How to Change Your Mind

of more accurate perspectives: that we’re a swarm of genes, vehicles for
passing on DNA; that we’re social creatures through and through, unable
to survive alone; that we’re organisms in an ecosystem, linked together
on this planet floating in the middle of nowhere. Wherever you look, you
see that the level of interconnectedness is truly amazing, and yet we insist
on thinking of ourselves as individual agents.” Albert Einstein called the
modern human’s sense of separateness “a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness.”*
“Psychedelics knock the legs out from under that model. That can be
dangerous in the wrong circumstances, leading to bad trips and worse.”
Johnson brought up the case of Charles Manson, who reportedly used
LSD to break down and brainwash his followers, a theory of the case he
deems plausible. “But in the right setting, where your safety is assured, it
may be a good intervention for dealing with some of the problems of the
self”—of which addiction is only one. Dying, depression, obsession, eating
disorders—all are exacerbated by the tyranny of an ego and the fixed
narratives it constructs about our relationship to the world. By
temporarily overturning that tyranny and throwing our minds into an
unusually plastic state (Robin Carhart-Harris would call it a state of
heightened entropy), psychedelics, with the help of a good therapist, give
us an opportunity to propose some new, more constructive stories about
the self and its relationship to the world, stories that just might stick.
This is a very different kind of therapy than we are accustomed to in
the West, because it is neither purely chemical nor purely psychodynamic
—neither mindless nor brainless. Whether Western medicine is ready to
accommodate such a radically novel—and ancient—model for mental
transformation is an open question. In taking people safely through the
liminal state psychedelics occasion, with its radical suggestibility,
Johnson acknowledges that the doctors and researchers “play the same
role as shamans or elders.
“Whatever we’re delving into here, it’s in the same realm as the
placebo. But a placebo on rocket boosters.”

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