McKenna is anything but; he literally believes that widespread use of psychedelics is the only thing that can save the planet from imminent apocalypse caused by human greed and egoism. I started reading to become more familiar with drug culture and history and potential good uses of psychedelics. McKenna è incredibilmente capace di saper descrivere le trasfigurazioni sensoriali che avvengono nei trip, e di ricostruire l'atmosfera sacra e sospesa in cui avvengono i riti sciamanici. All later adumbrations of religion in the ancient Near East can be traced to a cult of Goddess and cattle worship, whose Archaic roots reach back to an extremely ancient rite of ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms to induce ecstasy, dissolve the boundaries of the ego, and reunite the worshiper with the personified vegetable matrix of planetary life.

A book which I imagine will be read for a long time henceforth, as different cultures work out their own balance on intoxicating substances. He posits God as a Wholly Other and presumably bearer of a fixed, pre-given Meaning, as revealed perhaps in psychedelic experience. Because of its subliminally psychedelic effect, cannabis, when pursued as a lifestyle, places a person in intuitive contact with less goal-oriented and less competitive behavior patterns. The historical and health impacts of our seemingly harmless drugs of choice like caffeine and sugar cannot be overstated. I must say my perception of McKenna has changed now, and although the subject material covers all kinds of substances (most of which I abstain from now ((or use very infrequently)), but most of which I have experimented with to various degrees), the writing style pleasingly mixes academic knowledge and language with a technicolour vision and writing style.If you’re a fan of Robbins’ fanciful writing style, you might enjoy Food of the Gods, as I admit I did. The Tassili-n-Ajjer of 12,000 BC may well have been the partnership paradise whose loss has created one of the most persistent and poignant of our mythological motifs—the nostalgia for paradise, the idea of a lost golden age of plenty, partnership, and social balance. Coauthor of The Invisible Landscape and Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide , Terence mesmerizes his many lecture audiences with tales of science and shamanism. The World Tree or Axis Mundi is a common motif in mythological sequences, from Norse tales of Odin, to the awakening of the Buddha at the foot of the Bodhi tree, to the crucifixion of Christ which takes him down into hell and then up into heaven, spanning a vertical spectrum of consciousness - all use a similar metaphor to describe dramatic transformations and a vertical wooden presence, but framed in different ways according to the culture.

And now take ten thousand or even more years in which apes and human ancestors consume certain mushrooms, herbs, fruits, weed, etc. But his distaste of drugs such as caffeine and sugar is partly a consequence of his condemnation of "patriarchal dominator culture," in favor of "partnership" cultures. In building a case for the harms of "drugs," he propagates the same kind of misinformation that he decries when government agencies employ it against his preferred substances.He lives in Occidental, California, and is co-manager of a botanical garden in Hawaii for endangered tropical plants. The history presented is compelling, convincing and derived out of a unique insight into the world which few seldom attain.

This is fine if you’re just looking for an interesting read with lots of anecdotal evidence, but it’s definitely not what you should pick up if you want more academic/scientific knowledge on the topics. Among his major premises is the theory that the human brain, and higher human consciousness, evolved in large part from early hominids’ use of mind-expanding hallucinogens—primarily magic mushrooms. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Again and again, and in various ways, we find Soma intimately connected with the symbolism and rituals related to cattle and pastoralism. Before the brainwashed hippy types that read McKennas books start pointing fingers and condemning me for saying this I've read stuff where even these South American Indian shamans that guide white people through Ayhuasca sessions have said they believe that it effects whites differently than other races. It can get too specific in history topics and a little boring for me, but I’m sure some people love that. He wonders why we are so fascinated by altered states of consciousness, do they reveal something about our origins as human beings and our place in nature? I would suggest, that on analysis, it is hard to argue that meaning is not, to some degree, context-dependent, but I certainly have experienced an archetypal substratum to existence, that he may be hinting at, in which certain patterns seem to be playing out, behind the surface veil of people's lives.

The first step away from the symbiosis of the human-fungal partnership that characterized the early pastoralist societies was the introduction of other psychoactive plant substitutes for the original mushroom. Thus started a centuries-long conspiracy to suppress consciousness that continues to this day through corporate advertising and television. Fanciful ideas and interesting concepts, but at the end of the day chuck-full of new age psycho-babble. The chapters about our future are hopeful, it remains to be seen how close we will go towards extinction before we hopefully get our shit together as a species. This is the hidden issue that makes governments unwilling to consider legalization: the unmanaged shift of consciousness that legal and available drugs, including plant psychedelics, would bring is extremely threatening to a dominator, ego-oriented culture.To pretend that the right to the pursuit of happiness does not include the right to experiment with psychoactive plants and substances is to make an argument that is at best narrow and at worst ignorant and primitive. No matter what subject your into, this book should be mandatory reading for anybody on this planet to become a better, stronger human.