Fantastic Fungi (2019)

A classic example of Mycelium Teleology in which Brie Larson voices the mushroom deity. The film treats mycelium as if it were the life-force itself. And no brute unthinking life, but a life force of such staggering diversity and intelligence that it is very difficult to not want to believe in it, as you would believe in Shiva, or Jesus. And yet only find a forest and turn over a rotting log and there you will find the woven God, knitting the ecosystem together in mute ecstasy. This is an amphibious religion of half scientific naturalism and half teleology. The teleology here, the cosmic purpose, is none other than the salvation of the planet. It seems that there is no man-made problem that the mushroom cannot solve; from nuclear waste to alcoholism, the mushroom has an answer. Extrapolating from this theology, one might conclude that the non-believer is someone who is still trapped by such square and capitalist dogmas as “individuality,” “personal responsibility,” and “human supremacy.” Can Mycelium Teleology produce such societal change at such large scales needed to save the planet? Anyone who has taken psilocybin says hell yes it can. Those who have not taken psilocybin are still laboring under the Nixonian slander that drugs (with the exclusion of alcohol) are bad and that psychedelics and the psychotic-break are the same. Reader, they are the same. And yet what breaks in you are nothing less than the toxic and obsolete epistemic fantasies of an era that is now rapidly coming to its terminal. Mycelium Teleology demands nothing less.