Sharday Mosurinjohn

What Do Psychedelic Plants and Fungi Want?: On the Microcosms Approach to Phytorelation

The vital problem for which the Microcosms project has offered a salve is that for those who do not have a psychedelic practice or a practice of deep relationship with plants or fungi, there is no experiential framework to motivate heart-centred, phytorelational work. The aesthetic proposal Steven White makes with his “Phytoformalism” essay is to orient to the way psychedelic plants and fungi experience themselves. Relating to the microscopic scale of stomata, trichomes, vascular tissue, xylem, and pollen bridges the human sensorium into scales on which the plants and fungi often phytognostically suggest to us is how they experience themselves, us, and other elements of being. In the confocal microscopy images we get, for instance, to see patterns and colours they otherwise communicate through chemical means directly into our bodies, or through subtle means – like song – when we have deeply practiced other means of becoming energetically attuned to their consciousness.

From this perspective, we can appreciate the logics of their autopoiesis, and frame our inquiries around them, rather than starting from the assumption that reigns in the academy, and in western modernity, that science gets to dictate what is useful (see Jules Evans’ “The Uselessness of Non-Materialist Theories of Reality”) and it dares art, philosophy, and religion to make a pitch that appeals to its terms of reference. What Microcosms experientially conveys is that if one expects, say, the healing qualities of these psychedelic plants and fungi to be articulated according to the terms and values of biomedicine, then one simply cannot recognize the gains of practicing with them. The capacities, powers, desires, and intentions of these psychedelic beings are right there, but the premises of biomedicine’s concept of “healing” is radically incommensurable with theirs. Even though they can, per the subtitle of Michael Pollan’s blockbuster book, treat the suffering of “dying, addiction, [and] depression,” they treat these experiences not as problems to be solved by somehow extracting them directly, but as intelligent mechanisms for conveying signals about the integrity with which one is living their life or whether their environment is nourishing or toxic. As White writes, “the plants often reveal the grotesquely destructive human behavior that has threatened biodiversity on a planetary scale, including, of course, our own species, accusing us in no uncertain terms as being responsible for this ecocide.” There is no “healing,” in psychedelic terms that is not a reckoning with right relationship at all these micro, meso, and macro scales, and no ”healing” that is not also a growing, and a development of spiritual potential, for the mechanisms of growth, repair, and evolution are the same. For the pharmaceutical profit-driven healthcare system to persist in not knowing this while bioprospecting psychedelic medicines is like inviting company over, locking the door once they arrive and then blaming your would-be guest for your loneliness.

The most apt human-scale metaphor for the work psychedelics insist on doing, though some may cringe to hear it, is that of the heart. And though everything, as I shall shortly return to, is a metaphor, this one is also as literally true as anything can be. Stephen Buhner made the observation in his Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature, that connecting to plant consciousness depends on the heart mode of perception – “aisthesis.” This is where, in fact, we first register and route the broadband of data that flow into us from the world. To the beings that we humans are, this information registers to us first as feeling, emotion and sensation. The heart can then entrain the relatively amoral perception of the brain to itself, being the most powerful electromagnetic oscillator in the body. Microcosms likewise trains us in the intelligence of the heart for the direct perception of nature – how to experience encounter with these psychedelic plants and fungi themselves, and how to perceive the radically interrelational order of being as it appears to function from their perspective.

Steven White and Jill Pflugheber translate frameworks, concepts, and practices for relating to psychedelic plants and fungi, and the experiences they can co-create with us, from cultural contexts that have long practiced working with visionary experiences. Indigenous communities with traditional use of spirit medicines, especially, have refined practices to elicit, navigate, and integrate visionary experiences. Non-Indigenous grassroots psychedelic communities, and esoteric religious and spiritual communities have much to contribute as well, though of course nowhere is intimate communion with the sacred plants of the Americas better stabilized than in the Indigenous communities of this region. White and Pflugheber’s translation work through their visual and verbal lexicon of phytoformalism is vital intervention for the so-called “renaissance” of psychedelics. Whatever it is that was reborn has more amnesia than anamnesis, because it has largely restricted its expression to a scientistic biomedical frame. It has stumbled onto the psyches of these psychedelic plants and fungi without a philosophy of their perception – that is to say, their aisthesis, their heart-centred mode of engaging emotion, sensation, and relation. In fact, to call this class of psychoactives “cardiodelics” (heart manifesting, rather than soul, mind manifesting) might be a useful reorientation via vocabulary irritation. Or better than delos for “manifesting,” how about charis (χάρις‎) for “aesthetic exchange” or “sharing”¹ – “cardiocharics.” Maybe even better yet, leave off the medical-sounding Greek and Latin compounds and use the more earthy Germanic² roots – perhaps Herzmischen for “heart mixing.” 

Microcosms, and especially the “Phytoformalism” essay shows us the paradox of representation – all language, all image, all material things, they are all condensations of information, and their form therefore literally constitutes their meaning, and yet points to something deeper, or higher, or in any case not fully identical with it.³ Everything is a metaphor, a thing that gives meaning a form to travel in. That is, even chemicals like the indole alkaloid psilocin are metaphors; they are “inter-species chemical messengers that serve to transfer information from one species to another,” as White glosses it from Terence McKenna. The particular metaphor is irrelevant in some sense; the power is in the meaning. This is why a song like an icaro or a painting on a maloca or a ritual or a spell or a touch can convey the same kind of knowing (“gnosis”) and the same kind of effect (the “healing,” the potentiating of something more). That the form is therefore not strictly identical to the effect points up the futility and ultimate unhealthfulness of studying and using psychedelic chemicals in more and more isolated ways, like rendering high fructose corn syrup from the corn plant. The more dissociated it gets, the more its wholesome, saludogenic properties fade away, and the problems psychedelics were meant to treat will recrudesce through the medicine itself.

Psychedelic biomedicine mistakes the chemical mechanism for the meaning of the healing, and Microcosms makes palpable that mechanisms present; they do not explain. And when presentation is substituted for explanation – when outward form is substituted for inward content – dissociation occurs. When one equates the effects of psychedelics with their physical action upon the human body, and assumes that human’s qualitative experience of the psychedelic effects is a “metaphysical hallucination,”⁴ they have engaged a way of knowing that dissociates and alienates them from rather than connects them to the aliveness and personhood of what they are trying to know about. We see this dissociation occur in the way psychedelics can get slotted into the practice of psychiatric medicine. For instance, psychiatry prescribes drugs to treat an assortment of “depressive” and “bipolar” “disorders” based on the monoamine theory of mood,⁵ which states that depression is caused by a functional deficiency of catecholamines, particularly norepinephrine, whereas mania is caused by a functional excess of catecholamines at critical synapses in the brain. “Corporate actors assert that psychedelics will succeed where other mental health treatments failed due to their unique [and patentable] mechanisms of action” on these chemical levels.⁶ Thus, we see scientists like David E. Olson seeking to engineer “psychedelics without hallucinations”⁷ and companies like Delix planning to sell “non-hallucinogenic versions of drugs like LSD, psilocybin and MDMA.”⁸ In the extreme form, this kind of psychedelic biomedicine holds that no psychonautic, noumenautic (per Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes’ lovely term)⁹ or therapeutic skills are needed, just chemical intervention. After all, if good and bad mood are functions of chemical levels that can randomly fluctuate, so-called bad trips must therefore be reduced to the terms of personal psychology and chemical levels. It violates parsimony to layer on a model that holds that these chemicals are mechanisms for other species and discarnate beings communicating with us.¹⁰ And it violates metaphysical naturalism to see psychedelics as having both outward, mechanistic form and inward animate beinghood that can meaningfully link us and our experiences to other real parts of an animate, sentient and sapient cosmos. Yet this is precisely what communities with traditional use of psychedelics hold, and what anyone can hold if they value holotropic practice – moving toward wholeness, radical integrity of experience of what is – over closing the loop of reductionist certainty around themselves.

Microcosms lovingly offers an example and an invitation for the collaboration of psychedelic science, art, religion, and philosophy to take place in a way where all of these modes refuse being cast in the role of arbiter of ground truth. None ought to wish to have the final word, for all systems of representation are metaphor, and metaphors are ways of communicating what is to be experienced. But for the academy and for people whose linear mode of perception has been formed by and through it, “the hardest thing for us to do is to give reality to the feelings that flow into us from the outside world as it breaks this conditioned mindset.”¹¹ It is increasingly a wonder to me that anyone doing this work willingly does any part of it in an academic institution; this, at the same time, is a testament to the academy’s rigid grasp on authority and the terms of valid knowledge. Many of us need to cross altitude from integral consciousness¹² to speak in its cosmophobic¹³ terms to get things done in the world, like to influence the policies of various institutions including those of [the euphemistically named] healthcare system. I am deeply grateful to the plants, fungi, people, and all the forces involved in the Microcosms project for making new routes between the worlds of the sacred plants of the Americas, the academy, and elsewhere, for those of us walking a medicine path, a green path, and a heart-guided path.

Sharday Mosurinjohn, PhD is Associate Professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University, Kingston ON, where she researches and teaches on esotericism, occult sciences, and new religious movements. Her focus is enlivening integrative, non-mechanistic worldviews found within these traditions. Her first book is The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom (2022; McGill-Queen’s University Press). Her ongoing projects with multidisciplinary collaborators seek solutions to psychedelic spiritual crises by synthesizing tools for facilitating navigating existential distress, recovery and maps for meaning-making. This work begins from a cosmophilic starting point, centring epistemologies of direct gnosis from traditional communities of practice, and integrating academic scientific and humanistic epistemologies. She is involved in a number of academic and other organizations, including as a founding member of the Human Augmentation Research Network, leadership positions at the American Academy of Religion, and has been Director of Research at the Psychedelic Association of Canada.

¹Lars Spuybroek, “Charis and Radiance: The Ontological Dimensions of Beauty,” In S. Van Tuinen (ed.), Giving and Taking: Antidotes to a Culture of Greed, pp. 119–49 (Rotterdam: V2 Publishing, 2014).

²On German roots, see Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London etc.: Collins, 1958): 45-46; on translation, see Melvin-Koushki, “Translating Esotericism: Early Modern Persian,” Correspondences 11, no. 1 (2023): 103–112

³The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, but then, neither is the moon only the moon, for it, in its way, also points to something else.

⁴A recent talk on psychedelic epistemology for the MIND institute argued, not for experiencers developing discernment about the truth of their experiences from within, but for psychedelic researchers applying epistemological criteria from without, in order to determine whether knowledge is truly being acquired in psychedelic experiences. The philosopher Chris Letheby advocates a philosophical view known as “metaphysical naturalism,” which holds that the mind is an evolved product of biological processes and all that we can know about are natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences. Letheby argues that even if we could know what is metaphysically true, mystical experiences do not furnish the necessary epistemic justifications for “justified true belief” about metaphysical things. Instead, he says there are always simpler explanations for mystical experiences – that these are “metaphysical hallucinations” is a simpler explanation, in his assessment. And this assessment is justified for him by the fact that these hallucinations can occur “independent of an object.” They can be explained by the mechanism of the chemical stimulation of certain brain regions. The knowledge people experience themselves as directly accessing after taking a psychedelic can thus say nothing about reality beyond this. At worst, psychedelic experiences of knowing “result in false beliefs or unjustified beliefs” about the natural world, and at best, they can result in cognitions “that might be somewhat inaccurate, but can have therapeutic benefits, practical benefits, that in turn lead to epistemic benefits.” This is the metaphysical logic of the mainstream biomedical reductionist model that is the front-and-centre, taken-for-granted ultimate frame in which the debate about psychedelic access is taking place. Letheby, Chris. “Dr. Chris Letheby – ‘Psychedelics and Epistemology’ (The Mind Philosophy Series #2).” YouTube, June 1, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDn4W-_C8M8.

⁵Carl L. Hart, “Exaggerating Harmful Drug Effects on the Brain Is Killing Black People,” Neuron 107, no. 2 (July 2020): 215–18, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2020.06.019.

⁶See Devenot, Conner, & Doyle, 2022, pp. 486–488.

⁷January 11, 2024 https://news.uchicago.edu/psychedelics-without-hallucinations-new-mental-health-treatment.

⁸Ken Garber, “Psychedelics Without the Trip,” Nature Biotechnology (19 August 2022)  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41587-022-00006-0.

⁹That is, metaphysical skills. Peter Sjostedt-Hughes coined the term “noumenautics” in analogy to “psychonautics”: “One might say that the noumenaut is a philosophical psychonaut – one who navigates through both the human harbour of ideas and out through to the inhuman ocean that is psychedelic consciousness” (2015, preface).

¹⁰Guy M. Goodwin et al., “Single-Dose Psilocybin for a Treatment-Resistant Episode of Major Depression,” New England Journal of Medicine 387 (2022): 1637-1648. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2206443.

¹¹Buhner, 149.

¹²Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 2001).

¹³Antônio Bispo dos Santos, A Terra Dá, a Terra Quer (São Paulo, Brazil: Piseagrama, 2023).