How to Change Your Mind

“Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take
care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we
can understand.” Why us? “We humans are the most populous bipedal
organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially
interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a consciousness and
are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us
biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.”
These were riffs I’d heard Stamets deliver in countless talks and
interviews. “Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all
life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in
another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life
called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing
through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I
feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and
to which I will return at the end of this life.” Stamets sounded very much
like the volunteers I met at Hopkins who had had full-blown mystical
experiences, people whose sense of themselves as individuals had been
subsumed into a larger whole—a form of “unitive consciousness,” which,
in Stamets’s case, had folded him into the web of nature, as its not so
humble servant.
“I think Psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to
help steer and speed fungal evolution so that we can find solutions to our
problems.” Especially in a time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t
afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at its normal pace, to put forth
these solutions in time. Let the depatterning begin.
As Stamets held forth, and forth, I couldn’t help but picture in my
mind Alex Grey’s wacked painting of the stoned ape, with the tornadoes
of thought flying out of his hairy head. So much of what Stamets has to
say treads a perilously narrow ledge, perched between the autodidact’s
soaring speculative flights and the stoned crank’s late night riffings that
eventually send everyone in earshot off to bed. But just when I was
beginning to grow impatient with his meanders, and could hear the call of
my sleeping bag from inside the yurt, he, or I, turned a corner, and his
mycological prophecies suddenly appeared to me in a more generous
light.
The day before, Stamets had given me a tour of the labs and grow
rooms at Fungi Perfecti, the company he founded right out of college.