Fungi Frontiers - The Official Podcast of the Maine Fungi Fest
The Commonality of Consciousness : How Shroom Guidance WorksÂ
Welcome to Fungi Frontiers, the official podcast of the main Fungi Fest, where we will celebrate all things Fungi, plant-based healing, and evolving consciousness. Yes, welcome one and all, to the very first episode, and I am your host, Bobbie Paluzzi. Today, very fittingly, Sean P. O'Donohue, an herbalist, I get to interview, we're going to ask him about his personal relationship to mushrooms and his concept of the consciousness of things, that is to say the consciousness of forms of life. It's fascinating, he is fascinating, and we're going to start talking about that in a moment of its time. One of the greatest and most dangerous solutions of our culture is the idea of the unique, the specialness of human consciousness of human consciousness. Sean P. O'Donohue, I'd like you to give me your title, if you have one. I'm not sure if I do, I'm an herbalist. Yes. Okay, so could you please explain your relationship to mushrooms at this time? The fungal world helps us understand so much of where we came from. Our own individual nervous systems are localized variations on a mycorrhizal myth. It was the mycelia of that network that formed the basis for our neurons and our synapses form the evolutionary model. And so I relate to mushrooms profoundly as our ancestors and as our distant kin, and also because I think that they help us to understand a little bit more about different ways of being in the world. So we look at a mushroom and we think of it as an individual, and it is an individual. Each mushroom has a different experience than any other mushroom has ever had before, or will I ever have again? Yeah, it's going to be different than another one located in somewhere else, right? Exactly. Okay. And yet they're part of a larger organism. And the law does the larger organism have a consciousness of its own that is able to produce and adapt into these into these into these different environments. It does precisely. And so the mushrooms having its individual experience at the same time that that's feeding into the collective experience of the whole mycelia organs. This is the key of your wonderful insight is the human capacity to get closer to the guidance of the mushroom by using it and also just by being more aware of it. So we need to go on a slight tangent first to make it all make sense. Do it, which is a lot of scholars who look at indigenous world views versus our contemporary Western world view say that one of the fundamental differences is that for in our culture, the first layer of being is I. We think of ourselves as primarily and often as strictly individual, whereas an indigenous culture is the first layer of being is we. It's not that there's not an it's not that there's not an eye, but that I is primarily understood as part of a week or as part of multiple weeks as part of a family as part of a tribe as a tribes collection section. And they recognize the roles they're in. They recognize their roles. Yeah. And so. Exactly. And that way, like, original human consciousness is much closer in its forum to mushroom consciousness. But then we look back at when did humans first start coming into contact with psilocybin with philosophy mushrooms on a regular basis was when they started creating clearings to graze cattle and sheep and those grasslands mushroom and we can think of it as living intelligence of the earth was reaching out to us and say, hey, now that you're beginning to treat yourselves as more separate, you need to go back and remember that togetherness. And so the mushrooms came and come into relationship with us in a way that helps us to do that. Are the farms, are you saying the farms are making people less tribal and more what more like spread into sort of like little nuclear family areas that they weren't as communing all to one another in the way that a tribe does. At the point that I was just talking about, it was still very much a tribal existence and tribal understanding, but it was creating a separation between the human and the wild and altering the landscape in a different way than people had before. And then we have across history, but in a very strong way about 500 years ago when both in Europe and in the colonization of the Americas and in the kidnapping of people from Africa, there was separation of people from community and land so that begins to move towards more individual. And then that gets really, really hyper accelerated in the 20th century, but it's really interesting that at the point that humans detonate the first nuclear bomb within, it's within a few years of when our culture comes back into contact with philosophy and when Albert Hoffman working with the claviceps fungus extract LSD. And so it's like at these crucial moments in our development, but we're moving further away from the course of the rest of life. Seems like a lot of things turned over right around that atomic age and we gained a lot of potential for awareness right around then. Okay, people say that, you know, mushroom therapy can repair and that sounds like a guidance to me, like repair people from illnesses, psychological illnesses, neurological illnesses. And this kind of thing says, all right, that consciousness can be accepted by humans and passively allowed to kind of like work on on you. Maybe adhere to its call. Yeah, I mean, in some ways, Timothy Larry had a pretty right and succinctly when he said turn on to an end drop out, although maybe he'll be turned on to an end drop in, if he talked about dropping in. I think the last part of that was always the key kicker for someone to drop out. Wait a minute. Yes. So where do I go from there? After out. So but yeah, I think I think there's something to it. You do have to drop out of a certain aspect of thinking, any kind of rigidity that you were. Do you do you see something with intuition and the idea of following the again, I just want to keep going on with because you have this insight. You seem to know that the mushroom is a guide. Some kind of a way that we can recognize what we're able to supposed to be aware of. Yeah. Well, I would say that all of the philosophy mushrooms serve the. So the so the ones that produce psilocybin, okay, all the mushrooms that produce psilocybin are serving a role within their ecosystem of helping to facilitate interweaving and connection. And so they do the same for us when we come into contact with them just as they did for other beings long before us and just as they will for other beings long after us. Which which which beings before us pretty much every species that encounter, for example, that trees have saroprenergic systems and so trees dream to. What is a dream of a tree like, what do you think, like what what what what consciousness does a tree inhabit? I I'm getting closer to a mushroom, if I can get to a tree, maybe because we have a lot of exposure with trees. So what does a tree dream about or of or with or how does it how does it dream? Yeah. Yeah. The with is a wonderful word is dreaming with because they're dreaming with each other and they're dreaming with the whole of the forest and one of the things about a tree is that because they are there for often for centuries or at least they evolve to be able to live for centuries they are memory keep so they focus a lot on what's happening in one place over a long period of time. And it's interesting because they're roots intertwined with the mice with the mycelium of the fungi and the fungi are all about what's happening over a vast distance in a single moment. So together the the mycelium mind is the vast horizontal mind that's conceiving of everything happening in an instant across a wide area and the dream is a very concentrated deep mind that goes into everything that's happened in one place over a long period of time. But imagine beyond that place except I see the degree that it's informed by what's flowing in from that net. And there there are even fungi in deserts I mean not as abundant but I'm not certain if there's fungal life in Antarctica but pretty much every in all of the terrestrial world there's fungal life but I do tend to be land-based rather than water-based. Let's take a nice pause and thanks again for joining us on the very first episode of fungi frontiers. This podcast is brought to you on behalf of the main fungi fest May 30th through June 1st 2025 at St. Joseph's College in Maine where we encourage those now interested in participating please visit www.mainfungifest.org for more of those details. Let's get back to our lively and provocative discussion philosophically and I want to say metaphorically about his first episodes with psychedelics. Took me a long time to articulate it and identify it when I was 19 and had my first experience taking psilocybin in the forest and felt myself felt as though I first understood what it was like to be a deer in the forest bracing on the buds of the trees. I felt that mine had gone through the roots and I felt it going to something else and something else was the mind of the forest. It was that my chorizo network I think the primary thing is curiosity and you know the great mycologist Merlin Sheldrecht speaks about this in his book and Tangled Life where he talks about how the mycelium puts itself inside its food and begins to digest it from within and assimilate it and experience it and then its curiosity to discover more leads it to branch out further and she's branching and branching and what's interesting is our own brains have that same capacity and when we're under the influence of psilocybin or LSD which is also fungal compound initially we then actually end up having our own brains creating more branching synapse in a way that's more similar to what's happening in a mycelial organism. Are we talking about meditation is that what you do to get to a place where you're connecting or is it just an everyday thing with with your after a while. It's both a become an everyday thing okay and there are lots of different forms of meditation that can bring people there but I find that for for me the one that works that has been as probably there most deeply has been one I learned from my late friend Stephen Booner and his partner Julie McIntyre which is to bring your awareness to feeling your heartbeat and then to bring gratitude to your heartbeat and stay with that for longer and longer and then once you've learned to stay in that place from that place going out encountering the world and often a tree is a good place to begin that encounter. So a rhythm did you just say a rhythm of your heartbeat bringing your attention to the rhythm of your heartbeat and bringing gratitude for it because that we felt this is our prioritizing what's coming in from the world and our hearts have these very sensitive electromagnetic fields that are feeling all the fluctuations in everything because everything is aligned has a different electromagnetic signature that heart that heart field has changed and then that travels to our brains as a kind of sensory information but it's a kind of sensory information that is sort of the feeling sense of things in the same way that our eyes take in light that we perceive it in terms of color and shape or ears take in sound we perceive it in terms of pitch and volume when our hearts take in what's happening in the world we perceive it as the emotional sense of what's around us and that felt sense of what we're encountering. So like when you walk into a room and without looking at people's faces or tearing them speak you can tell sort of the mood of the feeling of the room that's that sense kicking it. Okay close your eyes open your heart if possible and maybe be in a safe enough place to allow that which also if you think about it mushrooms do seem to be need to be in the right condition you know to to at least expose to the outside world and grow so finding that that place is is a wonderful thing for human beings and fungi frontiers here is this is a perfect interview for us because we're we're trying to make that match and get that consciousness that you're talking about that's out there into the human set mindset and make it more of an everyday thing to the point where it really is a wonderful mingling and what benefits do you think in a just now very idealistic overall way would such a thing to happen we're such a thing to happen on a large scale and in a very accepting way do you think that that would would possibly occur. Well it's interesting so it's like we have public health officials being talked about loneliness as a health crisis and they're right but they're only under part of it because the loneliness for human connection is real it is a crisis in our culture but we also have a deeper loneliness that's a lonely loneliness for the connection with the rest of life a loneliness for remembering what we're part of for understanding that we're part of that evolutionary dance and when we come into this experience of direct contact with living world that the mushrooms are not the only path to that can be a profound path to help us enter into then that loneliness begins to obey and we become not only individually healthier but also collectively healthy we become more able to fluidly respond to what life wants to need. Say something one more time about this loneliness. Yeah well if we think about our oldest ancestors in every moment of their life they're experiencing life in some form whether it was hearing the calls of birds or the howl of a wolf or that we're hearing the wind and the trees bathing in the escalations of plants or tasting in the water things that pass through the roots of the plants around them. They were constantly in contact with the living world that was shaping their reality and so we evolved toward that kind of deep kinship with everything and the more we've become separated from it the more we've become separated from ourselves and from each other and so that ecological loneliness is of all of our other kinds of loneliness and the good news is that we have the same nervous systems that our ancestors had that they just exposed to different things and so we have the capacity to reconnect with them and I think about Clarence McKenna famously said nature is alive and is always speaking to us and this is not a metaphor and I always laugh because people try to figure out well what is he trying to say? Well he was trying to say exactly what he said that's what he said. That's it. That's it. Well it's funny as I'm you know asking these questions I say wow it sounds so profound but I really liked one of your answers which was it's an everyday thing as well as a highly you know aware state and something rare. It becomes an everyday thing and this sounds like an achievement that we could we could be aiming for and I love that you were able to come on and represent that with us here. Did there was there some news that you had something new coming out from you? I just had no book come out this summer Silver Branch and the other world where I delve into this way of looking. Silver Branch, the Silver Branch and the other world? Yes all right I just wanted to get that right the Silver Branch and the other world and your name is Sean P. O'Donohue. I can look that up if I'm listening. So please tell me a little more about it. Yeah so in the ancient Irish understanding of this world there was this world that we live in and there was the other world that was not separate it was close it was an inner dimension of everything. It was always touchy on like what we think of as the spirit world but but people had lost daily contact with it and the Irish seagoth Monon McLeer the son of the great sea of being would sometimes come to a human and bring the Silver Branch of an apple tree that had flowers and fruit and leaves on at the same time because it came from a world where there was that deeper understanding of unity and when they held it they could see the deep inner dimensions of everything and so that to me becomes a metaphor for our entering into that remembering that everything is alive and so the book is an exploration of that. Oh wow, wow I'd love to explore it. Is there some story or something about fungi fest that you can add to our interview here from the main fungi fest? Well I think that what I think I love about fungi fest is we have all these people who are wildly differently individual coming together united by their common love hub or curiosity about the fungal world and then over the course of a few days become woven into a collective where we're all sharing in deeper degrees of understanding. I think that's splendid. Okay, I've had a great time interviewing Sean, thank you so much. Thank you. Welcome back listeners from our interview with Sean. I hope you thought it was more than worthy and gave you something to explore. Fungi frontiers is brought to you by moving on productions and the main consciousness healing and living medicine project. We're going to have our main fungi fest on the shores of Sabago Lake, May 30th through Sunday, June 1st, 2025 at St. Joseph's College in Maine this year. Oh my. We're going to tap in to fungi fest across the country as they are growing in popularity and the whole subject matter itself is becoming wider and reaching more and more people in more and more ways. Head to www.mainfungifest.org. For more, I'm Bobby Paluzzi. I'm thanking you so much for coming this far with me on this very first broadcast. And don't forget to stay connected. Until next time, as we further our fungi frontiers. [BLANK_AUDIO]