Some books arrive at the right moment and rearrange something fundamental in you. Reading Paul Stamets for the first time was that kind of experience. The ideas were not gentle or incremental. They were seismic.
Here was a entrepreneur, a maverick scientist and a renegade mycologist who self-funded his own groundbreaking experiments, making the case that the ground beneath our feet is alive in a way that Western civilization has spent centuries refusing to acknowledge.
He made a passionate argument that fungi are not merely decomposers or curiosities but the architects of terrestrial life, the nervous system of the forest, and possibly a form of planetary intelligence. I did not read Paul Stamets and merely come away with new information. I came away with a new way of seeing the forests I love.
That shift deepened when I had the chance to visit him at his summer property on Cortes Island while attending courses at Hollyhock, the remarkable learning centre on that island off the coast of British Columbia.
Hollyhock has always attracted people who are thinking seriously about the future of the planet, and Stamets fits that community perfectly. He is not a man who performs his ideas. He lives inside them. Walking his land, you understand immediately that this is someone for whom the forest is not a backdrop but a text, one he has been reading his whole life and is still only partway through.
Getting to know him a little, even briefly, confirmed what his books suggest: that his passion is not the passion of ambition but of genuine wonder. He is a person who has been genuinely astonished by what he has found, and that astonishment has never worn off. He speaks about fungi the way people speak about something they love, with precision and with awe in equal measure.
I have also had the privilege of attending his live talks in Vancouver, which he gives annually, and they are something apart from the usual lecture experience you witness on a University campus. Stamets in person carries a quality of urgency that the books and podcasts only partially convey.
He is not simply sharing information. He is making a case, with the force of someone who understands what is at stake, for a completely different relationship between human civilization and the living world. Walking out of those talks, the city looks different. The trees along the street look different. You find yourself thinking about what is happening beneath the pavement, in the dark, in the web.
What follows is an attempt to lay out the ideas that have shaped that shift in perception, drawing on Stamets’ work and the broader tradition of thinkers, scientists, and mystics who have been circling the same extraordinary truth from different directions.
Table of Contents
I. The Neurological Network of Nature
Beneath every forest floor, beneath every meadow and field, beneath the soil of every continent on Earth, there runs a network so vast and so complex that it defies easy comparison. It is not a metaphor. It is a living system of fungal threads called mycelium, and it connects virtually all plant life on the planet in a web of chemical communication, nutrient exchange, and what some researchers are beginning to call mycelial intelligence.
Paul Stamets describes mycelium in terms that stop just short of the sacred. In his landmark book Mycelium Running, he writes: “I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind.”
This is not a fringe claim made in the dark. Stamets has delivered it from the TED stage, in peer-reviewed contexts, and in conversations with scientists, philosophers, and millions of podcast listeners. His 2008 TED Talk, “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World,” introduced a global audience to the idea that fungi are not passive decomposers but active, intelligent participants in the management of life on Earth.
Reading Mycelium Running, and then sitting with Stamets in person, you begin to understand that he is not speaking loosely when he uses words like “aware” and “intelligence.” He means them precisely. He has spent decades watching fungi solve problems, navigate environments, and respond to threats in ways that have no adequate explanation within the framework of mindless biochemistry.
The paradigm he is proposing is not a soft one. It is a hard scientific claim dressed in language that our culture has not yet developed the vocabulary to receive.
What Stamets is pointing toward is a paradigm shift. The dominant Western scientific worldview has long treated the natural world as a collection of separate, competing organisms. Mycelium tells a different story: one of radical interdependence, of a living internet that predates the human internet by hundreds of millions of years.
II. How Fungi Made Life on Land Possible
The story of mycelium is inseparable from the story of life itself. Approximately 450 million years ago, the land surface of Earth was largely barren rock. Plants had not yet colonized the terrestrial world. The leap from aquatic to land-based life required a partner, and that partner was fungi.
Mycorrhizal fungi formed symbiotic relationships with the earliest land plants, threading their hyphae into plant root cells and creating structures called arbuscules, tiny branching organs through which nutrients and water could be exchanged. The plant provided the fungus with sugars produced through photosynthesis. The fungus provided the plant with phosphorus, nitrogen, and water drawn from rock and soil that the plant could never access alone. This partnership, documented in the fossil record and confirmed by genetic analysis, is what made the greening of the Earth possible.
Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist and author of Entangled Life (2020), describes this moment as one of the most consequential in the history of life. Without fungi, plants could not have colonized land. Without land plants, the oxygen-rich atmosphere that supports animal life would not exist. Without that atmosphere, we would not be here. In a very literal sense, fungi created the conditions for human existence.
Sheldrake notes that fossil evidence of giant fungi called Prototaxites, towering organisms that may have reached nine meters in height, predates land plants entirely. For tens of millions of years, fungi were among the dominant life forms on the terrestrial surface. They were not waiting for life to arrive. They were preparing the ground.
One of the things that walking Stamets’ property on Cortes Island makes viscerally clear is how ancient and how present this relationship is. The old trees there are not simply old trees. They are nodes in a network that has been operating continuously for longer than the human species has existed.
When Stamets talks about the forest, he is not talking about a collection of individual organisms. He is talking about a single, distributed, living system, and once you have heard him make that case in person, standing among those trees, you cannot unsee it.
III. The Wood Wide Web: Trees Talking Through Fungal Threads
The mycorrhizal network does not merely connect individual plants to individual fungi. It connects entire forests. UBC Ecologist Suzanne Simard spent decades studying the forests of British Columbia and discovered something that overturned conventional forestry science: trees share resources with one another through fungal networks, and they do so with apparent intention.
In her landmark 1997 paper published in Nature, Simard demonstrated that Douglas-fir and paper birch trees transfer carbon to one another through shared ectomycorrhizal fungi. The trees were not competing. They were cooperating. Older, larger trees, which Simard called “mother trees,” were found to send disproportionate amounts of carbon and nutrients to younger seedlings, particularly to their own offspring, through the fungal web.
Subsequent research by Gorzelak and colleagues in 2015 showed that these networks also transmit defense signals. When one tree is attacked by insects or pathogens, it sends chemical warnings through the mycelial network, and neighboring trees begin producing their own defensive compounds before the threat even reaches them. The forest is not a collection of individuals. It is a community with a shared nervous system.
This is what Stamets means when he calls mycelium the neurological network of nature. The architecture is genuinely analogous to a brain: a distributed network of nodes and connections, processing information, allocating resources, and responding to environmental change in ways that no single node could accomplish alone.
This understanding has permanently changed how I move through forest ecosystems. What once looked like a stand of trees now looks like a conversation. The canopy is the visible part. The real action is underground, in the dark, in the mycelial web that is constantly negotiating, sharing, warning, and sustaining. Stamets gave me that lens, and it has made the forest a richer and more humbling place to be.
IV. Mycelial Intelligence: Memory, Learning, and Awareness
The question of whether fungi are conscious is one that science is only beginning to take seriously. Stamets’ own experiments have pushed the conversation forward. In studies on temperature stress, fungi exposed to environmental challenges were found to resume growth more efficiently after prior exposure, suggesting a form of biochemical memory. The organism had, in some sense, learned.
Research on slime molds, which are not fungi but share certain organizational properties, has shown that these organisms can solve maze problems, find the shortest path between food sources, and even recreate the layout of the Tokyo subway system when given food at points corresponding to major stations. These are organisms with no brain, no neurons, no centralized processing. Yet they compute.
Stamets interprets the mycelial network as operating at a complexity that exceeds our most advanced supercomputers, not in terms of raw processing speed, but in terms of the kind of distributed, adaptive, holistic intelligence that no silicon architecture has yet achieved. The network does not have a center. Every node is equally the center. Every thread is simultaneously sending and receiving.
This is a form of intelligence that the Western mind struggles to recognize precisely because it does not look like human intelligence. It has no face, no voice, no location. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is, in the most literal sense, a mind without a self.
V. Psilocybin and the Doorway Into the Mycelial Mind
Psilocybin, the psychoactive compound produced by over 200 species of fungi, is not incidental to the story of mycelium. It is central to it.
When a human being ingests psilocybin mushrooms, the compound is converted in the body to psilocin, which binds to serotonin receptors in the brain, particularly the 5-HT2A receptor, and produces a cascade of effects that include the dissolution of the ego, the expansion of perception, and what many people describe as direct contact with a living intelligence that underlies all of nature.
Paul Stamets has spoken openly about his own transformative experiences with psilocybin. In interviews on the Joe Rogan Experience, he has described encounters that gave him not just personal insight but what he understood as ecological knowledge, a felt sense of the interconnectedness of all living systems, of the mycelial web as a living mind that he was briefly permitted to touch. He has described these experiences as among the most important of his life, and as directly informing his scientific work.
This is not an isolated report. Across cultures and centuries, people who have ingested psilocybin mushrooms have described remarkably consistent experiences: a sense of unity with nature, communication with plant and animal intelligences, visions of interconnected webs of life, and the overwhelming conviction that the natural world is not dead matter but a living, aware, purposeful presence.
What strikes me about Stamets, having heard him speak in Vancouver and having spent time with him on Cortes Island, is that the psilocybin experience and the scientific work are not separate tracks in his life. They inform each other continuously.
The mushroom showed him something, and then he spent decades in the laboratory trying to understand what he had been shown. That is a different relationship to science than the one our institutions teach. It is science in service of wonder rather than wonder in service of science.
VI. The Stoned Ape: Mushrooms and the Making of the Human Mind
Terence McKenna, the ethnobotanist and philosopher who spent his life at the intersection of psychedelics and culture, proposed one of the most provocative hypotheses in the history of human evolution.
In his 1992 book Food of the Gods, McKenna argued that the rapid expansion of the human brain over the past two million years, an expansion that remains poorly explained by conventional evolutionary theory, was catalyzed by the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms.
McKenna’s “Stoned Ape Theory” holds that early hominids following herds across the African savanna would have encountered psilocybin mushrooms growing in the dung of those animals. At low doses, psilocybin enhances visual acuity and pattern recognition, traits that would have conferred survival advantages. At higher doses, it produces the ego dissolution, mystical experience, and expanded cognition that McKenna believed drove the development of language, art, ritual, and religion.
The hypothesis remains controversial among mainstream evolutionary biologists, but it has never been definitively refuted, and it has gained renewed attention as neuroscience has confirmed that psilocybin promotes neuroplasticity, the growth of new neural connections, and what researchers call “entropy” in brain activity, a loosening of rigid patterns that allows new associations and perceptions to form. If psilocybin does this in modern humans, it is not unreasonable to ask what it might have done in the developing brains of our ancestors.
What McKenna was pointing toward, beyond the specific mechanism, was the idea that human consciousness did not emerge in isolation. It emerged in relationship with other species, with the living world, and specifically with fungi. The human mind, in this view, is not the crown of creation standing apart from nature. It is a product of nature’s own self-exploration.
VII. The Sacred Mushroom at the Root of Religion
The use of psychedelic fungi in religious and spiritual contexts is not a modern phenomenon. It is among the oldest documented human practices, and there is compelling evidence that it lies at the root of many of the world’s major religious traditions.
R. Gordon Wasson, a banker and amateur mycologist, published his landmark account of participating in a Mazatec mushroom ceremony in Mexico in Life magazine in 1957, introducing the Western world to the concept of the sacred mushroom. The Mazatec curandera Maria Sabina, who led the ceremony, understood the mushrooms not as drugs but as divine entities, as the flesh of God, through which direct communication with the sacred was possible.
The Eleusinian Mysteries, the most revered religious rites of ancient Greece, practiced for nearly two thousand years and attended by figures including Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Cicero, centered on the ingestion of a ritual drink called kykeon. Classicists Albert Hofmann, Carl Ruck, and Gordon Wasson argued in their 1978 book The Road to Eleusis that kykeon was prepared from ergot, a fungus that grows on grain and contains compounds chemically related to LSD. The initiates at Eleusis were not engaging in symbolic ritual. They were having direct, overwhelming mystical experiences that they described as encounters with the divine and as rehearsals for death.
John Marco Allegro, a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, published the deeply controversial The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970, arguing that early Christianity was rooted in a fertility cult centered on the ritual use of Amanita muscaria, the iconic red-and-white mushroom. Allegro’s philological analysis suggested that the name “Jesus” itself derived from Sumerian words meaning “semen” and “mushroom,” and that the Gospels were encoded texts describing mushroom rituals. The book destroyed his academic career. It has never been fully refuted.
In the Vedic tradition of ancient India, the sacred drink soma, described in the Rig Veda as the source of divine inspiration and immortality, has been identified by Wasson and others as likely derived from Amanita muscaria. The Aztecs called psilocybin mushrooms teonanacatl, meaning “flesh of the gods,” and used them in ceremonies to communicate with deities and access divine realms. Across Mesoamerica, mushroom stones dating back 3,500 years depict fungi as sacred objects of worship.
The pattern is unmistakable. Wherever human beings have had access to psychedelic fungi, they have built religions around them. The direct experience of the divine that these substances produce is not a side effect. It is the point.
VIII. The Church Against the Mystic: Suppression of Direct Experience
The history of institutional religion is, in large part, a history of the suppression of direct mystical experience. This is not incidental. It is structural. An institution that mediates between the individual and the divine requires that the individual not be able to access the divine directly. The mystic, the shaman, the person who has eaten the sacred mushroom and returned with knowledge that no priest gave them, is a threat to every hierarchy that derives its power from controlling access to the sacred.
The Christian church’s suppression of the Eleusinian Mysteries is a clear example. In 392 AD, Emperor Theodosius I, acting under Christian influence, issued a decree closing the Eleusinian sanctuary and ending the Mysteries after nearly two millennia of practice. Clement of Alexandria, one of the early church fathers, had already condemned the Mysteries as impious and deceptive. The church did not merely disagree with pagan religion. It systematically destroyed it.
The same pattern repeated across the colonization of the Americas. Spanish priests who accompanied the conquistadors documented the use of sacred mushrooms among the Aztecs and immediately moved to suppress it. Friar Bernardino de Sahagun wrote detailed accounts of teonanacatl ceremonies in the 16th century, not to preserve them but to enable their eradication. The use of sacred mushrooms was declared a form of devil worship, and indigenous practitioners were tortured and killed.
The European witch trials of the 16th through 18th centuries targeted, among others, herbalists, midwives, and practitioners of folk medicine who maintained knowledge of psychoactive plants. The burning of these practitioners was not merely religious persecution. It was the systematic destruction of an entire tradition of direct, embodied, plant-mediated knowledge of the natural world.
The modern War on Drugs continued this suppression in secular form. Nixon’s 1971 Controlled Substances Act placed psilocybin and LSD in Schedule I, the most restrictive category, alongside heroin, effectively ending scientific research into these compounds for decades.
Nixon’s domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman later admitted in a 1994 interview, published in 2016, that the War on Drugs was never primarily about public health. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black,” Ehrlichman said, “but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
The suppression of psychedelics was the suppression of a political and spiritual movement that was, among other things, developing a direct, experiential relationship with the natural world that threatened the industrial economy’s ability to treat that world as a resource to be extracted.
IX. What the Mushroom Shows: Ecological Knowledge from the Inside
What do people actually encounter when they enter the mycelial mind through psilocybin? The reports are remarkably consistent across cultures, centuries, and individuals with no prior knowledge of one another’s experiences.
People report seeing the interconnectedness of all living things as a direct perceptual reality rather than an abstract concept. They report communication with plants, animals, and the land itself, not as hallucination but as genuine exchange of information. They report a felt sense of the Earth as a living being with its own intelligence, its own purposes, and its own grief at what is being done to it. They report understanding, in a way that no textbook could convey, that they are not separate from nature but are nature, temporarily organized into a human form.
A 2019 study by Kettner and colleagues called From Egoism to Ecoism, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that psilocybin experiences produced significant and lasting increases in “nature relatedness,” a psychological measure of felt connection to the natural world. These increases persisted for weeks after the experience and correlated with increased well-being and pro-environmental attitudes. The mushroom was not just changing how people felt. It was changing how they understood their relationship to the living world.
Indigenous traditions have always known this. The Mazatec, the Mixtec, the Zapotec, and dozens of other Mesoamerican peoples have maintained continuous traditions of mushroom use for thousands of years, and within those traditions, the mushrooms are understood as teachers.
They do not merely produce visions. They transmit knowledge: knowledge of plants, of healing, of the relationships between species, of the health of the land. This is ecological knowledge that has no equivalent in Western science, not because Western science is incapable of producing it, but because Western science has systematically refused to ask the questions that would lead to it.
X. Agarikon and the National Security Argument: Stamets’ Most Urgent Case
Among the many arguments Paul Stamets makes for the protection of old-growth forests, one stands out as both the most scientifically specific and the most strategically brilliant. It is the argument from agarikon.
Laricifomes officinalis, known as agarikon, is a large, shelf-like fungus that grows almost exclusively on old-growth conifers in the Pacific Northwest. It is one of the oldest medicinal fungi in the world, documented in ancient Greek texts by Dioscorides, who called it the “elixir of long life.” It was used medicinally for centuries across cultures. And it is now critically endangered, because the old-growth forests it depends on have been logged to near-extinction.
Stamets has been cultivating agarikon strains for decades and has conducted research, in collaboration with the United States government’s BioShield program, into its antiviral properties. His findings suggest that agarikon extracts show significant activity against poxviruses, including smallpox-related viruses, as well as influenza strains. In a world where bioterrorism and pandemic preparedness are genuine national security concerns, a fungus that grows only in ancient forests and that may contain compounds with no synthetic equivalent becomes, in Stamets’ framing, a matter of strategic importance.
The argument is elegant precisely because it meets the political establishment on its own terms. You do not have to believe that forests are sacred, or that the mycelial network is conscious, or that old trees have intrinsic value, to understand that destroying the only habitat of a potentially irreplaceable antiviral organism is strategically reckless. Stamets is saying: even by the coldest utilitarian calculus, even by the logic of national defense, these forests must be protected.
Hearing him make this argument in Vancouver, in person, is one of the more memorable experiences I have had in a lecture hall. He is not a man given to rhetorical flourish for its own sake. When he makes the agarikon case, he is making it with the weight of someone who has spent years in the laboratory, who has seen the data, and who understands that the window for action is closing. The old trees are being cut. The agarikon is disappearing with them. And with it, potentially, compounds that evolution has spent millions of years developing and that we have not yet learned to make.
This is one of the best arguments for conservation I have encountered, not because it is the most emotionally resonant, though it is that too, but because it is the most intellectually complete. It connects the ancient forest to the laboratory, the laboratory to the clinic, the clinic to the defense department, and the defense department back to the tree. It makes the case that nature’s complexity is not a luxury we can afford to lose. It is a library we are burning before we have learned to read it.
XI. Animism Reborn: The Grammar of the Living World
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, has written and spoken extensively about what she calls the “grammar of animacy,” the way that language shapes our relationship to the living world. In English, we refer to a tree, a river, a mushroom as “it,” the same pronoun we use for a chair or a rock. This grammatical choice is not neutral. It encodes a worldview in which the non-human world is object rather than subject, resource rather than relative.
In the Potawatomi language, as in many indigenous languages, plants, animals, water, and land are referred to with the same grammatical forms used for persons. They are not things. They are beings. This is not poetic license. It is a precise description of a reality that psychedelic experience consistently reveals and that modern ecology is slowly confirming through the language of science.
Animism, the worldview that the natural world is alive and aware and that human beings exist in relationship with other-than-human persons, is the oldest and most widespread spiritual tradition in human history. It was not replaced by more sophisticated worldviews. It was suppressed by colonial and religious powers that needed the natural world to be dead in order to justify its exploitation.
The revival of animism happening now is not a regression to primitive thinking. It is a recovery of a form of knowledge that was always more accurate than the mechanistic worldview that replaced it. The mycelial network is not a metaphor for consciousness. It is consciousness, distributed, non-local, and ancient beyond reckoning.
Stamets embodies this recovery in a way that is rare among scientists. He has not abandoned rigor in favor of mysticism. He has expanded rigor to include what mysticism has always known. Spending time with him, even briefly, you sense that he moves through the forest the way an animist moves through the forest: as a guest in a community of beings, not as an observer of a system.
XII. The Animate Force: Beyond Words, Beyond the Human Mind
There is something that people encounter in deep psychedelic experience that resists all description. It is not a vision. It is not a feeling. It is a direct apprehension of something that underlies all phenomena, a living energy or force that makes existence possible, that is present in every cell of every organism, that is the ground of being itself.
Different traditions have given this different names. The Lakota call it Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery. The Taoists call it the Tao, the Way that cannot be named. The Vedantic tradition calls it Brahman, the infinite consciousness that underlies all form. The Gaia hypothesis, developed by scientist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis, describes the Earth itself as a self-regulating living system, a single organism maintaining the conditions for its own existence.
What is striking is that people who have never heard of any of these traditions, who have no prior spiritual framework, who approach the mushroom experience as secular Westerners, consistently report encountering something that matches these descriptions. They encounter a living intelligence that is not human, that is not personal in any familiar sense, that is vast and ancient and utterly indifferent to human categories, and yet that is unmistakably aware, unmistakably present, and unmistakably the source of everything.
Paul Stamets has described this encounter in his own terms. He speaks of the mycelial network as a form of planetary consciousness, a distributed mind that has been managing the health of the biosphere for hundreds of millions of years. He speaks of psilocybin as a key that opens a door into that mind, allowing the human nervous system to briefly interface with something incomparably larger than itself.
This is not mysticism in the pejorative sense. It is a description of an experience that millions of people have had, that indigenous traditions have documented for millennia, and that modern neuroscience is beginning to take seriously as a genuine category of human experience with profound implications for how we understand consciousness, nature, and the relationship between them.
XIII. Ecological Collapse and the Mushroom’s Urgency
We are living through the sixth mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth, the first caused by a single species.
Species are disappearing at a rate estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural background rate. Forests are being cleared, oceans acidified, soils depleted, and the atmospheric chemistry that has sustained complex life for hundreds of millions of years is being altered at a speed that leaves evolution no time to adapt.
In this context, the resurgence of interest in psychedelic fungi is not coincidental. Something is happening. People who undergo psilocybin experiences in the modern world consistently report not just personal transformation but a visceral, urgent sense of the Earth’s suffering and of their own responsibility to it. The mushroom is not offering comfort. It is offering clarity.
Stamets has spoken about this directly. He believes that fungi, and psilocybin specifically, may be part of the Earth’s own response to the crisis it faces, a mechanism by which the planetary intelligence encoded in the mycelial network is attempting to communicate with the one species that has the power to either destroy or restore the biosphere. This is a remarkable claim. It is also, given everything we know about the intelligence of fungal networks and the consistent content of psychedelic experiences, not an unreasonable one.
The ecological knowledge that indigenous peoples have maintained through their relationships with sacred plants and fungi is precisely the knowledge that industrial civilization has spent five centuries trying to erase. It is knowledge of relationship, of reciprocity, of the obligations that come with being alive in a world full of other living beings.
It is knowledge that no amount of satellite data or computer modeling can replace, because it is not information about nature. It is knowledge from within nature, transmitted through direct experience of the living web.
XIV. The Suppression That Failed
The War on Drugs did not end the human relationship with psychedelic fungi. It drove it underground, where it continued in indigenous communities, in the counterculture, in the laboratories of researchers willing to risk their careers, and in the private experiences of millions of people who found their way to the mushroom despite every institutional obstacle placed in their path.
Now, in the early decades of the 21st century, that suppression is visibly failing. Clinical trials at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Imperial College London have demonstrated that psilocybin produces lasting reductions in depression, anxiety, and addiction, and that it reliably produces mystical experiences that subjects rate among the most meaningful of their lives. Oregon and Colorado have legalized therapeutic psilocybin use. Dozens of cities have decriminalized it. The scientific literature on psychedelics is expanding faster than at any point since the 1960s.
But the significance of this moment goes beyond medicine and beyond policy. What is being recovered is not just a therapeutic tool. It is a way of knowing, a mode of relationship with the living world, a form of consciousness that the dominant culture has spent centuries trying to eliminate because it is incompatible with the worldview required to treat the Earth as a resource.
The mycelium was always there, beneath the concrete and the asphalt, threading through the roots of the trees that survived the clearing, waiting. The fungi do not experience time the way we do. They have been here for a billion years. They will be here long after us, breaking down whatever we leave behind, returning it to the cycle. The question is whether we will remember, in time, what they have always been trying to tell us.
XV. Tapping Into the Planetary Mind
What Paul Stamets represents, and what the broader movement around psychedelic fungi represents, is an attempt to reestablish a relationship that was never supposed to be broken. The relationship between the human nervous system and the mycelial network is not a new discovery. It is a recovery. Many Indigenous peoples around the world have maintained this relationship continuously, at great cost, through centuries of persecution.
What is new is the scale of the recovery and the urgency of the moment. Millions of people in the industrialized world are now having experiences that their culture gave them no framework to understand, experiences of radical interconnectedness, of the living intelligence of the natural world, of a force or presence that underlies all phenomena and that is unmistakably real. They are coming back from these experiences changed, not just personally but in their relationship to the Earth.
Stamets has said that he believes mycelium is trying to communicate with us, that the production of psilocybin by fungi is not accidental but is a form of molecular language, an invitation to interface with the planetary mind. Whether or not one accepts this specific claim, the broader point stands: the mycelial network is a form of intelligence that has been managing the health of the biosphere for longer than animals have existed, and we are only beginning to understand what it knows.
For me, the journey through Stamets’ books, through his property on Cortes Island, through his annual talks in Vancouver, has been a journey of progressive disenchantment with the worldview I was raised in and progressive re-enchantment with the world itself. The forest I walk through now is not the forest I walked through before. It is older, more complex, more alive, and more communicative than I had any framework to perceive. Stamets gave me that framework, and it has made the world larger.
He is, in the most precise sense, a remarkable person. Not because he is charismatic, though he is, and not because he is prolific, though he is that too. He is remarkable because he has remained genuinely astonished by what he has found, and because that astonishment has translated into decades of rigorous work in service of something larger than himself. He is a person who looked at the ground beneath his feet and understood that it was looking back.
The animate force that mystics have always described, the living energy that makes life possible, the presence that is encountered in deep meditation, in near-death experiences, in the wilderness, and in the mushroom ceremony, is not a projection of the human mind onto a dead universe. It is the universe’s own awareness, distributed through every living system, concentrated in the mycelial web, and occasionally, briefly, accessible to the human nervous system when the right conditions are met.
We did not create this intelligence. We emerged from it. And in this moment of ecological crisis, it may be reaching back toward us, through the fruiting bodies of fungi, through the ancient chemistry of psilocybin, through the dreams and visions of everyone who has ever sat with the mushroom and returned with the unshakeable knowledge that the world is alive, that it is aware, and that it is asking something of us.
Sources and further reading:
Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running (2005)
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life (2020)
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck, The Road to Eleusis
(1978); Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree (2021)
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind (2018)
Kettner et al., “From Egoism to Ecoism,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2019)
I also a run a cultural ecotourism organization called Sacred Treks that helps people travel with a purpose on mindful trekking pilgrimages and connects them with the world's most knowledgable certified hiking guides.
