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Some fifteen years later in Mill Valley, California, I sat with a cluster of scientists wondering how to study psychedelic awe. One of the first questions we entertained: How do we measure mystical experience? Thankfully, Ralph Hood was on hand. Ralph, it has to be said, bears a striking resemblance to Walt Whitman. He had translated the writings of William James, and scholars of mysticism who followed, into, of all things, a questionnaire—“Hood’s Mysticism Scale”—which would figure prominently in the new science of psychedelics.

The next question: Do psychedelics really change people? As with many experiences of awe, people say they have been transformed by psychedelics. The alternative hypothesis, though, is that people think they have changed but actually revert to personally ingrained habits of thinking and feeling. William James hinted at this possibility, that mystical awe reveals our individual temperaments: some mystical experiences, he observed, are more optimistic (think Walt Whitman) and others more pessimistic (think Leo Tolstoy). Today, a prominent theory holds that during times of transformation, our identities emerge more forcefully to construct experience in the present moment. This reasoning yields an ironic prediction: Psychedelic experiences make us more like who we are, rather than changing us in any enduring ways. Mystical transformation is an illusion. Out of the decay of these extraordinary experiences, we simply distill who we really are.

My Berkeley colleague Oliver John was in attendance, a specialist in the study of identity change. He had a hunch: psychedelics make us more open to experience. This tendency is captured in statements such as “I come up with new ideas,” “I am fascinated by art, music, and literature,” and “I am original.” People who are open to experience, studies show, are receptive to ideas and new information, are innovative and creative, are often moved to chills and tears by art and music, and are inclined toward empathy and generosity. The defining emotion of openness, you probably already guessed, is awe. Perhaps psychedelics open us up to openness.

Neuroscientist Roland Griffiths listened carefully. Over the course of several years, with Bob Jesse quietly assisting, Griffiths would distill in a first, field-shaping experiment what is at the heart of the psychedelic experience, mystical awe—given to us by Indigenous traditions that are thousands of years old—and see whether it promoted growth in the study’s participants. In a double-blind experiment (one in which experimenters and participants alike were unaware of which participants got what), the participant received either psilocybin or a placebo. The participant relaxed on a couch for eight hours during the journey, listening to music with eye covers on, with a therapist and guide nearby. What is called the “set and setting”—how people are oriented to the experience and the comfortable context in which it takes place—were carefully implemented.

In this study, 13 percent of the participants receiving psilocybin reported feeling intense fear. Sixty-one percent of the participants reported a mystical experience that day. That is, on Hood’s Mysticism Scale, they reported that they:

had merged with some kind of force larger than themselves,

encountered fundamental truths about life,

felt a sense of reverence for what is sacred,

experienced intense joy and awe,

and experienced timelessness and a dissolution of boundaries between themselves and the world around them.

This finding has been replicated: across studies, 50 to 70 percent of participants report that psychedelics produce one of the most significant experiences of mystical awe of their lives.

And, yes, people grew. When compared to their self-assessments before the study, two months later participants who had ingested a small serotonin-altering chemical had become more open to experience, their minds and hearts more open to big ideas, music, art, beauty, mystery, and other people. I don’t think there is another experience that produces mystical awe with such reliability except, perhaps, watching the birth of a child, nearly dying, or dancing with the Dalai Lama.

Since Griffiths’s breakthrough experiment, one line of studies has looked to psychedelics as an approach to our most complex struggles, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and PTSD. Psychedelics have been found to reduce levels of depression and anxiety, as well as the fear one might feel when living with a terminal disease. Eighty percent of smokers smoke significantly fewer cigarettes after a guided psychedelic experience. People struggling with alcoholism drink less. Psychedelic experiences make us less likely to commit crimes.