Conversations on shamanism and mind-altering plants by filmmaker Jan Kounen, anthropologist Jeremy Narby, and writer/filmmaker Vincent Ravalec • Explores how ayahuasca and iboga are tools for communicating with other life-forms • Offers insights into the role this indigenous knowledge can play in solving the current problems facing the world In the Amazon, shamans do not talk in terms of hallucinogens but of tools for communicating with other life-forms. Ayahuasca, for example, is first and foremost a means of breaking down the barrier that separates humans from other species, allowing us to communicate with them. The introduction of plant-centered shamanism into the Western world in the 1970s was literally the meeting of two entirely different paradigms. In The Psychotropic Mind, three of the individuals who have been at the forefront of embracing other ways of knowing look at the ramifications of the introduction into our Western culture of these shamanic practices and the psychotropic substances that support them.