In 1998, Griffiths, Jesse, and Richards began designing a pilot study loosely based on the Good Friday Experiment. “It wasn’t a psychotherapy study,” Richards points out. “It was a study designed to determine whether psilocybin can elicit a transcendental experience. That we were able to obtain permission to give it to healthy normals is a tribute to Roland’s long history of commanding respect both at Hopkins and in Washington.” In 1999, the protocol was approved, but only after wending its way through five layers of review at Hopkins as well as the FDA and the DEA. (Many of Griffiths’s Hopkins colleagues were skeptical of the proposal, worried psychedelic research might jeopardize federal funding; one told me there were “people in the Department of Psychiatry and the broader institution who questioned the work, because this class of compounds carries a lot of baggage from the ’60s.”)
“We had faith that the people on all these committees would be good scientists,” Richards told me. “And with luck maybe a few of them had tried mushrooms in college!” Roland Griffiths became the principal investigator of the trial, Bill Richards became the clinical director, and Bob Jesse continued to work behind the scenes.
“I can vividly remember the first session I ran after that long twenty-two-year hiatus,” Richards recalled. He and I were together in the session room at Hopkins; I was sitting on the couch where the volunteers lie down during their journeys, and Richards was in the chair where he has now sat and guided more than a hundred psilocybin journeys since 1999. The room feels more like a den or living room than a room in a laboratory, with a plush sofa, vaguely spiritual paintings on the walls, a sculpture of the Buddha on a side table, and shelves holding a giant stone mushroom and various other nondenominational spiritual artifacts, as well as the small chalice in which the volunteers receive their pills.
“This guy is lying on the couch right there where you are, with tears streaming down his face, and I’m thinking, how absolutely beautiful and meaningful this experience is. How sacred. How can this ever have been illegal? It’s as if we made entering Gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums, or sunsets!
“I honestly never knew if this would happen again in my lifetime. And look at where we are now: the work at Hopkins has been going on now for fifteen years—five years longer than Spring Grove.”
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• • •
IN 1999, an odd but intriguing advertisement began appearing in weeklies in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., area, under the headline “Interested in the Spiritual Life?”
University research with entheogens (roughly, God-evoking substances such as peyote and sacred mushrooms) has returned. The field of study includes pharmacology, psychology, creativity enhancement, and spirituality. To explore the possibility of participating in confidential entheogen research projects, call 1-888-585-8870, toll free. www.csp.org.
Not long after, Bill Richards and Mary Cosimano, a social worker and school guidance counselor Richards recruited to help him guide psychedelic sessions, administered the first legal dose of psilocybin to an American in twenty-two years. In the years since, the Hopkins team has conducted more than three hundred psilocybin sessions, working in a variety of populations, including healthy normals, long-term and novice meditators, cancer patients, smokers seeking to break their habit, and religious professionals. I was curious to get the volunteer’s-eye view of the experience from all these types, but especially from that first cohort of healthy normals, partly because they were participants in a study that would turn out to be historically important and partly because I figured they would be the most like, well, me. What is it like to have a legally sanctioned, professionally guided, optimally comfortable high-dose psilocybin experience?
Yet the volunteers in the first experiments were not exactly like me, because at the time I doubt I would have read past “Interested in the Spiritual Life?” There were no stone-cold atheists in the original group, and interviews with nearly a dozen of them suggested many if not most of them came into the study with spiritual leanings to one degree or another. There was an energy healer, a man who’d done the whole Iron John trip, a former Franciscan friar, and an herbalist. There was also a physicist with an interest in Zen and a philosophy professor with an interest in theology. Roland Griffiths acknowledged, “We were interested in a spiritual effect and were biasing the condition initially [in that direction].”
That said, Griffiths went to great lengths in the design of the study to control for “expectancy effects.” In part this owed to Griffiths’s skepticism that a drug could occasion the same kind of mystical experience he had had in his meditation: “This is all truth to Bill and hypothesis to me. So we needed to control for Bill’s biases.” All of the volunteers were “hallucinogen naive,” so had no idea what psilocybin felt like, and neither they nor their monitors knew in any given session whether they were getting psilocybin or a placebo, and whether that placebo was a sugar pill or any one of half a dozen different psychoactive drugs. In fact the placebo was Ritalin, and as it turned out, the monitors guessed wrong nearly a quarter of the time as to what was in the pill a volunteer had received.
Even years after their experiences in the trials, the volunteers I spoke to recalled them in vivid detail and at considerable length; the interviews lasted hours. These people had big stories to tell; in several cases, these were the most meaningful experiences of their lives, and they clearly relished the opportunity to relive them for me in great detail, whether in person, by Skype, or on the telephone. The volunteers were also required to write a report of their experiences soon after they occurred, and all of the ones I interviewed were happy to share these reports, which made for strange and fascinating reading.
Many of the volunteers I spoke to reported initial episodes of intense fear and anxiety before surrendering themselves to the experience—as the sitters encourage them to do. The sitters work from a set of “flight instructions” prepared by Bill Richards, based on the hundreds of psychedelic journeys he has guided. The guides go over the instructions with the volunteers during the eight hours of preparation all of them receive before commencing their journeys.
The flight instructions advise guides to use mantras like “Trust the trajectory” and “TLO—Trust, Let Go, Be Open.” Some guides like to quote John Lennon: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”
Volunteers are told they may experience the “death/transcendence of your ego or everyday self,” but this is “always followed by Rebirth/Return to the normative world of space & time. Safest way to return to normal is to entrust self unconditionally to the emerging experiences.” Guides are instructed to remind volunteers they’ll never be left alone and not to worry about the body while journeying because the guides are there to keep an eye on it. If you feel as if you are “dying, melting, dissolving, exploding, going crazy etc.—go ahead.” Volunteers are quizzed: “If you see a door, what do you do? If you see a staircase, what do you do?” “Open it” and “climb up it” are of course the right answers.
This careful preparation means that a certain expectancy effect is probably unavoidable. After all, the researchers are preparing people for a major experience, involving death and rebirth and holding the potential for transformation. “It would be irresponsible not to warn volunteers these things could happen,” Griffiths pointed out when I asked if his volunteers were being “primed” for a certain kind of experience. One volunteer—the physicist—told me that the “mystical experience questionnaire” he filled out after every session also planted expectations. “I long to see some of the stuff hinted at in the questionnaire,” he wrote after an underwhelming session—perhaps on the placebo. “Seeing everything as alive and connected, meeting the void, or some embodiment of deities and things like that.” In this and so many other ways, it seems, the Hopkins psilocybin experience is the artifact not only of this powerful molecule but also of the preparation and expectations of the volunteer, the skills and worldviews of the sitters, B
ill Richards’s flight instructions, the decor of the room, the inward focus encouraged by the eyeshades and the music (and the music itself, much of which to my ears sounds notably religious), and, though they might not be pleased to hear it, the minds of the designers of the experiments.
The sheer suggestibility of psychedelics is one of their defining characteristics, so in one sense it is no wonder that so many of the first cohort of volunteers at Hopkins had powerful mystical experiences: the experiment was designed by three men intensely interested in mystical states of consciousness. (And it is likewise no wonder that the European researchers I interviewed all failed to see as many instances of mystical experience in their subjects as the Americans did in theirs.) And yet, for all the priming going on, the fact remains that the people who received a placebo simply didn’t have the kinds of experiences that volunteer after volunteer described to me as the most meaningful or significant in their lives.
Soon after a volunteer takes her pill from the little chalice, but before she feels any effects, Roland Griffiths will usually drop by the session room to wish her bon voyage. Griffiths often uses a particular metaphor that made an impression on many of the volunteers I spoke to. “Think of yourself as an astronaut being blasted into outer space,” Richard Boothby recalled him saying. Boothby is a philosophy professor who was in his early fifties when he volunteered at Hopkins. “You’re going way out there to take it all in and engage with whatever you find there, but you can be confident that we’ll be here keeping an eye on things. Think of us as ground control. We’ve got you covered.”
For the astronaut being blasted into space, the shudder of liftoff and strain of escaping Earth’s gravitational field can be wrenching—even terrifying. Several volunteers describe trying to hold on for dear life as they felt their sense of self rapidly disintegrating. Brian Turner, who at the time of his journey was a forty-four-year-old physicist working for a military contractor (with a security clearance), put it this way:
I could feel my body dissolving, beginning with my feet, until it all disappeared but the left side of my jaw. It was really unpleasant; I could count only a few teeth left and the bottom part of my jaw. I knew that if that went away I would be gone. Then I remembered what they told me, that whenever you encounter anything scary, go toward it. So instead of being afraid of dying I got curious about what was going on. I was no longer trying to avoid dying. Instead of recoiling from the experience, I began to interrogate it. And with that, the whole situation dissolved into this pleasant floaty feeling, and I became the music for a while.
Soon after, he found himself “in a large cave where all my past relationships were hanging down as icicles: the person who sat next to me in second grade, high school friends, my first girlfriend, all of them were there, encased in ice. It was very cool. I thought about each of them in turn, remembering everything about our relationship. It was a review—something about the trajectory of my life. All these people had made me what I had become.”
Amy Charnay, a nutritionist and herbalist in her thirties, came to Hopkins after a crisis. An avid runner, she had been studying forest ecology when she fell from a tree and shattered her ankle, ending both her running and her forestry careers. In the early moments of her journey, Amy was overcome by waves of guilt and fear.
“The visual I had was from the 1800s and I was up on this stage. Two people next to me were slipping a noose around my neck while a crowd of people watched, cheering for my death. I felt drenched with guilt, just terrified. I was in a hell realm. And I remember Bill asking, ‘What’s going on?’
“‘I’m experiencing a lot of guilt.’ Bill replied, ‘That’s a very common human experience,’ and with that, the whole image of being hanged pixilated and then just disappeared, to be replaced by this tremendous sensation of freedom and interconnectedness. This was huge for me. I saw that if I can name and admit a feeling, confess it to someone, it would let go. A little older and wiser, now I can do this for myself.”
Some time later, Charnay found herself flying around the world and through time perched on the back of a bird. “I was aware enough to know my body was on the couch, but I was leaving my body and experiencing these things firsthand. I found myself in a drumming circle with an indigenous tribe somewhere, and I was being healed but was also being the healer. This was very profound for me. Not having that traditional lineage [of a healer], I had always felt like I was a phony doing plant medicine, but this made me see I was connected to the plants and to people who use plants, whether for rituals or psychedelics or salad!”
During a subsequent session, Charnay reconnected with a boyfriend from her youth who had died in a car accident at nineteen. “All of a sudden there is a piece of Phil living in my left shoulder. I’ve never had an experience like that, but it was so real. I don’t know why he’s yellow and lives in my left shoulder—what does that even mean?—but I don’t care. He’s back with me.” Such reconnections with the dead are not uncommon. Richard Boothby, whose twenty-three-year-old son had committed suicide a year earlier after years of drug addiction, told me, “Oliver was more present to me now than he had ever been before.”
The supreme importance of surrendering to the experience, however frightening or bizarre, is stressed in the preparatory sessions and figures largely in many people’s journeys, and beyond. Boothby, the philosopher, took the advice to heart and found that he could use the idea as a kind of tool to shape the experience in real time. He wrote:
Early on I began to perceive that the effects of the drug respond strikingly to my own subjective determination. If, in response to the swelling intensity of the whole experience, I began to tense up with anxiety, the whole scene appears to tighten in some way. But if I then consciously remind myself to relax, to let myself go into the experience, the effect is dramatic. The space in which I seem to find myself, already enormous, suddenly yawns open even further and the shapes that undulate before my eyes appear to explode with new and even more extravagant patterns. Over and over again I had the overwhelming sense of infinity being multiplied by another infinity. I joked to my wife as she drove me home that I felt as if I had been repeatedly sucked into the asshole of God.
Boothby had what sounds very much like a classic mystical experience, though he may be the first in the long line of Western mystics to enter the divine realm through that particular aperture.
At the depths of this delirium I conceived that I was either dying or, most bizarrely, I was already dead. All points of secure attachment to a trustworthy sense of reality had fallen away. Why not think that I am dead? And if this is dying, I thought, then so be it. How can I say no to this?
At this point, at the greatest depth of the experience, I felt all my organizing categories of opposition—dreaming and wakefulness, life and death, inside and outside, self and other—collapse into each other . . . Reality appeared to fold in on itself, to implode in a kind of ecstatic catastrophe of logic. Yet in the midst of this hallucinatory hurricane I was having a weird experience of ultra-sublimity. And I remember repeating to myself again and again, “Nothing matters, nothing matters any more. I see the point! Nothing matters at all.”
And then it was over.
During the last few hours, reality began slowly, effortlessly, to stitch itself back together. In sync with some particularly wowing choral music, I had an incredibly moving sense of triumphant reawakening, as if a new day were dawning after a long and harrowing night.
* * *
• • •
AT THE SAME TIME I was interviewing Richard Boothby and his fellow volunteers, I was reading William James’s account of mystical consciousness in The Varieties of Religious Experience in the hope of orienting myself. And indeed much of what James had to say helped me get my bearings amid the torrent of words and images I was collecting. James prefaced his discussion of mystical states of consciousness by admitting that “my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost enti
rely.” Almost entirely: what James knows about mystical states was gleaned not just from his reading but also from his own experiments with drugs, including nitrous oxide.
Rather than attempt to define something as difficult to grab hold of as a mystical experience, James offers four “marks” by which we may recognize one. The first and, to his mind, “handiest” is ineffability: “The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” With the possible exception of Boothby, all the volunteers I spoke to at one point or another despaired of conveying the full force of what they had experienced, gamely though they tried. “You had to be there” was a regular refrain.
The noetic quality is James’s second mark: “Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge . . . They are illuminations, revelations full of significance and importance . . . and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.”
For every volunteer I’ve interviewed, the experience yielded many more answers than questions, and—curiously for what is after all a drug experience—these answers had about them a remarkable sturdiness and durability. John Hayes, a psychotherapist in his fifties who was one of the first volunteers at Hopkins,
felt like mysteries were being unveiled and yet it all felt familiar and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known. I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, including the distinct sense that death was illusory, in the sense that it is a door we walk through into another plane of existence, that we’re sprung from an eternity to which we will return.
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