I recently had a long-awaited tryst with ‘magic mushrooms.’ These unassuming fungi, whose many species grow wild across the world, induce psychedelic states through their active compound, psilocybin. When ingested, psilocybin acts on serotonin receptors in the brain, temporarily changing one’s mood, thought patterns and visual imagination. The resulting altered state of consciousness variously shifts both one’s perception of reality and of the self.

Some indigenous societies, especially in Mesoamerica and Southern Africa, have used magic mushrooms for centuries, perhaps millennia, for healing, spiritual exploration, divination and ritual practices. Tantalizingly, while there is no scholarly consensus on the identity of soma—the sacred drink of the Vedic Aryans and gods Indra and Agni—some scholars think that soma also contained a type of psychoactive mushroom.

Interest and research on psilocybin’s therapeutic and other properties grew in the 1950s and 60s across the West, only to be rudely shut down in the 70s by America’s foolish War on Drugs, partly as a reaction to the rebellious, psychedelic counterculture of the Baby Boomer generation. Many US administrations, from Nixon’s to Reagan’s and Clinton’s, criminalized human association with a wide range of psychoactive substances, treating all such ‘drugs’ as a single moral and social peril, despite known large differences in their pharmacology, effects, risks, harms and potential for addiction. Cannabis and heroin, for instance, were both deemed Schedule 1 substances under US federal law.

Fortunately, a more nuanced approach has emerged in recent years, leading to the legalization of cannabis in many US states and the resumption of scientific research into many substances, including psilocybin. A critical mass of expert opinion now views these substances differently. Many advocates, including Michael Pollan in his Netflix series How to Change Your Mind, have focused more on their therapeutic potential than on their possibilities for safe intellectual and spiritual enrichment—perhaps to make them more palatable in a culture that’s still hostile to the undifferentiated spectre of ‘drugs’.

Although psilocybin remains illegal under US federal law, Oregon now allows people to legally undertake a psilocybin ‘journey’ in supervised, regulated centres. Many US cities, such as Denver, Oakland, Santa Cruz and Washington, have variously decriminalized its use, cultivation and possession, but not yet its sale. Its appeal now extends well beyond hippies, new age gurus, artists and writers. Some Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists, for instance, pursue it to help spark disruptive business ideas, upgrade their cognitive output, reevaluate leadership styles and so on. In Amsterdam, meanwhile, any adult can purchase psilocybin truffles from licensed smart shops, at around $30 a dose.

My first time with psilocybin turned out to be a dazzlingly vivid, emotionally intense and deeply joyous experience, surpassing all expectations based on my pre-reading. I felt an intense outpouring of love and a profound sense of oneness with the natural world. Many people find themselves at a loss for words when trying to describe their psilocybin journeys. I now understand why. Still processing this powerful experience, I’ll nevertheless try to put some of it into words, however inadequately. I’m aware that in doing so, I run the risk of appearing ridiculous, certainly to those who have never ventured to see their world from anything other than the ‘default settings’ of their contingent brain chemistry.

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About twenty minutes after ingesting a chocolate bar infused with ground-up psilocybin mushrooms, I feel my body growing heavier, as if gravity itself were intensifying. Doorknobs and handles seem much brighter, while a ceiling beam is streaked with rainbow colours. I lean back and close my eyes.

An amazingly vibrant canvas soon comes into view, like a giant 3D-IMAX screen, which begins to fill with dazzling shapes and forms: brightly coloured fractals and other geometric patterns, pulsating tendrils and root-like organic forms—all moving, glowing, turning, dissolving and transforming in a riotous spectacle.

I open my eyes and the canvas disappears. Each time I close them again, a slightly different though equally dazzling canvas unfolds. How astounding, I think, that all this is irrupting unbidden from my own fully-awake mind. I recall the advice of experienced folk: don’t resist; let the mind go wherever it will.

Some 20–30 minutes later, the experience begins to shift. My mind wanders to the places, incidents and people from my life, but I find myself seeing them differently from the way I ordinarily visualize them with my eyes closed. An old memory surfaces, setting off an extraordinary mental experience. But first, a little back story.

In my late twenties, some thirty years ago, I travelled alone to the Himalayas for a trek beyond the Gangotri glacier, joining a small group of trekkers. After reaching Gaumukh, traditionally regarded as the source of the Ganga, I decided on a whim to hire a local guide for an additional day hike to Tapovan (14,630 ft). But young and stupid as I was, I had grossly underestimated the difficulty of this climb and was ill-equipped for it, lacking the right hiking gear. Nevertheless, I made it to the top, where I rested and met Mauni Baba, an ascetic who apparently lived there year-round in a tiny ashram in the extreme cold of the high Himalayas—peak India (pun intended)!

As I prepared to descend, I looked at the very steep slope ahead and panicked. I told my guide that I couldn’t make it down. But that was not an option. With his encouragement, I began negotiating the treacherous path. Only a few steps down, and still gripped by fear, I slipped and was on the verge of sliding all the way down the mountainside into the valley below when my guide sprang into action. He planted his foot firmly in my path to arrest my slide and grabbed my hand, quite literally saving my life before helping me safely down.

This memory suddenly appears in my psilocybin journey, but very differently. This time I do slip and tumble down the slope, hurtling along the mountainside. But there is no fear or pain. Instead, as I fall, I begin to turn into the very stuff of the mountainside—earth, mud and rock—as I keep falling and falling. I am become earth, mud, rock. I fall and fall, broken up and ground down, until I reach a dazzling waterfall. I flow over its lip, plunge through its thunderous roar, and become part of the rapids, flowing with the swirling currents, on and on. I am the mud and silt in the river. I am the river.

This experience, utterly exhilarating, joyous and visceral, brings tears to my eyes. It feels so liberating that I replay the entire scene in my mind, dwelling longer on each step.

It later struck me that this experience—the dissolution of the boundary between the self and the natural world—was entirely compatible with a non-dual conception of reality. Many philosophical and spiritual traditions, from Taoism to Mahayana Buddhism and varieties of mysticism, have independently valued such concepts of non-duality. Some strands of Brahmanical thought took this dissolution of boundaries further, finding an evocative expression in Tat Tvam Asi—You Are That. Perhaps the sages who theorized Ātman and Brahman drew at least some inspiration from the mushrooms in soma!

Rave-like music plays in the room, but I feel drawn to something else. I put on my headphones and listen to some African folk and a capella music, with its haunting and earthy vocals. I listen to Ghazal, an Indo-Persian ensemble from the late nineties. It feels sublime and uplifting, transporting me into new moods and emotional landscapes. Music has long had this power but now it seems unusually heightened and sensual.

My mind’s eye sweeps though visions of my urban neighbourhood in Gurgaon, taking in its squirrels, dogs, cows, monkeys and even a donkey. I effortlessly rise above the street level and see colourful birds and a host of animals in a wilderness beyond—all so silly and so lovable, yet so transient and vulnerable. I feel a surge of affection towards them; I want to protect them in their shrinking spaces. I rise further and see the Earth as a vast living, breathing expanse, ceaselessly churning out creatures from its crevices. They leap and gambol, their forms changing and transmuting before me in a resplendent pageant of natural evolution.

I zoom out to a cosmic scale with little effort. I’m far beyond our pale blue dot, with vistas of stars and galaxies sweeping past in visuals reminiscent of those in the film Hubble 3D IMAX, which I saw multiple times around 2010. It feels cold and lonely though it’s also vivid, organic and tranquil.

A couple of hours into the journey, I get up to serve myself a slice of pizza after heating it in the microwave. My physical movement in the room is somewhat laboured but steady; my motor skills and judgment seem intact, at least for routine tasks around the house. Unlike cannabis, which often heightens physical sensations and stimulates the appetite—aka the ‘munchies’—psilocybin produces neither effect. But while eating the pizza with eyes closed, I feel an instinctive pull and attachment to Earth, whose fecundity I see myself literally imbibing in every morsel, and for which I feel grateful.

My mind’s eye imagines my mother: weak, hobbling on her arthritic knees, her eyesight fading. So vulnerable, so unable to fend for herself. She appears to me now as the very essence of an idealized mother figure, devoid of everything that can be challenging or irritating about her in daily life. I am suddenly overcome by an urge to protect her from the ravages of aging and the cruel ways of the world, the way she protected me when I was small and vulnerable. I want to rush to her side, do all in my power to shield her and envelop her in something like a cocoon. I resolve to do this with all my strength. It feels like a powerful distillation of filial love and tenderness. This, too, brings tears to my eyes.

I also feel an aching sense of pity for a friend battling cancer, his body ravaged by chemo. There is so much history with some friends that they become a part of you. I find myself hovering in a cancer clinic, watching his body turn fully transparent, letting me see the drug coursing through his blood as it hunts down cancer cells while wreaking collateral damage and causing him pain. This odd vision seems inspired by a documentary I once watched about the human body, with its amazing footage filmed from within a living person. I haven’t thought about that documentary in a while.

A host of other fleeting thoughts and images of people and places pass through my mind: joyful moments, bittersweet feelings, subterranean regrets. I find myself repeatedly dabbing my eyes with a kerchief, something I rarely do. The tears rise not from sorrow but from the intensity of feeling. I dwell on my camaraderie with a college friend who died a decade ago and feel an acute longing for him.

As the music plays, I experience other ineffable, at times inchoate, moments for which it is perhaps best to follow the dictum, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. Or recalling Whitman, ‘This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless.’

Around four hours into the journey, the psychedelic effects start wearing off, though a pleasant afterglow lingers for hours. My mind feels alert and reinvigorated, as if it has just emerged from a gym workout. I wonder how much of this feeling will endure in the days ahead, and what shifts, if any, might I notice in my mind and consciousness.

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My experience also reinforced my view that psychedelics like psilocybin mostly draw upon the cultural and individual repertoire of one’s mind: memories, bonds, beliefs and imaginative possibilities. They work with its existing priors and potentialities rather than inserting ideas and concepts that are wholly alien to it. A devout Catholic, for instance, is far likelier to encounter Jesus or Mary than I am. Just as I, a dyed in the wool atheist etc., never dream of gods, angels, ghosts or the devil, I’m unlikely to encounter them in a psychedelic journey either, and so on.

Even with their ego-dissolving, oft-unsettling and other dramatic effects, I think psychedelics less often introduce entirely novel realms of thought than open doors of perception that were already present—doors perhaps shut or held ajar—revealing vistas into one’s own lifeworld, deploying one’s own concepts and categories in new ways.

In his brave and insightful book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality (2025), Justin Smith-Ruiu, cosmopolitan philosopher, eclectic writer and friend, sees psychedelics like psilocybin as ‘potentially useful to anyone who is keen on pushing past the limits of ordinary perception and arriving at some profound insights about the nature of our existence, the reality of the external world, the limits of natural science, and so on … psychedelic drugs do not so much show us the truth about the nature of reality as rather expose to us the inadequacies of our ordinary presumptions about what is true and what is real.’ I’m inclined to agree with that. Your mileage may vary of course.

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Disclaimer: I’m by no means advocating the use of psilocybin, which remains illegal in many jurisdictions and carries risks for people with certain physical and mental health conditions. Readers should make their own informed choices after all due diligence.