How to Change Your Mind

A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes; depression, anxiety, obsession, and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages.

The default mode network keeps order in a system so complex it might otherwise descend into the anarchy of mental illness.

For many people, in a great flood, is love... love as the meaning and purpose of life, the key to the universe, and the ultimate truth.

It is only when these boundaries fade or disappear, as they seem to do under the influence of psychedelics, that we can 'let go of rigid patterns of thought, allowing us to perceive new meanings with less fear.

Mushrooms are bringing us a message from nature.

It shook me to the core, and left me with a sense of possibility that has yet to recede.

A phrase like 'boundless being,' which once I might have skated past as overly abstract and hyperbolic, now communicated something specific and even familiar.

The whole question of meaning is central to the approach of the NYU therapists.

It may be that the loss of self leads to a gain in meaning.

Extraordinary new energies had been loosed upon the world; things would never be quite the same.

Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.

By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience.

The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment.

After more than half a century of its more or less constant companionship, one’s self—this ever-present voice in the head, this ceaselessly commenting, interpreting, labeling, defending I—becomes perhaps a little too familiar.

The renaissance of psychedelic research now under way began in earnest with the publication of that paper.

You may not get what you want, but you’ll get what you need.

Love seemed to emanate from a single point of light … it was and is the only purpose.

The ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show...stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience.

Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.

What started as a pleasure becomes a need; what was once a bad mood becomes continuous self-indictment; what was once an annoyance becomes persecution.

One way to think about what's happening under the influence of a psychedelic is that your ego sees itself for what it is—just one character in the drama, not the only character, not even the main character, just a minor character who doesn't even have to be there all the time.

When the history of second-wave psychedelic research is written, Bob Jesse will be seen as one of a pair of scientific outsiders in America—amateurs, really, and brilliant eccentrics.

It was as if we made entering Gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums, or sunsets!

Temporarily freed from the tyranny of the ego, with its maddeningly reflexive reactions and its pinched conception of one’s self-interest, we get to experience an extreme version of Keats’s 'negative capability.

Expanding our repertoire of conscious states is not an entirely new idea: Hinduism and Buddhism are steeped in it, and there are intriguing precedents even in Western science.

Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice.

By temporarily disabling the ego, psilocybin seems to open a new field of psychological possibility.

This will be far too valuable to limit to sick people.

The DMN becomes active whenever we switch from outward tasks of life to introspection, or 'self-referential' thinking.