true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
On other occasions I saw alternative futures where the knowledge of the mushroom was not fused with humanity's restless expansionism. I
saw a planet covered with a society of slave-worker machine symbiots. I saw the life of North American society running through several
hundred years of upheaval and political change, an image like a great animated, war-planning map. The dualism of fascism and democracy
hung around North America's neck like an albatross. Again and again, nightmare police-state fascism would sweep like a fouled tide over the
aspirations of the people, and again and again, the subtlety of the people would organize against the stupidity of the oppressor. They would
rise in wild and bloody
revolt to secure the space of a few generations in which to inaugurate attempts at democratic social reform.
The mushroom always returned to the theme that it was wise in the ways of evolution and sympathetic therefore to a symbiotic union with
what it referred to as "the human beings." It was eager to share its own sense of the howness of things, a sense that had been developed over
millions of years of conscious experience as an intelligent organism radiating through the galaxy. From its point of view, the mushroom is an
elder life form, and as such it offers its tempering experience to a vibrant but naive child-race standing for the first time on the brink of flight
to the stars. As our imagination has striven outward to attempt to encompass the possibility of the intelligent Other somewhere in the starry
galaxy, so has the Other, observing this, revealed itself to be among us, when we are in the psilocybin trance, as an aspect of ourselves. In the
phenomenon of Stropharia cubensis, we are confronted with an intelligent and seemingly alien life-form, not as we commonly imagine it, but
an intelligent alien life nevertheless. In the often zany way that it does, popular culture has anticipated even this odd turn of events. Invasion
of the Mushroom People, a schlocko-socko B science fiction film from those same good folks who brought us Godzilla, contains a final scene
in which a team of Japanese explorers are transformed beyond the reach of audience identification into a group of mushrooms singing together
in an islanded Asian rain forest.
Only an anachronistic lack of informed self-reflection would lead one to suppose that an intelligent, alien life-form would be even remotely
like ourselves. Evolution is an unceasing river of forms and adaptive solutions to special conditions, and culture is even more so. It is far more
likely that an alien intelligence would be barely recognizable to us than that it should overwhelm us with such similarities as humanoid form
and an intimate knowledge of our gross industrial capacity. Star-traveling species could be presumed to have a sophisticated knowledge of
genetics and DNA function and therefore would not necessarily bear the form that evolution on a native planet had given them. They might
well look as they wished to look. The mushroom, with its habit of living off nonliving organic matter and its cobweb-fragile underground
network of ephemeral mycelium, seems an organism designed with
Buddhist values of noninterference and low environmental impact in mind.
In the late summer of 1975, Dennis and I decided that the world we were exploring required a wider audience. We hoped to establish a
community of consensus about what was going on. To that end we wrote and published a guide to the method we had developed cultivating
the Stropharia. At the beginning of that little book, I introduced what we had personally learned about the world of the mushroom:
The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind:
"I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages, I am
from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disk of the galaxy have conditions which allow my
spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing. My true body is a fine
network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than the number in a human
brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal—only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out.
By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality, all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in
hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web, but the collective hypermind and memory
is a huge historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to
those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across
the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a
suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently
evolved near relatives have achieved the hypercommuni-cation mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community
of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should
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