PLANTS WITH SOUL

How A Mind-Bending Plant-based Drug Made Its Way From The Amazon Jungle To
The Us Supreme Court

Every tree, every plant, has a spirit.

People may say that a plant has no mind. I tell them that a plant is alive
and conscious.

A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that
sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it
alive.

- Pablo Amaringo, Peruvian ayahuasquero

In 1984, a young Ph.D. student at Stanford University named Jeremy Narby
travelled to the Peruvian Amazon to conduct field research for his thesis
in anthropology. Raised in Canada and Switzerland, Narby lived for two
years with Peru's Ashaninca tribes, and had read accounts of the remarkable
healing abilities of their shamans.

When he told the shamans about his chronic back problem, they offered him a
plant-based cure, a sanango tea consumed when the moon was new. It would,
they cautioned, leave him debilitated for two days, at first chilled and
then unable to walk; afterward, he would be fine. Their forecast proved
accurate; Narby drank the tea and felt chilled to the bone. When the cold
abated, he found he could not stand.

By the third day, the pain in his back was gone. Twenty years later, it has
not returned.

Curious to learn more, Narby questioned the shamans about the source of
their knowledge.

They told him something that he--trained in the materialist, rationalist
ethos of Western science--could scarcely comprehend: that their wisdom
derived from spirits within the plants themselves. In other words, they
said, the plants of the Amazonian rainforest spoke to them, giving precise
instructions in the art of healing and a great deal more. Narby initially
thought this claim was a kind of shamanic joke. He quickly learned otherwise.

For millennia, the indigenous peoples of South America have used
plant-based potions to enter altered states of consciousness that confer
medicinal and spiritual powers.

The Ashaninca and dozens of other tribes derive their information via a
foul-tasting tea known as ayahuasca (eye-yah-wah-skah), a Quechua word
meaning "vine of the souls." Others in the region know it as yage or caapi.

According to the shamans, the visions often induced by the drug--of coiled
fluorescent serpents, prowling jaguars, and brilliant multicoloured
tableaux of gardens, palaces, and lush forests--are not projections of the
human imagination; rather, they are an alternate reality to which the
brain's receivers become attuned.

Ayahuasca, they explained to Narby, is like "television of the forest."
When they turn it on, it is as though they are dialing up channels and
communicating with spirits, possibly from other dimensions. The plant
spirits, known as doctorcitos (little doctors) or abuelos (grandfathers),
teach shamans how to diagnose illness, what plants to use for treatment,
and what diet to follow.

They also teach icaros, shamanic hymns that are sung to help summon the
presence of the spirits. Indeed, music is an indispensable part of
tea-drinking ceremonies.

Narby was fascinated. As he notes in his book The Cosmic Serpent, dna and
the Origins of Knowledge, there are some 80,000 varieties of plants in the
Amazon. To make ayahuasca, it is necessary to combine precisely two of
them, a vine and a leaf that, morphologically, have nothing in common.

The leaf (Psychotria viridis) contains N,N-dimethyltryptamine (dmt), a
hallucinogen. Ingested by itself, the drug has no effect; a stomach enzyme,
monoamine oxidase (mao), renders it impotent.

The vine (Banisteriopsis caapi), however, contains three alkaloids that
effectively turn off the mao, allowing the psychoactive ingredient of dmt
unfettered access to the brain. In chemical composition then, ayahuasca is
related to, but more complex than, psilocybin (derived from mushrooms) and,
to a lesser extent, lsd (lysergic acid diethylamide, a synthetic).

How did ancient Amazonian tribes discover what is effectively a designer
drug Surely not, Narby suggests, by trial and error; there are roughly 6.4
billion possible combinations of flora.

Moreover, brewing ayahuasca tea is a laborious process during which the
plant stems must first be pounded for days, then immersed in hot water with
the leaves, then boiled for up to fifteen hours, and finally filtered.

Even if the Ashaninca or another tribe simply intuited the potency of this
specific leaf-vine arrangement, how would they have happened upon the
complex recipe that must be used to make the tea There is no satisfactory
answer.

Similarly, forty types of curare, the paralytic agent derived from seventy
different plant species, are available in the Amazon. Making it requires
collecting a precise combination of several plants, boiling them for
several hours, and injecting the resultant paste under the skin. Could that
have been discovered by trial and error

The shamans of the Amazon basin insist that plant gods, appearing during
periods of extended trance induced by ayahuasca, taught them the secret
medicinal properties of the plants that cured Narby's aching back. These
gods also taught them about curare and hundreds of other healers hidden in
the botanical world.

Their knowledge and its efficacy appear to be beyond dispute; it has, in
myriad ways, been adapted and profitably exploited by the global
pharmaceutical industry.

But for the empirical West, Narby observes, two fundamental problems arise.
First, we regard hallucinations as illusions-projections of the mind that
have no basis in reality.

But if that precept is correct, and these visions are simply culturally
specific phantasms of the brain, then how is it that Peruvian Indians,
American businesspeople, Israeli scientists, Swiss anthropologists, and
Canadian journalists tend to see exactly the same kinds of visions after
drinking the tea

Second, the notion that under any circumstances plants might speak is
anathema to Western science.

Indeed, anyone who declares that plants communicate, let alone that they
are capable of offering detailed tutorials in pharmacology, is likely to be
treated for a psychological disorder.

But if plants do not speak, then where does the verifiable knowledge of
Amerindian shamans come from The universe of ayahuasca therefore poses a
profound intellectual dilemma.

Jeremy Narby wasnt at all sure that he could resolve the paradox, but he
was determined to try.

In May 1999, US customs agents searched property belonging to Jeffrey
Bronfman in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Bronfman is the leader of the American
branch of O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal (the United
Beneficent Spiritual Union of the Plants). The udv, as it is known, is a
Brazil-based syncretic church--part Roman Catholic, part animist--that uses
hoasca (the Portuguese transliteration of ayahuasca) as a sacrament in lieu
of the traditional wafer and wine. Founded in 1961 and now boasting a
worldwide membership of some 7,000, the udv is one of three
well-established ayahuasca churches in Brazil; the others are Santo Daime
and Barquinha.

Bronfman had imported the tea used in the twice-monthly ceremonies of his
130-member New Mexico congregation. The agents seized some thirty gallons
of hoasca, possession of which is illegal under Schedule I of the US
Controlled Substances Act, but laid no charges.

The following year, Bronfman sued the Drug Enforcement Administration,
alleging a First Amendment violation of the constitutional guarantee of
freedom of religion. Hoasca, his lawyers maintained, was an essential
sacrament--used exactly as peyote is now used, legally, in rituals of the
Native American Church.

There was more than a little irony in all of this. Bronfman, forty, is a
second cousin of Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music Group chairman and scion
of the famous Montreal family and its once-great liquor empire.

In the 1920s and early '30s, Edgar's grandfather, Sam, built a vast fortune
eluding federal agents and running alcohol from Canada into the US, where
its sale and consumption were banned under the Eighteenth Amendment to the
Constitution. Now, seventy-five years later, another Bronfman was using
part of his inherited wealth to take on the US government in a landmark
case involving another banned drug.

At the first hearing in 2001, a US district judge sided with Bronfman's
group and instructed the federal government not to confiscate the tea. The
Department of Justice appealed the ruling, but the US Tenth Circuit Court
in Denver upheld the injunction, twice.

The Bush administration, however, was not prepared to surrender.

Federal attorneys again appealed, this time to the US Supreme Court. It,
too, sided with the udv on the narrow injunction issue, but later agreed to
review the case. Thus, on November 1, 2005, did lawyers for both sides
appear before America's highest court to contest Gonzales, Attorney General
et al v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Unio do Vegetal et al. The question
at issue: whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, "requires
the government to permit the importation, distribution, possession, and use
of a Schedule I hallucinogenic controlled substance." The battle had been
joined: America's commitment to religious freedom versus the decades-long
war on drugs.

Ayahuasca is not a trip, certainly not the hedonistic kind often associated
with lsd, to which it is sometimes compared.

On the contrary, drinking the tea--Narby likens the taste to acrid
grapefruit juice--is a challenging, often terrifying, and at times
transcendent, life-altering experience. Physically, the brew commonly
induces nausea, vomiting, farting, and diarrhea--humbling moments in a room
full of other voyageurs.

It purges psychologically as well; the visions and emotions it conjures up
can rattle one to the core, laying siege to the artfully arranged
fortifications erected on behalf of the ego. It is for good reason that
members of the oldest of Brazil's ayahuasca churches, Santo Daime, call
ayahuasca ceremonies trabalhos (works). Spiritually, ayahuasca is often
said to put users in touch with divinity, to connect them with the
ineffable presence of God, or with the spirits of the dead, including
family members. Ultimately, the drug--a word disciples of udv, Santo Daime,
and the estimated seventy-two other ayahuasca-based Amazonian cultures
firmly reject--seems to reveal the hidden, deeper, and essential meaning of
things.

Making post-facto notes of his first overwhelming ayahuasca session in
1985, Narby wrote:

Images started pouring into my head...an agouti [forest rodent] with bared
teeth and a bloody mouth; very brilliant, shiny, and multi-coloured
snakes.... I suddenly found myself surrounded by two gigantic boa
constrictors that seemed fifty feet long. I was terrified.... [T]he snakes
start talking to me without words.

They explain that I am just a human being. I feel my mind crack, and in the
fissures, I see the bottomless arrogance of my presuppositions.... I find
myself in a more powerful reality that I do not understand at all...I feel
like crying in view of the enormity of these revelations. Then it dawns on
me that this self-pity is part of my arrogance.

My own single experience with ayahuasca was not dissimilar. Forty-five
minutes after I drank about five ounces of the tea, a wave of panic swept
over me, as if my life itself were slipping away. I was powerless to stop
it. I was cold and sweaty at the same time. In fact, I thought I was dying.
The leader of the group I was with approached and suggested that I lie
down. When I did, my legs and knees started shaking, rhythmically but
uncontrollably. Later my whole body--lying supine on the floor--rocked
visibly from head to toe, like a metronome, but again I was not the agent
of the rocking.

I had no ability to stop it. Like Narby, I was told--by thought--that I was
nothing, a mere drop in the ocean.

Images flashed before me at absurd speed, wild and intricate geometric
patterns.

Snake heads rose in front of my closed eyes and seemed to examine me.
Oddly, they seemed benign and I had no fear of them. I felt--indeed, I
knew--that I had been conveyed into the hands of some extraordinary power,
the kind of power that traditional Judeo-Christian prayer frequently
ascribes to God. I had uttered prayers thousands of times before, but had
never genuinely understood them. Now, I found myself thinking okay, I get
it. But I had no sooner conceived the thought than another replaced it: You
haven't begun to get it.

Are you God, I asked, phrasing the question as a thought.

God, Jesus, Mary, call me whatever you want.

How can you do these things, move my body like a puppet

The thought-answer came back instantly: I can do anything.

I had been instructed to concentrate on breathing--deeply and slowly; when
I did, the shaking would instantly stop and, bathed in a light I had never
seen before, I felt a sense of benevolence and well-being. I wanted to get
up and hug the people around me, most of them strangers.

Suddenly, the chasm between the human sense of self-importance and our true
impotence struck me as wonderfully amusing, and I started to laugh.

Later, still on the floor, I used my hands like a choir conductor to direct
the singing of hymns that was going on constantly around me. My
interpretation of the entire six-hour session--the lesson I felt I was
being taught--was that it was time for me to wake up, get my act together,
and show more love for those closest to me. Despite the initial terror, I
concluded that I had been treated mercifully and regarded the experience as
positive.

These accounts are typical.

All of it--exotic, wondrous imagery, fear, utter annihilation of the ego,
the forced encounter with personal issues one would rather not confront,
some compelling apprehension of the sacred and the mystical, and the
conviction that everything encountered is more real than the floor one
stands upon--are commonly reported.

But no two drinking experiences are ever exactly the same.

In the growing body of literature about ayahuasca, by far the most
comprehensive and illuminating text is Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the
Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience, by Benny Shanon, a professor of
cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "An entire
continent resides inside our mind and Shanon has provided the map," Narby
explains. "His book gives the sense that Western man is still living in the
sixteenth century, and the Americas have just been discovered. Westerners
have thought that objective knowledge was the only way to know the world
seriously. That's all very well until what you want to deal with is
subjective human consciousness. It's impossible to be objective about the
subjective. Consciousness is a first-person experience. It's like
swimming--you've got to be wet."

During the almost six years it took him to write the book, Shanon, an
otherwise traditional, Western-trained cognitive scientist now in his
sixties, drank the sacred tea more than 100 times and interviewed 178 other
users. Many of those interviewed by Shanon told him that taking ayahuasca
was the most important event of their lives.

His own experiences affected him profoundly. Gradually, he became aware
that "what I was actually entering was a school.... The teacher was the
brew." His sessions of intoxication--his word--forced upon him a rigorous
self-analysis. "One finds oneself having no other option but to address
issues that are often neither easy nor pleasant." When he started going to
Peru and Brazil, Shanon confesses, he was "a "devout atheist.' When I left
South America, I was no longer one." Ultimately, he writes, scientific
investigation cannot unravel the mysteries of ayahuasca: "I am inclined to
say that [it] brings us to the boundaries not only of science but also of
the entire Western world-view and its philosophies."

It was a measure of the importance attached to Gonzales v. udv that,
marginal though ayahuasca culture is in the United States, the Supreme
Court hearing drew the attention of every major and many minor religious
and human-rights groups.

Among those filing amicus curiae briefs in udv's defence were the American
Civil Liberties Union and organizations representing Baptists,
Presbyterians, Evangelicals, Roman Catholic bishops, Jews, Muslims, Sikh
Americans, and various independent scholars.

The insuperable hurdle confronting Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler
was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It effectively gives objectors a
presumptive exemption from laws that violate their religious beliefs.

In the language of the act itself, no federal law shall "substantially
burden a person's exercise of religion" unless a "compelling governmental
interest" is proven; even then, the law must be implemented in a way that
is "least restrictive" to religious practice.

Kneedler mounted a tripartite argument: first, that the active ingredient
in ayahuasca, dmt, posed a genuine danger to human health, leading to
anxiety, dissociative states, and psychosis; second, that if udv were
allowed to import the brew, some portion of it might be diverted and used
for recreation outside of controlled spiritual settings; and finally, that
importation would violate both the US Controlled Substances Act and the
1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances, to which the US
is a signatory.

Allowing lower-court rulings to stand, Kneedler maintained, would undermine
US drug policy.

Open that door, he said, and who knows what groups might claim a religious
use for drug activity--for example, Rastafarians with marijuana.

In response, Nancy Hollander, the lawyer representing udv, argued that in
Brazil, where hoasca is legal and where the udv has been active for
decades, and in New Mexico, sacramental consumption of the tea has caused
no significant adverse health consequences and has not been diverted to
illicit use. Nor has there been any evidence that peyote--used by the much
larger (250,000 members) Native American Church--has been diverted to
non-religious uses. As for the 1971 UN convention, the lower courts had
already found that it does not apply to plants or to infusions,
concoctions, or teas made from them. Moreover, the convention expressly
permits religious-use exemptions, such as for peyote.

The Supreme Court largely agreed with Hollander. Justice Stephen Breyer
noted "a rather rough problem under the First Amendment" and argued that if
it was permissible for Congress to make an exception to the Controlled
Substances Act for peyote, why not for hoasca Chief Justice John Roberts
objected to the government's "totally categorical" approach, saying it
would apply even if a single member of a single udv group consumed a single
drop of the tea once a year. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative
who might have been expected to support the federal side, seemed skeptical.
It was Scalia who wrote the 1990 opinion that had allowed states to ban
tribal use of peyote.

That decision was effectively overturned by the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act--and the results of the reversal, he suggested, were a
demonstration that "you can make an exception without the sky falling."
When Kneedler protested that making such an exception would effectively
turn decisions about federal drug laws over to 700 district court judges,
Justice David Souter observed, "Isn't that exactly what the act does"

The Supreme Court rendered its verdict in February, voting unanimously in
favour of udv's position, with one abstention. In his written ruling, Chief
Justice Roberts noted, "Everything the Government says about the dmt in
hoasca--that, as a Schedule I substance, Congress has determined that it
"has a high potential for abuse,' "has no currently accepted medical use,'
and has "a lack of accepted safety for use...under medical supervision,'
applies in equal measure to the mescaline in peyote, yet both the Executive
and Congress itself have decreed an exception from the Controlled
Substances Act for Native American religious use of peyote."

What impact the US decision will have on other jurisdictions remains to be
seen. In Canada, the use of ayahuasca remains, at least for now, illegal.

After completing his Ph.D., Jeremy Narby returned home to Switzerland and
joined Nouvelle Planete, a Swiss ngo dedicated to promoting bilingual
education and securing property rights for South American Indians. At the
same time, he started writing a book, seeking to reconcile shamanic wisdom
with scientific knowledge, and to explain how plants might, in fact,
communicate. He read dozens of books and scholarly articles, made copious
notes, and went for long ruminative hikes, but after some months felt no
closer to postulating a theory.

It was a footnote in an article by another anthropologist, Michael Harner,
that finally provided the spark.

Harner had taken ayahuasca with the Conibo Indians in the Amazon in 1961
and, like many others, had been transformed. In his vision, he had seen
giant dragon-like creatures, which spoke to him in a kind of thought language.

They showed the earth as it had existed before life had formed.

Then, thousands of black specks with wings and whale-like bodies descended
from outer space.

He was told they were embedded within all forms of life, including humans.

Harners footnote said, "In retrospect, one could say they were almost like
dna, though at the time I had no knowledge of dna."

dna (deoxyribonucleic acid) is, of course, the language of life itself.
Informing every living thing on the planet, every microbe, plant, and
animal, it is a miniature coded text that has survived, virtually
unchanged, for at least 3.5 billion years.

The only difference between a bacterium and a human being, with respect to
dna, is the amount of genetic information carried and its sequencing. In an
average human being, there are enough strands of dna to cover 125 billion
miles--enough to wrap around the planet five million times.

Moreover, dna contains coding for an unfathomable amount of genetic data.
Think of the largest, most sophisticated data-storage device: dna contains
100 trillion times as much information. A single cell contains more data
than all the volumes of the Encyclopdia Britannica put together, yet weighs
less than a few thousand millionths of a gram.

Poring over his notes, Narby suddenly had an epiphany: the shape of the dna
molecule, discovered by Watson and Crick in 1953, is the double helix, a
serpentine form that twists endlessly upon itself as it replicates. It's
like a sinuous ladder, consisting of four chemicals--adenine (A), guanine
(G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T)--that bond repeatedly in pairs (A always
with T, C always with G). That same shape, he realized, is precisely the
form described by shamans the world over to explain the origins of life on
earth. On every continent, from ancient Sumer to Scandinavia, from Amazonia
to Australia, creation myths speak of twinned serpents, twirling ladders,
twisting ropes, spiralling staircases, intertwined vines, or trees that
stretch from heaven to earth, the so-called axis mundi.

Even the Old Testament's patriarch Jacob dreams of a ladder touching heaven
"with the angels of God ascending and descending on it." In Amerindian
terms, ladders, ropes, vines, and trees are the means by which shamans
ascend to the heavens or descend to earth to communicate with spirits.

Narby was staggered. "It seemed that no one had noticed the possible links
between the "myths' of "primitive peoples' and molecular biology," he says.
On the contrary, the wisdom of indigenous peoples was typically discounted
and their knowledge of pharmacology deemed an accident.

But the parallels were striking.

Like the serpents of myth, dna is both incredibly long and infinitely
small, lives in salt water, is both single and double, and capable of
complete transformation while remaining the same.

The ancient Egyptians, Narby notes, used the phrase "provider of
attributes" to describe their cosmic serpent.

They depicted it as a two-headed snake accompanied by hieroglyphs, which
variously signified the concept of one, several, spirit, double vital
force, place, wick of twisted flax, and water.

They also added an ankh, symbol of the key of life. Similarly, Ashaninca
cosmology speaks of the "Great Transformer," Avreri, who created life on
earth, lives in the underworld (the cellular level), in sea water, and
adopts the form of a cord or strangler vine. For the Shipibo-Conibo of the
Amazon, the earth is embraced by Ronn, a cosmic, amphibious anaconda, which
is half-submerged but surrounds all of life. What else could the Egyptians,
the Ashaninca, the Shipibo-Conibo, and others have meant by these metaphors
if not dna

Slowly, Narby enunciated a thesis--speculative, to be sure, but
compelling--that integrated shamanism and microbiology: ayahuasca enables
shamans to bring their vision down to cellular levels.

The spirits they "see" in altered states of consciousness are photonic
resonances or electromagnetic images of dna. Scientists have confirmed that
dna does emit light and have compared these emissions to a weak but
discernible laser, brightly coloured and three-dimensional. Virtually all
research into biophotons, moreover, involves quartz, a stable crystal known
for its ability to send and receive electromagnetic waves. dna, too, of
course is a crystal. Perhaps, Narby theorized, that's what shamanic spirits
are--light signals, amplified by ayahuasca or other psychoactive
substances--that can be read or interpreted for specific information.
Perhaps we are, in essence, as mystics have always maintained, beings of light.

To test his hypothesis, in 1999 Narby took three molecular biologists to
the Amazon to drink ayahuasca.

None had previously consumed a psychoactive plant. Afterward, all said they
had been dramatically affected by the experience, that it had altered their
way of perceiving themselves and the world. During the sessions, each posed
questions about their work and received answers.

One involved a new way of thinking about aspects of the human genome.

Another related to the proteins that make sperm cells fertile. A third
dealt with the ethics of modifying plant genomes.

All said they planned to return--and drink again.

It is not easy to challenge the orthodoxies of Western science.

One can publish books but they are apt not to be celebrated, reviewed in
major newspapers, or discussed on Oprah. Narby's The Cosmic Serpent and its
sequel, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry Into Knowledge (published last
year), have attracted a cult following but have been otherwise ignored.

Still, the problems Narby articulates remain.

If dna is fundamentally a text, can "one presuppose that no intelligence
wrote it," as he asks If humankind is merely the result of eons of random
natural selection, what adaptive advantage was gained by embedding the
capacity for transcendent hallucination within the brain Do all of us have
centres in the brain that respond to mind-altering teas by repeatedly
spewing forth visions of jaguars and serpents Or is the brain as much a
receiver as a transmitter, tuning in, as the shamans say, to parallel
planes of reality, to "television of the forest," or, alternatively, dna tv
Even Benny Shanon, clinging to familiar scientific modalities, writes that
"perhaps we have no choice but...[to] consider the possibility that these
commonalities reflect patterns exhibited on another, extra-human realm."

Shanon is not alone in thinking this. During the 1990s, American
psychiatrist Rick Strassman conducted the first federally authorized,
peer-reviewed research into human hallucinogens in more than two decades,
injecting pure dmt into 400 healthy volunteers in a clinical setting.

In his subsequent book about the project, dmt: The Spirit Molecule,
Strassman acknowledged that the visions his subjects encountered--among
them, insect-like intelligences, aliens, angels, demons, imps, elves,
dwarves--could not be logically explained by prevalent theories of
hallucination, the Freudian unconscious, or Jungian archetypes. In daily
life, Strassman concluded, our brains are "tuned to Channel Normal. dmt
provides regular and reliable access to other channels.

The other planes of existence are always there...transmitting all the time
but we cannot perceive them because we are not designed to do so." Such
views, Strassman concedes, are hard to reconcile with the current
scientific model, premised on objective reality.

The idea that dna might have been "written" is not, it should be said,
creationism by another name. Jeremy Narby is a secular agnostic.

His anthropology has more in common with Marx than anything else. When he
is not writing books, he is waging battle against the World Bank and big
ranchers and land developers in Peru. "Whether out in the cosmos there is
one God or many gods--anything is possible," he says. "The universe is a
fabulously complex and weird place and I dont know enough about it." At the
same time, he acknowledges doubts about Darwinian theory and the
circularity of its argument--namely, that its conclusion (certain
characteristics develop because they are selected by nature) is assured by
its premise (nature selects those traits that promote species survival).
"Nature is an edifice shot full of intelligence, which most probably did
not occur by chance," Narby says. "I'd sign up for that. Random collision
of molecules is not part of my belief system. dna itself seems to be the
result of some kind of intelligence--the most miniature language possible
but more complex than anything we know. You could not make a more
sophisticated language.

The entity that came up with it is way beyond something I can understand."

Considered across the span of human history, mechanistic rationalism, of
course, is the new kid on philosophy's block.

As Narby notes, 99 percent of the religious history of Homo sapiens sapiens
is animist. "And then along comes rationality and monotheism and it takes
2,000 years, 100 generations, to get chemistry, control of matter,
technology, electricity, etc. The price we paid was cutting ourselves off
from quite a few things--nature, the feminine, our own visions, dreams.

Suddenly we're surrounded by all these objects and we've lost the sacred
and connections to other species. But we know it. So we correct."

Well, perhaps.

As the US Justice Departments case against Uniao de Vegetal illustrates,
governments are prepared to go to great expense and length to enforce
blanket prohibitions on the use of psychotropic drugs.

They cite the risks of use and make authorization to conduct new research
difficult to arrange.

The scientific community remains utterly dismissive of such notions as
intelligent dna or alternate channels of reality.

But how can science assume dna is a mere chemical when, as Narby notes, it
does not even understand the brain, the seat of our own consciousness,
built according to the instructions laid out in our dna "How could nature
not be conscious if our own consciousness is produced by nature" he writes.

The profound mysteries of human life--our consciousness, our origins, why
we're here at all--remain.

Michael Posner is an arts reporter for the Globe and Mail and the author of
The Last Honest Man: An Oral Biography of Mordecai Richler.