PLANTS FOR BRAINS
A Skeptic’s Guide to the Language of the Jungle
 
I then pass the whole day in the open air, and hold spiritual communion with the tendrils of the vine, which say good things to me and of which I could tell you wonders.
-Goethe
 
Does the Earth love you back?
—Robin Wall Kimmerer
 
  I.
The first word that flies into my mind when I step off the boat through the rain onto the muddy bank of the Amazon and onward down a cut path is “undifferentiated.” It is too green, too heavy for my eyes, a great thick expanse of leaves, overgrowth, a cacophony of insect sounds that overwhelm the senses. Sun might dapple through in places, though not that day, and no rain drops make it through the canopy’s thickness from sky to skin. A soup of heat envelops me, it’s almost too hot and wet to breathe.
 
Know that, if you end up staying in the jungle not your scheduled two weeks but three full months as I did because Peru shut down at the start of Covid, your system acclimates and identifies more and more detail, starts and stops of trees and bushes, shapes, forms, and shades of green. Certain stumps, bushes will become points of reference and landmarks. Back in my world there’s a single crayola crayon named “jungle green.” Here, after time, intricate nuances of green sort themselves: chartreuse, veridian, phthalocyanine green, sap green. My reference basically remains paint swatches, but the colors slowly start to become more a feeling sense than an idea, something emanating from the aliveness around me. The shapes of the leaves are varied, fat and waxy, striated or oblong, spatulate. The barks of the tree trunks are miraculously individual. Eventually, it’s a mystery how it ever looked like one thing.
 
II.
“Plant blindness” was defined in 1999 by two Western research scientists, Wandersee and Schussler, as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one's own environment,” which leads to the inability to recognize the importance of plants at all. Plant blindness also includes “the misguided, anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals, leading to the erroneous conclusion that they are unworthy of human consideration.”
 
The relation between plant blindness and the climate crisis is an obvious one, though it’s not a human blindness but a Western/urban/cultural one. From what I’ve seen, even children in the Amazon basin may know their plants. It’s a knowledge and understanding we have lost, yet one critical to our survival as a species. It seems that “plant blindness" also colors the perceptions of many scientists in my own culture who claim with utmost certainty that plants are merely dumb mechanisms. Plants, I learned through my lived jungle experience, are part of a higher intelligence that exists alongside and among us, part of the sentient force of nature. The Amazonians have believed this for more than 4000 years but the debate in the early 21st century in the West goes like this:
-Are plants conscious, do they have intelligence? 
-No, impossible because they don’t have brain or a nervous system.
-But they recognize and care for their kin, communicate, remember, make choices and sounds in distress, here’s the scientific evidence for these things.
-NO, it’s not a REAL brain
 
Still, the debate deepens and grows and there are now international academic conferences about the agency and intelligence of plants. The phrase “more than human” became popularized thanks to David Abram though indigenous people globally have been saying this forever. Humanities scholars, artists, technology experts, and scientists are reconsidering the brain itself as the locus of human consciousness, this was always a hypothesis and never something proven. Many are rethinking intelligence and consciousness as two very different things, leaning towards the animist-style world view of nearly 100% of all human ancestors, that consciousness cannot be located within a particular physical structure but exists everywhere and is something that we partake in.
 
Definitions of consciousness aside, humans throughout time have been so very certain but so profoundly wrong—we westerners continually flip out when we are decentralized in the cosmic scheme, starting with the Copernican Revolution, that the earth (we) are not the center of the universe, continuing on through Darwinism, that we could possibly be descended from apes. People freak out to the point of murder every time. But what if the the path out of our destructiveness is recognizing we aren’t the premiere intelligence on the planet, we are not the most conscious at all. We are a specific kind of intelligence with thumbs, a central nervous system, and a dangerous propensity to shit where we sleep.
 
 
III.
I’ve come to the jungle in the first place to treat CPTSD with plant medicine, ayahuasca, and Amazonian curanderismo, a last ditch effort because my own medicinal culture could not help me. Plant medicine does help, though not in any way I could have possibly imagined. The healing and medicinal systems across the Amazon basin are sophisticated, complex, and ancient. Most work with an enormous range of plants and ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), a flowering vine that when mixed with chacruna (Psychotria viridis) forms a sacred tea that is drunk in ceremony. 
 
On my first day in the jungle I meet Guido Rimachi (Gee-do, not the Italian mafia Gwee-do) whom I don’t yet know will be like my brother shaman on the crazy, impossible path that unfolds for me over years…like something with a mind of its own. He and his two assistant shamans wear black watches and backpacks, have cell phones. They sit in three rudimentarily constructed wooden chairs at the front of a circular temple with a floor of dry, cracked jungle earth. Sometimes they text before the ceremonies start. Guido is in his fifties, has straight shiny black hair parted down the middle with bangs hanging down to his eyes. He is a beautiful man, short in stature, big on wisdom. He grins like he’s five. I look in his eyes and wonder in whose hands I have placed my well being, but I feel reassured by his presence and the steady deep way he looks back at me. Guido is a descendent of the Aguaruna people, he calls himself a curandero not a shaman. He of all the 15 Peruvian indigenous medicine people I will work with in the ensuing years, including Q’ero, mestizo, and Shipibo, is a pure healer. These, it turns out, are not so common. I will witness Guido nearly die twice in service to healing others, once for me.
 
What I see that first night with ayahuasca is that these shamans can siphon massive power in ceremonies while being gentle to the point of tenderness. It’s astonishing. It is a different form of power and a different masculinity than I’ve ever experienced. Next, I am dumbfounded by the sense of a presence with me. I am not alone in my skull, in my own consciousness. I hear a kind of wordless voice say in my mind, “You are a being of great power. You are Guido’s counterpart. You can help a lot of people.” In my guts and marrow I deeply trust this voice, it comes to me as healing and beautiful. But I find the content of these words horrifying. As a former academic and agnostic I want to crawl under the bed and not come out.
 
That first night I am shown I will not be leaving in two weeks but will be there for months. To this I think: hell no. Absolutely not. Five days after this vision, in March 2020, Peru closes its borders due to Covid and stops all flights out of nearby Iquitos, the largest city in the world with no roads. I am stranded for months and will be shown and live out impossible things. 
 
Many people have since asked me was it literally a voice, and this is hard to describe. It’s like word-forms coming in my head that aren’t me. People ask, how do you know it wasn’t you. I answer that it feels internally as plain as a different person physically sitting with you—its knowledge, sensibility, its communications, even its sense of humor—none of it is you. I am far from the only person to experience this. The people of the Amazon say it is a being, the spirit of the plant, Ayahuasca the mother of the jungle.
 
I spend most of my days alone in my hut in the sweltering heat, except for meals, ceremonies, and group meetings with Guido to discuss what is happening for each of us, what the ceremony visions mean, our questions. Many of us are anxious, constantly checking our cell phones for news of covid, closures, our loved ones. The jungle itself is far from the chaos, we don’t wear masks, but there are scary times when the boats don’t make it with food, and a period where the villagers of Santa Maria decide by vote that pouring bleach over people coming back by boat from Iquitos will wipe out any possible covid before they reenter the town. Second best is dunking in the Amazon, clothes and all. 
 
White-faced Tamarin monkeys come by my hut, line up one by one and look in at me curiously, I see leaf cutter ants, toucans, hummingbirds and blue morpho butterflies. In one short week I am covered in mosquito bites, I count the angry red welts in a square inch on my ankle and multiply it to calculate maybe 150 bites, math was never my strong suit. I become an expert at killing them in my hut lest they gorge on me all night, once I kill eight in a row without missing. I hear the most vivid bird calls, especially at dawn and dusk, but to me monkeys sound like birds, birds sound like mammals, intense jungle frogs sound like birds, we cannot parse this in the same way we cannot recognize plants. I figure out the name of one bird, the oropendola, because its call sounds like a magical water drop hitting the floor of a cave grotto, an almost underwater echo. Amazingly, googling “magic water drop in a cave bird” produces videos of this same bird making the exact sound. On the other hand Guido knows all the birds to the degree he can tell by their call they’re pregnant. One night there is something calling he says is not a bird at all, not a being of our world at all, but a spirit calling out. The first night I hear it he and shaman Jack point with arms outstretched in exact unison, as if their hands are tied to the same cosmic string, towards the sound. They are concerned. I never learn more about it (frankly, I’m too scared to ask) but it calls through the jungle night a few more times.
 
It takes me three weeks to tell Guido I’m his counterpart according to the plant vision, but when I finally do, sweating, miserable, and uncomfortable, he already knows and says with a serious expression, “Siiiiii!” He tells me he and I have a special connection, that I am extremely sensitive, it’s as if I have been drinking ayahuasca for years not weeks, I can help a lot of people. He knew that my ceremony visions were showing me how to help the other patient-pasajeros, I was seeing what they looked like in trauma and then as their core radiant selves along with information about their next steps towards the healing. I will experience again and again in the ensuing years the shamans knowing much of what happens to people in ceremonies and beyond, ayahuasca shows them, me, many of those who partake. I am shown the future, things that will unfold in an hour or days or, it turns out, years. *The blending of the visionary world and the physical one… Once, in ceremony I am flown over the jungle floor, experiencing its literal pain for the burning, chopping, terrible human destructions.
 
As I write this I continue every day to unpack it all, what happened in those three months was so shattering to my world view that I have needed with every fiber of my being to understand more. I am nothing if not a product of my culture and there’s been a duel nearly to death between my western skepticism and budding jungle spirituality. To this day I feel possessed of a kind of “spirit blindness,” another thing ingrained in my by my culture. It will take many more years to learn to see in this new way. After my first three months in the Amazon I return many times. It is an incredibly difficult path but I develop spiritual and material practices outside the jungle to stay connected, I read and watch everything I can get my hands on from anthropological papers to documentaries, ethnobotanical books, and accounts by others experiencing similar things as me. I work with Guido and his brother by phone so they can teach Zoom classes about shamanism and the plants, about cannabis as a master plant, learning from them myself as we do this. The translation process from English to Spanish to indigenous shaman-speak and back is laborious.
 
 
IV.
 
'Western science is a powerful way of knowing, but it isn't the only one,' says Robin Wall Kimmerer. As both a scientist and an enrolled member of the Potowatami Nation she would know and her book about plants, Braiding Sweetgrass, hit a cultural nerve in the west, tapped powerfully into the plant intelligence zeitgeist. In her native language, she says, it is impossible to refer to nature as “it,” whereas in English it’s only possible to refer to other beings and nature as it, or as something outside ourselves. What does this do to our capacities to perceive and connect in general?
 
She says, “I think it’s also deeply disrespectful to say that they have no consciousness, no awareness, no being-ness at all. And this denial of personhood to all other beings is increasingly being refuted by science itself.” Anthropologist Jeremy Narby, a western scientist who changed his own world view after experiencing the plants with the Amazonians: "You go to the Amazon and you ask people, how do you say everything that is not human in your language? They say we don't have a concept like that. In fact, in our view, all the other species are people like us.” Of course, it turns out all of our ancestors believed this, were animists, even white Europeans.
 
What if once upon a time we shut it all down. What if plants (and other beings) are not only intelligent but can communicate with us, not only communicate but teach, not metaphorically but beyond our wildest imaginings? What if everything the Amazonian curanderos believe, the Andean paqos, the Huicholes of Mexico, the Aboriginals in Australia is literally true. Not metaphorically. What if their languages, their workaday worlds don’t contain the barriers English and the Romance languages do, the languages of the conquerors who have dominion over earth. How difficult would it be to relearn for those of us trapped in a material way of seeing.
 
Although their spiritual beliefs vary across all geographies and languages of the over 400 tribes in the Amazon basin, the core beliefs about the consciousness of plant beings are largely the same—they are alive and they can heal and teach. Ayahuasca is the mother/grandmother of the jungle, of all the plants, she is una planta maestra. Other master plants, like cannabis and datura (both historically and globally considered “magical” across the world from India to the European witch era) also teach us. So do mushrooms, fungally speaking. We recognize these plants because our minds are altered, we call it hallucination, something that according to our definition is imaginary. Not real. Not all master plants are hallucinogenic, some teach through the spiritual system called “dieta.” They are the guides in a kind of training program for shamans and have been for thousands of years. The western authors of a qualitative scientific study called "Plantas con madre”: Plants that teach and guide in the shamanic initiation process in the East-Central Peruvian Amazon (Jauregui X, 2011) conducted interviews with 29 Peruvian medicine people of different tribes to determine 55 master plants, or “plants with a mother.” Many Amazonians believe there is an overspirit or mother of each plant species as well as a personhood in each plant. Not every plant or tree is a teacher of humans but they are all conscious, as alive as humans.
 
These days master plants can also expand the consciousness of the many westerners coming to the jungle, can reframe the ontological nature of our universe, can re-embed us within natural systems in a way our western culture has forgotten, can show us how to live well. “When dealing with the sacred plants it is best to assume they know things we do not, to do as they say, and to treat them with a corresponding respect.” says Peruvian shaman Jorges Hachumak.
 
In my own experience the consciousness of plants is an ancient, omniscient, slow wide deep sentience, filled with humor, joy, but also darkness (the Amazonian Shipibo call it “shitana,” it is the darkness that is part of all the world and every being), but they “want” to work with us humans despite our terrible destructive ways, they are in simpatico with us, natural allies. 
 
After three months trapped in the jungle I finally get evacuated on a tiny outboard boat and then a chartered flight, “humanitarian flights” they call them. I am a changed person, more changed than by anything else in my life. I look around the world with a lightness, an open heart, deep gratitude; the world is an enchanted place, everything potentially alive and profoundly different than before. I go on to heal familial relationships, old friendships, estrangements. I take a new and natural interest in meditating and exercise. A new devotion to flossing my teeth every single day appears seemingly out of nowhere. I can witness my own embedded reflexes, the maladaptive ones developed in a difficult childhood, and start to behave differently for perhaps the first time in my life. I look at my mother’s dog differently, he seems like a being encased in dog flesh. I don’t even know what I mean by this, it’s as if a set of new antennae have sprouted from my core. But most of all I look at plants differently. 
I start looking at all the plants in a kind of shock. Is THAT one alive? Is that one a master plant? What would that dandelion teach? What about that whispery, long-needled pine I don’t know the name of, whose elegantly arrayed needles glinting in the light give me shivers, the softness, the wispy angles. What would their voices say in my head if I could hear them? I had previously regarded all of them as closer to inert, more like cement blocks except in need of watering.
“How do I reach ayahuasca back in my world?” I ask Guido.
“Go to nature,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a rock, a river, a tree, become one with it and you will hear ayahuasca.” It’s shaman-speak, them trying to explain to the stunted western mind a kind of wisdom that to us sounds like a meme, maybe even a tired one. Nonetheless I try it in the woods next to my mother’s house back in the US suburbs. I am rewarded with a new sense of energy coming from the trees and one special time with a walking waking vision of all the tree trunks as columns of white light. My mouth drops open, it is magical but shocking.
When I finally make it to the seaside, Guido teaches me over WhatsApp a very specific meditation that allows me to see visions when I connect to the ocean. It’s not just the plants that are beings. I try it, all of it despite an inner resistance that’s hard to explain but has to do with cultural brainwashing. I strain at my own limits, contact an interiority akin to the space of meditation, a mental click shifting from outward to inner, the same place I saw visions in aya ceremonies. 

V.
 
I can now say that plants speak to us around the edges of our recognition as westerners, but as with any contemplative practice anyone can reach them through intention and repetition. And without ayahuasca, though it’s certainly a fast track. In order to learn the language of plants we only have to open to the possibility, not believe first (I didn’t and that is too tall a requirement)—just be open.
 
The teacher plants speak to humans differently than ayahuasca, less dramatically than the mother of the jungle, in shades, colors, feeling tones, whispers, dreamy images, dreams themselves, in tongues as glossolalia, words and fragments, perceptual shifts. It takes time and devotion to recognize their language within us and at times most of us westerners think we are making it up since it occurs mainly in an interior space. However, many of us have now tried this strange and difficult approach: we see and hear similar things.
 
The Amazonians say they are taught songs by the plants in diets. Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “We know the names but have forgotten the songs.” That the earth has songs is a belief found around the world in indigenous societies. The Amazonians describe an insistent and clear melody that simply enters the person’s consciousness during diet. In much of the Amazon the songs are called “icaros” and are sung by the shamans to heal other beings, with or without ayahuasca.
 
If there is such a thing as singing plants and the singing could be heard by anyone but mostly through humility and discipline, can it help save our world?
 
All the master plants including ayahuasca seem to design visions and teachings for each individual person in combination with the plant’s attributes, personality, set of powers. There is a merging of plant and human. Just as ginger’s chemical components work to help a human’s upset stomach—the role of the gut in brain power and emotions has been rethought in the past few decades—or the Amazonian chuchuhuasi (Maytenus laevis) helps arthritis and muscle issues, each plant has characteristics that also affect a human emotionally and spiritually.
 
Ayahuasca shows people vivid movies in their minds, has been called “the tv screen of the jungle”—it’s so strong we have no choice but to completely relinquish control of our minds and bodies. One curandero likened it to drinking the Bible, literally like swallowing a Book of Knowledge all at once (be careful what you wish for). The tv scenes are so powerful they seem more real than reality: of a long dead relative speaking from the beyond, of spirit “surgeons” operating on the body, of past romantic relationships, of scenes from a parent’s childhood or something long buried in our own. It is astonishing. People encounter death, the divine, scenes from the future, ego shattering, visions of the entire cosmos, the birth of a star. I have seen these things myself and witnessed many others with their own versions, speaking of them the day after a ceremony. 
 
Our culture designates these things to the chemical and mechanical realms only. “Ah,” we analyzers say, “That is all due to DMT.”
 
When I was younger I tried a few drugs from LSD to MDMA; ayahuasca is no drug. My greatest shock, which remains to this day as I write, is the presence, the being sharing consciousness in my mental space. It/she is still with me, many people say the same, that there is a kind of voice that lasts for life. We all recognize it as that voice, the specific voice of ayahuasca. It is someone not-me with far vaster omniscience who has shown me the design of the universe and opened the doors to the divine along with realms of horror, mainly via humans gone dark making a surplus of choices to hurt for greed and power. Not everyone must deal with these horrific dark parts, on my particular and unusual path I couldn’t have one without the other. Compounding these extreme rites and trials born of the jungle was my western bias and resistance. I can feel it physically, like a hard block of cement in my mind, a terrible queasiness in my stomach when I consider my experiences, though the more time passes the less this is true. Westerners have no compass for these worlds that open up, as anthropologist Jeremy Narby points out, "Westerners already have a more inflated ego than indigenous people, which does not mean that the desire for power and the inflation of the ego are absent in Amazonian shamanism…” But there is a tradition, a cosmology, structure, and community, things that are lacking in the West.
 
It’s my second time in the jungle and the third master shaman I’ve worked with. He is slight, elegant, grumpy, graceful, in his early 60s. He dresses like an LA hip hop artist, loves soccer and sponsors a team on the grounds of his center. He has a darkness to his countenance which I will unfortunately learn too much about. His singing in ceremonies is powerful, otherworldly, he is like the Mozart of jungle music. The other participants are an entire range of human seekers, two older white ladies from Marin, an older black IT professor from Chicago, two gorgeous gay Parisians, a bald graduate student in psychology, backpackers in their 20s. The seekers are mostly white and affluent, it must be said. This center has a herd of more than 15 chihuahuas, a number of them like to cuddle whoever will have them in the hammocks. I am here to do a one month diet with a master plant, a wondrous Amazonian fig tree, oje (Ficus insipida), that can grow to enormous heights.
 
The “dieta" is an ascetic shamanic practice found throughout the Amazon, now also used by westerners who want to heal from illness or learn from the plants. Food and stimuli are severely restricted, no sugar, salt, oil, alcohol, sex of any kind, spices. I eat only the blandest of foods for a month: fish, rice, lentils, potatoes, oatmeal. Social contact and cell phones are limited or disallowed. Initiates will ingest their master plant and spend time in quiet to better commune with the plant. The process is described differently by different tribes and shamans, but several things happen at once: the human puts their energy and attention towards the plant, the human suffers, learns discipline, and enters a heightened state of sensitivity that is able to receive the plants. “Sacrifice something to get something else,” Guido explained to me. Anthropologist Silvia Mesturini Cappo puts it another way: “Training with teaching plants means ‘meeting’ them regularly, spending time with them and getting to know them well. It is a relational training. It means negotiating relational ethics and subtleties. It implies learning to meet with radical otherness.”
 
After one week the fish and rice become repulsive and unbearable to eat, around the 10th day food taste no longer matters. Three weeks in people can start fainting from lack of salt. Different plants have different personalities or signatures and confer their own varieties of healing, shamanic or spiritual abilities.
-
Across the Amazon oje is known as a parasitic that also clears away emotional or spiritual “parasites” and energies such as addictions. I have the typical dieta experience of spending a lot of time alone facing traumas and shadows of myself and the world. This is what you sign up for. When I first “meet” oje I am in my hut, the tree comes in like a beautiful beam of light starting in my head and traveling down to my core with visually uneven radiating lines around the center. I feel it in my body; it is so positive and wonderful I cry. To this day I have the sense of something aligning with my spine, like a second spinal column, like a tree trunk or tree formation, a beam of trunk-light uplifting the center column of my own being. Eventually over the next year this turns into a braiding, like the tree’s white column is merging with mine. I have a sense of whiteness, of branches, of a gentle presence. When it’s the plant and not my own wandering mind, a clear image comes out of nowhere like a flash, like being visited by something, another presence that’s not me though far less dramatic than ayahuasca. Westerners and tribal people alike report many varied encounters with plants in dieta, some see colors as if from inside a flower, some see a humanlike figure or simply an image of a tree, one saw a baby budding tree at the end of a dark tunnel. Words I would use to describe oje are lightening, brightening, clarity. One not-me image floats in of an old-fashioned twig broom sweeping away my mental dust. 
 
One day after my first oje encounter I sit in despair engrossed in a habitual negative mental looping. I suddenly experience a subtle shift, a small gentle presence, a change on the grayscale from a dark despair color to a somewhat lighter one, the next one or two up on a paint swatch. Relief comes in, my mind unclenches, it is a different sensation than I’ve ever experienced, every object of my fretting is lighter, one grayscale lighter. This never happens again, instead I start learning how to do this for myself, to seek this lightness when I’m struggling. Of course it does not work every time. But I have been… taught.
 
My next one month dieta is piñon blanco (jatropha curcas), said to bring light as pure as baby breath. Pre-diet this meant almost nothing to me. Often the only information available about these plants is a few words on the web site of a jungle center, like it “facilitates connection with unseen world.” Arguably they all do this, yet after my month with this plant I understand, it becomes an issue of translation, the language of the plants and these other worlds as from English or Spanish or Shipibo, and the cultural mindset that comes with any language. Piñon blanco, a shrub-tree curiously star shaped in its growth patterns and possessing the most remarkable white bark, shows itself to me as a bright white tonal space, centralizing itself in my mental mid section (third eye). During this diet I hear the words, “health of the organism” and understand the organism to be me, my inner ecosystem as well as the larger one I’m embedded in, micro to macro all swirling together. This is not rocket science, but I feel it in my body on a new level. 
 
Towards the end of that diet, I get “initiated,” I have 3 separate, agonizing rebirth ayahuasca ceremonies, my being is reborn in a powerful blaze of white light so strong it might destroy me. We can only sustain so much from this mortal coil and these experiences pushed this limit for me. In the third ceremony the plants speak to me in one voice. “Learn the medicine,” they say, “We will always be with you” (they have been). They show me a glimpse of their world in tones of blue and white, the greatest delight I’ve encountered in my days on earth. This is a sparkling chattering, delicious joy, but they also show me something that resembles a swirling vortex of shitana, the dark side. 
 
At the end of each month, my dieta is closed by the shaman, who says a seed has been planted that will sprout in my consciousness, the plant grows inside me, with me. It will mature over time and, in the tradition of almost the entire Amazon, the plant spirit will become my ally for life, continually growing and teaching. And it’s true, I still recognize the tone and presence of my plants in my dreams and meditations, sometimes when I take breaths and pause, sometimes out of nowhere.
 
VI. 
Back in the West there’s a beauty to the language of science, if only its disciples understand it’s not the only one. It’s thought that plants mechanically communicate through volatile organic compounds, electrical signaling, and fungal networks (“common mycorrhizal networks”). Kin recognition affects plant communication and defense, researchers have discovered they recognize and help kin even when VOCs are transmitted artificially. Researchers have also discovered plants emit sounds inaudible to the human ear when under threat, that the same anesthesias work on plants as humans, doped up Venus fly traps can’t catch their insects. How is this possible? Theories float towards cellular disruption, but there is no real or complete argument for anything. 
 
Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist at Southern Cross University, unapologetically straddles the (currently) opposable edges of science and her own otherworldly experiences with master plants in the Peruvian Amazon. She endures scathing ridicule but keeps publishing her experiments in high quality, peer reviewed scientific journals. She claims the plants told her how to design the experiments—just as the people of the Amazon say the plants tell them all kinds of things.
 
But analytic materialists need objective evidence—though every day new discoveries seem to catch up with older knowledge. In 2014 Gagliano dropped Mimosa pudica plants (commonly called the sensitive plant because its leaves furl up to the touch—and humans can see it) 60 times onto foam. The plants “learned” in a way objectively discernible to humans and publishable by science through a number of trials. They remembered they weren’t in danger and didn’t need to close their leaves for a month later and longer.
In a much-cited paper published in 2012 Gagliano and her co-authors reported the detection of clicking noises using a laser vibrometer trained on the root tips while submerged in water. In 2023 Lilach Hadany at Tel-Aviv University measured the sounds of plants in stress with a microphone and found tomatoes and tobacco that need water or have recently had their stems cut produce up to 35 sounds per hour while well-hydrated and uncut plants make only one sound per hour.
Far from the study of numbers and measuring machines, the language of ayahuasca is dramatically discernible to most humans when we ingest it, more so in the jungle and probably the most so in the care of indigenous shamans/onanya/curanderos/vegetalistas who know the tradition and how to work with the plants. According to an increasing number of sources shamans in the Amazon have cured the most impossible maladies western medicine can’t address, from PTSD to autoimmune illness, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s Disease, even some cancers, but most of these healers see the cura as a form of spiritual awakening because westerners have been cut off, our ties with nature severed. We have forgotten the songs of the earth, its language, they say it’s why we are destroying the earth. 
 
 
 
 
VII. 
 
At first I believed this miracle of Amazonian plants and healers could save the world if only other people knew. I’ve come to understand in the ensuing years that of course it’s more complicated, and while the plant teachings appeared to me to be perfectly designed, western people do leave this terrain with confusion, ungroundedness, trauma, ego mania, even messiah complexes. Some are healed from terminal cancer or diabetes but many are not. The plants are not a solution to end suffering though they can help, according to some greater design. There is also an ongoing war in the jungle between the curanderos and the brujos, dark shamans, between those who work with the plants to heal and those who deliberately harm for greed, for money, from jealousy, for revenge. The less savory, destructive parts of human nature take over even here and even in these beautiful plant presences. Many westerners come down with an extractive mentality or appoint themselves ayahuasca curanderos after one week, charging fees for their services. 
 
Something different is sorely needed and although people do what people do, globally a kind of braiding the languages is happening, a merging of ways of knowing to form a whole picture, a reaction to the world from multiple angles, seeing in layers… Some Amazonian shamans joyfully merge global spiritualities into their work and lives, call Jesus the OG dieter (forty days and forty nights in nature and he came out healing), bring chakras, go to western doctors for appendectomies or antibiotics.
 
There’s a global paradigm shift happening, more people paying deep attention to indigenous thinking and the language of the more than human, we might better contribute to the reimagining of the world we live in. Master plants grow all over the world: oak, cedar, and rose are just a few. Some Amazonians like Ashaninka Maestro Juan Flores of the Boiling River are advocating that westerners learn or diet the plants where they live, find their own medicine outside the jungle. It is possible and necessary for humans to meet radical otherness on its own terms. --Shamans gleefully incorporating anything, other ways of knowing, other religions, Jesus is the OG dieter (forty days and forty nights). Go to doctors for appendectomy or antibiotics, they know the difference.
-I watched my mind, my protective ego, discard parts of these new ways of seeing and contacting nature and the world, parts that were too uncomfortable, parts I and my culture write off as quaint or primitive.