My God! I love everything

Amp and I returned to the field, collected another basket of fruit and, on the Friday night of a 3-day-weekend, I filled my little belly. Not having any kind of scales, and the weather being too cool and humid to dry the mushrooms anyway, I settled upon eating as many as I could. I got through nearly two bowls, and had to stop for being full, which seemed to me a sensible marker. They ranged from about an inch to ten inches in size, and I probably ate upwards of 75. It was intense: Hadn't eaten all day; followed them down with a gargantuan spliff to still the stomach acids.

The (t)rip itself. I found myself in the presence of a female plant, slowly becoming aware of herself. Sweating in her opening. Flexing mechanisms inside her as she stirs. Then a scene from behind a house, a tiny inlet running behind a kitchen window, plants in bowls, hanging, and the distinct impression that some alien and mind-bogglingly broad data-gathering harddisk had summoned this for me. "We have this," it said, as if rounding up visions of our world for cosmic storage.

Being shown how indistinguishable It All Is when viewed from the perspective of an endless mushroom. And then, accompanied by massive bass tones, the camera pulls back yet further, and you're reeling, thinking, "Please don't show me anymore!" - the perspective becoming so wide that, far from the mind embracing it or no, the problem is comprehending it in its vast and terrible beauty in the first place. The first time I've fought my mind against incoming information. The first time I really felt my curiosity might disembowel me, leave my psychic viscera swaying beneath.

A being, some kind of hyper-complex poly-engine replete with faces, demons and a variety of machine tools, all of the features spinning and whirring away frantically. Close, very close, to the elves who scribble away at the frontier of mind, penning the next moment to be beheld by your perception. (I actually heard the pens scratching away.)

Inferring that 'enlightenment' is merely a choice: Open up your eyes and see that you have the means to fashion this Thing as you so wish. Or don't open up. I found myself on a chain - I felt like clothes hanging from a line, unable to do anything about it but observe: I got the impression that the only game there is is observation. I felt the engine running, felt myself pinned to it as the thing revolves on, going through its gigantic cycle. I was looking at all life from up there on the clothes line, with a mind that was not only perfectly functional, but perfectly aware of its primacy.

Primacy of mind: There is a joke that many people aren't in on. The whole of reality appears to come out of some understanding, some pact, that we don't mention the absurdity. That we ignore the initial friction that resulted in Thought. I watched Amp and I living a life together, becoming wise to this notion. I was shown that you can lend your support to the Illusion - the Illusion arising from this blinding friction - or you become part of the enriching process, that slowly awaking female plant from the beginning; examine how the energies you create feed the flanks of the Big Octopus we're all plugged into. As the mushroom showed me the absurdity I noticed how literally everything that arises in the Illusion - the friction that required mind in the first instance - becomes like an old piece of furniture: It all grows, decays. And those who truly come to enlightenment no longer complain about the frictions because, like scattered and aging fungi, all absurdity is to be expected here in timespace. Cackling about this, I noticed that the closer I came to accepting the Illusion of the world, the more the world tried to pull me back: So as soon as these thoughts came into my head the wind and rain outside suddenly started thrashing at the meshing, Amp suddenly started screeching at me to come back. All very eerie. Mind is primary.

Decay: Decaying - dying - is living. Those of us who have reconciled this rhythm of nature with our mayfly stories end up dancers, rock and rollers, and generally joyful: We have the terminal life rhythm inside us, and we flow with it. I experienced the growing and withering of a fungus, and how that withering Is you, and Is Life. Felt the withering rhythm hasten until it became a pulse, a vibe riffing. I felt that as 'the end' approaches, one's wisdom correspondingly increases. That no one dies in ignorance. That, in fact, the universe is rigged so that all beings may enjoy an endlessly increasing comprehension of the Profundity. And If you play the right cards, you can actually manipulate this into bliss, turn it into an asymptotic curve: A force that will infinitely and unceasingly rise, allowing you to create whole systems of worlds if it tickles you to do so.

Being inside a singularity. Indescribable really, memory being so fragmentary. Time spinning down; a freezing, silver, globular moment in which I came back; realised that, to an extent, a mushroom took me inside this place.

Outside, a gigantic, belching frog punctuates the jungle night. And, out of its throat, cascades of my hysterics.

"You're in the jungle yeah, kid!" the fungus reminds. The world is a jungle, there are so many lifeforms teeming for lebensraum. Try to get wise without getting infected. And there is an impression that viruses, and other kinds of software, are available, transmittable, in these spaces. I watch as an octopus-cum-leopard-come-spiderplant crawls into some kind of genetic wall. I think about symbiosis and fill out the next day being the leopard, the jungle cat. Lazing on my balcony during a thoroughly green day, gazing out of my introspection at impossibly high clouds, content to smoke only and ponder the small things.

I have tried to sum up a few of these visions; but getting information out of these places is fiendish. The business about consciousness arising from a certain friction and that most people are unaware that everything they whinge about must be a natural consequence of their being in the first place, this was so.. vivid.. so well implied by the mushroom's visions that it may as well have been presenting a lecture: The sequences of images were so meaningful.. But, I just can't grab back whatever it was that causes the friction in the first place: It's something to do with thought, subjectivity, the illusion of objects. And that once you start thinking you've got to be prepared to give everything up, because someone will have a harder time letting go of their mind than you will. Be ready to be charitable.

This is tiresome now, I'm sure. More practice is required translating these images. That's piece of news number one. Piece of news number two: The shamanic ecstasy delivered. It is both terrifying and electrifying; signs, as McKenna might say, of the enterprise's "existential validity."

Out for now.