Charles Bessant

Charles Bessant, a museum exhibit designer in his sixties, became one of the most vivid examples in the book of how a psychedelic experience could alter a person’s relationship to smoking. His account links an immense, frightening sense of ego dissolution and connectedness to a plain conclusion: smoking had become irrelevant. He took part in a small Johns Hopkins pilot study, and the narrator reports that Bessant had been abstinent for six years by the time of their conversations.

Identity and Study Context

Bessant was one of fifteen smokers enrolled in a smoking-cessation pilot study directed by Matthew Johnson, a psychologist and protégé of Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins. The volunteers were trying to quit smoking; their program included several sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy followed by two or three psilocybin doses. It was an open-label study without a placebo, so participants knew they were receiving psilocybin. They were required to stop smoking before a session, and researchers measured carbon-monoxide levels at intervals to check compliance and continued abstinence.

The study’s results were striking but preliminary: it was small and not randomized. Six months after the psychedelic sessions, 80 percent of the volunteers were confirmed abstinent; after a year, 67 percent remained so, a rate the book describes as exceeding that of the best treatment then available. The group figures provide context rather than a complete account of Bessant’s individual course. The narrator identifies him as having remained abstinent for six years, and notes that participants with the most complete mystical experiences had the best outcomes. Bessant’s story is presented within that pattern, not as proof that every participant had the same experience or result.

The Mountain and the Dissolved Ego

In recounting his session, Bessant described finding himself on a mountaintop in the Alps, with Wagner playing in his headphones and “the German states stretching out before me all the way to the Baltic.” The geographic sweep of the scene accompanied a change in his sense of self. As he put it, “My ego had dissolved, yet I’m telling you this. It was terrifying.” The account preserves both sides of the experience: dissolution did not mean that the experience felt merely peaceful or reassuring. Bessant remembered it as frightening, while the narrator compares its combination of terror and wonder to a Romantic encounter with the sublime.

Bessant made sense of the experience through the language of unity and connection. “People use words like ‘oneness,’ ‘connectivity,’ ‘unity’—I get it!” he said, describing himself as part of something far larger than anything he had previously imagined. The importance of this shift was not limited to an abstract belief. It altered the scale against which he judged an ordinary habit: smoking, once something he was trying to give up, now seemed small beside the larger reality he felt himself to belong to.

Seeing the Ordinary Anew

In a later phone conversation, Bessant paused to describe standing in his garden as light came through the canopy of leaves. He connected his ability to appreciate the scene with the simple fact of having eyes open to see it: “If you don’t stop to look, you’ll never see it.” He acknowledged that the thought was obvious as a statement, but distinguished knowing it from feeling it—being able to look at the light and be amazed by it. He attributed this renewed attention and his feeling of connection to everything to the session.

The garden scene gives the account a counterweight to the Alpine vision. The experience had carried Bessant toward a vast landscape and an altered sense of self; its continuing significance appeared in the attention he brought to light in an everyday setting. The book does not treat the change as a new doctrine or an elaborate explanation. Instead, Bessant’s account turns on an ordinary capacity—to stop, look, and recognize the scene as something worth noticing—that had acquired fresh force after the session.

Smoking Becomes Irrelevant

Bessant followed up by email, continuing to search for language adequate to the experience’s immensity. His explanation for quitting remained direct: “Why quit smoking? Because I found it irrelevant. Because other things had become so much more important.” The account therefore describes a change in priorities rather than a detailed strategy for resisting cravings. Smoking was not said to have vanished through a step-by-step effort; in Bessant’s description, its significance diminished in relation to what the experience had made newly important.

The narrator connects this shift to an overview effect: a vantage from which problems that once felt daunting could seem smaller and more manageable. In Bessant’s case, the image is not a view of Earth from space but a mountaintop encounter with a larger whole, followed by an altered way of seeing his own life. The comparison helps explain why the result could sound both profound and almost banal. Bessant’s account of unity reaches toward immensity, while its practical consequence is succinct: smoking no longer seemed worth continuing. By the time the narrator spoke with him, the reported abstinence had lasted six years.