How to change your mind

 Watched the first two installments of the new Netflix documentary based on Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind last night. Impressive. 

I'd already read the book, four Junes ago already. (I'll always associate it with Montreal, where our attempt to flee the summer swelter of Tennessee was confounded by a record-breaking Canadian heatwave that made us want to change our minds.) I've read all his books. I've been reading Pollan ever since his first, Second Nature. 

I wrote him a fan email back then, he promptly responded, we had a nice correspondence, I dumped a draft of my long Springs of Delight introductory chapter on consciousness on him and he responded constructively and generously. Then he got famous, I haven't pestered him since.  

I'm not ready to drop acid or eat magic mushrooms just yet, I'll wait for a suitable life-crisis or physical trauma or galloping decrepitude (it's still just creeping, so I'll stick with my ordinary everyday consciousness for now) to trigger that decision. But if the time ever comes I'll thank Michael again for boldly going where only other psychonauts (and nuts like Leary) have gone before, and writing beautifully about the experience.

 

Experience is key in this whole discussion, I think. A front-page story in this morning's Times says some psychopharmacologists think it may be possible to take the magic, the hallucinatory subjectivity,  out of magic mushrooms and still reap the mind/brain-changing benefits. They "think that psychedelics’ effects on the brain are what give them their therapeutic properties, not the trip they take people on, and that the subjective experience of the drugs can be removed while their impact on depression remains.”

But my impression from Pollan is that omitting the subjective experience of psychoactivity would be to miss the point... kind of like Robert Louis Stevenson's lantern-bearers without their lamps. I don't just want to be transformed, by a pill or an injection, I want to be transformed by experience. And possibly by joy. "To miss the joy is to miss all." 

I want always to be able to tell a story about who I thought I was before and after, and what it felt like during. There's not much to tell about just ingesting some molecules and then, presto, being changed. What made the change, from the changeling's point of view? If I'm to be "shaken out of my grooves" I want to feel the shaking and then to narrate it. I don't just want to wave a magic wand. But I might still want to feel some magic.

And that's what Pollan has done, as he did before for plants and caffeine and food: felt and conveyed the natural magic of being a sentient, sometimes sapient organism on this planet, striving to connect and to flourish.

But my wife says he's too thin, and looks older than his age (which is also mine). I don't think she'll ever change her mind about that. It's genetic and behavioral, on his part (he eats mostly plants, after all). Hers too, I think.