It’s somewhat plausible considering their unique biology - radically different to plants and animals. His book on mushroom cultivation is a classic. But honestly later he had some crackpot theories.
A young hippy materialized out from behind a tree and told me he had spent time on McKennas farm in Hawaii. He recommended I read True Hallucinations & The Archaic Revival.
A day later I walked out of my local coffee shop and saw the same kid sitting on the street, which reminded me to get the book.
Some twenty years later, I was just interviewed on a podcast after Dennis McKenna about my experiences with psychedelics.
Also, I am commenting so my future self listens to your podcast!
I just got invited to speak at the “Working With Psychedelics” workshop in NYC this month.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/working-with-psychedelics-tools...
If you are in town, it would be fun to meet you!
Psychedelic research has been slow for years, and it's partly due to reasons such as people believing that a mushroom is a mechanism for communicating with intelligent life throughout the cosmos. I'm not saying the theory is wrong (though I'm pretty certain it's wrong) - but given that we have zero proof of intelligent life outside of Earth, and that the speed of light is a limiting factor in the speed communication (ignoring entanglement as a potential form of communication for now), how has it been extrapolated that a mushroom could be the solution to these limits?
It's likely the theory has come from a user of psychedelics, and one thing that frequent users of psychedelics fail to understand at the time (this is from experience) is that reality is pretty slippery. I would estimate that in a single year (a few years ago) I experimented with N,N-Dimethyltryptamine 200+ times and that's just the kind of theory that I'd come up with at the time.
[0]: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/5gkkpd/dmt-you-cannot-ima...