How to Change Your Mind

body to a funeral pyre floating on the Ganges,” and found herself
“standing on the edge of the universe, witnessing the dawn of creation.”
She had the “humbling” realization that “everything in the universe is of
equal importance, including yourself.
“Instead of being so narrowly focused, moving through this little
tunnel of adult life,” she found that the journey “returned me to the
child’s wider sense of wonder—to the world of Wordsworth. A part of my
brain that had gone to sleep was awakened.
“The universe was so great and there were so many things you could
do and see in it that killing yourself seemed like a dumb idea. It put
smoking in a whole new context. Smoking seemed very unimportant; it
seemed kind of stupid, to be honest.”
Alice imagined herself throwing out lots of junk from her house,
emptying the attic and the basement: “I had an image of tossing
everything over the ledge, all the stuff I didn’t need anymore. It’s amazing
how you can whittle things down to the few really important things that
are necessary for survival. And the most important thing of all is the
breath. When that stops, you’re dead.” She emerged from her journey
with the conviction “that you should cherish your breath.” She has not
had a cigarette since her psilocybin journey. Whenever she feels a
craving, she goes back in memory to her session “and thinks of all the
wonderful things I experienced, and how it felt to be on that much higher
plane.”
Charles Bessant had his epiphany while on a similarly “higher plane.”
Bessant, a museum exhibit designer in his sixties, found himself standing
on a mountaintop in the Alps, “the German states stretching out before
me all the way to the Baltic.” (Wagner was playing in his headphones.)
“My ego had dissolved, yet I’m telling you this. It was terrifying.” He
sounded like a nineteenth-century Romantic describing an encounter
with the sublime, at once terrible and awe inspiring.
“People use words like ‘oneness,’ ‘connectivity,’ ‘unity’—I get it! I was
part of something so much larger than anything I had ever imagined.” We
were speaking by phone on a Saturday morning, and at one point Bessant
paused in his account to describe the scene before him.
“Right now, I’m standing here in my garden, and the light is coming
through the canopy of leaves. For me to be able to stand here in the
beauty of this light, talking to you, it’s only because my eyes are open to