Plants that change our consciousness

The incredible Amazonian expeditions of Richard Evans Schultes made this Harvard University researcher a legend of ethnobotany, and brought us a wealth of knowledge about Indigenous culture and plant medicine use.

https://kahpi.net/richard-evans-schultes-amazon-shaman/

I think I might finally have the motivation to read his earlier book How to Change Your Mind

How does an animal stumble on the existence of geometry? Impaired sensory input creates feedback loops that yield periodic patterns. How does it begin apprehend the scope of something greater than its senses? Impairing those senses and seeing the edges. How do ancient people hear supposedly divine messages? Inhaling smoke from burning plants that contain substances that cause said impairment, like if a common regional bush that contained these substances caught fire, on a mountain somewhere, just randomly. If the knowledge from this tree that contained this chemical were forbidden, how would you preserve it? Rituals, symbols, allegories, etc. Who would forbid it and why?

Bonkers fun! I should pitch the Ancient Aliens people on a hallucinogens spinoff. If only there were someone with the right hair.

While I'm partially joking, there is a deep internet rabbit hole on that stuff, and given we've evolved video games where you discover random things within the system to level up - and if we were in one (as some prominent tech figures suspect), we could probably find similar hints encoded in what we percieve as the biology of this one. It would be part of the design. To close the loop on the analogy, the logical substrate of a video game is in effect its own "biology," so to Super Mario, those mushrooms were as real as he was.

When you look at how as biological entities, we have evolved our own artificial game systems where we practice "leveling up" using found artifacts within the games, and it seems reasonable that this is self-similar to the rules and our experience of the world.

In that worldview, these plants, while of our same logical substrate, alter our perception of our physics and biology, and create a different experience of it where we percieve it without the same rules, and these are the clues within our logical layer that there is an encompassing set of rules to be discovered. Literally everything is a clue.

The shamanistic rituals aren't there to make us believe in spirits, they are wisely and sufficiently ridiculous to make the leveled up experience seem somehow sufficiently un-real and dismissable so that we can take from it and re-engage constructively on this level after acquiring knowledge of what's beyond.

Who wants to be on the show? :)