Modern Culture

Make room for mushrooms…

…people have been using psychedelics for community gatherings, religious ceremonies and healing purposes for centuries… according to 2021 research published in the… journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, psychedelic use in rituals… around the world, “from the Americas, to Eurasia, to Australia, and Africa.”…help us dismantle those precepts that result in deeply unequal societies in the first place? … the first and easy answer is by growing them and eating them.

After the flower-power movement of the ’60s… interest in psychedelic mushrooms started growing again… thanks largely to the work of… [Terence and Dennis McKenna who first presented the home cultivation techniques for growing psilocybe mushrooms in the form of and price of a book]… Paul Stamets and… Michael Pollan… the parallels between cannabis and psychedelic legalization are unavoidable… once we put plants [and fungi] into the context of deep-time human experience, we know their omnipresence in the human toolkit, rather than excising them as bad old intoxicants that those other primitive, non-techno-scientifically sophisticated beings without models of mechanistic causality used, we can talk about how we would explore such a relationship between humans and plants [and fungi]… we seduce each other, by giving each other attention. One of the lamentable things about the way medicalization and some decriminalization has occurred in the US is that many of us do not have the right to grow… you think that’s trivial; you can go to a dispensary and get certified, grown-by-union-labor, organic, kind bud that’s got its genome scanned… what that doesn’t give you is the well-testified experience of a dialogue with the plant [or fungi], a relationship with the plant [or fungi], that is necessary for the cultivation… this practice of growing and eating the plants [and fungi] and humbling ourselves before the plants [and fungi] helps us rethink what and who we are, to imagine we’re interacting with a sentient being, despite our culture’s bizarre allergy to recognizing the agency of plants [and fungi]. I couldn’t take a breath right now without 200 plants somewhere producing that oxygen… we grow them and eat them… share… you can look to the contemporary science of plant [and fungi] signaling and behavior and be bedazzled [by] an incredible field of information being synthesized and fed back into the growing of the plant [and fungi] itself, so it’s very reasonable to interact with plants [and fungi] as if they were minded beings, just as we implicitly, automatically interact with a dog or a cat…

Original Article (Westword & Jeffrey Morel & Richard Doyle & Edelic Archives):
Make room for mushrooms: legal psychedelics inspiring a new boom in therapy, businesses, regulations & Conscious conversations: Richard Doyle, author of darwin’s pharmacy, co-author dark side of the shroom
Artwork Fair Use: Hyperborea

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