How to Change Your Mind

institutional support for the study of psychedelics, and never before has
an institution of Hopkins’s reputation devoted so many resources to what
is, after all, the study of mystical states of consciousness.
The Hopkins lab remains keenly interested in exploring spirituality
and the “betterment of well people”—there are trials under way giving
psilocybin to long-term meditators and religious professionals—but the
transformative effect of the mystical experience has obvious therapeutic
implications that the lab has been investigating. Completed studies
suggest that psilocybin—or rather the mystical state of consciousness that
psilocybin occasions—may be useful in treating both addiction (a pilot
study in smoking cessation achieved an 80 percent success rate, which is
unprecedented) and the existential distress that often debilitates people
facing a terminal diagnosis. When we last met, Griffiths was about to
submit an article reporting striking results in the lab’s trial using
psilocybin to treat the anxiety and depression of cancer patients; the
study found one of the largest treatment effects ever demonstrated for a
psychiatric intervention. The majority of volunteers who had a mystical
experience reported that their fear of death had either greatly diminished
or completely disappeared.
Once again, hard questions arise about the meaning and authority of
such experiences, especially ones that appear to convince people that
consciousness is not confined to brains and might somehow survive our
deaths. Yet even to questions of this kind Griffiths brings an open and
curious mind. “The phenomenology of these experiences is so profoundly
reorganizing and profoundly compelling that I’m willing to hold there’s a
mystery here we can’t understand.”
Griffiths has clearly traveled a long way from the strict behaviorism
that once informed his scientific worldview; the experience of alternate
states of consciousness, both his own and those of his volunteers, has
opened him to possibilities about which few scientists will dare speak
openly.
“So what happens after you die? All I need is one percent [of
uncertainty]. I can’t think of anything more interesting than what I may
or may not discover at the time I die. That’s the most interesting question
going.” For that reason, he fervently hopes he isn’t hit by a bus but rather
has enough time to “savor” the experience without the distraction of pain.
“Western materialism says the switch gets turned off and that’s it. But