The New Science of Psychedelics: At the Nexus of Culture, Consciousness, and Spirituality

Introduction

Awakening from My Slumber and Recognizing My Preprogrammed Robotic Nature

In this book we’ll be exploring a wide array of unorthodox ideas about the evolution of consciousness and the future. The New Science of Psychedelics contains a collection of fascinating anecdotes from my many interviews with accomplished iconic thinkers and discussions on how these interactions interfaced with the ideas, insights, and revelations from my numerous psychedelic experiences.

My career as an interviewer, science writer, scientific researcher, and science-fiction author has been inseparably linked with my thirty-three years of experimentation with psychedelic drugs and hallucinogenic plants. The areas that I was inspired to research, the subjects that I was motivated to write about, the people I chose to interview, and the questions I decided to ask them have all been thoroughly influenced by my regular and disciplined use of cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, salvia, and other psychedelic sacraments.

Since 1989 I’ve been interviewing some of the most thought-provoking thinkers on the planet, with a special interest in how psychedelics have affected their work. In The New Science of Psychedelics, I alternate between describing my psychedelic experiences and my interview encounters, quoting from the many dozens of in-depth interviews that I have conducted over the years, in order to shed some light on the mysteries that can occur during a psychedelic journey.

In the book I quote from my interviews with luminaries such as Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Garcia, Ram Dass, Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Deepak Chopra, Ray Kurzweil, Andrew Weil, Jack Kevorkian, Edgar Mitchell, Albert Hofmann, Stanislav Grof, Joan Halifax, Alex Grey, H. R. Giger, Simon Posford, and Rupert Sheldrake. Some of the varied topics explored in the book include the interface between science and spirituality, lucid dreaming, time travel, morphic field theory, alternative science, optimal health, what happens to consciousness after death, encounters with nonhuman beings, the future evolution of our species, and how psychedelics affect creativity.

TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION

My interest in exploring altered states of consciousness grew out of a childhood fascination with science fiction, the occult, and unexplained phenomena. This interest in the mysterious aspects of reality and my own mind—as well as a desire to calm my mind, do better and improve my reading comprehension skills in school, and explore the untapped potential of my brain—led me to learn how to meditate when I was fourteen years old and a sophomore in high school.

I convinced my mom to spend $50 in 1974 so I could learn the transcendental meditation (TM) technique. I participated in a private ceremony with a certified TM instructor, where I was given a personal mantra, which I was told to never, ever reveal to anyone else. I kept the mantra a secret for about twenty-five years before revealing it to others, and I haven’t noticed any difference in my meditations since doing so. When I interviewed TM expert Peter McWilliams in 1999, I told him my mantra, and he said that it wasn’t even one of the official TM mantras. Nonetheless, it has always worked for me, so now I’m passing along this magic mantra to you. Here it is: ee-ma.

One repeats this mantra silently in one’s mind over and over, while sitting quietly with closed eyes in a peaceful environment. Whenever one stops repeating the mantra and starts thinking thoughts, it’s time to start repeating the mantra again. It’s that simple. With time, the mantra is repeated more and more, and thinking diminishes. This is what I learned for $50. The quasimystical ceremony, which occurred before an altar with religious objects and burning candles, undoubtedly enhanced the initial effect, but I’m sure that I could have just as easily learned the technique from reading a few sentences in a book. It’s not terribly complicated, but it does take practice to master.

I began practicing TM religiously as a young teenager, sitting alone in my bedroom twice a day for twenty minutes with the door locked, while I silently repeated the mantra ee-ma in my head. By occupying the language/speech/thinking center of my mind with a repeating mantra, I found that my sense of awareness was liberated into a more peaceful space—one that transcended my conventional thinking process. In addition to making me a more peaceful and less anxious person, it really did improve my reading comprehension skills.

But, more important, meditation became an especially useful skill once I began to experiment with cannabis and other mind-expanding substances. Like the many Hindu sadhus before me, I found that cannabis and meditation went extremely well together and that the sacred plant enhanced my ability to transcend conceptual or verbal awareness.

Meditation also became an essential tool once I began to explore the far reaches of hyperspace with psychedelics. Whenever I ran into difficult psychological terrain on my psychedelic journeys I was always glad that I knew how to meditate when the energies became too overwhelming to process or understand. This eventually led to my realization that all spiritual practices appear to work best when combined with psychedelics.

DJB MEETS THC

My interest in meditation and the writings of Robert Anton Wilson led me to experiment with the cognitive-changing, sensory-enhancing properties of cannabis. In 1976 I purchased a small quantity of the illegal herb from a fellow student in my art class, and I picked up a small pipe with a wooden bowl at my local mall. I tried smoking the condensed, dried brown buds three times in the pipe without any noticeable effect. Then, on the fourth try, it finally worked.

I was taking tokes from my pipe in an extra bedroom, downstairs in the home that I grew up in, while my mother spoke on the phone upstairs in the kitchen. I was listening to her voice and laughter seep through the ceiling, and it seemed to be unusually interesting for some reason—dreamlike and amusing—almost like a parody or as if she were speaking in a cartoon. I was hearing these archetypal and strangely humorous qualities in my mom’s voice when I suddenly realized that I was totally and completely stoned. I found the perceptual shifts, cognitive changes, and sensory enhancement that cannabis brought to be absolutely delightful, and I marveled at everything around me.

Getting high for the first time felt like being let in on a great cosmic secret. As Timothy Leary exclaimed about his first cannabis experience, Wow. How long has this been going on? I was astonished by my own thoughts, and my imagination became greatly enhanced. At times it became hard to determine if what I was seeing was really there or not. I saw ghostly images of my dead grandfather and dead uncle, standing together, looking at me from the foot of the bed. A translucent genie wrapped in folded cloth swam out of the heating vent as the heater came on, and spoke with the air-blowing sound of the heater, saying, I’ve come to soothe you. The oo in soothe was drawn out into a long, trance-inducing auditory experience that resonated with the sound of the heater.

I soon became ravenously hungry but was far too nervous about being stoned in front of my mom, so I waited. After my mom left the kitchen I cautiously made a heroic climb up the Mt. Everest–size staircase and discovered that the coast was clear. I sat down at the kitchen table with a bowl of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies and a container of cow’s milk. For around thirty minutes I sat there in absolute divine bliss, eating bowl after bowl of Rice Krispies. They were the most incredibly delicious Rice Krispies I had tasted in my entire life, and I just couldn’t get enough of them. It was a completely magical experience, sitting there at the kitchen table, eating a sublimely delicious cereal—that spoke to me about the secrets of existence in its snapping, popping, and crackling language—while the elves on the glowing box smiled at me.

Then afterward I went to lie down on my bed, closed my eyes, and started seeing visions. Dreamlike images shifted before my eyes, and this was my favorite aspect of the experience. I lay there for around an hour before falling asleep, watching the fascinating imagery flow behind my eyes with utter astonishment.

After that fateful day I first got high, I began using cannabis regularly by the time I was fifteen Now, more than three decades later, I continue to ingest cannabis, almost daily. I consider it one of my greatest allies, and it has been an especially wonderful addition on my psychedelic journeys with other substances.

Cannabis opens my senses. It greatly enhances my sensitivity to all forms of sensory stimulation—taste, smell, vision, touch, hearing. Music, food, sex, massage, art, film, and television all become enhanced with new dimensions, and one can become completely immersed in cultural creations as though they are real. Movies take on mythic and archetypal qualities. Every pleasurable sensation is experienced as pure, heavenly bliss. Colors become subjectively brighter, humor becomes more amusing, and music takes on more depth and texture as one discovers additional levels of auditory detail within it.

Thoughts and mental imagery become much more fluid under the influence of cannabis, and there is an increased propensity for insights into one’s life and revelations into the nature of reality. It helps to raise my spirits when I’m feeling down, and it allows me to see my life from a new perspective, which I find both sacred and invaluable. It also helps to bring my body into a state of homeostasis—physical and mental balance—and it allows me to experience euphoria, bliss, and pain relief without any side effects.

I’ve come to use cannabis predominantly when I write and find it to be an essential part of my creative process. I follow Timothy Leary’s suggestion: If you write straight, edit stoned, and if you write stoned, edit straight. Whenever I work on a piece of writing I alternate between editing the piece while under the influence of cannabis and not. I find that this process allows me to see the work from multiple perspectives that synergize with one another, and I enjoy doing this immensely.

Robert Anton Wilson told me that he works in a similar fashion. He said:

I have always had strong tendencies toward compulsive rewriting, polishing, refining, etc., and marijuana has intensified that. In fact, these days I seldom stop fine-tuning my prose until editors remind me about deadlines. As Paul Valery said, A work of art is never completed, only abandoned, and I regard even my nonfiction as a kind of art.

HOW DOES CANNABIS BOOST CREATIVITY?

For many years numerous highly acclaimed artists, scientists, writers, musicians, and creative people of all sorts have claimed that cannabis holds enormous potential to enhance creativity and inspire the imagination. New scientific studies are beginning to confirm these claims, and researchers are starting to understand the psychological mechanisms behind how cannabis can improve the creative process.

There’s a common myth, perpetuated by the mainstream media, that people often mistakenly think that they’re brilliant and creative while under the influence of cannabis only to find that their creations are worthless or that their insights are meaningless nonsense when they return to normal everyday consciousness.

The late astronomer Carl Sagan described this best in an essay that he wrote for Lester Grinspoon’s book Marihuana Reconsidered. Sagan wrote:

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the compelling insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.

I agree with Sagan. So let’s dispel this pervasive myth about cannabis right now by taking the many anecdotal reports to heart and looking at what the scientific studies have to say. From Charles Baudelaire to George Carlin, Shakespeare to Carl Sagan, Louis Armstrong to Jack Nicholson, the list of accomplished creative people who have claimed a positive influence from their use of cannabis is truly impressive. I’ve personally spoken with many accomplished people who made claims about how essential cannabis was for their creative process. For example, when I interviewed the late comedian George Carlin, he told me:

Pot . . . changed my thinking. It fostered offbeat thinking. . . . Then it changed my comedy . . . I became more myself. The comedy became more personal, therefore more political, and therefore more successful. . . . So, suddenly, I also became materially successful. People started buying albums. I had four Gold albums in a row.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys said to Rolling Stone magazine that marijuana helped him write Pet Sounds, which was ranked by the magazine as the second greatest album of all time. Anecdotes about cannabis and creativity abound, but what does the scientific research say?

The Beckley Foundation—a nonprofit organization in England that supports pioneering, multidisciplinary research with cannabis and psychedelic drugs—funded a study by neuroscience researchers Valerie Curran and Celia Morgan at the University College London in 2012 that studied the effects of cannabis on creativity, and the results indicate that cannabis does indeed have a positive influence on the subject’s creative performance.

Another study conducted by Celia Morgan and her colleagues in 2010 at University College London looked at how cannabis intoxication enhanced the effects of semantic priming, in which the activation of one word allows people to react more quickly to related words and to see more connections between words. One way that creativity can be described is the ability to find novel connections between different concepts. The study found that subjects linked distantly related words and concepts significantly quicker when they were high than when they weren’t. This hyperpriming, as the researchers called it, is evidence that the flow of loose associations that cannabis users report is indeed real and not an illusion, as some skeptics have claimed.

Additionally, research by Xia Zhang and colleagues at Saskatchewan University demonstrates that THC (the primary psychoactive component of the cannabis plant) can spur neurogenesis, or new brain-cell formation, which is precisely the opposite of what government propaganda has been telling us for years—that cannabis kills brain cells. This research relates to our understanding of neuroplasticity—how the brain can reorganize neural pathways and rewire itself in order to become more efficient at processing information. We now know that the brain is continually rewiring itself and that it’s always possible to grow new brain cells and learn new skills, which may play a role in creative thinking.

Cannabis has the effect of slightly increasing alpha-wave activity in the brain and increasing blood flow into the right hemisphere, which is associated with holistic, nonlinear thought. Alpha waves and right-brain thinking are generally associated with meditative and relaxed states of consciousness, which are, in turn, often associated with creativity. The link between psychedelics and creativity will be explored in more detail later in this book.

Although I stopped smoking cannabis regularly in my midthirties, because the smoke began to hurt my lungs, I have remained faithful to my green goddess. Since I stopped smoking I’ve been largely eating the sacred herb and find it much more psychedelic this way. I prefer making my cannabis edibles out of finely crushed organic cannabis leaf and natural peanut butter. I spread the cannabis–peanut butter mix on a cracker and bake it in the oven at 290 degrees for 30 minutes. I’ve used cannabis this way for creativity, as an imagination enhancer, as well as an antidepressant, a sexual enhancer, a sacrament, and a way to relax and relieve anxiety, reflect, and connect with the deeper aspects of myself and nature.

DISCOVERING THE SECRET ROOM

When I was in my early teens, not long after my parents got divorced, my dad moved out, and I started smoking cannabis, I discovered a secret room hidden in my house that I never knew existed before. The entrance to the doorless, windowless room was hidden in the back of a long walk-in closet, which was covered by a stack of old dusty boxes. While curiously rummaging around the closet one day, I discovered that behind the boxes was a small rectangular square sliced into the wall. The sliced square was still embedded in the wall, but the wooden-plaster rectangle easily pushed right through. Behind the hole in the wall was a small space under the staircase, where my dad had apparently stored some of his valuables before moving out.

I got a flashlight and climbed inside the small, rectangular hole in the wall, like I was entering a portal into another dimension or the enchanted cave of wonder from Aladdin’s magic lamp. I was astonished to discover that there was a hidden room under the staircase, and it soon became a place for my younger brother and me to hang out whenever we wanted some extra privacy. My brother and I hung up psychedelic posters on the walls of the small room, lit candles, and often got stoned on cannabis together in there. It was our private world, and we didn’t reveal our knowledge of the secret chamber to our mom for many years, not until long after we’d both moved out.

I learned from reading the works of the late psychologist Carl Jung that my real-life discovery was unusually similar to an archetypal dream that many adolescents frequently have. It’s common for young teenagers to dream that they discover a secret room in their home that they never knew existed before, perhaps as a symbolic metaphor for entering a new stage of life or finding a hidden chamber in one’s mind. I had recurring dreams as a small child where I would discover a magical passageway in the back of my bedroom closet, but actually discovering a secret room in the home where I grew up—right as I was entering adolescence and first experimenting with altered states of consciousness—seems rather uncanny to me.

However, this was merely the beginning of the many weird synchronicities and strange events that have become a regular part of my life, which is why I try to follow the valuable suggestion of my late friend neuroscientist John C. Lilly to always expect the unexpected.

Over the years I’ve discovered many secret rooms in my mind—previously unknown brain circuits and neural programs hidden in my brain—while on LSD and other psychedelics. Once activated, these hidden neural programs seem fully complete, as though they were designed to be there for a particular purpose by some higher intelligence. As the late psychologist William James famously wrote in The Varieties of the Religious Experience:

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. . . . We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

These secret brain circuits and neural programs appear to be genetically wired into us, and turning them on for the first time is similar to discovering programs inside of one’s computer that one didn’t know was there.

I owned a MacBook laptop computer for around a year before I discovered the Time Machine program that was installed in it. Once I hooked up an external hard drive to the computer the Time Machine program was activated, and my computer screen suddenly shrank and dropped into a metaspace behind my virtual desktop. On my monitor a long row of computer desktops, arranged by date, appeared to be trailing behind it into outer space. I swear it seemed like smoking salvia or DMT for the first time. I thought, Wow. I never knew my computer could do this! This experience seemed analogous to me with regard to how new states of consciousness sometimes appear after taking psychedelics. You never know what you might find in your own brain.

DJB MEETS LSD

I tried LSD for the first time when I was sixteen years old. My curiosity to engage in this illegal form of self-exploration arose from several intersecting factors. In my high school health class I was told that LSD made people see new, never-before-seen colors, which was supposed to frighten me but instead fascinated me. I also noticed that some of the smartest and funniest kids at school were using acid, and they seemed anything but brain damaged to me. Additionally, since I was a child I had always been interested in unusual states of consciousness, and my experiments with meditation and marijuana helped to enhance this curiosity. So after watching a close friend enjoy his first LSD trip, and noting that he appeared to retain his sanity, despite all his uncontrollable laughter, I decided to give it a try.

One night during the 1977 school year, in the suburbs of central New Jersey, I swallowed a tiny purple microdot, about the size of a pinhead, that probably contained around 100 micrograms of LSD. My friends hung out with me for a few hours after I took it, but I didn’t feel anything unusual. So after about three hours my friends left, and I went bed. Then it began to hit me. The first thing I noticed was that the walls in my room appeared to be breathing. My bedroom walls began to expand and contract in organic rhythms, mirroring my own breath, and I became frightened that I was losing my mind. I had heard that people can forget who they are on LSD, so as my anxiety began to escalate I started repeating my name and address over and over in my head, like a mantra, so I wouldn’t forget who I was.

My name is David Jay Brown. I live at 16 Lee Way, Somerville, New Jersey. My name is David Jay Brown . . . I silently repeated over and over again, with increasing difficulty. My ego was rapidly dissolving, my sense of self was expanding, and I was desperately (and, in retrospect, comically) trying to hold on tight to the gooey remains of my melting ego, as my mind spilled out of my head and began to fill the room. I closed my eyes and was astonished by the colorful morphing visions that appeared within me. Terrified beyond words that I had permanently damaged my brain and that I was going insane, I also realized that if I could possibly paint onto canvas the extraordinary imagery that I was seeing behind my closed eyes, I would be the greatest artist who ever lived.

But the fear of losing my mind became too powerful, and as the effects intensified I vowed to flush all the cannabis in my closet down the toilet in the morning and to never do LSD ever again. With no previous training in shamanism or mysticism, I remember seeing a small, condensed version of myself shrinking down inside my own mind, and for some reason this scared the hell out of me. I just wanted this nightmarish experience to end. Time agonizingly slowed to an almost complete standstill, and it seemed like it was going to be a very long night indeed. My name is David Jay Brown. I live at 16 Lee Way, Somerville, New Jersey. My name is David Jay Brown . . .

Then, suddenly, it struck me with the force of a revelation—Hey, some people actually enjoy this kind of experience! I became curious about what was happening to me. What could people possibly enjoy about having their minds dissolve? Everything was so intensified. My body was trembling with hypersensitivity, everything was rippling and vibrating, and I was really scared. Music, I thought; that seemed worth trying. My mom and brother were asleep in neighboring rooms, so I wrapped a pair of overstuffed stereo headphones around my head and put on an album by the Electric Light Orchestra called A New World Record. The first song was called Livin’ Thing.

Within moments I was transported into a state of ecstasy. The music took on incredible depth and dimension audibly, emotionally, and visually, and every note carried me higher and higher into heavenly bliss. I savored the boundless music on my headphones until sunrise, and then at dawn went outside and sat in a lawn chair in my backyard. I looked up at the sky and watched the clouds as ever-changing, three-dimensional imagery emerged from them. I stared in pure astonishment at the shifting cartoon and mythiclike images in the sky, as every philosophical or spiritual question that I ever had about God, consciousness, the soul, and reincarnation seemed to be answered immediately in my mind. The answers simply formed in my mind as the questions arose—leaping into my awareness one after another. By the time the sun had risen I knew that I stumbled upon something really big and that my life would be forever changed.

STAYING ONLINE

The eloquent British philosopher Alan Watts is noted for having said that when one gets the message, then one should hang up the phone, meaning that after one has received the spiritual revelations and mystical insights from a psychedelic experience, there is no need to continue taking the drug. However, I think there is far more than a single message to be gleaned from one’s psychedelic experiences, and when you actually have Divine Intelligence on the line, don’t you think it might be a bit rude to just hang up? I generally try to keep her talking for as long as I possibly can. Not to mention the fact that human beings have a notorious tendency to forget what they learn, unless it is drilled into them over and over.

It’s now been more than thirty-four years since my first acid trip, and I’ve taken the illegal sacrament well over a thousand times. There’s hardly a psychedelic substance listed on the encyclopedic website Erowid that I haven’t tried at some point in my career. (I love Erowid! I think that one can effectively argue that Erowid—the largest drug resource on the Internet—has helped to save more lives than any other educational resource in human history.) Additionally, with the exception of only several weeklong or monthlong breaks, I’ve used cannabis almost every day since I was around fourteen.

At the very least I’ve been using psychedelic drugs several times a year since that first magical night in 1977, often much more frequently, so it’s really impossible for me at this point in my life to even imagine how differently my mind would have developed had I not bathed it in a continuous sea of psychedelic potions since I was a teenager. But it’s self-evident that my experimentation with these substances dramatically affected the course of my life and the development of my mind.

Overall, though, I would say that the effects of psychedelics on my life have been overwhelmingly positive. I once debated medical advice expert Dr. Drew Pinsky on the popular radio show Loveline, which is broadcast on KROQ in Los Angeles. He had been saying repeatedly on the show that LSD caused brain damage, and I knew that this wasn’t true. So I told him that there wasn’t any scientific evidence to support this notion and that he was spreading misinformation.

To support his frightening claims, Dr. Drew said that while working in psychiatric wards he had witnessed many LSD users who continued to see trails, blurry tracers following moving objects, long after the acid wore off. It occurred to me that because Dr. Drew was working with the sickest members of our population he tended to pathologize whatever he saw that didn’t fit into the conventional psychological mold. In other words, he wasn’t working with the best and the brightest LSD users, so he didn’t see all the positive and creative changes that I’ve witnessed.

So I said that I didn’t think that this was because of brain damage but rather because of a valid shift in the perception of reality. I’ve been seeing trails swirling behind everything that moves since I was sixteen, and this seems more like a sense of time dilation to me than brain damage. In fact, on one of the first occasions that I tripped I vividly remembered having seen trails long before, when I was much younger. I saw trails as an infant, before I could talk, and the world seemed to become less and less fluid and more and more solid with time as I grew up.

Psychedelics came into my life just as the magic and innocence of my childhood was leaving. They helped to reconnect me to that magic again, but in a powerful new way, which seemed to jump-start a prewired sequence of developmental phases into action. I think that there actually is something to the notion that marijuana is a gateway drug, but not in the way that most antidrug crusaders would have you believe. There’s no scientific or sociological evidence that using cannabis leads to using harder drugs like heroin, cocaine, alcohol, or tobacco. In fact, it appears to be just the opposite, as many of the people who use cannabis tend to become more health-conscious, and many stoners and trippers actually helped to start the health-food industry, as well as many early yoga and fitness centers. Unlike alcohol, cannabis tends to make people more sensitive and aware of their bodies.

However, anyone who has experimented with the classical psychedelics—cannabis (THC), magic mushrooms (psilocybin), peyote (mescaline), or ayahuasca (DMT)—has probably noticed that the effects of these substances have unusual similarities that can seemingly be placed along a continuum. A high dose of cannabis often seems like a low dose of magic mushrooms or LSD. A high dose of LSD or magic mushrooms for many people is like a low dose of DMT or ayahuasca. A low dose of DMT is like a high dose of LSD. So in a sense smoking marijuana prepared me for my LSD experience, and I used the meditation techniques that I had learned prior to using marijuana to help control my marijuana and later my LSD experiences.

Cannabis and LSD opened new gateways to higher states of awareness for me, where the interrelatedness of all things became obvious.

EVERYTHING IS INTERCONNECTED

One of the most valuable lessons that I learned from my psychedelic experiences is that everything is connected to everything else. The vague and gooey revelation from mystical experiences that all is one is indeed a profound insight for a mind that has been isolated in the illusion of separateness, and biology and physics absolutely confirm that everything really is interconnected.

All of the boundaries that we routinely see between supposedly separate objects or beings are created and maintained entirely by our conceptual minds—as in nature, every system is simply nestled within a larger system, and everything just flows into everything else. With every breath we take and every move we make, our bodies blend and blur with the environment around us.

Like many other people, the first time that I saw a photograph of the Earth from space, I remember being awestruck by the fact that there were was no clear distinction between the various nations as I had seen on maps of the world in school as a child. I realized on LSD that this was actually true for everything that exists; all and everything is unquestionably, seamlessly interconnected.

It often becomes seemingly obvious to someone under the influence of LSD that our whole planetary biosphere operates as a single organic process, like one organism. James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis—which proposes that our oceans and atmosphere are seamlessly regulated by the biosphere itself, so that it maintains the delicate balance of chemicals and conditions that support life on the planet—became an important perspective for me, as well as for many other people who have experimented with psychedelics.

But not everyone whom I interviewed shared this view. When I interviewed Beat poet Allen Ginsberg about the Gaia Hypothesis, he replied:

No, no, no, absolutely not. None of that bullshit! No Gaia hypothesis. No theism need sneak in here. No monotheistic hallucinations needed in this. Not another fascist central authority . . . You’ve got this one big