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nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.
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Michael Pollan |
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Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion.
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Michael Pollan |
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The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.
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Michael Pollan |
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The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.
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Michael Pollan |
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Sigmund Freud wrote that "there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, our own ego." Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists. The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything."
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Michael Pollan |
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Wrangham estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day. (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)
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Michael Pollan |
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Ninety percent of a cooked egg is digested whereas only 65 percent of a raw egg is; by the same token, the rarer the steak, or more al dente the pasta, the less of it will be absorbed. Dieters take note.
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Michael Pollan |
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Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations--a kind of controlled hallucination. This raises a question: How is normal waking consciousness any different from other, seemingly less faithful productions of our imagination--such as dreams or psychotic delusions or psychedelic trips? In fact, all these states of consciousness are "imagined": they're mental..
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Michael Pollan |
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Each of the tastes has been selected by evolution for its survival value. Either it guides us toward nutrients we need to survive, or it steers us away from ingesting things that might endanger us.
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Michael Pollan |
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Some researchers attribute the increase in gluten intolerance and celiac disease to the fact that modern brands no longer receive a lengthy fermentation.
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Michael Pollan |
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In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work so much as attentiveness.)"
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Michael Pollan |
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In the course of a lifetime, sixty tons of food pass through the gastrointestinal tract, an exposure to the world that is fraught with risk.
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Michael Pollan |
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The Johns Hopkins experiment shows--proves--that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. It uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity's secularism. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a re-sacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that is our best defense against not only soullessness, but against religious fanaticism. And it do..
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Michael Pollan |
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What to my (spiritually impoverished) mind seemed to constitute a good case for the disenchantment of the world becomes in the minds of the more psychedelically experienced irrefutable proof of its fundamental enchantment. Flesh of the gods, indeed.
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Michael Pollan |
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The only discordant note in the conversation came when I casually dropped the slang expression for psilocybin when asking him about going hunting for 'shrooms. "I really, really hate that word," he said, almost gravely, adopting the tone of a parent upbraiding a potty-mouthed child. The word never crossed my lips again."
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Michael Pollan |