Jun 5, 2018 04:46 PM
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...om/561860/
EXCERPT: Paul Stamets, a mycologist I had come to visit in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula to go mushroom hunting [...] Stamets suspects that Psilocybe azurescens might originally have ridden out of the forest in the flesh of those logs and found its way here to the mouth of the Columbia [River]—thus far the only place the species has ever been found. Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. [...]
I saw plenty of LBMs—little brown mushrooms—that might or might not be psilocybin and was constantly interrupting Stamets for another ID [...] After an hour or two of fruitless searching, Stamets wondered aloud if maybe we had come too late for the azzies. And then all of a sudden [...] he called out, “Got one!” I raced over, asking him to leave the mushroom in place so I could see where and how it grew. [...]
It was a handsome little mushroom, with a smooth, slightly glossy, caramel-colored cap. Stamets let me pick it [...] “Bruise the stipe a bit,” Stamets suggested. I did, and within minutes a blue tinge appeared where I’d rubbed it. “That’s the psilocin.” I never expected to actually see the chemical I had read so much about. The mushroom had been growing a stone’s throw from our yurt, right on the edge of a parking spot. Stamets says that like many psilocybin species, “azzies are organisms of the ecological edge. Look at where we are: at the edge of the continent, the edge of an ecosystem, the edge of civilization, and of course these mushrooms bring us to the edge of consciousness.”
[...] That evening, we carefully laid out our seven mushrooms [...] in front of the yurt’s space heater to dry. Within hours, the hot air had transformed a mushroom that was unimpressive to begin with into a tiny, shriveled gray-blue scrap it would be easy to overlook. [...] I had been looking forward to trying an azzie, but before the evening was over, Stamets had dampened my enthusiasm. “I find azurescens almost too strong,” he told me [...] “And azzies have one potential side effect that some people find troubling. [...] Temporary paralysis,” he said matter-of-factly. He explained that some people on azzies find they can’t move their muscles for a period of time. That might be tolerable if you’re in a safe place, he suggested, “but what if you’re outdoors and the weather turns cold and wet? You could die of hypothermia.” [...] I was suddenly in much less of a hurry to try one.
The question I kept returning to that weekend is this: Why in the world would a fungus go to the trouble of producing a chemical compound that has such a radical effect on the minds of the animals that eat it? [...] One could construct a quasi-mystical explanation for this phenomenon, as Stamets and Terence McKenna have done: Both suggest that neurochemistry is the language in which nature communicates with us, and it’s trying to tell us something important by way of psilocybin. But this strikes me as more of a poetic conceit than a scientific theory.
[...] The best answer I’ve managed to find arrived a few weeks later courtesy of Paul Stamets’s professor at Evergreen State College, Michael Beug, the chemist. [...] Beug pointed out that if psilocybin were a defense chemical, “my former student Paul Stamets would have jumped on it long ago and found a use for it as an antifungal, antibacterial, or insecticide. [...] Instead the chemicals are in the fruiting bodies, sometimes at over 2 percent by dry weight!”—a stupendous quantity, and in a part of the organism it is not a priority to defend.
Even if psilocybin in mushrooms began as “an accident of a metabolic pathway,” the fact that it wasn’t discarded during the course of the species’ evolution suggests it must have offered some benefit. “My best guess,” Beug says, “is that the mushrooms that produced the most psilocybin got selectively eaten and so their spores got more widely disseminated.” Eaten by whom, or what? And why? Beug says that many animals are known to eat psilocybin mushrooms, including horses, cattle, and dogs. Some, like cows, appear unaffected, but many animals appear to enjoy an occasional change in consciousness, too. [...Animals like horses and dogs...] that “zero in on psilocybes and appear to be hallucinating.”
[...] You are probably wondering what ever happened to the azzies Stamets and I found that weekend. Many months later, in the middle of a summer week spent in the house in New England where we used to live, a place freighted with memories, I ate them, with my wife Judith. I crumbled two little mushrooms in each of two glasses and poured hot water over them to make a tea; Stamets had recommended that I “cook” the mushrooms to destroy the compounds that can upset the stomach.
[...] after only about 20 minutes or so, Judith reported she was “feeling things,” none of them pleasant. She didn’t want to be walking anymore [...] She told me her mind and her body seemed to be drifting apart and then that her mind had flown out of her head and up into the trees, like a bird or insect. “I need to get home and feel safe,” she said, now with some urgency. [...]
I couldn’t understand her desire to be indoors. I went out and sat on the screened porch for a while, listening to the sounds in the garden, which suddenly grew very loud, as if the volume had been turned way up. [...] flying insects and the digital buzz of hummingbirds rose to form a cacophony I had never heard before. It began to grate on my nerves, until I decided I would be better off regarding the sound as beautiful [...]
Whenever I closed my eyes, random images erupted as if the insides of my lids were a screen. My notes record: fractal patterns, tunnels plunging through foliage, ropy vines forming grids. But when I started to feel panic rise at the lack of control I had over my visual field, I discovered that all I needed to do to restore a sense of semi-normality was to open my eyes. To open or close my eyes was like changing the channel. I thought, “I am learning how to manage this experience.”
[...] I was still vaguely worried about Judith [...] She was stretched out on the couch [...] “I’m having these very interesting visuals,” she said, something having to do with the stains on the coffee table coming to life, swirling and transforming and rising from the surface in ways she found compelling. She made it clear she wanted to be left alone to sink more deeply into the images—she is a painter.
I stepped outside, feeling unsteady on my feet, legs a little rubbery. [...] I felt wide open emotionally, undefended. [...] I had planted the hydrangea decades ago [...] it seemed to me these were the most beautiful leaves I had ever seen. It was as if they were emitting their own soft, green glow. And it felt like a kind of privilege to gaze out at the world through their eyes [...] A plant’s-eye view of the world—it was that, and for real! But the leaves were also looking back at me, fixing me with this utterly benign gaze. I could feel their curiosity and what I was certain was an attitude of utter benevolence toward me and my kind. (Do I need to say that I know how crazy this sounds? I do!)
I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time [...] the battlements of ego had not fallen; this was not what the researchers would deem a “complete” mystical experience, because I retained the sense of an observing “I.” But the doors and windows of perception had opened wide, and they were admitting more of the world and its myriad nonhuman personalities than ever before.
[...] As I gazed at [...] two trees I had gazed at so many times before [...] it suddenly dawned on me that these trees were—obviously!—my parents: the stolid ash my father, the elegant oak my mother. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, except that thinking about those trees became identical to thinking about my parents. They were completely, indelibly, present in those trees. [...]
My walk back to the house was, I think, the peak of the experience and comes back to me now in the colors and tones of a dream. [...] the flowers were addressing me as much as the pollinators [insects and hummingbirds], and perhaps because the very air that afternoon was such a felt presence, one’s usual sense of oneself as a subject observing objects in space—objects that have been thrown into relief and rendered discrete by the apparent void that surrounds them—gave way to a sense of being deep inside and fully implicated in this scene, one more being in relation to the myriad other beings and to the whole.
“Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much the case, and so, for the first time I can remember, did this: “I myself am identical with nature.”
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...om/561860/
EXCERPT: Paul Stamets, a mycologist I had come to visit in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula to go mushroom hunting [...] Stamets suspects that Psilocybe azurescens might originally have ridden out of the forest in the flesh of those logs and found its way here to the mouth of the Columbia [River]—thus far the only place the species has ever been found. Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. [...]
I saw plenty of LBMs—little brown mushrooms—that might or might not be psilocybin and was constantly interrupting Stamets for another ID [...] After an hour or two of fruitless searching, Stamets wondered aloud if maybe we had come too late for the azzies. And then all of a sudden [...] he called out, “Got one!” I raced over, asking him to leave the mushroom in place so I could see where and how it grew. [...]
It was a handsome little mushroom, with a smooth, slightly glossy, caramel-colored cap. Stamets let me pick it [...] “Bruise the stipe a bit,” Stamets suggested. I did, and within minutes a blue tinge appeared where I’d rubbed it. “That’s the psilocin.” I never expected to actually see the chemical I had read so much about. The mushroom had been growing a stone’s throw from our yurt, right on the edge of a parking spot. Stamets says that like many psilocybin species, “azzies are organisms of the ecological edge. Look at where we are: at the edge of the continent, the edge of an ecosystem, the edge of civilization, and of course these mushrooms bring us to the edge of consciousness.”
[...] That evening, we carefully laid out our seven mushrooms [...] in front of the yurt’s space heater to dry. Within hours, the hot air had transformed a mushroom that was unimpressive to begin with into a tiny, shriveled gray-blue scrap it would be easy to overlook. [...] I had been looking forward to trying an azzie, but before the evening was over, Stamets had dampened my enthusiasm. “I find azurescens almost too strong,” he told me [...] “And azzies have one potential side effect that some people find troubling. [...] Temporary paralysis,” he said matter-of-factly. He explained that some people on azzies find they can’t move their muscles for a period of time. That might be tolerable if you’re in a safe place, he suggested, “but what if you’re outdoors and the weather turns cold and wet? You could die of hypothermia.” [...] I was suddenly in much less of a hurry to try one.
The question I kept returning to that weekend is this: Why in the world would a fungus go to the trouble of producing a chemical compound that has such a radical effect on the minds of the animals that eat it? [...] One could construct a quasi-mystical explanation for this phenomenon, as Stamets and Terence McKenna have done: Both suggest that neurochemistry is the language in which nature communicates with us, and it’s trying to tell us something important by way of psilocybin. But this strikes me as more of a poetic conceit than a scientific theory.
[...] The best answer I’ve managed to find arrived a few weeks later courtesy of Paul Stamets’s professor at Evergreen State College, Michael Beug, the chemist. [...] Beug pointed out that if psilocybin were a defense chemical, “my former student Paul Stamets would have jumped on it long ago and found a use for it as an antifungal, antibacterial, or insecticide. [...] Instead the chemicals are in the fruiting bodies, sometimes at over 2 percent by dry weight!”—a stupendous quantity, and in a part of the organism it is not a priority to defend.
Even if psilocybin in mushrooms began as “an accident of a metabolic pathway,” the fact that it wasn’t discarded during the course of the species’ evolution suggests it must have offered some benefit. “My best guess,” Beug says, “is that the mushrooms that produced the most psilocybin got selectively eaten and so their spores got more widely disseminated.” Eaten by whom, or what? And why? Beug says that many animals are known to eat psilocybin mushrooms, including horses, cattle, and dogs. Some, like cows, appear unaffected, but many animals appear to enjoy an occasional change in consciousness, too. [...Animals like horses and dogs...] that “zero in on psilocybes and appear to be hallucinating.”
[...] You are probably wondering what ever happened to the azzies Stamets and I found that weekend. Many months later, in the middle of a summer week spent in the house in New England where we used to live, a place freighted with memories, I ate them, with my wife Judith. I crumbled two little mushrooms in each of two glasses and poured hot water over them to make a tea; Stamets had recommended that I “cook” the mushrooms to destroy the compounds that can upset the stomach.
[...] after only about 20 minutes or so, Judith reported she was “feeling things,” none of them pleasant. She didn’t want to be walking anymore [...] She told me her mind and her body seemed to be drifting apart and then that her mind had flown out of her head and up into the trees, like a bird or insect. “I need to get home and feel safe,” she said, now with some urgency. [...]
I couldn’t understand her desire to be indoors. I went out and sat on the screened porch for a while, listening to the sounds in the garden, which suddenly grew very loud, as if the volume had been turned way up. [...] flying insects and the digital buzz of hummingbirds rose to form a cacophony I had never heard before. It began to grate on my nerves, until I decided I would be better off regarding the sound as beautiful [...]
Whenever I closed my eyes, random images erupted as if the insides of my lids were a screen. My notes record: fractal patterns, tunnels plunging through foliage, ropy vines forming grids. But when I started to feel panic rise at the lack of control I had over my visual field, I discovered that all I needed to do to restore a sense of semi-normality was to open my eyes. To open or close my eyes was like changing the channel. I thought, “I am learning how to manage this experience.”
[...] I was still vaguely worried about Judith [...] She was stretched out on the couch [...] “I’m having these very interesting visuals,” she said, something having to do with the stains on the coffee table coming to life, swirling and transforming and rising from the surface in ways she found compelling. She made it clear she wanted to be left alone to sink more deeply into the images—she is a painter.
I stepped outside, feeling unsteady on my feet, legs a little rubbery. [...] I felt wide open emotionally, undefended. [...] I had planted the hydrangea decades ago [...] it seemed to me these were the most beautiful leaves I had ever seen. It was as if they were emitting their own soft, green glow. And it felt like a kind of privilege to gaze out at the world through their eyes [...] A plant’s-eye view of the world—it was that, and for real! But the leaves were also looking back at me, fixing me with this utterly benign gaze. I could feel their curiosity and what I was certain was an attitude of utter benevolence toward me and my kind. (Do I need to say that I know how crazy this sounds? I do!)
I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time [...] the battlements of ego had not fallen; this was not what the researchers would deem a “complete” mystical experience, because I retained the sense of an observing “I.” But the doors and windows of perception had opened wide, and they were admitting more of the world and its myriad nonhuman personalities than ever before.
[...] As I gazed at [...] two trees I had gazed at so many times before [...] it suddenly dawned on me that these trees were—obviously!—my parents: the stolid ash my father, the elegant oak my mother. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, except that thinking about those trees became identical to thinking about my parents. They were completely, indelibly, present in those trees. [...]
My walk back to the house was, I think, the peak of the experience and comes back to me now in the colors and tones of a dream. [...] the flowers were addressing me as much as the pollinators [insects and hummingbirds], and perhaps because the very air that afternoon was such a felt presence, one’s usual sense of oneself as a subject observing objects in space—objects that have been thrown into relief and rendered discrete by the apparent void that surrounds them—gave way to a sense of being deep inside and fully implicated in this scene, one more being in relation to the myriad other beings and to the whole.
“Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much the case, and so, for the first time I can remember, did this: “I myself am identical with nature.”
MORE: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...om/561860/
