JULY 23, SUNDAY

METAPHOR AND REALITY

My next door neighbor, Jon Scoville, yesterday recommended the film “Fantastical Fungi” to me and I bought it and watched it last night. The film parallels “Entangled Life” but with thinner explanations along with beautiful videos of fungi of all kinds and enthusiastic personal responses to fungi, particularly to the effects of magic mushrooms through the hallucinatory power of psilocybin.

Merlin Sheldrake is a little more restrained in his scientific analysis of some of the properties of fungi, but the overall picture is the same.

One suggestion in the film is that our pre human ancestors discovered magic mushrooms, which is likely, and that the effects of psilocybin on the brain contributed to the rapid expansion of the human brain, particularly to the development of our ability to expand our consciousness by connecting sounds to objects through words which led to complex languages which allowed us to greatly expand and share our connections to the world around us. The film suggests that the power of psilocybin to expand the connections of the brain to everything in the universe through language could be the what enlarged our brains and made us human.

This idea, as far as I understand, is unproven. But what was demonstrated in the film was that ingesting small amounts of psilocybin leads to a huge opening up of perception along with a feeling of intense joy that allows the overcoming of depression for people who are depressed. For people about to die, this feeling of joy overcomes the fear of death

But the connection that I personally make to this opening up intensity of psilocybin is much more modest and with no scientific proof at all.

Words themselves, language, is a way to open up to and a way to respond to everything outside and everything within us. This magic power is within each one of us. And for some of us, certainly for me, this power of words brings a feeling of delight. I don’t need psilocybin, although I am sure that psilocybin could enhance this power to connect my mind with everything that I can perceive.

I can give a very simple example from my own experience. It is what I am doing right now. I sit down and open my mind and begin to write about the film that I saw yesterday. I have a sense that something has touched me but I don’t know what. I begin to write. And from somewhere is coming a stream of words in complete sentences, even complete thoughts and paragraphs. But all I am doing is allowing these words to appear by writing them down. They almost appear magically on the iPad screen in front of me. Not only do they appear, but whatever the process is that turns intense feeling into words on the screen is a pleasureable process. I don’t think writing is for everyone, but it is for me. It is such a pleasureable process that I start in on it at 6 in the morning and can do it all day. It might not be as intense as the effect of psilocybin which seems to manifest itself in hallucinatory visions rather than words but I am guessing that it is a similar feeling. The process, more like jogging or meditating than scholarly analysis, is pleasant it itself. It isn’t the importance of what I am saying to myself as these words hit the screen that gives pleasure, it is the process of emotional awareness turning into black and white words on the page that is pleasureable. It is more like surfing than analysis. Something within me feels the crest of the wave and then surfs along with the idea or the feeling for ten or fifteen minutes. The surfing can start with some form of inner tension that works itself out in some form of resolution by transforming feeling to words.

That is as close as I can describe it. I don’t know where these words come from or why they come in an ordered way. I don’t rewrite what appears on the page, I have no control over it, it just happens.

But it feels to me as if this process of being able to make ordered connections to the swirl of life within me is very close to the way that fungi make thousands of underground connections to the nutrients in the soil, mostly breaking down vegetation and transforming it to carbon and releasing oxygen as well as connecting to the roots of trees and the plant life all around them in a symbiotic relationship. This may be more a metaphorical feeling than a scientific explanation, but metaphor is more real to me than scientific proof in any case. I like the metaphors of the film and feel they connect with the way that the pleasure in writing this post feels to me.