little plants that manufacture little molecules with the power to change the little subjective experience we call consiousness

And that, my friends, is ethnobotany.

Not only is this the field where the ingenuity of plants meets the art of biochemistry, but discovering this connection was, for me, the moment when the universe's mysterious molecular makeup seemed to unravel—when the DNA woven through the tissues of my bones became luminous and spoke to me in a foreign tongue, one I had, in truth, had access to my whole life.

Accessing excellence.

Ethnobotony's art and my relationship with it.

Imagine, through equal parts scientific inquiry and equal parts cultural history, that we are able to explore the mysterious interactions between plants and human culture, body, and mind. Ancient doctors, classical philosophers, and shamans of today have healed, prescribed cures, and altered the textures of consciousness; and as nature wears the colors of our spirits, so too have plants been used to provide the aesthetic flourishes in cultural practices of beauty across the vividly outlined crayola-spectrum of human expression.

Today, I want to introduce YOU(!) to one of my favorite ethnobotanists, Terence McKenna. An ethnobotanist among many other names, he is noted for his studies of plant-based entheogens—remarkable plants whose chemistry guides human consciousness into its own molecular depths, giving our minds access to the genetic sequences shared by all forms of life.

McKenna held a particular fascination with shamanic cultures. In his work, he draws a poignant comparison between schizophrenia and shamanism, highlighting the sharp contrast between the linear values of Occidental society and the archaic, authentic impulses glorified and celebrated among land-based cultures.

A few of my dearest, most extraordinarily creative, and provocatively brilliant loved ones have had to learn strategies to navigate the conditions of schizophrenia within our modern social civilization. Having firsthand witnessed these individuals similarly “living in a world of twilight imagining, becoming marginal to society, and struggling to hold a regular job,” McKenna provides a deeply personal perspective that, in turn, helps me gain a greater understanding of what may have been unique developments in their own access to new, molecular levels of insight into the genetic sequences behind nature's vast intelligence.

The Occidental gaze, McKenna felt, is a double-edged mirror: on one side, it fractures the ancient wholeness of shamanic vision, reducing the sacred to spectacle, mystery to pathology, the ecstatic to chemical anomaly. What once was the birthright of human consciousness is translated into categories of “primitive ritual” or “hallucination,” stripped of its living soul. McKenna’s warning and hope was this: that the Occidental effect on shamanism shows both the wound and the medicine. The wound is disconnection, desacralization, exploitation. The medicine is rediscovery—if only the West can learn to approach these practices not as curiosities to be consumed, but as doorways into remembering the latent capacities of the human spirit: telepathy, ecstatic communion, the sense of being woven into a living cosmos.


"People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting."