Meme #2 - Holistic

Quoting Ulf Büntgen, professor of geography at Cambridge University, Merlin Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life: 

[Mycology] is an intellectually stimulating field because it’s so interdisciplinary. It is microbiology, physiology, land management, agriculture, forestry, ecology, economy, and climate change. You really have to take a holistic perspective. (p.39) 

This statement implies that to follow a fungi lifestyle we must first break the habit of looking at things in isolation and move toward a perspective of relationships. I believe that one of the best ways to do this is to start using terms that encompass multiple distinctions rather than employing labels that dissect the whole into component parts. For instance, it would be better to call ourselves “human” rather than identify as Black, White, or any other racial category. Taking this idea further, it would be better still to call ourselves “living being” rather than identify as either human or animal. Ultimately, it would be best to contemplate how even the term “living being” may create another false dualism, because as Buddhists note, life is not the opposite of death. From their perspective, the opposite of death is birth. Life is an eternal state that exists before we’re born and continues after we die. If true, this would greatly complexify our concept of identity because it would now include intersections across dimensions distinct from empiricism, which is commonly called the spiritual world.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, life is defined as “any system capable of performing functions such as eating, metabolizing, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and responding to external stimuli.” But if life were to exist beyond these physical categories, who knows what it might look like? Musing on this mind-bender would certainly deepen our appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things - even the unimaginable.

Of course, certain people might say that while expanding reality to include non-empirical dimensions may be a pleasant notion, it is ultimately meaningless because it’s based on a hypothesis that cannot be disproven by experiment and therefore remains pure conjecture. My response would be, “Non-testable? Probably. Meaningless? I’m not so sure.” Operating with a purely reductionistic, experimental mindset that focuses on parts instead of the whole, is not always the best approach. For instance, if I attend a play and can’t stop thinking it’s just a bunch of actors reciting memorized lines, wearing costumes, and moving inside a fake, rickety set, I will never be moved by the performance. Getting lost in a theater production can be a life-changing experience that deepens our appreciation for the world around us and affects how we weave through our days. But we tend to use sloppy words to describe such experiences. Things like, “It was a magical night,” “I felt transformed,” “I was transported to a different world.” These are not rigorous terms, and I doubt any of us could describe in adequate detail what we mean by them, but that does not make them any less real - or any less meaningful. There is plenty of room in the universe for both hard, quantifiable data and squishy, poetic reflections. Each just needs to acknowledge the other’s merits and limitations. 

Therefore, to mirror the Way of Fungi, I believe we should not be limited by dichotomies and rather allow ourselves to also proceed gracefully and intuitively through the uncanny world of holistic integration. Let's stop exclusively focusing on the parts and lean into the gestalt experience every once in a while. But we must remember, this synergistic dimension is not a magic trick that is beyond human reasoning. Rather, it results from the predictable actions of its components. For instance, water is the simple consequence of negatively charged oxygen atoms bonding with positively charged hydrogen atoms...and it's also the mystical Source of Life. If we can keep these contrasting ideas in our minds at the same time, our movements will remain fluid while the experience is deepened by knowing the details of what’s going on. 

This is the Way of Fungi: engage with the whole and see the minutiae, but don't get bogged down in it. For instance, in an interview, the writer Barry Lopez related that his one regret of living in a forest was that he could not experience the sun beating down on him because of the shade created by all the trees. But then one day he looked up and saw the bigger picture, which included a small, rocky island in the river that ran by his house. It was lit by the bright glare of the midday sun, so he got on his waders, put his writing material in a ziplock bag, and walked out to that island where he spent the rest of the day writing. He called this “reimagining” or “redreaming” what is possible. 

This lesson suggests that we don’t always need to stumble through the awkward terrain created by a million details. Yes, we must take care of the small stuff, but we don’t really need to “sweat” it. Rather, we should remember to sometimes step back and see the bigger picture that reveals paths hidden by a more narrow focus.