How to Change Your Mind

from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul
Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from
nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.
Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual
dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a
Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of,
might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston
Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized
being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery
of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel
awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing
more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye
view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that
disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary
hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I
don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me
anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness
available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote
William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with
reality.”
Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to
reopen my own accounts with reality.