Campbell provides a succinct example below which highlights the importance of preparing for and having the appropriate mindset prior to engaging in a psychedelic experience. Preparation and a supportive environment are key.
Set and Setting. Set refers to ones mindset. Why are you taking psilocybin? If it is just to get high, just for kicks, or to escape reality then forget it because "the magic is not going to work". If you are taking it to grow spiritually, to feel connected to those around you, to deal with an existential crisis or for an addiction problem
then you may be on the right path. Setting is the environment both social and physical that you will be in while the psilocybin is having its effect. Having a supportive environment that is familiar and relatively free of extraneous stressors with the presence of a spiritual guide or trained therapist is important.
Below is a conversation between journalist Bill Moyers and mythologist Joseph Campbell. Their enlightening discussions was made into a PBS series titled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth in 1988. A book, the Power of Myth followed.
In the course of their discussion, Joseph came to describe the peyote ritual found amongst Native Americans in north-western Mexico. Keep in mind that there are 3 main classes of psychedelics that work on the 5-HT2A receptors. The 3 classes are represented by psilocybin, peyote and LSD.
CAMPBELL: These missions are mystical journeys with all of the details of the typical mystical journey. First, there is disengagement from secular life. Everybody who is going to go on this expedition has to make a complete confession of all the faults of his or her recent living. And if they don't, the magic is not going to work. Then they start on the journey. They even speak a special language, a negative language. Instead of saying yes, for example, they say no, or instead of saying, "We are going," they say, "We are coming." They are in another world. Then they come to the threshold of the adventure. There are special shrines that represent stages of mental transformation on the way. And then comes the great business of collecting the peyote. The peyote is killed as though it were a deer. They sneak up on it, shoot a little arrow at it, and then perform the ritual of collecting the peyote. The whole thing is a complete duplication of the kind of experience that is associated with the inward journey, when you leave the outer world and come into the realm of spiritual beings. They identify each little stage as a spiritual transformation. They are in a sacred place all the way.
MOYERS: Why do they make such an intricate process out of it?
CAMPBELL: Well, it has to do with the peyote being not simply a biological, mechanical, chemical effect but one of spiritual transformation. If you undergo a spiritual transformation and have not had preparation for it, you do not know how to evaluate what has happened to you, and you get the terrible experiences of a bad trip, as they used to call it with LSD. If you know where you are going, you won't have a bad trip.
MOYERS: So this is why it is a psychological crisis if you are drowning in the water where --
CAMPBELL: -- where you ought to be able to swim, but you weren't prepared. That is true of the spiritual life, anyhow. It is a terrifying experience to have your consciousness transformed.
MOYERS: You talk a lot about consciousness.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: What do you mean by it?
CAMPBELL: It is a part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ originating consciousness. It isn't. The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a certain set of purposes. But there is a consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness. I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy, there's consciousness. Certainly the vegetable world is conscious. And when you live in the woods, as I did as a kid, you can see all these different consciousnesses relating to themselves. There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness, and we share both these things. You eat certain foods, and the bile knows whether there's something there for it to go to work on. The whole process is consciousness. Trying to interpret it in simply mechanistic terms won't work.
MOYERS: How do we transform our consciousness?
CAMPBELL: That's a matter of what you are disposed to think about. And that's what meditation is for. All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional. A lot of people spend most of life in meditating on where their money is coming from and where it's going to go. If you have a family to bring up, you're concerned for the family. These are all very important concerns, but they have to do with physical conditions, mostly. But how are you going to communicate spiritual consciousness to the children if you don't have it yourself? How do you get that? What the myths are for is to bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual.
