How to Change Your Mind

temporarily take charge of the mammalian brain? Was it a defense
chemical, intended to poison mushroom eaters? That would seem to be
the most straightforward explanation, yet it is undermined by the fact the
fungus produces the hallucinogen almost exclusively in its “fruiting
body”—that part of the organism it is happiest to have eaten. Was there
perhaps some benefit to the mushroom in being able to change the minds
of the animals that eat it?*
There were also the more philosophical questions posed by the
existence of a fungus that could not only change consciousness but
occasion a profound mystical experience in humans. This fact can be
interpreted in two completely different ways. On the first interpretation,
the mind-altering power of psilocybin argues for a firmly materialist
understanding of consciousness and spirituality, because the changes
observed in the mind can be traced directly to the presence of a chemical
—psilocybin. What is more material than a chemical? One could
reasonably conclude from the action of psychedelics that the gods are
nothing more than chemically induced figments of the hominid
imagination.
Yet, surprisingly, most of the people who have had these experiences
don’t see the matter that way at all. Even the most secular among them
come away from their journeys convinced there exists something that
transcends a material understanding of reality: some sort of a “Beyond.”
It’s not that they deny a naturalistic basis for this revelation; they just
interpret it differently.
If the experience of transcendence is mediated by molecules that flow
through both our brains and the natural world of plants and fungi, then
perhaps nature is not as mute as Science has told us, and “Spirit,”
however defined, exists out there—is immanent in nature, in other words,
just as countless premodern cultures have believed. What to my
(spiritually impoverished) mind seemed to constitute a good case for the
disenchantment of the world becomes in the minds of the more
psychedelically experienced irrefutable proof of its fundamental
enchantment. Flesh of the gods, indeed.
So here was a curious paradox. The same phenomenon that pointed to
a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an
experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a
nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief.