How to Change Your Mind

psychedelic himself; Roland Griffiths had told me he thought it was
possible. (“Bob was a jazz musician,” Griffiths told me, “so I wouldn’t be
at all surprised.”) But Johanson said no. “He was definitely curious about
them,” she told me, “but I think he was too afraid. We were martini
people.” I asked if he was a spiritual man. “Not really, though I think he
would have liked to have been.”
Jesse, not quite sure what Schuster would make of the meeting,
arranged to have Jim Fadiman bunk with him, instructing Fadiman, a
psychologist, to check him out. “Early the next morning Jim found me
and said, ‘Bob, mission accomplished. You have found a gem of a human
being.’”
Schuster thoroughly enjoyed his time at Esalen, according to his wife.
He took part in a drumming circle Jesse had arranged—you don’t leave
Esalen without doing some such thing—and was amazed to discover how
easily he could slip into a trance. But Schuster also made some key
contributions to the group’s deliberations. He warned Jesse off working
with MDMA, which he believed was toxic to the brain and had by then
acquired an unsavory reputation as a club drug. He also suggested that
psilocybin was a much better candidate for research than LSD, largely for
political reasons: because so many fewer people had heard of it,
psilocybin carried none of the political and cultural baggage of LSD.
By the end of the meeting, the Esalen group had settled on a short list
of objectives, some of them modest—to draft a code of ethics for spiritual
guides—and others more ambitious: “to get aboveboard, unimpeachable
research done, at an institution with investigators beyond reproach,” and,
ideally, “do this without any pretext of clinical treatment.”
“We weren’t sure that was possible,” Jesse told me, but he and his
colleagues believed “it would be a big mistake if medicalization is all that
happens.” Why a mistake? Because Bob Jesse was ultimately less
interested in people’s mental problems than with their spiritual well-
being—in using entheogens for the betterment of well people.
Shortly after the Esalen meeting, Schuster made what would turn out
to be his most important contribution: telling Bob Jesse about his old
friend Roland Griffiths, whom he described as exactly “the investigator
beyond reproach” Jesse was looking for and “a scientist of the first order.”
“Everything Roland’s done he’s devoted himself to completely,” Jesse
recalls Schuster saying, “including his meditation practice. We think it’s