Dispatches from the Field, a new digital program designed to bring The Explorers Club community closer—wherever you are.
Each session kicks off with a 15-20-minute talk from a Featured Speaker, recorded and posted later to the public on explorers.org and our YouTube channel.
This will be followed by Campfire sessions—intimate, Members-Only breakout groups where you can connect, share ideas, and build relationships.
This edition features Rebekah Senānāyaka FI’25, to present “From Amazonia to the East: Psychoactive Plants and the Oldest Tree”
Was it the Buddha or the tree that became enlightened, or both? After a decade of ethnobotanical fieldwork in Amazonia, this talk brings new research from the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in Sri Lanka, the oldest living genetic material of the tree the Buddha attained enlightenment under. The hypothesis it presents is that an underlying altered states fabric connects psychoactive plant encounters in the Amazon with deep meditative practice in Buddhist tradition. In Amazonia, distinct psychoactive plants each open a different door, while the Buddhist path works through sustained meditative practice with a single ancient tree. This talk explores what those convergences reveal about how humans have ritually engaged with intelligences beyond the human for millennia and the nature of our conscious reality.
Members only – click here to register.
Rebekah Senānāyaka
Dr. Rebekah Senānāyaka is a cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist whose work explores beyond-human intelligence through ritual and altered states of consciousness. Her doctoral research focused on plant intelligence and traditional knowledge in Amazonia, drawing on 27 months of fieldwork across a decade of engagement in Peru and Colombia. She is a Fellow International of The Explorers Club, a founding member of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund As1 Next Generation Advisory Council, and founder of Inner Visions, a consciousness consultancy. She is currently conducting fieldwork in Sri Lanka, weaving Amazonian traditional knowledge with Eastern wisdom.
