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

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The explosion in the 1960s of psychedelic use will have certainly fueled a momentum which was already happening, which has always been latent in the human psyche, and will have had periods of flourish (cave-painting, Dionysian celebration, Renaissance art), and then repression (Protestant smashing of the stained glass windows and insistence on scripture over sacraments, Taliban destruction of Buddhist statues, ISIL destruction of Palmyra, and the rest). This book is a highly speculative, yet plausible, account of how human evolution may have been influenced by psychoactive mushrooms. This was often combined with climbing very high mountains, which gives extra weakening to the brain by a lack of oxygen so that the sh** can kick in like hell. In our culture, private drug taking is viewed as dubious; solitary drug use is viewed as positively morbid; and, indeed, all introspection is seen this way.

Alternative ideas of how something might have developed are always interesting and in this case, two interesting questions come to mind. In fact, part of his argument for the stoned ape theory is based on misrepresentation of one particular study. For a start, these things are naturally occurring in plants and in our bodies, plus, current and archaic societies have been using them for a long time. Brian Bates may have been correct in his warnings of McKenna's visionary glow obscuring a paucity of analytical thinking.Anyhow so his thing is like, mushroom trips break down the ego and through mushroom tripping and orgies society was more equal and women were shamans and decision makers and everyone got along and made telepathic decisions about what the group should do, which is why he thinks we need everyone to trip on mushrooms or smoke raw DMT and communicate with entities I guess. small amounts of Psilocybin, consumed with no awareness of its psychoactivity while in the general act of browsing for food, and perhaps later consumed consciously, impart a noticeable increase in visual acuity, especially edge detection. 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. Thus, at this second level of usage, by increasing instances copulation, the mushrooms directly favored human reproduction.

I picked this book off Michael Miley's shelves while visiting him in Sonoma having read previously McKenna's Archaic Revival. Ritual, isolation, and sensory deprivation are the techniques used by the Archaic shaman seeking to journey in the world of the spirits and ancestors. No matter what subject your into, this book should be mandatory reading for anybody on this planet to become a better, stronger human.We tend to rely on public ignorance and fears to drive the drug laws, which would be funny if it wasn't for all the people in jail for no reason or dying in drug wars.