A Really Good Day(43)

Researchers at Johns Hopkins and NYU, also working with subjects diagnosed with terminal cancer, have used higher doses of psilocybin and seen similarly striking results. The author Michael Pollan, in an insightful and thoroughly researched article published in The New Yorker, interviewed researchers and subjects of both the NYU and Johns Hopkins studies. Stephen Ross, the lead scientist at NYU, told him: “I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it. They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”

The results are remarkable, as is the excitement of the researchers involved. What I find particularly interesting, however, is their focus. Their interest is specifically in the mystical experience engendered by psilocybin, which is what they believe inspires the dramatic reduction of anxiety and depression and the increase in well-being. Roland Griffiths, the psychopharmacologist in charge of the Johns Hopkins Medical School studies, came to the research, he told an interviewer, after meditation “opened up a spiritual window” for him and made him “curious about the nature of mystical experience and spiritual transformation.”*2 As Pollan wrote, “Griffiths believes that the long-term effectiveness of the drug is due to its ability to occasion…a transformative experience, but not by changing the brain’s long-term chemistry, as a conventional psychiatric drug like Prozac does.”

Similarly, the insights engendered by psilocybin-induced mystical experiences are theorized to be behind the remarkable recent results in studies on alcohol and tobacco addiction. The initial success of these studies should, perhaps, be no surprise, given the overtly spiritual nature of the most popular treatment for alcoholism: Alcoholics Anonymous. Most people know that the Twelve Step program instructs people to seek aid from a “higher power” in overcoming dependence. Few are aware, however, that AA was founded on a drug-induced mystical experience.

In 1934, Bill W., cofounder of AA, was treated for his alcoholism with a hallucinogenic belladonna alkaloid. The resulting mystical experience led him to become sober and inspired him to write the book and cofound the organization that have changed the lives of so many millions around the world. In the 1950s, Bill W. underwent LSD therapy, and found his experience so inspiring that he sought to have the drug made part of the AA program. His board of directors overruled him. More than half a century later, it appears that Bill W. is finally being vindicated.*3

Though microdosing causes no mystical experiences, I am drawn to these studies, not because I am by nature a spiritual person, but because I am a skeptic. I am an atheist who believes that religion in all its forms is a delusion, occasionally benign, more often vicious, violent, and cruel. I was raised in this belief as some are raised in the belief in God. In my home, atheism was a dogma as rigid as evangelical Christianity or Wahhabist Islam. The most religious of Jewish parents sometimes tell their children that if they marry non-Jews the parents will “sit shiva” for them; they will cut off contact and mourn them as if they are dead. My father once told me that if I rejected the atheism with which I was brought up and became an Orthodox Jew, he would sit shiva for me.

When reading accounts by LSD explorers, you can’t avoid the tales of their spiritual awakenings. When Ram Dass was a young man, he described himself just as I describe myself: “Inured to religion…I didn’t have one whiff of God.” Psychedelics led him to gain access to the divine, as they led Aldous Huxley and even the sober Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. Jim Fadiman writes of “Spiritual Journeys,” and the importance of the spiritual in his own life.

I keep asking the psychonauts and researchers I interview if they believe that the mystical experiences that transform the lives of people with end-stage cancer and the lives of Harvard professors like Ram Dass are real. When Aldous Huxley writes in The Doors of Perception that psychedelic drugs gave him “a glimpse of the unbearable splendour of ultimate Reality,” does that ultimate reality exist outside himself, or was he just suffering from a delusion that it did? Isn’t it more likely that the many people from various religious traditions who use psychedelics to gain access to the divine are merely confusing brain-centered hallucinations with God? Most of the time, the reply I get is “What difference does it make?” If the experience is transformative, why do I care so much about whether it is “real”? What do I even mean by “real”?

I was going on at perhaps tiresome length to my husband about how frustrating I find those anti-ontological, circular answers to rational questions, when I noticed a peculiar expression on his face.

“What?” I said.

“It’s not like you’ve never had spiritual experiences,” he said.

I bristled. “I have never in my life had a spiritual experience,” I said. “Never.”

“Uh-huh,” he said blandly.

“What?”

“Esalen?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Esalen.”

Esalen Institute, a “holistic learning and retreat center” in Big Sur, is a place where you can go on a “modern day vision quest,” take a class in the “Energetics of Consciousness,” or study the “Alchemy of Love and Aliveness.” It is an overtly spiritual place, where meditation and yoga first gained a foothold in the West. It’s also where many of the early researchers into the therapeutic uses of LSD and other psychedelics gathered to exchange information and insight. So what was I, the condescending rationalist, doing at Esalen? I could spin some yarn about how Big Sur, on the Central Coast of California, where the Santa Lucia Mountains drop abruptly into the Pacific, is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I could blame it on how much I love a good massage (Esalen hosts one of the best massage schools in the world). I could describe the stunningly beautiful hot baths, cantilevered out over the crashing surf below. I could complain about how hard it is to find a reasonably priced place to hole up and write, especially one that feeds you three delicious, wholesome meals a day made from food plucked from the garden. All that is true, but it’s not the whole truth.