Using plants of the type described above will help us understand the valuable gift of partnership with plants that was lost at the dawn of time. Many people are eager to get acquainted with the facts concerning their true identity. Plant hallucinogens are clearly directed to this essential identity. Not to know your true identity means to be some kind of insane deluded thing, a golem. And, undoubtedly, this image, painfully Orwellian, is applicable to the mass of human beings, now living in societies of highly developed industrial democracy. Their authenticity lies in the ability to obey and follow the changes in mass style that are transmitted by the media. Engaged in the use of narcotics, absurd communications and the policy of disguised fascism,they are doomed to a poisoned life at a low level of consciousness. Put to sleep by the daily TV program, they are the living dead, lost for all but the act of consumption.

I believe that the failure of our civilization to resolve issues related to the problem of psychoactive substances and habitual destructive behavior is an unlucky legacy for all of us. But if we had sufficiently restructured the image of ourselves and the image of the world, we could make of pharmacology a means of giving us the most ambitious hopes and dreams. Instead, pharmacology has become a devilish maid of rampant rolling toward regulativeness and the destruction of civil liberties.

Most people have a predilection for certain substances and, more importantly, they all have a predilection for certain standards of behavior. Attempting to see the difference between habits and addictions threatens the indissoluble merging of mental and physical energies that shape the behavior of each of us. People who are not involved in the relationship of food stimulation or stimulation of psychoactive substances are rare, and by their adherence to dogma and the intentional narrowing of their horizon, it can be judged that they failed to create some viable alternative to substance involvement.

Here I tried to explore our biological history and our more modern cultural history in search of something that could be missed. My theme was human agreements with plants, created and torn over thousands of years. These relationships shaped every aspect of our identity as self-reflecting beings — our language, our cultural values, our sexual behavior, what we remember and what we forget in our past. Plants are a lost link in search of an understanding of the human mind and its place in nature.