The idea was to use psychedelics to escape the prison of self. “We wanted to provide a brief, lucid interval of complete egolessness to demonstrate that personal intactness was not absolutely necessary, and that perhaps there was something ‘out there’”—something greater than our individual selves that might survive our demise. Cohen quoted a patient, a woman dying of ovarian cancer, describing the shift in her perspective following an LSD session:
My extinction is not of great consequence at this moment, not even for me. It’s just another turn in the swing of existence and non-existence. I feel it has little to do with the church or talk of death. I suppose that I’m detached—that’s it—away from myself and my pain and my decaying. I could die nicely now—if it should be so. I do not invite it, nor do I put it off.
In 1972, Stanislav Grof and Bill Richards, who were working together at Spring Grove, wrote that LSD gave patients an experience “of cosmic unity” such that death, “instead of being seen as the absolute end of everything and a step into nothingness, appears suddenly as a transition into another type of existence . . . The idea of possible continuity of consciousness beyond physical death becomes much more plausible than the opposite.”
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VOLUNTEERS IN THE NYU psilocybin trial are required to write an account of their journey soon after its completion, and Patrick Mettes, who worked in journalism, took the assignment seriously. His wife, Lisa, said that after his Friday session Patrick labored all weekend to make sense of the experience and write it down. Lisa agreed to share his account with me and also gave Patrick’s therapist, Tony Bossis, permission to show me the notes he took during the session, as well as his notes from several follow-up psychotherapy sessions.
Lisa, who at the time worked as a marketing executive for a cookware company, had an important meeting on that January morning in 2011, so Patrick came by himself to the treatment room in the NYU dental school on First Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, taking the subway from their apartment in Brooklyn. (The treatment room was in the dental college because, at the time, both Bellevue and NYU’s cancer center wanted to keep their distance from a trial involving psychedelics.) Tony Bossis and Krystallia Kalliontzi, his guides, greeted him, reviewed the day’s plans, and then at 9:00 a.m. presented Patrick with a chalice containing the pill; whether it contained psilocybin or the placebo, none of them would know for at least thirty minutes. Patrick was asked to state his intention, which he said was to learn to cope better with the anxiety and depression he felt about his cancer and to work on what he called his “regret in life.” He placed a few photographs around the room, of himself and Lisa on their wedding day and of their dog, Arlo.
At 9:30, Patrick lay down on the couch, put on the headphones and eyeshades, and fell quiet. In his account, Patrick likened the start of the journey to the launch of a space shuttle: “a physically violent and rather clunky liftoff which eventually gave way to the blissful serenity of weightlessness.”
Many of the volunteers I interviewed reported initial episodes of intense fear and anxiety before giving themselves up to the experience, as the guides encourage them to do. This is where the flight instructions come in. Their promise is that if you surrender to whatever happens (“trust, let go, and be open” or “relax and float downstream”), whatever at first might seem terrifying will soon morph into something else, and likely something pleasant, even blissful.
Early in his journey, Patrick encountered his brother’s wife, who died of cancer more than twenty years earlier, at forty-three. “Ruth acted as my tour guide,” he wrote, and “didn’t seem surprised to see me. She ‘wore’ her translucent body so I would know her . . . This period of my journey seemed to be about the feminine.” Michelle Obama made an appearance. “The considerable feminine energy all around me made clear the idea that a mother, any mother, regardless of her shortcomings . . . could never NOT love her offspring. This was very powerful. I knew I was crying . . . it was here that I felt as if I was coming out of the womb . . . being birthed again. My rebirth was smooth . . . comforting.”
Outwardly, however, what was happening to Patrick appeared to be anything but smooth. He was crying, Bossis noted, and breathing heavily. This is when he first said, “Birth and death is a lot of work,” and seemed to be convulsing. Then Patrick reached out and clutched Kalliontzi’s hand while pulling up his knees and pushing, as if he were delivering a baby. From Bossis’s notes:
11:15 “Oh God.”
11:25 “It’s really so simple.”
11:47 “Who knew a man could give birth?” And then,
“I gave birth, to what I don’t know.”
12:10 “It’s just too amazing.” Patrick is alternately laughing and crying at this point. “Oh God, it all makes sense now, so simple and beautiful.”
Now Patrick asked to take a break. “It was getting too intense,” he wrote. He removed the headphones and eyeshades. “I sat up and spoke with Tony and Krystallia. I mentioned that everyone deserved to have this experience . . . that if everyone did, no one could ever do harm to another again . . . wars would be impossible to wage. The room and everything in it was beautiful. Tony and Krystallia, sitting on [their] pillows, were radiant!” They helped him to the bathroom. “Even the germs (if there were any present) were beautiful, as was everything in our world and universe.”
Afterward, he voiced some reluctance to “go back in.”
“The work was considerable but I loved the sense of adventure.” Eventually, he put his eyeshades and headphones on and lay back down.
“From here on, love was the only consideration . . . It was and is the only purpose. Love seemed to emanate from a single point of light . . . and it vibrated . . . I could feel my physical body trying to vibrate in unity with the cosmos . . . and, frustratingly, I felt like a guy who couldn’t dance . . . but the universe accepted it. The sheer joy . . . the bliss . . . the nirvana . . . was indescribable. And in fact there are no words to accurately capture my experience . . . my state . . . this place. I know I’ve had no earthly pleasure that’s ever come close to this feeling . . . no sensation, no image of beauty, nothing during my time on earth has felt as pure and joyful and glorious as the height of this journey.” Aloud, he said, “Never had an orgasm of the soul before.” The music loomed large in the experience: “I was learning a song and the song was simple . . . it was one note . . . C . . . it was the vibration of the universe . . . a collection of everything that ever existed . . . all together equaling God.”
Patrick then described an epiphany having to do with simplicity. He was thinking about politics and food, music and architecture, and—his field—television news, which he realized was, like so much else, “over-produced. We put too many notes in a song . . . too many ingredients in our recipes . . . too many flourishes in the clothes we wear, the houses we live in . . . it all seemed so pointless when really all we needed to do was focus on the love.” Just then he saw Derek Jeter, then the Yankee shortstop, “making yet another balletic turn to first base.”
“I was convinced in that moment I had figured it all out . . . It was right there in front of me . . . love . . . the only thing that mattered. This was now to be my life’s cause.”
Then he said something that Bossis jotted down at 12:15: “Ok, I get it! You can all punch out now. Our work is done.”
But it wasn’t done, not yet. Now “I took a tour of my lungs . . . I remember breathing deeply to help facilitate the ‘seeing.’” Bossis noted that at 2:30 Patrick had said, “I went into my lungs and saw two spots. They were no big deal.
“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 and that the more important matter . . . the real work to be done is before you. Again, love.”
Now Patrick experienced what he called “a brief death.”
“I approached w
hat appeared to be a very sharp, pointed piece of stainless steel. It had a razor blade quality to it. I continued up to 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 . . . [and] 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 guides about his choice, Patrick explained that he “was not ready to jump off and leave Lisa.”
Then, rather suddenly around 3:00 p.m., it was over. “The transition from a state where I had no sense of time or space to the relative dullness of now, happened quickly. I had a headache.”
When Lisa arrived to take him home, Patrick “looked like he had run a race,” she recalled. “The color in his face was not good, he looked tired and sweaty, but he was on fire. He was lit up with all the things he wanted to tell me and all the things he couldn’t.” He told her he “had touched the face of God.”
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EVERY PSYCHEDELIC JOURNEY is different, yet a few common themes seem to recur in the journeys of those struggling with cancer. Many of the cancer patients I interviewed described an experience of either giving birth or being reborn, though none quite as intense as Patrick’s. Many also described an encounter with their cancer (or their fear of it) that had the effect of shrinking its power over them. I mentioned earlier the experience of Dinah Bazer, a petite and mild New Yorker in her sixties, a figure-skating instructor, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2010. When we met in the NYU treatment room, Dinah, who has auburn curls and wore large hoop earrings, told me that even after a successful course of chemotherapy she was paralyzed by the fear of a recurrence and wasted her days “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
She too worked with Tony Bossis and in the difficult first moments of her session imagined herself trapped in the hold of a ship, rocking back and forth, consumed by fear. “I stuck my hand out from under the blanket and said, ‘I am so scared.’ Tony took my hand and told me to just go with it. His hand became my anchor.
“I saw my fear. Almost as in a dream, my fear was located under my rib cage on the left side; it was not my tumor, but it was this black thing in my body. And it made me immensely angry; I was enraged by my fear. I screamed, ‘Get the fuck out! I won’t be eaten alive.’ And you know what? It was gone! It went away. I drove it away with my anger.” Dinah reports that years later it hasn’t returned. “The cancer is something completely out of my control, but the fear, I realized, is not.”
Dinah’s epiphany gave way to feelings of “overwhelming love” as her thoughts turned from her fear to her children. She told me she was and remains a “solid atheist,” and yet “the phrase that I used—which I hate to use but it’s the only way to describe it—is that I felt ‘bathed in God’s love.’” Paradox is a hallmark of the mystical experience, and the contradiction between the divine love Dinah felt and “not having a shred of belief” didn’t seem to faze her. When I pointed this out, she shrugged and then smiled: “What other way is there to express it?”
Not surprisingly, visions of death loom large in the journeys taken by the cancer patients I interviewed at NYU and Hopkins. A breast cancer survivor in her sixties (who asked to remain anonymous) described zipping merrily through space as if in a video game until she arrived smack at the wall of a crematorium and realized, with a fright, “I’ve died and now I’m going to be cremated. (But I didn’t have the experience of burning—how could I? I was dead!) The next thing I know, I’m belowground in this gorgeous forest, deep woods, loamy and brown. There are roots all around me and I’m seeing the trees growing, and I’m part of them. I had died but I was there in the ground with all these roots and it didn’t feel sad or happy, just natural, contented, peaceful. I wasn’t gone. I was part of the earth.”
Several cancer patients described edging up to the precipice of death and looking over to the other side before drawing back. Tammy Burgess, diagnosed with ovarian cancer at fifty-five, found herself peering across “the great plane of consciousness. It was very serene and beautiful. I felt alone, but I could reach out and touch anyone I’d ever known.
“When my time came, that’s where my life would go once it left me, and that was okay.”
The uncanny authority of the psychedelic experience might help explain why so many cancer patients in the trials reported that their fear of death had lifted or at least abated: they had stared directly at death and come to know something about it, in a kind of dress rehearsal. “A high-dose psychedelic experience is death practice,” says Katherine MacLean, the former Hopkins psychologist. “You’re losing everything you know to be real, letting go of your ego and your body, and that process can feel like dying.” And yet the experience brings the comforting news that there is something on the other side of that death—whether it is the “great plane of consciousness” or one’s ashes underground being taken up by the roots of trees—and some abiding, disembodied intelligence to somehow know it. “Now I am aware that there is a whole other ‘reality,’” one NYU volunteer told a researcher a few months after her journey. “Compared to other people, it is like I know another language.”
At a follow-up session with Tony Bossis a few weeks after his journey, Patrick Mettes—whom his wife, Lisa, describes as “an earthy, connected person, a doer”—discussed the idea of an afterlife. Bossis’s notes indicate that Patrick interpreted his journey as “pretty clearly a window . . . [on] a kind of afterlife, something beyond this physical body.” He spoke of “the plane of existence of love” as “infinite.” In subsequent sessions, Patrick talked about his body and cancer “as [a] type of illusion.” It also became clear that, psychologically at least, Patrick was doing remarkably well in the aftermath of his session. He was meditating regularly, felt he had become better able to live in the present, and “described loving [his] wife even more.” In a session in March, two months out from his journey, Bossis noted that Patrick, though slowly dying of cancer, “feels the happiest in his life.”
“I am the luckiest man on earth.”
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HOW MUCH SHOULD THE AUTHENTICITY of these experiences concern us? Most of the therapists involved in the research take a scrupulously pragmatic view of the question. They’re fixed on relieving their patients’ suffering and exhibit scant interest in metaphysical theories or questions of truth. “That’s above my pay grade,” Tony Bossis said with a shrug when I asked him whether he thought the experiences of cosmic consciousness described by his patients were fictive or real. Asked the same question, Bill Richards cited William James, who suggested we judge the mystical experience not by its veracity, which is unknowable, but by “its fruits”: Does it turn someone’s life in a positive direction?
Many researchers acknowledge that a strong placebo effect may be at work when a drug as suggestible as psilocybin is administered by medical professionals with legal and institutional sanction: under such conditions, the expectations of the therapist are much more likely to be fulfilled by the patient. (And bad trips are much less likely to occur.) Here we bump into one of the richer paradoxes of the psilocybin trials: while it succeeds in no small part because it has the sanction and authority of science, its effectiveness seems to depend on a mystical experience that leaves people convinced there is more to this world than science can explain. Science is being used to validate an experience that would appear to undermine the scientific perspective in what might be called White-Coat Shamanism.
Are questions of truth important, if the therapy helps people who are suffering? I had difficulty finding anyone involved in the research who was troubled by such questions. David Nichols, the retired Purdue University chemist and pharmacologist who founded the Heffter Research Institute in
1993 to support psychedelic research (including the trials at Hopkins, for which he synthesized the psilocybin), puts the pragmatic case most baldly. In a 2014 interview with Science magazine, he said, “If it gives them peace, if it helps people to die peacefully with their friends and their family at their side, I don’t care if it’s real or an illusion.”
For his part, Roland Griffiths acknowledges that “authenticity is a scientific question not yet answered. All we have to go by is the phenomenology”—that is, what people tell us about their internal experiences. That’s when he began querying me about my own spiritual development, which I confessed was still fairly rudimentary; I told him my worldview has always been staunchly materialist.
“Okay, then, but what about the miracle that we are conscious? Just think about that for a second, that we are aware and that we are aware that we are aware! How unlikely is that?” How can we be certain, he was suggesting, that our experience of consciousness is “authentic”? The answer is we can’t; it is beyond the reach of our science, and yet who doubts its reality? In fact, the evidence for the existence of consciousness is much like the evidence for the reality of the mystical experience: we believe it exists not because science can independently verify it but because a great many people have been convinced of its reality; here, too, all we have to go on is the phenomenology. Griffiths was suggesting that insofar as I was on board for one “miracle” well beyond the reach of materialist science—“the marvel of consciousness,” as Vladimir Nabokov once called it, “that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being”—maybe I needed to keep a more open mind to the possibility of others.