How to Change Your Mind

see it. If you don’t stop to look, you’ll never see it. It’s the statement of an
obvious thing, I know, but to feel it, to look and be amazed by this light”
is a gift he attributes to his session, which gave him “a feeling of
connectedness to everything.”
Bessant followed up on our conversation by e-mail with a series of
clarifications and elaborations, striving to find the words equal to the
immensity of the experience. It was in the face of this immensity that
smoking suddenly seemed pitifully small. “Why quit smoking? Because I
found it irrelevant. Because other things had become so much more
important.”
Some volunteers marveled themselves at the simultaneous power and
banality of their insights. Savannah Miller is a single mom in her thirties
who works as a bookkeeper for her father’s company in Maryland.
Possibly because she spent her twenties tangled in an abusive
relationship with a man she describes as “a psychopath,” her trip was
painful but ultimately cathartic; she remembers crying uncontrollably
and producing tremendous amounts of snot (something her guides
confirmed really happened). Savannah gave little thought to her habit
during the journey, except toward the end when she pictured herself as a
smoking gargoyle.
“You know how gargoyles look, crouched down with their shoulders
hunched? That’s how I felt and saw myself, a little golem creature
smoking, pulling in the smoke and not letting it out, until my chest hurts
and I’m choking. It was powerful and disgusting. I can still see it now,
that hideous coughing gargoyle, whenever I picture myself as a smoker.”
Months later, she says the image is still helpful when the inevitable
cravings arise.
In the middle of her session, Savannah suddenly sat up and
announced she had discovered something important, an “epiphany” that
her guides needed to write down so it wouldn’t be lost to posterity: “Eat
right. Exercise. Stretch.”
Matt Johnson refers to these realizations as “duh moments” and says
they are common among his volunteers and not at all insignificant.
Smokers know perfectly well that their habit is unhealthy, disgusting,
expensive, and unnecessary, but under the influence of psilocybin that
knowing acquires a new weight, becomes “something they feel in the gut
and the heart. Insights like this become more compelling, stickier, and