I am looking at a culture in which our capacity for cyberception allows us to move effortlessly without encumbrance across a phenomenological continuum. By Virtual Reality I am referring to much more than a singular technology. Apart from Mixed Reality which combines real and virtual events into a seamless whole, and Augmented Reality which allows the viewer to see simultaneously both the internal dynamics and the external features of an object of study, as for example in surgery, VR encompasses a whole ontology of telepresence, of sensory immersion, and immaterial connectivity, which affords the VR changes the way we view ourselves, the manner of our comportation, and environments we wish to inhabit.

Validated Reality, our daily experience, is familiar to us all. It is the orthodox universe of causal "common sense", the way we are taught at school to view the world, a consensual reality established early in our lives by the constant repetition of its axioms. Validated Reality finds it hard to accept the world views of quantum physics, eastern mysticism, or the many conflicting models of consciousness generated by contemporary scientists, across a wide range of disciplines, in their attempts to bridge the explanatory gap that prevents our understanding of this ultimate mysterium. Those whose minds have been conditioned to accept Validated Reality as the only reality balk at the implications of nano-technology, and have great difficulty in coming to terms with genetic modelling and the scope of biotechnics in redefining Nature. In short, Validated Reality is authorised reality, whose narrow confines delimit the sense of what we are or what we could be. Nevertheless it controls the co-ordinates of our daily life, dictates the protocols of our behaviour, and provides an illusion of coherence in a contingent universe. It has been Validated Reality, which has created Nature as an array of objects set in Euclidean space, rather than a dynamic network of processes and relationships.

Vegetal Reality, the third axis of reality following the Big Bang, is quite unfamiliar to Western praxis, despite the extensive researches of Richard Evans Schultes, Professor of Ethnobotany at Harvard, for example, or the proselytising of the late Terence McKenna. Vegetal Reality can be understood in the context of technoetics, as the transformation of consciousness by plant technology. In this case, the plant technology involved supports a canon of practice and insight which is archaic in its human application, known to us principally through the work of shamans, largely visionary and often operating in a context of healing which is distant in the extreme from the Validated Reality of western medicine. However, frequently during the past century we have seen how the shaman's knowledge of plants has been appropriated, and synthesised by the pharmacutical industry. This ancient knowledge provides us with some of the more spectacular products of modern medicine.

What has all this to do with the central concern of our symposium today? Is not the lore of plants rather more gnomic and occult than genomic and transparent? Aren't matters genetic best left to scientists in their labs rather than medicine men in their forests? In any case, who can master the formulaic intricacies of genome-speak? Well in fact, this is at the centre of my thinking on genes. In my opinion shamanic culture has everything to do with these matters—with DNA, genetic communication, and molecular manipulation. Although we know little neurologically about how entheogens, the psychoactive ingredients of the shaman's plants, work on the human organism, there is nothing mysterious or magical about their efficacy. In this respect it is worth referring at this point to the research of Jeremy Narby, embodied in the book Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge which relates shamanic knowledge to a kind of shared genetic matrix.

Narby suggests is that the shaman is, in some way, communicating with his own DNA, and this is where his informative visions originate. We have to remember that we do not know why most of our DNA is there. After all a mere 3% accounts for the whole diversity of life. Narby thinks the shamans information comes from the mysterious junk DNA, the 97% we don't account for. He also points out that it is known that DNA in one cell exchanges signals with the DNA in other cells. He suggests that, once someone taps into their own DNA, it can then communicate across organisms, across species—even across the boundary between animal and plant—and that the totality of all the DNA in the world forms a kind of matrix. This transmission of signals between DNA in separate cells is effected by the emission of photons, the signals are in the form of light, and at a wavelength visible to humans. The DNA in one cell transmits and receives signals from DNA in other cells. This is done by emitting photons—biophotons—that is, they actually exchange signals in the form of light, at a wavelength that is visible to humans.

Narby's working hypothesis is that shamans can take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which in their terms are "animate essences" or "spirits." He writes: "Here they see double helixes, twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes. In this way shamanic cultures have known for millennia that the vital principle is the same for all living beings and is shaped like two entwined serpents (or a vine, a rope, a ladder... ). DNA is the source of their botanical and medicinal knowledge, which can be attained only in defocalized and "nonrational" states of consciousness, though its results are empirically verifiable. The myths of these cultures are filled with biological imagery. And the shamans' metaphoric explanations correspond quite precisely to the descriptions that biologists are starting to provide".

Before we dismiss critically these ideas as "merely metaphorical" ie not real genetic or biological science we should remember perhaps that the war of interpretation in quantum physics was won with metaphor by Neils Bohr and his Copenhagen School, as Mara Beller of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has shown in her recent book Quantum Dialogue; the making of a revolution. Just as she argues for dialogical discourse rather than paradigmatic dogma within science, so I think we should attempt to build a dialogic discourse between western science and native bodies of knowledge. The ethnobotanical studies of the late Edward Schultes of Harvard has opened the way to this.

In the early 1980s, Narby points out, it was shown that the cells of all living beings emit photons at a rate of up to approximately 100 units per second and per square centimeter of surface area, with DNA as the source of this photon emission. The wavelength at which DNA emits these photons corresponds exactly to the narrow band of visible light. Yet this did not constitute proof that the light emitted by DNA, an ulta-weak signal, was what shamans saw in their visions. However, the signal is highly coherent, and a coherent source of light, like a laser, gives the sensation of bright colors, a luminescence, and an impression of holographic depth It could well be then that DNA's highly coherent photon emission accounted for the luminescence of hallucinatory images, as well as their three-dimensional, or holographic, aspect.

On the basis of this connection, Narby conceived of a neurological mechanism for his hypothesis. The molecules of nicotine or dimethyltryptamine, contained in ayahuasca activate their respective receptors, which set off a cascade of electrochemical reactions inside the neurons, leading to the stimulation of DNA and, more particularly, to its emission of visible waves, which shamans perceive as "hallucinations." There, he concluded, is the source of knowledge: DNA, living in water and emitting photons, like an aquatic dragon spitting fire.

I think it is worth reciting this account of Narby's work because it amplifies the intuition that there is much to be gained in both biological sciences and the arts from research which seeks correspondences and collaborations between the two technologies of machines and plants, within the natrificial space of the Three VRs, virtual, validated and vegetal. In this new knowledge terrain, the planet shrinks to make the Brazilian rain forest contiguous with Silicon Valley, where the jaguar lies down with the lamb .