Mushroom.Man

by Paulo Tullio

  I sent him the relevant extracts from this report and asked for his comments. I think that this was one of the very few times he ever gave me a specific reply to a specific question. His response seemed almost angry. I must be a fool, he wrote, if I thought that making music or enjoying it had anything to do with being able to name the notes. Is this what makes the music of Schubert touch the soul, being able to name the notes? In a Pythagorean universe, numbers underpin everything including the structure of the diatonic scale, but how can understanding the numbers explain the effect on our emotions? Whoever this E.G. Williams is, he has a weird idea of what music is or how to assess its quality.

  As an argument it sidestepped the core issue of impairment of ability, but I pressed it no further. Instead I took up the Pythagorean theme of numbers being the basis of all things in our universe. Certainly statistical analysis formed a major part of my work – it was a tool I could scarcely do without when dealing with raw data. But I was curious to know what part numbers played in his world. Eventually he sent me this.

  Attn. mushroom.seeker.

  Subject: Mathematics and the shaman universe.

  13 August.

  In all the years that I lived with Jane I’d never been able to talk to her about mathematics. A glazed look would come into her eye; my enthusiasm was never infectious. She refused to accept that it could have any relevance to her life. She’d say, ‘I don’t need to know any of that.’ I’d talk about classical Greek architecture, so bound up with the irrational number phi – the golden ratio. How mathematics and form were linked, how the underlying discipline made the shapes pleasing to the eye. I’ve always believed that knowledge of any kind is a useful tool, that it can be used not only to understand, but to create. If the early geometers hadn’t discovered the properties of a 3,4,5 triangle they’d never have got a square base to the pyramids.

  I don’t think that there’s anything ethereal about mathematics. It’s a branch of learning with very real, tangible products. It can also describe the universe well. If that weren’t true you couldn’t send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars. As a description of our universe it works; every lunar landing was a proof. The trouble is, of course, extracting the ideas from the arcane figures and notations. Some ideas are complex and incomprehensible, others so beautifully simple and elegant that they startle. I’ve never believed that these ideas should be left as the preserve of mathematicians, they’re too good not to steal.

  We were all taught a mechanistic view of physics. Things worked by laws that were demonstrable and repeatable. You could reduce the movement of celestial bodies or the swing of a pendulum to an elegant set of simultaneous equations. What was happening was that to reduce the observed phenomena to neat and tidy equations you had to leave bits out, or they didn’t work. The swing of a pendulum works in a mathematical model as long as you don’t include a three-dimensional wobble. The pendulum has to swing in a two-dimensional plane. Real pendulums don’t do that, of course. To make a mathematical model of a real pendulum’s swing requires horrendous equations – unless we address the problem differently. If you use fuzzy logic – logic that allows for wobbles – you get a close approximation to observed phenomena. It’s good at describing rules for a quantum universe. In fact there’s nothing fuzzy about the logic, it’s the rules that are fuzzy: that is, they’re more like English than maths. You can tell a room heater ‘if it gets a bit colder turn up the heat a little’. That’s a lot closer to the kind of logic we use daily than pure mathematics. In a way it’s like developing a meta-language of logic from functions – rather like a high-level computer language constructed from binary logic bits.

  I remember once sitting in the woods and deciding to mark the passage of time by the swaying of a branch in the wind. The wilder the wind the faster the passage of time; the more gentle, the slower time passed. Time was matched to my sense of being, not to a quartz crystal. In this part of the country an acre of land used to be enough land on which to pasture a cow. This was fuzzy logic at its best: on poor land the acre was large, on good land it was smaller. The measurement was fuzzy, but the information was precise. If you bought an acre, you knew you’d bought enough land to pasture a cow, and therefore it was easy to work out your return from the money invested. The old acre was a measurement that included within it years of observation of the land and the climate; it was matched specifically to the area it measured. When that method of measurement was lost, so was all the information that went with it. Yet it remains in folk memory as an example of how the world was once viewed, before the rigorous homogeneity of the modern state took hold.

  Discoveries in mathematics are no different in their effects than discoveries in other disciplines. If they fit into the existing schema they present no problems and are readily accepted. If something is discovered that doesn’t fit, that refuses to conform with the currently accepted wisdom, then it tends to be shelved and ignored. Only when the shelf is bulging with things that don’t fit the current theory does it become time to change the theory. The strange functions that defied differentiation; functions that had singularities; mathematical oddities for half a century – were precisely those that led Mandelbrot to his fractal geometry and by analogy to chaos theory as well. He found a new way of ordering the data that made sense of what had been regarded as curiosities. It is not a binary universe; chaos and order are not the only alternatives. There is a boundary area between the two that exhibits a little of both states. This is where the fractal universe lives. The world and its physics are fuzzy; our universe is lumpy. Order and exactness are what we want to find, not what’s there.

  Thinkers in the Aristotelian school find this way of looking at things anathema. Fuzzy and lumpy are exactly the epithets that they are at pains to eradicate from their world view. And there is no doubt that the mechanistic view of the universe has been successful: it has brought us to the technologically wondrous world that we now inhabit. Computers are the logical result of addressing the universe linearly. But it does seem that somewhere on the journey from Aristotle to here we lost sight of some other part of ourselves, the part that deals not in logic and equations but in perceptions and dreams. I sense a shamanistic revival; a groundswell of ill-defined discontent seems to be taking a gradual form, a shape that expresses itself in the non-material spheres. Earth magic, Buddhism, witchcraft, re-birthing, druidism – all these point in a similar direction. There is a sense that we have explored one road well; so well that it has been to the detriment of others.

  All the time I was living with Jane many ideas began to form, loosely at first, but then with gathering clarity. It was frustrating not to be able to bounce them off Jane, check them out against her feedback. It’s hard to think in a vacuum, especially if you doubt your own sanity at the same time.

  Reading was the only route available to me to keep some kind of tab on where my thoughts were leading. Bibliographies of sources were the only pointers I had to other ways of thinking, and getting books not in the mainstream of publishing was hard. Still, my bookshelves are a monument to the cabala of mushrooms. There is an enormous jumble of information on ethnopharmacology, from the scholarly to the frankly bizarre. Between these extremes there does seem to be some common ground, some agreement. That the hallucinogenic experience has had a large and quantifiable effect on western societies and thought is clear enough. Myths and legends can be interpreted with little difficulty as parables, attempts to give an insight into worlds where words have little meaning. All through recorded history there are descriptions of rites and mysteries that appear to have mushrooms at the heart of them. Men and mushrooms have a long and entwined history.

  No matter how you try, the problem is still the same one. Explaining a world where words have no meaning, to a world where words are the only meaning, has inherent paradoxes. It can’t be confronted directly, only obliquely; hence the myths, parables and legends. The lack of clarity is not only because of the difficulty of describing the indescribable, but also
because over many centuries the secret rites and mysteries were feared and proscribed. Circumlocution was often the only way to pass on information without persecution.

  Essentially that is still the case. The modern Malleus Malefecorum is the global war on drugs – demonology has simply changed its target. Unfortunately the target has been made large and amorphous. Heroin-and cocaine-induced crime and sociological disintegration have been lumped together with mushrooms, tryptamines and indoles. Yet the effect of hallucinogens is to break habits of behaviour and thought; quite the contrary of the white powders. Demonizing drugs has led us to throw away a real tool for self-awareness. Oversimplification has produced modern mantras repeated in all of our media. Television good, drugs bad. Ignorance and repression of the unknown have always been universal currencies.

  I keep coming up against an intellectual wall. Moments of intuition, moments of epiphany, never become moments of elation. The dampening factor is arrogance. It’s a wall I find hard to get past. Every time an apparent insight comes, a voice within says ‘Don’t be so arrogant. Why should you have discovered something no one else has?’ The only response I’ve ever been able to find is that it’s perhaps because I was looking where few others have explored. That allows me to believe in the validity of an insight while retaining an intellectual modesty. Every virgin territory has discoveries waiting to be made by even the least perceptive. Obviously it follows that the better explored the territory, the harder new discoveries are to make.

  The other major doubt is the one that says, ‘If this way of life is so fulfilling, why are you permanently poor and alone?’ That’s easier to deal with than the first, because loneliness and discomfort are simply a product of exploration. If I had surrounded myself with comforts and friends then there would be no solitude, and with no solitude no exploration. Although easily answered it is none the less a recurring doubt. Sometimes when I sit in the damp and cold surrounded by seventeenth-century technology I wonder about the wisdom of my choices. They were never intended to be so, but they can look obdurately wilful at times.

  To me, however, they seem real choices. Not the choices that are fobbed off on us by advertisers and industry whose battle cry of ‘freedom to choose’ means nothing more than a choice of breakfast cereals. Free will has been redefined; its only application is in the world of consumerism. You are free to choose the car of your choice, the house of your choice, the pension plan of your choice, but there is an underlying criterion for this freedom: purchase. The only freedom on offer in a consumer-led society is the freedom to spend.

  Like everyone else I often ask myself, ‘Where do I go from here?’ There has to be a point to it, a purpose, a goal where the journey ends. There is something unsatisfying about the idea of a life-long search that ends with nothing to report. Whizz. What was that? Your life, pal. Anything to report? No, not really. Depressing thought. So there has to be a rationale. It means having to define some of my ramblings as purposeful journeys. It means investing banal thoughts with deeper meanings. Re-defining enforced choices as acts of will. Obviously I’m aware of these tendencies and try to curtail them, but some get past me. It’s a constant struggle.

  Is it worth it? Although I have doubts, I suppose I must believe the answer is yes. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. In the final analysis we measure our lives by the pleasure received against the pain received. I may have discomfort, but there is little if any pain. And pleasures are there too. If I’m to be specific, then the pleasures are all of the same kind; pleasures found by being part of the natural world. The splash of a kingfisher, the majesty of a twelve-point stag, the fruiting of a mushroom. Pleasure in being part of the grander scheme of things; those rare moments when you feel a sense of belonging as opposed to alienation. And pleasure too in those moments of insight.

  I worry that any social skills I may have had are withering from lack of use. In company I still feel as I always did, still believe myself to be normal and average, but increasingly I’m aware that people are treating me differently. As though I’m some kind of alien species. It’s nothing tangible; I can’t put my finger on any specifics, it’s just a feeling. It might be something as simple as my appearance; maybe I’m beginning to look like the wild man of the mountains. I think that’s what happens. Gradually, imperceptibly, you begin to assume the camouflage that best fits your surroundings. Look at me, I’m dressed entirely in greens and browns. There’s a bit of the chameleon in us all.

  If it wasn’t for the changing seasons my days would have a stifling monotony. The seasons at least change the backdrop against which I act. They create their own set of daily routines and actions, they point to the passing of time. And that’s another worry of mine, getting older and no wiser. I could be wiser, if only I could remember some of the things I’ve learned. Time passes unobtrusively here, it sneaks past you like a rat in the dark. If time is measured by movement, then it’s no surprise you don’t spot its passing here. Nothing changes, nothing moves.

  Time is one of the things that changes from world to world. Outside the daily world of consciousness it doesn’t have the same driving urgency. The advances in time-keeping create paradoxes of their own. A stopped clock is right twice a day; one that loses only a hundredth of a second a day is right once every 12,000 years. Once you start down the Aristotelian path of science and dissection you have to go to ridiculous extremes to get back to where you were before you started. I sometimes wonder whether I need a watch or not, or even a calendar. I can’t think of anything that I do that requires that kind of temporal precision.

  Diversity is increasingly giving way to monoculture. Global networks of television, communications and computers are slowly homogenizing our world. There are no parts of the planet left that a lone wanderer can explore. Maybe that’s the attraction of inner space, it’s accessible to everyone and largely unexplored. A place that appeals to the frontiersman; a place with no regulations, no signposts, no roads. It’s the antithesis of the urban world.

  As political and economic power is increasingly centralized, so the ideals and the philosophies of the urban mind have begun to dominate. Its urge to put systems in place, to set everything in concrete, to pass laws that ultimately prevent the individual from taking responsibility for his own life, is making existence on the frontiers harder to sustain. Living outside the system is getting harder. As government databases grow and communications get faster and more efficient, the urban net is ever more encompassing. More and more the countryside is perceived and regulated as a theme-park for the urban visitor. The frontier is losing its wildness and its inhabitants their freedom.

  How far has the urban mind moved from the land when it deems it intelligent to make a plant illegal? Mutter what you like about biodiversity and animal rights, but where is the sense in outlawing a plant? How does an organism that has existed longer than the human race become unlawful? I’m not an anarchist; I believe in laws and a society that is regulated to ensure the greater good but I’m sure that the regulatory urge has been given too free a rein.

  Until things change the only true freedom to be found is in inner space. Here dreams and imagination make the fabric that defines it, and by their nature they are both boundless. There are no limits in this space; that is both its attraction and its drawback. Complete freedom means there is freedom to make bad or unwise choices, freedom to go to places where the sensible wouldn’t venture, freedom to express both the good and the bad in our souls. The only repercussions to these choices, both good and bad, are from the traveller’s own sense of self-discipline. It’s what Carlos Castaneda called the warrior’s path, where the individual makes the rules and lives by them, taking responsibility for his actions and their effects. I have a need to make my own decisions, to find my own route to knowledge.

  Just what knowledge is can be hard to pin down. It’s the result of exploration either of ideas or of physical space. It can be immediate in its application like the knowledge of fire, or it can remain intangible like kno
wledge of the cosmos. We seek it because knowledge is power, and sometimes it converts to money. If you were a druid and could use your henge to predict eclipses, you had power over your society. You could make an eclipse the response of the gods to your society’s careless treatment of its priests. When Arab traders learnt that the stars Phad and Dubhe pointed to Polaris, they could navigate at night and sail directly to the Indies in less time than anyone else. This little piece of information made them a lot of money. I heard a story a long time ago about a man who could take a dent out of a motorbike fuel tank. He made a fortune because he was the only man who could do it. One day somebody hid on the roof of his workshop and watched through a hole. He saw dented tanks filled with dried peas which were then wetted. When they expanded they took out the dent. Now anyone can do it.

  At the turn of the century anglers had to go to a tackle shop to get a blood knot tied. The tackle shop would tie as many as you paid them for, but wouldn’t show you how. It took a determined man called Jock Purvis with a razor blade and a magnifying glass to cut tiny sections and discover its secret. Now it’s public domain. The point is that knowledge is there to be used. Once it has become the property of everyone it can no longer be used as an instrument of personal power.

  Research into biology and genetics is linked inextricably with the need to exploit the knowledge gained. It becomes vital to protect the investment in research with patents and lawyers. This is the kind of knowledge with actual applications; a hardier strain of wheat, or a spliced gene. It differs from conceptual knowledge which has no application. Philosophical knowledge is knowledge for its own sake. It brings no tangible benefit to those who find it, and sometimes persecution to those who seek it. If there is a pay-off it’s hard to quantify; perhaps it’s no more than the peace that comes from a centred sense of being.