Mushrooms, fungi and mycelium have deep philosophical implications, as well as practical implications. I love the marriage of the idealistic and the practical coming together, because that way we can have effective change for the better. In the many years that I've been studying mushrooms, what really dawned on me, particularly while using the scanning electron microscope to look at mycelium, is its network-like design.
Also, how mycelium often benefits from disturbance. Very few organisms benefit from disturbance. Due to epigenesis, [after it’s disturbed], the mycelium grows out at the end [as part of its recovery]. The mycelium [grows] literally millions of end-tips in a cubic centimeter that then encounter new food, toxins, new opportunities, new challenges. It's like having little scientific teams at the end of every little tip of mycelium that are working together to see if they can come up with a solution. And then, out of the millions and millions of experimental teams in these tips, one or several may be successful.
And what happens then, if they are successful, is that they surge and they grow. But what's extraordinary, because they're a network-like design, is that the information gets back-channeled into the genome of the species and becomes the part of the “resonant body intellect,” if you will, of the mycelium. So now it's become educated. If it meets another pathogen, a bacterium, a virus, a toxin, it can upregulate the gene sequences and the proteins that allow it to overcome that obstacle.
So it really speaks metaphorically to something I think is very, very true: that our biodiversity is formed by the minority that leaves evolution. And so it's really important that we protect the minorities in our society. Scientific innovation does not come from the majority. It comes from surges of individuals who are up against conventional wisdom, breaking convention. These people surge with an idea that seems radical or preposterous to some, and in fact seems preposterous to most, but they can be right. And when these individuals are right, at the cost of being ridiculed, at the cost of failure (and most of them do fail), we then have innovation that is paradigm shifting. Mushrooms are a bridge across cultures, across continents, across the centuries, bringing in indigenous and minority cultures that have been using mushrooms and sharing their knowledge.
Reply With Quote
Originally posted by Dreamtimer
“El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"
Bookmarks