refrains
from defining it.) “As a result of this molecule being in your body, you’ll
understand more about yourself and life and the universe.” And more
often than not this happens. Replace the science-y word “molecule” with
“sacred mushroom” or “plant teacher,” and you have the incantations of a
shaman at the start of a ceremonial healing.
But however it works, and whatever vocabulary we use to explain it,
this seems to me the great gift of the psychedelic journey, especially to the
dying: its power to imbue everything in our field of experience with a
heightened sense of purpose and consequence. Depending on one’s
orientation, this can be understood either in humanistic or in spiritual
terms—for what is the Sacred but a capitalized version of significance?
Even for atheists like Dinah Bazer—like me!—psychedelics can charge a
world from which the gods long ago departed with the pulse of meaning,
the immanence with which they once infused it. The sense of a cold and
arbitrary universe governed purely by chance is banished. Especially in
the absence of faith, these medicines, in the right hands, may offer
powerful antidotes for the existential terrors that afflict not only the
dying.
To believe that life has any meaning at all is of course a large
presumption, requiring in some a leap of faith, but surely it is a helpful
one, and never more so than at the approach of death. To situate the self
in a larger context of meaning, whatever it is—a sense of oneness with
nature or universal love—can make extinction of the self somewhat easier
to contemplate. Religion has always understood this wager, but why
should religion enjoy a monopoly? Bertrand Russell wrote that the best
way to overcome one’s fear of death “is to make your interests gradually