Alan Watts once said that “when you get the message hang up the phone”.
I believe this is wrong.
To say to hang up the phone when the message is understood is to misunderstand understanding. The mushroom is not an answering machine. Their is an essential knowledge but beyond this their is infinitely more to learn. The mushroom is a telephone wire to nature. We are intelligent, and therefore this must mean the environment from which we emerge is also intelligent. Nature is the source of our intelligence, in whatever capacity we exercise it. The implication in Alan's statement is that there is no more to be learned, and that's why you hang up the phone. But you might agree that it can never be true that one has achieved mastery over every possible thing to be learned. Therefore it is not a good idea to hang up the phone. Unless time for integration is required of course.
So the mushroom is not to be seen as a one time experience that you have. The mushroom is to be seen as our forgotten symbiotic partner in the ancient world before anything identifiable as humanness was evident on this planet. Without the mushroom 'you' are not. Don't hang up the phone. Instead seek to spend as much timeless time as you can with this most strange and humble creature that may have origins in a time and place that transcends the contemplative power of the human imagination. Why? Because the mushroom is the source of the human imagination. The mushroom is the architect of our thought. It extends the boundaries of what it is possible to think, of what ‘can’ be thought.
When you take the mushroom, the mushroom takes you. It teaches by virtue of the content of your own mind. It rearranges this content into a narrative that you can understand. That is the ‘message’ that appears before you although it seems so obviously to arrive from somewhere outside you. And having understood you are amazed that you didn’t see what you now see before! The knowledge was always there, deep in your mind, in different regions of the brain, never brought together in this specific unique way to create a new coherent picture on the way reality is put together. So is the mushroom a tool to open us up to the dimensions of the ultimate reality that are normally hidden for their irrelevance to the human virtual reality? But who defines these boundaries of the human experience? What do we mean by human anyway? I am nothing, nothing at all. Absolutely nothing to say.
Or maybe it is you that teaches yourself. It could be that the mushroom by virtue of fully realizing the potential of the human brain into actuality that we experience our native selves, as we knew ourselves before the arrival of language to corrupt the clarity of our original minds. It is the experience of a child’s perspective on life, when self and time and profit were irrelevant concepts because what was really interesting was the magical outlines of faces in the clouds or strange configurations of texture in the grassy plains or the magnificent beauty in azurite found in some random place you never suspected. That is the reality we are missing. The sound of the rain, the thorough enjoyment of every moment whatsoever despite its transience or pain; it is possible to achieve equanimity in the heart, such that every perception of the world is as exciting to your consciousness as bright a light reflecting off a diamond is to your eyes.