bedside, Patrick slipped away. “I went home to shower and he died.” We
were speaking on the phone, and I could hear her crying softly. “He
wasn’t going to die as long as I was there. My brother had told me, ‘You
need to let him go.’”
Patrick was gone by the time she got back to the hospital. “He had died
seconds before. It was like something had evaporated from him. I sat with
him for three hours. It’s a long time before the soul is out of the room.”
“It was a good death,” Lisa told me, a fact she credits to the people at
NYU and to Patrick’s psilocybin journey. “I feel indebted to them for what
they allowed him to experience—the deep resources they allowed him to
tap into. These were his own deep resources. That, I think, is what these
mind-altering drugs do.”
“Patrick was far more spiritual than I was to begin with,” Lisa told me
the last time we spoke. It was clear his journey had changed her too. “It
was an affirmation of a world I knew nothing about. But there are more
dimensions to this world than I ever knew existed.”
Two: Addiction
The dozen or so Apollo astronauts who have escaped Earth’s orbit and
traveled to the moon had the privilege of seeing the planet from a
perspective never before available to our species, and several of them
reported that the experience changed them in profound and enduring
ways. The sight of that “pale blue dot” hanging in the infinite black void of
space erased the national borders on our maps and rendered Earth small,
vulnerable, exceptional, and precious.
Edgar Mitchell, returning from the moon on Apollo 14, had what he
has described as a mystical experience, specifically a savikalpa samadhi,
in which the ego vanishes when confronted with the immensity of the
universe during the course of a meditation on an object—in this case,
planet Earth.
“The biggest joy was on the way home,” he recalled. “In my cockpit
window, every two minutes: the earth, the moon, the sun, and the whole
panorama of the heavens. That was a powerful, overwhelming
experience.