“How to Change Your Mind–What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” by Michael Pollan Copyright 2018 by Penguin Press

Pollan is a Professor of Writing and Journalism at U-Cal Berkeley and at Harvard. He apparently is well grounded in psychology, pharmacology, social relations and several other things. He has published a number of books and often contributed to the NY Times magazine. So we have here a smart and educated man who expresses himself well. We also have one who has taken psychedelics and also studied the drugs themselves and the effects they have had on others. The result is a fascinating book, particularly if you are a seeker after the ultimate in the fields of spirituality or psychology, epistemology or about anything else important you may think of.

Pollan does not offer absolutely ultimate answers. But he suggests many things and touches on the ultimate fairly frequently. By “the ultimate” I mean, what/who are we really? What is our origin? Who or what force created us? And how well do we understand our own nature? Pollan has interviewed (and discusses seriously these matters with) a huge number of people who have in one way or another been connected to psychedelics over the past–well half century or so, actually, but especially about the last 20 years.

The result is a scholarly(but not humorless)recounting of psychedelics starting with the invention of LSD(1943)and carrying on through the 50’s when there was research and experimentation, the 60’s when it was cult enthusiasm and a social/political issue, and on to the present. This includes a government ban for about a generation on experiments, and the enthusiastic return of many to experiments, use and publicity of a sorts in the 21st century.

The book is a little over 400 pages and some of it is a faster read than other parts. About the first half of it is a usually scholarly and certainly a careful and well researched explanation of what psychedelics are and what they do, as far as this is both understandable and comprehensible. There is also a great deal of the social history of their use and of their relationship and struggles with the US legal system. If you really want to know the subject well you need to read this part of the book carefully.

But, to be frank, some of it is interesting and some of it–well, not so interesting. If you just want to know his own experiences and attitudes regarding psychedelics, and get some idea of what using them is like, you can get these by reading the second half. In fact, I think you could call the second half the “good stuff” part of the book and it begins with chapter 4 on p 221.

Since I tend to read more than 1 thing at a time, you can usually tell my attitude towards a book by how long I take with it. It took me somewhere around a month, maybe a little bit less, to read the first half. I think I did the second half in less than a week. Well, it was the “good stuff,” what else can I say? In any event, it is my intention to concentrate on the second half and on what he experienced and discovered and what he surmises based upon conversations and experience. He delves into his own mind-experiences and he tells the reader what other people have relayed to him. There is no way I’m going to try to explain everything in the good stuff, but I will try to make it representative.

When Pollan decided he wanted to learn about this subject he tried to find the right people. This meant entering a quasi-illegal culture where respectable people such as professors and psychiatrists and psycho-therapists conducted carefully guided surreptitious sessions with searchers and seekers and people with problems whom they thought they could help. He took his time in choosing a therapist to act as his guide. Fortunately, he chose well, as this is, he fully admits, a fairly dangerous venture if you try it unsupervised or in the hands of an irresponsible person.

He describes in detail his first LSD trip, tightly supervised, and how it brought him to a new outlook on personal identity and reality and the rest of the book is largely elaborations on this theme. But what elaborations, a huge number of them discussed and none exactly alike, but mostly with one organizing belief. And this is where I enter dangerous territory, both in that some will be perturbed by what I say and in that I may get something wrong as my own background in this sort of thing is, well, limited. I did smoke a little pot many years ago when I was a recent graduate school drop-out working at a job I despised.

The organizing belief here is that there is more than one kind of human consciousness. Maybe another way of looking at it would be to say there are different levels of human consciousness. In any event, our ordinary, everyday awareness is the most obvious of these and the one we use–because it works–most of the time. But there are other levels and they may be useful too–for certain kinds of healing and understanding, among other things.

First, anyone who has had what is usually described as a mystical experience is likely to recognize many of the descriptions of the drug experience. The two seem to be frequently identical in terms of human perceptions. Mysticism is something I will not pursue to a great extent here. But we need to acknowledge it and get at least a rudimentary understanding of it.

Without going into much detail, suffice it to say that mysticism is difficult to define, but it is fairly easy to say what it is not. It is NOT just any kind of weird or ESP type experience. It is not(usually, anyway)a ghostly encounter. Maybe ghostly encounters are sometimes real, but they are not mysticism. It is not just something foolish and strange. Studying it might lead to the conclusion that it is neither one.

Mysticism is, as nearly as I can quickly define it, a method of obtaining knowledge of what the Truth Behind the Truth is. It is not knowledge obtained directly by reading or listening, but only by experiencing and the experience is inward. It is clear that epileptics often have mystical-type experience but it is also clear that many people have and have had these experiences without being epileptic. It is not linked, in fact, to any kind of psychological or mental illness. Those who have studied and/or know mystics often comment on their mental health and normality.

Mysticism is supposed to reveal a truth at, let’s say, a layer of human consciousness most of us rarely experience or maybe never do. Mystical experience may come from prayer, contemplation, or just opening the mind and relaxing. Although I have no direct experience of this it is my guess that it could be induced by music, alcohol or sex, any or all of them, but usually is not. Mystical experiences often come upon one unbidden and unanticipated.

Although mystics have different interpretations of what happens to them, there seems to by wide agreement that they learn something new about humanity and themselves when in this state and that the new information they have is true, way beyond any reasonable doubt. They also, most of them, find a new peace in this knowledge and live happier and less stress-filled lives after this knowledge is obtained.

NOW-the big idea that Pollan has is that this experience of mysticism is likely real, but is also attainable in another way than the classical mystical approach. That is would be drugs, particularly those usually known as psychedelic substanaces. The best know of these is, of course, LSD.

After long being banned in the US , experimenting with psychedelics in controlled, usually university sponsored, sessions became legal again about 15 years ago. Experiments have taken place in a number of locations, mostly in California and at Johns Hopkins and NYU, two of the most famous and prestigious of American institutions of higher learning.

Pollan’s research indicated that many of these experiments with LSD, psilocybin and other such substances have been largely “successful,” in one sense. Usually a successful experiment means one from which the scientists learned something. That meaning is by no means absent here, but more importantly the use of these substances in these controlled circumstances, with subjects guided by learned and experienced experts relieved various kinds of human mental suffering. Pollan’s title tells you largely what–fear of death, addiction issues, and depression.

Now, one thing that impressed me with Pollan is that he actually dealt with a question I have wondered about and never had gotten an answer to before, not in anything I read, and not in the one time I asked someone something. My question is simply this. All mystics, or anyway all who have expressed themselves on this particular issue, have maintained that at some point in the mystical experience the identifiable, individual personal ego disappears, preusmably becomes part of something else..

They differ on what this something else is. Some would say God, some the One, some other things,–perhaps the Real Self(behind our personal selves, and I’m guessing on this one), perhaps Nirvana(Buddhism). Some non-religious types who eschew any kind of “spiritual” explanation, would say it disappears into some kind of super personality we all belong to, or retreats into the super-ego or whatever. The point is that with few if any dissenters, they maintain the ego goes somewhere during a mystical experience.

My unanswered question has always been this. While they claim that the individual ego disappears, they also strive to tell us what the experience was like. Nearly all of them say it was ineffable, that is inexpressible. But they all seem to remember that there was something they’d like to express, something they experienced. Well, if the ego disappeared, I would ask, who was doing the observing? Who was there to experience anything at all, regardless of whether it is something they can express?

I don’t remember any writer on mysticism ever addressing this question. Though I no longer remember the exact details, I do know that once I asked this question in some kind of class or lecture, and the “expert” I asked misunderstood what I was asking or thought it unimportant. It is important to me. I want to know how something(someone-whoever)can disappear and still be able to offer an opinion on what happened during their period of absence.

Pollan, maybe without exactly intending to do so, actually takes a swing at this. If you want to check it out more exactly try pp 304-306 & 388-390, so you may read the author’s exact words, some of which I will quote.

One of Pollan’s experiences in using psychedelics was similar to some of his fellow volunteers. The had what they experienced as “ego dissolution.” Pollan says that the “bounded self” may be an illusion. “The psychedelic experience of ‘non-duality’ suggests that consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we –and it–like to think.”

OK–and to go further with more or less the same idea–“Of all the phenomenal effects that people on psychedelics report, the dissolution of the ego seems to me by far the most important …I found(among researchers)…it is finally the loss of ego or self …they’re suggesting is the key psychological driver of the experience.”

“Consider …the sense of transcendence, sacredness, unitive consciousness, infinitude … can all be explained by what it can feel like to a mind when its sense of being, or having, a separate self is suddenly no more.”

Pollan says it is no wonder that when the boundaries of the self fall away, a person would feel one with the universe and, being a human and a meaning-needing creature, would begin to create stories to explain what happens. The brain gets so many “error signals” that it develops wild new interpretations of “an experience that transcends its capacity for understanding.”

Both Sigmund Freud and Aldous Huxley expressed themselves on this, Freud finding it a “regression to magical thinking,” Huxley “an access to transpersonal realms.” Pollan states there is no way to say for certain which of these is correct. Perhaps he has doubts about both thought he doesn’t say this. But he adds the thought that “losing or shrinking the self would make anyone feel more ‘spiritual,’ however you chose to define the word, and that this is apt to make one feel better.”

He does not have a final answer on this, but offers, near the end of this section of the book, the following–spirituality is usually perceived as the opposite of materialistic. But he thinks the “more useful antonym for ‘spiritual” might be ‘egotistical.’ As one’s ego dissolves, he opines, “so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader idea …of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection or love, however defined seems to figure prominently.”

Now, there are couple of things missing here in a sense-but not in a sense I think the author is to be criticized for. He never quite gets to answering my question–what is the “thing,” what is the consciousness that lies behind the ego and that the indivdual remembers the perceptions of when he returne to “normal ” consciouness.. Also, he never reaches a conclusion as to whether this is something that would be “spiritual” in the usual popular, more or less religious sense.

But it appears to me very likely that these things are unknowable, at least at present. Perhaps someday there will be a more advanced psychedelic or(and this would be more exciting)a more advanced method of non-drug induced mysticism which will explain it all. Then again maybe not, and perhaps in the overall scheme of things, that is not supposed to be revealed to us, at least not yet. Perhaps the final answer, -assuming one exists–would be too much for our emotions, or intellect, or sense of who we are or–well use your imagination on the rest.

Now this is a far as I am going to try to take you on this book and the ideas of Mr Pollan, who seems to me honest and brilliant. I have not the knowledge, nor to tell the truth, too much of the inclination to try to go further. I lack the background in psychology, biology, and philosophy to go any further. The book–including that first half I mentioned–is a treasure trove of ideas from these fields, but I am not going to try to give explanations that very well might prove to be wrong. I hope I have not gotten much wrong up to this point. Some of you with backgrounds in these fields have already likely noticed my lacking in knowledge and better understanding here.

So I take leave of you with the advice to check out this remarkable book and to come to it with an open mind and heart. I have no idea what images or ideas you may glean from it that I did not, but I would be happy to know if there are any. In fact, if you have any comments at all I would be glad to hear them. E-mail me at jnjcfloh@webtv.net or jbpatter@kent.edu if you wish. Your comments would be a pleasant contrast to all the ads and appeals for money. Thanks for your attention and I hope to be back soon with something more, uh, well normal maybe??