“Our normal waking consciousness,” wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James in 1902, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” For reasons that are poorly understood, certain fungi lead humans out of familiar stories into forms of consciousness that are entirely different, and toward the edge of new questions. “No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded,” James concluded.
