The second book, TiHKAL, came out in 1998, with the acronym standing for “Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved,” and referring to drugs like LSD, DMT, and ibogaine. In this volume, the Shulgins included recipes for fifty-five more substances along with even more commentary. “Use them with care,” they wrote, “and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get to a really bad place. . . .”
Not that their cautions prevented the inevitable banging about, or avoided the predictable consequences. Two years after they published PIHKAL, Richard Meyers, a spokesperson for the DEA’s19 San Francisco office, told reporters: “It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs. Agents tell me that in clandestine labs they have raided, they have found copies of them.” So they raided Shulgin’s lab, fined him $25,000 for violating the terms of their agreement, and yanked his Schedule I license.
While a variety of government agencies continued to surveil Shulgin for the rest of his life, he was never charged with a crime. Nor, as Rick Doblin, founder of the psychedelic research nonprofit MAPS, explains, did he ever regret his decision.
“Sasha,” Doblin says, “was fiercely in favor of personal liberty. He felt these kinds of consciousness-expanding experiences were crucial to the world’s spiritual and emotional development. His decision to share his research came from a real fear that he would die with this enormous body of knowledge trapped inside him. Even before PiHKAL, Sasha had that open-source impulse. He gave away information to anyone who asked—it didn’t matter if they were DEA agents or underground psychedelic chemists. But after publication, when the crackdown came, it was like locking the barn door after the horses had already gone. The research was out there and Sasha knew, even if the contemporary climate was hostile to these substances, sometime in the future things would change and his work would be very useful.”
By publishing his psychedelic cookbooks, Shulgin bypassed the geographical and cultural limits of the botany of desire. In open-sourcing these recipes, he distributed hundreds of tools for investigating consciousness and changed countless lives. “Everybody knows who the Shulgins20 are,” wrote Teafaerie, a close friend of the couple, in her widely circulated essay: “No Retirement Plan for Wizards.” “It’s pretty much impossible to overstate their collective contribution to psychedelic culture, and indeed to the very fabric of human society at large. They not only brought us most of our favorite alphabetamines, they tested them on themselves and published their extensive notes so the rest of us could benefit from their groundbreaking discoveries. Sasha is the greatest psychopharmacologist who ever lived. Ann is a pioneer in the field of empathogen-assisted therapy. Their love story has inspired millions of people. And that’s just for starters.”
This Is Your Brain on Drugs
While Shulgin definitely got things started, his impact was primarily felt on the edges of society—in law enforcement and the counterculture. But it’s next-generation psychedelic researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris who have brought that impact directly into the mainstream.
Carhart-Harris didn’t start out21 interested in mind-altering substances. In the beginning, when completing a master’s in psychoanalysis at Brunel University in England, it was the unconscious that caught his attention. “Here was a part of our mind that seemed to govern so much of our behavior,” he explains, “yet it was incredibly difficult to study. I was in a seminar where the class leader rattled off all the different methods we use to access it—free association, dream analysis, hypnosis, bungled actions, slips of the tongue. None were very good. Except for dreaming, they’re all indirect approaches. And dreaming takes place when we’re asleep, so all we can get is after-the-fact reports. If we were going to make any headway on this problem, we had to find a better way to explore the unconscious.”
In his hunt for that better way, Carhart-Harris picked up psychologist Stanislav Grof’s classic book, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research. One of Grof’s main arguments was that during psychedelic states, our ego defenses are so diminished that we gain nearly direct access to the unconscious. That’s when it clicked. With tools like fMRI, Carhart-Harris could exploit this access—he could take pictures of the unconscious in real time.
After finishing his master’s, he switched careers and joined David Nutt’s lab (the psychopharmacologist we met in Chapter 3) at the University of Bristol, learning the basics of neuroimaging doing sleep research and making an initial foray into psychedelics by imaging MDMA. In 2009, he became head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London and became the second person in history to use fMRI to explore the neurological impact of psilocybin.22 And the very first to explore LSD.23
These were important milestones. “This is to neuroscience what the Higgs24 boson was to particle physics,” David Nutt told the Guardian. “We didn’t know how these profound effects were produced. It was too difficult to do. Scientists were either scared or couldn’t be bothered to overcome the enormous hurdles to get it done.”
More than anything else, what those first-ever imaging studies revealed was the middle ground that Sasha Shulgin never had the tools to map. Shulgin gave us a wider assortment of chemicals to assay and subjective reports about what happened when we did. Carhart-Harris closed this gap. He showed us what was going on in the brain, illuminating the neurological mechanisms that lay beneath Shulgin’s subjective reports.
And these newly discovered mechanisms shed more light on two of the fundamental characteristics of ecstasis: selflessness and richness. Earlier in the book, we explored how the deactivation of key parts of the brain, what’s called transient hypofrontality, is largely responsible for selflessness. Carhart-Harris extended this work, helping to determine exactly which parts are involved in that process. “A lot of the earlier imaging work on altered states gave us static pictures of the brain. So we made correlations: when we’re on LSD, this region deactivates; when we’re meditating, that region deactivates. But the technology has improved and we can now take dynamic pictures. This is how we know that the vanishing of self is not really about specific regions deactivating. It’s bigger than that. It’s more like whole networks disintegrating.”
One of the most important networks to disintegrate is the default mode network. Responsible for mind-wandering and daydreaming, this network is active when we’re awake but not focused on a task. It’s the source of a lot of our mind chatter, and with it, a lot of our unhappiness. But, like many of the brain’s systems, the default mode network is fragile. A little trouble in a couple of nodes is all it takes to knock it offline. “Early psychologists used terms like ‘ego disintegration’ to describe the effects of an altered state,” says Carhart-Harris. “They were more correct than they knew. The ego is really just a network, and things like psychedelics, flow, and meditation compromise those connections. They literally dis-integrate the network.”
The other important discovery made by Carhart-Harris and his team involved the birth of new networks. The scans revealed that psychedelics created highly synchronized connections between far-flung areas of the brain, the kinds of linkages we don’t normally make. So when researchers like James Fadiman discovered that psychedelics could enhance creative problem solving—these far-flung connections were the reason why. Or, as Carhart-Harris explains, “What we’ve done in this research is begin to identify the biological basis of the reported mind expansion associated with psychedelic drugs.”
Carhart-Harris set out to take real-time pictures of the unconscious and when he did, he saw the unconscious actively hunting for new ideas. It’s a discovery that helps to legitimize these substances as performance-enhancing tools for solving wicked problems. And it’s one that Carhart-Harris feels couldn’t come at a better time.
“A lot of people have been pointing out that the modern world is in crisis. I don’t know if I ag
ree with the most pessimistic of those assessments, but I do know it takes significant cognitive flexibility to solve complex problems. So I do think all this research is timely. It’s making us a little less afraid of a powerful problem-solving tool. Going forward, I have a hunch that’s going to matter.”
The Hyperspace Lexicon
On September 22, 1823, a seventeen-year-old farm boy from Manchester, New York, named Joseph Smith25 had a strange dream about an angel named Moroni. The angel told him of a treasure buried on a hilltop behind his house. Upon awakening, Smith climbed that hill and, just shy of the peak, unearthed a gold-leafed book. Bound together with three D-shaped rings and written in strange hieroglyphics he later described as “reformed Egyptian,” it contained a prophecy that would alter the course of U.S. history.
The book told of a lost tribe of Israelites who had sailed to North America in 600 BCE. It recounted the story of a prophet named Mormon and the second coming of Jesus Christ. If true, these ideas would turn nearly two thousand years of Christian orthodoxy on its head.
But there was one small problem: proof. The angel didn’t let Smith bring the golden tablets down “Mormon Hill.” In fact, by the time Smith translated the revelation and published it a few years later as the Book of Mormon, the golden plates were nowhere to be found. The angel, Smith reported, had taken them back for good.
While many of Smith’s contemporaries doubted his story, and subsequent scholars found no evidence of a “reformed Egyptian” culture in North America, to the faithful, Smith’s account stands as gospel. So compelling was his epiphany that it inspired one of the most successful religions in American history. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints transformed the barren deserts of Utah into a garden theocracy, constructing massive temples and a global mission network that impacts millions to this day.
And Joseph Smith was by no means the first person to have a prophetic vision that then birthed a religion. Moses fathered three of the world’s largest traditions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—when he came down from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets written by “the finger of God.” But this time as well, the problem was proof.
When Moses returned to camp, he found the Israelites worshipping a golden calf. Enraged at their idolatry, he smashed the newly forged Ten Commandments into shards. It was the first time in recorded Western history that God had directly communicated with humanity, and the evidence was destroyed almost as soon as it had been created. The chastened Hebrews had to take Moses’s word for it.
Until recently, those sorts of visions were always unverifiable. Access to ecstasis was rare. Understanding its mechanisms and meaning rarer still. When someone did find a hotline to God, the experience was usually a one-off: unrepeatable and impossible to validate. The only way to gauge the truth revealed in these states was to assess the conviction of the original visionary or listen to the retroactive stories of their followers.
But Sasha Shulgin and those researchers who have come after him have changed our relationship to revelation. Because, say what you will about pharmacology being a cheat code to the mystical, there’s no question it works. “[S]ome people can reach transcendent26 states through meditation or similar trance-inducing techniques,” New York University neurologist Oliver Sacks once explained, “[b]ut drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand.” No climbing a mountaintop and waiting for lightning to strike. No sitting on a cushion wondering if nirvana will ever arrive. Pop the pill, take the hit, and pretty soon you’re undeniably someplace else. This ease of access means more people can visit these states more often and collect more data. As a result, they no longer have to treat one person’s epiphany as written-in-stone Truth.
Not long after the publication of PiHKAL and TiHKAL, online message boards and forums began popping up to provide clandestine recipes for kitchen chemists and detailed maps for explorers of inner space. Referring to Erowid,27 one of the largest and best-regarded of these online repositories, author Erik Davis writes: “By far the most entertaining vault contains thousands of ‘experience reports’ logged by psychonauts flying high (and taking notes) on exotic cacti, prescription pharmaceuticals, and newfangled phenethylamines. . . . At once formulaic and bizarre, these reports provide details . . . largely lacking in the hazy trip tales of yore.”
This open-source approach to pharmacology has given us a way to fact-check ecstatic inspiration, moving us from the “one to many” route—à la Moses and Joseph Smith—to a “many to many” model. Rather than having to take anyone’s word for what happens out there, explorers can now repeat the original experiments and see for themselves. It’s a development that upends the closely guarded and often reactionary world of revealed truth and religious insight.
Take, for example, psychiatrist Rick Strassman’s28 research at the University of New Mexico. In the early 1990s, Strassman was searching for a naturally occurring substance in the human body that could prompt mystical states, which he hoped might provide a way to explain the epiphanies of Moses and so many other historical prophets. Initially, he turned his attention to melatonin but, disappointed with the results, soon decided to focus on its cousin DMT (dimethyltryptamine). DMT made sense as a candidate. It occurs naturally in the human body yet when vaporized or injected, becomes a powerful psychedelic.
Strassman was shocked by how powerful it was: “I had over twenty years in experience29 and training and study in [a] Zen monastery, and I was expecting those kinds of enlightenment experiences from . . . DMT.” But Strassman’s study group didn’t experience anything that could comfortably be described as Buddhist. More than 50 percent of his research subjects blasted off to distant galaxies, had hair-raising encounters with multidimensional entities, and came back swearing that those experiences felt “as real, or in many cases, more real than waking life.”
When Strassman published his findings in the Buddhist review Tricycle, there was a considerable backlash. He was roundly criticized by readers and disowned by his meditation community for suggesting there might be something else going on in mystical states besides Zen oneness. In 1995, it all became too much. He shut the project down, sent the remaining chemicals back to the DEA, and retired to the mountains of Taos, New Mexico, to knit alpaca sweaters.
But the precedent Strassman set proved compelling. In the wake of his study, unsanctioned use of DMT and its more potent cousin, 5-MeO-DMT, skyrocketed. An experience too strange for all but the most ardent sixties’ trippers became the first truly Digital Age psychedelic—knowingly referenced in DJ samples, discussed at length in podcasts, and inspiring online forums all its own.
One forum in particular, the Hyperspace Lexicon, reflects a collective effort to codify and make sense of the utterly novel landscape of DMT (which aficionados refer to as “hyperspace”). The Lexicon is packed with neologisms30 that would have made James Joyce proud. Among many others, there’s “lumenorgastic,” for the orgasmic experience of white light; “mangotanglement,” referring to the brightly colored fractal building blocks of DMT reality; and “ontoseismic,” for the utter shattering of your worldview after glimpsing the DMT universe. But tucked beneath the creative nomenclature, the Hyperspace Lexicon reflects a watershed in how we relate to ecstatic revelation.
For a concept to make it into the Lexicon, it can’t have come from anyone’s singular experience. Rather, the new idea has to resonate with a critical mass of the community. And even then, it’s taken with a grain of salt.
Consider the first entry, under “A,” for “Akashic Book,” an imagined but seemingly real book that, as the Lexicon says, “contains deep knowledge in a language you can’t read but do understand. It is so profound . . . it contains exactly the right wisdom for you at this moment.” Whether Moses and Joseph Smith perceived that same Akashic Book as stone tablets or golden plates is impossible to prove (though the similarities to these reports are notable). However, unlike the lessons of these prophets, no one is being asked to take insights gleaned from that boo
k at face value. While the Lexicon specifies that the knowledge it contains is profound, even omniscient, it then qualifies that with “for you at this moment.”
Another example of the provisional nature of the Lexicon is the phrase “End of the Line.” Defined as: “When having a DMT experience and you feel as if you have reached the Absolute Point. The Alpha and Omega of the universe and your entire existence. Then you are having a ‘The End of the Line’ type breakthrough. It may very well not be true at all, but for you, subjectively, it feels as if. So, even though an “End of the Line” experience might have birthed hellfire zealots in earlier days, today we have anonymous explorers bracketing the certainty of their experience with phrases like “you feel as if” and “it may very well not be true at all.”
If you put this all together, what seems to be emerging in the aftermath of Shulgin, Carhart-Harris, and Strassman is a kind of “agnostic Gnosticism,” an experience of the infinite rooted in the certainty that all interpretations are personal, provisional, and partial. As a result, no one can claim their particular vision of the divine as correct, if there are thousands of other “visions” with which to compare it. And anyone who does try to claim the spotlight? Even a few decades ago, they could have started a cult. These days, they’ll just get trolled online, then ignored.
And what that does is leave more room for open experimentation. It disempowers anyone tempted to escalate his position and privilege, and empowers everyone else to make sense of their own experiences.
When the physicist Enrico Fermi famously guessed the number of piano tuners in Chicago, or the number of stars in our galaxy, he did so by applying provisional estimates to impossibly large problems. And while never exact, his guesses often landed within an order of magnitude of the actual number—enough, in other words, to act upon.
Today we’re following Fermi’s lead, applying the power of Big Data to approximate answers to the Big Questions. One or two data points like a Moses or a Joseph Smith can’t ever make a trend, but what about a thousand data points? A hundred thousand? A picture is starting to emerge of the worlds inside us. And while it’s no less strange, it is arguably a good deal more accurate than the singular epiphanies that have come before.
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