Iamwhomiam wrote:Sim,
If some here will forgive the first reference, a few that come to mind would be Tompkins'
The Secret Life of Plants an Weil's
The Natural Mind and
From Chocolate to Morphine, though I believe the books you mention are more recent.
I'm sorry, but I've forgotten more I've read regarding this subject. Perhaps I shall find time to read those you've mentioned.
http://www.drweil.com/
Thanks, Iamwhomiam.
The Secret Life of Plants sounds like an especially fascinating book from the perspective of plant sentience. Both you and Norton Ash have mentioned "polling the plants" and, as odd as the idea might at first sound, there may be some basis for doing just that, albeit in ways that are considered highly unconventional here in America.
This also relates directly to the topic of this discussion: UFOs.
Earlier I mentioned Graham Hancock's excellent book,
Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. He has suggested that psychedelic plants may be the key to understanding our true human origins — and that our origins are not of this earth.
In my own experiences as a child with beings who looked remarkably similar to what are commonly referred to today as "UFO occupants,"
I was told by one of them that what I will need to know has been "written on your cells."You can imagine then how surprised I was when I read the following passages about how
psychedelic plants may be able to unlock information, which resides within human DNA:
Graham Hancock wrote:The teachers within
It is bizarre not only that Crick's hypothesis reflects the ayahuasca-inspired mythology of the Yagua of the Amazon, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, but also that a number of Westerners who did not know one another or compare notes, and who experimented with ayahuasca or with pure DMT at different times, nevertheless arrived separately at what were essentially very similar visions involving DNA. In Chapter Eighteen we saw that several of the volunteers in Rick Strassman's DMT project at the University of New Mexico experienced intense visions featuring "threads of DNA" and "spirals of DNA." In Chapter Nineteen the reader will find the case of the American biologist who received detailed images of specific DNA sequences under the influence of ayahuasca, and in Chapter Three I reported my own ayahuasca visions of "snakes that wind around each other like the DNA double helix."
Indeed, this theme seems to be everywhere abundant amongst people who have encountered hallucinogens, like DMT, LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, which have a tryptamine core. In 1961, the American anthropologist Michael Herner was one of the first Westerners to participate fully in an indigenous ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon — in his case in the Conibo Indian village beside a remote lake off a tributary of the Rio Ucayali. After drinking a large dose of the bitter hallucinogenic brew, he received a spectacular vision in which he saw dragon-like creatures that came to earth fleeing something, perhaps an enemy, "out in space" after a journey that had lasted for "eons":
"The creatures showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence. Before me, the magnificence of plant an animal creation and speciation — hundreds of millions of years of activity — took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to imagine. I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside all forms of life, including man. They were the true masters of humanity and the entire planet, they told me. We humans were but the receptacles and servants of these creatures. For this reason they could speak to me from within myself. In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, in 1961, I knew nothing of DNA."
Much later, in the 1990's, Jeremy Narby's experiences of ayahuasca evoked a similar chain of thought. During his first session with the brew he reports that he suddenly found himself…
"…surrounded by two gigantic boa-constrictors that seemed fifty feet long. I was terrified. These enormous snakes are there, my eyes are closed and I see a spectacular world of brilliant lights, and in the middle of these hazy thoughts, the snakes start talking to me without words. They explain that I am just a human being."
Despite superficial differences, it seems to me that Narby and Harner's ayahuasca experiences have much in common with Crick's LSD experience, and his subsequent elaboration of the directed panspermia theory. In essence, what all three seem to envisage is a control system for the human race that is not of this earth, that is serpent-like in form, that now dwells inside us, and that is superior to all of us. Crick calls it the double helix, coils it up inside bacteria, and has it sent here from across the galaxy on alien spaceships. For Harner it is creatures that he sees as dragons that have likewise come to earth from space after a journey of "eons," that have found a way to perpetuate themselves here inside all life, and that are the "true maters of humanity." Narby is put in his place by twin serpents, notes that the double helix of DNA resembles "two entwined serpents," calls it "an extremely sophisticated technology ... that was initially developed elsewhere than on earth," and goes on to write a book called The Cosmic Serpent, in which the notion that DNA may be minded, and may encode intelligent messages that we can access in altered states of consciousness, receives its fullest elaboration.
I feel that the possibility cannot be discounted that these insights into the mysteries of DNA that have been given to scientists and anthropologists, just like the insights in to the properties and combinations of plants that ayahuasca gives to shamans in the Amazon may not be accidental. If our DNA is in any way an artifice of technology, then there is every reason to suppose that its makers would expect such a technology to result in the evolution of beings of high intelligence — sooner or later. In that case, the one certain way to send those future beings a message, no matter what unpredictable paths their mental and physical development might follow, would be to encode it in their DNA — indeed in the most basic elements of DNA that everyone and everything would have to possess some of, but that might accumulate preferentially in higher organisms.
Making up 97 per cent of the total DNA library in the cells of modern human beings, this is why the "junk" non-coding sequences with their mysterious language-like properties are so interesting. it may be the case that hallucinations of the sort that convey veridical knowledge about DNA or about plants, or about how to cure a certain sickness, or about the nature of reality, are as effective a technology as bio-engineering and genetic manipulation for exploring the true potential of the legacy stored inside all our cells. It may be, in other words, that the ancient teachers of mankind have been inside is all along but that we must enter altered states of consciousness in order to hear what they have to say.
— Graham Hancock, Supernatural, pp. 489-491
Bath, England, October 2005
