Markus Berger

Psychoactive plants and their ingredients, or the plants in their holistic manifestation of the one consciousness that we all are, sometimes serve as microscopes to look deep into our inner realities. Steven F. White and Jill Pflugheber’s work Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas, which combines art and science in an astonishing way, again provides a microscopic view into the innermost parts of these fascinating beings. We witness how life itself is a psychedelic journey – how the revealing soul creates forms of expression from formlessness for the sake of experience. In the here and now. We are all woven from the same physical fabric, whether plants, fungi, animals or humans (as well as so-called dead matter). Steven and Jill’s work offers an amazing insight into the microcosms of psychoactive, shamanic organisms, combining meditation and the process of insight. It offers us the opportunity and at the same time gives us the gift of becoming aware again that things are not as they often appear and that there are an infinite number of different perspectives from which we can experience the one Being. I wish the work a wide and lasting dissemination.

Markus Berger from Germany is a cultural creator within the psychedelic movement, ethnopharmacologist and private drug researcher. Berger discovered, for example, the psychotropic properties of the orchid genus Dendrobium. He is author of almost 40 books on ethnobotany and psychoactive science and more than 3500 specialist articles on the subject of psychotropic substances. He is also editor-in-chief of the magazine Lucys Rausch and co-publisher of Nachtschatten Verlag. His magnum opus to date is the Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants, volume 2 of which he published with Christian Rätsch in 2022. www.markusberger.info