Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal: Pollan: "This is your mind on [drugs as] plants"

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Pollan: "This is your mind on [drugs as] plants"

Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven (eds.) Wisdom Quarterly

This Is Your Mind on Plants (audiobook)

From number-one New York Times bestselling author and Berkeley graduate Michael Pollan comes a radical challenge to how we think about drugs.

This is an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants called entheogens rather than hallucinogens and the equally powerful taboos against them.

Of all the things we humans rely on plants for -- sustenance, beauty, medicines, fragrances, flavors, fibers -- surely the most curious is our use of them to change our consciousness to:

delude ourselves
stimulate ourselves
calm ourselves
fiddle with ourselves
completely alter the qualities of our mental experience...

Entheogens (psychedelicsangha.org)

Take coffee and tea, for example. People around the world rely on caffeine to temporarily sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a “drug,” or our daily use as a chronic “addiction,” because it is legal and socially acceptable.

So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from the seedpod of an opium poppy a serious federal crime?

In This Is Your Mind on Plants, popular researcher and author Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs: morphine (garden poppy opium), caffeine (tea leaves and coffee beans), and mescaline (San Pedro cactus and peyote cactus buds) -- and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief, the:

upper (stimulant)
downer (sedative)
outer (hallucinogen).

The New Science of Psychedelics (M. Pollan)

Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants.

Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and why do we then fence in that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?

In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory-journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts.

Harvard U's Dr. Timothy Leary tried to tell us.

He shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively as a drug -- whether licit or illicit.

But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with Nature in one of the most profound ways we can.

Based in part on an essay published almost 25 years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants and our attraction to them through time holds up a mirror to