Our guest showed us a film about fungi, a subject that is increasingly at the intersection between spirituality and environmentalism, as science learns about the way that fungi live and people become increasingly interested in the curative or psycho-active properties of some them.
The film (whose name I’ve forgotten) is interesting, though not great. It jumps, like many popular American documentaries, from one thing to another, without due analysis, leading one to suspect its credibility (perhaps unfairly). The narrators and interviewees are leading lights in the subject, fungi enthusiasts. Our guest said that he had been partly inspired by the film to try “magic mushrooms” himself: with favorable results.
I agree that the fungi kingdom or queendom, in particularly their mycelia, can be a material metaphor for what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing. The way that mycelia facilitate the links and communication in the biosphere, such as between forest trees, is indicative of the cosmic interconnections between all “things”. And if it’s true, as the film claims, that the psycho-active properties of some fungi are uniquely suited for interaction with our neural synapses (I think that’s what they said), then this is a further indication.
On the other hand, this is just one of the manifestations of the way that the universe is wired. One finds similar connections at the molecular level, for example. In terms of the unity of consciousness, this remains only a metaphor for the transcendent reality in the material plane.
In our conversation, I told him that in meditation (as in life) I am not seeking new “experiences”. The truth (satya) of the unity of consciousness remains the truth whether or not we “experience” it.
His response was that I might be doing meditation wrong. With regard to ingesting magic mushrooms, he said that this has helped many people to have transcendent experiences.
From a vedantic perspective, however, these would still be merely experiences. Experience points to an experiencer. As long as we think in terms of experience, there is the illusion of separation. This is the very fallacy in which we are caught; a wrong-vision that is basic to our nature. I don’t think that adding new experiences, of the kind induced by drugs, can help us to be free of it. Ramana Maharshi would say that such freedom can only come through self-inquiry into the nature of the I that hankers after experience.
While I’ve never had any luck with self-inquiry, or resounding success with any other spiritual pursuit, I have at least understood the roads not to take – the directions not to bother with. This in itself is a net gain, because it leads me back to the only place that any transformation can really happen.