One spring afternoon toward the end of his freshman year, walking
alone along the wooded ridgeline above campus, Stamets ate a whole bag
of mushrooms, perhaps ten grams, thinking that was a proper dose. (Four
grams is a lot.) As the psilocybin was coming on, Stamets spied a
particularly beautiful oak tree and decided he would climb it. “As I’m
climbing the tree, I’m literally getting higher as I’m climbing higher.” Just
then the sky begins to darken, and a thunderstorm lights up the horizon.
The wind surges as the storm approaches, and the tree begins to sway.
“I’m getting vertigo but I can’t climb down, I’m too high, so I just
wrapped my arms around the tree and held on, hugging it tightly. The
tree became the axis mundi, rooting me to the earth. ‘This is the tree of
life,’ I thought; it was expanding into the sky and connecting me to the
universe. And then it hits me: I’m going to be struck by lightning! Every
few seconds there’s another strike, here, then there, all around me. On
the verge of enlightenment, I’m going to be electrocuted. This is my
destiny! The whole time, I’m being washed by warm rains. I am crying
now, there is liquid everywhere, but I also feel one with the universe.
“And then I say to myself, what are my issues if I survive this? Paul, I
said, you’re not stupid, but stuttering is holding you back. You can’t look
women in the eyes. What should I do? Stop stuttering now—that became
my mantra. Stop stuttering now, I said it over and over and over.
“The storm eventually passed. I climbed down from the tree and
walked back to my room and went to sleep. That was the most important
experience of my life to that point, and here’s why: The next morning, I’m
walking down the sidewalk, and here comes this girl I was attracted to.
She’s way beyond my reach. She’s walking toward me, and she says,
‘Good morning, Paul. How are you?’ I look at her and say, ‘I’m doing
great.’ I wasn’t stuttering! And I have hardly ever stuttered since.
“And that’s when I realized I wanted to look into these mushrooms.”
• • •
IN A REMARKABLY SHORT SPAN of time, Stamets made himself into one of the
country’s leading experts on the genus Psilocybe. In 1978, at the age of
twenty-three, he published his first book, Psilocybe Mushrooms and
Their Allies—their allies understood to be us, the animal that had done