WONDERFUL WORLD OF SCIENCE GIVES US ANOTHER NO-DUH STUDY

Hide the children. Pour some absinthe, fluff the pillows, take off
your pants. It is time.

Because now we know: Getting nicely and wholly high on illegal but
completely natural hallucinogenic drugs might, just might, open some
sort of profound psychological doorway or serve as some sort of giddy
terrifying rocket ride to a higher state of consciousness, happiness,
a sense of inner peace and love and perspective and a big, fat lick
from the divine.

It's true. There's even a swell new study from Johns Hopkins
University that officially suggests what shamans and gurus and botany
Ph.D.s and alt-spirituality types have known since the dawn of time
and Jimi Hendrix's consciousness: that psilocybin, the all-natural
chemical found in certain strains of wild mushrooms, induces a
surprisingly large percentage of users to experience a profound -- and
in some cases, largely permanent -- revolution in their spiritual
attitudes and perspectives.

Not only that, but the stuff reportedly made a majority of testers
feel so much more compassionate, open-hearted, connected to and
awestruck by the world and the universe and God that it ranks right up
there with the most profound and unfathomable experiences of their
lives. I know. Stop the presses.

But let us sidestep the face-slapping obviousness. Let us look past
the fact that you are meant to react to this study's findings like
it's some sort of revelation, like it doesn't merely reinforce roughly
10,000 years of evidence and modern research and opinioneering and
responsible advocacy by everyone from Timothy Leary to Terence McKenna
to Huston Smith to the Tibetan Book of the Dead with yet another study
to add to the pile in the Science of the No Duh.

You know the type -- studies that merely reinforce ageless common
sense, that simply reiterate something that's been said and understood
for eons. There have been, for example, recent studies that prove that
meditation actually reduces blood pressure (no!) and that MDMA
(ecstasy) is amazing at releasing inhibition and tapping the deeper
psyche (shocking!) and that marijuana is roughly a 1,000 times less
harmful than Marlboros and nine vodka tonics and smacking your family
around in an alcoholic rage. You know, duh.

Because one thing painfully redundant studies like this do provide is
a nicely clinical framework, a structured context from which to view a
long-standing phenomenon. But here's the fascinating part: In the case
of something like psilocybin, it's not so much the astounding findings
that can make you swoon, it's also, well, the illuminating
shortcomings of science itself.

Put another way, the scientists are trying, once again, to measure
enlightenment. They are attempting to put a frame around
consciousness, cosmic awe, God. And of course, they cannot do it. Or
rather, they can only go so far before they hit that point where the
sidewalk ends and the world spins off its logical axis and the study's
participants cannot help but deliver the death blow every scientist
dreads to hear: "You cannot possibly understand."

Witness, won't you, these revelations:

The psilocybin joyriders said the experience included such feelings as
"a sense of pure awareness and a merging with ultimate reality, a
transcendence of time and space, a feeling of sacredness or awe, and
deeply felt positive mood like joy, peace and love." What's more, for
a majority of users, the experience was "impossible to put into words."

It doesn't stop there. Two months later, 24 of the participants (out
of a total of 36) filled out a questionnaire. Two-thirds called their
reaction to psilocybin "one of the five top most meaningful
experiences of their lives. On another measure, one-third called it
the most spiritually significant experience of their lives, with
another 40 percent ranking it in the top five. About 80 percent said
that because of the psilocybin experience, they still had a sense of
well-being or life satisfaction that was raised either 'moderately' or
'very much.' "

You gotta read that again. And then again. Because those statements
are just a little astonishing, unlike anything you will read in some
FDA report on Prozac from Eli Lily. The most profound experience of
their lives? One of the most spiritually significant? Can we get some
of this stuff into Dick Cheney's blood pudding? Into the Kool-Aid at
the American Family Association? Into Israel and Lebanon?

But this is the amazing thing: Here, again, is hard science running
smack into the hot cosmic goo of the mystical. Here, again, is science
peering over the edge of understanding and jumping back and saying,
"Holy crap." It is yet another reminder that our beautiful sciences
have almost zero tools with which to quantify something like
"transcendence of time and space" or "a feeling of sacredness and
awe." And watching them try is either tremendously enjoyable or just
depressing as hell. Or a little of both. It all depends, of course, on
how you see it.

Here then, are your choices. Here are the three ways to look at the
effects of magic mushrooms on the consciousness of humankind. Which
angle you choose depends a great deal on how nimble you allow your
mind, your heart, your spirit to be. Or maybe it's just how much wine
you've had.

The first way is to simply presume that the lives of the study's
participants had obviously been, up to their psilocybin joys,
tremendously mediocre. So bland and so limp that something like
hallucinogenic mushrooms could not help but be, in contrast, as
profound as being licked by angels.

This is a clinical interpretation. The gorgeous experience itself
means nothing except to say that normal life is terribly drab, and
crazy drugs temporarily scramble your brain in occasionally positive
and interesting ways, but never the twain shall meet, so, oh well,
let's go back to work.

But you can also take it one step further. You may conclude that the
study underscores the harsh fact that we as a species are so divorced
from deeper meaning, so detached from the mystical and the divine and
the universal in our everyday instant-gratification lives, that it
takes something like a powerful hallucinogen to show us just how meek
and limited and far from merging with God we still very much are. This
is the pessimistic view. And it is, by every estimate, a very
primitive and sour place to be.

Ah, but then there's the third way. This is to suggest that it's
exactly the other way around, that perhaps at least some of us are, as
Leary and his cosmic cohorts have suggested for decades, just inches
from the celestial doorway, already on the precipice of realizing that
we are, in fact, the divine we so desperately seek. Problem is, we
can't see the edge through the tremendous fog of consumerism and
conservatism and quasi-religious muck.

But even so, every now and then, we manage to take a tiny,
unconscious, clumsy step ever closer to the edge, stumbling toward
ecstasy without really knowing or understanding that we're doing so.
And ultimately, sly entheogens like psilocybin are merely nature's way
of clearing the fog for a moment, of letting us know just how close we
are by smacking us upside the scientific head and tying our cosmic
shoelaces together. And doesn't that sound like a fascinating way to
spend the weekend?