The true method of knowledge is experiment

The true method of knowledge is experiment is the inscription on a mushroom medallion that Roland Griffiths gives the narrator at the end of their first meeting. The words make scientific inquiry and mystical experience seem less like opposites: Griffiths’s parting gift turns a question about awareness into a small exercise in observation, while its mushroom image recalls the natural source of the compound studied in the laboratory.

Inscription and Object

One side of the medallion bears four tall, slender, curving Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. On the reverse is a quotation attributed to William Blake: “The true method of knowledge is experiment.” The pairing gives the maxim a concrete counterpart. The coin does not present experimentation as an abstraction alone; it places the words beside an image of the mushroom associated with the research Griffiths and his colleagues have pursued.

The narrator recognizes that the quotation aligns the scientist’s way with the mystic’s. In the scene, the alignment is not argued as a theory. It is staged through a question that asks the narrator to attend to awareness itself, followed by a physical object that preserves the encounter in words and image.

The Gift and Its Occasion

At the close of the meeting, Griffiths rises from his desk, takes a small medallion from his trouser pocket, and offers it as a gift—but first asks the narrator a question. He asks whether, at that moment, the narrator is aware of being aware. After a perplexed, self-conscious pause, the narrator answers yes. Griffiths hands over the coin, making the act of answering part of the exchange rather than merely its prelude.

The medallions had been minted after Griffiths attended Burning Man the previous summer and learned that the temporary city operated through gifts rather than money. He had made them so he would have something suitable to give or trade there. He later gives them to volunteers in the research program as a parting gift. The coin therefore carries two occasions at once: its origin in a gift-based festival and its later role as a token of departure from a scientific study.

Experiment, Nature, and the Laboratory

For Griffiths, the mushroom image is fitting because the Psilocybin molecule his team studies comes from a fungus. Yet the laboratory setting can obscure that natural history. Volunteers take a small white pill containing a synthetic version of the molecule, not mushrooms; the sessions unfold in medical suites, and reminders of mushrooms are scarce. The medallion makes visible what that clinical arrangement can leave out: the research concerns a compound found in nature, with roots beyond the laboratory.

The inscription’s force lies in this conjunction. The narrator’s brief act of inward attention is treated as an answerable question, while the coin connects that experiment in awareness to Griffiths’s research and to the mushroom depicted on its face. Scientific practice and mystical inquiry remain distinct, but the gift places them in deliberate proximity: knowledge is approached through experience, and the object bearing that principle points back to the living source often screened from view by the laboratory pill.