Food Of The Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Psychedelics and Human Evolution

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The second and third parts of the book focus on the restriction of psychedelic medicines, which is then followed by these plants being ignored and forgotten. There is very little substantive basis for determining which specific drugs are dangerous and should be outlawed, and which are harmless or even beneficial in certain conditions. He is a pleasure to read and preferable to the YouTube videos which filter his rather nasal, monotonous psychedelic guru voice into your living room. You should also probably know that Terence McKenna stopped doing mushrooms in 1998 after a bad trip. This definition denies that sugar can act as a highly addictive drug, yet the evidence is all around us.

If we're using drugs as an escape rather than a spiritual exploration, then we're not using them for the right reasons, in his view. The premise is still almost entirely unsubstantiated, to say nothing of the fact that humans are not the only consumers of hallucinogens. 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. No matter if they get secretly drugged by the shamans before a session or the witch doctor floats the room with psychoactive smoke, if they take it together in a ritual, they get welded together by this experience.In this landmark piece of psychedelic literature renowned ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna explores our ancient relationship with organic psychedelics and opens a doorway to a higher state of being for us all. Have you ever thought about the mind altering power of purified sugar, the politics of coffee, and the parallels between these and what we consider to be more dangerous drugs like cocaine? McKenna provides a revisionist look at the historical role of drugs in the East and the West, from ancient spice, sugar, and rum trades to marijuana, cocaine, synthetics, and even television-illustrating the human desire for the "food of the gods" and the powerful potential to replace abuse of illegal drugs with a shamanic understanding, insistence on community, reverence for nature, and increased self-awareness.

For instance, he repeatedly claims that crack cocaine is more addictive and therefore more dangerous than powder cocaine, but as Dr. The options for pimping epigenetics and brain development are the bigger topic, because they may lead to different brain evolutions, depending on what a culture, nation or government prefers to feed to its citizens. Although I personally don't believe McKenna provides all the right answers he does get us asking the right questions.The costs of drug education and drug treatment are small relative to routine military expenditures and could be contained. And once you realize that Terence can't even provide interesting accounts of drug trips, you start to think very hard about your life and why you're 200 pages deep in hell. If you can suffer through it, I dare you to try to come up with one thing you learned from hearing him speak. McKenna thinks popular fears of the consequences of the legalisation of drugs are analogous to Establishment fears of the eradication of slavery or emancipation of women in the past. The book covers a very wide range of topics, from the description of legal and illegal synthesized drugs, natural drugs, history of drug use, and it´s influence on human evolution and history.

McKenna provides a revisionist look at the historical role of drugs in the East and the West, from ancient spice, sugar, and rum trades to marijuana, cocaine, synthetics, and even television--illustrating the human desire for the "food of the gods" and the powerful potential to replace abuse of illegal drugs with a shamanic understanding, insistence on community, reverence for nature, and increased self-awareness. There were a few parts I did like, including a wealth of historical information about the use of psychedelics in various cultures throughout history, and some interesting theories about their role in the development of both ancient and modern religions. The fact that these plants are strictly prohibited and culturally discouraged without any serious reasons related to health tells me that these things have the potential/ability to destroy/transform the assumptions upon which our culture is based. Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind. Could it not be that we are willing to pay the terrible toll that alcohol extracts because it is allowing us to continue the repressive dominator style that keeps us all infantile and irresponsible participants in a dominator world characterized by the marketing of ungratified sexual fantasy?I’ve thought a a lot about some of the ideas McKenna shares in this book, but this book brought it all together. Thus, at this second level of usage, by increasing instances copulation, the mushrooms directly favored human reproduction. Some of the points are spot on, he includes television as one of the drugs invented in the 20th century.