Plant Conversation 2: Luis Eduardo Luna and Kristi Onzik
hosted by Alex Greene
Join anthropologists Luis Eduardo Luna (representing ayahuasca) and Kristi Onzik (representing the passionflower) as they delve into philosophical and existential questions inspired by plants. Dichotomies like science and religion and waking and dreaming emerge in the conversation and are unpacked. Their discussion of the limitations of (human) language leads to a recognition of the importance of careful terminology and the search for new modes of expression in understanding plant cognition and consciousness. Finally, Luis and Kristi turn their gaze to embodiment itself, and ask what plants can teach us about ‘individuality’.
In a way, all storytelling is a kind of dreaming, all of life is a kind of dreaming.
“Certainties. I have less and less certainties, but I have more and more questions.”
“I became the plant, the plant was me, we were one, and there was communication happening that I currently cannot portray in the English language.”
“You know, I was thinking that as children we are all animistic. And our ancestors were all animistic. So in fact this Western way of approaching the world is deception, and it is quite new.”
“We started to talk about plants, and we ended at philosophy, or cosmology, because we are wondering about the nature of reality… To think with plants is to be open to those questions”
Luis Eduardo Luna is director of Wasiwaska, Research Center for the Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Art, and Consciousness, Florianópolis, Brazil
Kristi Onzik is an ethnographer of science with a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California Davis
Alex Greene grew up hoping to become a 19th century naturalist