Plantsofpower 1 Rc

Part radio series about mind-altering drugs in nature and culture.

Written and presented by Nick Rankin.

Plants of Power.

Program 1. Brain Power.

Hello. People and plants go back a long way together.

And this series is about our chemical connection.

A story of dangers and delights.

Plants make chemicals to protect themselves.

Some of them are poisons.

And we people need chemicals to live.

The human brain works on chemicals.

Your moods, thoughts and feelings are governed by drugs manufactured naturally in your body.

This series argues that drugs are part of our nature.

Common to all human cultures.

Plants of power trace our secret history.

And help to reveal our inner selves.

Plants produce phenomenally complex compounds.

Plants that are probably to do with attracting or repelling other life forms.

By chance, those products have equally remarkable effects on the human nervous system and the brain, which is the most complex organ in the known universe.

Plants are unimaginably powerful.

Dr. Clive Cohen.

I'm from King's College, London.

Dr. Clive Cohen.

and my main interest is in neuroscience.

Neuroscience is the science of the brain.

Science of the brain and the spinal cord and the peripheral nervous system.

Now the brain is sort of wetware sloshing around in our skull.

It is chemical. It's a chemical system, isn't it?

It's an immensely complicated universe of cells

that are speaking to each other

and somehow promoting vast numbers of functions,

many of which have nothing to do with thinking.

The man in the street may think the brain is largely to do with emotions and thinking.

It's certainly subserving those functions,

but it's maintaining temperature regulation, water balance,

reproductive hormones, biological rhythms,

countless hosts of functions.

And at this moment, at the end of the 20th century,

we don't fully understand the full potential of the brain.

We understand practically nothing, to be honest.

We know quite a lot of the phenomena

and they're being studied with great diligence and great accuracy.

But it's a science still in its infancy.

It's really only a few decades old.

Any drug or agent that affects your mental state

must get through to your brain.

Now your brain works by electricity and chemistry.

The chemicals in your brain that signal to each other

are called neurotransmitters

and they lock on to the receptors of other cells to do their business.

David Pierce runs BLTC Research.

That stands for Better Living Through Chemistry.

And he wants to make people happier by modifying the brain balance.

Basically, the mind-brain is a community of perhaps thousands of millions of nerve cells

and somehow they have to talk to each other

because for the most part they're not directly connected

and they do so by these little chemicals

and the terminals from one cell release these chemicals

and these chemicals lock on to receptors

which is rather like locks and keys on, let's say, a nearby cell.

And this triggers off a whole cascade of events inside the cell.

And by changing the way our cells talk to each other

it's possible to alter mood, it's possible to alter thought.

It can be done in an uncontrolled and dangerous way

as in many of our street drugs

or it can be done in a much more controlled and precision-engineered way.

One of the problems with the mind-brain

is that it's got a whole host of mutually inhibitory feedback mechanisms

and let's say by boosting one particular neurotransmitter subtype

you actually inhibit the function of another transmitter.

Hence, in many cases, drugs that boost serotonin function

impair dopamine function

and dopamine is very important.

A neurotransmitter, it's involved in willpower, euphoria, well-being, drive

and so you really need to have a twin-track approach.

Hang on to two words there, serotonin and dopamine.

They're two important chemicals in the brain

that all the mind and mood-altering drugs seem to do things to

blocking them, freeing them, mimicking them in some way.

Serotonin is linked to the sleeping-waking cycle,

to dreaming, to temperature regulation,

to moods and the fine-tuning of how you see reality.

Dopamine is involved in all the pleasures that we feel,

to euphoria and to control of sex hormones.

And it's on these and on other neurotransmitters

that leading-edge brain scientists are now focusing.

My name is Susan Greenfield.

I'm a university professor in pharmacology at Oxford.

What is pharmacology, actually?

Well, people think that pharmacology is all about drugs

because that comes from the Greek word for drugs, pharmakos.

But really, what we like to think of it as in Oxford

is more the study of what we say chemically sensitive sites.

We're more concerned with how chemicals working in the body

can be modified by agents that some people will regard as drugs.

So it's not necessarily all about drugs and just drugs on their own,

but rather how they work in the body.

Let's go back to these receptors, these locks and keys

that a drug or an agent introduced will somehow trigger the chemical

or fool the brain into thinking that this is the right key for this lock.

What I want to ask is, how come our brain has got these locks

that match so many cannabis, tobacco, opiates

that there are, apparently, I've been told, receptors in the brain that match these?

That's a fascinating question, and perhaps the best example of that

and the most established now comes from findings in the 1970s

that, to my mind, represented one of the biggest advances in brain research

of this century, and was discovered in Aberdeen.

And what it was found was that we have naturally occurring opiates,

morphine, in our brain.

And so at that time, people knew that morphine was one of the most powerful drugs,

both in terms of abuse and in terms of analgesia, in terms of therapy.

It's one of the oldest and most powerful drugs that we know of, is opium,

of which morphine is a derivative and heroin a derivative of that.

In the 1970s, it was discovered that we had in our body special receptors

that the opium, or the morphine, or the heroin could work on.

It was then discovered that there was in our bodies a naturally occurring agent,

a transmitter, that was just like the morphine.

That's called enkephalins, literally meaning in the head.

And this was held with great excitement, and now we know a lot more

that the body does have a mechanism that can be involved in the control of pain, for example.

It's also the same agent believed to be released during something called jogger's high.

That's to say when people do a lot of long-distance running.

After about half an hour, they feel euphoric.

And that's now associated with increased levels of this enkephalins.

Is there a way one can trigger one's own enkephalins naturally?

Then you need any drugs at all.

Exactly, and this is one of the reasons people try and get people who are depressed

to engage in lots more activity.

It's undeniable that if you take exercise, you do feel a lot better.

And another way we know that you can release endorphins is with laughter,

and again, a marvellous way.

If you could get people to laugh, then doing that rather than taking drugs would be marvellous.

There'd be no side effects, it'd be cheap, you wouldn't need a medical practitioner,

you couldn't overdose on it.

It wouldn't matter what culture or age you were, anyone could do it.

With me now is Dr. Andrew Weil, well-known author.

His latest book is called Eight Weeks to Optimum Health.

He's also the author of Natural Health, Natural Medicine, Spontaneous Healing,

and also two books on the subject of plants and drugs,

From Chocolate to Morphine, Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs,

and a famous book from the 1970s, The Natural Mind,

A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness.

Dr. Weil, can you tell me why are human beings, this species,

so interested in intoxication, in altering their moods and their minds?

In The Natural Mind, which was published in 1972,

I postulated that human beings are born with an innate drive to alter consciousness,

and this is based on observation.

Now, I don't say they're a drive to get intoxicated,

because I think that's one variety of consciousness alteration.

My sense is that what we find most aversive is boredom,

and what we find most reinforcing is change in the area of consciousness.

And I think as you go up the phylogenetic scale,

you find this desire to alter consciousness becomes more and more prominent,

and it reaches its peak in human beings.

I also think that human beings in most cultures quickly discover

that drugs are one way of satisfying this need.

But I think unless society acknowledges that need and addresses it,

we have no hope of coming to any terms with intoxicants in our midst.

If we take it back in human history, back into evolutionary history,

I mean, how far back does this start, do you think?

I think it's there from the beginning,

and even if you look at drugs,

which most people early on were using in plant form,

the only culture that I know of that was not heavily invested

in growing, distributing, using drug plants

were traditional Eskimos who had the misfortune not to be able to grow things

and had to wait for us to bring them alcohol,

which they quickly learned to abuse.

One reason why we've evolved a brain at all

comes from the fact that we are animals.

And if you're an animal, unlike a plant, you're animated.

Now, I know that plants in certain cases can turn to the light and so on,

but they can't translocate unless you believe in the day of the triffids

or something going in, or red shakes, there were burn and wood.

Most usually, plants are fixed to one spot,

whereas animals, the hallmark of animals is that they are moved, they're animated.

And there's a very interesting little story

of a tunicator, a sea squirt, a little marine creature,

that spends its immature part of its life swimming around

and it has a very primitive brain.

And then it fastens to a rock

and lives out its adult life by filtering seawater

so it doesn't have to move.

And once it becomes immobile like this,

it consumes its own brain.

So it doesn't need a brain once it becomes stationary.

So the idea is that we've evolved a brain

because it enables us to have a rapid interaction with the environment.

A plant doesn't need that

because things for plants don't change very quickly.

The light changes slowly.

It doesn't have to make very rapid adjustments to survive,

whereas we do, which is why we're equipped effectively

with a very quick sensory input of things coming in

so through our five senses we can know what's going on in the world

and, of course, we can react quickly, we can move,

we can run, we can chase, we can hunt.

So the brain has evolved as such to enable you, we think,

to interact rapidly with the environment.

The most fundamental thing is that as animals,

any animal is by definition dependent on plants.

There are no animals that aren't dependent on plants,

either directly or indirectly.

And therefore our evolutionary history has been tied in with plants

from the very, very beginning.

The artist and zoologist Jonathan Kingdon,

whose latest authoritative book is

The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals.

We, animals, have been eating plants from the beginning

and that has meant that plants have had to contend with this

as a major force as they've evolved.

I think the most obvious aspect of it is that the plant is trying to protect itself

and producing chemicals which are often highly specific to the particular creature

that is its prime enemy.

But very often, if it's having a strong effect,

it may be right on the edge of being a poison.

And we do know that a lot of drugs, a lot of plant compounds,

which are taken by animals, by wild mammals, and by human beings,

if you take too much of them, of course you die.

If you are a particular type of individual,

you also die anyway, even if you take a very tiny quantity of it.

But if you've got a genetic resistance to it,

then you may be able to take it in quite large quantities

without it doing you any harm.

It may indeed even give you pressure.

And the chemistry of plants is such that it can affect so many different...

We're a web of systems.

I mean, we've got a blood system, a nerve system,

we're coping with air, we're coping with temperature,

we're coping with so many different environmental pressures.

And for all of those, there are chemical balances that are just right

and we can push one way or the other.

And we may actually enjoy getting rather hot or rather cold

as a result of taking some kind of spice,

which has that physiological effect on us.

Now, for somebody else or for another animal,

just making you feel hot or making you feel cold

may be the thing that tips them towards death, if you like.

And so it is a definite deterrent to another animal.

So we're actually latching onto the plant's strategy

against other animals to a great degree

because the vast majority of the plants that we do use as drugs

and that we do use as compounds to stimulate ourselves or whatever,

none of them were designed for us

because most of them are not African

and we are African apes by origin.

And so all our sort of highly refined relationships with plants

are all restricted to the plants of the African forests

and the African savannas.

Spain.

Christian Rech.

My basic professional field is ethno-pharmacology

and I'm specialized in the use of plants by indigenous people

and also specialized on shamanism.

And I do a lot of traveling and researching,

trying them out, taking pictures, writing books, articles,

do some lecturing here and there.

And I've been almost in every place on this planet.

You're the author as well of a dictionary of sacred and magical plants.

You're an ethno-pharmacologist.

You study how native people use these plants.

How far back does human interaction with plants go?

Well, to the beginning.

I mean, it's very difficult to estimate how long people use plants,

but they use them since earliest times.

And there is also some evidence that plants were already used

for magical purposes or for healing or for rituals in Paleolithic times.

And we have some evidence that Neanderthal man already used some bioactive

and even psychoactive plants as offerings to the dead or something like that.

And from the earliest beginning of writing,

we have records of the use of plants for healing, for magic,

for offerings to the gods and goddesses,

and the use of incense and plant materials had been used as incense almost everywhere.

And from all the written sources,

we have records that this is part of human culture since culture is formed.

Smoke is something right at the root of our distinctness that is homo,

as distinct from, you know, gorillas and chimpanzees.

Smoke is one of the things that defines us.

Because when we built fires and we sat either in caves or in shelters over a fire,

we would have exposed ourselves to an enormous amount of smoke.

And probably any individuals that were hypersensitive to smoke

were eliminated through natural selection at a very early stage in our ancestry.

And this is pure guesswork,

but I would be very surprised if there weren't particular woods

that people say, ooh, lovely, I really like that smell.

And they would have selectively collected those woods

when they wanted a kick out of it.

But they would have just been put into the fire

for maybe a million years that might have occurred.

And they would have just kept them and stuck them in the thing.

And eventually, then it would begin to be controlled.

I think this is confirmed by early archaeology.

There are a lot of censors, they call them,

either for burning opium or for burning cannabis,

that are seeds or leaves are put on and the smoke comes off.

And that could be, in a way, the first step towards having a pipe.

I think you have to find the roots of nearly all these things

in hunting people much more than in agricultural people.

Hunting people would have known so much more about animals and plants

than any agricultural people.

Agricultural people, by definition,

have narrowed their relationships with animals and plants

to a minuscule degree.

And foragers really know an enormous amount about their environment.

They may clothe it with lots of mythology,

but even the mythology generally has some sort of strand

that links it in a functional way with the organism's real biology.

To me, one of the most interesting findings is that

the human brain has receptors that fit molecules produced by plants.

And that's very curious.

Now, why does the brain have receptors

that fit molecules produced by the opium plant?

I mean, that certainly suggests that there is a link

between human beings and human consciousness and plants

that extends very far back in time.

Some would say this is purely an accident,

but are you saying, suggesting that there is a co-evolution here?

Yeah.

You know, even another one,

we find the neurotransmitter molecules,

molecules like serotonin, for example,

in one-celled organisms.

Now, so these seem to be molecules

that are very conserved in evolution.

To me, it suggests that there is linkage.

Andrew Weil.

Now, one man who's spent much of his life

exploring that linkage between plants and people

is the writer Terence McKenna,

the impish guru of natural psychedelics.

I first came across Terence McKenna

when he co-edited with Howard Rheingold

the fall 1989 issue

of that always interesting California-based magazine,

Whole Earth Review,

a remarkable issue whose cover story was

The Alien Intelligence of Plants.

Terence McKenna.

Plants represent an order of existence

that is completely alien to most people,

and yet all around us.

Plants cannot move away from their toxic by-products.

Consequently, they have a great stake in recycling

and keeping the atmosphere and the environment

clean and uncontaminated.

Plants have a wonderful integrated passivity

that makes them a model

for certain aspects of human consciousness.

So, basically, we just wanted to call attention

to this alien life form in our midst,

often as saturated with neurotransmitters

as our own brains are,

and then to discuss the ways in which human beings

can contact or participate

in this kind of consciousness.

One of the things you suggest in your article,

the keynote article of this Whole Earth Review,

plan, plant, planet,

is that you could see the green world

as having influenced us enormously.

Not us in control,

but the plant world has been controlling the mammal life.

Well, an evolutionary biologist

once remarked somewhat facetiously

that animals are something invented by plants

to move seeds around.

And if you stand back and look at it,

that's not far wrong.

Plant life dominated the planet

long before the rise of higher animals.

And plants continue to be

the major life form on the planet.

The atmosphere is controlled

by the gaseous intake and outtake of plants.

Many plants live in the sea

and establish the environment of the oceans.

This is really a plant planet,

and animal life is only an incidental

and late addition to biology here.

The issue also points out

that plants can defend themselves

and work through chemicals,

and immensely subtle chemicals.

And is it your case

that in fact it is those chemical messages

that have helped human beings?

Well, it's a great mystery

why plants would produce

and sequester compounds

that have no apparent role

in their own metabolism.

And I think once you entertain the idea

that these so-called tertiary compounds

are messenger molecules,

pheromones, if you will,

then what emerges

is the picture of biology

united into a seamless web

by the exchange of message-bearing chemicals

in the environment.

We communicate with spoken language,

but insect societies are run by pheromones,

and it now appears

that many plant activities

are mediated by these same messenger chemicals.

Essentially, chemicals lie beneath

the surface of language and communication

in plants and animals.

Nature is trying to communicate

with human beings.

With almost all of these drugs,

I mean, same with cannabis,

although we didn't discover this

quite recently,

there's a receptor in the brain

for THC.

So there is a fit between our brains

and these substances produced by plants.

Now, what does this tell us then?

I mean, what is the...

Well, you know,

many scientists and medical scientists

get very upset

if you try to read meaning

into all of this,

but I've never hesitated to do that.

To me, it suggests

that there is a logic

in our wanting to go around

and experiment with plants

and see what they do to us.

My sense,

and this again was a major point

of the natural mind,

is that the reason

that there is this evolutionary drive

to alter consciousness

is that these experiences

potentially are doorways

through which we can discover

expanded potentials

of the human mind

and human consciousness.

The potential benefits

to be gained

through this kind of experimentation

are probably great

for us as a species,

and that's why this drive

is so present.

So in fact,

legislating about it,

if it is such a primary

evolutionary drive,

legislating...

is futile.

I mean,

it's that simple.

And furthermore,

there is not a shred

of evidence

from anthropology

or history

to suggest

that it is possible

to get human beings

to live without

mind-altering substances.

As I said,

the only culture

that's out there

that I know

that has done that

were Eskimos.

But every other human culture

that I've ever looked at

has been heavily involved

with the production,

distribution,

and consumption

of mind-altering substances.

And then you start

from there

and see,

well,

what can we do about it?

How can we reduce

the potential for harm?

How can we encourage people

if they're going to use

these things

to use them

in responsible ways

and so forth?

But I think

any social program

that begins

from the assumption

that you can make

these substances disappear

or stop people

from using them

is doomed to failure.

...of Power,

a six-part radio series

about mind-altering drugs

in nature

and culture.

Written and presented

by Nick Rankin.

Plants of Power.

Program 2.

Spirit Power.

Well, history shows

that we have always

used drugs.

In every age

and every part

of this planet,

people have pursued

intoxication

with plant drugs,

with fermented fruits,

and other types

of chemical substances.

Psychopharmacologist

Ron Siegel,

author of

Intoxication

and Fire in the Brain.

And surprisingly,

we're not the only animals

that do that.

Our research teams

have found

many examples

of other animals

that pursue

intoxication

with plant drugs

and fermented fruits.

and this drive

to intoxication

is so strong,

it's so persistent,

that it functions

very much like

the drives

of sex,

hunger,

and thirst

that motivate us,

that motivate our lives,

and that drive

our behavior.

There's no region

of the world,

really,

where plants grow

that people haven't

used them,

not only for medical

reasons and for food,

but also for their

psychoactive properties.

Richard Rudgley

is an anthropologist.

He's the author

of Alchemy of Culture

in Toxicants in Society

and a forthcoming

encyclopedia

of psychoactive substances.

So what do

the plants of power do?

Basically,

you can divide them

simply into

a few categories.

You have plants

which are called

stimulants,

obvious ones

being the coffee

and tea plants,

but those cultures

have their equivalents,

which...

basically help you when you're feeling tired or to give you extra energy for some mental

or physical task. Then you have hallucinogenic plants which cause visionary or auditory hallucinations.

Then you have what are called hypnotic plants, a lot of which, such as opium, cause states

where basically they're the opposite of stimulants. They make people relax, they relieve mental

or psychological pain, or physical pain obviously, where they interface with medical use. And

finally you have the inebriants, which is the most classic one of course being alcohol.

Now there's a stream of intoxicants that flow through our lives today. It doesn't matter

whether we wake up with a cup of coffee or a line of cocaine, or we take a break from our

work with a cigarette or a beer, or we relax after work with a cocktail or a joint of marijuana,

or we try to get to sleep at night with something we bought at the pharmacy, or something we bought

from our street corner dealer. People use drugs to change the way in which they feel.

We are chemical organisms. Our brain is a three pound sack of chemicals. Of course we're more than that,

but we are that too. And our brain manufactures lots of natural chemicals. We manufacture opiates,

which are as strong as any kind of heroin or morphine. Our brain manufactures dot-methyltryptamine,

a hallucinogen that is stronger than LSD. Our brain and our nervous system manufactures adrenaline,

which is a stimulant that's as strong as any crack or an amphetamine. So it's natural that in

forging around in our environment on this planet, we will find other chemical substances that we have

affinity to, that hit our receptors and strike us as being pleasant. And it's also being natural that

we're going to find chemicals that we don't like, that we respond to with aversion. So we are just

responding to these chemicals. But how people respond to chemicals depends, we're told, on the set and the

setting. That's the set of ideas or expectations someone has about the substance. And the setting

is the place and time and the other people around you when you take it. It does matter whether this is

a sacred ceremony or a casual habit. Richard Rudgley thinks that for the earliest people,

the astonishing chemical reactions of certain plants had spiritual consequences. There is no question

when you look at the archaeological literature, the literature of the ancient world, and also the

experiences of contemporary tribal peoples, particularly Shaan's, that psychoactive plants have had a central

role in the religious history of mankind. Now you used the word shaman there. Can you explain to me what a

shaman is and the origin of this word? Well the word itself comes from a Siberian tribe and then it was used

by the Russians and from there it reached the western world. And now it generally means people who are living

in tribal societies who have what in other areas are called medicine men, but they go specifically

into trance states in which they perceive the origin of diseases and then by medical practices they seek

to cure their patients. Often, and this is where it is rather different from western medicine, by them

taking the drugs rather than administering them to their patients. Saman or shaman is the Tungus word from

from one of the tribes of Siberia? That's right, yes. Are plants in any way psychoactive plants, mind-altering

plants involved in shamanism in its original place of origin? Well in Siberia there are certain peoples who

use the flygaric mushroom in shamanism, the famous flygaric mushroom which is the well-known mushroom of

fairy tale illustration with the red and white cap. It's one of the naturally occurring

hallucinogenic substances. For the tribal hunter-gatherer, living embedded in nature and instinct and

surviving by skill with animals and plants, the mental world is the spiritual world. A mind-altering plant,

changing the nature of reality when ingested, would for our prehistoric ancestors have been a sacred

plant. For who could doubt this fruit of Eden's stunning power of ecstasy and trance? And who could

not respect the strange person, the shaman or shaman, possessed by that power or somehow channeling its

impulses and insights? I think that, yes, shamans are very interesting because they they clearly belong to

the hunter-food-gatherer phase. Artist and zoologist of Africa, Jonathan Kingdom. Anybody who could

actually invoke hidden powers to provide fruit, the person would have been almost turned into a shaman

anyway. And that does seem to have been one of the roles of shamans, that they they actually interceded

with the hidden powers to provide or to create the harmonious situation in which there would be plenty

of food. And I think that there again this mystery, the mystery of how you could starve sometimes and

you could be full of plenty at another. The food was very, very abundant and then suddenly it would

be withheld. It was so easy for people to actually see this as the result of a malevolent power, which

was a projection of, of a, if you like a, a senior person. So a senior person then became the agent in

a sense for this hidden power. And that I, I think would have been the sort of sequence that would have

led to shamans. But this is purely speculation obviously. And I don't think there's any evidence

anywhere for the, the real origins of shamanism. I definitely think that the origin of shamanism was

the human encounter with psychoactive plants. Because these plants are still the most important tool in

shamanism to enter the other realities. Ethnopharmacologist Christian Rech, author of another forthcoming

encyclopedia of psychoactive plants in German. We have now so much evidence for the worldwide use of

psychoactive plants as the main tools of shamanism that we can really suppose that this is the

original method and that it, it's very old and that the plants actually produced shamanism. And

they also produced what we might call religion or mysticism or something like that. That is an idea

that Weston Labar, the, uh, anthropologist author of the famous book, The Paity Cult, proposed an essay,

that in fact the origins of the sacred and of religion at all is in consciousness changing

plants. Do you hold to that? Of course. I mean, definitely. I mean, it's really easy to understand.

If, uh, you take a psychoactive plant by yourself, you're just thrown into another world, into another

reality. And there you see unbelievable things. You meet, uh, incredible creatures and, uh, all kinds of

stuff is happening. And, uh, stuff is happening. And, uh, uh, if, uh, uh, you experience this by yourself,

then you, uh, can feel that, uh, there is another reality and that this reality is very important to know

and to interact with because, uh, this other reality is not, uh, separated from our visible world. It's

like immanent. It's in this world. Professor Susan Greenfield of Oxford University. We've been talking

about religion here and, and drugs. People want to change their consciousness. You could have an

ecstatic vision. Perhaps you could have an experience of God in some way. It would change your life. Now,

consciousness, our, our sense of knowing ourselves, what is, here's the most simple question of all,

what is the relationship between our brain, the physical wetware in our skull and our consciousness?

Well, if I could answer that, I think, by now. You'd have the Nobel Prize. Well, at the very least,

the Nobel Prize. That'd be, uh, that, of course, is the one of the biggest challenges in biology today

and one that fascinates me. I find it the most exciting question one can ask. Now, that doesn't

mean to say one can answer it. I think one must, first of all, draw a distinction between consciousness

and self-consciousness and that most other animals and indeed very young children are not

self-conscious and that you don't have a rat looking at itself in the mirror. God, I'm a rat,

I don't think. But consciousness, leaving aside self-consciousness, consciousness itself

is a fascinating issue and one that I think actually to come full circle, drugs will offer us the most

progress in understanding for the following reason. If you just look at properties of the brain

as people that are building computers do, or indeed like many neuroscientists do when they're

looking at the electrical signals, then you never know how those electrical signals will match up or

cause you enjoying the sun on your face or the feel of fresh grass on your bare feet. You'll never

know those things. Philosophers, on the other hand, say that what's important is the subjective

experience of consciousness, the feel of my headache to me. Now, until recently, it's been very hard to

bring those two worlds together to understand subjective feelings, sort of feelings that,

let's say, a drug will give you, with what happens in the brain. But it strikes me that drugs are

indeed the bridge, the kind of bilingual link, if you like, because we can talk about how the drug

works in physical terms, how it affects the transmitters and the receptors and the neurons,

and of course you can have someone saying how they feel when they take a drug or reporting their

experiences. So as long as you don't mind having a second-hand insight into someone's consciousness,

that is to say, as long as you don't mind having to rely on what they report, their subjective reports,

you can start to match up subjective sensations with what we know they're doing to chemicals in

the brain, the more we might start to have some insight into how those reactions relate to those

chemicals in the brain. One kind of drug that we haven't talked about are the hallucinogens.

Now, this is an interesting mental experience. What is happening if people are hallucinating?

Okay, well, it's not just people that take hallucinogenic drugs that can hallucinate. We

know that certain types of schizophrenia can lead to the illusion that you're hearing voices,

or that there's cameras hidden in the light bulbs that are watching you.

Fever can do it.

Yes, indeed. So we know that it's not just drug-induced. One could argue almost that when you

dream, you're hallucinating, because you're certainly not registering simply what is out

there in the environment, because nothing is there. So I wouldn't like to think of just the LSP

taker as the only person that's hallucinating, although they are a good example of it. Now,

this is one example of when I said drugs can be used as a bridge to understanding

what people feel and what's happening in their brain. Hallucinogens offer a very exciting bridge

between those two worlds, if you like. The fact that you can see something glowing colors,

or you can see something that's not there at all, raises the question of the brain not just as

some passive sponge that is taking in the inputs from the outside world, but is actually doing

something, generating something in its own right that gives you that illusion.

I use a very useful analogy which helps simplify and explain what goes on inside the brain when

someone is having an hallucination. Think of a man sitting in a study and he's looking out the window

and he sees the people walking out on the street and the traffic moving by. And as night falls and

he looks out the window, he can no longer see out because it's completely dark. But let's say he has

a fireplace behind him and he stokes the fire and the fire burns brightly and he turns around to look

out the window. He still can't see out because it's dark, but he sees a reflection of himself in the

glass and the furniture reflected as if it came from the outside. The analogy is that the window is

the window of our eyes, our ears and our senses to the real world. And the fire is the degree of

electrical expectation that many drugs can produce in the brain. So when it's dark at night, not much is

happening. And the fire roars brightly. You have a lot of LSD in your brain. Let's say you may no longer

see the real world, but you see the furniture of your own mind, memories, your images, your fantasies

reflected as if they came from the outside. And some people become like Alice going through the

looking glass. They believe all of this stuff is really there. The good news is that as soon as the

fire dies down and the drug wears off or is counteracted by another drug, perception returns to normal and

you begin to see your own reflection again and you begin to see the room. John Siegel's clear example

is the materialist scientific way to see this brain event, but it's not how the old ecstatic shamans

think. They do step through that window or penetrate the membrane to the other side.

The hallucination is true, says Christian Wrench. For me, it's so clear and obvious that

the plants contain something which might be called a spirit or a soul or some consciousness. And when I

ingest such a plant, I have the feeling that this part of the plant uses my own consciousness to express

itself for me. What you've just been saying confirms exactly what Terence McKenna was saying to me,

in that in evolutionary terms, the plants need animals not only to propagate their seeds, but to

communicate. Because animals can move and plants can't. So are you saying that part of the story of

the shaman is that the plant is teaching the shaman? Of course, and the shamans view plants as teachers,

as masters, and as allies. And they say, if I take a plant, the spirit of the plant will talk to me and I can

ask the spirit, hey, what are you for? What is your purpose? What can you do? Can I use you for healing?

Or can I use you for something else? Or how to prepare the plant and all this stuff? And so there is a

dialogue between the shaman and the shaman learns from the plant. And then he later can use this knowledge

to use the plant wisely. And I think that is the best view for understanding psychoactive

psychoactive substances and plants, that they are teachers. And we learn from them. And what we learn

from them is very important for ourselves, for our community, for the earth, and maybe for the whole

universe. We never know. Not all shamans use mind altering plants, but all shamans use music and trance

to achieve ecstasy. Shamanism is found in all continents, often hidden and out of the way.

Shamanism is still strong in South Korea. The shaman there, man or woman, is called Mudang. And the

symbol is a tree between earth and sky, and two dancing figures. My name is Cho. Cho Hung.

Eh? Similar name is Cho. And I am professor of cultural anthropology at Hanyang University,

specialized in religious anthropology. What is the history of shamanism in Korea? When does it begin?

You know, from the beginning of the Korean history. It is well known that the founder of a Korea

Dangun was shaman. You know, at that time, the religion and politics is not separated, you know.

So Dangun was the shaman. And then the kings, till the beginning of the so-called three kingdoms,

say, third, fourth centuries, they were shamans. It is so affected in Korean history.

What is the connection between shamanism in South Korea and shamanism in, say,

Central Asia and Mongolia? Is there a connection?

Yes. The Korean shamanism has, in many elements, something to do with the Central Asian or Siberian

shamanism. An example, you know, the dance and the ecstasy or the crown, you know.

The well-known Korean, the so-called national treasure, the kumwan, the golden crown,

as the typical shamanistic head covering, as the Siberian tradition.

This is the Gyeongju National Museum in the southeast of Korea. And right in front of me,

behind a glass cabinet is one of the headdresses that the professor is talking about. These are the

headdresses, the golden headdresses of the original shamanic kings of Sila. And there's a

circlet of gold that goes around the temple. But above them, sticking up like trees, are these

towering gold ornaments. They look exactly like trees, or they could be horns. And they're hung with

coins of gold, beaten coins of gold, and cashew nut-shaped pale jade jewelry. And it's like a

forest of trees above the shaman's head. The shaman then was a king as well as a priest. On his

head, he wore the great symbols, the power plants of his religious and political power.

The American Indians originated out of Central Asia and came across the Bering Strait. And yet the new

world seems to have more mind-altering plants than the old, at least that were discovered and used by

people. Why is this? Richard Shelters, who's the the world's leading expert on the botany of

Hallucigenic Plants, has said that this isn't down to natural factors. In other words, it's not

because the plants aren't there. He's been seeking a cultural explanation. And in conjunction with the

theories of Western Lava you've already mentioned, what we're looking at is the survival of shamanic

cultures much longer in the new world than in many parts of the old world.

Now, if we look at shamanism, shamanism has a direct contact with the world of the spirits or the world of

the divine. Are you saying that the cultural explanation is that the people who came from Asia,

who had, I don't know, vision quests or wanted altered states, were therefore actively looking for

plants that would help them do this? Well, this is the suggestion of Lava and I think it makes a lot of

sense because if you go back way back, basically when societies were much simpler, generally speaking,

amended the hunting and the women gathered the plants. So we would suspect that they were the ones perhaps

who discovered many of these plants. I think they obviously, they were looking for food plants,

we know that they were looking for medical plants. And really in a lot of native cultures, the difference

between medical use and what we would call drug use is not so clearly defined as in our own culture.

So a homosogenic plant would be considered purely on that criteria alone to have medical properties.

So they would have valued it and so they would have been looking for it as they pushed into new environments.

And they certainly discovered them because the new world has, I believe Schultes has said,

over a hundred plants that are used for their psychoactive properties.

Whereas in the old world, with the rise of the world religions, for example, Christianity, Islam,

and also with the Judaic tradition, these religions, although of course we have wine as a sacrament and so on,

they don't, well, they in fact actively resist the idea of using hallucinogenic plants obviously

in part of their religious quest. So they have tended to suppress or to simply wipe out these earlier

religious traits. Professor Cho, you're an expert on Korean shamanism. Now, can we not say that shamanism

is in fact the first religion, the primal religion of the earliest peoples? Yes, you're right.

You know, according to the religious evolutionism, the shamanism was always a first place of the

history of the religion. Well, it's good, but in interpretation of this evolutionism, we have

regarded the shamanism as a, you know, the primitive, as nonsense.

Typical ethnocentrism, you know, the western civilization, or the christian civilization, or

the mechanistic civilization, have ruined so much the environment or the beautiful nature of the world,

and shamanism. You know, such kind of a religion is very important for the aboriginal people.

They have their own philosophy and their own, their wonderful, I would say, harmonious world, you know,

and they've lost in Korean shamanism. You know, they always think that we are persecuted, etc.

The shamans cannot say openly that we are shamans, they lie, you know. No, I'm, I believe in Buddhism,

etc. So, it's a repressed belief system. It is important, but it runs like, like a river

underground. You may not see it, but the river is still running.

Not underground. Yeah, underground, you're right. And I would say the shadow,

or in, in, in night, at night, you know. The Korean shamanism is believed at night,

very strong still, but at days, you know, they must hide themselves, you know.

In the daylight, the world of Hyundai and Samsung and Daewoo, is it? Different gods.

And we'll be looking at how industry and empire profaned the sacred plants next week. Till then,

goodbye.

you