A patient in psilocybin therapy
The Enlightenment Cure
This is the first in a series of blogs about psilocybin therapy.
My experience as patient in Holland where psilocybin therapy is legal, as a doctor administering treatment in a clinical trials, and a researcher who has read thousands of studies and interviewed dozens of experts for my upcoming book, has led me to one simple conclusion. Psilocybin therapy is the most wildly effective therapy we have ever measured because it cures us at the most fundamental existential level.
A therapeutic trip is a momentary experience of what Buddhists and Hindus call enlightenment,
The idea that psychedelics are a fast track to the enlightenment is not new.
What is new is that we have the technology to reliably induces an enlightenment experience.
And the data to support it.
Writers like Aldous Huxley, Allan Watts Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, and musical artists like the Beatles, imbedded that idea into the culture in the 1970’s. Indeed, many people who have tried psychedelics at some point in their life recall it as a profound reality altering experience that they still regard as meaningful.
But I’ve never heard anyone claim that the acid they took at a Grateful Dead Concert permanently cured them of a major mental illness, nor that taking magic mushrooms in the woods with friends permanently relieved them of all fear of death. If you’ve taken psychedelics recreationally, with all due respect, you’ve only been to the foothills of the psychedelic experience.
Psilocybin therapy will take you to much higher ground.
Psychedelic therapy is not new, either. In the 1970’s, researchers like Bill Richards and Stanislav Grof were doing research demonstrating that psilocybin and LSD had amazing efficacy with treatment resistant problems like alcoholism. It’s even been reported that the co-founder of AA, Bill W., was an early LSD patient and that his psychedelic experience of a “higher power” led him to found the most successful alcohol treatment in history.
But Nixon’s war on drugs shut that research down. It was revived in the 1990’s at Johns Hopkins (with Bill Richards once again taking part, one of the few people to participate in both generations of psychedelic research) and NYU. But at the time of this writing, it’s still not legally available to the general public, unless you travel to Oregon, a progressive state that just legalized psychedelic therapy.
When you are properly therapeutically prepared and supported, take a very high dose of psilocybin, put on eye-shades, lay quietly in a bed for 6 hours without speaking to anyone, and listen to a specially curated soundtrack– you will not leave that room the same person you were when you entered. You may have entered the hospital that morning suffering from a lifetime of intractable depression, and find yourself cured when you get back into your car.
If psilocybin therapy can cure major mental illness, that would be revolutionary enough, but as we shall see it does so much more than alleviate symptoms. Subjects have a “full mystical experience,” “dissolve their egos,” resolve their traumas, have insight into their problems, are infused with profound feeling of love and being loved, discover a sense of connection to the universe and everyone and everything in it, become less ego-centric, lose their fear of death, and become more mindful, mature, and compassionate.
I will argue that psilocybin therapy cures mental illness by inducing an enlightenment experience. One enlightenment experience may not constitute full enlightenment as the Buddhists and Hindus define it. It’s probable that the psychological state of enlightenment exists on a spectrum, like most traits and states.
But a partial enlightenment can mean a complete remission from depression.
