How to Change Your Mind

Colorado to study Zen. He had had a meditation practice before
psilocybin, but “now I had the motivation, because I had tasted the
destination”; he was willing to do the hard work of Zen now that he had
gotten a preview of the new modes of consciousness it could make
available to him.
Turner is now an ordained Zen monk, yet he is also still a physicist,
working for a company that makes helium neon lasers. I asked him if he
felt any tension between his science and his spiritual practice. “I don’t feel
there’s a contradiction. Yet what happened at Hopkins has influenced my
physics. I realize there are just some domains that science will not
penetrate. Science can bring you to the big bang, but it can’t take you
beyond it. You need a different kind of apparatus to peer into that.”
These anecdotal reports of personal transformation found strong
support in a follow-up study done on the first groups of healthy normals
studied at Hopkins. Katherine MacLean, a psychologist on the Hopkins
team, crunched the survey data produced by fifty-two volunteers,
including follow-up interviews with friends and family members they had
designated, and discovered that in many cases the psilocybin experience
had led to lasting changes in their personalities. Specifically, those
volunteers who had “complete mystical experiences” (as determined by
their scores on the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire)
showed, in addition to lasting improvements in well-being, long-term
increases in the personality trait of “openness to experience.” One of the
five traits psychologists use to assess personality (the other four are
conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism),
openness encompasses aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity, fantasy and
imagination, as well as tolerance of others’ viewpoints and values; it also
predicts creativity in both the arts and the sciences, as well as,
presumably, a willingness to entertain ideas at odds with those of current
science. Such pronounced and lasting changes in the personalities of
adults are rare.
Yet not all these shifts in the direction of greater openness were
confined to the volunteers in the Hopkins experiments; the sitters, too,
speak of having been changed by the experience of witnessing these
journeys, sometimes in surprising ways. Katherine MacLean, who guided
dozens of sessions during her time at Hopkins, told me, “I started out on
the atheist side, but I began seeing things every day in my work that were