What the Mushrooms Taught Me Part III. (The Last & Final Post)
From my first lessons from the mushrooms to the beautiful but confusing messages I was receiving from gifted mystics, psychics and healers, I was forming a question that would come to be the very center of all my work:
What is the piece of the truth puzzle we hold?
How do we relate to information in ways that are subtle, nuanced and for our highest good?
If there is no right answer, and how do we balance turning to others and turning to ourselves?
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When we look at spiritual information from a linear or a capitalistic lens (which in many ways go hand in hand), we tend to relate to everything in an extractive way.
And because our cultural frameworks are deeply embedded in our psyches, we tend to self-objectify and self-extract. Because of this, we tend to perceive the information we receive about ourselves with the same extractive attitude - What do I do with this? What will I get from this?
When we invite ourselves to think about information relationally - then the information we encounter has a lot more creative potential and latitude.
We can change the question from what does this give me, to how does this change my understanding?
And by extension:
What is my experience of being with this information?
How does it feel in my body and my emotional field?
What does it spark within me?
How does the field of information itself change because I interact with it?
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Productivity culture doesn't promote the slowing down or sensitivity it takes to receive information in this way.
It reminds me of this post I saw today.
In my opinion, we don’t need another intellectual solution, a new philosophy or another methodology to approach “life” as if it is a problem to solve, but instead, a way to reorient to life and ourselves with the assumption that existence has innate value. In other words, instead of seeing life like a problem to solve, what experiences are available to us when we see it as a living creative project?
In Create Your Cosmology, we approach the world and ourselves as the forest. We ask questions we have asked before, but instead of extracting from our curiosity, we become it's student, letting it lead us and teach us. In this sense, we reclaim our psychedelic senses without taking psychedelics.
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Twenty years after this first psychedelic experience, I realize that the mushroom was allowing me to witness myself differently, giving me access to the sensations I habitually tuned out or categorized as unimportant because they didn’t lead me to productivity.
By putting me deeply in touch with my body, the mushroom allowed me to go underground within myself to find what needed to be composted, and what it needed to be fertilized. It is not that the mushrooms were making me incapable of functioning, but that they were showing me all the incredible sensory experiences we are taught to dismiss so we can feel like a functioning person in a society that is obsessed with a very narrow definition of what it means to be human.
It is so magical that without teaching me a thing about capitalism, or the nature of consciousness intellectually, the mushroom so generously allowed me to feel with my whole body all of the emotional grief, overwhelm, and chaos that I probably always sensed, but was adept at hiding, even from myself.
Some say psilocybin is a perception-changing consciousness, but I find that what it does is reintroduces us to our natural sensitivity, so that we can see what we have been looking past in our ordinary life. The psychedelic lens allows us to put down the filter of function we use everyday. I am not one to create a “bad guy” in a narrative, but a part of me believes that hyperstimulated consumer-driven reality encourages us to desensitize ourselves in order to “get things done” and goes so far as to characterize this desensitization process as a necessity of adulthood and a sign of maturation.
The mushrooms, the earth, the sky and our breath, all invite us to welcome the information that productivity culture throws away, and encourage us to give these sensations a home within the present.
Nature tells us we can expand our capacity to acknowledge and hold all that is available in the moment - perhaps this capacity is what we refer to when we use the word presence. And the more of it we have, the more we can hold the full spectrum of existence with less shutting down and more spaciousness for the deep and wonderful, including our grief, our body’s constant communication, and of course, the intensely powerful Love that pulsates through all of existence, reminding us that we are nothing and everything at once.