How might psychedelics open our minds to the wonders of life? One straightforward thesis championed by University of Alabama at Birmingham scientist Peter Hendricks and Johns Hopkins scientist David Yaden is that the magic ingredient is awe. In keeping with this thinking, UC San Francisco neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris has found that psychedelics consistently deactivate the DMN, thus revealing that a core phenomenological dimension to the psychedelic experience—ego death, or vanishing or disappearing self—has correlates in shifting brain activation. Psychedelics, like awe, reduce activation in threat-related regions of the brain—the amygdala—freeing people from the threat-vigilance of trauma, or obsessive ideas, or addictions, or even the awareness of the certainty of our own mortality. Psychedelics lead people to feel greater common humanity and perceive fewer distinctions with others. These compounds lead us to be more altruistic up to a year after a guided journey, and more curious and open to others. With these plant medicines, given to us by Indigenous cultures thanks to their thousands of years of composting the mystical awe found in these molecules, we do indeed redeem “something really wild in the universe,” something very close to our “highest happiness.”
Awe Walk in India
In 2010, Nipun and Guri Mehta sold everything they had from their life in Silicon Valley and walked 600 miles through villages in India, in 120-degree heat and monsoon downpours, living on one dollar a day. The married couple was walking in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi’s salt march, when he marched 240 miles to the sea with tens of thousands of fellow protesters to grab a handful of salt in defiance of the British Salt Act of 1882. That protest, powered by moral beauty and moving in unison, would dethrone English colonial rule. Political collective effervescence indeed.
Over lunch one day, Nipun described to me the mystical awe he felt on this pilgrimage. Impoverished villagers would always give them food—humanity’s first act of moral beauty. In a graduation speech at the University of Pennsylvania, Nipun distilled what he learned on this awe walk into the acronym WALK: Witness, Accept, Love, and Know thyself. In the vast and mysterious 180-degree view of life one finds at two miles per hour and in Kierkegaard’s “chance contacts” with strangers, we discover mystical awe.
In 2020, Nipun invited me to a retreat he named Gandhi 3.0, to take place in Ahmedabad, India. The invitees included scientists, government officials, tech leaders, and people working in nonprofit organizations. And so, with my twenty-year-old daughter, Serafina, I made the sixteen-hour-flight to be part of Gandhi 3.0, held at the Environmental Sanitation Institute (ESI), a couple of miles from Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram. This modest institute was built to bring toilets to India, in reverence of one of Gandhi’s most impassioned causes, to champion nationwide toilet access (in his era, so-called untouchables composted the feces of people in castes above them). The entrance to ESI is a museum of toilets, with annotated photos, models, flow charts, and histories of toilet and sewer systems. Posters provide lessons about the life cycles of composting. The toilets in our rooms composted our waste, feeding the lush grounds of the ESI.
One day, at Gandhi’s ashram, we sat quietly in the sand-filled square near the Sabarmati River, where Gandhi meditated each day. We reflected in the room where he wrote at a small desk, spun wool, and took in the view of a courtyard outside. From such a modest room came vast ideas that would inspire Martin Luther King Jr. to acts of courage, which would stir Berkeley students in 1964 to free speech protests of moving in unison, which would nourish the student antiwar movement, which would pave the way in the swinging pendulum of history for Ronald Reagan’s rise to power. History so often follows the ebbs and flows of awe.
