This is what you are dealing with, with the magic mushroom. You know how in shamanism we acknowledge that every being has its own form of consciousness or awareness. Our claim to fame is the largest brain or neural network of the animal kingdom except for whales and dolphins. Our great opus of evolutionary accomplishment is our ego or self-consciousness, but before we (homosapiens) developed an ego (give or take 10,000 years) we had a different kind of brain that was much more connected to "earth-consciousness" or the Great Mother. That is the story of human consciousness in a nutshell -- 300,000 years of earth-connected consciousness underlying 10,000 years of ego-consciousness and 300 - 400 years of scientific / logical (conditioning of) consciousness. (slave / master, masculine, top-down, hierarchical, problem-solving, matter is dead, cause and effect, power-over, controlling our environment, education = conditioning, thought-control, chronological time).
Human consciousness is self-reflective. At least half of what we experience is colored by what we project, the world outside of our projections can never be directly experienced as it is without that veneer of how we perceive it. As we (both individually and collectively) begin to explore and deconstruct the ego (self-consciousness) we realize that it isn't a prison but an opportunity to interface with the universe via an array of lenses. (My septuagenarian male heterosexual lens, my poet lens, my progressive left-wing American lens, my Jungian lens, my vegetarian lens, my pacifist lens, my shamanic lens . . .)
When I was working with ayahuasca I learned that "I" can be experiencing something without being at the center of what I am experiencing, so I learned to witness, to be a witness of something that included me but wasn't about me. I also learned that, on psychedelics we do well to know when we are experiencing something through the lens of me (Gary Lindorff) or through the lens of what I call my "entity", which is my core self, that is still who I am but is not tied to my name or my middle-worldly self.
When I can make that shift from being in my Gary-skin to being in my entity, I am still uniquely myself, but we simply lack the language to explain how we can be experiencing ourselves outside of that self-conditioning which has served us since our mothers named us.
To understand this it might help to remember that we were someone before we were named and stepped into our karmic shoes. I think of Michael Meade's story of how he learned at 13 that he was much more than the son of his parents and one of 5 siblings in a working class Irish family living on a shoestring in Brooklyn. His aunt's presenting him with his first book with Pegasus on the cover and with the image of the powerful archer about to release his arrow, this aunt was his angel (just for that moment). She was a catalyst, showing him the archetype that was going to be instrumental in moving him into a larger life. The arrow was his gift, his story-voice. It was his power, his medicine and it transcended his ego. But it was still integral to who he was. So when the hoods herded him into the bathroom and were about to beat him to a pulp for something his friend did to anger them, his entity was awakened. (It wasn't his day to die, but his day to rise, for his acorn to sprout..)
A mushroom journey may be life-changing or it may not. It all depends on many variables.
Clearing the deck is important. When I did my recent soul-retrieval. I asked for a dream to show me something, to help get me ready for the soul-retrieval. I dreamed I was seeing the butternut tree where my father hung a swing that I and my brother and sister could all sit on at the same time, by the horse barn, where my mother would swing us. So that butternut was, obviously, my soul tree. Right next to the tree (in my dream) was a giant rusty cylinder, like a silo with no discernible openings. I didn't know what was in it. When the shaman did my s-retrieval, as she explained afterward, she emptied out that silo, and got rid of it, She sent it (respectfully) far away, out of my life, for good. So when the session was over, I felt I had a lot of room in my psyche that was not available before. She recommended that I fill that space with joy!
Now, if I was going to journey with the mushroom, that would have been good prep work, and I would have been in a good place to go with the mushroom's teaching / journey. If I had come to the mushroom session with the silo still prominent in my dreaming, the mushroom would have had to deal with that. (What was in the silo? Shadow stuff, probably very low-energy shadow stuff. Probably psychic "junk" that I was storing away, but it had no purpose. Maybe 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago it had a psychic charge. Maybe it was what was left of old complexes that I had dealt with or outgrown.) But what is interesting is, it was still there, right next to the butternut. It probably went way back. Maybe it contained family karma. Maybe it was a mix of the remains of inherited and personal trauma that I had stuffed out of sight-out of mind, like Robert Bly's long sock filled with shadow that we drag behind us all our lives, that we need to dump out and look at. Bly was closer to being a Jungian than a shaman, so the "sock" metaphor worked for him. But my situation was different. My silo was not a sock, it was metal, rusty and very strong like a vault, and I wasn't dragging it behind me but it was right there towering next to my soul-tree. Wow, right? So soul-retrieval was exactly what I needed to get it out of my life.
Once I had that space (thanks to this shaman) my work shifted to focusing on my heart (the only organ that is also a chakra). I was in the life-long habit of treating my heart like it was only an organ most of the time, and a chakra only when I wanted or needed it to be. It took me about two years (after my soul-retrieval) to realize that that approach was making my heart sick. It finally dawned on me that, yes, we need to take good care of our hearts (as our primary organ of perception, always communicating with our gut and brain via the vagus nerve), but that, energetically speaking, our hearts have infinite capacity! But the heart, as our organ of perception and as our quantum "pump" that helps to move out blood, as remarkable as it is, as a physical organ (or, at its best, as a quantum computer, but physical), doesn't have infinite capacity. When it stops, we pass out of our body. So, if we want our heart to be happy and healthy, we need to grow into it as both an organ and a chakra. As a chakra, it does have that potential of infinite capacity to empathize with the suffering of the planet (for example) and to feel for the chipmunk we ran over and for the man holding the sign outside the mall ("Please help. Will do anything for pay.") To ask our heart, as organ, to do the work of a chakra is just asking for trouble.
So, even realizing what I have just explained is a good way to make the mushroom's job easier.
Now let's consider the mushroom. The mushroom that we call "mushroom" is the fruiting body of a vast organism, the mycelia, which is a subterranean fungus, which has no self-awareness but it is a billion year old organism. . .older than the plants, way older than the animals, even the insects. It has been here since the beginning of time, the beginning of life. (At least 800 million years old!) (When you take the mushroom, does the mushroom get off on experiencing a self?? This is a very curious question that we should ask.
When we journey with the mushroom we have the potential to filter our experience through that billion year old mind! Try to get into that. For everyone it is different but what you might be looking for is not so much insight into any of your issues or psychology (which would be asking the mushroom to act as therapist), but into the (universal) mystery of energy, life-energy and embodiment. . .patterns. The mushroom automatically has to work through what we bring and what we are capable of perceiving. In other words we can't dispense with our lenses, but the unique awareness that the mushroom engenders is a prehuman, naturally holistic, viewpoint.
I have always enjoyed the thought that, if we could see the way God sees, it would probably be much closer to how the mushroom allows us to experience the universe, than by any more acculturated window on so-called reality.
I am not saying to go into zazen and try to clear your mind so the mushroom can have space to work with you. I am saying to do your work before you ingest the mushroom, and think about what I said above, about how you can't leave your self-consciousness behind so the mushroom can sweep you into some sort of cosmic awareness or cosmic reality. It might do that anyway, but our work is to clear the deck as well as we can and approach the mushroom as we would approach any enlightened teacher. But remember, sometimes the zen-master unexpectedly strikes you with his or her bamboo cane!
We think we know what "color" is or what a "flower" is or what a "tree" is, but we don't. With the mushroom there is the possibility of dipping into an awareness that predates or underlies, not only our humanity but self-consciousness itself. You are, ideally, plugging your brain (neo-cortex) into a virtually infinitely older "awareness".
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