5. Can sacred plant medicine help us overcome our alienation from the wisdom of Mother Nature, which we so need in this troubled time? 

As philosophers like Jeremy Lent and Andreas Weber have shown, when we humans became agriculturalists, we established dominion over land and animals, and women became property; the patriarchal religions taught human supremacy, a rigid hierarchical way of thinking about our place in Nature that was carried over into the modern religion of Science. 

Scientific philosophers like Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin reinforced the separation from Nature, not only in the human relationship to the outer world, but also within ourselves. Our “lower nature” was to be banished (a theory that dovetailed nicely with Christian ideas of sin and hell), while our intellect was exalted.

The so-called Enlightenment, with its accompanying savage colonialism and the spread of corporate capitalism, sealed the deal, setting up the fatal oppositions of Light/Dark, Mind/Matter, Man/Woman, Human/Animal, Culture/Nature, and establishing them so deeply in every human endeavor that for a long time we weren’t even aware of how they were conditioning our way of life on the planet and driving us down the road to ruin. 

Fortunately there have always been some stubborn independent thinkers who have refused to be indoctrinated into this way of thinking: indigenous peoples, pagans, artists, so-called geniuses—ordinary people who are open to new ideas. Many have worked in quiet obscurity. But every so often we get a genius like Einstein or Jung, who gives us a great leap forward, helping us see our selves and our world in a new way. 

In these early years of the 21^st century, such independent thinkers are few and far between. But there has been a sudden resurgence of interest in the wisdom offered by “sacred plant medicine,” which has been used for millennia as a sacrament among those scattered tribes that successfully resisted the onslaught of colonialism and managed to hold on to their age-old religions and customs. 

The late psychonaut Terence McKenna posited that sacred plants were basis for the Christian “tree of knowledge” in the Garden of Eden. In the Christian myth, humans were expelled from the Garden when their thirst for knowledge grew too great. But all over the world, many other people kept right on eating that apple—i.e., consuming the sacred plants and learning to work with the psychic insights and healing power they provided. 

McKenna goes so far as to hypothesize that the collective psychosis of the modern western world is a result of our outlawing, in the 20^th century, open access to sacred plants like psilocybin mushrooms and cannabis. This goes along with some other major 20^th century decisions that turned out to have serious negative consequences: investing in sugar, alcohol, oil, gas and cars, for example, rather than in healthier alternatives. 

Modern capitalism runs on speed and efficiency. The system needs us to be productive workers; we can’t be opting out and taking time for psychic explorations. We can get drunk on Saturday nights, as long as we’re sober in time for work on Monday. Most people limit their focus on the divine to a quick bow in church on Sunday mornings; and there is no time anymore for the lengthy explorations of psychoanalysis—just take a Prozac and get on with it, honey. 

But how many of us are satisfied by this workaday world? We are not ants or termites—we know ourselves to be more than simply drones. We want to understand more deeply who we are, why we are here, and how we can make our lives a positive offering to the world. 

Sacred plant medicine reminds us that we are not just cogs in the superficial capitalist wheel; that there is more to life than accumulation of wealth and the selfish pursuit of pleasure. 

Over and over, people who have tried plant medicine report back versions of the same message of divine unity: we are the world, and the world is love. That was the mantra of the 1960s psychedelic generation, and it’s coming back around again in the 21^st century, in a world that has only gotten more hostile and alienating during the intervening years. 

The powers that be are threatened by this message because it challenges the philosophical basis of capitalist civilization: the idea of our “God-given right” to dominion over the natural world. If we are all one, how can we continue to turn Mother Earth and her children into commodities, to be prostituted, bought and sold?

Plant medicine is emerging widely in the U.S. and other western nations because we so desperately need its wisdom now. Unlike alcohol, which numbs us and puts us to sleep, psychedelics wake us up—and this is a time when we need to be awake, alert, and cognizant of our potential to take an evolutionary leap forward and survive…or watch our civilization collapse, like so many others before. 

Psychedelics synthesize the wisdom of eastern philosophy, quantum theory and depth psychology, showing us in a visceral, direct way that reality is perceptual; that matter is energy; and that on an energetic level, everything is interconnected. Sacred plant medicines allow us to perceive the multiverses of the quantum, and voyage in the spiritual landscapes that open up in our psyches, beyond time and space. 

Science has refused to embrace full implications of quantum theory, and Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, accessed through the dream world, has given way to “cognitive neuroscience,” which ignores the psyche in its focus on the brain. But slowly the ripples are spreading out from the first few western plant medicine adventurers, like Terence McKenna and John Perkins, who learned from wise indigenous shamans about love as a force of nature, and brought this wisdom back to their western tribes.

Indigenous wisdom keepers have kept this sacred knowledge alive through the dark times that began with the so-called “Enlightenment”: the long period of alienating monotheism and capitalist, extractivist science and industry. Now, knowing that the suicidal tendencies of western civilization threaten to bring the entire planet into a massive evolutionary reset, they are offering plant medicine to westerners as a gateway to sanity and a livable future.

The Bioneers tagline points to the word LOVE hidden in the word REVOLUTION. Revolution also means a turn of the wheel, a new cycle. In the 21^st century, will we have the courage to step boldly into what Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects calls the “new and ancient story” that teaches us of the interconnection of All That Is? 

It remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: this is a revolutionary time. It is not a time to be timid.