The Cosmic Serpent PDF

Rating: Author: Jeremy Narby ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF

Free download PRETITLE The Cosmic Serpent [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge. In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.
Direct download links available for PRETITLE The Cosmic Serpent POSTTITLE

• Product Details
• Table of Contents
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• File Size: 1609 KB
• Print Length: 276 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0874779642
• Publisher: Tarcher (April 5, 1999)
• Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0049MPVJ0
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #57,355 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #13 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Special Groups > Native American Studies
  • #15 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Genetics
  • #27 in Books > medical books > Basic Sciences > Biochemistry
• #13 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Special Groups > Native American Studies
• #15 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Genetics
• #27 in Books > Medical Books > Basic Sciences > Biochemistry

The Cosmic Serpent PDF

Author, Jeremy Narby leaps between science and mysticism on his quest to explain how several millennia ago Stone-Age hunters living in the Peruvian rainforest learned the botanical properties and the chemistry of plants. Dr. Narby, a Canadian-born scientist, lived two years with the Ashaninca people in the jungles of the Pichis Valley in Peru. Early in his work with the Ashaninca, Dr Narby perceived an enigma. He writes, "These extremely practical and frank people, living almost autonomously in the Amazonian forest, insisted that their extensive botanical knowledge came from plant-induced hallucinations." For Dr. Narby, the hallucinatory origin of botany contradicts two fundamental principles of Western knowledge. First hallucinations cannot be the source of real information, because to consider them as such is the definition of psychosis. Western knowledge considers hallucinations to be at best illusions, at worst morbid phenomena. Second plants do not communicate like human beings. Scientific theories of communication consider that only human beings use abstract symbols like words and pictures and that plants do not relay information in the form of mental images. Dr. Narby said that he often asked Carlos (interpreter) to explain the origin of place names, and Carlos would invariably reply that nature itself had communicated them to the shaman during their hallucinations. Throughout Western Amazonia people drink ayahuasca. (hallucinogenic drug) Carlos said, "That is how nature talks, because in nature, there is God, and God talks to us in our visions. When a shaman drinks his plant brew, the spirits present themselves to him and explain everything.