The Epiphanies of Mycelium Teleology
The Epiphany
There is only one Epiphany of Mycelium Teleology and that is Psilocybin. Psilocybin is the original flesh of the Gods, the psychoactive substance that underwrites every eucharist. This substance is a Mycological key that fits into our neurochemical tumblers. It is an Epiphany that is at once epistemic—the knowledge that there exists a link at-all-whatsoever between our human brains and Mycelium—and cognitive, the catalyst by which our brains achieve neuroplasticity—but the Epiphany is also a rupture of a cognitive membrane. Because humans have been ingesting Psilocybin for time-immemorial, it is an Epiphany that has always already taken place; the Epiphany is transhistorical. Mycelium Teleology holds that the Epiphany is what caused language and subsequent history to exist to begin with. The Epiphany is the institution of human meaning as we know it. In the hieratic mode of MT the cosmic instantiation of Psilocybin is an event that spans space and time. Psilocybin and the weird fact of consciousness are linked at a cosmic scale that is folding/unfolding into ever more complex fractal waves radiating across the universe.
The Local Epiphany
The local epiphany is the trip itself. The trip is the original eucharist, induced by Psilocybin and bounded by the parameters of Set and Setting; where Set is a set of mental parameters, or intentions, and Setting is a physical zone operating as safe space. The Psilocybin trip as eucharist is the religious experience par-excellence. MT maintains that this Epiphany is the mystical experience that underwrites all other religious experiences. The mystical experience that religious persons strive to have over the course of a lifetime can be had in an afternoon on Psilocybin. This mystical experience induced by Psilocybin is a prolonged instance of what psychoanalysis refers to as Oceanic Feeling.
Oceanic Feeling is a primitive brain-state with a high level of entropy in which the parameters of the ego have fallen away: The classical example of Oceanic Feeling is an infant at a mother’s breast; the infant is the milk, is the breast, is the mother, is the room. The feeling is not that of you and world, but rather one of all-world—or all-you, depending on perspective. In the Oceanic Feeling experienced during the trip the Symbolic has loosened its hold on your experience, and objects, including your own body, begin to drift in and out of sense. A feeling of being one with something far larger than one’s mere self can become primary.
From a neuro-technical standpoint the ego is theorized to be maintained by a physical zone in your brain called the Default Mode Network. The DMN is what is necessary for thinking about the self and the other, for situating yourself in space and time. It is exactly the DMN, this central regulating hub of neuro-typical self-awareness, that gets disabled during the trip; the disabling of the DMN and the inducement of the Oceanic state are one and the same.
The benefits of the Psilocybin trip are multiple and manifold. The reduction of depression, an increase in creativity and empathy, the recall of trauma and a breaking up of PTSD, a newfound literacy of your own changing brain-states, and peace in the face of mortality have all been documented. And yet these benefits are incidental to Mycelium Teleology.
What purpose does Mycelium Teleology have with Oceanic Feeling? Why does the mushroom want us to feel this way? The local and immediate answer is ecological; Mycelium wants to make contact; the melting down of the barriers of ego in the Oceanic state allow for the contact to take place. It is the common experience of the trip in a woodland setting to feel afterwards a newfound empathy towards green life itself; the trip awakens one’s sense of belonging to the forest. From a network standpoint, we could imagine that, much like how mycelium connects disparate plant-life in the wood-wide-web, Psilocybin plugs the human subject into the same assemblage or network of systems that is the process of nature itself.
The emergent being in this peculiar situation is the symbiont. The combination of forest, Psilocybin and human-subject creates what Donna Haraway calls Sympoiesis. The harmony of Sympoiesis spans from micro to macro, from local, this patch of earth here, to the cosmic, the vast seas of consciousness that pass through the universe.
In this regard Sympoeisis will always be new and strange. The deeper one advances into the eucharist of Mycelium Teleology, the more weird everything becomes. This is the fundamental weirdness of the mushroom, but also of ourselves. Because humans share so much history and genetic material with mycelium this weirdness is a species of the uncanny: it is a feeling of homelessness while bring at home; you encounter your ordinary-human-self as the alien stranger. It is an alien that has traveled across the universe through the portal made by the Epiphany of Mycelium Teleology.
The Fourteen Thousand Epiphanies
The Fourteen thousand Epiphanies is what one encounters when one undertakes the study of Mycelium. There have been counted at least 14,000 species of mushroom (from out of a speculated140,000) and each presents a world that overturns our own. Because so little is known about Mycelium, every new observation threatens to explode our own knowledge structures of biology and being. The fourteen thousand epiphanies causes an epistemic shift that leads to a cognitive shift. This cognitive shift is otherwise known as Mushroom Thinking.
Mushroom Thinking is thinking with Mycelium. With the inclusion of Psilocybin this can in some sense become literal. In the advanced stages of Mushroom Thinking, it is literal.
Just as Psilocybin melts down the sense of self, or ego-consciousness, so too does Mushroom Thinking explode societal notions of self. If an Episteme, or the grounding structure of all knowledge, is a structure in which an ego is forged, that ego will not escape transformation with the destruction of the Episteme. Because the Episteme is so large, grounding the very possibility to think, it’s break up is, as I have argued elsewhere, catastrophic for the subject on a planetary scale; the collision of Planet X. Time and time again vertigo and the dissolution-of-the-self are common experiences of human-subjects studying Mycelium; the very ground is shifting under their feet.
The experience is akin to one of contact with an alien intelligence. The vertigo is due to the fact that it can appear, suddenly, with all of the power of revelation, that this intelligence is more intelligent than you are. The fact that there are beings whose cognition predates our own by 400 million years, and whose tricks for survival surpass anything that we can dream of in a lab, upends the very foundations of human knowledge. Because these foundations are built into language and built out of language, it can feel as if the very language itself is breaking up. The language is inadequate to express this simple event of contact. One might conclude that this is the white-hot nuclear interior of the star of language itself: the attempt to describe what fundamentally cannot be described.
The Epiphanies of Mycelium Teleology demand nothing less.
