Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

by Merlin Sheldrake

Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses. What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.

In scientific circles imagination usually goes by the name of speculation and is treated with some suspicion; in publications it is usually served up with a mandatory health warning. Part of writing up research is scrubbing it clean of the flights of fancy, idle play, and the thousand trials and errors that give rise to even the smallest of findings.

A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Nature is an event that never stops.

Lichens are living riddles.

Is the world what it looks like in fine weather at noon day? Or is it what it seems to be at dawn when we first wake from sleep?

Stimuli—which may be unremarkable gestures in themselves—swirl into often surprising responses. Financial crashes are a good example of this type of dynamic nonlinear process. So are sneezes, and orgasms.