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. Evolutionary logic dictates that in situations of food scarcity those animals able and willing to tolerate many marginal foods will be more evolutionarily successful than those that can accept only a limited number of items into their diet… there will be pressure on a given animal to broaden its definition of what are acceptable foods by broadening its tastes. My feeling is that McKenna has been so seduced by the beauty of his own psychedelic experience and the rush of information received through sometimes overwhelming revelation (see 'The Invisible Landscape') that he let his own academic rigour be swayed by the poetry of the vision. Heroin flattens the image; with heroin, things are neither hot nor cold the junkie looks out at the world certain that whatever it is, it does not matter. might have been shaped by coincidence or by consciously consuming certain herbs, plants, berries, mushrooms, etc and second, how this might have influenced the development of all kind of faiths and beliefs.

As an odyssey of mind, body and spirit, Food of the Gods is one of the most fascinating and suprising histories of consciousness ever written And as a daring work of scholarship and exploration, it offers an inspiring vision for individual fulfilment and a humane basis for our interaction which each other and with the natural world.While I'm not against people using Mushrooms, Peyote or Ayhuasca I also don't think everybody is cut out for using them. What surprising results may the interdisciplinary field of ethnobiology find in the future both about our past development and the coming influences of what we are consuming right now, looking at you, eating or high reader. That gets more interesting with bigger mammals and very exciting with primates, because a few hundred or thousands of years of consuming, especially during pregnancy, might have some impact. I have attempted here to examine our biological history and our more recent cultural history with an eye to something that may have been missed. In addition, McKenna’s description of the environment that early humans thrived in is truly one-of-a-kind.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to convince you why this book is FUCKING AMAZING - so you'll just have to trust me. through Homeric times people did not have the kind of interior psychic organization that we take for granted. He has added to their shared knowledge of rituals his own efforts to preserve the plants used in these ceremonies. The question of how quickly we develop into a mature community able to address these issues lies entirely with us.

They allowed human beings to leap ahead of other species, and it was mostly women, the plant gatherers of society, who did this. Some of Terrence’s ideas are very interesting like I could see how human kind developed creativity to use tools and developed a language or form of communication through hallucinogenic experiences. These relationships have shaped every aspect of our identities as self-reflecting beings--our languages, our cultural values, our sexual behavior, what we remember and what we forget about our own past.

I’ve thought a a lot about some of the ideas McKenna shares in this book, but this book brought it all together. The premise is still almost entirely unsubstantiated, to say nothing of the fact that humans are not the only consumers of hallucinogens.It may be true, as he asserts, that in small doses they help with visual acuity, while in large doses they help dissolve one’s ego and foster a sense of community. I feel like if McKenna had his way, a mushroom experience would be a requirement for life, and nicotine and alcohol- society's "okay" drugs, would be considered the root of all evil.