This is Your Mind on Plants

Introduction

• Societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society's rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.
• Humans have identified plants that:
  • Lift the burden of physical pain
  • Render us more alert or capable of uncommon feats
  • Make us more sociable
  • Elicit feelings of awe or ecstasy
  • Nourish our imagination
  • Transcend time and space
  • Occasion dreams and visions and mystical experiences
  • Bring us into the presence of ancestors or gods.
• Evidently, normal everyday consciousness is not enough for us humans; we seek to vary, intensify, and sometimes transcend it, and we have identified a whole collection of molecules in nature that allow us to do that.
• Each substance in this book represents one of the three broad categories of psychoactive compounds:
  • The downer/sedative (opium)
  • The upper/stimulant (caffeine)
  • The outer/hallucinogen (mescaline)
• A pharmakon, from the Greek, can be either a medicine or a poison; it all depends - on use, dose, intention, and set and setting. It also means "scapegoat", a role that these substances have played in the drug war.
• Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.
• The notion of a beyond, of a hidden dimension of reality, or of an afterlife - may be memes introduced to human culture by visions that psychoactive molecules inspired in human minds.