The Cosmic Serpent PDF

Rating: (113 reviews) Author: Jeremy Narby ISBN : 9780874779110 New from $21.99 Format: PDF

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The Cosmic Serpent is a great personal adventure story, a fascinating study of anthropology and ethnopharmacology, and, most important, a truly revolutionary look at how knowledge and consciousness may come into being. For ten years, Jeremy Narby explored Amazonian rain forests, the libraries of Europe, and some of the world's most arcane scientific journals, following strange clues, unsuppressible intuitions, and extraordinary coincidences. He collected evidence and researched the seemingly impossible possibility that specific knowledge might somehow be transferred through DNA, the genetic information at the heart of each cell of all living beings, to a drug-prepared consciousness. The beginning of Narby's explorations lay with the Peruvian Indians, who claim that their knowledge of chemical interactions-now scientifically confirmed-has its origins in plant-induced hallucinations and that during these experiences they gain information that could not be acquired by methods of trial and error. Narby demonstrates that indigenous and ancient peoples have known for millennia-and even have drawn-the double helix structure, something conventional science discovered only in 1953. He also suggests that DNA, and the life it codes for at the cellular level, are "minded." In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, the knowledge of indigenous peoples, 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.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Hardcover: 257 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher; 1 edition (April 13, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874779111
• ISBN-13: 978-0874779110
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces

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.