opening of the heart, toward my parents, yes, and toward Judith, but
also, weirdly, toward some of the plants and trees and birds and even the
damn bugs on our property. Some of this openness has persisted. I think
back on it now as an experience of wonder and immanence.
The fact that this transformation of my familiar world into something I
can only describe as numinous was occasioned by the eating of a little
brown mushroom that Stamets and I had found growing on the edge of a
parking lot in a state park on the Pacific coast—well, that fact can be
viewed in one of two ways: either as an additional wonder or as support
for a more prosaic and materialist interpretation of what happened to me
that August afternoon. According to one interpretation, I had had “a drug
experience,” plain and simple. It was a kind of waking dream, interesting
and pleasurable but signifying nothing. The psilocin in that mushroom
unlocked the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2-A receptors in my brain, causing
them to fire wildly and set off a cascade of disordered mental events that,
among other things, permitted some thoughts and feelings, presumably
from my subconscious (and, perhaps, my reading too), to get cross-wired
with my visual cortex as it was processing images of the trees and plants
and insects in my field of vision.
Not quite a hallucination, “projection” is probably the psychological
term for this phenomenon: when we mix our emotions with certain
objects that then reflect those feelings back to us so that they appear to
glisten with meaning. T. S. Eliot called these things and situations the
“objective correlatives” of human emotion. Emerson had a similar
phenomenon in mind when he said that “Nature always wears the colors
of the spirit,” suggesting it is our minds that dress her in such
significance.
I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my
heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of
magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant
on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented
nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience,
disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in
plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William
James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with
subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only
the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us
frankie
(Frankie)
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