When Plants Dream Quotes

“When Dennis McKenna drank ayahuasca , he had a vision in which he became “a sentient water molecule, percolating randomly through the soil, lost amid the tangle of the enormous root fibers of the Banisteriopsis World Tree.” I could feel the coolness, the dank dampness of the soil surrounding me. I felt suspended in an enormous underground cistern, a single drop among billions of drops … as if squeezed by the implacable force of irresistible osmotic pressures, I was rapidly translocated into the roots of the Banisteriopsis tree …”
He was “carried through the articulating veins toward some unknown destination”. McKenna found himself within the extraordinary cellular mechanisms that turn light into “the molecular stuff of life”. Pulled on a kind of conveyor belt to the place where photosynthesis occurs. His consciousness exploded as he was “smited by the bolt of energy emitted by the phytic acid transducers and my poor water-molecule soul was split asunder”. As this vision ended, he found himself “embedded in the matrix” of the plant’s biochemical makeup.
Suddenly he was suspended above the Amazon rainforest, looking over its vast expanse: “The vista stretching to the curved horizon was blue and green and bluish green, the vegetation below, threaded with shining rivers, looked like green mold covering an overgrown petri plate.”

McKenna felt: “anger and rage toward my own rapacious, destructive species, scarcely aware of its own devastating power, a species that cares little about the swath of destruction it leaves in its wake as it thoughtlessly decimates ecosystems and burns thousands of acres of rainforest.” He wept. Suddenly a voice spoke to him: “You monkeys only think you’re running things. You don’t think we would really allow this to happen, do you?”
― Daniel Pinchbeck, When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance

“The origin of human consciousness as well as the mystical experience may have been linked to humanity’s use of visionary plants.

In the Rig Veda, one of the earliest collections of Vedic Sanskrit hymns from India, there is frequent mention of a plant called soma, which, when drunk, produced marvellous seemingly entheogenic effects.”
― Daniel Pinchbeck, When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance

“Most people only care about one state of consciousness – the ordinary waking state – and they seek to accumulate material things. We have lost connection with any subtler levels of reality, the many dimensions and dream worlds that ayahuasca reveals. Amazonian cultures like the Achuar and the Secoya often believe that communing with these other levels or dimensions is an essential part of what we are here to do as humans. In losing touch with the dream world and the imaginal dimensions, modern humanity lost its soul and its purpose.”
― Daniel Pinchbeck, When Plants Dream

“In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2009),”
― Daniel Pinchbeck, When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance