The Wonder of Seeing Things as They Really Are
Paul Stamets' origin story is much more interesting than mine.
You may find this hard to believe, but I’m not a particularly prolific eater of mushrooms. Not to say I haven’t swallowed my share—dried, fresh, or dissolved into tea—but they don’t seem to have much effect on me. Aside from some pleasant body high glowing. Which is nice, but not quite the self-flattening experience old Terence McKenna lectures amp me up for. I assume it has to be physiological.
Interestingly, the closest I’ve ever come to a real psychological experience was when I stayed up for four days straight on Adderal1 and Red Bull in order to deliver an extremely over-deadline draft to my publisher. I was also working my regular full-time job at Comedy Central, and I remember watching the advertisements on the N Train shimmy around like Al Pacino’s wall sculpture at the end of The Devil’s Advocate2, but less sexy. I didn’t see God, but I did sort of see cartoon mailman kinda do a little jig.
Curious as it was that experience wasn’t life-changing—but the reason I had it was. The book I was killing myself to finish was Man vs. Weather, the result of a simple request for a fun guide to back yard weather reporting that I turned into an 18-month project to understand why things thing. I didn’t know anything about meteorology (or how to reject ill-fitting offers) when I accepted the request from my agent, so the first (useful) thing I did was write out a list of everything about the Earth’s atmosphere that I didn’t know. It was a huge list. So, I would sit down with the list, and the piles of books and print-outs I had incorrectly assumed would teach me through osmosis, and work my way down. Obnoxiously, every question I got to cross out would necessitate at least two new ones. It was some real fucking hydra bullshit. Totally get why Hercules just started burning shit.
Eventually, something cool started happening. Something wonder-inducing. Something self-flattening. I started enjoying the experience of realizing how much dumber I was just five minutes earlier. I remember when I first put together that the tiny little eddies of wind that turn a plastic bag into the most beautiful thing Wes Bentley ever filmed3 is the same natural effect that had recently destroyed New Orleans. It filled me with the sort of wonder and excitement that demanded more. I’d done a lot of research for my previous three books, but that was mostly collecting information in order to synthesize it into jokes. This required understanding. And that was intoxicating.
Long story short, that experience put me on the path to where I am today: Unemployed and in my basement, writing about mycelium for a newsletter with 31 subscribers. Which somehow feels right for me right now.
That was supposed to be an introductory paragraph, with the intention of showing how even a self-absorbed humorist can get life-changingly intoxicated by the natural sciences, before throwing to the actual subject of the post. (Whoops.) So, do me a favor, and let’s pretend that this paragraph here works as a transition. (Thanks.)
Paul Stamets is a world-renowned, but self-taught, mycologist. His research into natural science—mycelial networks in particular—is immensely influential for everything I’m working on with Thought Magnet. Particularly Social Mycelialism (obvs). If you ever want a really good primer on him and his work, I highly recommend Louie Schwartzberg’s 2019 documentary, Fantastic Fungi…
There’s going to be a lot more discussion of Stamets and his work in this newsletter, so I won’t bother with all that right now. What I will do, though, is leave you with his much-more-dynamic-than-my origin story—complete with a cure for his lifelong stuttering problem—as he told it on The Joe Thumbhead Show back in 2017…
So, I walked and walked and I came at the tree and I was eating the mushrooms and and then I started feeling the effects and so it was great because I was climbing the tree and I was getting higher in the tree and higher in my brain.
And I climbed to the top of the tree and this beautiful landscape, but it was there was these in the summertime, these boiling black clouds on the horizon. I go, "Oh, that's cool." You know, and so this big summer storm was coming the clouds were dark and boiling, and they're coming close and I could hear the thunder. Then I'm going higher and higher and the winds pick up, and the trees started moving and I started to get vertigo because I was like, "Oh, Oh my god, I'm getting so freaking high on these mushrooms. And so I grabbed the tree and held on the tree and it became my axis mundi into the earth.
And then the lightning started coming closer. Then lightning strikes started coming really close, and the lightning would hit and I go I saw fractals for the first time. The atmosphere became liquid. I saw these liquid waves of these multi-dimensional geometrical patterns everywhere and the sparks of lightning would just create this amazing crescendo of of secondary tertiary. Fractals all around me, and I was like, "Oh my, this is amazing." I said, "This is what I read about."
So, the storm came and lightning strikes were all around me and I was washed with rain and I was up there and I feel I felt in touch with Gaia, the universe. My heart opened up. I felt one with all. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is such a powerful spiritual experience." I had no idea. No matter what anyone has read, as you probably know, it cannot describe the experience…
I came out of the tree and walked back to where I was living. And then the next day, I got up. I didn't see anybody. And I was walking along on this path and the sidewalk. There's a lady that I really liked a lot, but she was always attracted to the super self-assured jocks. She was actually very kind and sweet, but I didn't want to stare at her in the eyes because I would stutter, and it's humiliating for us. So, the more humiliating us stutterers feel, the more we stutter. And so it's a really slippery slope. And so I would avoid eye contact… She says, "Good Morning, Paul. How are you?” She was always so nice to me, and I was terrified because I'd embarrass myself. I looked at her straight in the eyes and said, “I'm doing fine. How are you?” And I stopped stuttering in one day.
And this speaks to now what has been medically proven, that we can reset the neurology of the human brain through neurogenesis. I believe that experience allowed me to map new neurological pathways that allow me to elocute in a way that I could not before.
Do drugs, kids. It’s much healthier and more fun than panic-tweaking for 96 hours just to see a cartoon dance.
Stamets, by the way, is a really good conversationalist and (by all accounts) a decent human being. Attached, you’ll find a bunch of videos to support my claim...
Provided by a friend with whom I share a birthday and who has popped up suddenly to save my ass on a number of occasions.
Old reference because this happened a long time ago.
Another old reference because I’m old.
I think to get McKenna’s experience, one would have to gobble up more than a human palate could endure. And I agree with you on Paul Stamets. My kids and I are fans