Day 570: conscious plants

talked with one of the facilitators of the 2-week ayahuasca retreat i was looking at and it’s all good so it looks like i’m going to be communing with mother aya in peru

that means i won’t be launching browserflow on hacker news as i had originally planned since my super optimistic mind thinks i’ll be flooded with users (o dk, u sweet summer child) and i don’t want to disappear on everyone for two weeks out of nowhere, SO gonna hold off on that

but i don’t want to sit around twiddling my thumbs for the next two weeks either so gonna launch to my waiting list and use that to tweak things

the conversation with the facilitator was interesting, esp when we talked about michael pollan’s how to change your mind. i’m a huge fan of that book and recommend it to my friends who are curious about psychedelics because it provides a comprehensive look at the history, science, and experiential nature of psychedelics from a rational, grounded view.

the facilitator made the comment that pollan fell short of recognizing plant medicine (psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, etc.) as spirits who are teachers rather than being mere tools. the idea here is that these plants are spiritual entities that you’re communing with during these ceremonies (e.g. ayahuasca = mother aya)

i’ve always had difficulty understanding people whenever they ascribed anthropomorphic characteristics to plants (e.g. the mushroom wanted to show you X) because i don’t hold plants to be conscious, but maybe panpsychism is real and everything has a certain degree of consciousness. seems a reasonable solution as any to the hard problem of consciousness and i’ve been wrong about enough things at this point that i’m more open to things that still sound pretty wacky

i don’t doubt that you can have the experience of communing with nature as a sentient being because on my first lsd trip, i felt mother nature as an entity as i found refuge next to a magnificent tree

i hold that experience to be separate from a metaphysical claim that nature is conscious though — that is, that there is something that it is like to be nature

anyway, excited to explore more of this experientially in a few weeks~~~