Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

Such ratomorphism, as the writer and philosopher Arthur Koestler cynically termed it, used to dominate psychological science, and topics like mind and consciousness were banished from the scientific arena like some forbidden fruit unfit for empirical consumption, even though, of course, the science of psychology is itself mediated through the stuff of consciousness. Today things are fortunately beginning to change, and a kind of philosophical psychological approach to mind and consciousness is emerging, a topic I will later explore in much detail.

Back in 1962 the Good Friday Experiment was as far removed from rats as is possible, stretching empirical science to its limits. It was the type of experiment that our controversial psilocybin demanded, and its results remain significant.

A psychology student named Walter Pahnke, working for his doctorate, arranged the experiment with the help of Leary and other members of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. It was an attempt to capture the psilocybin-induced mystical experience in quantitative measures through questionnaires. Although questionnaire studies fall foul of a number of methodological criticisms, it is the only viable scientific approach to measuring the reported subjective effects of drugs. It is not enough for someone to claim that psilocybin is a wonderful substance that elicits transcendental feelings of awe. Rather, one must obtain objective measures if one wants to bring entheogens under the analytical eye of science; if, that is, one is a scientist who believes science offers the best approach to psilocybin—a moot point to be sure. If you’ve tried the stuff yourself and you’ve traveled to those divine realms, then you are one who knows . Leary knew, as did the other members of the project, but though they had tasted superconsciousness, they were still caught in the unenviable position of trying to document the psilocybin experience with the relatively cumbersome tools provided by the science of that era. Understandably perhaps, Leary was soon to don a kaftan, abandon academia, and hijack the media instead. Yet the Good Friday Experiment, or “Miracle of Marsh Chapel” as it became known, still stands out as the classic psychology experiment of that pre-LSD period.

Five rooms in the basement of Boston University chapel were reserved for Pahnke and the psilocybin project team. Twenty subjects, all theology students and therefore at home in the chapel building, took part in the study, which employed a double-blind methodological approach. This meant that half of them received psilocybin while the other half received a mildly psychoactive placebo. No one knew who got what, not even the experimenters, though it soon became clear who had been given the mushroom pills.

Leary later recalled that the ten psilocybin subjects began to act rather unconventionally. Some began to wander around the chapel murmuring prayer. One lay on the floor, some lounged on benches, while another began playing strange music on the chapel organ. The most intense effects, however, were occurring in the depths of the subjects’ psyches, and an analysis of the subsequent 147-item psychological questionnaires completed by the subjects soon revealed what had taken place.

The questionnaires were designed to probe various aspects of the psilocybin experience. Parts of the subjects’ reports were then rated by naive markers, who had to compare this psilocybin phenomenology (phenomenology is the study of direct conscious experience) with mystical phenomenology taken from various religious scriptures, without knowing which was which.

Incredibly, the results showed that the psilocybin group had mystical religious experiences indistinguishable from those reported in religious literature. This was a decidedly controversial finding. A naturally occurring substance, although in pill form thanks to Sandoz, had been shown to be capable of generating a full-blown mystical experience within the religiously ripe minds of theology students. The implications were enormous, and, as we shall see, many a storm was to brew over the validity of chemically induced theophany. Traditionally cherished beliefs about mystical enlightenment and the religious impulse were being threatened by, of all things, a drug, and this was guaranteed to cause uproar and dissent among those members of the priestly elite who serve to police communion with the divine.

Despite the beginnings of heated controversy, Pahnke’s thesis on psilocybin was uneasily approved, though he was not allowed to continue his line of work and his requests for further government funds were denied. Something was obviously amiss. Psilocybin—this wild alchemical product of Nature—was becoming a threat to long-established power structures both in academia and in the realm of traditional religious beliefs about divine communion. Psilocybin’s wild and ebullient energy, dormant for so long, was once more on the loose, this time flowing though the very heart of the Western establishment.

In one sense, it was as if the Good Friday study could be viewed as the last experiment that the scientist keen on ascertaining the nature of consciousness and reality needed to perform. The message seemed clear. Humanity could transcend its secular level of being and raise itself to a new order, an idealistic dream shared by many early Western psychedelic explorers. Psilocybin could be carefully used as a source of knowledge and wisdom, allowing people glimpses of a transcendental reality that is a mere perceptual step away.

As it was, the lofty psychedelic dream shared by so many at the time never quite materialized, although I would argue that this was mainly due to the lack of an explanatory framework for the psilocybin experience, and not because the idealism of the dream was untenable. Indeed, at this early stage in psychedelic research, almost nothing was known of psilocybin’s mechanism of action, and apart from Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, there were little in the way of speculative psychological theories able to capture the full import and impact of the psilocybin experience in a nonreductive way. In a real sense, language let the scientists down, or at least the lack of descriptive terminology and lack of conceptual sophistication meant that psychedelic phenomenology remained an abstruse anomaly. And anomalies, even if they might contain the essence of some new ways of understanding the nature of reality, are more often than not deliberately buried out of sight, or at least the conceptually uncomfortable data are all too easily lost somewhere at the back of the scientific community’s filing cabinet. Such a fate did indeed meet the psychedelic experience, and by the late 1960s almost all of the world’s known psychedelic substances had been deemed a dangerous social threat and were promptly declared illegal. Scientific research into psychedelics was thereby halted.

However, this was not a big and final end to the matter, and today scientists are once again gradually returning to experimentation with psilocybin—often with a view to elucidating psilocybin’s therapeutic potential. It is also the case that psilocybin mushroom use by the public is now more widespread than ever, particularly in Europe. Indeed, various specialized spore samples and grow kits can now be purchased in many countries—although it is still unclear how the law will react to this novel situation. Given recent scientific reports on the relatively benign nature of psilocybin (which I discuss in more detail at the end of this book), one hopes that good sense will prevail and that the mushroom’s decidedly spiritual influence will continue to be integrated within our Western culture.

As further evidence of psilocybin’s vivid effect upon those fortunate theology students, and so that I can build support for my enthusiastic contention that the psilocybin mushroom represents a kind of medicinal soul food with which to reconceive the nature of reality, I now recount a follow-up study of sixteen of the twenty original subjects of the Good Friday Experiment. This was undertaken by Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), in the late 1980s when, by this time, many of the subjects were practicing ministers.