Lettuce or Ayahuasca - What's the difference?

Lately, I’ve found myself using the term “sacred plant” with increasing frequency - in articles, conversations, even in the quiet musings I pretend are entirely private.

Naturally, the question arose (thank you, Ilie): what exactly makes a plant sacred, as opposed to just… a plant? After all, from a certain angle, all plants perform miracles: they turn sunlight into life, oxygenate our world, and allow humans to enjoy salads.

Yet some plants hold a different status altogether: they are revered, feared, protected, consumed with ritual or ceremony, or kept at a reverent or even at a fearful distance.

In The Return Series, I’ve explored these threads through fiction, but here, in this essay, I want to ask more directly: Is sacredness something intrinsic to the plant, or something awakened within us by our encounter with it? And if some plants do carry a greater weight in the tapestry of human experience, are they inviting us to remember something we’ve long forgotten, or simply firing off neurons across various regions of our brain to give us “trips” into the imagination?

Why are some plants so important in our daily lives while others are not?

Just to note here, some of the plants that are extremely important in our lives mostly go unseen by us.

One of the threads I have touched upon in the past is that of humans and plants being part of the same species. Where there are humans, there are plants, and where there are plants, there are humans. The link has now also been discovered by the “scientific community,” which has stated that plants and humans are genetically very, very similar.

How about that?

Let me bring you into my journey of getting to know the human connection with plants.

I was little more than a toddler when I discovered my first “plant.” We lived in a small suburban house in a place called Cerros Los Placers, which was, at the time, on the outskirts of Valparaiso, Chile.

My mom was a keen gardener of flowers, and our little yard, which to me was enormous at the time, was a wonderland filled with roses, lilies, and other flowers whose names I never learned.

One day I walked out into the yard while she was busy doing something on the ground. I walked over to her and looked to see what she was doing. She was planting new flowers. I gasped. These flowers were tiny bunches of white magic. Several Baby’s Breath plants now covered the ground between her rose bushes.

She looked at me and smiled. She looked back at the plants, then back at me. “I got these just for you, my love,” she said. “Make sure they are happy.”

I was blown away. Flower plants that were just for me? I went over to touch them and play with them. “Be careful with them, they are delicate,” she said as she walked away, her gardening taking her to another section of the yard.

I sat down next to the plant and got so close that each cluster of little flowers took up my entire field of vision. I touched the petals, or tried to, and simply bathed in the wonderment and beauty before me. “Why are these for me?” I finally asked my mother.

“Because they are tiny and beautiful, just like you,” she answered.

Eventually, I was taken back inside for whatever it is that kids need to leave the yard for.

Every day, I would run out there and check on “my flowers.” One day, a day that for me was like any other day, the flowers were gone. The plants were there, the leaves were there, but the flowers were not.

“Don’t worry,” my mom said, “they will be back next year.”

I cried and cried. I sat with the plants and touched them, trying to convince them that wherever their flowers had gone, they could bring them back even if just for a moment.

The plants seemed to be listening, but instead of bringing their flowers back, they told me they would stay strong and bring back the flowers later on.

From that day, I would run outside and touch the plants, which were getting mysteriously smaller, or maybe it was because I was getting taller every day. Then, one magical day, tiny little buds appeared, and soon after that, the ground was covered in a cloud of white.

The second deep connection with plants happened when I was seven years old, and due to the political situation in Chile at the time, I found myself living with my grandmother and my granduncle, her brother, Uncle Carlos.

My grandmother and Uncle Carlos lived on an acre of land where they grew tomatoes, beans, lettuce, corn, potatoes, onions, desert pears, fruit trees, and many other staple vegetables and food plants.

I spent most of my days out in the land playing with the plants. One day, I watched as my uncle planted some tiny plants in a field. I went over and asked him what he was doing.

“These are tomato plants; we need these for making canned tomatoes and tomato sauce for the winter,” he answered.

“Can I help?”

He looked at me, then looked around at the field. “Yes, see that pile of sticks over there? Go get a few and I will show you what to do.”

I went over to get the sticks. He then told me that the sticks were from our “rock pear” plant and that they were perfect for holding up the tomato plants once they got bigger. He showed me how the buds in the sticks were growing and how the direction they were pointing meant that it was the top of the plant because leaves want to reach the sun. He said that I needed to plant them so the top end was in the ground. Otherwise, the sticks would grow roots and leaves, which we didn’t want. He explained that we didn’t want a field of rock pears; we wanted a field of tomato plants.

He then showed me how to bury the sticks, how deep, and how to make them stable.

I was happy to have a job and got to it. He finished planting the baby tomato plants and moved on to a different job, not before telling me that I better finish my job before dinnertime.

I worked slowly and methodically, talking to the sticks and telling them not to dare grow leaves or roots because it was not allowed.

Dinner time came, and I was proud to tell my uncle that the job was done. We walked back to the field, and he took a good look and nodded in approval. With a big smile, he told me I had done a good job and one day I might make a good farmer too.

Two days later, my uncle came into the house and asked my grandma to follow him. They left, and of course, I followed behind. When we got to the tomato field, he said to her, “Look at this. Can you see what’s wrong here?”

My grandma looked and said, “Well, that’s what you get making a seven-year-old do your job.”

“No, you don’t understand,” he said, walking to one of the sticks that was covered in leaves now. I gasped; the sticks, at least half of them, had sprouted leaves. But how could that be? I had planted the tops into the ground.

“Look,” he said, bringing the stick to my grandmother.

“But that’s impossible,” she said.

They both turned to me and then back to the stick. “She followed the instructions,” my uncle said, “but the sticks sprouted and look,” he pointed at the end that had been in the air, “roots are growing in the sun.”

I started crying.

“It’s OK,” my grandmother said, “he’s not angry at you. Are you, Carlos?”

My uncle, whose face was indeed very angry, looked over at me and said, “No, I am just upset that you can’t help me farm anymore.” He then looked at my grandmother and said, “I’ve heard of things happening before; she can’t touch anything we don’t want to grow again.”

“Well, she can help plant the seedlings,” my grandmother responded.

“No, they are too delicate.”

I cried some more but not loud enough that I could not hear what they said.

“I have to redo the whole field now,” my uncle said, breaking the stick in two and throwing it away.

My grandma took me by the hand, muttering something under her breath.

For a few days, I was not allowed out.

Then one day, my uncle came in and told me to follow him; he had a job for me. My grandma had a tiny smile on her lips that I knew I had to pretend I did not see.

“This is going to be your job,” my uncle said once we got to the tomato field. “You are to come here every day and touch each and every one of these plants, and you are to tell them to grow big, strong tomatoes filled with flavor.”

I looked at the field and back at my uncle.

“OK!” I said and ran to start my job.

That year, we had a bumper harvest of tomatoes. We even had to get help to can and preserve them, and my grandma was able to send our helpers home with boxes filled with winter goodness.

It was during that next winter, in fact, that the third and most significant connection with the intelligence of plants happened.

I got pneumonia, and as we lived in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, there was no way for my grandmother and uncle to get me to a hospital or have a doctor visit. There were no telephones and no vehicles in the town. Our neighbor from across the street was the only one with both, and he was not home.

My condition became extremely serious, and my life began to drain out of my body. At that point, I heard my grandma and uncle arguing.

“I will not allow that Indian witch in my home! It is all hocus pocus and unscientific.” My grandmother was shouting.

“She is dying. What harm can it do?” my uncle argued back. “She will be gone within hours. We have to at least try something, or she will be gone like your daughter.”

Many years later, I learned that my uncle was referring to my grandmother’s first daughter, who died as a toddler from pneumonia. I happened to be the spitting image of that girl, my body elemental being the same one.

I saw my grandmother turn toward me and look into my eyes. “Go and get the Machi witch,” she said to my uncle.

He ran out of the room. I later learned that he had run two miles to his brother’s house to fetch a horse, then galloped several miles to the Mapuche village in the mountains. It was the middle of the night and pitch dark all the way there and back again.

Several hours later, my experience of what happened was that I was sitting in a void, waiting. I was not sure what I was waiting for, but I knew this was the place between lives. I sat, patiently waiting until I heard a voice calling my name and telling me to go to her.

I became curious and stood up, looking toward where the voice was coming from. A woman was walking toward me. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, had black curly hair and dark skin. “Inelia, come to me, come to me NOW,” she commanded.

I decided to do as she said and felt myself fly toward her. I flew until I was back in my body, opened my eyes and flew into her.

Inside of her there were thousands of women and men. Their collective voice said, “Machi.” And after a few seconds, they started going into me. With them came millions of years of experience, knowledge and wisdom. I was amazed.

Suddenly, the woman, who looked exactly like she did in the in-between place, shut her eyes, turned around and ordered me to get out of “her.” I sat up and tried to grab her, turn her back so that the Machi could finish downloading, but she pushed me away.

“She will live,” she told my grandma, who was holding her hand over her mouth in shock.

I was screaming for her to come back and look at me.

She then told my grandma to make a drink of milk, garlic, honey and elderberries and feed it to me a spoon every hour. Then she left.

The next day, I overheard my grandma and uncle in the next room.

“She won’t come to check on her? Is that normal?” my grandma asked.

“No, she said she will never set eyes upon the white devil again.”

“What do you mean, a white devil?”

“She said that Inelia is a white devil who stole her Machi.”

“This is what happens with native savages.”

“She saved her life, so I would hold your tongue if I were you.”

That was the end of the conversation and the last time the Machi was mentioned in our household.

You might wonder why this is relevant to plants. Well, without the context of what happened between me and the Mapuche Machi, the next bit of my story would not make sense.

It took me a few days to be strong enough to get out of bed. My grandma helped me get dressed, put on my shoes, and helped me outside to take in the sun. Not too much sun, as I was sensitive to it, but enough.

As she sat me down on a chair and covered me in blankets, I looked beside me and saw a little flower. Like my mother, my grandma was fond of growing flowering plants, bushes, and trees. And she liked to have blooms all year round, including winter.

As I looked at the plant, my sight seemed to zoom into it. Suddenly, I saw the plant through the eyes of the Machi that were now living inside of me. If you can imagine a type of x-ray, fully colored image of the plant, with the energy flows of lifeforce and mechanics, that is close to what I saw while the Machi and the plant would tell me what each part of that plant was good for in our lives. The roots were good for one thing, while the flowers for another, and the leaves for something else.

I took the entire experience like it was Tuesday afternoon. The most normal thing that could happen.

This ability went on for months, which meant I had to leave for school much earlier than usual because I had to stop at every weed by the sidewalk and every plant by the fields’ edges and have a good look and ask it and the Machi questions about it.

Eventually, through the years, the ability faded and went away for lack of use.

Here I want to tell you the story behind the experiences a character from the Return Series had when he touched a large tree and was taken inside a broad consciousness that was not human. You can find Francisco’s adventures with the tree consciousness in the third book the series, Planet of Entry.

The real life story that it was based on happened in the early 2000s, in northern Spain near Santander. My brother lives there.

To give some context, my brother married a local girl and had lived there for many years. Her family had some land and property in the country which my brother loved and spent a lot of time fixing up and taking care of.

When I visited, I felt compelled to enter the old forest that surrounded the house. I walked up the hill and started enjoying the ancient oaks and maples all around me. At some point, I needed to climb down a short steep part of the overgrown path and I reached over to hold onto the side of one of the oaks.

Time slowed down for me, and everything around me sped up. I gasped in surprise and wondered what had just happened. That is when I felt a consciousness, almost like molasses, travel around my hand from the trunk. I struggled to move my head and look at my hand and saw a misty cloud with very defined edges covering my hand. I tried to pull my hand away but could not. Then the cloud started traveling up my arm. I was fascinated by this and just watched for a while.

I don’t know how long it took for my body to let me know that we could not do this. I knew without a doubt that the tree did not know it would hurt me by bringing me into the tree consciousness, but it would. They move much slower in this world and our human bodies and consciousness moves much, much faster. It could take days just to say, “hello.”

With an almost superhuman strength of will, I pulled my arm away.

It will not surprise you to know that when I got back to the house, I had been gone for several hours.

Years later, on a return trip, I felt the oaks calling me back. It was a very powerful and strong call. At this point I felt they now knew that bringing me into their consciousness would kill me, so this time they were speaking at my speed.

When trees speak, they do so in experiential telepathy. They don’t know English or Spanish, or any other human language.

What they showed me was that they wanted to speak to my brother. They had information for him and only for him. I told my brother and we went to the forest for him to touch an oak. Then he touched another, then another and so we spent several hours in this endeavor. At the end, he told me to ask the trees if they could give me the information and I could then give it to my brother. They approved.

I touched an oak, this time there was no cloud. Instead there was a very intense and dense energy dump from the tree and into my body. It didn’t take me long to realize that that bundle, whatever it was, was not for me and not compatible with me. I immediately touched my brother’s arm and it went into him. He stood there for some time, his eyes big as saucers. Then he nodded and told me it felt warm and he could see it was his.

He never shared what was in the bundle with me.

I wondered if it had to do with the fact that what was left of the ancient forest was surrounded by tree farms, which my brother hated. Or it may have had something to do with the skill he acquired to open portals into different frequency dimensions. I didn’t ask again, and he didn’t share.

One of the things that came later, much later, was the knowledge that particular species become interesting to the human collective for their own ends - that being, mostly, to spread beyond where the wind takes them and populate.

And this is where we come to the types of plants that are extremely important to us but invisible. Your house probably has wood in its structure, as does your furniture. The wood came from tree species that became interesting to humans. They became so by being of a certain hardness, growth speed, shape, and longevity.

Some years ago, I was in the car with Larry, and my awareness field became the We. If you are not familiar with the We, they are the expanded awareness of my “larger self,” or “source.” Anyway, unlike my singular soul, they have travelled the Earth for millennia. We looked out of the window and saw a forest of one particular species of tree that is farmed here at the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, USA.

After greeting the species, we became interested in how they had managed to become so large, taking hundreds of thousands of acres around us. And we could feel it, across the world too.

“We became interesting to humans, and boom, now we are bigger than we have ever been.”

We nodded.

Fascinating.

As a person, I always felt righteous about tree farming. Seeing massive areas cut down to make toilet paper felt gross. After talking to the trees that brought that about, and how they feel about it, I cannot go back to that righteous feeling.

Those trees have a big role, an important role in your human experience, yet you might have never seen them or their importance in this way.

So, now the question that remains is: what is the difference between lettuce, which also became an important plant to humans by the way, and ayahuasca, which we consider to be a sacred and important brew of amazonian plants?

When I, and others, talk about sacred plants, we are talking about plants that appear to alter our experience of reality from the mundane that we experience from a day to day basis, to one where some that mundane experience is changed to become something else entirely.

Let’s ask that question again:

Is sacredness something intrinsic to the plant, or something awakened within us by our encounter with it? And if some plants do carry a greater weight in the tapestry of human experience, are they inviting us to remember something we’ve long forgotten, or simply firing off neurons across various regions of our brain to give us “trips” into the imagination?

The word “sacred” is used by me to denote the plants that take a person into areas of consciousness and awareness that are not available to us on a regular basis.

Whether it is imagination, our brains trying to understand nonsensical neuron patterns and hallucinations, or it is doors opening to perceptions of the larger reality around us, for me it is a non-issue.

You see, everything a person sees, perceives, and understands is ultimately a result of their culture, frequency of experience, programs, and belief systems. They are a result of their core self.

But is the trip from a sacred plant all made up or real?

REAL = REALITY

Reality is the interpretation of data input through our senses.

When we take a sacred plant, those senses DO expand, allowing in AND interpreting the input in different ways than it would without the sacred plant.

Let me explain. We do not live in isolation. We are not the only sentient species with intelligent and conscious self-awareness and capacity to analyze.

Our universe, reality, Earth, is filled with that awareness and consciousness. Most of it is out of our reach, and even when we do reach it, we are unable to interpret the language the others speak.

So, the plant opens up your input senses beyond what is “normal.” You receive the input, the information, from around you. After that, what you do with it is layered with analytical overlays and your own personality, belief system, and memories you contain that can interpret what you see.

For example, let’s say you have never seen a horse or knew that horses exist.

One day, a day just like any other day, you see a horse in a field. You will not see a horse, but a very, very large dog. What is fun, then, is that you go back to your house and tell your family that you saw the biggest dog you ever did see. When they ask you for details of the dog, you will describe it in minute detail. For all intents and purposes, you saw a big dog, and you cannot see the difference between a dog and a horse because horses don’t exist, and you don’t even know the name to call them.

Let me tell you a different story that will explain this further.

Some time ago, many members of our local community had shared experiences of “going to a spaceship and meeting aliens.”

I became very curious as to what was going on, and the next time that they were taken, I went with them.

The mechanics on how to find out when this is happening, and how to tag along, is not part of this story, so take my word for it for now and we can explore it at another time.

When we got to the place, I noticed that there were dozens of people there. And I did not know most of them. I saw three people I know personally, including Larry, and one person I know because they are a public figure.

I looked around the place we were in and thought to myself, “I guess this could be described as a ship.”

The beings who hosted all these humans were indeed not human themselves. I looked at them and noticed that they didn’t have a shape or form that could be understood to be physical and thought to myself, “I see how they can be interpreted to look like tall greys, insect people, or nordics.”

You see, I was seeing things without trying to interpret them into human. I was just receiving the input and seeing from a perspective that was marginally less narrow. From that sense, it was not familiar at all, and I was also fully aware that what I did see - their light formlessness, for example, or the walls, ceilings, equipment, and floor of the location - were also what my translation was making of the sensory input.

Was it real? Did it really happen?

Yes.

Did any of us interpret what we saw, heard, smelled, etc., correctly? Not in a puritan type of way, but yes in an overall understanding of the experience - so yes, a horse that is “in actual fact” a large dog.

Another example I can share is that of a podcast Larry and I listened to that talked about the work of ethnobotanist, author, and philosopher Terence McKenna, who in his 1989 book True Hallucinations described entities that would appear during his DMT trips:

“During my own experiences smoking synthesized DMT in Berkeley, I had had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures. Dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Faberge eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry…”

What is interesting is that these creatures have been described by Amazon tribes for thousands of years, but they give them a different name and describe them differently. Yet they are small and do the same things, dance around and move fast.

Multiple reports are also recorded of these creatures - again, described in different ways - but always small, energetic, and in great multitudes by Westerners who explore DMT without being familiar with McKenna’s work, or the experiences of the South American tribes.

Same experiences, different descriptions with underlying commonalities.

These plants, the sacred plants, have travelled with us and exist in different forms, opening up different doors into reality, all over the world.

The experiences reported from them are uniformly equal, yet their interpretations can be radically different. For some people, they see electric raccoons, others see fairies, others see elves, others see greys. But they are all dancing or moving in dance-like patterns, and they all have overwhelming numbers.

That’s just one commonality.

There are many commonalities within particular sacred plants and their chemical derivatives.

In other words, peyote, for example, will have many common experiences among users, who will interpret those experiences according to their culture, memories, beliefs, and frequency.

Ayahuasca is a plant mix which opens up communication with the plant kingdom. How this communication is interpreted has a lot to do with the practitioner and the person carrying out the ritual. But inevitably, it involves the plant kingdom.

The main difference, therefore, between lettuce and ayahuasca is not so much in importance, because they are both very important to us as a species, but one of function.

Lettuce nourishes us and provides a great background for lovely salad dressings, while ayahuasca opens a communication line to the plant kingdom.

In the end, sacredness seems to be a co-creation between the plant, the human, and the journey itself. A collaboration equal parts biology, psychology, and cosmic comedy, where leaves whisper secrets, humans pretend they’re in charge, and reality quietly rearranges itself behind the scenes so we can make sense of it.

Not much different to what we call “real” when looking at the world without sacred plants in our bodies, if you think about it.

I hope you enjoyed this essay, my dear lecturian, don’t forget to press “subscribe”, and do visit us at drivingtotherez.com for our regular podcast.