a decent trip

s and i got to see michael pollan speak in brooklyn last month and it proved to be the motivation we needed to read his book on psychedelics How to Change Your Mind: etc etc (though the essentially free copy of the book didn’t hurt). a few thoughts.

a good primer for those who have not spent much time investigating their own minds. pollan’s investigation — cautious, thorough and skeptical — may (i hope) encourage people to question the assumptions they hold about their minds and their experience. whether this can lead people towards a spiritual life or prompt them to demand more from their spiritual tradition, i dunno. with this book, i’m satisfied that if nothing else, it lends cultural and scientific legitimacy to one method of accessing the spiritual and working through our collective "spiritual disorders". i’m glad to have read it, it helped connect a few dots, but it doesn't delve deep enough into either philosophy or science for me to imagine revisiting it.