Our present global crisis is more profound than any
previous historical crises; hence our solutions must be equally drastic.
I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for
life in the twenty-first century, just as the computer seems to be the
dominant mental/social model of the late twentieth century, and the steam
engine was the guiding image of the nineteenth century.
This means reaching back in time to models that were successful fifteen
thousand to twenty thousand years ago. When this is done it becomes
possible to see plants as food, shelter, clothing, and sources of
education and religion.
The process begins by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so
long. Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be
declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal
plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.
Reestablishing channels of direct communication with the planetary Other, the mind behind nature, through the use of hallucinogenic plants is the best
hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear
to be channeling us toward true ruin. We need a new set of lenses to see
our way into the world. When the medieval world shifted its worldview,
secularized European society sought salvation in the revivifying of
classical Greek and Roman approaches to law, philosophy, aesthetics,
city planning, and agriculture. Our dilemma will cast us further back into
time in search for models and answers.
The solution to much of modern malaise, including chemical dependencies
and repressed psychoses and neuroses, os direct exposure to the authentic
dimensions of risk represented by the experience of psychedelic plants.
The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an anti-drug position.
Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive
behaviour; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological
makeup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve
habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric,
and more grounded point of view within the individual. It is foolish to
suggest that there is no risk, but it is equally uninformed to suggest
that the risk is not worth taking. What is needed is experiential validation
of a new guiding image, an overarching metaphor able to serve as the basis
for a new model of society and the individual.
The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation of our
individual and group existence in the world. What I call the Archaic Revival
is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward
nature, including plants and our relationship to them. The Archaic Revival
spells the eventual breakup of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy based on animal organization, something that can not be changed overnight by a sudden shift in collective awareness. Rather, it will follow naturally upon the gradual recognition that the overarching theme that directs the Archaic Revival is the idea/ideal of a vegetation Goddess, the Earth herself as the much ballyhooed Gaia--a fact well documented by nineteenth-century anthropologists, most notably Frazer, but recently given a new respectability by Riane Eisler, Marija Gimbutas, James Mellaart, and others.
The closer a human group is to the gnosis of the vegetable mind--the Gaian collectivity of organic life--the closer their connection to the archetype of the Goddess and hence to the partnership style of social organization. The last time that the mainstream of Western thought was refreshed by the gnosis of the vegetable mind was at the close of the Hellenistic Era, before the Mystery religions were finally suppressed by enthusiastic Christian barbarians.
My conclusion is that taking the next evolutionary step toward the Archaic Revival, the rebirth of the Goddess, and the ending of profane history will require an agenda that includes the
notion of our reinvolvement with and the emergence of the vegetable mind. That same mind that coaxed us into self-reflecting language now offers us the boundless landscapes of the
imagination. Without such a relationship to psychedelic exopheromones regulating our symbiotic relationship with the plant kingdom, we stand outside of an understanding of planetary
purpose. And an understanding of planetary purpose may be the major contribution we can make to the evolutionary process. Returning to the bosom of the planetary partnership means
trading the point of view of the history-created ego for a more maternal and intuitional style.
The widely felt intuition of the presence of the Other as a female companion to the human navigation of history can, I believe, be traced back to the immersion in the vegetable mind, which provided the ritual context in which human consciousness emerged into the light of self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-articulation: the light of the Great Goddess.
What does it mean to accept the solutions of vegetable forms of life as metaphors for the conduct of the affairs of the human world? Two important changes would follow from adopting this assumption:
- The feminizing of culture. Culture would be feminized on a level that has yet to be fully explored. Green Consciousness means recognizing that the real division between the masculine and the feminine is not a division between men and women but rather a division between ourselves as conscious animals--omnivorous, land-clearing, war makers, supreme expression of the yang--and the circumglobal mantle of vegetation--the ancient metastable yin element that constitutes by far the major portion of the biomass of the living earth.
- An inward search for values. Inwardness is the characteristic feature of the vegetable rather than the animal approach to existence. The animals move, migrate, and swarm, while plants hold fast. Plants live in a dimension characterized by the solid state, the fixed, and the enduring. If there is movement in the consciousness of plants then it must be the movement of spirit and attention in the domain of the vegetal imagination. Perhaps this is what the reconnection to the vegetal Goddess through psychedelic plants, the Archaic Revival, actually points toward: that the life of the spirit is the life that gains access to the visionary realms resident in magical plant teachers. This is the truth that shamans have always known and practiced. Awareness of the green side of mind was called Veriditas by the twelfth-century visionary Hildegard von Bingen.
A new paradigm capable of offering hope of a path out of the cultural quicksand must provide a real-world agenda addressed to the escalating problems that the planet faces. There are several domains in which the rise of awareness of Veriditas might help stave off armageddon:
Detoxification of the natural environment. The process of detoxification is naturally carried out by the combined action of the atmosphere, the biological matrix, and the oceans. This planetwide process was able to take care of even urban industrial waste, until modern industrial technology became a truly global phenomenon. Planting species of datura, the plants once a part of the religious rites of the Indians of Southern California, and other plants that leach heavy metals from the earth and sequester them in their cellular tissue are examples of a natural process that could help clean up our environment. Recognizing the many ways in which the biological matrix of the earth functions to avert toxification, recognizing that nature is working to sustain life, might go a long way toward building a political consensus to actively participate in saving that same life.
Connectedness and symbiosis. Like plants, we need to maximize the quality of connectedness and symbiosis. Plant-based approaches to modeling the world include awareness of the fractal and branching nature of community action. A treelike network of symbiotic relationships can now replace the model of evolution that we inherited form the nineteenth-century. The earlier model, that of the tooth-and-claw struggle for existence, with the survivor taking the hindmost, is a model based on naive observation of animal behaviour. Yet it was cheerfully extended into the realm of plants to explain the evolutionary interactions thought to cause speciation in the botanical world. Later, more sophisticated observers (C.H. Waddington and Erich Jantsch) found not the War in Nature that Darwinists reported but rather a situation in
which it was not competitive ability but
ability to maximize cooperation with other species that most directly contributed to an organism's being able to function and endure as a member of a biome. Plants interact with each other through the tangled mat of roots that connects them all to the source of their nutrition and to each other.