In 2006, somebody sent me a paper.
And I've got the title of it here on this piece of paper.
Because it it was such a weird paper,
that it caught my attention.
It came out of a lab at Johns Hopkins,
a scientist named Roland Griffith, who along with Robin
is one of the pioneers of this research.
And it was-- you can see why this caught my attention,
as science-minded people.
"Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-type Experiences,
Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual
Significance."
These are words, you don't see in too many scientific papers.
These studies like were bringing us
to this interesting frontier of scientific investigation
of spiritual experience.
And so I kind of put that data point in my files.
And then a couple of years later,
I read about another study giving psilocybin
to cancer patients.
These were people who had, in many cases, terminal diagnoses.
They were really debilitated as much
by their fear, depression, and anxiety, as by their cancer.
And in this trial, they were having
a single guided psychedelic experience.
There was a placebo also, a placebo experience.
And I should explain what that is
because the way that psychedelics are being used now
in university trials is not the way you perhaps have heard
of some people using them.
It's not taking a handful of mushrooms
and eating them and going to a concert.
These are highly controlled, prepared.
There are usually two therapists who
are with you the whole time.
They prepare you in advance.
They tell you what to expect and how
to deal with the challenging parts of the voyage.
Basically the overall advice is to surrender in and through
and not to resist when you feel yourself going crazy,
or you're dying, or your ego is dissolving.
If you fight that, you'll be pretty unhappy and anxious.
And so then during the experience,
they're with you the whole time, and you're
wearing eye shades to encourage an internal voyage.
You're listening to music, which actually
has a very profound effect on the experience.
And they're there just-- they don't say very much,
the guides.
But they're there to hold a hand if you're feeling upset
or get you to the bathroom or something like that.
And then afterwards the guides help you.
Usually the next day you come back,
and they help you make sense of the experience, which
can be very hard to understand, and help
you apply whatever lessons are learned to your life.
So this is the kind of experience that I'm describing.
And Robin is too when we talk about
these psychedelic sessions.
There is a strong therapeutic component.
It's not just a drug therapy.
And it departs from drug therapy in lots of ways.
So I started interviewing people because this seemed
so implausible to me that a psilocybin trip would actually
help you with your fear of death.
It was the last thing I would do if I had a terminal
diagnosis, to give up that much control of your mind.
It sounds like you'd end up in a very dark place.
But the patients I started talking to
had amazing stories to tell.
I interviewed probably a dozen of them.
And I'll give you an example of one of them
because this one is kind of succinct,
and I don't want to go on too long.
But there was a woman I met named [? Dinah ?] [? Baizer, ?]
who was 60-ish.
She was a New Yorker.
She was this figure skating instructor actually
in Manhattan.
And she had ovarian cancer.
And her cancer had been treated successfully.
It was in remission.
But she was debilitated by the fear it would come back.
And she just could not get through the day.
It was all she could think about.
She was in this obsessive ruminative loop.
So she heard about this trial.
She'd never use psychedelics, entered, and had a very
profound experience.
Like a lot of the cancer patients,
she went into her body imaginatively, and many of them
confront their cancer and see it-- go in and see it.
In her case, though, she saw a black mass,
and it was under her rib cage, so she
knew it wasn't her cancer.
It was in the wrong place.
But she immediately recognised what it was.
It was her fear.
The black mass was her fear.
And as soon as she realised that and saw it,
she said she screams out.
And imagine her guides, who don't
know what's going on in her head,
and suddenly this rather timid woman screams, get the [BLEEP]
out of my body!
And the black mass evaporates just like that.
She went on to have a very profound experience
that you might describe as a mystical-type experience.
And she said she was-- she's an atheist.
She told me at the beginning of the interview.
But she said she had an experience
of being bathed in God's love.
And I said, but you're an atheist.
And are you still an atheist?
She says, yes, I'm still an atheist.
So why would you use that language?
And she said, well, we don't have
any word big enough for how it felt,
this bath of love in which she found herself.