My goal is to illuminate on our shared humanness and it’s relationship to the earth specifically through nature’s plants which provide us the gift of food to fuel us in our journeys, the essence of life, and the vision opening our minds to the universe.

“All human wisdom, all energy comes from our beloved synergistic partners of the vegetable queen-dom. It all comes from plants. Now, we all know that the human body, we have to have food, it comes from vegetables. We have used vegetables over the years, the essence of vegetables in the form of wood to develop fire, gas, oil, and so forth. But, what we forget that plants have given us an even more important gift. They’ve given us the gift of vision, they give us the illumination. And throughout human history is the Eves, the Pandoras usually it’s a woman who takes this wonderful vegetable and gives it to humanity and says, be illuminated.”

Plants and their presence on this earth have certain mysticism to their origin. The general understanding is that they’ve been on this planet longer than most other life forms and have taken root to lay claim to Earth’s terrestrial environments since the soil was sustainable. They’ve survived global catastrophe time and time again always reaching for the stars, morphing into the multitude of forms they’ve evolved into today. Their ubiquitous influence to the rest of this floating rock’s inhabitants in the time-space continuum is clear, we wouldn’t be here without the plants. Having observed that we human beings like the plants have been reaching out and looking to the stars with a spirit aspiring of being where they are in the sky since our known beginnings. I can’t help but think that people as a species have this evidently shared ambition with the plant forms for a reason. Looking at various cultures and religious activity in history they almost universally look to the skies above for essentially hope and faith that heavens will grace them with some sort of abundance.
Now, as you read earlier in the quote of Timothy Leary claiming to our wisdom and energy is owed to the rooted vegetable occupants of earth mother Gaia gifting us that of physical resources and illumination of the mind happens to be a shared thought of another influence to this blog and friend to Mr. Leary, Terence McKenna. McKenna was a self-proclaimed psychonaut, lecturer, and advocate for the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants through the 1990s who I found to be an enchanting character of counter-culture along with Tim Leary and many others. I had first heard of Terence McKenna from my absolute favorite podcast the powerful Joe Rogan Experience where Mr. Rogan mentions this “Stoned Ape Theory” coined by McKenna. His hypothesis stating that the early evolution of consciousness in Homo sapiens had a main transformative factor catalyzed by the ingestion of a psychedelic mushroom, specifically the Psilocybe cubensis widely known as the magic Psilocybin mushroom. This theory turned me on to an idea I had never heard before and curiously seems to fit in the blank spaces or jumps in the pathology of the established evolutionary model, which I’m fascinated by. His concept of modern human origins begins with these sprouting mushrooms on the ancient grassy plains of Africa that would be found growing…
“In the manure of the cattle when the hunting packs of early primates followed along the cattle they inevitably encountered the mushroom ate it had their visual skills thereby increased, breed more readily. Therefore survived more easily than their non-mushroom eating cousins. And so the eating of mushrooms and the development in higher aspects of consciousness including self-refection were there by enforced. Leading to the conclusion that it was actually a symbiotic relationship to a mushroom. And that has given us self-reflection, language, religion, and all the spectrum of effects that flow from these things.”

To expand on this enlightened egoless humanoid in our evolutionary transition from the trees to the plains of Africa arose a utopian partnership paradise society, in contrast to our modern dominator society, consisting of this trinity amongst human, cattle, and mushroom plants. The cattle were a central dynamic to this equilibrium; the cattle were an innovation to primal life instead of scavenging off lion kills like what the previous primates were doing. This interesting notion goes on to suggest our documented explosion of brain size, which had tripled in just two million years, attributing our humanness (amusement, language, spirituality) apart from the ego-self is the result of pathological evolutionary pressures to be overcome by mushroom consuming primate cousins. This phenomenon of forming this reciprocal relationship where blood, milk, and meat of the cattle were available to the human beings and in return they propagated and increased the size by protecting these herds. But, a natural consequence of all this activity is for the mushroom to always be there to always be present creating this paradise dynamic equilibrium.

So, some may find McKenna’s theory unlikely, distasteful, offensive, or even disgusting, but science and art alike are usually disturbing or forcing us to look at ourselves in another light. Not to take his notion for a fact, if you consider his knowledge and experience with psychedelics in particular and in how he explains the neurological benefits of eating psilocybin, for example, he explains in a lecture that there is this three-part process to the effect of eating Psilocybin increasing visual acuity, increased sexual activity, and increased religious activity. He begins to make some sense in how we as a species evolved from this plant’s biological influence. And like any great story or what makes a theory unconfirmed is the unexplainable factor of mystery without a time-travel device, but Terence McKenna has a talent for putting the missing pieces together in this evolutionary puzzle with his “Stoned Ape Theory” like a true detective in this alleged crime scene of today’s questionable humanity.
“Well, so the reason I spend so much time on this is the idea got lose in the sixties that LSD was a miracle drug. And that it was all created within the context of twentieth-century history, this isn’t what was going on . I mean we are discovering discovering the chemical forces that created humanness in the first place and then we are discovering the consequences of having disrupted those relationships. I think it would do a lot to change the discussion about drugs in this country if we had this kind of model of pre-history in front of us. Of coarse it would enrage a great deal of people in the same way that the nineteenth-century had to come to terms with the idea that we maybe descended from apes. This theory would add the notion that we now have to face the fact that we had descended from stoned apes. You know, one further nail in the coffin of male pride… ”
— Terence McKenna

Today we have continuous war, which is largely influenced by ancient religions. Religion is a hallmark trait of any society. It is a symbol of stability and general guidance of how to live amongst ourselves. Just as religion is a necessary and practical tool for functionality to help move us along in this world it equally is used as a reason to be terrible to each other, not so good. Somewhere along the line, there must’ve been a failure to communicate. So then the question is, well what went wrong?
What Terence puts forth in our ‘Stoned ape’ story as a species, is what originally influenced the creation of religion in early primates in the first place may have been found where this dynamic equilibrium paradise of a partnership society was in ancient Africa, is the development of language with meaning. This African paradise society consisted of this trinity on the grassy plains including humans, cattle herds, and the ever-present mushroom boosting the acuity of vision resulting in successful hunting, which equates to food then increasing breeding to pass genetics, and amplifying religious activity associated with the enlarging of brain size (possibly due to the neurological benefits of eating Psilocybin). A more successful community implies an efficiency to communicate amongst each other. Then developing a language to better understand one another with meaning behind the language. This development of language is difficult to put a finger on since it is the most complicated thing we do as humans.
It appears through seemingly spontaneous art found in archeology like cave paintings of ceremonial activity, for example, that an overflow of intentionality in these primates was creating then a cascade of verbal arrhythmia of some sort. And over a thousand generations, this becomes an integrated mode of activity. Imagining how language emerged is not an easy task. But, the easiest way to imagine may be to think that it was done for people’s amusement long before anybody would use language for communication. In other words, the first musical instrument must have been the voice. There is this thing called glossolalia, which across the world people experiment with and McKenna would be seen displaying samples of it in his lectures. Glossolalia is language in the absence of meaning. When examined there are connectors, declensions, prefixes, and suffixes all the syntax is there, but no meaning. So, in the development of language among primates, of which meaning could be imagined as coming into the picture very late having to do with an explosion of brain size.

The earliest surviving archeological stratum of religion we possess is a horned goddess image that is an Upper-Paleolithic, High-Neolithic icon The Great Horned Goddess. She’s known to have many aliases’ i.e. the goddess of the animals, the mushroom goddess, and the mother image that was the religious icon, which coincidently was stabilizing this African plains cattle propagating partnership society. You may be asking, what happened to them? Well according to Terence Mckenna’s inquiry and evident archeology finds that the same forces that created it, eventually destroyed it, which was this progressive drying of the African continent. This climatic drought of the Saharan grassland is locked up in the mechanics of the solar system it doesn’t have anything to do with fate and blame.
When the once grassy land of the Sahara began to dry, so too began the growing distance between watering holes for the cattle of the nomadic mushroom cult became replaced with a mead cult. As these people poured into the middle east, along with their mead, due to a much harsher climate they then out of necessity resorted to agriculture evidently for the first time…
“Agriculture, which had been minimal and unfocused to that point, became absolutely necessary in the new regime in the retreating glaciers pulling back across Palestine and Lebanon. And Jericho, which is an 8,000-year-old site on the West Bank, was the most advanced civilization of its time and what was it? a grain tower with a series of defensive enclosures around it. It indicated that agriculture had succeeded to the point that it had brought with it paranoia, because if you succeeded agriculture you produce surpluses. These surpluses mean you’re a target for raiding from less fortunate people. Evidence for all of this is the rock paintings from southern Nigeria on the southern plateau. We actually see shamans with mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies and dancing. Ordinary anthropologists had never talked about this. Don’t know why this info was suppressed. Tend to think there is a kind of unconcious racism in the suppression of the idea that the origin of not high culture, but of humanness itself is in Africa.”
— Terence McKenna
It is curious to suggest that ultimately the cycle of global climate drove civilization to be the technological giants we are in the present day. And of consequence in being entirely removed from our primally humble egoless beginnings under the awesome starlit sky as a partnership society of the African grassland to the narcissist plagued smog-covered cities of dominator society today. In contrast, this is quite a different picture that Terence McKenna paints here from the biblical sense of genesis, demonstrating how and why we began to draw lines in the sand out of the abrupt transition to a scarcity of available resources in the once abundant land. It can be argued if you factor in the overall very recent wetness of Africa that a perfected version of human society existed there and only there in the pre-desert wet utopian African grassland.

If you look at The Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, which is the story of our origin you can see it in a whole different light with his theory being tangent specifically to this story. It is essentially the story of a drug bust. The suppression of information about plants. It is the story of a partnership man and woman, first of all, the woman doesn’t take orders from anybody. She has a relationship with a snake who tells her if she eats from the tree she will gain knowledge of the world. This is one way of saying they will gain true information about their existential world (they’re completely naked). The creator of the garden paradise, Yahweh or God is observing the situation is curiously musing to himself and says, ‘If they eat the fruit of the tree of life they would then become as we are’. They eat the fruit then immediately get expelled from the garden paradise, Eden. The final shot at the intruders is an angel with a burning sword of fire is placed at the eastern gate of Eden so that the human beings can never find their way back.
“What this is, is the story of the breakup of a woman run psychedelic partnership society by aridity. The angel at the eastern gate of Eden is the unforgiving Sharan sun making it impossible to go back. And the switch from partnership to dominator society is occasioned then by abandoning the set of practices, which keep the ego under control.”
— Terence McKenna
The regular consumption of the psychedelic plant in the nomadic diet made restraint of the ego-self possible only in this brief period of 50,000 years that is Upper-Paleolithic High-Neolithic times. The reason the plant did this to the ego is if you analyze psychedelic experiences and ask what is the psychedelic experience? The answer is, it dissolves boundaries. Whatever your boundaries are the plant will totally challenge and overthrow your view of reality once consumed. Boundaries become easy to see that they are a creation of culture. A psychologist, William James says, “We’re born into a blooming buzzing confusion.” And so we reside in that blooming buzzing confusion 18 months, 2 years until we get our language skills together and then we start to mosaic over the confusion with concepts and that’s how we create our culture.

In the twentieth century, one of the great strides forward to our society has been a general understanding with the practitioners of modern communication technology, that language creates reality. A reality is made up of language, reality is made of words. Realities can be mutually exclusive though lesser so now with the advent of the internet connecting and overcoming these physical boundaries making our world smaller reaching every corner of the earth. In the sense that they can only reach each other over bridges of very generalized concepts. So the world is made of language. When you take a psychedelic that cultural world is dissolved. You see the ego must live by constraint, it draws lines. This is a primary denial of the world, which it is seamless and one. Feeling is primary. Once you start drawing lines you’re off into dualism. And it’s no joke to say that dualism is the root of all evil.
Where the psychedelic mushroom religion died was in Africa. In which never really flourished outside of there and this may be a key concept to understand our current fascination with addiction to substances that influence consciousness. When this religious mushroom activity was happening then it could have created in us an appetite, nearly at a level of genetic proclivity, for boundary dissolution between the individual mind and culture.
“This kind of chemical obsessionism is very hard to explain. Evolutionarily doesn’t seem to make sense unless you hypothesize a situation in the past in which this was very important to us. And when we moved out of Africa and broke this connection with nature because that’s what it really is when you dissolve the boundaries of language. What floods back in to fill that vacuum is the fact of the natural world, the overwhelming modality that is not culturally defined. So that kind of relationship to nature having been disrupted leaves us not only a sense of loss, but a kind of anger, a kind of fury directed against the natural world.”
— Terence McKenna

There is this desire maintained by many people, in many places around the planet to bridge back to a place of wholeness through the vegetable-gnosis. Going back and looking at shamanism both ancient and modern is evident to an archaic revival to use plants in this pursuit to the equilibrium of consciousness. I think most can agree that the present world we live in today is fairly crazy. And this cultural legacy we carry is a thousand generations of being removed from anything authentic for most of us. This traumatic thing that happened to us in the past damages us all. The dominator culture and the apotheosis of its values have fed upon itself for a long time and now they can call the power that lights the stars down upon our enemies. The planet is very small and fragile in the face of that kind of energy. The only counterflow to that power is some kind of reconnection with nature that is not casual or recreational, not weekend conservation. This mother Gaian Earth depends on us that we act to embody the collectivity in being more stoned to find more about the dimensions of the psychedelic experience.
We are what we are because of the relationship to plants. This is a political issue in the same way reproductive freedom is as well. The main socio and political debate waged in western society has been how free shall the individual be? The point that has been planted strongly is the individual should be free as can be without it dissolving minimal social constraints keeping society together. Addictions and substance obsession that comes out of that freedom is an effort to get back to this primal equilibrium.

