How to Change Your Mind
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I was recently watching the short documentary series “How to Change Your Mind” on Netflix. It was made after the book of the same name by Michael Pollan, and featured the author as a presenter. It was all about the medicinal and religious uses of psychedelics, the positive aspects of mind-expanding chemicals and so on.
In one episode he talks about the discovery of LSD by Albert Hoffman, who was one of an old school of experimental chemists who would try a little of whatever chemical he synthesised. A fascinating story followed of Hoffman cycling home while hallucinating on LSD, which seems to have been very trippy.
But Pollan also talks about how the psychedelic Peyote cactus has special significance for the North American Indians and is a key sacrament in the Native American Church. Much like Ayahuasca in South America it has a religious status. So it seems that these substances have long been part of religious traditions in the Americas. Also there was a story of a Native American man who cured his addiction through a peyote ceremony.
That then put me in mind of the mention of Soma and “enlightenment through light-filled herbs” which were mentioned in the Veda’s, although the tradition and the plants seem to have died out in India. It’s fascinating to me that this kind of mind-expanding way to the religious experience seems to be making a comeback in the global expansion of ayahuasca.
Anyway, very interesting docu series! Well worth watching.
Comments
The trailer…
If anyone is interested in cognitive or philosophical means to help change your mind, here's an interview with the psychology professor and author Adam Grant. Its kind of business oriented but all the ideas and lessons are usable in our everyday, spiritual lives. His book "Think Again" was #2 on the New York Times best seller list.
Hmm yeah, it won’t be for everyone.
“Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.”
― Terence McKenna
Lots of effort has been going into the use of psychedelics to help people with PTSD or other emotional problems they may be having, in controlled, therapeutic settings and have been used in spiritual contexts for the history of humanity. It can open people up to the possibilities of seeing things in new ways. I agree that they can be powerful tools for waking people up and opening their hearts in new and profound ways.
I suppose I'm wary of them as a path in themselves or a widely applied panacea. I think recreational or personal use doesn't always lead to positive growth. There's a danger or recklessness potential. Also, as a spiritual path I view their use as more of a crutch than a true path to awakening.
My posting Think Again was mainly to point people to other methods to change one's mind, to open oneself to possibilities.
The thing with books is that they are very much a self-selected ‘bubble’ of topics that we surround ourselves with. It’s like searches on the internet, it’s a biased list of topics. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be good to read all of the nr.1 NYT bestsellers in a year, it would certainly be a way to catch up with the zeitgeist, but that’s not exactly a casual purchase.
Travel is supposed to be mind-awakening as well, you often hear people say they feel more alive and in contact with new cultures when travelling. Maybe we did lose a certain something when we left the nomadic lifestyle behind, these days one of the biggest purchases you can do is buying your own home, which ties you down to a mortgage and a location.
...Change is inevitable (thoughts -wholesome & unwholesome- continually changing how we see things) ...Suffering (the changing thoughts) optional
No need to try to change the mind.... just unfetter it...
It’s not so easy to unfetter the mind, if it “signifies a mind that is not bound by attachments, cravings or delusions”. That sounds like an enlightened mind, which in general isn’t affected by chemicals like psychedelics. I remember Ram Dass’ story about how he went to India with doses of LSD and gave them to various gurus and noticed it hardly seemed to affect them, and was told later that it allows them to see the “lesser lights”, the first stages of what comes after death.
Even a mind with few attachments or delusions will be stuck in the bubble of what it knows. It’s one of those things, you usually hardly notice that your mind stays on certain tracks, and that what you perceive is just the ordinary.
For many people these substances have inspired a deep spiritual search, for those of us who are still bound by habits and attachments it opens up a window where we can catch a glimpse of the wider universe. I’ve been following some of Graham Hancock’s stories about his psychedelic voyages and the things he encountered, it seems to really unleash something visionary in some people.
There are non-chemical techniques like breathwork which can have a similar effect. Stanislav Grof did a lot of work with these in the time after Nixon’s “war on drugs” started in the late 1960’s. In some ayahuasca retreat centres like Rythmia in Costa Rica they do a day of breathwork sessions to prepare people before doing ayahuasca ceremonies.
That’s true but growth isn’t always the answer. When an oak tree reaches middle age it doesn’t get any taller, just a little wider and it’s growth lies in successive generations of acorns it produces. I think with humans we produce children when young, and we try and produce wisdom when middle aged.
I think with a lot of psychedelics their real use lies in deconditioning, in starting down a new, fresh path that is different from where the mind has taken you before. Whether that is truly awakening is a matter for debate, because psychedelics have their own logic about where they take you, from what I’ve read and seen.
When you see ‘positive growth’ or ‘awakening’ as your goal, you are holding in mind a certain image of where you want to go. If this is something specific and relatively clearly defined, like the path to being a Buddhist arhat, then psychedelics probably aren’t for you. Instead, psychedelics as I understand it are for those people who could do with a new inspiration.
I wanted to add this video, which is an intelligent high level interview of the author Michael Pollan conducted by Hamilton Morris. Really worth watching if you are interested in the debate around the war on drugs and legalisation…
I thought Hamilton’s approach in this chat was very interesting: he basically said that although Pollan’s book takes a medical and religious approach to the uses of psychedelics, there was a wider issue — that in reality the right to use mind-expanding chemicals ought to be basic to the human condition, like appreciating music or freedom from slavery. That framing the debate in terms of medical usefulness was to potentially miss this bigger question.
The war on drugs has been a failure of massive proportions, wasting a lot of law enforcement funds, creating much criminality and damaging many lives. The legalisation of cannabis in 10 US states so far has created the beginnings of a wave of potential decriminalisation of a variety of useful and harmless substances. I’m largely in favour of this, it makes no sense to me to have an underground industry making these things.
They also talked about the situation which got psychedelic mushrooms banned in the Netherlands. There was a French girl who took a dose of mushrooms in Amsterdam and ended up jumping out of a five storey window and died, the case got taken up by the media and the courts banned mushrooms. It shows the power of the media in these kinds of cases. The banning of ayahuasca here was similar, it followed a scare story.
Michael Pollan also wrote a follow up book, “This is Your Mind on Plants” in which he talks about how actually many plants have an effect on the mind, from sugar and coffee to poppies and cacti. The book is divided into three main parts, an essay on opium from poppies, one on caffeine and tea and sugar, and one on mescaline and cacti.
I found the account of a San Pedro cactus ceremony near the end of the book particularly moving, because it showed how going through these things together brings a group of relative strangers into close contact. It is said that mescaline brings forth feelings of togetherness, brotherhood and nobility, and that it is a much gentler experience than say ayahuasca, which takes you by the scruff of the neck and starts showing you things.
Why do we always have to go into the spiritual benefits of hallucinogenics? Why can't we just get high and be happy with that?
Oops
I’ve now acquired Michael Pollan’s book of the same name, and wanted to quote a part of a letter written by Huston Smith to Bob Jesse.
"The Johns Hopkins experiment shows — proves — that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. It uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity's secularism. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a re-sacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that is our best defense against not only soullessness, but against religious fanaticism. And it does so in the very teeth of the unscientific prejudices built into our current drug laws."
Seems there is some hope for the mystical experience!
Only if our Government suddenly becomes rational.
It surprises me how much of the current psychedelic re-awakening is based on the direct mystical experience. I was expecting to see much more enthusiasm for the medical uses, such as against addiction and depression, but the books first hundred pages are very much a mixture of the two.
Thus we open other door.
A piece from the MAPS newsletter archives…
I heard the real reason for the federal criminalisation of Marijuana the other day: so that the Nixon white house could look good to their fan base by rounding up and putting in jail a lot of young black folks. Very few white weed users ever get prosecuted.
My outsider impression of the Netherlands is that it has an open drug policy. Is it possible to get a psychedelic and take in a spiritual or therapeutic environment? Are you thinking of taking that step, you've talked a lot about it.
Some psychedelics are legal in the Netherlands, most are not. The UN Convention on Illegal Substances is something you have to sign to join the UN, and that obligates you to persecute illegal drugs, and many psychedelics like LSD and DMT fall under that obligation.
I’ve considered taking psychedelics, but I’m somewhat careful because of my hypnagogia, which places me in a vulnerable category. I may still do it at some point.
Some news, it seems the US FDA has rejected a phase 3 trial aimed at introducing drug-assisted psychedelic therapy with MDMA (ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder. The idea behind it is that while receiving therapy on the drug, feeling good allows you to more easily access difficult memories, and within a few sessions the emotional ‘colour’ of the memory shifts, as it becomes associated with happier feelings, and then the patient doesn’t suffer from PTSD anymore. It is the first real therapeutic advance to arrive for PTSD in over 25 years, providing a glimmer of hope for veterans, firefighters and first responders plagued by the condition.
Really, they should have anticipated how closely these trials would be scrutinised by anti-drug advisors. But there were one or two cases where a researcher said to a patient, we are making history here, and the patient felt pressurised not to report negative results, and ended up writing a letter about it to the FDA. Hence accusations of bias, and a vote by the panel of advisors against letting the case go forward.
This has international implications as well, as the FDA is the key agency for determining how legal these various substances are, and whether they have a medical use.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/more-bad-news-for-psychedelic-drug-company-fda-expands-probe-after-rejection/
It now seems genetic sequencing is enhancing one type of psychedelic.
https://www.wired.com/story/breeding-stronger-magic-mushrooms/
In the UK as far as I know, it is not illegal to poison yourself with liberty caps. One Mushroom ID book I had, described liberty caps as poisonous, leading to dangerous hallucinations. It is illegal to dry them or sell them. Not sure if this grey area has changed. Very difficult to police.
Fortunately the last time I came across some fresh ones was in a Christian monastery garden in North London. I was on retreat and had to work out if the two hours of hallucinations would make me normalised sufficiently for the evening meal (in silence) apart from a bit of uplifting reading out loud from a designated monk.
I took the risk. And made the still a little strange evening meal.
It seems the young people these days buy “research chemicals” online which are slightly chemically different (and so not illegal) from mainstream psychedelics but still have the same effect. Interesting…