When James Arthur decided to experiment with Salvia divinorum, a Mexican visionary plant sacred to the Mazatecs, he was expecting a hallucinogenic experience'but not the transformation of his entire view of the world. With repeated sessions over the course of several years, he began returning to the same inner landscape, where he found himself entering a unique state of ?thoughtless awareness? and accessing a mode of language that articulated a distinctive form of understanding and communication. The repeated immersion in these states of trance, as well as the analysis of their approach and withdrawal, led to a profound re-assessment of the nature of our normal perception, and a re-evaluation of our habitual sensory bias in defining what we normally refer to as the real world.