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.

Opium

• Poppy seedpods contain significant quantities of morphine, codeine, and thebaine, the principal alkaloids found in opium.
• Regarded as "God's own medicine", preparations of opium were as common in the Victorian medicine cabinet as aspirin is in ours.
• Alkaloids taste bad; it's conceivable that plants produce them as a defense against pests
• The opium tea seemed to subtract things: anxiety, worry, grief. It is a pain killer in every sense: "definitely lightens the existential load.
• I just didn't need to have all that visual information, thank you very much!
• Like sitting out on the porch of one's consciousness, watching the world go by.

Caffeine

• Caffeine is one of the most studied psychoactive compounds there is.
• For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness. Something like 90% of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of soda).
• That's pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.
• Alkaloids are nitrogen-containing compounds, biosynthesized by both marine and terrestrial organisms, often with strong biological properties. They are among the largest classes of natural products and are found particularly in plants.
• Has the discovery of caffeine by humans been a boon or a bane to our civilization?
• Coffee, tea, and chocolate (which also contains caffeine) arrived in England during the same decade - the 1650s - so we can gain some idea of the world before caffeine and after. Coffee was known in East Africa for a few centuries before that - it's believed to have been discovered in Ethiopia around AD 850 - but it does not have the antiquity of other psychoactive substances, such as alcohol or cannabis or even some of the psychedelics, like psilocybin or ayahuasca or peyote, which have played a role in human culture for millennia. Tea is also older than coffee, having been discovered in China, and used as a medicine since at least 1000 BC, though it wasn't popularized as a recreational beverage until the Tang dynasty, between AD 618 and 907.
• Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.
• By the 15th C, coffee was being cultivated in East Africa and traded across the Arabian Peninsula.
• Within a century, coffeehouses had sprung up across the Arab world. In 1570 there were more than 600 in Constantinople alone.
• Coffee offered the Islamic world a suitable alternative to alcohol, which is specifically proscribed in the Koran. The notion that coffee somehow exists in opposition to alcohol would persist in both the East and the West.
• This Arabian culture gave birth to modern mathematics. In China, the Tang dynasty also represented a golden age suggesting some causal link.
• The fact that you needed to boil water made tea and coffee the safest things to drink.
• The tannins also have antimicrobial properties and so societies thrived as microbial diseases declined.
• In 1629, the first coffeehouse opened in Venice and in 1650 in Oxford, England.
• Coffeehouses in London were distinguished by the interests of their patrons: Lloyds Coffee House for shipping, the London Stock Exchange grew out of Jonathan's coffee-house and the Royal Society and Tatler magazine out of Grecian.
• The first teashop in London was opened by Thomas Twining in 1717.
• If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies, caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.
• The scientific consensus seems to be that caffeine does improve mental (and physical) performance to some degree:
• Caffeine improves our focus and ability to concentrate, which surely enhances linear and abstract thinking, but creativity works very differently. it may depend on the loss of a certain kind of focus, and the freedom to let the mind off the leash of linear thought.
• Cognitive psychologists distinguish between:
  • Spotlight consciousness - illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning
  • Lantern consciousness - in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do people on psychedelics.
• Many of the coffee plants grown in the New World today are descendants of an original plant smuggled out of Mocha in 1616, offspring of a theft nearly Promethean in its impact. Now the West had taken control of coffee - and coffee took control of the West.
• Caffeine and the minute hand on clocks arrived at more or less the same historical moment.
• It was tea from the East Indies - heavily sweetened with sugar from the West Indes - that fueled the Industrial Revolution.
• The first tea plantations in China were cultivated thousands of years ago by monks, who found that sipping tea was an important aid to meditation.
• Tea also contains a great many vitamins and minerals - one of the highest concentrations in any plant - and prodigious quantities of polyphenols, compounds rich in antioxidants (tea contains more polyphenols than red wine).
• Soon after the East India Company began trading with China, cheap tea flooded England, rapidly displacing coffee as the nation's preferred caffeine delivery system. A beverage that only the well-to-do could afford to drink in 1700 was by 1800 consumed by virtually everyone, from the society matron to the factory worker. To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony, into a tea producer, than to buy tea from China.
• The widespread use of caffeine is, arguably, one of those developments in human history, like the control of fire or the domestication of plants and animals, that helped life us out of the state of nature, providing a new degree of control over biology, in this case our own.
• Caffeine keeps adenosine, a neuromodulator, from doing its job by getting in its way. Over the course of the day, adenosine levels gradually rise in the bloodstream, and as long as no other molecule is blocking its action, it begins to slow mental operations in preparation for sleep. As adenosine builds up in your brain, you begin to feel less alert and a mounting desire to go to bed - what scientists call sleep pressure.
• It also causes increases in adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine (the latter, typical of drugs of abuse, and probably accounting for caffeine's mood-enhancing qualities.
• Regular coffee consumption is associated with a decreased risk of several cancers (including breast, prostate, colorectal, and endometrial), cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, dementia, and possibly depression and suicide.
• Coffee and tea are also the leading source of antioxidants in the American diet, a fact that may by itself account for many of the health benefits of coffee and tea.
• The energy that caffeine gives you has been borrowed from the future and must be paid back with interest, via the quantity and quality of your upcoming sleep.
• By the end of the 18th C, tea was being consumed daily by just about everyone in England. It accounted for an estimated 5% of the nation's GDP and depended on two articles (tea and sugar) "imported from opposite ends of the earth"!
• In order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.
• If you pair caffeine with any flavor, people will express a preference for that flavor.
• Alfred Peet almost single-handedly introduced Americans to good coffee in 1966.
• By one estimate, roughly half the world's coffee-growing acreage - and an even greater proportion in Latin America - will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately endangered by climate change.
• In less than a thousand years, coffee has managed to get itself from its evolutionary birthplace in Ethiopia all the way here to the mountains of South America and beyond, using our species as its vector.
• Who could have guessed that a secondary metabolite produced by plants to poison insects would also deliver an energizing bolt of pleasure to a human brain, and then turn out to alter that brain's neurochemistry in a way that made those plants indispensable?

Mescaline

• The Rio Grande is the only place in the world where the peyote cactus grows wild.
• San Pedro (Wachuma) is the other mescaline producing cactus, this one from the Andes.
• Huxley describes a "principle appetite of the soul" for a means of transcending the limitations of circumstance, the various walls - whether of habit or convention or selfhood - that confine us. For him, it was mescaline that had shown him a "door in the wall".
• 1940s - LSD created by Sandoz Laboratories
• 1957 Gordon Wasson writes about "mushrooms that cause strange visions" (psylocybin) in Life magazine.
• Huxley "For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else."
• That's why our usual perception of the world is "limited to what is biologically or socially useful"; our brains evolved to admit to our awareness only the "measly trickle" of information required for our survival and no more.
• 1897 - a german scientist isolated the psychoactive substance in peyote.
• 1919 - an austian chemist synthesizes mescaline.
• The cactus has been used by the indigenous peoples of North America for at least 6,000 years, making it the oldest-known psychedelic.
• Shulgin on mescaline: "More than anything else, the world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child."
• A mescaline trip can last 14 hours.
• While in the trance state, rigid narratives about yourself tend to soften until it becomes possible to construct new ones, typically narratives of transformation or rebirth.
• "That is the problem with you whites. You always want to know everything. We just experience it."
• "There is enough to see here. To see, to understand, to experience. A sufficiency of reality."
• I was a helpless captive of the present moment, my mind having completely lost its ability to go where it normally goes, which is either back in time, following threads of memory and association to past moments, or forward, into the anxious country of anticipation. I was firmly planted on the frontier of the present and, though this would soon change, there was nowhere else I wanted to be, or anything else I needed from life in order to be content. Whatever was in my field of awareness - this sumptuous feast of reality! - was sufficient.
• To an extent, this is what all psychedelics do - not so much change how we feel inside as imbue the world around us with never-before-appreciated qualities.
• These (William Carlos Williams') eyes are the eyes I was seeing with! Here was the sheer isness of the given world and its objects at a particular moment in time. Haiku consciousness.
• Wide open, my senses were admitting to awareness exponentially more of everything - more color, more outline, more texture, more light. It was, to quote from Huxley, "wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying.
• Without the usual filters of consciousness there came the fear "of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cozy world of symbols, could possibly bear."
• Never had my eyelids felt so crucial - powerful technologies for changing the channels of consciousness.
• The notion that there is so much more out there (or in here) than our conscious minds allow us to perceive is consistent with the neuroscientific concept of predictive coding.
• Psychedelics seem to mess with this system in one of two ways:
  • In some cases, the brain's predictions about reality go haywire, as when you see faces in the clouds or musical notes leapt to life or something happens to convince you you're being followed. Common on LSD or psilocybin, this kind of magical thinking might occur when top-down predictions generated by the brain are no longer adequately constrained, or corrected, by bottom-up information arriving from the world via the senses.
  • But if Huxley's account and my experience are representative, then something very different happens in the brain on mescaline. Here the bottom-up information of the sense and the emotions inundates our awareness, sweeping away the mind's predictions, maps, beliefs, and "cozy symbols" - all the tools we have for organizing the inner and outer worlds - in what feels like a tidal wave of awe.
• This is exactly where we live, amid these precious gifts in the shadow of that oncoming moment.
• He called himself a chakaruna - a human bridge for people to walk across to get where they need to be.
• We have three bodies (pachas, worlds), he explained:
  • The physical
  • The mental
  • The spiritual
• The plant allows all three bodies, little by little, to vibrate at a higher frequency until it is only light, pure light. This is what is meant by illumination. The plant allows you to disconnect from the mind. You can't figure it out mentally. You need to feel it in your physical body.
• When any part of your body has been affected by destructive energies or trauma, the heart will close down to protect itself. A closed heart will not heal. It will not express its feelings. The mind becomes more active because the heart's not feeling anymore. The mind will go into the past or it will go into the future, which doesn't really exist, and it will get stuck in a chaos, between remembering the past and trying to go into the nonexistent future. And it will lose the gift of life, which is to live and be present in the moment. Wachuma locates and unblocks the dense energies of trauma so that the mind might quiet and the heart might speak again, returning us to the gift that is the present moment.
• It's your choice. We make the world with our words. Say it. Say the words right now.
• Many shamans regard tobacco as the most powerful of all plant medicines
• We cut our cords to the discordant or destructive energies that connect us to others in the past.
• The medicine attenuates the bonds of the past, making it easier to let go of regrets. And then we forgive ourselves.
• The future doesn't exist.