- seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
wait for the results’ (1954, p. 13). In The Doors of Perception, he describes how a
vase of three ill-assorted flowers became the miracle of creation; how time and
space became insignificant; how his own body seemed perfectly capable of act-
ing without him; and how everything simply was, in its own isness or suchness.
From these profound experiences, he surmised that the brain works as a reducing
valve, preventing our connection with reality, and that drugs can open the valve.
Mescaline, or trimethoxyphenylethylamine, is the main active ingredient in the
San Pedro cactus Trichocereus pachanoi and in peyote, a small, spineless desert
cactus Lophophora williamsii that has apparently been used for ritual purposes
for at least 7,000 years (Devereux, 1997). Traditionally the top of the peyote is
dried to make mescal buttons, which are then chewed to invoke deities and open
up other worlds. Mescaline is also produced synthetically and is then used on
its own without the complexity of the thirty or so other alkaloids that are found
in peyote. Mescaline makes the world seem fantastic and colourful, which is
reflected in the art it has inspired, and contributes to ‘the conviction that this is a
view of the essential nature of the universe’ (Perry, 2002, p. 212). This is probably
its most characteristic effect, and we will learn more about it in the next chapter.
Some users describe mescaline as more hallucinogenic and less self-revealing, or
self-destroying, than some of the other psychedelics, especially LSD.Psilocybin is found in many mushrooms of the Psilocybe genus, often called
magic mushrooms or sacred mushrooms. They include Psilocybe cubensis and Psi-
locybe mexicana, which can (with difficulty) be cultivated, and many other species
native to different parts of the world. When it was readily available and legal in the
1960s, Timothy Leary and other members of the ‘Harvard psilocybin project’ used
psilocybin to encourage people to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ (Stevens, 1987).
‘Turn on’ meant to [. . .] [b]ecome sensitive to the many and various levels
of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. [. . .]. ‘Tune
in’ meant interact harmoniously with the world around you [. . .]. ‘Drop
out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to
mobility, choice, and change.
(Leary, 1983, p. 253)Psilocybin’s effects typically last for 3–4 hours, making it a much more man-
ageable drug than LSD, and for this reason it is preferred for scientific research,
including studies on psychedelic-assisted therapy for treating depression (Car-
hart-Harris et al., 2016a) and for helping reduce anxiety and improve quality of life
in the terminally ill (Ross et al., 2016). The risk of adverse psychological effects for
healthy users taking ordinary doses is low (Studerus et al., 2011), and the drug is
often also claimed to induce mystical and religious experiences. Psilocybin often
induces a feeling that one’s self is disintegrating and merging with the rest of the
world, and this ‘ego dissolution’ has been found to be associated with decreased
functional connectivity between the medial temporal lobe and high-level cortical
regions, as well as with reduced interhemispheric communication (Lebedev et al.,
2015). Given that psilocybin is meant to be ‘mind-expanding’, researchers were
surprised to find that when profound experiences were induced in an fMRI scan-
ner, only decreases in cerebral blood flow were found, especially in the thalamus
and cingulate cortex (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012). Some have taken this to support
Huxley’s idea that psychedelic drugs open the mind’s ‘reducing valve’.‘If the doors of
perception were
cleansed, everything will
appear to man as it is,
infinite’
(William Blake, The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, 1790)