Mycelium and The Mystical Experience

Mycelium and The Mystical Experience
Returning to the mystical experience I had a year or so back had me thinking many things. As my ego and sense of self and separation dissolved, I entered the soil. Becoming one with the humus I spread throughout the forest floor. It is difficult to remember details though my sense was of being a subsurface interconnected network or web stretching several square miles. The extreme ties or size of the area I was able to explore had no real interest, all I knew was I was part of something far greater. Each particle of soil, each speck of broken down tree or rock held its own history. The life of the tree from acorn through shoot, to great arbor till finally falling, breaking down through decay and returning to the soil. Rock particles of sand also told their histories stretching back further to a time before plant life. This early stage of the experience I can recall most clearly. It is this stage that is relevant to Paul Stamets work on mushrooms. Ill return to him later but in a broader sense a shift is underway in scientific circles. Many cultures saw the land as alive. People like the Lani of West Papua who sing to the forest. Their environment is not inanimate, a mere backdrop for human activity as we tend toward in post Christian cultures. The forest for the Lani is one great being and to live is to be in constant exchange. They sing to it and the forest sings back.
Western minds struggle with this idea and often label it superstitious. To us the wild places are the source of resources. Even many naturalists focus on singular species failing to see the ecosystems as interactive wholes. All life forms evolve in codependence with a myriad of others. The notion that the non human world is inanimate is often represented as rational or scientific but is really a modern superstition. Though science is facing a reluctant about turn. Recent studies show that certain plants communicate with each other, releasing pheromones that warn of insect attacks. They signal to each other using a series of electrical impulses not unlike an animals nervous system. They send out airborne distress signals to insect predators that feed on the plant eaters who threaten them. Underground are mycelia. Vast networks connecting and weaving through the forest floor connecting the many root systems of plants, flowers and trees. Stamet suggests they are a complex system of interplant communication. Ecologist Stephen Harding suggests they "possess an eerie intelligence, and probably a peculiar sense of self to boot."
The supposedly secular western humanist clings to the Abrahamic notion that only humans possess consciousness or souls, and this gives us the right and duty to run the planet. Our treatment of animals and environment has been reprehensible and idiotically stupid in our destruction of the whole of which we are but a part. Scientists studying animal and plant consciousness are turning us back to older ways of seeing by modern means. Philosophers are beginning to accept that consciousness rather than being an emergent property of complex systems and unique to humans could well be a pillar of reality. As significant and ubiquitous if not more so than time, space or matter. The world around us looks to be sentient, aware and connected. As Adam ate of the apple and stepped away on his journey towards god hood leaving behind the singular whole it may be away from the truths earlier people's knew and into superstition and delusion that is causing the sixth great extinction.
My experience found something far greater than me taking me in to a reality so crisp and true that the everyday delusional state we live in became laughable. What took me in was not like any notion of a god known to me. As the experienced developed it grew far greater but the entry point was integration with the soil. Below the surface. Interestingly a standard shamanic practice the world over is to enter the underworld. As a shaman myself I use the system whereby, as one enters the transcendent state or other state of consciousness, through drumming and chanting most often, the shaman journeys to the lowerworld which has no connection to hades but is more a parallel reality where say a lost spirit animal guide can be refound for the dispirited individual who has sought help. Once in the state the shaman imagines a hole they know of, usually in a forest or piece of wild land they know well. The place I use now is one from recurrent dreams stretching back to childhood that I picture now in the area of woodland where my own epiphany took place. Was the mycelium taking me into the global or universal consciousness through its own consciousness? There was certainly a higher power at work. Another, greater consciousness of which my molecules became a part.
Some ideas from Paul Stamets work could be key to understanding what it was that happened to me. I have written in previous posts about the biology of mystical experiences and it seems likely that amongst their many uses or purposes, mushrooms are the trigger for human epiphany. The key to the necessary shift in our paradigm perspective if we are to survive as a species.
Previous extinctions like the one 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs have been caused by asteroids striking the Earth. Darkness follows as the ash cloud denies the planet of light. Each time it has been mycelium, fungi that has returned life to the planet. Fungi predates plant life by a long way. 1.3 billion years ago fungi was alive on earth. 600 million years later plants followed. Through the ability to form tendrils with cell walls of one cell thickness, mycelia can grow through rocks, breaking them down. They create humus. They stand between life and death, breaking down the plant matter, creating nutritious soil for new life to form. Biodiversity follows in abundance. We share a common ancestry with fungi. A super kingdom links animals and fungi and this common origin means the same concerns. We both breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. As we grew thicker cell walls and consumed using internal stomachs we stepped onto land. Far earlier mycelium took to the land though they went underground using external stomachs to find nourishment from the stuff they brushed against. We walk above a complex world we know little about. Mycelium mats, the subterranean network of fibrous growth of which mushrooms are the fruiting body are the largest organisms on the planet. Beneath our feet in field, supporting forests above, they can grow to thousands of square metres in size. Such is their complexity that within a single square inch of soil, the cellular fibres, if stretched out, cover eight miles. Eight miles of mycelium in a cubic inch. The biggest known organism in the world is in Eastern Oregon, 2000 acres in size is this mycelium mat. A highly evolved being, of cell wall of a single cell, serving as lungs, externalised stomach, a neuro biological network in constant communication to all parts. These sentient organisms pervade all ecosystems. Aware of humans footsteps as they walk through, seeking out the debris disturbed. Where nutrients are unavailable mycelium can communicate the need to other extremities and transport requirements a hundred or more yards. Givers of life to plants and animals by breaking down rocks in to humus. Stood between life and death, breaking down dead trees into mulch nutrients feeding bigger trees. Breaking down death to create life. Perhaps it is from here that a fear or phobia seems to grow. Stamets refers to a racism against fungi. The dark and dank places, the superstitious fear of toadstools, an inherent feeling of disgust in many that urges them to look away. Yet our very existence is entwined and dependent on fungi. Our evolutionary roots are shared, we evolved from fungi. One has to wonder of this disdain is shared also. In logging we cut down and burn, hoping for a hit of carbon yet killing the mycelium below. Now open to the sun the ground grows dead as the soil becomes nutritionally thinner. A forestry of decreasing returns. If mycelium is the life bringer below ground then we are the death bringer above.
As far as we know, the current extinction our over population is causing is the sixth in the planets history. Two we know of were caused by asteroids hitting the planet. The dust and ash cloud brought darkness killing 90% of all life. Mycelium, not needing light, survived both and initiated both repopulation and creation of the new ecosystems. Fungi inherited the Earth. Fossil records from 450 million years ago show a planet with no planet higher than two feet though a fossil found in Saudi Arabia came from a thirty foot high mushroom. One can try to picture a land of ferns no higher than your thigh interspersed with the occasional towering mushroom as tall as a house. The oldest none buried human so far found is nicknamed the iceman. Preserved as he was in life, not laid out for death, he carried two fungi. These tree growth fungi still grow today and are of a type that can take a spark and smoulder for a week or more. With such fungi he was able to carry fire on his travels. In legend the keeper of the flame, the carrier of fire has always had a significant role. Similar fungi played a role in the development of firearms, ground down they carry the spark to the gunpowder.
Stamets points out that fungi follow catastrophe. Returning life to the planet after the asteroid extinctions. Humans leave catastrophic mess in their wake. Timber milling for example leaves wood chips in its wake that see rare species become abundant. Mycelium is often the missing component in permaculture and agriculture. Mycelium make soil. It is expected that at least half the planets species will become extinct in the next hundred years, 90% or more as yet unidentified.
To ward off pathogens, fungi I have developed numerous antibacterial and antiviral compounds. Our shared ancestry means these offer a vast resource in medicines. People of traditional cultures the world over have used these for years. In 1929 Alexander Flemming discovered Penicillium Rubens mold and so began antibiotics. A factor in the allies victory over the nazis was superior anti biotics and many further discoveries found us able to eight infection. Sadly overuse now risks this valued resource. Cheese, beer, wine, bread use moods and yeasts. Stamets work now uses mycelium to breakdown organic pollutants like oil and petroleum. The aftermath of chemical warfare against the Kurds saw his studies allocating species to breakdown anthrax. Further his work finds possible cures for viral disease HIV being an example. Working together with mycelium we may find a sympathetic existence with the planet. It is a law of nature that if a species overpopulates to the ecosystems overall harm the host body will reject it. It is hubris to think we should be unique in being seperate from the biodiversity of a singular and complex whole. If my experience could be placed into words it would be akin to this. For a time I lost self and drifted into the whole. An interdependent singular, much like Lovelocks Gaia or quantum theories multiple arrangements in a singular molecular field. We are one. Whether our puny consciousness, our arrogant measure of an equal being or God, became of such redundancy as a question when faced with something so much greater than a single man and his mind.
Mycelium masses form a planetary web, a mass of fibrous tissue, that largely goes unseen until it breaks surface to form the fruiting mushroom body. The intricate branching of threadlike membranes whose structure, inescapably resembles brain cells. To imagine sentience, a high intelligence is hard to avoid. The similarities are numerous from the way both brains and mycelium grow new connections and prune existing ones in response to environmental changes to the use of chemical messengers to transmit signals throughout a cellular web. Mycelium actively help trees and an explanation of how saplings trapped in darkened forest corners survive. Through one parts requesting another part for specific nutrients hundreds of yards away the mycelium can address such crises. The brain and the mycelium mass evolved as similar structures to perform similar jobs. Nature repeats successful patterns. Stamets sees other parallels in the information architecture of the Internet, in the matrices of string theory, in computer models of the web of dark matter suffusing the cosmos. The mycelial archetype is mirrored throughout the universe. Such recurrences are signs of an evolutionary intelligence governing reality itself.
As a youth discovering magic mushrooms, the Liberty Cap abundant where grew up, my eyes were opened to such a new perspective the change was beyond puberty. For a few seasons I religiously picked psylocibin mushrooms and took many trips. Of these some delivered real epiphanies. I saw the light. I understood. Once the eye became attuned, areas of land that once seemed barren suddenly lit up as the light caps became visible. Looking back the mycelium offered them up to me. Not that I am special in anyway. Others of my circle had the same experience. Once I recoiled back to my materialist scientific upbringing I rarely saw them again. As though not required hence invisible. As I struggled to verbalise or put the understanding in to words I slipped into thinking that these states were delusions. That it only felt like I understood. For this reason and an increasing inability to contain the two realities I gave them up along with LSD the other psychedelic I used. I felt as though our youthful dream was over. Many turned to other drugs and alcohol. As the free festival scene and New Age traveller movement was targeted and crushed by the government my mystical moments I buried.
Quite by chance, in exploring the research chemical bubble where loopholes in the law allowed new substances a window of legality I discovered AL LAD. Across the spectrum many new compounds mimicked illegal counterparts. On occasion they were trumped massively. The three or four years saw development in psychoactive substances accelerate till new improvements on the rough and cut street drugs were becoming available on the internet one a week. Of course there were as many if not more failures and poor imitations.
Lysergic acid diethlamide 25, LSD or, under contemporary distinctions, METH LAD was discovered famously by Albert Hoffman the same year the atom was split. Derived from ergot, a mold peculiar to rye grain, western culture was changed. As though these two discoveries offered a fork in the road. Destruction or enlightenment. At first used by intellectuals it ultimately made it to the public by the sixties. This revolution saw the birth or growth of environmentalism, feminism, vegetarianism, a craft revival and numerous shifts in culture still playing out today. Though the cause of only rare accidents the authorities clamped down on LSD with a zeal beyond cocaine or heroin. Dangerous drugs with violent cultures of supply. Mushrooms saw a minor cultural blossoming in the early eighties. This is all well covered elsewhere. But within the research chemical scene first AL LAD and LSZ became available. Later came ETH LAD, 1p-LSD, ALD 52, PRO LAD, a divergent family of lysergamides. Many had been discovered in the 1970s but largely unexplored. After a few trips I learned AL LAD offered a trip similar to LSD yet less challenging. In its manufacture LSD must first be made and four fifths is lost in the processing meaning that it only made commercial sense to reduce product so profoundly if it was legal.
A product synthesised from ergot, a fungi, triggered the mystical experience that was to change my life. I have written many posts about it so won't here other than to say this. After abandoning the epiphanies on psylocibin mushrooms of my youth I followed a workaholic path. Furniture design and making offered a creative practice by which to both make a living and explore artistically. After thirty years obsessing over objects I'd developed habits to cope that were unhealthy. The AL LAD did three things. It rendered a materialist obsession with objects wasteful. It cured my tendency towards stress of work, depression and substance misuse as a coping strategy. Thirdly it ridiculed the materialist scientific atheist outlook I had developed. I must have done AL LAD no more than twenty times but only the final one qualifies as a mystical experience. Just as with the thousand odd mushroom trips and few hundred LSD trips of my youth only a handful were of a mystical quality. It is wrong to think these substances always deliver transcendent states. But on occasion they do. My final AL LAD trip took me so far beyond anything before they feel like single letters to the book.
Mystical experiences are generally interpreted within an individual's cultural or religious framework. Mine occurred in woodland. Whether the mycelium beneath the forest floor reached out for me I don't know, but it was into this underground network I first entered. The forest took me in. I lost any sense of separation as my particles dispersed amongst the whole. There were all the qualities of the divine. The sense of a higher power. The sense of being taken. The sense of universal love. A benevolence. A singular consciousness of which we are part. Innefabilty, not explicable with language. A gnosis. The gift of a knowledge or understanding. My life had grown tangled but I was taken above all trivial concerns and freed to see the greater truth. Reading Stamets work, how I experienced this stood on a mycelium mass, it's reflections in the mushroom trips of my youth, coming from a synthesis of ergot, all point towards the entity or sentience that spoke to me either being the mycelium or using the mycelium to connect.
On Sunday, as these thoughts span round my head, quite by chance I was given three Brazilian psylocibin mushrooms. They weren't sufficient to deliver a trip. They did, however, give me a warm reconnection. A message for later in the year. In our new warm damp climate I imagine mushrooms will be more abundant than thirty years ago when I last took them. Now I find myself unconsciously looking for likely fields to go check in a few months time.


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