Michael Pollan

It's weird to spend five years on a book and come to an answer like that.

But as I said at one point, this is a book where you may know less at the end than you do at the beginning, but you'll know a lot of other things.

Well, I think that the interest in psychedelics is partly an interest in taking back our consciousness and exploring it.

Because one of the things that happens...

The day you do a psychedelic is not a day you're looking at your phone.

It's a day that you've put a fence around if you're doing it right and not just walking around the streets of Manhattan tripping, but you're doing it with some intention and you reclaim your mind for a period of time and you explore it.

This idea of expanding consciousness, there's a line in Aldous Huxley that I've always really liked.

He believed in this transmission theory of consciousness.

which he got from Henri Bergson, who really was the person who first put that forward, was that in normal times, our brains admit only the trickle of consciousness we need to get through the day, to be productive, to do what we need to do, but there's so much more.

And what he said psychedelics did is open what he called the reducing valve so that more consciousness got in.

What was that consciousness?

To him, it was the mind at large.

But I find it's also sensory information, bodily information.

I mean, sometimes trips are incredibly somatic and they're all about the body.

And other times they're about, you know, visual material information.

But it's ours.

It's mine, right?

Although some people go to a divine place about it.

And so I think it's... You know, I'm just out there starting to talk about consciousness, and I'm like, I'm curious that people are so interested in consciousness.

Like, I didn't expect this when I started on this book.