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This is Your Mind on Plants: How Coffee Took Over the World, Opiates Destroyed the Fabric of Society, and Mescaline Revealed the Eternal Splendor of the Universe
Is the plant that produces caffeine using us, or are we using it?
Can human consciousness be expanded in a way that’s “safe” and doesn’t lead to addiction, or is mescaline the scourge that fearmongers have always claimed that it is?
Do the opiates that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people by overdose have benefits that outweigh their devastating costs?
Michael Pollan fearlessly (and sometimes fearfully) addresses these and other pressing questions of our times in This is Your Mind on Plants, his follow-up to the absolutely phenomenal book, How to Change Your Mind.
Both books contain a ton of nuance and daring conceptual leaps, but their common thread is that people everywhere are always — pretty much constantly — attempting to change their consciousness in some way.
We want to feel more awake (coffee), more connected to the universe (LSD, mescaline, ayahuasca), more chilled out (marijuana, sleeping pills)…the list could go on and on.
We’re always attempting to move from one state of consciousness to another, presumably better…
