Spoiler: I hope to have many more years on this planet, so y’all are stuck with me for the time being. :)
Once the party alure of shrooms wore off, I was still stuck wondering how deep the rabbit hole actually was.
After months (or eons?) of searching all the galaxies in the universe and turning over every metaphorical stone in my brain, I still never found the mystical “42” that everyone kept talking about.
For me, the years of searching for the meaning of life ended right were it started. I had nothing and still have nothing. And I was baffled.
Yet, I felt that this primitive form of life, ney, this thing, this humble fungi, was trying to teach me something. Many times before, my brain has formed this idea: Listen to what the mushroom is telling you.
So, I stood back and looked: Mycelium, in its most basic form, bridges the gap between life and death. It is an extremely efficient nutrient eating machine and it poops out more life wherever it goes. It is a simple, yet extremely elegant and complex creature.
The it hit me like a freight train filled with PE: The mycelium quite literally dissolves the barriers we are taught in life: You are born. Hard stop. You then die. Hard stop.
Life never dies. It gets converted millions of times over into different forms, but yet, it is still life. The artificial and insignificant barriers of life and death are meaningless to mycelium. If one cell of it manages to survive my compost heap, I can say with near certainty that in a few thousand years, that one bitch of a cell will have multiplied a trillion times over and eaten half the neighborhood. (Life, uh, finds a way.)
Mycelium is quite literally the honey badger of humanities rules and honey badger don’t give a fuck what you think.
My main takeaway from this is something that the fungi figured out 650 million years ago: You are already immortal, you idiot. Sure, this body will die eventually, and get converted into some other form of life.
What is life? I am life. It took billions of years and several iterations of stars, and here we are. The universe had to cram a fuck ton of actual energy into what we are now. In the words of one of my heros: We are starstuff.
You, me and everyone in this planet is a glorious example of how the universe is becoming self aware. Right in front of our eyes, we can see the infinite number of combinations life is testing. Every living thing on this planet is an example of how life itself probes trillions of different combinations of things at the exact same time. Like it or not, we are the sum of all the good and evil on this planet.
Now it becomes clear that the geometric patterns and the fractals that we see during our trips are a bit of delicious humor: If you keep zooming in to those patterns, you are only going to end up where you started, friend.
So, today, I actually believe that I was the closest to death that I have ever been and it was the most humbling and beautiful experiences of my life. I truly believe I held the lightswitch of this life in my hand and could have easily pushed that button, but it didn’t matter. Life is immortal. We are immortal.
Today, I saw nothing, but yet, I saw everything.
You put into words something that I feel but can’t adequately explain. I understood that “the meaning of life” was less about me or my species or even my entire planet and more about the universe, which I would describe as not just humbling, but an epiphany of ego death on a scale I’d never considered. I was searching for the meaning of life, and was initially disappointed to not find one, and then understood that the meaning isn’t for me or us. We are merely a tool; a function.
Life is something that happened because it was possible, and it’s been allowed to continue because it’s expediting the natural process of masses and energies. All life absorbs matter and energy, breaking them down faster than they otherwise would. We’re achieving entropy. Humans are especially good at this, burning material for heat, moving quickly over long distance, dreaming of escaping to other worlds to burn material elsewhere. With interstellar travel, we could be an entropic plague. The heat death of the universe gets a little closer every time we breathe or eat or drive our silly cars or fuck. Everything we do is fulfilling our purpose, so there’s really no wrong way to live, and I find an awful lot of comfort in that.
The new Zelda game is fun, and playing it is my meaning of life this week.
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Believe it or not, it was a mild dose for me. Like most trips, this one was absolutely induced by my environment. (It is likely that the couple of mushrooms I ate were just stronger, so that is not off the table. I’ll trip once a week, or every two weeks. Whichever.)
That time, I was laying in bed with some really nice psychill music and was wearing a sleep mask to block out any stray light. The lack of external stimulation and letting my mind do it’s thing was very unique, for sure.
It truly is amazing what the mind can do when it is not getting distracted.
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Did we talk about gypsum? I can’t remember. Regardless, it’s just used as a source of calcium and also to adjust the pH of the substrate.
If mycelium is even slightly like cannabis, pH could play a role in what micronutrients are available from the substrate. I dunno if the same concepts apply or if nutrient lock-out is a soil issue or how the roots of cannabis work in that condition.
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Oh, we were bouncing around between here and lemmy.world in our conversations I just found out. Lulz.
The shrooms community just got unbanned over there, btw. That is nice, as it is a huge instance. I’ll probably stay on lemmy.ca as my home though.
On a relevant note on this, I read up on this subject again just yesterday and gypsum is a source of sulfates and is pH neutral (~6.7). Mushrooms like sulfates in small quantities, it seems. Its species dependant on if you would add it to a casing layer, if I remember correctly now. Stamets book references gypsum in several different contexts, so it’s going to be a bit for me to take that in myself.
Thanks for the grow compliments! My current monotub is about to go into fruit and my fingers are crossed.
(Excuse me if I was wrong before. I tend to remember lots of things incorrectly and have to reference the same data a hundred times before it sticks in my brain.)
