The Philosophy of the Shroom Liberation Front - what shrooms means to us

At the SLF we believe mushrooms can empower us for the better. We beleive they can make us healthier, to gain clearer thought processes and to view life from other perspectives. Shrooms energize us, and inpart an extrodianary vibe throughout our soul. They give us insight, deep and privildged, and seemingly secret to only those who know. Shrooms entertains us, and makes us laugh. The Shroom elevates us to a better place, and leaves us instilled with inspiration and motivation. After all, take a look at our website and how much pride, passion and respect has been put into making it one of the foremost shroom related websites on the web. These little mushroom are very special to us, and we just felt that in building a website to save them, we also wanted a website that would do justice for shrooms and their truly amazing qualities.

The SLF aims to be a beacon out there to anyone who will listen, that shrooms are an amazing, safe, undiscovered, under-valued, positive, magical force that every single, level headed and psychologically sound individual can appreciate. Why should they be ileagal? The SLF wants to use this site to discuss and investigate all of these fascinating aspects of shrooms, and address them in our website.

Of all things magic in this world, these humble mushrooms truly live up to their name, and users can quickly be transported to a world of Tolkienesque strangeness and magnificence. For within the realm of magic mushrooms, fairies, wizards and sorcerers truly abound. Dragons carve the evening sky, trailing a wake of sparkling, glittering swirls behind them. The imagination possible in this world is unlike imagination possible anywhere else - this is a world of imagination.It is not just enhanced, it is super-enhanced. At one moment you can be drifting down an alien superhighway, the next, gliding in a deep-sea submersible, illuminating underwater cities in your high-powered lamps through the aqua gloom. Perhaps even the great empire of Rome rises up before you in your vision, marble pillars, and mosaic floors abounding everywhere, as the sun slowly rises, orange and golden above it. We cannot stress enough, the intricacy of the visions possible (dosage dependent of course), and the effect that the psilocybin has on the mind – it is as if your mind is suddenly converted to a precision engineering CAD Package, where designs of immense complexity, and detail can be summoned at will. Yet a lot of the time you are a passenger, with little control of what visions will unfold next before you, and you just flow along from amazing thought to thought, like a canoe down a mountain stream.

Yet this is just a rough description of the general buzz derived from the mushrooms. But the question is, why is it the mushrooms themselves are capable of giving people such an amazing and wondrous experience - why mushrooms? Obviously, the experience is generated by the chemical compounds found in the mushrooms, mainly psilocybin, psilocin and baeocystin. Similar mind-manifesting drugs can also be found elsewhere in the Natural World in plants, frogs, and even some rare kinds of fish!!! Yet it is mushrooms that interest us. Why have these mushrooms developed the ability to produce these chemicals?According to Andy Letcher, author of Shroom – A Cultural History (2006)

“Some of the more lurid theories suggest that the mushrooms altruistically synthesise them for human benefit, to kick-start a human-mushroom symbiosis, or perhaps to open our eyes to the planet’s ecological needs; others, that they are a gift from God. More prosaically, they may be by-products from some other essential metabolic process, or have some yet-to-be determined ecological function, perhaps in deterring mycophagous flies” Paul Stamets in his book Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, states “Psilocbyes have propelled themselves to the front lines of the evolutionary race, precisely because of their psilocybin content. The production of psilocybin has proven to be a competitive evolutionary advantage. Psilocybin mushrooms carry with them a message from nature about the health of the planet. At a time of planetary crisis brought on by human abuse, the earth calls out through these mushrooms – sacraments that lead directly to a deeper ecological consciousness, and motivate people to take action.";

From our own perspective, mushrooms are like some gateway, existing between life and Death – they are saprophytes by their very nature, meaning that they decompose dead wood, plant or animal material, recycling them back into the environment. The mushrooms themselves also form many symbiotic relationships with many plant and tree roots – forming complex underground networks called mycorrhizae, or a ‘wood-wide web without which both the plant and fungus would struggle to survive. Without similar fungal relationships, the Amazon rainforest would simply not exist. Mushrooms play a crucial role in the life cycle of the planet, and without whom we probably wouldn't be here today.

It is also strange that fungi are one of the simplest organisms, primitive (yet sophisticated) in their design. Estimates suggest they have existed on Earth for at least 400 million years, since the Devonian period. They have proved to be remarkably successful, exploiting a huge array of niche’s and the mushrooms themselves coming in a wide array of shapes and sizes. But almost certainly mushrooms were one of the earliest organism to exploit the Earth (comparatively speaking) from its earliest days. Humans by contrast represent the most evolved and advanced species on the planet mainly thanks to our equally highly advanced brain, a veritable super computer, capable of allowing us to through imagination and creativity, shape and manipulate our world around us, and is perhaps the main reason we have become the dominant species of the animal world, along with our famous and highly designed opposable thumbs, which better allow us to make tools to achieve these dreams we have envisioned.

Yet the chemical affect of psilocybin in the brain is profound – it seems the close similarity of psilocybin and psilocin to serotonin means that they latch onto the brain’s so called 5-HT2A serotonin receptor sites (but, unlike LSD, psilocybin does not directly affect dopamine, the neurotransmitter implicated in schizophrenia). Andy Letcher in his book "Shroom: A Cultural History" said

It is rather as if a new, alien but curiously compatible piece of software is thrown into the brain’s computer, disrupting its normal operations in novel and unexpected ways."

Is this not a case of convergent evolution? I.e. tantamount to throwing in a super software that unleashes your super computer brain to its maximum operating potential. Amazing when we think this software (arguably) is at least 200 million years old. It just adds to the ongoing mystery of the relationship, between man and mushroom. Have these chemicals been evolved just for us? Is it an accident, or is it part of some divine plan?

As you have seen, magic mushrooms offer plenty to fascinate one and all. And that is why the Shroom Liberation Front feels so passionately that the magic mushrooms deserve more respect in today’s modern society, not least by the governments of the world. In creating the Shroom Liberation Front, we wanted to devise a legitimate means of publicising the benefits of magic mushrooms and generating an interest in them to new people, so that Shrooms' following can continue to grow.