Extraordinary insights into mystical knowledge. Author, Jeremy Narby leaps between science and mysticism on his quest to explain how several millennia ago Stone-Age hunters living in the Peruvian rainforest learned the botanical properties and the chemistry of plants. Dr. Narby, a Canadian-born scientist, lived two years with the Ashaninca people in the jungles of the Pichis Valley in Peru . Early in his work with the Ashaninca, Dr Narby perceived an enigma. First hallucinations cannot be the source of real information , because to consider them as such is the definition of psychosis.
Western knowledge considers hallucinations to be at best illusions, at worst morbid phenomena.
Second plants do not communicate like human beings. Scientific theories of communication consider that only human beings use abstract symbols like words and pictures and that plants do not relay information in the form of mental images. Throughout Western Amazonia people drink ayahuasca. When a shaman drinks his plant brew, the spirits present themselves to him and explain everything. Narby observes that in the jungles of Peru are people without electron microscopes who seem to know about the molecular properties of plants and the art of combining them, and when one asks them how they know these things, they say their knowledge comes directly from hallucinogenic plants, themselves.