Exploring the Ancient Mythology of the "Tree of Knowledge": A Journey to Discover the "Food of the Gods"

Kindle Customer: I prefer audiobooks but I like to own my favorites

Canada on Aug 28, 2023

Amazon56: As long as you’re open minded I don’t see how you couldn’t enjoy this book.

United States on Jul 15, 2023

Oliver Fleming: AMAZING

Australia on Apr 30, 2023

2bo: Das ist mal wieder eines dieser Bücher, die ich gern 20 Jahre früher gelesen hätte. Ich möchte gar nicht groß auf den Inhalt eingehen - bitte selber lesen. Ich habe es auf Englisch gelesen und musste öfter mal Vokabeln nachschauen. Es ist für mich der Gegenpart zu Ray Kurzweil's the Singularity is near. Diese Bücher ergänzen sich. Die hier gebrachten Thesen sind oft steil bis unglaublich, aber keinesfalls dumm. Ich habe zwar nicht alles verstanden und es derzeit verliehen, aber danach muss ich nich mal lesen!

Germany on Dec 02, 2022

Pauline D.: Livre offert à un proche, il a adoré !

France on Aug 04, 2022

Bretonista: This is a hard book to review. On the one hand, it's an enjoyable romp through the history of psychedelics, putting forward some interesting arguments. On the other hand, so many of the key points in the book are actually unsupported assertions, making the book more of a breathless polemic than a serious study. This is most noticeable in regards to the very foundation of the book, where McKenna postulates the development of human consciousness as an off-shoot of psilocybin use - the famous "stoned ape" hypothesis. This is the starting point for the whole book, yet the author fails to put forward anything more than a few "what if" arguments to support it. Very disappointing. By the end of the book McKenna is telling us about the DMT elves who've told him things when he's been tripping, at which point I found myself chuckling indulgently rather than thinking "Wow! So it must all be true!".

In short, this isn't really a good introduction to the historical use of mind-altering substances - Paul Devereux's book 'The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia' is both more detailed and more level-headed. But this is a funny, and often passionate polemic, and was influential in some...

United Kingdom on May 30, 2022

D.R.Thomas: This is the first book from Terrence McKenna I have read, but I have listened to a number of his lectures. As it stands, if I had to sum of the book in one phrase it would be, "An illicit peepshow of truth regarding our human culture." This book quite literally takes you all over the world, back and forth through time in 275 very novel pages. It employs the character of showing us how closely attached we, the human species, have been to drugs, or altered states of consciousness. There is also an attribute on how we as a species have developed society and religion as result to these experiences. This is a manifesto that beckons the need for further research into the areas of which McKenna vectors us. This book is also far much more than just a pontification about the history of drugs, it also delves deep into human culture and alternative views of how culture developed, especially from the feminine perspective. I have to say those who wish to study our human origins should read this; it is definitely an intriguing compilation, especially with his theories on the origins of consciousness. McKenna does not fail to display his erudition in this work, just as he does in his lectures,...

United States on May 01, 2009

Klaus Stiefel: This book is an entertaining read and a source of valuable food for thought, but, at the same time, has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. I can recommend reading it, but reading it critically, which is, I assume, what Mckenna would have wanted you to do anyway. He is interested in a variety of topics all related to the use of drugs in human history.

One of his basic theories is that the consumption of psilocybin-containing mushrooms accelerated the evolution of the human mind. First of all, doesn't that sound a bit like Lamarkism? Well, on the surface it does, but there are serious academic biologists who have recently suggested that biological and cultural evolution (such as taking up the use of psychedelic mushrooms) can interact in interesting ways. The "Baldwin Effect" is what is potentially at play here, the phenomenon that phenotypical modifications (psilocybin induced brain states), while not directly affecting genes, can lead the evolutionary pathway in a certain direction. Acquired phenotypic modifications of the brain come first, and the genotype can catch up later. An excellent outline of these extensions of classic evolutionary theory can be found in...

United States on Apr 07, 2009