How to Change Your Mind

first of these molecules was an accidental invention of science. Lysergic acid diethylamide,

first of these molecules was an accidental invention of science. Lysergic acid diethylamide,

first of these molecules was an accidental invention of science. Lysergic acid diethylamide,

Volunteers are told they may experience the “death/transcendence of your ego or everyday self,” but this is “always followed by Rebirth/Return to the normative world of space & time. Safest way to return to normal is to entrust self unconditionally to the emerging experiences.” Guides are instructed to remind volunteers they’ll never be left alone and not to worry about the body while journeying because the guides are there to keep an eye on it. If you feel as if you are “dying, melting, dissolving, exploding, going crazy etc.—go ahead.” Volunteers are quizzed: “If you see a door, what do you do? If you see a staircase, what do you do?” “Open it” and “climb up it” are of course the right answers.

The flight instructions advise guides to use mantras like “Trust the trajectory” and “TLO—Trust, Let Go, Be Open.” Some guides like to quote John Lennon: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream

That said, Griffiths went to great lengths in the design of the study to control for “expectancy effects.” In part this owed to Griffiths’s skepticism that a drug could occasion the same kind of mystical experience he had had in his meditation: “This is all truth to Bill and hypothesis to me. So we needed to control for Bill’s biases.”

The guides go over the instructions with the volunteers during the eight hours of preparation all of them receive before commencing their journeys

This guy is lying on the couch right there where you are, with tears streaming down his face, and I’m thinking, how absolutely beautiful and meaningful this experience is. How sacred. How can this ever have been illegal? It’s as if we made entering Gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums, or sunsets

tone mushroom and various other nondenominational spiritual artifac

“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”