A Strait-Laced Writer Explores Psychedelics, and Leaves the Door of Perception Ajar

Wednesday, 30 May 2018

quote [ Pollan’s initial skepticism and general lack of hipness work wonders for the material. The problem with more enthusiastic or even hallucinatory writers on the subject is that they just compound the zaniness at the heart of the thing; it’s all too much of the same tone, like having George Will walk you through the tax code. ]

I'll start listening to this as an audiobook on my commute in the next few days. I've read several of his books, and deeply enjoyed them, as well as seen him speak a few times. There's a link to a recent interview about the book with Michael Pollan by Sam Harris in the extended, along with a few of my own thoughts. NYT text also in extended.

NYT article full text and photo, credited:

Reveal

A Strait-Laced Writer Explores Psychedelics, and Leaves the Door of Perception Ajar

By John Williams
May 14, 2018, New York Times

Microdosing is hot. If you haven’t heard — but you probably have, from reports of its use at Silicon Valley workplaces, from Ayelet Waldman’s memoir “A Really Good Day,” from dozens of news stories — to microdose is to take small amounts of LSD, which generate “subperceptual” effects that can improve mood, productivity and creativity.

Michael Pollan’s new book, “How to Change Your Mind,” is not about that. It’s about macro-dosing. It’s about taking enough LSD or psilocybin (mushrooms) to feel the colors and smell the sounds, to let the magic happen, to chase the juju. And it’s about how mainstream science ceded the ground of psychedelics decades ago, and how it’s trying to get it back.
“How to Change Your Mind” is a calm survey of the past, present and future. A book about a blurry subject, it is cleareyed and assured. Pollan is not the most obvious guide for such a journey. He is, to judge from his self-reporting, a giant square. In the prologue, he describes himself as someone “not at all sure he has ever had a single ‘spiritually significant’ experience,” a pretty straitened admission even for an avowed atheist. “I have never been one for deep or sustained introspection,” he writes later. You often find yourself thinking: This guy could really use a trip.

And he takes one. More than one. He learns things from them, but he also doesn’t overplay his experiences, admitting that he never felt his ego had “completely dissolved,” as some others report happening.

Pollan’s initial skepticism and general lack of hipness work wonders for the material. The problem with more enthusiastic or even hallucinatory writers on the subject is that they just compound the zaniness at the heart of the thing; it’s all too much of the same tone, like having George Will walk you through the tax code.

Like another best-selling Michael (Lewis), Pollan keeps you turning the pages even through his wonkiest stretches. We get history, starting with Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD in 1938 and embarked on “the only LSD trip ever taken that was entirely innocent of expectation”; profiles of current-day proselytizers and mushroom hunters; analyses of brain-scanning technologies and government policy.

If Pollan’s wide-ranging account has a central thesis, it’s that we’re still doing the hard work of rescuing the science of psychedelics from the “countercultural baggage” of the 1960s. Timothy Leary and his tuning-in, dropping-out crowd so successfully branded the drugs as accouterments of hippie culture that in the mid-60s “the exuberance surrounding these new drugs gave way to moral panic,” and soon after that “the whole project of psychedelic science had collapsed.”

Before collapsing, though, that project discovered in psychedelics the same potential that scientists are exploring as they reclaim it today: possible help in treating addiction, anxiety and depression, and “existential distress” — common in people “confronting a terminal diagnosis,” which of course, broadly speaking, is all of us.

From 1949 to 1966, the pharmaceutical company Sandoz dispensed free amounts of “however much LSD any researcher requested” to conduct trials. In 1957, before Leary had even tripped for the first time, R. Gordon Wasson, a New York banker, published a lengthy essay in the far-from-radical Life magazine about taking mushrooms in Mexico.

michael pollan

In Mexico and elsewhere, experiences with naturally occurring hallucinogens predated Hofmann’s discovery of LSD by a long, long time. The wonderfully named but factually dubious “stoned ape theory” posits that great evolutionary leaps were made when early humans ingested psilocybin. It’s unlikely that tripping led directly to, say, the development of language, as some proponents of that theory claim. But more convincing conjectures include the one Wasson made about mushrooms in Life: “One is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of a God.”

Like many who claim to encounter the divine, trippers often come back with knowledge comically difficult to convey. Plenty of testimonies cited in “How to Change Your Mind” are nontransferable mental checks. “I became the music for a while,” one person recounts after a trip. Another: “I don’t know why he’s yellow and lives in my left shoulder.” And Pollan himself: “It suddenly dawned on me that these trees were — obviously! — my parents.”
You get the point(lessness). But unlike people drunk or high who feel compelled the next day to shake their heads at what they did or thought under the influence, psychedelic users often feel the opposite, as if it’s important to keep a foot in the place they were while gone. They might not credit the man in their shoulder, but their philosophical revelations about self and relationships and need and perspective last longer than you might expect. Pollan writes: “The traces these experiences inscribed remain indelible and accessible.” William James, whose openness to mystery makes him one of the guiding lights of Pollan’s book, once wrote of the substantial aftermath of mystical experiences: “Dreams cannot stand this test.”

In all of this is an assumption that the true value of psychedelics is not the experience of them — the grooviness of the moment — but the sediment the experience leaves behind.
It’s possible these effects can be chalked up, in part, to the drug’s effect on the brain’s so-called default mode network, especially the part associated with self-referential thought. Pollan grants, if briefly, that turning off the network — truly getting over yourself — might also be achieved through “certain breathing exercises,” or through “sensory deprivation, fasting, prayer, overwhelming experiences of awe, extreme sports, near-death experiences and so on.”

Pollan doesn’t give a lot of prime real estate to psychedelics’ naysayers. But given that those on LSD can appear to be losing their minds, and that the drug leaves one feeling emotionally undefended (a potential benefit as well as a profound risk), he does strongly recommend having an experienced guide in a proper setting when you trip. With those safeguards in place, he believes usage could be on the verge of more widespread acceptance, pointing out that plenty of other once widely derided practices redolent of the ’60s, like yoga and natural birth, are now common.

There is a notable amount of talk in the book about metaphors; so much so that trips start to feel like textual events as much as physical ones. Pollan writes of emerging from psychedelics or meditation with “usable ideas, images or metaphors.” One researcher says that describing his own mystical experience involved “metaphors or assumptions that I’m really uncomfortable with as a scientist.”

Perhaps the hardest thing for the more skeptical and less mystically inclined of us to accept is that mulling these metaphors often turns people into, in Pollan’s handy phrase, “fervent evangelists of the obvious.”
Yet you end the book wondering if obvious things are all that bad. Aldous Huxley wrote of feeling, on psychedelics, “the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.”

These words, Huxley continued, “of course have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains.”

https://samharris.org/podcasts/127-freedom-known/

As a believer in materialism and science, and yet as one who has had some pretty profound experiences dealing with the nature of space, time, awareness, death, etc. mostly without any chemical help, I found the conversation between Harris and Pollan refreshing. There is no supernatural Woo here, but they aren't afraid to explore and express the profundity of non-standard consciousness and its potential positive effects on our lives.

It's been almost 30 years since I took any traditional psychedelics (mushrooms a few times), and I suspect I might have a lot more understanding and appreciation of the experience these days. Once I finish the book, I might have to ask around...

I highly recommend Pollan's books, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13839.The_Botany_of_Desire

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3109.The_Omnivore_s_Dilemma

[SFW] [health]	[+3 Interesting]
[by midden@12:41amGMT]

Comments

perezoso said @ 2:47am GMT on 30th May

Phil, Bobby, Jerry, and about 1,000 semi-clad spinning dervishes congesting the hallways of Hampton Coliseum and a few other places were my experienced guides and (semi-)safe place. Having Michael Pollan explain the experience to me is a little bit of tough sell. It's time to invest in shares of South American ayahuasca tourism camps if this guy's well (financially) endowed and (not so) liberal readers are all about take a trip.

LurkerAtTheGate said^[1] @ 3:18am GMT on 30th May

+1 for the book reco. Headed to Wyoming for family vacation next week and need reading material (on top of PSVita JRPGs and Darkest Dungeon/Moonlighter).

Been about 20 years since I've had mushrooms - growing them helped pay the bills in college - and only took LSD once. Never had a guided trip, but was called on to guide a few people already well on their ways to bad ones. I found my own experience of perceptive effects mildly entertaining, though never spiritually or otherwise enlightening. I'd grown out of my nihilist phase by that point and thus held few of ego's illusions.

Due to my struggles with interpersonal interactivity, and, as far as I and the psychiatrist-my-parents-dragged-me-to can tell, a noticeable absence of empathic ability, I've always wondered what something like MDMA would do to me. Never known anyone to have some that wasn't of questionable origin or quality, and frankly have dreaded the idea of a serotonin hangover, so I've never tried.

perezoso said @ 4:28am GMT on 31st May [Score:1 Informative]

In my experience, which also was many years ago now, X was a sort of "lite" "safe trip" kind of thing. I don't know if I'd even really call it a trip in comparison to a largish dose of acid, because it definitely lacked the ego risk and experiential intensity. Not as profound as an acid trip could be but sharing some characteristics and virtually none of the risk. Honestly I might have done more of it were it not for the prevalence of a ridiculous rumor about MDMA and spinal fluid at the time. But in retrospect, X'ing times were sort of 'having a good time' throwaways while LSD is something I think back on now - basically 30 years later - as having been significant. Not that I would really want to do it again at this point in my life. Although you might twist my arm with some shrooms if you were able to find any lingering spores. :-)

LurkerAtTheGate said @ 5:56pm GMT on 31st May

Mushrooms remain something I would do again; LSD unlikely. I've looked into getting spores again to start a small, personal-use terrarium but seems like they're harder to get these days (short of darkweb transactions, anyway).

midden said @ 10:10pm GMT on 31st May

Mushrooms would be nice, but like you, not easy to come by in my current social circles. I have dozens of morning glories growing on my property, though. I'm considering trying them. From what I have read, the seeds contain significant amounts of LSA, a molecule very closely related to LSD. Supposedly its effects are less hallucinatory and less anxiety inducing, which I take as both positive.

https://azarius.net/encyclopedia/5/morning-glory-ipomoea-violacea/

midden said @ 1:44pm GMT on 30th May

I'm certainly no guru, but as I understand it and from my own experiences, if you think you've outgrown ego's illusions, you almost certainly haven't, regardless of any preceding nihilist phase. :)

LurkerAtTheGate said^[1] @ 5:51pm GMT on 31st May

Certainly; I did say 'few.' There's still a handful lingering I'm only just now catching a glimpse of as I'm pushing 40. But 20 year old me tripping in rural SC with friends? I watched the pretty colors and bendy reality; they had realizations that shook the foundations of their religious beliefs.

1	ScoobySnacks
2	HoZay
3	Paracetamol
4	lilmookieesquire
5	Ankylosaur