Explicating the Mushroom

In stories of breaking-war, there’s a sense of a radical shattering, something new intruding open, bursting open the enclosed bubble, violently making itself known. The world wars began with an “outbreak”, a shattering of something false and the beginning of something new. 9/11 came into the Fukuyamaist concensus like a needle piercing skin, surgically precise plane-strikes piercing the plastic and metal facade of pax-Americana. The breaking-open begins a new paradigm of the world, the inside/outside having been unified, are now left on the same plane to mingle and interact with each other. Such is the ensuing conflicts or wars, the symphony of what follows from the interactions of things which had previously been on opposite sides of a subtle barrier.

Despite the pretensions of the conquerors and victims, this is never about annihilation, but the synthesis of the sides involved and construction of a new world after the interaction of the two has occurred. Notably, very few imaginations of conquering, as victor or defeated, involve true annihilation, but instead some form of humiliation, where what is really being feared is the painful acceptance into a new discourse, one of slavery and submission. Such is shown vividly in the Narmer Palette, depicting the conquest of Lower Egypt by Upper which resulted in a unification continuing on today, where the two interaction as part of a new peoples constructed after the unification of the two.

This unification can only occur because at the most basic level of this is a common substrate, that of humanity, which, like water, can bind to and interact with itself as one unit, divisible and combinable at will of higher power. The differences between these groups is not that of a foundational-kind, as both are the same substrate, humans, but of an expressed-kind, where that which is carried by the water is incompatible, different types of oil coming into violent contact atop an ocean. The water itself is able to remain present through all of it and once its mixing together, the substances carried along have no choice but to conflict, in whatever way may result. Such is the conflict of competing Ways of peoples in war, cultures clashing and ultimately becoming intertwined with one another, through whatever particular mechanisms that entails.

Covering substrate and covering types of organisms atop substrate, we abandon oil and water for a more interesting metaphor - mushrooms, with the oil being imagined here as mycelium. The Mushroom emerges from mycelium, the basic Way moving through the substrate of humanity, where the interaction of the two produces fruiting bodies. This is the creation of texts, vertical structures which grow out of to attain a life and meaning unto themselves. Notice well, psilocybin’s psychedelic properties can be best explained as turning the existing mental systems of the mind to intense frequences of vibration, setting the textual engine of thought into higher gears that possible normally.