Dreams of the Mushroom Forest

Many years ago, I had a dream of walking in a forest of mushrooms. It was cool, still and dark and I looked up the slender white stems to the caps high above me.

Touching the cool stems, I knew they were nothing like tree trunks. They were much less dense, much lighter, much more open.

Overcome with celestial peace, I thought ‘it is all so simple’.

The dream stayed with me. I knew it had something to do with my relationship with God, but I didn’t know in what way. In the Field Guide of Mushrooms of Southern Africa, I found the mushrooms I’d dreamt of were called Panaeolus papilionaceus. Unremarkable, inedible, they grow on dung or the soil of well-manured pastures.

Wonderful. This is a message of my spirituality? I’ll leave it right there, I thought. But some dreams have a way of staying with you. And this one would not be forgotten.

Before I tell you more about the mushroom story, maybe you’d like to know more of what came before. If you’re not interested, skip this section altogether. I have prayed, I have meditated. I have sung in churches and read religious books from all over the world compulsively. I have, at times, felt elevated and close to God. 

I have also been fiercely angry. I have been mean and selfish. I have been jealous and envious, spiteful and malicious. I have felt these feelings and been ashamed of them precisely because I had also felt elevated and close to God. 

In fact, the more I read books and heard accounts of highly evolved new age spiritual people, the more ashamed and unworthy I felt at times. 

After a perforated ulcer that nearly killed me, I really started panicking. I’d not seen an angel next to my bed. I’d not seen a tunnel of light. There had been no revelation, no epiphany at all. Once I stopped feeling grateful to be alive, in my heart I felt empty and short of breath, as if I’d been told to get out of a race I never knew I was in. 

It was as if I’d been told that I was no longer a member of the Aquarian conspiracy. I was being paid back for feeling cynical and superior about people who wrote ‘disease’ with a hyphen; who spoke about ‘karma’ as if it gave them a right to stop feeling sorry for people; who were as glib in quoting from Louise Hay as their grannies had been quoting from the Bible. 

Where had those feelings of superiority come from? I used to have spectacular dreams. I also, in my early twenties and once in my thirties, had experiences (without drugs) that made me feel as if I’d been given a glimpse into the workings of the universe. These were not merely the transcendent moments of joy one finds while listening to a beautiful piece of music, or seeing a glorious piece of art or a scene from nature. They were not the peak experiences that Maslow talks about. (Peak experiences usually occur when there’s a reason to feel happy or self-actualised) 

The brief, overwhelmingly joyful experiences I had came out of the most banal situations – driving in an old car to Pretoria, looking out from a balcony onto ordinary people going about their ordinary business, walking through a dreary park when all the children had gone home, lying on my bed in the early evening after a horrendous day in an advertising agency. I couldn’t find words to explain exactly what they were. I wrote down things like ‘the whole world seemed to stop for a moment and everything said ‘yes’. A window opened in my mind and I felt God blowing in with the wind. I forgot completely about myself and in that moment nothing mattered yet everything was significant in a whole new way. If this feeling could last forever, it would be heaven.’

Once I heard music that didn’t come from any earthly voice or instrument. And once I thought I saw the eye of God in outer space. 

These experiences made me feel special. And arrogant, if the truth be told. How could I grovel with other mere mortals in any gathering? How could I ever become one of a group? From all the reading I did subsequently, I decided that the only label I could vaguely put to myself was ‘mystic’, but it sounded so false and affected, how could I tell anybody? So I became a lonely, spiritual elitist even though the experiences had stopped. Of course I felt abandoned and wished they would come back, but marriage to a wonderful man and giving birth to three amazing children helped. I felt echoes of those experiences in my fairly uneventful daily life. I could handle problems and stresses with reasonable aplomb. I communed with God regularly even though there was no direct reply. 

In fact, I thought I had the whole spiritual path thing sorted out quite well, even if I wasn’t quite up to speed with people who could see auras and channel wisdom. Yet when I was in the perfect situation to get some concrete confirmation from God when I lay close to death with a hole in my guts, I felt nothing and I saw nothing. Lots of other people had, in similar situations. But not me. And that was profoundly shocking to me. I knew it did not negate anything of what I had felt, read and experienced before. But it reduced me to Grade 0. I felt that I knew nothing, I had to start all over again. 

I was bitter. I wouldn’t read or look at anything I’d written for two years. All I could do was nourish myself with homeopathic doses of writing by Aldous Huxley, Lao Tzu and Ralph Metzner. Beyond that, I tied myself to the love I felt for my husband, my children and our home. I tried to broaden my work interest and failed. I read a lot of escapist writing, watched a lot of TV, listened to rock music instead of classics and drank a lot of wine. 

Then one day my stepmother died and shortly afterwards I looked at some files on my PC and came across the notes I’d written about my mushroom dream. And I realised that without me knowing, the simple mushroom meditation I’d developed for myself had sustained me beyond measure. So even though I’m in Grade 0 in the School of Spiritual Enlightenment, I open myself to you because maybe it’ll help you or someone you know. Someone, somewhere who’s having trouble balancing humanness and spirituality. Someone who is in pain through insomnia and depression.

Back to the mushroom dream. I couldn’t forget it. And sometimes, when I was avoiding other work, I’d start writing down thoughts about mushrooms as a kind of non-challenging entertainment. So, what had made this first, pre-Cambrian life form synonymous in my dream with divine peace? 

About mushrooms

A mushroom is a fungus, neither plant nor animal. The particular kind I saw in my dream flourishes on dung. 

It’s a decomposer of waste material. And the body we see, that emerges into the air, is just a small, temporary part of a much larger fibrous body that remains underground. (Is humanity, on a certain level, one body, even though we feel like individuals?) It is here, under the ground, in total darkness, that acids and enzymes are excreted to break down and digest material so that the nutrients can be absorbed. 

Unlike plants, mushrooms don’t need the sun – they can’t photosynthesise. Yet somehow they tend upwards, towards light. The mushrooms emerge overnight, almost magically, from the hidden base, to send spores drifting into the air to reproduce. The rest of the time, when there are no fruit bodies, we are completely unaware of them. 

Mushrooms can be edible, providing good nutrients, or they can be deadly poisonous. Some are delicious, others foul or bland. Some are hallucinogenic.

Once you start reading about them, you discover that mushrooms are unimaginably fascinating. But with more facts comes complexity, so I decided to dig around in other areas, closer to home.

The night is dark. 

Night is when we rediscover our loneliness and long for closeness and comfort. Darkness harbours fear and uncertainty, because we can’t see properly. It is filled with doubts and ghosts; imagination turns everyday objects into fearful creatures. 

As a child, I was scared of the dark and still am, at times. But all fear darkens perception. If there is no light to run to, or strong protector to turn to, we curl back into ourselves. It is very difficult to do the right thing when you’re filled with fears and anxiety. 

I think of the idiotic things that make me anxious – confronting people who mean me no harm. Saying exactly what I think. Telling the truth about myself – my background and my vulnerabilities. Disagreeing, making a stand, creating a scene, losing my way, not having enough money, not being good enough, not being beautiful, being turned down, my work being disapproved of. 

I know that when I’m fearful, I can’t be fully human and connected to my better nature – or to other people. I’m scared of the dark because it’s the time favoured by thieves and murderers, predators, rapists, tokeloshes, ghosts and monsters – evil thrives in the dark.

In deepest night – between two and four a.m. – we’re on a physical low that turns the smallest worry into an overwhelming threat. Blood pressure drops, in fact, the whole human organism slows down so that its processes are barely idling. If you wake up during this time, you feel more vulnerable than at any other time. It is also the time when the very ill in hospital most often succumb. 

The ultimate darkness is death – and the fear of pain, uncertainty and the mystery of what happens afterwards. 

But there’s another side to it. Darkness without fear is enigmatic and exciting. It is full of possibilities precisely because one can’t immediately see what is there. It is a time of myth, legend, fantasy and story telling. A time when we feel that dreams can, indeed, come true. It also protects and shelters us from other eyes, allowing us to go about secretive business and romantic encounters, dressed up to be different and more exciting and wonderful than we can during the day. 

How is it that my dream suggests I find a relationship with God here? Because in the dream, I was not in the light, looking down on the mushrooms, I was close to the ground, looking up. This dark place is at complete odds with the openness, space and safety of cathedrals bathed in stained-glass splashes and candlelight. It’s the opposite of spires reaching towards heaven, of the lofty places to which we raise our eyes for help. Here there is no glow of a halo or whiff of incense… But when I remember the luminosity of the mushroom stems in the dark, I’m reminded of the ‘dark, divine light’ talked about by mystics.

Now we come to the real thing about mushrooms. ‘My boss thinks I’m a mushroom. He keeps me in the dark and feeds me crap.’ That cartoon must have been in millions of offices all over the world. Two things have become the most common facts about mushrooms because of it: darkness and crap. Even the field guide tells me that my particular brand of mushroom thrives on dung. 

I know I’m full of shit. Lots of people have told me. I also know that I’m not alone. Hidden in the dark recesses of my mind are the unmentionable aspects of my being. Here my demons roil; my worst unenlightened impulses grovel. I hide my shameful, hate-ridden nature here from others and myself. 

Here, under a trapdoor (covered with a beautiful Persian rug, no doubt) I have unspeakable anger, rage, jealousy, envy, negativity, selfishness, guilt, fear, shame, malice and endless greed and hunger. No, I’ve never killed or robbed and most people probably think I’m a Very Nice Person. But that does not mean that those impulses don’t exist. And I can’t believe that I’m the only fairly enlightened person walking around with this secret. Of course I try to pretend that the trapdoor isn’t there, that there is no dark space where any awfulness can hide. But it’s there. What’s more, sometimes I can smell it. Sometimes I feel an uncomfortable stirring deep inside me. And on occasion, that trapdoor flies open. Did I really say that to someone in the traffic? Did I turn into a harpy and frighten my darling child? Did I really feel like killing that other person? Yes I did.

 Quick. Push that foulness back into the darkness. Cover it with the trapdoor. Put the rug over. 

There. Trapdoor? What trapdoor? 

But mushrooms grow in shit. Not only do they find nourishment there for growing their incredibly beautiful airy bodies, they transmute the shit; decompose and purify the substance they grow in. 

Does this indicate that I should expose my worst to God? That I should be unafraid of placing my murderous, cold, callous animal self under the scrutiny of God’s all-seeing eye? Just thinking about it makes my heart want to jump out of my chest.

But then, maybe this is exactly where I need help. 

What’s the point of bringing God into the beautifully clean reception area of my life? Here I display the best I can offer. My feeling for beauty, the comfort and companionship I offer people when I feel generous and giving. My high philosophy and elevated sense of morality. I can imagine God being cynically indulgent, visiting in my proudest, most complacent showpiece. It’s so clean, so inviting, no speck of dust, the floors shiny, the windows sparkling, the cushions just so. Hoping to entertain God here, wearing my Sunday best, would surely be the ultimate pretence. So yes. Maybe it makes sense then, that I should bring God into the dung heap of my base nature. How else could it possibly be decontaminated?

The sun rules the earth. We schedule our lives around its rising and setting. Animals calculate the time to migrate and fall pregnant according to how long it stays in the sky. Trees blossom or shed their leaves to the same rhythm. The sun shines on plants that turn it into oxygen to breathe, food to eat and flowers to marvel at. 

Sunlight is warmth, light and happiness. It evaporates water and turns it into rain. It heats up air to quicken the winds. It brings us the light that chases away ghosts. 

Without sun, our physical bodies can’t manufacture Vitamin D and we become ill and depressed. The sun is the power generator of life on earth. I think of phrases like ‘it dawned on me’ and ‘brilliant mind’, so it has to do with our intellect too. Religious doctrines all came about through thinking – although some scientists have thought God straight out of their lives. 

As the sun is the centre of our solar system, so consciousness, and therefore my ego, is central to my life. The ego is created slowly through our childhood years and is made up of thoughts about our selves – our own thoughts and the thoughts of our parents, teachers and peers. I know that a healthy ego is necessary to operate successfully in the world. It gives energy to my will to achieve goals I set for myself. It fires my self-reliance and pride is my achievements. 

The dark spots of the ego, created by negative self-perception and feedback from others, leave us angry, unsympathetic, powerless and unable to control ourselves and events around us. Unchecked, it condemns us to a life of obsessively churning our thoughts around hurtful events, excluding all possibility of true joy and simple pleasure. 

Any adult who consistently stunts a child’s ego-development with harsh punishment, or teasing, or snide remarks, or put-downs, or open dislike, does harm that can damage not only one person, but society for generations to come. A distorted ego can become like a fierce, unforgiving sun that scorches, burning whatever it comes into contact with and breaking up all normal channels of communication.   

But mushrooms don’t rely on the sun at all for their nourishment. They fall outside of its power completely. They don’t need it to make food. They are hidden from it underground and will only send out their delicate fruit bodies when they know conditions are favourable. 

And yet… they tend upwards. Towards the light. Their fruit bodies are not sent deeper into the earth, or sideways. They’re sent up towards the light, out of the solid security of earth, into the unsupportive nothingness of air. I suddenly stop and wonder it all this analysing of symbolism isn’t just self-indulgent. It was just a dream. Am I being obsessive? But then, I know that somewhere in my deepest being I am a little bit like the objects I turn into symbols. I share needs and chemicals with plants and mushrooms. I share genetic material with every living animal on earth. I share carbon and other, more complex minerals with even rocks.

 I am not so far removed from any symbol that has ever been created or that I care to create for myself. So. I will continue to think about the symbolism of moisture, poison and nourishment and the depths of the earth.

We are 75% water. We can live for weeks without food, as long as we have water to drink. But we are not awash with water – we are moist. And mushrooms don’t need great bodies of water – just dampness. So the symbolism here is not of rivers, or lakes, or oceans, but of dampness. Dampness is more difficult that water. Water, in religious writings throughout the world, is linked with cleansing, regeneration, emotions and spiritual life. 

What would dampness mean? Maybe potential – it’s damp soil that is required to make seeds germinate. It’s derogatory to speak of someone as being ‘dry’ and ‘wet’. So, without saying it, ‘moist’ must be equal to ‘cool’. Tears are moist. Maybe moistness has to do with the tears we cry when we experience emotional pain. The tears we cry for years and years after an event that hurt us. People talk about emotional scars. But sometimes those scars just never form. When we revisit the memory, the wound is still wet and weeping, the pain is as intense and raw as at the time it was first inflicted. 

Sometimes we harden ourselves and stop crying. What happens to mushrooms when the moisture dries up? They can’t break down the waste matter they live in. Without dampness, they get no nourishment and the waste matter remains unchanged. 

The main underground body of the mushroom knows that conditions are unreceptive for regeneration, so it won’t form any fruit bodies to send spores out. It will lie dormant deep in the earth until the moisture returns. Sometimes it will lie like that for years – utterly unseen in an apparent wasteland. I have felt like that. I have been through times in my life when I felt stagnant and dull, when nothing felt new or different or exciting. When even death seemed to be more positive and interesting.

Mushrooms can be poisonous – a caution against how I can poison myself and those around me. But they can also provide nourishment, with high levels of protein, vitamins and minerals. Some mushrooms are hallucinogenic and revered for the mind-altering perspective they give in ancient religious ceremonies. 

What am I growing in the dark? Death or life? Maybe life and death. Maybe nourishment where it’s needed and deadly poison to kill off things I need to get rid of in my life. There are certainly attitudes and habits that I could well be rid of. And a new, fresh perspective on some aspects in my life would also not go amiss.

Except for the short time when mushrooms suddenly emerge to spread their spores, the main body lies unexposed to dappled light and starlit skies. 

It is easier to feel close to God when I’m in awe of natural beauty and the beauty created by man. With every sense I have, I’ve been enraptured by glorious sights, sounds, fragrances, tastes and textures. Beauty sometimes snaps me out of depression and despair. It turns me away from obsessive self-absorption. It gives me hope when the news is grim. It makes me believe in a higher power – some inimitable mind that creates with grace and elegance. 

I thank God constantly for beauty. Would I be able to feel love for God if I had no senses with which to perceive beauty? What if luminosity, inspiration, enthusiasm and awe suddenly disappeared out of the world? What if I looked at my husband and children and my heart didn’t swell with the sheer loveliness of them? Would I love them quite as much… and would I feel the urge to worship the First Creative Impulse? Well, maybe there is a certain kind of business one has to take care of in which beauty or awe would be a distraction. 

Maybe, for a while, I have to disconnect the God–Beauty circuit,

I got to a stage when I was sick of thinking and analysing. For a while, I’d made things complicated and got satisfaction from making connections and playing with concepts. But the more I thought about mushrooms, the more complex everything became. And although this was all very interesting, it had solved nothing and led me only further away from the simplicity suggested in the dream. 

My life was still in turmoil – problems with relationships, work, resources and depression. I tried to be as spiritual as I could, I still explored, meditated and prayed. But every now and again I would get an unsavoury reminder from beneath the trapdoor of how much anger and dissatisfaction there was in me. I wasn’t sleeping well and dreaded the lonely, wakeful hours at night, feeling it drain away the energy I knew I would need to carry on my dreary life the next day.

During these times, the dream would sometimes come to me and I would feel despair at how it tantalised and denied me. It eventually occurred to me that maybe this dream was not about thinking and understanding, but about doing. Maybe I just had to surrender to it, go into my dark space and be a mushroom. Nothing else was working, so I grudgingly decided to enter this space.

One night, instead of tossing and turning and running through endless conversations and arguments in my mind, or castigating myself that I didn’t have the energy to sit up and meditate, I tried to imagine myself to be a great underground mushroom body. 

I felt the solidity and comfort of being fixed in the earth. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t roll over. Everything was dark and still around me. I was invisible. I imagined the lightness and airiness of the filaments gently feeling around for something to feed on. They were loose and open within the dark stillness, finding and eating away at the shit in my life. At first, I didn’t want to know what it was feeding on, it was enough that it was simply happening. I imagined the light, airy white stalk rising out, unfolding an equally airy cap. 

I opened myself, willed myself to be less dense. I invited God’s Will to flow through my openness. It was really pleasant. I lay there awash in unthinking, undemanding nothingness until I went to sleep. Because it felt good, I did it again, every time I had trouble sleeping. 

Sometimes, when I was feeling strong, I would think about my dark side. I would hold a memory or just the existence of my anger or greed or negativity up for scrutiny and ask God to enter it with me. Much as I would like to deny this side of me, it’s there. It’s ingrained in my DNA, a hangover from when my genes and my brain belonged to a cold-blooded, ruthless predator. 

I was timid about exposing this side of my nature at first, but nothing happened. God didn’t desert me or lash out at me. So I started exposing even the other, softer parts. The little child parts in me that felt so hurt, it started making up lies and creating fantasies to protect itself. 

Have you any idea how much a lie weighs? No wonder it was so difficult to drag myself through life. Children often tell lies to protect their parents or their ideal of what parents should be. They create all sorts of untruths which they feel will help them fit in better with their peers. And then as an adult, it’s so natural to lie either by allusion or omission, in order to make oneself appear more interesting, cleverer, more sophisticated, exotic, innocent, wise, good… the reasons for lying are as limitless as the facility to tell lies. 

Again, I know I am not alone. Many people I know and even some I love, fabricate to a greater or lesser extent – not to hurt someone else, but to protect their own vulnerabilities. Many of them drive cars or live in houses they can’t afford and they suffer, their health suffers and their family at home suffers. 

Not revealing past hurts to the ones you love also brings about suffering. You suffer because you’re living with fears and an enormous unshared burden and those you love suffer, because they think they have to live up to the standards of this perfect person. And most of the time, on some level, people know you’re lying anyway. 

The amazing thing is, knowing the truth doesn’t destroy anything. In fact, it makes you love more. So gradually, I started exposing my lies to God as well. Not even I knew how dense a web I had spun to become what I imagined a person had to be to be loved and admired. I started looking forward to my nights of mushrooming, feeling God in every filament of my still being. 

Then one night, when I became unusually light, still and simple, I found myself being filled with divine energy. I felt I was in the presence of God. It was a gentle, luminous, loving feeling – very soft, unspectacular. Nothing like the sudden startling encounters of before. 

God had flooded into me in my darkest place and there was complete acceptance. Paradoxically, this receiving seemed to be a kind of giving as well. At the very moment of receiving, I was awash with a generosity that embraced every person that came to mind. People I had feared, resented or disliked along with those I respected, liked and loved – all were equal. I was generous with myself. I could be kind about the ‘wrongs’ I’d done; the things I felt ashamed about, the badness in me. 

I realised just how much of my mind had been taken up by a chatter of guilty justifications. ‘I know I did wrong, but… I know I behaved badly, but under the circumstances…’ I did wrong. I learnt. I will be aware. I am human. It is simply pointless wasting time on would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, but and if only. 

Thinking about it the next day, it dawned on me that all I had to do was be open in order to receive. What a revelation. It’s habit to live the consumer ethic of having to give in order to receive. But here there was no trade necessary. ‘So this is grace’, I thought. Something for nothing. Something of such value, in fact, that I couldn’t ever offer anything in return. For the first time I experience humility without any resentment.

Mushrooming became something I did only when I couldn’t sleep and especially when I was unhappy. I stopped fearing sleeplessness and sometimes months would go by without me going into this space. It was, after all, just something that I did that not even my husband knew about. A way of coping. Nothing special. I never really saw it as part of my spiritual path. 

In fact, so convinced was I about it not being something special, that I sneered at my ‘stupidity’ about the mushroom business after almost dying. After the disillusionment of not having been given a glimmer of celestial light or the wingtip of an angel. 

For two years, I thought the whole mushroom idea was, itself, crap. Besides, I was sleeping OK, I was being as ordinary as possible. I was talking to a wonderful woman who helped me to come to terms with being alive and not having left my children as my mother had left me. But there was no magic in my life. Everything was so ordinary. I’d lost faith, even in beauty, because it was so closely connected with God. I stopped thinking about what the garden looked like. I stopped listening to classical music – only heavy rock made any sense to me. I still now and again pickedd up something in the spiritual section of the bookshop. Some things made sense, but nothing touched me. 

I knew there was a God. I knew that I’d sometimes felt the presence of God. But I’d lost the way. I’d been pushed off the mountain. I was bereft, abandoned, resentful about having to survive in a harsh, practical way. I didn’t stop laughing, I didn’t stop ‘enjoying’ life, but everything was just a little bit tinnier, duller. 

Then my stepmother died. I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral 8 years before, but I decided an hour before the time that I would go to her funeral. Think about her one last time. I sat looking at the people in church – most of them the daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of a woman who, although she’d been impatient and insensitive towards her own children, had singled me out as a special receptacle of her bitterness and anger. 

The preacher was young. He obviously knew nothing about her when he spoke about the example she’d been to her family. Of course I wanted to laugh. Fool! What example? She was a monster! Everybody here knows you’re talking nonsense. 

But it occurred to me right there in the church that he was right. She had been an example to me. She’d shown me exactly what not to do, what not to be if I wanted warmth and happiness in my life. All I had to do to make my children feel loved, confident and intact, was the complete opposite of what she did to me and my sister and to her own children. 

If I wanted to make a conscious effort of bringing happiness and meaning into my life, I knew exactly what not to do, say or tolerate. If I didn’t want to live with an emasculated man in my life, I knew what not to say, how not to treat him in public. The saddest thing of all was how close she’d been to being really loved by me, my sister and my father. If only she’d known how small a change of focus was required of her to make everything different in her life. We were devastated by my mother’s death. All she had to do was show us that she had pain in the same way as we had pain and that we could nurture each other. But she couldn’t do that. 

She’d built herself a fortress to contain her own sorrow and keep everybody else out, at the gates, while she poured hot oil and brimstone on their heads. I know she felt very, very bad and guilty about her little sister who died from eating jackal poison. She was probably blamed – if not by her family, then certainly by herself. I know (because she had an older sister who was indiscreet with the family secrets) that she was betrayed by her first husband – so betrayed, that she turned him into a saint after his death. She couldn’t show her own sorrow, so she had to turn it into anger. She became a tyrant – fierce and outrageously demanding of herself and everybody close to her. But a tyrant kills every possibility of love, peace and happiness in her own life. Love, peace and happiness – the things I actively pursued the whole of my adult life. Not always successfully, but fiercely. She had, indeed, been a profound example to me and there, at the funeral, I thanked her spirit and let it go with absolutely sincere love and goodwill. 

I felt this towards a woman I had hated for years. I’d wanted her dead, maimed, reduced to worm status on her knees. I had despised her utterly, but now I had a genuinely warm feeling in my heart when I thanked her and wished her to experience whatever heaven and warmth and love she desired for herself for eternity. How did this happen? How was it possible that I could achieve such ‘saintliness’? A few days later I discovered the mushroom notes on my PC and I realised that my mushroom nights must have done something for me. 

Because of the effect my stepmother had had on my childhood, I had opened her memory in mushroom mind often. It was a place so full of anger and humiliation, so offended and brutalised that I’d never been able talk to a therapist about it – I simply cried too much. In mushrooming, I’d opened her memory often because I didn’t have to talk. I hadn’t tried to forgive her. I hadn’t tried to rise above what had happened. I hadn’t tried to make it better. I hadn’t tried to understand it. I hadn’t cried or ‘felt the feelings’. I’d simply kept her memory open to the scrutiny of God until I’d fallen asleep. Nothing magical happened at the time. There was no great song and dance and fireworks. Life went on. But on the day of her funeral I realised how blind I’d been to the beneficial effects of my mushroom nights with my stepmother. The shit had gone. 

And as I gently prodded the historically sore places in my heart, I found that I didn’t really feel them any more – much like bruises that had healed. There was no reason for me to have felt abandoned by God. It was I who had walked away; I who had bought into other people’s experience of God. 

How stupid of me. I’d always felt that people should seek out their own, unique relationship with God – and here I was feeling abandoned because I wasn’t experiencing someone else’s relationship. If it’s not my way to see auras and angels, so be it. It takes nothing away from those who do, and it takes nothing away from me. So why am I writing this down? 

Because I’ve known loneliness and depression, and the immensity of those feelings when I lay awake at the dead of night. I’ve known the torment of feeling inadequate and abandoned. And I feel deeply for anyone having similar feelings. My dream and how it developed helped me and I hope it can help someone else. Besides, I have a real sense that we are all connected on a certain level, like the underground mushroom body. And that we can use those insubstantial, open passageways to link up as sleepless, flawed seekers of the divine and bring comfort to each other.

Before you try to mushroom: 

• You must know that the influence of God is good. 
• Don’t discontinue any religious or spiritual path you’re on. 
• You must trust that God’s will is more beneficial than your will. 
• This is not a competition. 
• You’re not doing this for any other reason but to get you through a sleepless night. 
• Don’t even have another result in mind. 
• In fact, you’re going to do absolutely nothing. 
• Don’t burn a candle. 
• Be still.
• Don’t have music on. 

Next time you can’t sleep…   

• Stop feeling cross or worried because you can’t sleep. 
• Don’t feel sorry for yourself and don’t think about tomorrow. 
• Stay in your bed – whether you’re sleeping with someone or not. 
• Don’t put on a light, a radio, or a kettle. 
• Make sure you’re not thirsty and that your bladder is empty. (You don’t want to give your body an excuse to move) 
• Have a good, long stretch and then lie in your most comfortable position. Keep this for as long as possible. Endure any discomfort rather than moving – it will probably pass. 
• Keep your eyes closed. (Even if you don’t get any sleep, your eyes will be rested and you’ll be able to cope with the day.) 
• Tell yourself: I’m resting and tomorrow I’m going to wake up feeling good.   

Becoming a mushroom 

 When you’re in a really comfortable position: 

• Take a deep breath and put a smile on your face. 
• Imagine that your entire body is enclosed in a kind of soft, light, mushroomy material. 
• Imagine that you are part of that material and that you are made up of thousands of airy passageways. 
• Some of those passageways pass straight through the deepest, most painful areas of your life – you know where they are. 
• Now ask God’s will to fill those passageways. 
• The only words you can say in your mind are: Thy will be done. 
• Better still, don’t use any words – feel that God’s will is in you. 
• Smile and hum to yourself in your mind – not a melody, just like an organic engine at work. 
• If a thought or memory comes up, remember that it, too, is made up of passageways. Just hold it in your mind and let God’s will wash though it. Don’t start a conversation. 
• Offer up all your pain and your imperfections to God. 
• While God’s will is filling your mind and body, nothing can irritate you and nobody can judge or criticise you. 
• You are being enriched and energised.

Feel yourself dissolve into this state. Don’t worry about falling asleep – that’s part of the reason why you’re doing this. 

Having difficulty with stilling your mind? Learn to meditate for a while every day. There are many different methods, but the basic objective is to clear your mind of thoughts and conversations. The method that works best for me is to watch my thoughts and allow them to drift up, out of my head, like a bubble rising to the surface of a pond. If you find yourself holding onto a thought, just let go of it and allow it to drift up. 

Don’t try too hard. Don’t try to focus on blankness. The whole idea is to relax instead of tense up. It’s not something you understand, it’s something that you just do. Read a book on meditation. Join a group. Or simply practice a little bit at a time every day. Once you get into the habit, meditating and mushrooming will be simple. 

It really is this simple.

I’m having a problem. I come from an advertising background and now I’m thinking ‘Tell them the benefit!’ The truth is, there is no quick-fix benefit to promise. Apart from maybe feeling better after what could have been a sleepless night, I can’t say that your life is going to turn around instantly. I can’t say that your health problems or depression are going to disappear. Mushrooming is simply a devotional experience that helps you to rest and perhaps to clear your mind over time of the things you feel are distasteful and painful. 

I also think that when you feel yourself to be filled with God, it’s easier to make the right choices. It’s easier to operate like a reasonable adult instead of a cross child.   

Also: 

• If God is in you, how could anything be ‘wrong’?   
• If God is with you in that place under the trapdoor, you can be sure that some alchemy is taking place. 
• You must know that under God’s influence, the crap you’ve been holding onto for so long is being transformed into ordinary, non-toxic compost. The memories and thoughts that used to torment you will, in time, benefit and enrich you. They won’t go away, but they won’t hold you back anymore. The simplicity is that you hold your innermost self open to God – just that, nothing else.   

The days in between

Just live your life. Be yourself in the knowledge that you are a creation under the influence of a higher power. 

If you do something that you, yourself, don’t approve of, accept that you are aware enough to have spotted what you said or did. Promise to look at it next time you go mushrooming. Don’t beat yourself up and don’t pretend it doesn’t exist – if at all possible, LAUGH. If it’s too difficult at first, at least try to smile. We take ourselves far too seriously, especially in South Africa. Possibly because we come from a history that shocked us into the knowledge of the depths of evil and hypocrisy that human beings can sink to. 

Any person who is half aware cringes at just how awful human beings can be to each other. We know it from our history and we know it from what is happening right now. 

We have examples of great men and women, like Nelson Mandela and Amy Biehl’s parents, who have shown us just how vast acceptance and forgiveness can be. With examples like that, so many of us feel miserably small-minded. 

We get stressed when we can’t find it in our hearts to instantly forgive the person who cut us off in traffic or who mugged us. We try to balance it out against questions of racism, social ills, terrorism and wars. In fact, it doesn’t matter what happens, we try to understand it in terms of a heavily moral, peace and reconciliation process. 

We have to see the difference between offences. Losing a parking space is not Twin Towers. Being told by your mother that you’ve put on a bit of weight is not the same as having been abused as a child. Most of what makes us furious on a daily basis is simply that our ego is slightly damaged. If something minor happens and you feel humiliated or furious, understand that it’s where your ego is trying to protect a really sore place with a lie. Laugh at the situation. Then find out what the sore place is that your ego’s trying to protect.

There are degrees of depression. There is serious depression that really needs to be treated by a competent professional. But then there is a level of ‘downness’ that is interesting to look at. 

Why do we feel guilty when we’re depressed? We feel that somehow those people who want us to be ‘happy, happy, happy’ are right and that by being depressed we are doing something terribly wrong. There is, as with anything, a different way of looking at depression. It was pointed out to me by the very wise Lesley Wather. 

Before we go any further, let me just say that it’s possible to psych yourself out of depression temporarily. This may be necessary for an important meeting or event. But don’t imagine that it’s going to make the depression go away for good.

Quick Fix Depression Buster

• Sit up straight, as if you’re really interested in what’s happening in the world.  
• Grin and shout out: ‘I love it!’ Whether you have anything in your life you just love at that moment is beside the point. Just shout the words.  
• Breathe! You’ve heard this a million times, but it’s magical. It really works. Breathe through your nose and into your stomach for the count of five. Hold the breath there for the count of fifteen. Breathe out through your mouth for the count of ten. Do at least five breaths and look up while you’re doing this. (Physiologically, this kind of breathing gets rid of toxins through your lymphatic system.)  
• Jump up, strut around the room like Mick Jagger and just scream until you start laughing. (Even wallflowers can do this if they really want to.) 
• Go knock ‘em dead with attitude. 

When you don’t have to perform, nurture that depression. The reason why you’re not feeling happy and full of outgoing energy is that you need to feed yourself. You need yourself – maybe you also need some other special person, but most of all you need yourself.

 There are seasons in our life – not just the grand seasons of youth, adulthood, maturity and old age, but also cycles in-between. We need to accept these shorter cycles of initiation, growth, harvesting and dormancy. Very often we deny the dormant phase when it is really an essential period of preparation for initiating something new. 

When you’re in a depressed or dormant phase, sit down in peace and quiet and stare out of a window. Don’t put music on. Don’t put the television or radio on. Be a companion to yourself. Sit there for an hour without feeling guilty. If you need to cry, cry. But keep sitting. Sit still for an hour, and don’t let a sense of urgency drive you to do something. 

This time alone will give you hints about your life and what needs to be changed to achieve renewal. Pay attention to these hints. Pay attention to your dreams.

Become aware of your environment. If you see something small and it feels significant in any way, think about it. It may be the flight of a bird that makes you stop for a moment. Or the way a fly buzzes against a window pane. Those small ‘flags’ in your life could point the way to what you are doing to contribute to your own unhappiness. Why are you not as free and purposeful as the bird? Are you knocking yourself out for something that really isn’t for you at this time – like the fly?

Your brain thinks in words. But your soul talks to you in symbols. We all owe it to ourselves to learn the language of the soul. There are some excellent books on symbols and their meanings.

Depression could be your heart telling you that you need to change something in your life. Subconsciously you know what it is you need to change, but you probably know that now is not the appropriate time. Be careful to make the change when the time has come – if you don’t you could fall into a lifelong habit of unhappiness.

Sometimes, when you know what is causing your depression it’s easier to handle – you have a reason, and because of that, you have something that you can choose to work on.

But at times, depression comes out of the blue (the blues come out of the blue). You look at your life and find it basically good, yet you feel awful. There still is a reason; it’s just going to take a bit of time to get it to surface.

The first thing you owe yourself is to have a complete medical examination to make sure that there isn’t something physically amiss. It’s crazy to suffer if you have a thyroid, vitamin or chemical problem that could be fixed easily.

Another first thing you owe yourself is to stop drinking alcohol, start eating fresh, vitamin-rich foods, taking a good vitamin supplement and getting your body moving – walking, dancing, or doing yoga or Tai ‘Chi. 

But watch your attitude towards depression. Don’t see it as a pimple or as cellulite that you have to get rid of at all cost. Depression can be a gift. It could just be your psyche asking you to slow down and look at something that could make you function in an entirely new, more congruent way.

Change your focus about depression. Try just for a day to accept it and sit with it, like you’d sit on the floor with a cloak wrapped protectively around you. Don’t try and be happy. Don’t try to ‘snap’ out of it. 

Don’t panic! It is quite possible to be depressed and lead a perfectly functioning life at the same time if you own the depression. If you acknowledge that it’s there, but that it’s not necessarily ‘bad’. 

Look at your life and specifically at how you express yourself creatively. Although not everybody is a creative genius, every person is creative. We live in an age where technology has made all too many people suppress their creative, intuitive selves. 

Creative expression is something that everybody has to do. You have to either write, paint, draw, act, sing, dance or make something beautiful. Creativity, our sense of bringing something beautiful into being, is extremely important to general wellbeing.It is fresh and full of growing energy. It acknowledges the Creative Intelligence. If we don’t use our creativity, if we don’t allow our talents to constantly regenerate, they rot and start to poison us.

What is good about depression?

• Some of the greatest art, the most beautiful music and writing, come to us via the creative expression of their creators’ depression.
• Depression stops you going to mindless parties or sharing time with people who have nothing to give you.
• If you don’t step over the line and become sorry for yourself, depression makes you objective about your own life and about people around you.
• Depression drags you away from everything that normally entertains you and forces you to spend some quality time with yourself.
• You don’t feel like talking rubbish. You don’t feel like listening to anybody else’s senseless chatter.
• It gives you permission to look into your heart and to find the things that hurt you and the things that are there to please you if only you’d pay attention to them.
• Is there something that you haven’t done? Is there a talent that you haven’t used?
  Is there something you haven’t said, that needs to be said? Depression may just be a call to turn away from an empty, superficial life and to make it significant and full of meaning and purpose.

What not to do

• Don’t force yourself to be around people.
• Don’t drink or take recreational drugs when you’re depressed.
• Now is not the time to think of the future – although it’s not the end of everything, it sometimes feels like it.
• Don’t start reading a Stephen King novel or any other book that you read just for its escapist value.
• Don’t watch escapist movies or TV.
• In fact, don’t in any way try to escape from your depression. Honour it. Sit with it. Feed it with attention, love and significant, meaningful books, music, art or film. 

Can you be purposefully depressed and live a normal life at the same time?Just because you’re not your usual bouncy self doesn’t mean that you can’t work, look after your children, do the shopping or take care of the important people in your life. You are not angry, you are not debilitated, you are, in the background, purposefully engaged in personal stuff that is vital to you.

As long as you set aside time for yourself in your different roles, you will be able to cope. As long as you promise your depression that you will give it time and attention, your inner self won’t be fighting to get involved when you’re working or doing the things that are necessary in your life.

Depression and mushrooming

When you’re depressed, the most protective cloak you can wrap yourself in is mushrooming. Just lying there, in the dead on night, holding your depressive feelings in your mushroom body and flooding it with the divine is unutterably comforting. 

Have you noticed that depression doesn’t like talking? It creates the ideal atmosphere of wordlessness for mushrooming. To be with God and to absorb God’s divine will, you don’t want words and happy little excited thoughts to distract you.

You wake up in the dead of night with your heart pounding, gripped in fear. If it’s from a dream, put the light on and write the dream down immediately. Use this dream as a message from your subconscious that is revealing to you an issue that needs urgent attention. Learn the language of symbolism and find out what your dream is telling you. If you are being pursued in your dream, find out what it is that you’re running away from. If it’s a dream about death, find out what aspect of you needs to die in order for a new aspect to be born.

But what if it’s a nameless, unidentified recurring fear? It’s not going to go away until you recognise and face it. In fact, it’s a good idea to start off by giving fear a face. Draw a picture. If you can’t draw, page through magazines or art books until you find a face or a picture that stirs a memory of fear in you. Whatever the fear is, face it. Talk to it. Ask what it wants from you. Or what you can give to it. 

If it’s too scary, put a silly hat on it and give Fear a squeaky voice.

Some typical fears

• The Void (It’s OK, we’re all scared of it. Talk to someone. Read some poetry. Get creative – the entire universe was created from the void.)
• The Dark Mystery (It’s usually God you’re running away from.) 
• The Overwhelming Negativity
• The Terrible Illness (Get healthy, have a check-up and then either accept or relax completely.) 
• The Big Nowhere (Where do you want to be then? Write an essay about Somewhere – My perfect Place. Then work out how you’re going to get there.)
• The Big Loneliness
• I’m a Fraud
• The Unforgivable (Something you did, or something done to you?)
• It’s All for Nothing
• My Self 
• The Nasty Debt Collector (Money or Karma?)
• The Fashion/Beauty/Popularity Police
• Ugly Old Mamma Time
• Forgot To Do
• You can probably add to the list. 

You’re an adult. Find what is spooking you and sort it out. If you leave it, it will haunt you night after night. It’s not worth it. Say you’re sorry. Get rid of debts. Do what you have to do during the day. Stop worrying about things beyond your control. Mostly, it’s what you avoid thinking about during the day because you’re too ‘busy’, that comes to haunt you at night.

Become aware of the different wills you apply in your life. If you want to see a clear demonstration of what happens when an animal will opposes an ego will, look at a two-year-old in a supermarket having a tantrum and its distraught mother.

The battle usually ends with either violence or bribery. Only when the ego will is disengaged can the battle be resolved with some dignity and grace.

My animal will is an expression of what I want. What I want is very often rooted in my animal nature, which is strictly territorial and ruled by the instinct to survive at all costs. 

‘I want to eat first. I will eat first or bite.’   ‘I am the matriarch in this set-up. Flaunt your feminine charms too much and I will destroy you.’   ‘Every female in this herd is mine and no other male will be allowed in.’   ‘This area and all its resources belong to me and my kind only. No intruders will be tolerated.’ Even though I believe I’ve evolved beyond the merely animal, I can’t deny that remnants are left in me. The positive side of this will is that it is essential to my survival when I am in danger. Unfortunately, when I live in fear – even fear that I create or is created for my by newspapers and news channels – that unreasonable animal will surface from time to time. It terrifies me because it feels a little bit like madness.

Then I have an ego will. This demands to have what I need to feel good. My ego will says I’m just a little bit more important than you, so why don’t you just get your supermarket trolley out of my way. 

I think I built this will up over the years to cover up painful places. There’s a scale right over the place where I felt that my mother liked my sister better than me. Then there’s a scale where I wanted to play the piano perfectly (so my mother would love me) but didn’t. So every time I want to do something, I don’t try because I know I’m not perfect and I don’t want to fail. BUT DON’T LET ANYBODY ELSE POINT THIS OUT TO ME OR I’LL GIVE THEM HELL. 

There’s a scale over the place where I get less attention than my best friend is because she’s cuter than I am. So sometimes, when someone doesn’t take notice of me or looks only at others and not at me in a conversation, my ego will turns nasty. You know what, I don’t like you anyway, so now I will treat you with double the disdain.

Oh and it’s such an adrenaline rush to successfully impose my will on somebody else. You don’t make me feel special, so I won’t go to dinner and then we can all be miserable. I have a faster car than you so watch me speed up and overtake you – see? I’m better than you and I hope mummy notices (This even though my mother has been dead for decades). 

I don’t think I’m the only one who is at the mercy of my ego will. I’ve seen how it affects other people. You will tolerate my bad behaviour because I am paying you money. This means that anybody, from employers to visitors to a restaurant, imagine that they can behave absolutely appallingly to other human beings, because they have paid money to make imposing their will ‘right’.

My ego will is when I want things done my way – not only by myself, but also by others. Depending on how powerful I am, I may want to impose my will on anybody from members of my family to the rest of the world.

Think of the ego as that part of you which does everything possible to hide your true self from the world and the world from your true self. Make no mistake; doing this requires an amazing amount of effort, calories, nervous tension and psychological contortions.

Essentially, your ego projects an idealised view of yourself onto the outside world. The lies, half-truths and omissions it uses to achieve this results in all the panel beating you invariably have to attend to when you are deeply involved in a relationship of any type.

The problems my ego will cause

My ego will is immature and really gullible. It absorbs input from the media and immediately thinks it should have the same. Because an ego is essentially competitive and grasping, it wants the cars, the houses, the fame and fortune that someone else has. And it’s prepared to use whatever means it can to get those things. So the stronger and more unchecked my ego becomes, the more dangerous it becomes to me and to people around me. How many wars can be traced back to the ego of a single person?

My will, my ego, also imagines that it can own people. So while the other significant person in my life wants only me, things can be hunky dory. But, if the other person should decide that another person is more interesting than I am, watch that ego go into paroxysms of jealousy.

My ego is responsible for creating envy (wanting what other people have), jealousy (wanting to claim people as personal property) and greed (wanting all the attention, love, admiration, food, praise and other good things for itself).

It’s a very good idea to get to know my ego will properly. If there is one thing that needs to be controlled for the sake of happiness, this is it. 

I know I can use my will power (animal or ego) well when I use it on myself. I can use it to control impulses, which are short sighted. I can use my will power to make choices that in the long term are right for me – like avoiding destructive or dangerous behaviour.

I had to think really long and hard about the different wills in me to discover which one would be the best to lead me forward in my life.

It had to be a will, because will is power. And I know there is a positive will in me. This will gives me the power to control my rampant mind. It allows me to sometimes turn my creative dreams into reality. It helps me to find positive influences and to make good choices for me and for those I love.

It is this positive will that helps me to still my body and mind to a degree where I can absorb the will of God.

And what is the will of God? Looking around me, where the peach tree outside my window is getting ready to blossom, I can only think that it must be an impulse that is beyond my understanding and divinely right. I feel that the will of God is an active process. I don’t know where it is heading, but I can either hinder it or help it. I choose to help it. I choose to trust that that impulse can work through me to speed up a divine intention.

I may not live to see the completion of the goal, but the small creative spark that lives in me wants to further the numinous Something that God wants. Thy Will be done. This is not a giving over to slackness. It is the knowledge that we can absorb and be guided through life by a force of light that is beyond understanding, that will take us to achieve the true purpose of our soul. 

The up-side of anger and fear

When we work at becoming more spiritual, or even when we work at being liked and accepted by people around us, we often 
  
Don’t be tempted Maybe, if during a mushrooming session you start feeling particularly good, you’ll want to share the feeling – ‘sending’ the light to someone. Now is not the time. First, you have to fill yourself up completely. You have to spend this time to get rid of the rubbish in your life first. You’re not being selfish. With every speck of change that happens in yourself, a change for the good automatically ripples out to everything and everybody in your life.

You can hold the relationship you have with someone in your mind with love – but no more. Because essentially, this is time between you and God. Projecting out, towards someone else, means that you could be wanting to impose your will on someone else. Maybe you think you know better what they need or should have in their lives. Maybe you are avoiding some issue that lies within you. Let divine will deal with that first. The rest will follow.

I recently found this rather visceral appeal I once wrote to God.

‘I want you. I want you to sit in me like a golden cloud. I want you to be in my body, in my mind, in my soul, in my doing, in every cell. I want you to beam out of my pores, my eyes, my mouth, my vagina and my anus. I want to feel your light sliding through my veins, pushing and spreading into every atom of my being. I want you to be my constant companion, my friend and lover. I want to breathe you in, to hold you in my lungs, my thoughts. I want you to be more real than my self. I beg you. Make yourself apparent. Suffuse me. Show me the way. Be my map, my magnetic pole, my Northern star. Please, lead me out of the desert. Show yourself, manifest in my life on the outside and on the inside. Be my faith. My indicator, my traffic light and road sign. Be with me and let me escape from the non-doing that is my undoing, the busy inactivity that denies you. I breathe you in. I hold you. You breathe me in. Hold me.’

Spores drifting in the air

On certain mornings after rain, we wake up to find that mushrooms have magically sprung up on the lawn. Silently, secretly, with utter faith and undirected intent, spores leave their mushroom cap to drift into the air unseen. Somewhere, another mushroom place lies ready to embrace them.

We can spread our Godly nature to the outside world only when once we have filled ourselves with it. We can only breathe out once we have breathed in. And because the ‘breathing in’ of God is wordless, so is the breathing out. It is the ultimate act of faith, this breathing out of God spores. Trusting that what you have inhaled during the night and are now exhaling will connect with other exhalations to spread an invisible, silent cloud of divine will.I know that somewhere in the world, many sleepless, lonely people are thinking about God.

Maybe they haven’t made up a mushroom story to understand it better. But even so, I feel that we are connected, as if by that great underground mushroom body. I’d like to think that all we seekers could join minds and open more pathways to each other and to God’s divine intent.

Something is going on. Something that is subtly but surely changing the way we feel about the world, the earth, our lives, and our divinity.What could be simpler?God is in us all, even in our darkest, guiltiest despair. And in a great underground un-thinking un-movement, we can be open to the transformation of God’s continuing creative impulse.

Feel out for me next time you can’t sleep.

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