Descending the Mountain

What unfolds when seasoned Zen practitioners, unfamiliar with drug use, experience magic mushrooms? Exploring this question, psychiatrist Franz Vollenweider and Zen master Vanja Palmers orchestrate a groundbreaking legal study at a monastery atop Mount Rigi, Switzerland. Fifty years post the official ban on psilocybin, their venture aligns with the burgeoning “psychedelic renaissance.” While much current research centers around medical benefits, Vollenweider and Palmers aim higher: investigating whether the synergy of meditation and psilocybin can guide humanity toward healing the self-inflicted chaos of our neoliberal society and restore harmony with nature.