How to Change Your Mind

The book covers three areas: the history of psychedelics since the development of LSD, the impact of psychedelics through both scientific studies and extensive anecdotal accounts, and the neuroscience behind how psychedelics affect the brain. This summary focuses primarily on the practical impact rather than the historical narrative. The book is particularly valuable for those interested in first-hand accounts of psychedelic experiences.

In brief historical context, LSD was created by Albert Hofmann in 1943 by accident. It was researched for many years and the body of evidence supporting LSD's ability to create transcendental experiences and produce significant improvements in mental health grew increasingly robust. Despite overwhelmingly positive results, a series of negative incidents and news stories fueled a movement that ultimately resulted in its prohibition.

This wasn't the first time in history that psychedelics have been banned despite their overwhelmingly positive impacts. One of the first battles in the war on drugs occurred when Cortes met the Aztecs. The Aztecs were already well acquainted with psilocybin and they commonly used it to gain access to the divine. "The Nahuatl word for the mushrooms - flesh of the gods - must have sounded to Spanish ears like a direct challenge to the Christian sacrament, which of course was also understood to be the flesh of the gods, or rather of the one God. Yet the mushroom sacrament enjoyed an undeniable advantage over the Christian version." The Catholic Church subsequently engaged in interrogation and torture of the native peoples in order to control their use of psilocybin in response to the perceived threat. "The Roman Catholic Church might have been the first institution to fully recognize the threat to its authority posed by a psychedelic plant, but it certainly wouldn't be the last." The book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian Muraresku covers other historical accounts of psychedelic's ability to connect people with the divine.

As history and culture have patterned, one of the primary branches of research on LSD was its ability to create mystical states. Mystical states are defined by four markers according to William James, a researcher on mystical experiences:

How effective was LSD at creating mystical experiences? Roland Griffiths, one of the early scientific researchers of LSD, reported that 70% of participants had a mystical experience. "As a scientific phenomenon, if you can create a condition in which 70 percent of people will say they have had one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives... well, as a scientist that's just incredible." Griffiths compared the banning of LSD to making "Gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums, or sunsets"—the types of experiences that tend to elicit awe. Notably, very few participants reported negative experiences, or "bad trips," as long as they were guided through the process. The most common outcomes included an increase in love, greater openness, heightened sensitivity to others, and the acquisition of subjectively profound insight or knowledge.

Remarkably, although many participants were non-religious, they consistently reported experiences that led them to believe there was something beyond the material world, even if they did not necessarily attribute it to God or a divine being. A clearly biological catalyst—a plant—was producing experiences that participants described as transcending the substance itself. As the author noted: "Here was a curious paradox. The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality - the very basis of religious belief."

The impact of psychedelics is so significant that one theory of human evolution—the stoned-ape theory—places them as a central component. "Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors 'access to realms of supernatural power,' 'catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection,' and 'brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.'" The author reflected on his own experience with mushrooms: "if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, 'forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.'" Whether or not psychedelics played a role in ancestral evolution, they consistently provide an evolution of thought.

Besides inducing mystical experiences, psychedelic studies in the 50's were used to treat addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, autism, and end-of-life anxiety with more than 40,000 participants and 1,000 clinical papers. The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous sought to introduce LSD to AA due to its effectiveness and the American Psychiatric Association hailed it as a new wonder drug. Here are some statistics on how effective psychedelics are as healing agents:

These results are notable. Current studies on psychedelics continue to show highly efficacious outcomes with substances including psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and ibogaine.

The banning of a substance for scientific study is nearly unprecedented in our modern world, especially when it has consistently produced such impressive outcomes. The bias against drugs (psychedelics) is not only scientifically unsubstantiated, but is also religiously unsubstantiated, the irony being that it simultaneously benefits both seemingly contradictory fields yet both have chosen bias over conscious experimentation.