Fragmented Lessons Taught by a Fungus (PII)

leaky20 (65)in #philosophy • 6 years ago

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

-Terence McKenna

TAKING MUSHROOMS

My first time taking mushrooms was an exciting time for me. I had been wanting to try them for a long time and now I was finally getting a chance. I was with a large group of friends at a cottage which is probably the best place to take mushrooms in my opinion because mushrooms provide a certain kind of earthy high that truly makes you feel connected to nature and the planet in general. Being away from technology and noise and light pollution, is probably one of the best things a person can do if they decide to ingest the fungus.

We sat around a camp fire surrounded by water and trees and the stars - my god the stars. They shown in the sky with an intensity and force like I had never seen before. They looked so close that I felt as though I could reach out and touch them. At one point I looked up and a shooting star streaked across the night’s sky like a rocket. It’s light burnt a pathway across my retina and for a moment I was awestruck.

We sat around the fire and watched the fascinating ball of energy that seemed to spring up out of the earth from nowhere. It radiated heat and I could feel the intensity of the energy that it gave off. I was witnessing a profound physical chemical reaction that was taking place on an atomic level. Bonds between carbon atoms in the wood that fueled the fire were being rapidly split apart. The stored energy of the sun was being released back into the atmosphere in the form of heat and light. I watched in fascination.

Everything is fascinating when you’re on mushrooms. When they first hit I was looking at the ground – at the dirt and pine needles and stones, and I remember thinking in that moment that it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

My friend’s dog was with us. At one point he got excited and began nipping at the air trying to catch sparks that were whirling out of the fire like light bugs trying to escape an impeding doom. The whole scene was comical and appeared somewhat cartoonish. In that moment the character “Scooby Doo” popped into my mind and I could feel the image in my head transposing itself onto my friends dog. I thought, “man he looks like Scooby Doo.” The image in my mind overlapped with my sensory perception as if my brain were trying to physically turn the dog into the cartoon character. It was a strange process and I realized in that moment that my mind was capable of creating the reality that I experience every day. In that moment I truly realized that our perceptions are largely influenced by our experiences. One of the powers of the mushroom is that it blurs the lines between the reality “out there” and the reality in one’s head. I believe this is how hallucinations happen. Your mind "wills" false images into existence by transposing your thoughts and imaginations onto your external sensory perception.

Sitting around the fire I began to notice that its light was limited in its strength. It was extremely bright at its center but its brightness dissipated rapidly. I realized that I could only actually see about 15 feet outwards in any direction. Beyond that there was only blackness, except for maybe a few reflections on the water. I began to wonder if a reality actually existed beyond what I could see in that given moment. I guess from an individual perspective it did not. The perception of reality requires an observing force. Without an observing force perception cannot does not happen which begs the question – does a reality not perceived truly exist? My perception was limited by the light which allowed me to see and despite being outside, I felt as though I was in a box or in a room.

I also began having strange thoughts about my own mind and body. The fact that I could watch my body made me think that there was something inside my head peering out of the tiny windows in my head that we call eyes. What is it that actually looks out into the world? In that moment it definitely felt like something separate from my physical body. The obvious answer of course is that, it’s my brain that is the witness of my perceptions. However, the whole notion gets pretty confusing when you consider that your physical brain is also a part of your body and that the true perceiver is not something that is physical. Ultimately in that moment it felt like something that I couldn’t explain was controlling my body from another dimension - like my body was an avatar for some other entity that was actually in control and that the entity existed in two different but connected worlds.

Hours passed and we eventually all decided to go to bed. Unfortunately mushrooms do not allow you to sleep even though you are physically and mentally exhausted. I laid in my sleeping bag and stared at the inside of my eye lids. My mind kept going for hours and at one point I had a very strong feeling that one’s belief about aging actually created the aging process. We believe that we will get old so our mind manifests “getting older” into reality. We see others getting older and so we believe that we ourselves must naturally get older as well. I eventually came to the conclusion that ‘age’ is a very powerful placebo effect in action. It was a strange thought but it was so powerful that it became a belief in that moment. Much like the main idea in the movie “Inception” that belief became a seed in my mind that has lasted to this day and still makes me question the aging process.