The Psilocybin Solution

changing techniques like breathing exercises and fasting to facilitate altered states of awareness, Koestler countered with a parable about mountain climbing, claiming that the view obtained when one has slogged for hours on foot up the mountain is far superior to the view obtained at the end of a cable-car journey. In other words, the laborious toil undertaken by the fasting, self-flagellating, cave-dwelling ascetic leads to a qualitatively different revelation than the armchair mystic who merely pops down a handful of Sandoz pills.

This is the classic philosophical objection laid against the potential transcendental effects of substances like psilocybin. It is too easy. Where is the relentless sweat and toil? Where are the physical scars of the tortuous journey that preceded the mystical illumination? How can one possibly have access to realms of spiritual ecstasy without undergoing years of suffering? Are we to admit that any Tom, Dick, or Leary can achieve transcendence without experiencing untold pain, misery, and self-mortification?

Koestler, at least, was convinced that there were no shortcuts to the divine, and he stated this clearly to Leary and in the newspaper article. Significantly, he admitted to Leary that he was in the wrong state of mind when he tried psilocybin at Leary’s apartment, that he had been awoken to painful memories of being a political prisoner during the war. Similarly, on the night before his first unpleasant brush with the drug, he’d had disturbing dreams that lingered on long enough to pervade the psychedelic state. In fact, Leary himself had second thoughts in inviting Koestler to try psilocybin, as he came across as being too controlled and rational. Although these considerations go a long way in explaining Koestler’s negative encounters, the criticisms he raised still stand strong, and the advocate for the continued investigation of psilocybin must perforce respond to the allegations.

I can offer two lines of defence to parry Koestler’s objections. First, it is almost certain that Koestler did not dwell upon the fact that psilocybin is a natural part of the environment and not an unnatural synthetic product. Had he actually gone out and picked psilocybin mushrooms for himself perhaps his experiences might have been more rewarding, because the actual act of mushroom collection leaves an indelible earthly mark upon the memory. This fact of psilocybin’s naturalness, which I consistently remark on, deserves a still more detailed examination, and this is a good opportunity to begin doing so. I will return to answering Koestler’s criticisms after this brief diversion.

Food for Thought

As we shall see in much more detail later, psilocybin is believed to cause its effects by acting upon nerve cells, or neurons, within the brain. In particular, it acts on those neurons that utilize a substance called serotonin. Serotonin is a chemical messenger, or neurotransmitter, that allows individual neurons to communicate with one another to transmit and process information. Now, the various compounds employed by brains to process information have evolved over millions of years, and they are determined by the chemicals available in the environment, in particular, from the raw materials available in food. Serotonin has emerged as a key neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger, because it can be produced relatively simply from raw materials. You cannot just have any old chemical compound acting as a neurotransmitter; it has to have arisen through evolution under the deterministic constraints set by the laws of chemistry and the further constraints set by the availability of food.

Hence, serotonin is bound up with the chemistry of the environment. If the chemical constituency of the natural environment was radically different, Nature would have been forced to evolve completely different neurotransmitters that reflect to the constraints set by that environment. In this sense, we are indeed what we eat, and the notion that consensus reality is a popular serotonergic hallucination yields a formidably uncanny wisdom. Our minds, our very consciousnesses, depend upon the hardware of the brain, which in turn depends on chemical structure, which further depends on diet. Natural psilocybin mushrooms can enter one’s diet, and the new chemicals subsequently operating within the brain will alter awareness so that our common hardwired “serotonergic reality” shifts, as it were, to a rare “mushroomwired psilocybinetic reality.”

Having said this much it should now be absolutely clear that the psilocybin mushroom experience is wholly natural, and that it arises out of an environmentally driven alteration in brain chemistry in as much as the psilocybin mushroom is part of the environment. There is nothing artificial about this process at all. Just as we can selectively pick wheat to make bread for our physical well-being, so too can we selectively pick and consume natural psilocybin mushrooms for our spiritual well-being. Both wheat and mushroom are legitimate natural expressions of the interwoven biospherical system within which we are embedded. I think it unlikely that Koestler considered these environmental facts before making his negative judgments.

The second line of defence against Koestler’s classic objections is that it is not certain that technological short-cuts—as he called them—are necessarily bad. Is not the Earth viewed from space satellites beautiful? Viewed thus, is it really any less beautiful than if we were to build a really large ladder and clamber up to get the same view? Should we abandon all labor-saving technology and make things as hard as possible for humanity?

I think not. Huxley’s vision in The Doors of Perception of a mass-marketed psychedelic that enlightens the world cannot be faulted on its technological methodology. If technology, pharmaceutical or otherwise, can hasten some form of improved psychological condition, then the only thing stopping this is a sense of distrust and guilt, arguably instilled more often than not by dogmatic religion. Indeed, Leary surmised that Koestler’s mountaintop parable arose from a deep-seated Catholic guilt, a guilt that arises all too easily in the face of pleasure, ecstasy, and the bounds of human freedom.

Having defended the idea of humanity-saving technology, I would once more remind the critical reader that psilocybin is not a technological product anyway (at least not in the traditional sense). Koestler perceived it so because his psilocybin came in the form of a Sandoz pill, the perfect symbol of a modern technological fix. This is in direct contrast to the overtly organic symbolism of the wild mushroom.

When Koestler left Leary’s company to return to New York, it was wryly noted that he did not walk back but got a plane. Leary concluded that to ignore psilocybin as a psychological tool would be akin to rejecting the microscope because it made seeing too easy, a good analogy since both tools uncover the hidden riches of Nature.

I think it safe to conclude that Koestler’s negative attitude stemmed principally from his painful store of POW memories and the unresolved conflicts lying in the depths of his psyche. In particular, I would suggest, as did Leary, that Koestler’s Catholic guilt played a large part in his rejection of the mushroom.

This same type of traditional religious guilt, which seems to have plagued humans from time immemorial and which easily transforms into an oppressive drive against other people’s freedom, was also displayed, among others, by the French poet Baudelaire. Like other nineteenth-century poets and writers, such as Byron, Shelley, Balzac, De Quincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who reputedly wrote Kubla Khan after an opium reverie), Baudelaire once used “trendy” psychoactive plant products like opium and cannabis for creative purposes. Yet he later came to utterly despise them, as if they were the root of all that is evil and misleading, no less than the most cunning of the Devil’s tools for thwarting humankind from reaching God.

The point is missed, almost deliberately it seems. Psychoactive plant substances are not inherently evil; rather they can become destructive if used in excess or for the wrong reasons, much as any benign substance can become harmful if used beyond moderation. Had Koestler been in the possession of the right frame of mind and received the ultimate gift of the psilocybin mushroom, that is, had he perceived a direct communion with the transcendental Other and realized that this was a wholly natural phenomenon, then perhaps he would have embraced psilocybin’s cultural healing potential.

It seems, then, that if the potentially spiritual effects of the mushroom are likened to a stream, the stream can “hit” the wrong human mind, or at least the wrong state of mind, causing the stream to be blocked. Where it cannot flow on and blossom, psilocybin’s numinous potential will remain unrealized. God’s Flesh is clearly not for everyone. This fact must perforce be considered at length before any kind of nontrivial investigation commence.