-I hope to answer a question about my trajectory.
And how is it that the same writer
could get from the image on the left to the image on the right?
That's Alex Gray's memorable painting
of the stoned ape theory of how psilocybin led
to human self-consciousness.
The path of someone's career really only
appears as a path in retrospect.
This is something we construct after the fact.
I really didn't know where I was going.
The path of a writer is not like the path
of a doctor or a lawyer.
It's really crooked.
And so this appears-- something you figure out
after the fact, which only goes to show that you don't know
on this journey which books you'll
be grateful to have packed, or where your curiosity will
take you.
And this is another writing lesson
I learned along the way, which is that questions are more
important than answers, and that a good question can drive
a book from beginning to end in a way
that answers don't always.
That questions lead to more propulsive writing,
more suspenseful writing.
It becomes, indeed, the difference
between a speech and a detective story.
So the question in this book was what I think
of as the bumblebee question.
And that was, it occurred to me--
you saw me planting those weird looking--
I was planting potatoes.
And one day I was planting potatoes in my garden,
and it was a beautiful day, May in Northwest Connecticut.
And while I was planning potatoes,
the bees were just avidly going after this apple tree
that was in spectacular bloom.
And gardening doesn't take up that much mental space.
That's one of the things I like about it.
And it occurred to me, I wonder what I
have in common with those bees?
Look what they're doing.
They think they're getting the best of this arrangement
with the blossoms, that they're getting the nectar.
But in fact, they're being manipulated by those flowers
to pay a visit, in order to advance
the interests of the plant.
So who's in charge?
Are the bees in charge or the plant in charge?
And I thought, well, is that happening to me too?
I'm planting this kind of potato and not that kind of potato.
I've ordered these seeds.
They've been shipped across the country.
So are these plants in some sense,
these domesticated plants, manipulating us?
And that question kind of launched that book.
And that we too are in this co-evolutionary relationship,
one where we think we're in charge, but in fact,
very often we're being manipulated.
We are not the only subject in nature.
We think of everything else as an object,
but many other species are acting on us-- that nature
is really this dance of desire.
And so, I looked at human desire as a fact of natural history,
shaping evolution just like the climate does, or the soil,
or the preferences of pollinators.
I looked at four cases, apple for the desire
of sweetness, tulips and beauty, potatoes-control,
and cannabis-intoxication.
And I tried to use each of these plants
as mirrors in which we can learn things about ourselves.
Because in the same way you can look at a flower
and know precisely what a bee or another pollinator
regards as beautiful or aromatic,
you can look at the plants that have evolved with us
and understand a lot about us.
And that was the basic conceit of the book.
So among the desires I looked at in Botany of Desire,
and I'm returning to in this current project,
was this very curious universal human desire
to change consciousness, the existence of which
has been a very good thing indeed
if you are cannabis sativa or opium somniferum,
or a fungus like psiloscybe cubensis.
One of the things plants do to animals,
for their own purposes, is drug them.
It was recently discovered that the nectar of many plants
contains caffeine.
Why?
To make the pollinators better at their jobs,
make them work harder, just as it does for us.
And there are many examples like that of plants drugging animals
to get things out of them.
So the evolutionary success of these plants
depends on that desire of us, our abiding desire to change
the texture of consciousness.
So you sort of see, you see that my real interest, food
is a very important interest.
But I'm also very interested in this engagement with nature
that happens on our plates, and in our homes.
And it's always happening.
It's happening right now with the microbes in your gut.
And bringing this to light has always
been what I'm interested in doing as a writer.
And this issue of altered states of consciousness,
it's another thing that plants do for us, or mushrooms
do for us.
And why?
What's in it for them?
What's in it for us?
And what turned me on to this as a subject that was time to do
it was news of a remarkable trial that
took place at Johns Hopkins and was published
in the Journal of Psychopharmacology
with this decidedly idiosyncratic title,
"Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical Type Experiences
Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual
Significance."
Doesn't sound like a pharmacology magazine.
And what they discovered was that a high dose of psilocybin
could be used to safely and reliably occasion
a mystical experience, which of course the psychologists have
defined and have their are seven-point scale.
That the participants rank these experiences
as among the most meaningful in their lives,
comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.
That was striking.
And the volunteers who had the most complete
mystical experienced, by the scale,
showed significant and lasting increases
in their well-being and their openness to experience.
And openness is one of the five criteria of personality
that psychologists measure.
And this quality of openness is a predictor of tolerance,
aesthetics, creativity.
And its effect lasted for months.
Now, I have never had a mystical experience.
I may in fact be spiritually retarded.
But suddenly, I was extremely curious about the fact
that a mushroom could have such an impact
on not only one's personality but one's metaphysics.
Because a lot of these people were not
religious to begin with.
So what does that have to do with nature or food?
Well, you've probably guessed.
The chemical responsible for these amazing affects
in our brains is produced by a mushroom.
How did that happen?
And it's kind of a food.
The Aztecs called the magic mushroom teonanacatl,
the food of the gods.
But it's more of a sacramental food than a staple.
Still, something from nature that, ingested, changes us.
So what does it do for the mushroom?
Well, the curious thing about it is
that the chemical, the psilocybin or the psilocin,
is not found in the mycelium, the underground part, which
is the central part of a mushroom, the part that's
the organism.
The fruiting body, the mushroom, is the only part that has it.
And that's the part that the mushroom
doesn't mind having eaten, and doesn't depend.
So it has something to do with animals, who
apparently like psilocybin too.
And in our own time, it's been spread around the world
by the human interest in these drugs.
So anyway, I'm looking at the natural history of it,
and I was very surprised to learn that if you go back
pre-1965 that there was kind of a golden age of research
into both psilocybin and LSD.
And a lot of it, of course, took place here.
But what happened here with Timothy Leary
was the end of this process.
He kind of screwed it up, and for reasons
that make some sense.
But before his antics, there had been a thousand peer reviewed
studies of LSD in the literature,
and 40,000 research subjects going back
to 1950-- and very suggestive results
that it could be useful for people who were dying,
and addicts, and obsessives and depressives.
And all this research is now coming back.
The government has eased up and is allowing scientists
to study it.
And my guess is this scientific Renaissance
is going to teach us some extraordinary things
about consciousness and the mind,
about spirituality and religion, about creativity,
and about this handful of mental disorders
it's being used to treat.
The most interesting and the first
was giving psilocybin to people who
have terminal cancer diagnoses.
And this study was done at NYU and Hopkins,
and I spent a lot of time interviewing the people who
had this experience.
And it was fascinating.
But I want to end by reading one passage about one character who
I actually never got to meet because he
died before I had a chance.
But his name was Patrick Metas.
One of the most compelling stories I heard
was from a volunteer in the psilocybin cancer
trial I never got to meet.
He died before I knew his name.
However, I did get to know him slightly
through the words of his wife and therapist,
and the remarkable pages of his journal.
Everybody is asked to keep a journal of their experience.
Patrick Metas was a New York journalist
diagnosed with a cancer of the bile ducts
that had spread to his lungs.
As it happens, Patrick was almost exactly my age
and had first read about the psilocybin
trials in the same New York Times article I did.
Though he had never before taken a psychedelic,
he immediately called NYU to volunteer in their psilocybin
trials.
The experience he had there would
change his life and his death.
I first heard Patrick's story from Tony Bossis,
one of the investigators in the psilocybin trial at NYU.
Tony, a bearded, bearish psychologist in his mid 50s,
had been so deeply moved by his work with Patrick
that he obtained permission from his wife Lisa
to share his story with me.
I need to share with you just a bit of it now,
since Patrick's experience of learning how to die,
what Socrates said is the most important work we have to do,
is one of the reasons I decided to embark
on my own psychedelic journey of research.
In the course of four or five hours spent
laying on a couch in the treatment room at NYU,
wearing eye shades and listening through headphones
to a specially curated playlist, Patrick underwent a journey
by turns wrenching and ecstatic.
In his journal, he likened the start of that journey
to the launch of the space shuttle.
That's me hunting for psilocybin mushrooms,
but this is what I want to show you.
This is the setup in the treatment room.
And that's the therapist, the guide,
and that's the volunteer.
And that's the spiritual tchotchkes they put all around.
In his journal, he likened the start of that journey
to the launch of the space shuttle, a physically-- this
is his words-- a physically violent and rather clunky
liftoff, which eventually gave way
to the blissful serenity of weightlessness.
Early on, he re-experienced the trauma of his birth,
but as both mother and child.
Tony's session notes say Patrick drew his knees up to his chest,
convulsed, and when it was over began to cry softly,
saying twice, birth and death is a lot of work, birth and death
is a lot of work.
And then, oh God, it all makes sense now, so simple,
so beautiful.
Metas also took an internal tour of his body.
I went into my lungs and saw two spots.
They were no big deal, Metas recalled.
I was being told without words not to worry about the cancer.
It's minor in the scheme of things,
simply an imperfection of your humanity.
Then he experienced what he described as a brief death.
I approached what appeared to be a very sharp, pointed piece
of stainless steel.
It had a razor blade quality to it.
I continued up the apex of this shiny metal object,
and as I arrived, I had a choice, to look or not
look over the edge and into the infinite abyss,
the vastness of the universe, the eye of everything,
of nothing.
I was hesitant, but not frightened.
I wanted to go all in but felt that if I did I would possibly
leave my body permanently.
Death from this life.
But it was not a difficult decision.
I knew there was much more for me here.
Telling his guide about the decision,
he explained that he was not ready to jump off and leave
Lisa, his wife.
When Lisa came to pick him up after the session,
Patrick looked as though he'd run a marathon,
but also radiant.
He told her he had touched the face of God.
Patrick lived for 17 months after his psychedelic journey,
and Lisa reports he was a changed
man, able to enjoy the time remaining
to him free from the debilitating fear
and anxiety that had plagued him before.
The siege of his terror had been lifted somehow.
We still had our arguments, Lisa recalls,
but Patrick had a sense of patience
he had never had before.
And with me he had real joy about things, she said.
It was as if he had been relieved of the duty of caring
about the details of life.
Now it was all about being with people,
enjoying his sandwich and the walk on the promenade.
It was as if we lived a lifetime in a year.
Metas spent his good days walking around the city.
They lived in Brooklyn.
He would walk everywhere, try every restaurant for lunch,
and tell me about all these great places he discovered.
But his good days got fewer and fewer.
In March 2012, he decided to stop chemo.
He didn't want to die, she said, but I
think he just decided that this was not how he wanted to live.
In April, his lungs failing, Metas
wound up back in the hospital.
He gathered everyone together, this is his wife's words,
and said good bye, and explained that this
is how he wanted to die.
He had a very conscious death.
Metas's equanimity in the face of death
exerted a powerful influence on everyone around him, Lisa said.
And his room in the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai
became a center of gravity in the hospital.
Everyone, she said, the nurses and the doctors,
wanted to hang out in our room.
They just didn't want to leave.
When Tony Bossis visited Metas the week before he died,
he was struck by Metas's serenity.
Patrick was consoling me.
He said his biggest sadness was leaving his wife,
but he was not afraid.
It is very strange to feel something akin to envy
for someone dying of cancer.
But hearing Patrick's story, I realized
this man had acquired that essential knowledge so few
of us ever will, which is how to die
with equanimity, without fear.
Somehow I didn't completely understand
the mystical experience he had in that room at NYU,
courtesy of a molecule produced by a mushroom,
had showed him how to die.
Thank you very much.