Fungus: The Greatest Spiritual Teacher? What Teal Swan Gets Right

We were recently sent a clip that stopped us in our tracks. In an interview posted to Instagram, spiritual teacher Teal Swan was asked a simple question: who is the greatest spiritual teacher on Earth? Her answer wasn't a person.

"Who is the greatest spiritual teacher and why? Fungus," she said.

Takeaway Messages

• Teal Swan says fungus, not humans, is Earth's most connected species – the one any visiting intelligence would actually want to talk to.
• Fungus stays connected to the non-physical too. It's a bridge, not fully absorbed in the "avatar" of this reality the way most organisms are.
• We've held a similar belief at ENRICHD since 2013 – that mushrooms communicate with us, starting with taste and smell and going somewhere harder to explain.
• Each mushroom in our range feels like a different kind of conversation – resilience, calm, clarity, each one saying something different.
• Curious what that conversation actually feels like? Start with Reishi – the heart-centred end of it 😉

Her reasoning is worth sitting with. She talks about fungus as the most connected organism on the planet – holding a state of connectivity within the web of life that's unmatched by anything else here. But it's her second point that really landed for us: fungus keeps its connection to the non-physical too. It's a bridge. Most organisms, once they plug into this time-space reality, forget everything beyond it – fully absorbed in the "avatar" they're experiencing, as she puts it. Fungus, she suggests, stays more fundamentally connected to whatever's beyond that.

Why that resonates with us

We've believed something close to this since 2013, when Rich was first introduced to medicinal mushrooms in LA. Long before we had the language for it, the idea took hold that mushrooms were communicating with us.

Think about what actually happens when you eat. You see the food. You smell it. You feel its heat. That's all communication, arriving before a single bite. Then it goes in, and your mouth is covered in receptors – tasting, sensing, translating. Somewhere in that process, on what feels like a quantum level, something happens that's genuinely hard to put into words. A kind of exchange.

That's always been our starting point at ENRICHD – not that mushrooms are simply "good for you" in a checklist sense, but that there's a relationship there. A conversation. Hearing someone like Teal Swan describe fungus as a bridge between this reality and whatever's beyond it puts language to something we've quietly believed for over a decade.

Seven mushrooms, seven conversations

It's part of why we think about our range the way we do – seven different mushrooms, each one a slightly different conversation. Chaga for resilience. Reishi for calm. Lion's Mane for clarity. If fungus really is as connected as Teal Swan describes, it makes sense that each one might have something distinct to say.

We don't know if extraterrestrials would land and head straight for the mushrooms. But we like the idea that something this old, this connected, might be trying to tell us something – and that drinking a tincture every morning is, in its own small way, a conversation.