I didn't say *the* normal state of reality, I said their normal state.

And that's not untrue, so why do you think you've proved Hancock a liar?

There's only one reality that we're all in all the time.

And you just happen to know the precise shape of it all? Reality just unfolded its entire mysteries for you and you alone, I guess.

No. But it didn't unfold itself to anyone else either. Shamans have never produced a single falsifiable hypothesis. Reality is exposed but by bit through observation and experimentation. Preferably while sober.

The combination of plants that creates ayahuasca appeared in a dream. Shamans have identified cancers and illnesses in people. If science can’t cope with these realities, that’s a science problem.

That's it. Shamans appear in disparate cultures over millenia upon millenia, helping people in astounding and near-inexplicable ways... And modern academia is just like, 'well, they believe in spirits and take drugs so they must be dumb - now off I go to work to pay my $400,000 mortgage, because that's sensible'.

We owe these traditions an astonishing unacknowledged debt, and the people telling us so are ferociously attacked.

It's a shame. And it will change.