How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sometimes it’s nice to have your interest in a subject reinvigorated. My readings of late have rotated around cognitive science and personal transformation. Apparently those keywords must have made this book pop up. Reading it helped me re-connect my experience with psychedelics with who I am today (and probably why I keep adding books like this to my “to read” shelf).
So much of the psychedelic experience lies tantalizingly outside of our ability to form an intelligible narrative about it. This is both its bug and its feature. But the frustrations of communicability regarding my time spent unencumbered by restraints of conventional reality due to the presence of these molecules in my blood system are only the subjective dilemma writ large.
So I really appreciate Michael Pollan’s attempt at this journalism of consciousness. Talk about hard reporting. Some journalists go to war zones and put themselves in range of deadly ordinance in service of getting the story. Pollan chooses to travel to the brain on psychedelics. In both cases the challenge of getting the story is as formidable as the intimations of personal mortality.
The therapeutic benefit of this class of drugs has become a sliver of hope for me in a world that desperately needs transforming. The modern dilemma is one of scaling crisis in the face of an atomized psyche. In order to move towards a context where solutions to environmental, nationalist and even ontological problems can present themselves we will need something that resembles a trans-personal awareness.
So there is reason for hope that these drugs may play a beneficial role. My own take on them is that they can and should. And on personal reflection, having had the experience, the world has now and forever become psychedelicized; less opaque, more imbued with worth, unifying and celebratory. May we all get there in our own way.