Review of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby | Mufti Abu Layth

right so people let's do a review of let's do the review people let's do the review that's what i'm talking about so peoples i wanna present to you a book by jeremy nobby i've spoken

[Music] to my gambling habit [Laughter] right so this book called the cosmic serpent dna and the origin of and the origin of knowledge okay you can see that right there right so this book has been it has been so overwhelming i you know what i

am honestly wowed by this book i i would rate this book like maybe i don't know 8.5 out of 10. okay it is amazing but it is for a select people a select readership it's maybe not for everyone and i feel by that i even put myself in that feeling that had have i found this book

um how have i read this book let's say a year ago a year and a half ago i would have probably put it down halfway thinking what on earth what a waste of time [Laughter] i would have probably i'm i'm being real with you because the origin the origins of knowledge dna and the origins of knowledge and this book is about the journey of an anthropologist jeremy naby it's written in the first person and he gives his subjective experience of

this westerner who becomes acquainted accidentally you know it's it's just happenstance i mean he's in the uh staying with the amazonian people for an anthropological project but happens to become acquainted with the world view which is that of the realm of the shaman okay shamanism and how this shamanistic culture pervades and prevails

right through reality it is reality in amongst the ashaninka people who he stays amongst he's not there for that purpose but he ends up picking all of this up experiencing psychedelics learning about shaman mythology and just being a bit kind of dazed out by and then he returns to where he is and a decade later finds himself embarking on a project where he tries to reconcile between the experience of the shaman and western biological understandings that

what we experience is it out there or is it in here and is there a way to connect the two what the shamans are seeing can it have a kind of actual reality and he ends up arriving at the conclusion that we can and what he feels that that missing link is dna and dna he feels is active it's an active element okay it's these animated essences or sorry not animated but animate essences

that he feels dna is alive now we accept dna is kind of alive but we don't generally in the western biological understanding see dna as you see we see it as communicating its code like it replicates its code and it kind of creates it's a constructionist mechanism it's it's a constructionist language it constructs so by the example you know somebody asked about nicotine when you consume nicotine the dna actually constructs you know the impact it will have

your body will construct nicotinic receptors more nicotinic receptors and the dna is doing that this kind of epi genetics is taking place a kind of interaction between your genes and the environment now science obviously accepts that that is science but does dna communicate with as an essence it is it communicating now he's arguing that all since all life has dna plants everything bacteria you know the most simple

at the most simplest level of an individual kind of dna entity we see bacteria now all around us there will be then dna there may be bacteria in the air there may be other things in the ear there may be things that um you know we can't visibly see um but yet it still has but it's still it still has dna now these what we do know from science is dna does emit a kind of

it emits photons these kind of biophotons which correspond to a kind of radio wavelength now what he argues for is that dna constructs throughout the globe a biosphere because it emits a persistent ray this kind of this kind of light at a radio wave length level now he this he feels that this wavelength can communicate dna can communicate with people but not like this because we can't see it like this it

you know we would be meaningless because we wouldn't register but if we like the shamans were to lower our consciousness to that level we may engage with dna and because dna by the way these photons that are emitted are actually on the visual spectrum they are between infrared and ultraviolet rays i mean they are on that bandwidth so it is something detectable but we just can't see it with the naked eye so he sets off to argue that this ashaninka culture

because there's a the shamans interpret it in light of their mythology but it doesn't mean it's nonsense and the way the sham and the shamans have acquired all this knowledge and when they ask they say we acquire it from these light beings this anime anima essences which they call the maninkari these kind of beings of light that taught them that maybe some people may call that time angels or divine inspiration or and that he's arguing

is perhaps a biosphere that is all around us however we want to interpret it and i i found that incredibly just mind-blowing honestly i i totally loved it it was a slightly slow read in the beginning when you begin the first chapter is a bit boring because he's kind of trying to lay a backdrop and then he on he kind of unveils his um reveals his his conclusion gradually like he doesn't kind of say hey guys this is what i want to talk about this biosphere and dna communicates and then sets off

in some ways i i i feel i it may have been better if he did but that's my opinion because what you have to do you have to kind of read through the whole book to arrive at what he's saying so if you've read through one third you you you still might not get it because he's alluding to something but he will go off track and then join dots so you might think he's just alluding to this point but he's not actually and he's just building it up and so i totally love the book um it is i think in many he speaks of the axis mundi that this is perhaps dna what all these people speak about how we

communicate with other realms and things but yeah and what sufis would call kash the unveiling which is done through breathing exercises so yeah so i absolutely do love it but i love it because of my interest in psychedelics and interest in the realm of consciousness and interest in these things i feel that things like dmt and psilocybin and all these things are amazing things they're not haram and i feel that although they are issues of legality but i feel that they are the kind of gateway the portal to the realm of the unconscious

or consciousness sorry so yeah i absolutely um do recommend it for people who are only interested in that if you're not interested in that you will probably hate it you probably think what a load of baloney i mean what a waste of time you'd probably think but if you are into that it is um an absolute you know it's it's brilliant so yeah so from me uh definitely like 8.5 out of 10 and i must recommend for people who are kind of conscious consciousness explorers

cool people