“Fungi Can Teach Us a New Way of Looking at the World”
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
Came across it because I've always enjoyed mushroom spotting in the nearby forests, and decided to explore them in greater detail. Listened to a great talk by Paul Stamets on Jo Rogan's show https://youtu.be/xJ6Ym719urg Decided to look for a book to read, and Sheldrake's book popped up.
So much of it has been fascinating, and it's a very easy read, too. It's incredible how these organisms raise so many questions about life, from panspermia to questions about individuality. Well worth a read!
Find your local mycology club on NAMA, most of them have free walks that are open to the public every weekend: https://namyco.org/clubs.php
It only takes a year to learn most of the major edible species in your area.
I am coming around to the POV that soil should be thought of as a kind of organism.
Check out e.g.: "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
He talks about fungus starting around 1:20 (80 minutes in) https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A?t=4848 Fungal to bacterial ratios...
See: Symphony Of The Soil Official Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU
"Gabe Brown has been doing regenerative agriculture for over two decades on Brown's Ranch, over 2000 acres, in Bismarck, North Dakota successfully. Food crops plus cover crops plus livestock, all integrated. Lot of good results compared to neighboring farmers doing the traditional synthetic fertilizer / pesticide / tilling / monoculture approach. There are others like him too. ..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23799715
Others have been mentioning his work here too:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There are a few false positives (wrong term?) in the search results; could try putting his name in quotes in the above Algolia search or use some other option. I will try that myself.
More people need to realize this! Healthy soils are enormously rich ecosystems. They're also fundamental to the water and carbon cycles. Soils are cumulatively a much larger carbon sink than the atmosphere, for instance.
Arguably some similar mind opening processes might be going on while dreaming.
Is it just me, or does it seem that our understanding of the full chemistry of life is still in the very early parts of its evolution?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Stamets
I suggest to watch his lectures on youtube, some pretty fascinating stuff.
Most interesting was a comment about how we have recently discovered that trees communicate using these myccelium roots, things like signals of distress from lack of water or from nearby fires. I couldn't help but think of these roots as something like neural pathways. It is amazing how much we still have to learn about mushrooms.
How about not forcing a consent in the first place?
The second time I had an infinite sadness for my middle-manager boss at a tech company because I realized how he must lead a totally unrewarding and incredibly fear-laden life.
It doesn't really surprise me that they are illegal.
Case in point, Amsterdam consequently banning magic mushrooms in 2008: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dutch-mushroom-idUSTRE4AR...
*where “spirituality” is defined as knowing that your values and ethics come from some other place than your faculty for logical reasoning or from economic utility, however you choose to conceptualize that
If we could infuse our current economy of capital with "psychedelic values", there's no reason it can't be integrated. Terence McKenna pointed out that capitalism is a novelty-expanding engine. If we can use capitalism as a tool to build better societies, why not?
The pipeline of logistics and labor that keeps us alive is amazing, and worth preserving. We just need to introduce a different method of thought.
Legally. In shops.
> all the various mental abstractions we have built for ourselves in life and society are not necessarily 'wrong', but definitely questionable.
If I may interject here: The mental models we, both as a society and individuals, operate on are at best incomplete and at worst inaccurate. But then again, humanly-speaking there are no and there will never be a complete or accurate nor true or even correct model — it is by design. And the most obvious (inward) reason is: cognitive biases (and therefore, evolution by extension).
That said, while on a micro scale it might seem imperfect/suboptimal, on a macro scale it’s actually beneficial because that’s (the imperfection) what actually allows us as a group of individuals to evolve and adapt.
I think in GP's observations, "collective delusions" is the key phrase. I actually had this realization some time ago - as my mind accepted and internalized that all these mental abstractions are indeed collective delusions. We learn to intuitively expect the world to work in a certain way, but it only happens because almost everyone expects that too. Money is often referred to such a concept: it has value only as long as people believe it has value. That $10 in your pocket is only worth $10 if roughly everyone is willing to accept it in exchange for something, on the expectation that they'll be able to later exchange it with someone else. Rule of law is similar - it prevents people from seeking justice through violence, but only as long as everyone believes the law mostly works.
(This is why I consider attacks on public trust as an existential threat to society.)
I'm guessing shrooms let GP have this realization on overdrive, hitting directly and viscerally. I conclude that while not strictly necessary, psychedelics may be a fast track for one to do mental leaps, if somewhat at random.
And all of a sudden I felt strangely, and began to giggle, which turned into uncontrollable, uproarious laughter.
My partner asked me if I was okay, and I said:
"Absurd. It's all so ABSURD. Look at me, trying to put the 'right' wires into the 'right' holes on these boxes of metal and plastic. What the hell even ARE humans?"
I thought about our laws, borders, our giant pieces of metal we shuttle around on strips of asphalt we've poured, making sure to carefully follow all the Big Metal Box Driving regulations.
If you could take a step back from modern human life and look it "for the first time", like a child -- you would fall over laughing too.
Check out the comic Strange Planet, which has a silly, alien-based take on this. Human society really is absurd
They definitely pry open mental models your mind has trained itself to no longer see (probably because it's too overwhelming to experience them at all times).
Actually the third person I felt a unique depth of empathy for was myself, and that experience was pivotal in my life.
Indeed I have taken hallucinogens and have had no such feelings, to the contrary I have leaned even more to the right after having taking them (although I attribute no causal role). It did produce an appreciation of the numinous, alongside the hallucinations, but that's about it.
Why are you using "collective delusions" as synonymous with social construct. My initial reaction is that the delusion was the other way around.That you were delusional (only while on mushrooms, I mean no offense) thinking social pacts were a sign of collective delusion.
I think generally the human population is well aware that these pacts can be broken at anytime. Armies can cross borders (imaginary lines), someone can take your personal property. But we use power to punish rule breakers.
It was on the edge of comfort, I was paranoid people would notice I was high, because I realized that I didn't have all the mental and emotional barriers we normally put up when we interact with the outside world.
It truly felt like there was way less stuff between the outside world and my consciousness making all sensations and feelings way more intense and beautiful, but it also gave me an acute feeling of fragility, like I was very breakable because I was so 'open'.
I want to do it again when I'm less stressed, but I think I will take a slightly lower dose next time.
And national borders are just lines in the sand that most powerful AIs in the world, called armies and built out of bureaucracy, machines and people drew between themselves to share resources and people they exploit between themselves so they can continue exploitation and hoarding of most dangerous tech without major conflicts, which they learned in two wars, are not good for them, because they became too strong for their own good already.
And societal roles nowadays are like red Santa Claus. Nearly pure marketing vaguely drawing from preexisting superstitions.
I can't tell you anything about your middle manager but empathy gives you feelings of other people as you imagine them, not necessarily accurate feelings of other people.
These are insights you can get while sober.
Because they are. Anyways, I love psychedelics. They dissolve boundaries, they allow you to peek behind the curtain. They show you about cultural illusions and that culture is not your friend, and the like.
Crazy that psychedelics are illegal in so many places. There certainly are risks that need to be taken seriously, but their potential seems incredible.
The risk most people among my friends, particularly those who are generally scared of 'drugs' and who never had psychedelic experiences believe in turns out to be an urban myth:
https://www.nature.com/news/no-link-found-between-psychedeli...
There's a lot of evidence that ancient peoples knew about and consumed psychedelics, but treated them spiritually.
A recent Joe Rogan interview[1] went pretty deep on it.
Many have "bad trips" because of the context (and too much too soon), or because the setting involves consuming other things like alcohol and cannabis. Psychedelics should be treated with respect. I prefer to take them with loved ones in a private setting.
I agree in sentiment, but would replace /recreational/ with /solely recreational and often consumed unsafely/. Recreation is an important part of life and there is nothing shameful about using these substances recreationally.
To each his own, but for first-timers a more controlled environment might be best. I'm pretty introspective, so I like a environment where I can go deep with that. Too much chaos, or interruption would get in the way for me.
He also expressed skepticism of the “wood wide web” upon first hearing about it, but as he continued to study all the species interaction, he became just as amazed as the “hippy dippy” types.
I don’t think the Radiolab guys or most of the people they interview are big psychedelic users either. Their episode on mushrooms is pretty awe-inspiring too.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/from-...
there’s a long history, starting way back with Timothy Leary, of psychedelic drug promoters doing sloppy, dubious science.
but there’s also a growing orthodoxy in some circles around psychedelic drugs — any mention of possible long term negative effects really offends people.
anyway i am glad to see the botanical aspects are understood and accepted by people who aren’t also evangelists.
It’s important to know that the psychoactive fungi are a tiny, tiny fraction of fungal life. The role of fungi in the ecosystem has really only started to be deeply studied over the past decade or two. It’s kind of like microbiome research writ large. We don’t know what we don’t know, and what we are learning is wild stuff. Like, forests only exist because mushrooms farm trees (see the Radiolab episode).
And even the more...Experienced...advocates are finding wild stuff in the greater fungal world. Paul Stamets, for example, has gotten contracts with DARPA because he’s finding all kinds of very effective antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial compounds in different species’ mycelia. He may have found a simple cure for colony collapse disorder—the experimental results look good. So don’t ignore their contributions when they get results—just maybe skip their TED talks ;)