If We Just Knew What Mind Is

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan.  Penguin Press.  465 pp.

How’s that for a sub-title?  Why didn’t he just add, the Universe?

Except that in some ways that does describe what Michael Pollan’s book is about.  It’s also about the history of psychedelic drugs and the experiences of a number of people who have used them, including the author himself, who tried them only recently, as part of writing this book.

If there is a villain in the history of psychedelics, though Michael Pollan often bends over backwards trying not to call him one, it’s the man most associated with them, Timothy Leary.  Until he came along, the drugs had primarily been used in controlled scientific settings, or as part of religious rituals, often by groups of indigenous people.  Leary, with his famous slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” opened the drugs up to wide recreational use (although as one researcher points out, the original meaning of that term, re-creation, might not be entirely a bad thing).  In uncontrolled settings some crazy things happened, and the drugs were eventually banned.

Yet in quiet, carefully controlled ways, scientific research on psychedelics has continued, though not in the widespread way that happened before Leary.  People have used the drugs to treat patients who are terminally ill, others who are addicted and depressed, often with extraordinary results.  People have what could be described as religious, or mystical experiences.  And though—as Houston Smith pointed out—a mystical experience does not necessarily create a mystical person, these experiences have been important in turning lives around.

The question is: wouldn’t they be just as helpful to ordinary people?  Wouldn’t they make life richer, and more meaningful, for everyone, not just for people who are at the end of their lives or struggling with depression?  Pollan makes a strong case that they would.

The other thing about these drugs, which many people say, is that they have provided the opening that led people to a more spiritual life.  That happened most notably with Richard Alpert, who began with psychedelics, moved on to spiritual practice and became the teacher Ram Dass.  But he is far from the only one.  When you start snooping around in the biographies of spiritual teachers, you find that many had their beginnings in some drug experience.  Nearly all have renounced drugs since.

What Pollan makes of this is that the human mind has a kind of default state, in which it sees things and immediately categorizes them, classifying them in the usual landscape.  Those are trees outside my window, and some grass, and a wall of stones.  But as many people have pointed out—even some with no drug connection, like William Blake—if we saw things as they actually are, we’d be in a constant state of astonishment.  We’d never get anything done (Leary was a horrifying figure because his advice would have brought capitalist society to a standstill).  But we’d realize we’re living in paradise.

The thing that people have always said is that, though drug experiences bring about some momentary realization, spiritual practice brings the same results in a more lasting way.  There are even stories of meditation masters who have taken LSD and seen no result whatsoever.  Though I’ve never taken drugs, I’ve practice meditation seriously for 28 years (though I’m certainly no master).  I’m a good test case to see if what people are saying is true.

I’ve never had the extraordinary hallucinogenic experiences that Pollan describes, among other people and even for himself.  (There are accounts of such experiences all over the place.  There was a great one in a recent Parabola.  And Tom Robbins writes a beauty in his autobiography.)  I’ve had hallucinations occasionally, usually on retreat.  But the other result that people have noticed, a relaxation of the thinking mind, a realization that what we call mind is much larger than the thinking part we usually identify with, an understanding that we’re connected with something much larger than ourselves, something that transcends our ordinary life, are things I have experienced, though not necessarily with the rock-solid conviction of someone who just came off a trip.  I’m sometimes suspicious of those rock-solid convictions.  I wonder how long they last.

It would seem that, in the case of dying, addiction, and depression, three situations that these drugs are known to help, the problem is often the same: people are locked into conditions, often brought on by compulsive thinking, that they’re not able to escape.  It’s as if they’re trapped in a gerbil cage of thinking, and can’t get off that wheel.  But there are ways to make the walls more permeable, even open the cage up.  Meditation does that over time.  The drugs apparently have more immediate, if less lasting, results.

The whole question of what consciousness is is the most interesting one Pollan brings up.  He talks a lot about the human brain, about altering the brain’s chemistry with drugs, about all the things the brain does, and it’s definitely a complicated and remarkable organ.  But a conviction I have through meditation—though it’s not something I can prove—is that the intelligence of the human being, and of the universe, is not located just in the brain, but in the whole body, every cell of the body, also outside the body, in everything that is.  There are Buddhist teachings that say as much.  My personal conviction comes from my experience in meditation, as strange as that sounds.

I also think, and this is a real sticking point for Pollan, that our experience is our experience, and we shouldn’t doubt it.  It isn’t perfectly reliable, by any means, but it’s all we’ve got to go on.  A drug experience is no less an experience just because it’s been brought on by a drug.  Such an experience is now a fact in your life.  It’s part of who you are.

I found How to Change Your Mind slightly verbose in places; it would probably be a better book if Pollan lopped off a fourth of it.  But it was a completely serious endeavor, including a huge amount of research, and Pollan deserves a lot of credit for that.  He seems to conclude that, within certain parameters, use of these drugs should be legal, and I don’t disagree.  If they help people open to a more spiritual and fulfilling life, they’re well worth it.