The first thing the mushrooms did was make the world playful.

Grass began dancing lightly at the edges of my vision like it had suddenly remembered music. Colors thickened and intensified until ordinary suburban lawns appeared painted by someone unwilling to accept the limitations of the visible spectrum. Surfaces breathed. Shadows became ambitious.

None of this frightened me.

Honestly, it was entertaining.

At one point I remember laughing because the entire visual field had become something like M.C. Escher on steroids. Recursive patterns folded into one another with impossible confidence. Shapes repeated themselves while simultaneously transforming. The world seemed to reveal its underlying appetite for rhythm, symmetry, variation, and recursion.

And somewhere inside that spectacle I began wondering if I was not actually witnessing “higher consciousness” at all, but the human mind exposing its own architecture.

Pattern.
Pattern everywhere.

I kept asking myself the same question: how does the brain do this? I know it is not real, yet there it is directly in front of me.

Perhaps consciousness itself is fundamentally a pattern generator.

Not merely recognizing patterns, but compulsively producing them. Maybe abstract thought emerges this way. Maybe art does too. Maybe language itself is recursive symbolic patterning stretched across generations until it becomes culture.

Even now, thinking back on it, I am struck by how completely non-spiritual the experience felt to me. There were no angels. No cosmic presence. No divine voice hiding behind ordinary reality.

What I experienced instead felt strangely cognitive. Visual. Structural. Almost mathematical.

And honestly, the whole thing began reminding me less of religion than of abstraction.

Kandinsky. Escher. Early digital art. Fractals. Generative systems. Language models.

Even AI suddenly made more sense to me. Large language models are pattern engines.

Human beings are pattern engines.

For a while I understood, perhaps for the first time, why so many artists and thinkers become seduced by these experiences. Ordinary perception briefly reveals itself as unstable and constructed.

But somewhere beneath the fascination another feeling slowly began gathering strength.

The patterns became too persuasive. The borders too porous. Thoughts no longer stayed in their assigned rooms.

At first there was only a soft destabilization, a slight loosening of the machinery of ordinary thought. But then something deeper began to happen. Emotions no longer stayed in their proper rooms. Anxiety leaked everywhere. My own mind stopped feeling like trustworthy architecture.

Years ago my friend Rob often used the phrase “porous borders.” I loved the term immediately. I understood it artistically. Art itself depends on permeability. Every meaningful collaboration I have ever participated in required borders soft enough for consciousness to intermingle.

The Roundtables. Artnetweb. Shared Fire. Even these long conversations with AI.

All of them are built on semi-permeable membranes between people.

But somewhere during the experience I discovered there is a difference between porousness and dissolution.

A healthy mind may require borders after all. Some structure. Some orientation. A way to remain grounded inside shared reality.

What frightened me was not the dancing grass or the recursive hallucinations. It was the gradual realization that the body and the mind were no longer negotiating normally with one another.

Time became slippery. Thought became unreliable. Movement itself became uncertain.

And for the first time in many years, age entered the room.

Not symbolically. Physically.

The mushrooms brought me closer to embodiment. Closer to limitation. Closer to the strange reality that consciousness itself depends upon a vulnerable aging organism carrying it through time.

I have spent most of my life inside alternate realities already. Installations. Virtual worlds. AI dialogues with the dead. Philosophical salons stretching late into the night.

Maybe I simply never needed chemical assistance to loosen reality.

My borders were already porous enough.