Transcend by Scott Barry Kaufman

Author:Scott Barry Kaufman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

MIND-ALTERING INTERVENTIONS

It may be that these drugs [especially LSD and psilocybin] . . . could be used to produce a peak-experience, with core-religious revelation, in non-peakers, thus bridging the chasm between these two separated halves of mankind.

—Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (1964)

On April 15, 2012, on an airplane somewhere between Tuscon and Las Vegas, Katherine MacLean “died.” MacLean was always an anxious person. Certain things would make the anxiety go away temporarily, such as meditating, getting deeply absorbed in work, or dabbling in “psychedelic extracurricular activities.” But that day, everything changed.

MacLean was two years into her postdoc in psychopharmacology with Roland Griffiths at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she worked as a psychedelic scientist, conducting legal trials of psilocybin (the primary chemical found in “magic mushrooms”). One day at a conference while she was on a walking path with a teacher, the teacher said something thought-provoking to her.

After their conversation, MacLean visited a waterfall and sat down and meditated on her breath, when a question popped into her mind: Where am I? As soon as she asked herself the question, everything “dissolved into this vortex of energy. It was terrifying, because I felt as though I was going to get sucked into this vortex of energy that didn’t care about humans or life on earth or whether I was going to come back.” But when she came back into her body, everything was “shiny, brilliant, and I felt a lot of gratitude for having a body and being alive. And I saw the earth as just this paradise of biological life.” As it turns out, this was just the preliminary to her “death.”

A couple of days later, after giving her first big public talk about psilocybin, MacLean was heading home. As her feet started down the jetway to the plane, “That’s when I knew I was about to die. I knew it.” As she approached her seat, panic began to rise. “I was sweating. I was going to come up with some excuse to just leave, get off the airplane,” she recounts. But she stayed. Maybe it was the meditation experience a few days before, but she surrendered to the moment, a moment she had no control over, and began meditating on her breath as if each breath were her last. That’s when it happened.

“The moment of death was actually kind of anticlimactic,” she notes. “Instead, nothing happened. It was just like the light switch labeled ‘Katherine MacLean’ went off. I remember opening up my eyes and looking out the window and thinking, ‘Oh, that was it.’” She felt an immediate sense of relief and total freedom. But then the panic set in. “I knew there was no going back. When I stepped off the plane, everything seemed strange and unreal. It felt like the volume had been turned up on everything, and it was difficult to orient.” For months afterward, she felt as though she were stuck between the living and the dead. “The ground

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.