Magic Mushrooms & Learning to Listen in San José del Pacífico
The deeper we look, the more the world is revealed to us.
To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild Flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour. — William Blake.
We’re on a steep dirt road carved up by truck tires that zig-zags down the mountain and eventually falls into a valley where we’ve been told there is a river. I’m on my hands and knees and my girlfriend M is doubled down, her face no more than a foot from the ground. The fauna that’s growing wild in the middle of the road has captured our attention and won’t let us go.
There must be thirty different varieties of plants in a space no wider than a meter and the flowers burst with color — purple-cream, blood-red, snowflake-white, tangerine-orange. The lime-green stems curve, twist, arch, and unravel purposefully in the direction of the setting sun which leaks a buttery gold through the pine trees at our backs.
The deeper we look, the more the plants reveal. One has a bulb like two rows of little red teeth with purple tongues hanging at the mouth. A tiny bug, something like a bee, is hard at work inside the mouth of another. The deeper we look, the more we are in awe. Behind us is a vista that rivals any I’ve seen. Two huge mountain ranges, blue-green in the twilight, and a valley that’s hidden by a sea of clouds floating at eye-level. But we’re not looking at the view, because in this moment these little flowers seem to contain all that is, was, and ever will be.
A realization hits me and I flow into soft laughter. How ridiculous it is, I think, that we feel the need to go to the cities in search of art, (M is a dancer in Mexico City, and I am a writer in New Orleans) when with the right focus and state of mind something as “simple” as a flower can completely enthrall us — as if we’re walking through a wing of The Louvre.
“Beauty is difficult,” wrote the American expat poet Ezra Pound in his masterpiece The Cantos. But along this road beauty is effortless and abundant. He also wrote in ABC of Reading, that “it doesn’t so much matter where you begin the examination of a subject, so long as you keep on until you get round again to your starting point…until you have seen it from all sides.” This idea seems more appropriate. Color. Form. Purpose. Life. Beauty. It is all here (and always has been), inside each and every plant. I wonder how long it would take for us to see it “from all sides.”
We walk further down the hill and pause on a little ledge as the sun takes its last breath from behind the mountains, and the moon — first a concentrated bright white light, glowing, then form, outline, shape — slices through the clouds which are everywhere in front of us, an ocean of white, silver and gray, a bubble bath filled with snow and smoke that floats, mixes, morphs — (the silence in the mountains is immense) — and the intensity of the moon’s energy when it finally breaks through brings us to tears. I’ve got a cold and snot’s running out of my nose like a schoolboy in Northeastern winter. Tears puddle my eyes and wet my cheeks, but I’m not ashamed (I’m not even thinking of I) — and I look at M and she’s smiling and crying too.
We’ve been walking down this path in San José del Pacífico, a little town perched high in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range in Oaxaca, Mexico for about an hour now and the magic mushrooms are in full effect. Our senses have been heightened (yes, we’re “tripping”) and the profundity, complexity, artistry, and the breathing, living, talking nature of the natural world is hitting us deeply.
At times, it’s almost too much to take in and that’s when we laugh and wipe the tears from our cheeks. That’s when we open our mouths to speak, ( Look at this flower, the blue…it’s incredible — ) but we don’t say much before stopping because the experience cannot be put into words. We also realize that as soon as we open our mouths to talk (to produce output), the input from the moon and the clouds and the plants is reduced. So we shut up, quickly, sometimes awkwardly, and refocus our energies on observing, feeling, listening.
This is my fifth or sixth time using psilocybin mushrooms, and every trip has been a spiritual experience, as well a practical learning one. For me, magic mushrooms help quiet and organize the noise of my mind, and with a calmer mind I’m able to reflect more clearly on my life, habits, relationships, and on more philosophical musings such as the nature of the world and my role in it.
Mushrooms help me to see negative thought patterns arise, take note of them mindfully, and do away with them the best I can. They also help open me up to new ideas, concepts, observations, understandings, and epiphanies. This may be explained by recent research that shows the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, has the effect of connecting regions of the brain that don’t normally communicate, creating a hyperconnectivity of brain function that returns to normal once the drug has worn off. In other words, when you think on magic mushrooms, you are literally thinking outside of the box.
Other studies show that psilocybin decreases brain activity in certain hub areas of the brain and might actually temporarily eliminate the extra noise in the brain, or what’s known in yoga as chitta vritti (“monkey mind.”) In my case, this enables access to a clearer, calmer, more lucid mind.
Finally, the senses, especially vision, are heightened during a trip, and the natural world becomes an amusement park full of beauty and wonder. During a hallucination, Daffy Duck isn’t going to jump out of the bushes and push you off a cliff — as your high school health teacher might have led you to believe. But a flower, a patch of grass, the peeling bark of a tree, your lover’s hands, might glow with life and such intensity of color and perfection of form that it might bring you, like us, to your hands and knees, or to tears.
But perhaps the most important thing that magic mushrooms continually teach me is this: if you want to understand something more deeply you must Stop. Be quiet. And listen. It is this skill, this practice, simple as it sounds, that has been most beneficial to me after the trips have worn off and I’ve returned to my regular life.
Ultimately, it is the practice of meditation. And in a day and age when technology has given everyone a voice and we’re all ready to share it (on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tik-Tok, Twitter, comment sections), the ability to be quiet and listen is a fading skill worth re-cultivating.