Now in Tradepaper! Of all the things humans rely on plants for - sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience.
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs - opium, caffeine, and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
In this book, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from different angles, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively - as a drug, whether licit or illicit. Also, Pollan shows when we take them into our bodies, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.