Myco-mimicry -Mushrooms/We can save the world.

I recently spent some time speaking with the world's leading mycologist (mushroom expert), Paul Stamets, at the Green Festival in San Francisco. We had a wonderful conversation about mushrooms and bioremediation, biomimicry and mushrooms used for healing various medical conditions. He was kind enough to give me a gourmet Shitake mushroom mycelium kit which was part of his booth just like the one in the picture on this blog.

In a recent magazine article on Paul's work, he was quoted on the intelligence of the mushroom mycelium (the net of cells which is the "root" of mushroom of which the fruit is mushrooms as we know them.)

He states "I believe that the mycelium operates at a level of complexity that exceeds the computational power of our most advanced supercomputers, because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression on them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape."

In our conversation I shared with him my views on the necessity that we humans learn from the blueprint of how organisms organize and communicate.
Specifically I stated we are to restore the telepathic pathways of our group mind to organize ourselves similar to that of the mycelium of mushroom to reestablish a more effective way to communicate and share evolutionary consciousness coursing through the human mind.

Joanna Macy has also thought along similar lines with respect to the potential for global telepathy to heal our relationship with Nature. She discussed these ideas in an article that she wrote in conjunction with Andrew Beath's book "Consciousness In Action"

I'll quote her at length to allow her to speak in her own words

"The Birth of a New Planetary Consciousness”

“It could well be that our work now is to grow a new planetary consciousness. Carl Jung said there’s no birth of consciousness without pain. We are discovering that we are the sensory organs of our living planet, and that discovery involves pain. All of a sudden we realize that we care, that our hearts are breaking over people who aren’t even born yet. This is truly a noble thing. Over twenty years of doing this work I have found that people would rather hurt and feel connected than be anesthetized and feel isolated. “

“In terms of living systems theory, at every level of life’s self-organizing there is subjectivity. The brains of higher mammals – at our own level of subjectivity and consciousness – are the most complex objects in the known universe: one hundred billion neurons, all highly differentiated, with trillions of synaptic connections. This internal complexity evolved thanks to choice-making. This is still where we make conscious choices – right here between our ears – separately. But given our current global crisis, individual decision-making may be too isolated and too slow to stop the destruction. What could save us is if we start thinking and intending together – as interconnected whole. And fortunately, this is beginning to happen.”

“It’s as if we’re neurons in a big brain, which is itself starting to think. It’s like we’re being ‘thought through.’ I think that people are having that experience where they finish each other’s sentences or come up with the same ideas. We tend to refer to clairvoyant experiences in terms of the occult, like channeling, as if it’s somebody “out there” who’s channeling through me. But from the systems perspective we don’t need that kind of explanation. It's all emerging synergistically from our interactions.”

“This ‘mind sharing’ is, I believe, a natural function of our experiencing a common danger to our survival. The danger is not simply to Joanna or to Andrew or to John but to the whole Earth community. We are capable now of identifying with the planet as a whole. We start by identifying with families and countries, and then with humans as a species, then we move right out and identify with other species. I see this happening with people from all walks of life, regardless of location and background."

There are parallels I have also been enjoying in the online book by Robert Lorenz, PhD called "The Collapsing Tower - The Birth Pangs of Post-Ego Civilization" On the topic of restoring our connectedness with ourselves, eachother and all species on Mother Earth Lorenz speaks about the importance of intentional work of connecting our consciousness together telepathically and also "revisioning" the dream of life on this planet and thus restoring the morphogenetic field of consciousness on the planet.

"Research from Ramana Maharishi’s[*] Transcendental Meditation organization has calculated that it takes the square root of one-tenth of one percent of a population to change that population. That’s 8,000 people based on our current world population. This is a workable number. They don’t even have to be assembled at the same place at the same time. But they must have the same intention. Thus, we may be able to effect planetary healing with a two-step process: 1) the healing of disconnectedness and 2) revisioning."
[*Actually I am almost certain that the work researched was done by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's organization and not Ramana Maharshi's, it is called the Maharishi effect]

If we simply recognize that we that through harnessing an intentional telepathic connection we can to restore our connection with eachother and with Nature.

I invite us to ask help from higher beings, and model our behavior by learning from "lower" beings and restore our awareness of the telepathic connections between us.
In the conversation at the Green Festival I continued to suggest to Paul that we humans can pattern our thought process of doing this work based on the way that the mycelium of mushrooms operates.

Paul's response to such thinking was one word - "myco-mimicry."
Naturally...he had thought of the same thing.