Altered States of Consciousness

Altered States of Consciousness was the scholarly anthology that helped shape Paul Stamets’s early interest in non-ordinary states of mind. Its decisive force in his story came not only from its subject matter but from what happened when a friend’s conservative parents discovered and burned the borrowed book: an act of destruction that turned the volume into a symbol of forbidden inquiry and strengthened Stamets’s resolve to explore consciousness.

The Anthology and Its Arrival

Edited by psychologist Charles T. Tart, Altered States of Consciousness was a substantial collection of scholarly writing on non-ordinary mental states. Its subjects ranged from dreaming and hypnosis to meditation and psychedelics. The breadth of that spectrum placed psychedelic experience among topics that could be examined within a larger inquiry into how consciousness varies.

Stamets encountered the book through his older brother John. When John went off to Yale, he left it behind; five years older than Paul, he had already introduced his fourteen-year-old brother to magic mushrooms. The book therefore arrived within a relationship that had helped direct Paul’s curiosity toward both scientific study and altered states of mind.

The Book Becomes a Target

The anthology’s contents made a strong impression, but Stamets later emphasized that the reaction it provoked in adults mattered even more. His friend Ryan Snyder, whose parents were conservative, borrowed the book. After Stamets asked for it back, Snyder delayed; eventually he told him that his parents had found and burned it.

The destruction changed the book’s meaning. Stamets saw the Snyders as opponents of the exploration of consciousness, and reasoned that if they considered the information dangerous enough to destroy, it was information he had to possess. The volume had moved from scholarly anthology to contested object: its destruction could not erase its subject, and instead sharpened Stamets’s appetite for it.

Influence and Irony

Stamets described the episode as pivotal, while also saying that he owed the Snyders a debt of gratitude. The irony is central to the book’s place in his early formation: an attempt to prevent access to the anthology became an incentive to seek out the very knowledge it contained. The account does not credit the book’s arguments alone with setting his course; it presents the social response to the book as an equally powerful part of its influence.

Altered States of Consciousness thus stands in Stamets’s story both as an introduction to a scholarly field and as the object around which an early conflict over inquiry took shape. Its remembered significance lies in that double role: a collection about varied states of mind, and a book whose attempted suppression made the subject feel more compelling.