The Connection Between Psychedelics and Meditation: My Interview with Johns Hopkins’ Roland Griffiths

The man at the forefront of the modern wave of psychedelic research on how psychedelics are like meditation, how they give us insight into the nature of our mind, and how they work in the brain.

photos by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

Until fairly recently, psychedelics have been caught up in a “Just Say No” approach to drugs on the federal level, illegal and listed on the worst-of-the-worst “schedule 1” list alongside heroin. The public shift in attitude toward them over the past few years has largely been attributable to their re-emergence in major university studies that have shown them to be promising therapeutics for depression, PTSD, and other intractable psychological issues.

I talked to Roland Griffiths, whose research at Johns Hopkins University helped to launch the modern psychedelics movement, about this shift as well as the profound links between Buddhist practice and intentional psychedelic use. His 2006 study was one of the first to gain FDA approval since the U.S. government turned against psychedelics in the late ‘60s. He’s the founding director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins, though he’s recently stepped down from day-to-day operations after a colon cancer diagnosis.

I spoke with him last year for my piece on psychedelics and Buddhism in Lion’s Roar magazine, but there’s lots of bonus material here that didn’t make it into the final article. (This has been edited for clarity and length. It’s still quite long, but it’s good!)

JKA: How did you become one of the first researchers to essentially re-open the academic case on psychedelics after sanctioned study was essentially shut down in the 1970s?

RG: Well, let me start with my back story, because I think that's immediately relevant. I'm trained as a psycho-pharmacologist and came to Hopkins and for 20 years was studying mood altering drugs — mostly drugs of abuse.

And then about, it's over 20 years ago now, I undertook a meditation practice. And that opened up an entire worldview change for me, as I came to investigate the nature of mind. My initial introduction was not through Buddhism, but a mantra-based meditation practice, however. Then subsequently, I've turned to Buddhist practice.

But it was my deep curiosity in what it was that meditation had to teach me that led, in fact, to what I might describe as a minor midlife crisis where I was seriously considering leaving the academy. I was a full professor in the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. And I had a world reputation for my research on drug abuse. That's interesting, scientifically interesting, an important contribution. But the question at hand pales in comparison to what all of a sudden came into view as the most interesting question: What's going on here? What is the experience of sentience, life awareness, about, and what are the implications for understanding that?

So all of a sudden, there was this deep interest in understanding that. I became reacquainted with the older literature on psychedelics, and then deeply curious about whether that could tell me anything about what I was now very interested in.

It wasn't a calling to use psychedelics, it was a calling to use my credentials and training to see if I could launch a study that would allow me to engage in research that was of primary interest to me. And so that was the basis in which we initiated our first study. And the whole thing started unfolding in the 1990s. We got approval for our first study in 2000. And frankly, I had a lot of skepticism. I was agnostic about whether psychedelics could produce the kinds of experiences that I'd already had in meditation.

But the results of our first study were so remarkable, that it changed the whole direction of my career. And so the psychedelic work and my abiding interest in psychedelics, and psychedelics and meditation, and psychedelics and spiritual practice, has been what I've been doing since that time.

JKA: How are psychedelics like meditation?

RG: Meditation techniques, which have been developed over millennia, represent a powerful approach to investigating the very nature of mind or, as some might say, the nature of self. And what I'm fond of saying now is that if meditation represents a systematic, tried and true, course of discovery of the nature of mind, psilocybin and psychedelics represent a crash course.

So the psychedelics and my work has been primarily with psilocybin, it's a pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present moment. And that's identical to meditation, right? Psilocybin allows one to dispassionately observe and let go of pain, fear and discomfort, as does meditation.

It allows a recognition that mind is capable of revealing knowledge, that is, insights, sometimes forgotten memories, that are not readily accessible in everyday waking consciousness. Things can bubble up. And they both can the gateway to gaining of an authoritative sense of the interconnectedness of all people and possibly all things. It's a strong sense of emergent connectivity that comes out of these kinds of practices.

JKA: Yeah, definitely. And do you feel like meditation also can enhance the effect of psychedelics?

RG: Yes. In preparing people for a psychedelic experience, we, in effect, give participants a crash course in mindfulness. In our clinical situation, we are focusing on the introverted experience. So people have eye shades on and they have headphones on in which they listen to a program of music, although many of our meditators want to axe the music because they find it intrusive.

I think it's helpful for people who are unaccustomed to being inwardly focused, however, and also prevents distractions from the external world.

What we're asking people to do with psilocybin is go in, be deeply curious about your experience, and just bring in that intense sense of interest and curiosity and openness to whatever it is that arises in consciousness. I mean this is just like instruction for someone going into their first meditation retreat. We caution people to be indifferent about the emotional tone. They're not looking for pleasant experiences, and they can they can expect to experience a wide range of emotions and thoughts and feelings and visualizations. And what we're asking them to do is, remain in equipoise with that, be curious, be interested.

Psilocybin provokes a lot of imagery. Should a demonic figure appear and appear very threateningly to you — and that very well may happen, our instruction would be, well, recognize it is fearful. But but don't run from it. And don't try to fight it. Either running or fighting is reifying it into something it's not. And although the hair on the back of your neck may be standing on end, the posture you want to take is "approaching" and "interest."

But if you can approach it with curiosity and deep interest, it is going to change. Initially, a fearful thought, object, vision, might even become moreso, but if you stay with it, it's going to change. And then it may turn to something benign, ugly, disgusting, transcendent, astonishing, beautiful beyond belief. It’s going to change. And so you just follow whatever it is, but with a deeper awareness that this is all occurring as a play of consciousness, and then see what you can learn about that.

JKA: How do you think psychedelics give us insight into the nature of our minds?

RG: For people who have very little understanding about the nature of their minds, it's really a huge awakening. You know, it's a classic, abrupt awakening experience in which it's a recognition that there is interiority that's been lost because we're so wrapped up in our dialogue, our narrative structure of who we are. It leads to this deep curiosity about the nature of mind. And for that reason I think an ideal way of working with psychedelics would be for people without a practice to actually acquire some significant meditation experience prior to a psychedelic.

The thing is going to make a be of value is the extent to which one can learn from the experience and integrate aspects of that into their day to day lives. This is the project of waking up, right?

JKA: You've been doing this now for more than 20 years. What kind of resistance have you met with this area of study?

RG: Oh, my God. So, our study was the first study in decades to be approved to give a high dose of psilocybin or any psychedelic to people without any history of psychedelic use. It was simply considered, based on what happened in the 1960s, and the misunderstanding of the risk profile, to be too risky.

And so initially, it wasn’t clear at all we could even get approval for a study of the type that gave a high dose of psilocybin to psychedelic-naive individuals. So that that has changed markedly. And the psychedelic renaissance now has taken off, and in some ways I'm really hesitant about the enthusiasm. It's going to lead to some very significant problems. I mean, psychedelics can be dangerous. People can develop psychotic conditions. They certainly can engage in dangerous behavior to themselves and others, and get hurt or even end up in situations in which people end up dying — either suicide or accidental death of themselves or others. If anything, we’re in a bubble of over-enthusiasm.

JKA: How does this work in the brain? How do you explain that to people?

RG: Our understanding of how psychedelics work in the brain is something that's unfolding dramatically, quickly, and interestingly, but as we might imagine, given our primitive understanding of the nature of consciousness, we're far off the mark of understanding really what's going on. But what we know is: Psychedelics bind to a specific subtype of serotonin receptors. And from imaging studies, we know what areas of brain are activated and deactivated. Furthermore, with real-time imaging of a brain, we know something about the connectivity across different parts of the brain and how that is changed by psilocybin. And that's pretty dramatic. There's all kinds of connectivity differences that occur.

One of the most intriguing findings that is identical across long-term meditators, and in acute psilocybin experiences and other psychedelic experiences, is that there seems to be a deactivation of something called the default mode network The default mode network has been associated with self-referential processing. That's a kind of a sense of self. Sometimes the default mode network is labeled the egoic function. So that's dampened. That may account for these deeply moving experiences that emerge sometimes, with both psilocybin and, and meditation.

We also know that the psychedelics are capable of producing neuroplastic changes; that is they actually can change neurons and neural connectivity. And so that's really intriguing.

JKA: Obviously, this can have a lot of these great effects, like the sense of altruism and interconnectedness. This is a grand question, but how do you think the judicious use of psychedelics could change the world?

RG: Let me just put this caveat on: As a professor in the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience, you know, I'm on Team Science here. So I'm empirically based and I want to keep my eye on what it is we can learn about these. With that said, I think we're engaged in a much larger process here. Now, I'm incorporating Buddhist practice, many kinds of mystical or, or spiritual practices, use of psychedelics, all of which I would loosely call the Awakening Project. And and it really has to do with this kind of fundamental recognition, that we're all in this together, right?

At the core we're all looking into this astonishing mystery of what's going on here. And then, for me at least, what emerges is this deep sense of gratitude. Just the appreciation that somehow I don't know how I got here. But I've been gifted with the preciousness of this opportunity for this experience that I completely don't understand but has this deep, benevolent, precious quality to it.

This is the dilemma that we all face. And so what we want people to do is to awaken to that, because we know that when people do awaken to that they're going to be more compassionate, they're going to be more altruistic, and a lot of our primitive evolutionarily evolved motives that lead to destructive behavior and hurting one another just will not stand up to that.

And so, in some sense, the Awakening Project is in a race against the existential, the possibilities of technological destruction of our whole species. I'm also willing to say that, ultimately, what we're talking about is the survival of our species. What’s more important than that?