Bridle on taking ayahuasca
"Yes, I took ayahuasca, an incredibly powerful hallicinogenic. Most people who take it meet...the...the goddess. The spirit behind it. And she is pretty frightening. And yeah, she gave me a vision. She gave me a lot of things. It was long, and it was very hard, and it was terrifying in many ways. It was also one of the most beautiful experiences in my life. The central vision that I had during this experience was a vision of the world in which plants were helping people. Really stunning. I literally saw a city with people moving around it, and plants helping. Someone walking up steps and a vine kind of curling around them, and just this incredible strong message coming through of, like, We are here to help you. We want to help you. What am I supposed to do with that? Am I supposed to go read scientific papers to explain what I just experienced? I don't know how to write about it. I don't even know how to talk about it. I know how silly it sounds, in language! Right? But it is quite obvious that one of the problems of everything is that humanity has largely moved away. from that relationship with the world. Really, really obvious, but how do we deal with it? One way is to come to the awareness that everything you think you know about the world is some kind of abstraction. I have no problem with the scientific method as a way of knowing the world. As long as you remember that it is only one way, and then can see it through another lens as well, then it very much changes your relationship with the world. That is something I'm really struggling to articulate at the moment."
— James Bridle, British author of Ways of Seeing, as cited in The Reenchanted World: On Finding Mystery in the Digital Age by Karl Ove Knausgaard in the June 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine