Food Of The Gods: The Search For The Original Tree Of Knowledge Quotes
"The ecstatic part of the shaman's initiation is harder to analyze, for it is dependent on a certain receptivity to states of trance and ecstasy on the part of the novice."
"The shaman is transformed from a profane into a sacred state of being. Not only has he effected his own cure through this mystical transmutation, he is now invested with the power of the sacred, and hence can cure others as well."
"Reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language, but instead is actually produced by language."
"For the shaman, the cosmos is a tale that becomes true as it is told, and as it tells itself."
"The shamanic plants allow the healer to journey into an invisible realm in which the causality of the ordinary world is replaced with the rationale of natural magic."
"These questions have never been more important than today, when evidence of the failure of science to nurture the soul of humanity is everywhere around us."
"We are culturally and linguistically blind to the world of forces and interconnections clearly visible to those who have retained the Archaic relationship to nature."
"My encounters with shamanism and hallucinogens in the Amazon convinced me of their salvific importance."
"Shamanism's legacy can act as a steadying force to redirect our awareness toward the collective fate of the biosphere."
"The notion we are exploring in this book is that a particular family of active chemical compounds, the indole hallucinogens, played a decisive role in the emergence of our essential humanness, of the human characteristic of self-reflection."
"To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system."
"Human language may have arisen when primate organizational potential was synergized by plant hallucinogens."
"Certainly, their discussion of the scandal of 415 B.C., in which the Athenian noble Alcibiades was fined for having the Eleusinian sacrament in his home and using it for the entertainment of his friends, makes clear to even the most resistant skeptic that whatever the catalyst for ecstasy at Eleusis was, it was tangible."
"The notion that Eleusinian rites were celebrated with ergotized beer is entirely consistent with the notion that they had historical roots in Minoan Crete."
"Whatever its nature, the Eleusinian sacrament commanded the greatest respect and even love of the classical writers who invoked it."
"As the Mysteries faded, the phonetic alphabet helped move consciousness toward a world emphasizing spoken and written language and away from the world of a gestalt pictographic awareness."
"The ecstatic and orgiastic, visionary and boundary-dissolving experiences, the central mysteries of the mushroom religion, were the very factors in the human situation acting to keep our ancestors human."
"History is the story of our unfocused agony over the loss of this perfect human world, and then of our forgetting it altogether, denying it and in so doing, denying a part of ourselves."
"One of the first things that Homo sapiens did with his newly developed rationality and self-consciousness was to set them to work to find out a way to bypass analytical thinking and to transcend or, in extreme cases, temporarily obliterate, the isolating awareness of the self."
"All the natural narcotics, stimulants, relaxants and hallucinogens known to the modern botanist and pharmacologist were discovered by primitive man and have been in use from time immemorial."
"Alcohol helps nerve a man for battle, helps nerve men and women for love, and keeps an authentic perspective on self and world forever at bay."
"Cannabis use is correctly sensed as heretical and deeply disloyal to the values of male dominance and stratified hierarchy."
"Sugar stands at a watershed in such matters, for sugar and the caffeine drugs that spread with it reinforce and support industrial civilization's unreflecting emphasis on efficiency at the price of Archaic human values."
"Their stimulant properties made caffeine in coffee and its close cousin theobromine in tea the ideal drugs for the Industrial Revolution: they provided an energy lift, enabling people to keep working at repetitious tasks that demanded concentration."
"Indeed, the tea and coffee break is the only drug ritual that has never been criticized by those who profit from the modern industrial state."
"The tendency to excessive raving after coffee drinking apparently lay behind several edicts against coffee issued in Europe in 1511."
"The physician-explorer Rauwolf of Augsburg, who later became the discoverer of the first tranquilizer, found coffee apparently long established and widely traded in Asia Minor and Persia when he visited the area in the mid-1570s."
"The Aztec ruler Montezuma was said to be seriously addicted to ground cacao; he drank his chocolate unsweetened in a cold water infusion."
"Cortes was informed of the existence of cacao by his mistress, a Native American woman named Dona Marina, who had been given to Cortes as one of nineteen young women offered in tribute by Montezuma."
"Chocolate, made from the ground beans of a native Amazonian tree, Theobroma cacao, contains only small amounts of caffeine but is rich in caffeine's near-relative theobromine."
"It is extraordinary that in the relatively short span of two centuries four stimulants—sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate—could have emerged out of local obscurity and become a basis for vast mercantile empires."
"Yet the general attitude toward these plants could hardly be more different. Opium is illegal throughout most of the world."
"Tobacco, on the other hand, is probably the most widely consumed plant drug on earth."
"The heavy-lidded harlots of a Beardsley seraglio or the darker labyrinthine visions of Odilon Redon or Dante Gabriel Rossetti epitomize this esthetic."
"In the same way that slavery eventually, when no longer convenient, became odious in the eyes of the very institutions that had created it, the abuse of drugs eventually triggered a backlash against this particular form of piratical capitalism."
"The television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state."
"The fact is that, while heroin is highly addictive and while one of its preferred routes of ingestion, intravenous self-injection, offers opportunities for the spread of serious disease, it is nevertheless no more dangerous than its legal and highly touted competitor, tobacco."
"The near-universal availability and use of these stimulants in a global context stand as a testimony to their significant impact on the human condition."
"Canadian psychiatrists Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond concluded that 45 percent of the patients treated with LSD improved."
"Richard Evans Schultes—the same Schultes who had seen his Mexican research interrupted by World War II. Schultes spent more than fifteen years in the Amazon Basin."
"Schultes focused on psychoactive plants from the beginning of his work."
"The birth of ethnopsychopharmacology took place at Harvard under Schultes's watchful eye."
"Leary's earliest psychedelic experience had been with mushrooms; he would later recall that he was recruited for what he called 'my planetary mission' by that first psilocybin encounter in Mexico."
"After the suppression of the psychedelic subculture that began with the illegalization of LSD in October 1966, the evolution of substance sophistication seemed to lose momentum."
"The ambiance of psilocybin is different from that of LSD."
"What does it mean that pharmacology's effort to reduce the mind to molecular machinery confined within the brain has handed back to us a vision of mind that argues for its almost cosmic proportions?"
"The war on drugs was never meant to be won."
"Our only reasonable course is decriminalization of drugs, mass education, and shamanism as an interdisciplinary and professional approach to these realities."
"The communication and related systems of. . . cephalopods are largely visual."
"The Archaic Revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us."
"The deep psychedelic experience does not simply hold out the possibility of a world of sane people living in balance with the earth and one another."
"The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue."
"The experience that engulfs one's entire being as one slips beneath the surface of the DMT ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane."
"The deep psychedelic experience promises high adventure, engagement with something completely unexpected—a nearby alien universe teeming with life and beauty."
"Psychedelics are biochemical agents whose ultimate impact is not on the direct experience of the individual but on the genetic constitution of the species."
"The dominator mentality has always resisted change, almost as if it sensed the possibility of a kind of change that would leave it bereft of its power once and for all."
"The legality of nature must be recognized, so that all plants are legal to grow and possess."
"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."