Are plants the gateway to the mind? | Decoded

[Music] all across the world there were many tribes and ancient civilizations that were interested in hallucinogenic plants some used them in spiritual rites and others saw in them a divine link to science and knowledge the good part of their knowledge comes from the hallucinations induced by certain plants any credible research that's blocked typically by government is probably safer than any other drug how do we know that this is not a rumor the cia brought up the world supply of lsd there is a whole universe within the brain which brings us to a dead end [Music] crashed into one of the towers [Music] [Applause] [Music] they use psychoactive plants to learn about the world around them what we did find seems to be real you could by the use of drugs reprogram somebody's mind people underestimate how deep the brain [Music] hallucinogenic plants such as ayahuasca drink and denial blue lotus were they the source of knowledge and technological advancements of our ancient ancestors shamans have used hallucinogenic plants like ayahuasca the blue lotus iboga peyote and other plants and mushrooms to seek altered states of mind and reach a level the priests say opens the gates of knowledge in dimensions beyond our realm and this reminds me of my state as an actor when i build a character from a written script i live in a parallel world like a shaman though in a different way i'm seeking to tap somehow into that other dimension and i enter a different state of consciousness i learned many things from acting first time in my life i went to a theater audition i messed up badly i stuttered and i sweated and it was a scandal but i don't know why i enjoyed the experience so i went back to the director and offered my services as an assistant and not an actor just to learn from him and that is what happened my experience in theater taught me that sometimes the truth is beyond what you can see but is there really a parallel world of wisdom and knowledge and are there people who are able to tap into it through hallucinogenic plants my search for that answer led me to a researcher who studied this topic his name is jeremy narby hi jeremy hi um i want to talk a little bit about your work you have extensively researched hallucinogenic plants can you share with me your hypothesis please i was an anthropologist um a young anthropologist 35 years ago in the peruvian amazon and i was there not to study hallucinogenic plants but to study the political economy of the rainforest and this went through trying to understand how they understood the forest they lived in and they said that the way to understand this was to drink for example ayahuasca which is a mixture of hallucinogenic plants or take concentrated tobacco paste there are something like eighty 000 species of plants in the amazon rainforest european forests have a total of about 300 species so it really is a quite mind-boggling some scientists went and they made two meter by 10 meter plots in the forest and then they would take different ashankar people and ask them to walk through these 20 square meters and identify plant by plant the plants that were there and these people had names for 98 of the plant species and and they attributed uses to about half of them so they really do have encyclopedic knowledge about plants and and what one can do with that i mean you know how many plants do most people uh in switzerland know that they can just walk out and say i don't know 10 maybe 20. how did they acquire such immense botanical knowledge their knowledge about plants is is recognized by science and the pharmaceutical industry but they themselves say that a good part of their knowledge comes from the hallucinations induced by certain plants with ayahuasca for example they put whatever plant they find interesting in the ayahuasca brew and then they drink it and in their visions they hope to learn things about other plants they use psychoactive plants they use them intelligently to to learn about the world around them it's quite a paradox because they say that the knowledge they have comes from using the plants how did they know which plant to use to get this college it's true that one can see that paradox especially if one is on the outside but on the inside what you have is indigenous amazonian people are just naturally curious about their environment interested in experimenting you know they just have that sort of basic curiosity this topic takes me back to the question of how the pharaohs were able to attain the science and architecture that enabled them to build great things like the pyramids my research led me to the lotus flower and that some people say that this plant is rich in dmt an active hallucinogenic ingredient and it is the source of knowledge of the pharaohs or ancient egyptians not only the science they used to build the pyramids many and different sciences and answers to eternal questions about life in the universe according to this theory this knowledge is kept protected to this day in a secret chamber in egypt called the hall of records carmen bolter director of documentary series the pyramid code searched for that hole and may have some answers it seems that ancient civilizations have managed to gather exceptional knowledge some people claim that this knowledge is actually hidden in a place called the whole of records does this place exist it is a good question and i think edgar casey the sleeping prophet way back many many decades ago was one that talked about it and he also talked about it being in three different places now i've researched edgar casey's work and i think that there you can't take it all literally so did you figure out where it is in my time in egypt i spent a great deal of time when the plateau closed in the tunnel system i spent a lot of time inside the body of the sphinx and could see that there actually were blocked chambers blocked passageways there's a satellite system called geoscans and so when we did the scan it turned out to be a huge network of underground chambers not passageways so inside these chambers there was traces of precious metals gold precious jewels no bones no pottery so it wasn't a civilization it wasn't somewhere they lived so do you think this is their famous hole of records i'm not going to tell you that i know what this is that we can speculate but what we did find seems to be real i guess you need a permit to go inside and see for yourself did you show the government what you found to get a permit we made plans we presented it to the government but of course anything that goes through to the government they say yes yes come here show us your research and then they cancel so do you think there is a force trying to keep us away from our ancient knowledge i would say definitely it seems that any credible research that could give us real definitive information about our ancient past gets blocked typically by government who to believe some people have the credentials but they don't ask the right questions others don't have the credentials but their questions are good the question is why are academics persuaded not to follow this line of inquiry who would want to prevent them from following this path it seems that western science in the 50s and the 60s have started researching this but for some reason it all came to an abrupt end and the substances were classified it is said that in 1938 a swiss scientist named albert hoffman succeeded in a lab to synthesize a hallucinogenic drug called lsd people had experimented with magic mushrooms and other substances that altered consciousness but researching these compounds in a lab meant science was ready to delve into this issue lsd is colorless and essentially free is uh probably safer than any other drug this is not a drug there is a voice until it all came to a stop but why and who stopped it lynn picknet is a writer and researcher who worked extensively on this subject and i think she can help me i want to know who would want to stop research on such substances it says it all when you discover that the cia in the 50s basically brought up the world's supply of lsd i mean literally did that and they wanted to experiment with it this was because after the second world war the movement in military thinking was yes of course we want to have our traditional weapons but we want to look more at psychological warfare you know how can we for example um train assassins um by the the use of programming their mind like uh mk ultra the secret program by the cia in 1953. what can you tell us about that it was terrifying absolutely terrifying it was based on the real idea that um you could theoretically by the use of drugs and hypnosis reprogram somebody's mind they used i think up to 80 institutions such as prisons um hospitals including some universities even where they got a few willing experimentes but a lot of them weren't willing you know like in prisons you can imagine and uh some didn't even know they were being experimented on which is a whole lot worse and they were often force-fed one way or another um lsd how do we know that this is not a rumor and it actually happened in the 70s actually most of the mk ultra records were destroyed but uh the financial records of antholdia became known they weren't destroyed and and looking at them you could see the sheer extent of them killed you know what they paid for who they paid these are professors and researchers whose methods are sound and findings are compelling but but the truth sometimes there are parties interested in modeling the waters which brings us to a dead end i would like to know scientifically what happens in the brain when someone takes a hallucinogenic substance [Music] is a neuroscientist and he may have an answer you did a lot of research on hallucinogenic plants and drugs and their relation to human consciousness when someone takes dmt or lsd are they connecting with some sort of universal wisdom or tapping into cosmic knowledge or anything of that sort i'm by training i'm a physicist so i have a very hard time you know believing that there are things beyond what we know as the universe itself what i have to say is that people underestimate the the how deep is the brain in the sense that there is a whole universe within the brain in its sense so when people take ayahuasca for example and they see these wonderful images in the serpents shingles like the cosmos they have this instinct okay so this is so vast that it has to be outside myself but i think this is wrong i think that carl sagan once said that the brain is a very big place in a very small space it means that there are a lot of things inside of ourselves that we aren't usually aware of and it's exciting for me that would mean we are all quite similar inside because we are all human exactly you see that that's that's a wonderful conclusion yeah so people there are differences of course because not everybody is the same but at the very core level the secular experience is very similar across individuals there is something implicit in the human being that is tapped when it's confidence under the effects of psychology and that something of course is worth exploring okay so we are not tapping into universal wisdom but are we tapping into other beings like plants or other minds it's not that we read each other minds like you know waves coming from my brain to yours but it could happen that still the bandwidth of the motion that we can communicate to each other examplify a lot and that has a little bit of spiritual meaning by itself it doesn't have to go against the laws of physics to be spiritual [Music] my journey in the search continues [Music] and my journey will continue to move in different worlds and parallel dimensions but for sure without hallucinogenic substances words to which acting takes me and the music [Music] worlds that may have answers but for sure in them there are many more questions [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 273,681

Keywords: intelligence without brains, thomas horton, exploration of plants, al jazeera live, al jazeera, aljazeera live بث مباشر, aljazeera news, aljazeera news live, decoded, decoded al jazeera, al jazeera english decoded, plant bio-acoustics, gateway of the mind, creepy pasta, robert monroe, transcendental meditation, hemi sync, aljazeera live arabic, out of body experience, plant esp, the gateway experience sleep, ayahuasca, ayahuasca documentary, plant classification

Id: 3dA5_EJzuu4

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2022