Can you de-default the Default Mode?

The Default Mode Network, the part of the brain that we go to when we are not doing anything special, has huge overlap with what we call our ego. You know the ego – that bit of us that doesn’t want to die when we are having ‘ego dissolution,’ and that bit of us that probably thinks it’s going to die if it loses an argument with someone we don’t like. Unfortunately, of all the places in my brain I could choose to identify as my ‘self,’ this is the one we naturally pick as home ground ‘me,’ the part of my being I am most attached to.

 One of the great reliefs that psychedelics give us is a spontaneous holiday from the DMN as, for some reason, the business as usual connections of the Default Mode get disrupted and other connections get forged with disparate and faraway portions of our brain, maybe randomly, maybe not. The same, they say, happens with meditation eventually, perhaps because you spend so much time focusing on the tip of your nose or wherever instead of indulging in your own self-gratifying thoughts. And a similar disruption comes with mystical experiences, where some people, lucky or unlucky I’m not sure which, find that the DMN gets spontaneously overthrown and weird connections between heaven and earth form themselves quite naturally, if alarmingly at times.

 A major hallmark of the DMN, or at least its most annoying feature, is ruminating thoughts. Our ruminative thoughts are so repetitive and, well ruminating, that we can even bore our own selves to tears, and after we have done that who is there to turn to? So, a thought about those ruminations is that they happen when we are failing to process our own feelings and sensations, especially the quieter ones that go almost unnoticed. This mode is not just a default, but the default of a person loses contact with the fullness of life. Even as we once again prove Tucker Carlson or whoever is your personal pick for straw man, victory is soured by the fact that we are defaulting to a half-life, a ghost life of the ego:

    We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar

At least that’s how T.S. Eliot put it in The Hollow Men. Personally, I like the dry grass but I don’t think the rats’ feet are very helpful, but more importantly, since he published it in 1925, it’s clear that people have been noticing this semi-detached life for quite some time.

 I think that each character we adopt in our internal dialogue, each ‘me’ who heroically steps up to the plate, is an attempt by the brain to form a durable self, someone I can rely on to be consistent and admirable. And since whole swaths of my brain have difficulty in distinguishing between reality and the fantasies it generates, the brain certainly seems to think this dreamy self-deception is worth the effort. The sad thing though, is that as one of the Hollow Men, I don’t believe in this self for more than a few seconds, as I come to the realization that Tucker Carlson, or the headbanger of my choosing, is not there, I just made them up. I return to a more formless me as narrative falls away.

 What is to be done, as Lenin asked. Well, besides eating some mushrooms, I think the narrative can be reduced a little if we consider the conditions that create our defaulting. I believe that what is going on is that we start out by feeling some discomfort, emotional and physical, and defend against it by making up stories that will distract us from it. The pluses of that: we do relieve some of the discomfort. The minus: we get to be a bit hollow.

 I’m remembering from the blog a couple of weeks ago that brilliant thing someone said to me, ‘A signal is not a command.’ The signal in this case might be some kind of uncomfortable feeling, and the command is to make it go away. “Oh, you can’t make it go away?” says the brain. “Then reduce your awareness of it.” But it turns out this is a flawed strategy and it might be less painful to endure the unpleasant signal as is. Constantly distracting ourselves with rumination must surely create a signal traffic jam, which we register as perennially ‘stuck’ places inside us. Instead of allowing an internal shiver to be a shiver, an internal little nausea to nauseate us, we make up small hero stories about ourselves that exemplify our values, true enough, but only in T S Eliot’s cellar.

 Maybe that is why the Lone Ranger never failed to nab the bad guy, why Perry Mason never lost a case, and so on and so on. Those shows and a million others are the default mode of a culture pretending that everything is alright. And for thirty minutes, minus the ads, things do feel alright if you enjoy the show. The culture that reflects us is the one that has formed us, and the good thing is that we can affect it too. Any effort we take towards our own waking up is also helping the culture stir in its sleep as well. By stealing more moments from our default mode by feeling our feelings (by that I mean our interoceptions and body sensations as well as emotions), we are making a contribution. And maybe that is what we do when we are tripping, feeling everything as it is, unimpeded, or much less impeded, by defenses. In that same poem Eliot also says:

    There, the eyes are
    Sunlight on a broken column
    There, is a tree swinging
    And voices are
    In the wind's singing
    More distant and more solemn
    Than a fading star.

Somewhere inside us we are stuck believing that it is too dangerous to listen to the voices in the singing wind. I think we were inadvertently taught that by our parents, our teachers and our grandparents in a sort of collective osmosis until it became an absolutely ingrained personal habit. After all, if they had deliberately taught it in school, they would have questioned the wisdom of their default, and the little children would have constantly been getting it wrong. The wordless and unconscious transmission is much more powerful. But now, having taken a psychedelic, or having meditated, we are (occasionally) in the happy place where we can help our grandchildren, all of them, by grappling with that lie and defaulting to sensation instead of daydream. We demonstrate living by living.

A Psychedelic Problem of Evil

Somewhere around 300 BCE Epicurus the philosopher asked how, if there is all-good, all-powerful God, how can there also be evil? Sorry Epicurus, we haven’t cracked that one yet, and in fact 28 centuries later, we who do psychedelics have found a brand new problem of evil all of our own: Given that the current advice in psychedelics is to “let go” and be open to whatever comes up, what if the thing that comes up appears to be evil? Do you stay open to that too?

 It is this problem of evil that we wrestled with in group last week, and like our other discussions, it was not borne out of abstract curiosity but from personal experience. In our secular culture evil spirits seem a strange, perhaps even quaint idea, but all the indigenous traditions I have ever come across carry beliefs about a spirit world, one where both good and bad spirits live. Those icaros, the songs that are sung during ayahuasca ceremonies, are often about protection, and you only need protection from something that means you harm. Here’s a translation of one that I dug up on the Internet:

 Now that I have extracted this black spirit from you,

I can call for the good spirits to come…

I call the spirits,

I call my spirit protector.

May nothing enter,

May no evil spirit enter this body

And may all be cleansed and pure.

 You don’t need to go to the Amazon to find beliefs in the need for protection. Here in New York City, just go to the candle section of your local botanica, and you will find many of the candles there are to give protection against malevolent forces, and the only thing more popular than them is the love potions. Add to that a European tradition where beliefs in evil entities were rife, and people like Saint Teresa of Avila and her friend Saint John of the Cross, were very careful about sneaky old Satan worming his way into their ecstatic states, and were on the lookout for demonic con-jobs all the time. All to say, that outside of the modern secular West, everybody else agrees that we should take evil spirits very seriously. Just say no, no, no, no! Very different to our let go, go, go! Is the first one ridiculous and superstitious? Or is the second one dumb and naïve? Want to know what it really feels like? Ask Gene Wilder.

 The secular viewpoint says let’s just notice that although we can detect quarks, protons, Higgs bosons, and even light going back almost to the beginning of the universe, no one has yet detected a spirit world or any evil entities. Could this be because they don’t exist? Just like the earth is not really the center of the universe and touching wood doesn’t actually make you safe. Isn’t it more likely that in a state of great fear we invent something like a wicked demon to embody as a fear object? I’m just saying, the psychedelic does alter the brain and its perceptions, so maybe what you are experiencing when you trip is entirely brain-based. And, nobody ever got over their fear of the bogyman in the closet by hiding under the covers.

 For myself, I think different things at different times; as I am writing this now in the middle of a bright and sunny afternoon, I believe in the psychological viewpoint, and I don’t believe that a protection candle is anything more than a fire hazard; if I am tripping though, or sometimes when I am dreaming, my belief system does a 180 and the spiritual point of view is obviously right.

 And that’s the dilemma we face. Unless scientists discover the spiritual dimensions hidden in one of the extra dimensions posited by string theory or something like that, the two ways of looking at the world will remain very alive and totally incompatible. And yet there will be moments while tripping, where we may be called upon to make a decision between remaining open and saying no. I’ll share with you a dream I had a few weeks ago that relates to this: I was in a house with some other people and there was an evil presence in there. I mustered all my will in a way I’ve never done before and told it to leave, and it did leave, smashing a hole in the window as it went. I woke up straight afterwards, knelt to the four directions, saying a Hail Mary to each one, and then an Our Father to top it off. I haven’t said those prayers since my young teens, and even then unwillingly. Nor did I become any more of a Christian while I was saying them, it was just clearly the sensible thing to do, just to make sure that whatever was gone was really gone. Next morning, when I woke back into the secular world, my belief system had returned to the rational camp. But I did not for a moment regret my invocations or even think them ridiculous or unnecessary.

 Since my left brain and my right brain have different belief systems and I don’t have a third brain to adjudicate between them, I go to safety first on this problem of evil. The whole subject of “letting go” is fraught with its own conflicts, but I tell you, if I felt something as malign in a trip as I did in that dream, I wouldn’t give it a moment’s thought, I would tell it to jump out the window. The worst that’s going to happen is you miss a chance for growth out of an abundance of spiritual caution.  It’s one thing to have the medicine kick your ass, and quite another to invite in bad-intentioned spirits, if they exist. If I am unsure which viewpoint is real, I for one, don’t want to find out the difference by a process of trial and error.

Trippy Old Plotinus...and Us

In last Tuesday’s group we continued our discussion of the difference between the enlivened world of tripping and the regular world we live in, the one where the walls don’t bend and carpet designs don’t very often tell us about the secrets of the universe. It’s not that I need the walls around me to be bending all the time, but it can be frustrating to know that there is so much more possible living to do in any moment, and now that I’m back here “on earth,” I can’t penetrate those interesting multi-dimensions. That’s sad, and we pondered how to make sense of it.

 Somewhere in all of the group discussion I realized that we generally come to psychedelics, let’s face it, for the sake of “me.” It might be for “my healing,” “my growth,” or even “my” loss of self. That’s fair enough, after all I am the one who is responsible for me, and it’s me who benefits if I take the trouble to do “inner work.” But one thing psychedelics may show us is how tenuous the “me-focus” can be, and we can wonder what would happen if we reverse the telescope of introspection and instead of inviting in the divine to help in our personal healing, offer ourselves in some kind of service to the divine?

 Here our thoughts may drift to our good old Third Century friend, Plotinus. He was a Neo-Platonist, writing his footnotes to Plato like everybody else, but inadvertently making up a new system of his own on the way. He saw all there is as coming from what he calls the One, or the Good, what we commonly call Source. This One, like the Tao of Taoism, is ineffable and indescribable because as the source of everything it is beyond all qualities and all description. As the Tao Te Ching says, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” I’m also thinking of the original Greek word for mystic, mustes, which means lips or eyes closed, suggesting that people who were initiated into the mystery cults, had been in the presence of something so enormous that silence was the only adequate response.

 A core idea of Plotinus was of Procession and Reversion. Procession is the natural outflowing of energy from this One, this Source, radiating like a fountain that overflows with water, or as heat radiates from a star. That overflowing energy crystalizes into the Nous, the Divine Intelligence, who Plotinus tells us, is the most ultimately smart thing there can be, and might be equated to our normal idea of a God; from there the energy emanates down to Soul, first the World Soul and then our individual souls, and it finally lands in Matter, which, being so solid and dense, is as low as you can go. He puts it like this:

When there enters into it a glow from the Divine, the soul gathers strength, spreads true wings, and, however distracted by its proximate environment, speeds its buoyant way to something greater; ... its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the Giver of that love. ... Surely we need not wonder that It possesses the power to draw the soul to Itself, calling it back from every wandering to rest before It. From It came everything; nothing is mightier.

                                                                                                Ennead 6:22:23

Who knew they were thinking so hard way back in the Third Century? Once the divine energy has given all there is to give, the process of Reversion begins. Reversion is a complementary movement of energy back up the chain, from Matter through to Soul, from the individual soul to the World Soul, to the Divine Mind and then back into the One, the ineffable origin of being. The act of moving back up the chain of reality is an act of love, as the things of matter (like us) bring themselves to their true source. And the thought is, maybe that’s what we are here to do, join the awareness of the divine with our regular common awareness, whether we are watching the steam coming out from a kettle, or feeling the sensations of brushing our teeth. As William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

  One way of describing a trip is that it gives us a jumpstart in the process of Recession. During the trip that Default Mode Network we sometimes talk about is pretty much like a sedated guard dog; with it not chewing away at its favorite old bones, beliefs and stories, I may then encounter energies that – well, blow my mind, at least temporarily blasting away all my previous values and preoccupations. Here is Marguerite Porete, a Medieval mystic not on acid, in The Mirror of Simple Souls:  

Ah, sweetest, pure, divine Love, says this Soul, how sweet is this changing by which I am changed into the thing that I love better than I love myself! And I am so changed that I have therein lost my name for the sake of loving, I who can love so little; and I am changed into that which I love more than myself that is, into Love, for I love nothing but love.

And since this was around 1296, she couldn’t have been doing MDMA either. I wonder in this world of shopping carts, traffic jams and Zoom calls, if some people who have taken psychedelics, bufo especially, and found themselves gazing upon something so profound, indescribable, and ineffable, that they literally can’t recall the experience afterwards, if they, (as well as Marguerite) have been gazing on the One, upon Source. It would have been an experience so outside of experience that there would be no associations to link it to. Marguerite on the other hand, being more evolved than us, did bring back a report from that experience:  

If you properly realize your nothingness, you will do nothing, and this nothing will tell you everything. If you cannot properly appreciate your nothingness, the truth, then in truth you must do something, or risk losing what you have been given. If God has drawn you into his being, then you must remember what you were when he first made you, what you have been, are now and ever will be, except for those parts of you which are God in you.

Phew! You can’t say things lightened up at all between the Third and the Thirteenth Centuries. And if, in our own tiny way, we are moving our perspective out of the Me-centric and into the divine, then the value of tripping might be that we move this along by having a close encounter, a sort of contemplative worshipping. We are doing our bit in the process of Recession, of returning energy back to the Source, where it will probably feel most at home.

 Our modest contribution is still an act of worship if we intend it so, as we reach out with our poor hearts towards the Divine. Many people say things like, “I never was very spiritual before I took the psychedelics, but now I am.” And even here in the world of street lights, shopping carts and shoe adverts we can rethink our project from “self-development” to some version of worship or prayer, being confident that psychological me will be taken care of in this spiritual project. T.S. Eliot says:

 If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

 Eliot goes on to point out that the prayer he is talking about is not the prayer of formal religion or of asking for stuff from some imaginary Maker, but a gesture of the heart towards that energy which it may have been lucky enough to experience while tripping (Well fair enough, his poem doesn’t have the tripping part in it.) For the tripper it could be a prayer-based remembering of what happened during the trip, taking time out to attempt to reconnect with the divine.

 This makes me think of the book title, Eat, Pray, Love just the title, not so much the book. My task in life is to be an active portion of Matter remembering itself, participating in the process of Recession. That doesn’t need to supplant our self-help projects or our projects to help the world. It’s good surely to help ourselves and to help this sorry world take better care of itself and its children. Nor do I need to regret the more intimate contact with the divine that I may have had while I was tripping: my work is to move up the ladder of Recession, from wherever I am standing.  It’s just that now there can be a firm ground for all these enterprises to rest on: love and prayer. The eating part, I think we can take care of ourselves, and now that I have finished, that is exactly what I am going to do.

The DMN and the DMZ

In case you were one of the few unfortunate stragglers who missed last week’s Disintegration Group, one of the topics that came up was the difference between how we perceive the world on psychedelics and the sober everyday world of regular life. Even though it’s in the same location, our regular world is less interesting, less hypnotically fascinating, than the world we see on psychedelics, and maybe we are less interesting too – less curious, less innocent. We are not, in the words of Eleanor Farjeon, (brought to most of us by Cat Stevens) living in a world where:

           Morning has broken like the first morning

            Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.

            Praise for them singing! Praise for the morning!

            Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.

 No, our home is more like A Day in the Life, released just a few years earlier:

             Woke up, fell out of bed

            Dragged a comb across my head,

            Found my way downstairs and drank a cup

            And looking up I noticed I was late.

            Found my coat and grabbed my hat

            Made the bus in seconds flat…

 So, since I have to spend time in that Beatles’ world dragging a comb across my head, and I really like Cat Steven’s world, and maybe I even think my soul’s destiny lies in there someplace, it is frustrating that I can’t cross from one world to the other according to my choice. Once I have done all my functional tasks for the day, or as many as I could stand doing, what is it that gets in the way of me seeing the newness and the glory of the world all around? What the – ?

 I can’t answer the second question, but as to the first one, the culprit lies my alert problem solving style of consciousness, more particularly, as we decided in group, just in case you weren’t there, in the DMN. (No, not the DMZ, that’s in Korea and it has problems of its own.) I mean in fact the Default Mode Network, that system in the brain which is humming away when our thoughts are just ticking over, and we are focusing on nothing special at all.

 We related this brain-in-neutral DMN to our ruminating minds, the little voice that endlessly entertains itself with stories whose content generally boils down to the theme of, boy did I show them! Whether that ‘them’ was the boss I never much liked, or imaginary people with stupid ideas, I will always find my own personalized straw man, built to highlight my own cleverness, assertiveness etc. The cast is predictable, the scriptwriter is dreadful, and sadly, the show is on endless repeat.

 This voice, besides being so annoying, is almost entirely self-protective. In some space in my brain, whether I choose it or not, my DMN is checking out every hierarchy, evaluating my status, just trying to make sure that I don’t accidentally slip down the social league table, and preparing me to win future arguments – just like everybody else is doing. It is remorseless, and it even seems a built-in feature of us, but are there no escape routes?  

 Wondering about this as I wandered through my podcast app, I came across two guys, Zindel Segal and Norman Farb, talking on the 10% Happier podcast. (Don’t ask me what I think about podcast titles with meaningless numbers in them, my DMN has a prepared speech.) Anyway, they have just finished a book called Better In Every Sense, which is all about DMN escape techniques. The first six minutes of the podcast are bromantic introductions and mutual praise. After that they are describing the DMN, which is useful, and then at around minute 19 they get to describing the proposed escape routes, and the major one is: paying attention to the senses. Noticing your skin, the color of the trees, or the bus stop, or the washing powder box, and so on. And though the inner chatter may have no plan to stop because you are staring at the Tide carton, the power of the DMN must be diluted to the degree that you are paying attention, because you can’t have your attention in two places at once. Segal and Farb go on in a lot more detail over this connecting with the senses business – a bit too much at times – but as a low threshold method for holidaying from the thrall of your tyrannical inner monologue, they are well worth the listen.

 Of course it’s when we’re tripping that the DMN gets switched off, and the brain starts connecting neurons that had never had much been introduced before, and out of that somehow, we get to perceive the divine inside the so-called ordinary. That ruminating voice cares deeply – embarrassingly deeply – about our standing in all the various social hierarchies around us, and another way of diluting it is to care deeply about something different, that actually is important. When tripping, I am able to care about what T.S. Eliot calls, ‘the drawing of this love and the voice of this Calling,” the spiritual world that I am a part of. In normal circumstances, we are condemned to be either confined to the DMN or barred from it, and we don’t seem to have much free will about when to be where. But in my heart I care about spirit and beauty so much more than the products of my interior bullshit machine. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin puts the impressions of the senses and the impressions of spirit together in this way:

 The Diaphany of the Divine at the heart of a glowing Universe, as I have experienced it through contact with the Earth – the Divine radiating from the depths of a blazing Matter: this it is that I shall try to disclose and communicate.

                                                                        The Heart of Matter

 “The Divine radiating from the depths of a blazing Matter.” Nice! And that is what psychedelics do for us, concentrating our attention so much that we notice blazing depths inside of Matter. It’s a joy to behold. When you are high, seeing the wrinkles on the surface of an orange or the bark of a tree becomes the spiritual event it should always be.

 We are so used to our regular world and its DMN ruminations that we call the more mystical side of things “other-worldly.” Too bad! But a way to describe the work that takes place between one psychedelic experience and the next is that having seen the glory, we can now make the decision to turn our attention towards the divine that is blazing through the heart of matter, and we can do that as well as we may, as often as we can! I’ll have what Eleanor Farjeon was having please, if I can only place the order:

             Mine is the sunlight! Mine is the morning

            Born of the one light Eden saw play.

            Praise with elation, praise every morning

            Spring’s re-creation of the First Day!   

The Clench...And Psychedelics, Part II

How do we encourage the process of change, as opposed to the stuckness of the struggle? Through prayer. Or, prayer is probably the closest word to what I mean, if you strip away the meanings I don’t intend – such as the normal meaning where you have a religion and you pray for things to go the way you want. “Oh God, please help me make rent this month,” “May the in-laws not crash at our place again this weekend, oh please,” and so on. That meaning presupposes a God who listens to prayers and files some in the “okay” box and some in the “forget it” bin. Not that God, and not those prayers.

 In fact in psychedelics is where we get to a more interesting kind of God, one of our own personal experience, or perhaps impersonal experience, where the object of prayer might be light, or the ineffable, or something we want to call the divine but have no idea what that actually is, and so on endlessly. If the prayer has words in it, they will be spontaneous, or there may be no words, just an action of the heart, not of the lips. If I am a half-evolved being, a half-opened blossom, I open my heart towards some kind of a Most High, and look to connect with it, to be wrapped in its ecstasy, and certainly when we’re tripping, that’s a thing we can sometimes do. This experience, I believe, will make me more me, more of the being that doesn’t consume himself with regret over whether or not to eat a donut or continue to blame himself over that stupid, stupid thing he said ten years ago.

 For each one of us this prayer is its own internal motion, our own gesture. It could be to move your hands in front of your body and feel if it affects the energy inside (I know, seems weird, try it out anyway), or it may be to feel into your heart, “open” it, whatever that means, raise the hands (cupped and open!) and pour the energy upwards, as best you may. Our old pal Plotinus spoke in the Third Century of reality emanating from that ineffable place he called the One or the Good, going down to the Nous or the Divine Intelligence, down from there to Soul, and then hitting rock bottom in Matter. Then from Matter, the energy can go back up again to Soul, then on to Nous and back to the One or the Good, a process he calls Procession (the energy going down) and Reversion (going back up again). For him, meditation is not an emptying of the mind, but an enraptured upwelling of love back towards the ineffable Good:

 Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as Good…And one that shall know this vision – with what passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight! If he that has never seen this Being must hunger for It as for all his welfare, he that has known must move and reverence It as the very Beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror; he loves with a veritable love, with sharp desire…For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty, and makes them also worthy of love.

                                                                                    Ennead I, Sixth Tractate

 If you want a powerful and spontaneous expression of this Reversion, look to the 19th century nature writer Richard Jeffries, who describes ecstatic silent prayer, in his afternoon walks to the top of a hill near his house in Wiltshire. He tells us in The Story of my Heart:

 I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight…Then I addressed the sun, desiring the soul equivalent of his light and brilliance, his endurance and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it rested, for pure color is rest of heart. By all these I prayed; I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it, and the word is a rude sign to the feeling, but I know no other. By the blue heaven, by the rolling sun bursting through untrodden space, a new ocean of ether every day unveiled.

 Jeffries had quite a talent for walking up a hill and having a self-induced mystical experience – would that we could do the same! But then that’s what psychedelics are for, and when we’re tripping we can sometimes go up our own hill and reach that same state of rapture, of being enwrapped with the One or the Good, that Plotinus talks about. But when we come back to earth, what then? The whole point is that even in our “normal,” boring non-altered state, we can still make the same gesture of reaching out to Spirit, the Most High, whatever you want to call it or not call it, and even that small and limited version of reaching outwards will inch the process of Reversion along, the process that in some way or another, we all came here to do. It’s a matter of going after the golden fleece rather than staying home and putting out fires.

 And so, back to the note I wrote at the end of group – two weeks ago now: “Let go of the struggle and have faith in the process.” Instead of trying to reason and argue, or cajole and enforce our way out of our problems, we can refocus on the process of change. “Let go of the struggle”: Spend less energy in trying to close down rumination that you know are going to return in a few minutes or seconds anyway; let go of the self-improvement efforts which quickly turn into self-bashing. “Have faith in the process:” the active, open-hands process which keeps going by meditation and by “prayer,” in the Richard Jeffries sense, through reaching out towards – let’s call it spirit – and wishing for the future you want. To reach for a oneness of intention rather than the scatteredness of fighting that cloud of midges that constantly comes out of our brains. In Little Gidding T.S. Eliot put it clearly, if a little severely:

 You are not here to verify, instruct yourself or inform curiosity,

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

 And I think the Chaldean Oracles said it even more plainly: “Seek Paradise.”

The Clench...and Psychedelics: Part I

At this end of this past week’s Disintegration Group I wrote on my notepad, “Let go of the struggle and have faith in the process,” which now as I look at it, needs some explaining. It came out of the ideas of people in group who were talking about their psychedelic journeys that meeting. One spoke about the fact that “letting go” corresponds to turning from two clenched fists to two open hands. Sounds good, except that open hands don’t get to hold anything, suggesting that “letting go” means we have to be okay with having nothing. There certainly are philosophies that talk about groundlessness, but having nothing is not actually the most appealing notion in the world, as anybody in Las Vegas would tell you. But then this person’s trip showed another stance that hands can take: a giving/receiving pose. Hands that are neither clenched and uptight nor flat and empty, but cupped and ready. 

 We approach so much of our lives with metaphorically clenched hands. We struggle. We struggle to survive, to do well, to impress, to excel, to be above shame, and in the wellness culture we struggle above all to improve our silly selves. Ever had this headache – that you struggle to get away from the struggling self? It’s not entirely our fault I would say, because we are born into a culture where our basic education is about nothing but struggle. Struggle to get good grades, to behave well in class, to impress our classmates, do well in gym – it’s endless. How often do you hear a parent or a teacher tell a kid, “Good job!” They are saying it with positive intentions, but they are putting the kid into a rating system, and this time kiddo, you’ve done well enough to duck the bullet of abject failure and humiliation. Tomorrow, however, is a bright, fresh new day, with new possibilities for doing bad jobs and the attendant shame state. And after that an endless succession of tomorrows – until I suppose, the day they suddenly stop. Meanwhile, we are all of us, all the time, feverishly working on getting our 6th grade homework in on time, to some phantom, unforgiving internal teacher-in-chief. 

 And then the letting go. We sometimes do this quite naturally while tripping, as we enter a wider perspective, let’s say the broader air of the spirit, and we have no more need of the clenched-hands mindset, in fact it suddenly seems quite sad and ridiculous, as we no longer see our own selves as an object – an object of success, or failure, of accolades or derision. If we were to walk through a forest, we would be part of the forest, or even part of the town or the city that is our human home. In the non-tripping state though, we are busy improving, of getting ourselves up to speed, as we try to criticize our way out of bad habits and into enlightenment. “I said I wouldn’t eat any donuts today! I said I wouldn’t get anxious in that meeting! I said I wouldn’t get lost in ruminations!” And look at that, I just did. It’s what the Buddhists call the second arrow, the optional suffering we inflict on ourselves, layered on top of the unavoidable suffering of life. The good job/bad job evaluation has nothing to do with the process of change. It’s a convenient stick to beat ourselves up with.

 But, just letting go of self-scolding does not make for a process of change. It may, if we manage to achieve it, leave us with empty hands, but not with giving/receiving hands. The second tripper in last Tuesday’s group addressed that question when they said that they saw how the act of engaging with all this evaluative stuff, rumination, and even digging around in trauma memories, was not helpful. To them, it was simply: don’t engage with the devil and his machinations, turn to God and pray. This may or may not be your symbol system, and if it’s not, no matter, the basics are the same. We tend to approach our life issues in the closed-handed way, straining, and trying, and blaming ourselves when things don’t go right, probably exhausting ourselves, when in fact, the process of change is happening quite independently of that strenuous activity. We should put our energy and our will towards that process of change, and water that garden, not the weird Addams Family garden of self-blame.

  Next week: Part II!

If if Ain't Broke Don't Fix It, and if It IS Broke, Don't Fix It Either

There is something about having extra arms that just makes a god just that little bit more special, but wasn't the reason that Akhilandeshvari,  the goddess of Never Not Broken came up in Tuesday night’s Psychedelic Group this week. But just in case you’ve been wondering what she looks like, here she is below:

Nice crocodile! But does the West have some equivalent to Never Not Broken? Maybe the closest we get is Saint Jude, patron saint of hopeless causes. But even here, you have the sneaking feeling that the real wish behind praying to this saint is that he will slip in a good word for you and your hopeless cause will turn out to not to so be hopeless after all. Happy ever after in Heaven.

But that is not where this goddess, or her handsome crocodile, is at. She is about broke things staying broke and being okay with that, and in group we had a fascinating conversation about it. It helped sort out for me why out-and out 'fixing ourselves' so often feels like somehow missing the point of psychedelic journeying, even though another part of my brain is saying, ‘but wasn’t that exactly the point — to fix ourselves? I won't even try to reproduce Tuesday's conversation, but here's some of what I got from it: 

People talked about the idea of fixed/not fixed as an insufficient way of looking at ourselves -- as in neurodivergence, where the talents and sensitivities of one set of people is misunderstood by a second set, which calls itself the mainstream and resents and belittles people who don't look or act like it. Self acceptance is about being okay with my funny foibles, my weird moods, and what I have so far only regarded as incapacities.

Someone else brought up Kintsugi, the Japanese art of pottery repair, where the repaired item is more precious and special than before it was broken. I'm also thinking now of 'distressed' furniture and the sense of character, and history really, that goes with it. Something we may get from psychedelics is that the things we habitually stigmatize as 'broke' may in fact be gateways to new ways of seeing -- a new relationship with that ever fluid, elusive and often murky character -- ourselves. 

Some Psychedelic Thoughts and Quotes

Psychedelics vastly increase the capacity to concentrate and notice. What is more special about the experience other than it induces a trance state? And a trance state is nothing more than being able to concentrate very well, in fact to a degree that you can’t reach in normal consciousness. What does this give us? More information about the thing we are paying attention to. A vision, after all, is seeing something that was always there — the insight in what we call Insight Meditation. Deeply satisfying and, finally, uninterrupted knowledge. Connecting in a way that makes parts of us we hadn’t even noticed, very happy.

“God is just what the world is like when it is experienced fully, and spirit is what matter is like when it is experienced fully.” Shinzen Young

The difference between getting by and getting on. In getting by, we aim to accumulate enough power and resources to get us through any imaginable rainy day; in getting on, we delve into remembering who we are.

No special reason to think that in this life we are not sunk in ignorance and misapprehension. In fact when you consider the moment by moment content of our daily thoughts this seems perfectly possible. If that is true, there is no reason to suppose that our gloomy and anxiety-ridden ruminations should be on the right track. Quite possible then, that with ignorance gone, we might find ourselves living in paradise.

“The whole of life is one person in creation.” Ilia Delio

Wholeness can’t be one more to-do list item; it has to be organized around first principles, such as truth and light. A relationship with the infinite.

Not just what happened, but what failed to happen.

“Ridiculous the waste sad time, stretching before and after.” T.S.Eliot

On Rumination and Psychedelics

Life is precious, so it’s too bad that we spend more or less a third of it fast asleep. Worse than that, we skip out on a lot of the remaining time by ruminating about what might have been or will be, and it’s sad to think about how much energy goes into these do-over fantasies where I – now at last the star of the show – relitigate the battles of the past and finally put my opponents to the sword with my devastating, if imaginary, replies. Futile, yes. Except so much of this is driven by a sense of injustice and a desire to defend the most sensitive and wronged parts of ourselves, as we mourn over heartbreaks, stifled urges, and unfulfilled desires. Should we just let injustice reign and submit to the things that have wronged us? Not only that, maybe these re-runs prepare us with scripts us for the next time someone puts us down or wrongs us in some way.

 The reply to this? The repeated slaying of old ghosts brings no real comfort and dries no tears. And as for preparing for the future, repeated re-runs actually make a poor prediction for the what may happen next, not least because our opponents have not read the straw man scripts we have inwardly assigned them. Rumination seems instead to mire us more deeply in the mindset of the past, of the child covered with shame and choking with rage, of the adult momentarily lost in humiliation. As a repair job, it’s like putting pretty wallpaper over a fissure in the wall. Time rushes on, the wounds of the past stay fresh, and we stay lost in our sad or angry dreams. It is on us to choose between the echoes and shadows of the past and the substantial food of now – the delights of our perceptions, of simple things like the shape of a plant or the sun on a window, of our relationships, our inner states. There is something to be grasped if we can wake up and get a hold of it, in just the same way as the message of the psychedelic experience is that joy is all around us.

 It may be our personal tragedy is that we stay so disengaged with our “one wild and precious life,” designing the bounds of our resentments and regrets instead. Or maybe – this is no tragedy at all, and dealing with our shadowy preoccupations is a job we can take up with relish. We are far from alone in our ruminations, it is a culture-wide thing. Any given morning, how many people on the train to work are actually there on the train, rather than lost in their struggling thoughts? Is the train ride home any different? The grey cloud that hangs over us all can only be dispelled by all of us; so I should not expect to be mentally outside the maelstrom I was born into, and what I do for me, in fact I do for everybody in one massive communal growing up effort.

 And where exactly is the exit ramp to rumination? When, as in meditation, you look at the part of yourself that is mired in old conflicts or prepping for new ones, think of that “me” who is watching. Call it the observing self if you will, but maybe I can get to know – or rather, more deeply become – that calm person. I hope that over time my center of gravity will move from my obsessive ruminators to this more chill guy. He doesn’t just notice the ruminating ones, he also follows their energy, as energy, not arguing or judging but doing what you would expect an observing self to do —he looks at what’s happening. Speaking of do-overs, I need to repeatedly, over and over again, take his stance and watch my funny old selves as they enact their eternal internal doomscrolling. When I can be a little less on guard, I will bathe in the sound-bath of my senses, slip into the simple joys of the moment. It is the all-day everyday trip, where I can make the wish, “let me be present,” and just as in psychedelics, then give over my wishes to the medicine inside me.

Psychedelics and Cerberus

What’s so special about childhood is that the imagination is alive and undaunted, free and unchained, as the child reacts completely and spontaneously to everything that comes its way. Which is probably why toddlers always act like a bunch of impetuous little tipsy day-trippers. Then, as we become thinking creatures, we are driven into a defensive posture by the frightening and coercive world around us, our thinking mind gets preoccupied with self-protection, and we lose the ability to properly mediate between the world we live in and the world of the mind inside us. A kind of trauma freezes our mental innards; parts of us that were bound for a more interesting and absorbing destiny get pressganged into an entirely protective posture as they fend off the slings and arrows of regular life; and the most tender pieces of our young identity lay distant and gleaming in the far off underworld of the heart. The first job of entering, re-entering rather, our personal underworld is to reassure the defensive parts, the Cerberus guarding the threshold, that times have changed, and safety may indeed be possible.

 A daunting task, for this Cerberus, the fierce three-headed dog creature, is a very jittery monster! In the psychedelic journey though, we give Cerberus a sleeping potion, so that the imagination, in all its baroque splendor, pours out of its hidden home and inundates us for a brief flair, before the trip winds down and all retreats into its normal stance. This revelation is nothing more than a sign of what once was, the integrated life of childhood, and what may someday be, if we can contrive to play our collective spiritual cards right. What needs to be done after a trip is not so much an integration into the daylight world of diagnoses and to-do lists, but an act of remembering; remembering our selves, the places we have been when we snuck past Cerberus, the lives we lived there, the enormous pattern of which it seems we are but a tiny pixel, but playing our little pixel part. Having seen that dance of life, and having steeped it into our being, we can be at peace with our own selves and shortcomings. “It’s all very simple,” we say, though keeping it simple is one of the harder tasks of life.

If every one of us could calm down their inner Cerberus, what a different world it would be! Attuned to myself, I could attune to others, and others to me, so that the orchestra of community could play in full concert. “For me to be healed, everyone has to be healed,” says Pema Chodron. And do not be too disappointed that this music of humanity has not yet started playing, and may not play in our lifetime – we are so lucky to just be part of this delightful endeavor. And even when over time my deep remembering gets ground out of me by the traffic of normal life, I can still at least recall that the connecting did happen, that there was a day when I encountered something worthy of the soul’s fidelity, and nothing more than the provisions of circumstance and the wish to do it, stops me from going back there again.  

 We are all, all of us are twisted into different shapes and contortions by the childhood trial by fire, just as wood shavings twist in the flames of a camp fire, none of them in exactly the same way. This we call the shaping of the personality, the makeshift identity we have acquired from the accidents of laughter and pain, what W. B. Yeats calls the rag and bone shop of the heart. This may be so, but it need not shift attention from the original task. Even as we writhe in the fire of unmet needs, the question that hovers over me and my ancestors remains: how well did you encounter your imagination?

Thor Among the Giants. XIII: A Good Old Story

What then, might be a good story for a nascent noosphere? Call it a religion of the future. Today’s belief systems come out of the customs of particular tribes and islands, each trying to tell the same essential story of love’s triumph, whether it’s Christ’s resurrection, Rama’s re-emergence as king, or Buddha’s arrival in nirvana. The religion of the future will forgo the squabbles of creeds and dogmas and get straight to the business of love-spreading, because religion needs to be less about “I’m the only one who’s right,” and much more like going to the bakery. In the bakery you would never scorn the warm, freshly baked olive bread because you are a pastries person, committed only to eclairs and cannolis; or even worse, because you are a member of the chocolate sect, you would not tragically deny yourself (and your friends) the wonders of flan or apple squares.  As Sonam said, we all have to live together, so why should the practice of love be about proving each other wrong, when we could all be dancing together in the garden of delight? Teilhard de Chardin sees the formation of this kind of new kind of religion as not just us being nicer to each other, but as a crucial leap in evolution:

 “And now, like a germ of life in the dimensions of the planet, the thinking layer is developing and intertwining its fibres over the whole expanse, not to blend and to neutralize them, but to reinforce them in the living unity of a single tissue.

 I positively see no other coherent, and therefore scientific, way of grouping this immense succession of facts, except by interpreting the “superarrangement” that all thinking elements of the earth find themselves subject to today, individually and collectively, in the sense of a gigantic psychological operations – as a kind of megasynthesis…”

                                                                        The Human Phenomenon

 An average human is a synthesis of around 32 trillion cells, all cooperating in some massive way so that, in this particular case, Brian Murphy can amble down the street in the morning and wonder if he should have a scone with his latte or stick to the diet. The megasynthesis that de Chardin proposes is that a planetful of Murphy-like beings will coalesce into a new organism, not of matter, but of consciousness, and having evolved so mightily, may be less preoccupied with lattes than some of its potential constituents are today. Just as my cells, if they know what is good for them, do not go shooting off in their own selfish direction, de Chardin says that the global synthesis is only going to happen if our old, isolationist ways are overwhelmed by billions of friendly and cooperative selves. De Chardin would agree that creating such a megasynthesis is super-challenging, but the pressure of evolution towards greater and greater complexity is always behind us, pushing towards some next stage; not only that, we have done this before, remember, when we moved from being single-cell creatures chasing each other in ponds, into the modern day latte drinker, staring into his cup:

 “But if this is truly what is happening, what more do we need to recognize the vital error hidden in every doctrine of isolation?

 False and contrary to nature is the ego-centric ideal of a future reserved for those who have known egotistically how to reach the extreme of “everyone for himself.” No element can move or grow unless with and by means of all the others as well as itself.

 …The way out for the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the superhuman, will not open ahead for some privileged few, or to a single people, elect among all peoples. They will yield only to the thrust of all together in the direction where all can rejoin and complete one another in a spiritual renewal of the Earth...”

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 All together now! They say it takes a village, but it will take a whole planet for us to open our lungs to the first gulps of a noospheric atmosphere. Enticing as it sounds, or scary as it sounds, life in the noosphere promises to be much more genuine and nakedly real than it is today. Karl Rahner, a twentieth century mystic, said that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all,” and if you drop the Christian part and extrapolate what he says to all of us, then we will each have the task, the joy, of bringing our own inner mystic to life – just as we do every night, when we improvise extended dreams and dramas onto the blank screen of our sleeping brains. And the other time we reliably go there is when we take a psychedelic, encountering voices and impressions that come from the beyond or from the within, or from some weird and fuzzy fusion of the two. This mystic element could put us on an education program for entering – and staying in – the next phase of consciousness. You might think of each psychedelic journey as a sneak preview of our collective homecoming, one that could become a non-sneak, completely deserved preview, if we do our meditation and regularly perform our yoga practices.    

 In the past, contemplatives and mystics went off to the desert, or the monastery, or some other hard to reach place, to practice pretty much in isolation, but today’s – and probably tomorrow’s – chemically-based mystics won’t generally have the ‘luxury’ of such self-denial – we will be at work or at school shortly after, back in the mix of life. Thomas Merton believed that contemplatives, whether they are alone in their cell or in the mix of life, already put a secret positive pressure on the world, which is an appealing idea, and when we have mass mysticism, maybe that pressure will be all the more tangible, as we try to move up a vibrational notch together. The “self-healing” that we do today to improve our personal mental health is the starting block to an “us-healing,” where we might work with others in mind, as much as ourselves. Right wing people probably called it right when they said medical marijuana was the thin end of the (weed) wedge, while psychedelics might be the thin end of a more communal, noospheric wedge.

 Do you ever remember – I certainly do – being told as a kid that the meanness or rough treatment that an adult was dishing out to you was for your own good because it would prepare you for the far rougher grown-up world ahead? I always wanted to tell my elders, but was usually smart enough not to, “The world is only such a rough place because there’s too many idiots like you in it.” Ladakh is a rough place too, as far as the conveniences and amenities of life are concerned, but in the ways people treat one another it seems to be a blissful little peek into a communal and trustworthy human condition.  For the rest of us though, there is this stinky cosmic sludge that has accumulated in our karmic basement over thousands of years: the violence, despair and small-mindedness that has been generating all these Pebble-produced Hells we have been mistakenly residing in. And as each individual does their own psychedelic exorcisms, they are shoveling away a little bit of that collective shit. Maybe that is part of the reason why, after an exhausting trip where you seem to have purged away three person’s worth of trauma, a few days later more sludge seems to have slurped in, ripe for the processing. It could be that each personal basement has secret passages leading to a collective warehouse, meaning, among other things, that when I get well for me, I am getting well for everybody. On the psychological level we are enmeshed in a sort of codependent relationship with the world, such as when our good mood is spoiled by other people’s bad driving, or when we wait for the rest of the world to politely do the right thing before we can be at peace. Un-enmeshing ourselves, getting less attached in Buddhists language is, I believe, the very evolution that de Chardin is talking about. Thomas Merton describes this in the language of his particular tribe and quite large island:

 “I will have more joy in heaven and in the contemplation of God, if you are also there to share it with me; and the more of us there will be to share it the greater will be the joy of all. For contemplation is not ultimately perfect unless it is shared. We do not finally taste the full exultation of God’s glory until we share His infinite gift of it by overflowing and transmitting glory all over heaven, and seeing God in all the others who are there. And knowing that He is the Life of all of us and that we are all One in Him.”

                                                                        New Seeds of Contemplation

 For many of us today, who have no religion or found their religion to be an empty stocking on Christmas morning, it was psychedelics that opened us up to the kind of joy that Merton describes, or at least gave us a tantalizing whiff of it. One thing that psychedelics have is a capacity to burrow so deeply into our psyche that we reach down to, or sometimes below, the place where the original story of smallness and shame was imbibed and accepted. Part of a mushroom’s magic, after all, is the glimpse it gives us of world upon world beyond our own, and how our inner landscapes are much more conditional and malleable than we ever considered. Wishing doesn’t make things so, but the act of sending our wishes into the remoter corners of our being appears to give our good thoughts more of a hearing than we usually assume. Human selfishness and folly are just one lifestyle, a story we habitually choose to stick into the foreground of existence, forgetting that more interesting narratives are available in the library of being. 

 Our current story of globalization, endless growth and, in de Chardin’s words, “everyone for himself,” remains compelling to the self that functions on the twin poles of acquisition and safety; but the whole equation changes once the shotgun of an ecological endgame is held firmly to our heads. True, the billionaires are already building their bunkers and fortresses in case we enter a Mad Max world, but let’s hope this is their Plan B, and Plan A is still about saving the planet in some kind of a recognizable form. In fact, the increasing extremity of our situation may be the booster rocket we need to propel us out of our comfort zone of conflict and mistrust and into the unfamiliar territory of super-cooperation. It’s Utopia or bust for us – either a difficult birth into a startling future, or the train wreck we call end-stage capitalism. If we don’t do this quantum leap of faith into the noosphere, if we succumb to our own dumb story of human smallness – well, evolution can be patient and wait until the octopi, or some other sufficiently sentient being, comes along to give it their try.

 The unchangeable truth is that the ecstatic experience gives better value for effort than sipping white wine on your McMansion porch or getting drunk on power: it’s more fun. Having more fun, we become more like the Ladakhis, and in doing that we forgo our selfish pleasures for a more fully expressive life. A lot more fun or vicious self-destruction – which will it be Humanity? Humanity ponders hard, scratches its head and finally says, “Oh, I think I’ll take the fun please.” Phew! At least we hope that’s how it goes. But what would the daily life of this fun future look like? Perhaps on the outside, oddly enough, it might not be so different. A bit more tree-hugging perhaps, more spontaneous clouds-gazing in public places, but as for daily life, it may be that we do many of the same things, but be very different as we are doing them. In the words of Jack Kornfield, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.”

 Activities like dancing, singing, healing and discovering will be at the centre of our social life rather than being shunted off into a category called “the arts” where professionals perform them for us; we would be playing music together instead of having one person in front of their adoring fans; growing our own vegetables and putting on dramatic productions instead of sitting at home with Netflix and a bag of Doritos; creating our own ceremonies with the people we love, more than going to church and listening to the sermon. We would be like the Ladakhis, making meaning in our feasts, parties, and conversations; the noosphere would coalesce into focus by us having a damn good time, and our lifestyle would accommodate to ecstasy instead of luxury.

 The Stoic philosopher Seneca said this about the somewhat Pebbly lifestyle his Roman colleagues were living:

 “It is not that we have such a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is – the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.”

                                                                        On the Shortness of Life

 For Seneca this waste takes place when we spent our time on our business cares, societal aspirations and our carefully curated social masks. Reserve some time for yourself he says, but then he points out that even time alone may be frittered away in “busy idleness” instead of genuine leisure, which, he suggests, would be largely composed of quiet contemplations and philosophical discussions with your learned friends. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn describes the direct experience of this state of presence better than Seneca, when he says in a YouTube talk:

 “Your inbreath is not a fight, an act of fighting. Your inbreath is an expression of arrival, I have arrived. I don’t need to run. And if your inbreath is like that it has the power of healing. It is possible to live every moment of our daily life in such a way that every moment becomes a moment of healing.”

                                                                                                Stop Running

 Now that’s noosphere talk for you! Thich Nhat Hahn proposes inhabiting the world in a way that is totally different to the norm. In walking in a garden or down the street, he is “arriving” into a noospheric state of being, arriving in every moment. Seneca puts it to us that without this level of being we are not living up to ourselves, that “the part of life we really live is small,” where we “lose the day in expectation of the night and the night in fear of the dawn.” He compares our present selves with a more noospheric (okay, Stoic) way of being that is there to be achieved:

 “Decrepit old men beg in their prayers for the addition of a few more years; they pretend that they are younger than they are; they comfort themselves with a falsehood, and are as pleased to deceive themselves as if they deceived Fate at the same time. But when at last some infirmity has reminded them of their mortality, in what terror do they die, feeling that they are being dragged out of life, and not merely leaving it…But for those whose life is passed remote from all business, why should it not be ample? None of it is assigned to another, none of it is scattered in this direction or that, none of it is committed to Fortune, none of it perishes from neglect, none is subtracted by wasteful giving, none of it is unused; the whole of it, so to speak, yields income. And so, however small the amount of it, it is abundantly sufficient, and therefore, whenever his last day shall come, the wise man will not hesitate to go to meet death with steady step.”

 In Seneca’s world this sage-like person has developed the wisdom, fortitude and presence of a Buddha nature, a noospheric self. Once we have figured out that decorating ourselves with expensive shoes, bags, other accessories, fancy houses and so on, is slightly childish and certainly beside the point, we can get on with the business of being, which in itself is a kind of worship. William Blake, in his accustomed theatrical fashion, puts it all very apocalyptically:

 “The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”

                                                                        The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The cherub with the flaming sword guards the tree of life in the garden of Eden, so when he leaves his post humans can re-enter Eden, and restore ourselves to the state of innocence and completeness, not by becoming child-like again, but by cutting away the accretions of conventional life and habitual thinking. Blake compares this to the printer’s task of cutting into metallic blocks with acid and leaving the visual image of the artist (i.e. himself) apparent. On the human level this is done, as Thich Nhat Hahn said, by becoming present to ourselves. To Blake, this state of presence comes through deeply noticing our perceptions, so that the world we now see as “finite and corrupt” will appear in a more coherent form as “infinite and holy.”

 This is uncannily close to the tripper’s experience of seeing the vibrant life in everyday things, and of experiencing the world as “all connected,” “all one,” “alive,” and so on. When we trip we have the chance to peer into an infinity Blake celebrated long ago. This happens through “an improvement of sensual enjoyment,” which, no, doesn’t just mean having better sex, but to “arrive” in front of our sensory perceptions and enjoy them, and through this realize that infinity has always been hiding in plain sight. It is we who were too distracted to see it. If the noosphere of the future is a new religion, then the only false ideologies are the ones that prevents us from arriving to the fullness of our being. The lines that follow in Blake’s work are among his most famous, but they don’t make much sense if you haven’t read the ones that come before:

 “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

 Nothing really stands in the way of us doing this spiritual clean-up job, and the most interesting thing about our personal healing is that it is one iteration of a collective move to chip away at the rubble round human perception, where we can get ourselves out of this collective cavern. Eventually though, once free, we would feel sorry for people back in those crazy old days when money-making and one-upmanship were regarded as virile sports of the realist, and no one thought twice about masking their true self while out in public. Noosphere us would see that in our silly Pebblyness, we had been magicking a Hell out of nothing tangible at all, and that these virile sports were not sports at all, but simply a loss of nerve in the face of a naked encounter with the divine. The fascination with winning and losing is all that is left for the desperate soul after it has starved itself of the wellsprings of Imagination. Abuse, trauma, emotional violence, are the extreme end of the scale of what we are doing to ourselves all the time, when we close ourselves into our Pebbly Cavern. Noospheric us will notice that like the Ladakhis, joy is our birthright, confidence our human given, and that a plain old garden and the Garden of Delights are one and the same. And, as in the Arabian Nights, there is always another story to tell.

Psychedelics: Thor Among the Giants: Part XII

“Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sung a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle’s feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another’s loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

                                    William Blake

In her initial skepticism that the Ladakhis could really be so different from the Western World, Norberg-Hodge (never mind the rest of us) makes the same mistake as the character called Britannus in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, who “thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”  The Western take on human nature as essentially aggressive is the brainchild of a crowded continent that couldn’t stop warring with itself, and so assumed that everyone else was the same. Not that we are alone in that assumption, it is shared in most regions of the world, but Norberg-Hodge’s experiences in Ladakh suggest that this is not universal, but that in Pebble-shaping conditions we are likely to become Pebbles, while in Clod-shaping conditions we have a chance at least, of becoming happy Clods of Clay.

 Norberg-Hodge doesn’t go into the history of Ladakh, nor into why they are the way they are, but we can make our guesses, and here is one: Ladakhi apparently lies on the margins of empires, hardly worth the toil of being conquered, since all it might produce is a few yaks and a meagre crop of barley; and so the Ladakhis were not called upon to spend time in becoming great warriors or fierce fighters to defend their borders, they could instead invest their energy on party planning to while away the winter hours. Add to that the blessing of not having been influenced by any of the three blood-thirsty Mosaic religions but by Buddhism, and you have excellent Clod-producing conditions. Had gold been found in them thar mountains – well, it all might have been a very different story.

 Where else did this happen? Not a whole lot I think, but where it did happen appears at first to be in very disparate places. There are the Senoi people of Malaysia, the San people of the Kalahari Desert, maybe the Hopis of Mesoamerica, and the Central African foragers formerly known as Pygmies. What these people have in common is not that they are indigenous – there are plenty of aggressive and combative indigenous peoples – it is the fact that they already live in, or have been driven to, the margins. Not a heavily disputed margin where empires and races battled endlessly together, but the margins that no one could be bothered with. The Senoi and the Central African foragers lived in the impenetrable depths of rain forests, the San in the remote Kalahari Desert, and the Hopi were stuck up the top of uncomfortable-looking mesas. It’s only a supposition, but my guess is that these small civilizations flourished in these places because no one else could be bothered to live there, or in the case of the forests, found it just too impenetrable to reach – at least until modern times. Being consigned to these marginal places, they were relieved from continuous pressure from outside, and all had to pull together and get along; cooperation and not sweating the small stuff would have been the most adaptive trait.

 Norberg-Hodge describes an incident that perfectly illustrates this Ladakhi frame of mind: a man called Sonam and his neighbour, have both been promised a number of window frames, but the neighbour takes more than his fair share, leaving Sonam short:

Yet he showed no signs of resentment or anger. When I suggested to him that his neighbour had behaved badly, he simply said, “Maybe he needed them more urgently than I did.” “Aren’t you going to ask him for an explanation?” I asked. Sonam just smiled and shrugged his shoulders: “Chi choen? (“What’s the point?”) Anyway, we have to live together.”

Ancient Futures 46

In New York City, Sonam would have been seen as being super passive and a bit of a sap, but here in Ladakh, is he doing something more interesting than that? Norberg Hodge pursues the question:

In traditional Ladakh aggression of any sort is exceptionally rare; rare enough to say that it is virtually nonexistent…I have hardly ever seen more than mild disagreement in the traditional villages – certainly nothing compared with what you find in the West. Do Ladakhis conceal or repress their feelings?

I asked Sonam once, “Don’t you have arguments? We do in the West all the time.”

He thought for a minute. “Not in the villages, no – very, very seldom, anyway.”

“How do you manage it?” I asked. “So what happens if two people disagree – say, about the boundaries of their land?”

“They’ll talk about it, of course, and discuss it. What should you expect them to do?”

I didn’t reply. 

Ancient Futures 47

At my back I hear the spirit of Sigmund Freud saying no, this cannot be. In the unremitting war between our civilized selves and our animalistic core, sooner or later Sonam’s frustrated aggressions must lash out, and probably at the most embarrassing moment. The Jurassic Park monster of Sonam’s id will raise its snarling head above the smooth surface of politeness, and pick off a few tasty tourists of civilized pretension. Assuming, of course, that the Western model of psychology is universal to all people…but what if it isn’t?

In traditional Ladakhi society there are very few signs of neurosis. Nevertheless, they are recognized in the medical texts. An amchi (traditional doctor) once gave me two examples of mentally disturbed patients. One is always silent, very frightened. The other talks too much, is very aggressive, and will suddenly jump up and leave the room. The treatment, he said, involves shutting the patient up in his house with a friend, who will “tell him stories and sweet things.” He had never come across either of these two conditions himself but had merely read about them in books.

Ancient Futures 41

Take that, mental health industrial complex! Two diagnoses, one treatment, and no drugs. How does that stack up against the 357 diagnoses in the DSM, the U.S.’s mental health diagnostic manual? I suppose the more neurotic and complicated we get, the more complicated we want our solutions to be. Oddly, the Ladakhi treatment is very much like our original asylums, built in the early nineteenth century by the Quakers. Appalled by the mental institutions of the day, they reserved a few safe little cottages in the countryside, where the troubled person would live and be around kind and placid people who would have them dress up nicely for tea and tactfully change the subject if the conversation started to get too whacky. The Quakers called these cottages asylums, as in a place of calm and safe retreat, and only later did the “asylum” cottage morph into the sad and tragic warehouses of human pain that we know today. Simpler, surely, to be a Ladakhi, live on barley meal and dried apricots, and be happy:

But the Ladakhis I was staying with were content; they were not dissatisfied with their lives. I remember how shocked they used to be when I told them that in my country, many people were so unhappy that they had to see a doctor. Their mouths would drop open, and they would stare in disbelief. It was beyond their experience. A sense of deep-rooted contentedness was something they took for granted.

Ancient Futures (39)

It really does seem, doesn’t it, that these people are living by a different rule book to us, or as Thoreau would have it, marching to a different drum, one that we have trouble hearing. Mind you, I say “are,” but Ladakh has apparently changed a lot since 1975. Globalization has attacked their way of life in all the ways you might expect, and modernization and ruination have become synonyms in those mountains. I even heard on the news lately that their entire way of life is under assault by climate change, as the glaciers that supply their little bit of water are melting away. For the Ladakhi people, and for us if we know about it, this is tragic; but it does not detract from the lesson of Ladakh: a bunch of people have lived cooperatively, happily and sustainably over an extended period of time without much fuss. Are we humans a lot more malleable than we take ourselves to be? If so, we can be encouraged when designing a new story for a noosphere-based society. A William Blake one-liner (well, two-liner really) gives us a clue about how we might get there;

Mutual forgiveness of each vice

These are the keys to Paradise.

Want Heaven in Hell’s despite? Start channeling your inner Ladakhi:    

“Perhaps the most important lesson of Ladakh has to do with happiness. It was a lesson that I was slow to learn. Only after many years of peeling away layers of preconceptions did I begin to see the joy and laughter of the Ladakhis for what it really was: a genuine and unhindered appreciation of life itself. In Ladakh I have known a people who regard peace of mind and joie de vivre as their unquestioned birthright. I have seen that community and a close relationship to the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible.”

Ancient Futures 182

Another way is possible. And though it would be silly to try to carbon copy ourselves from people who live halfway up a faraway mountain, the “ancient” Ladakhi story of super-cooperation gives us a pointer for how we might build a “future” noosphere. In the arid mountains of Ladakh, Sonan’s story of “Maybe he needs it more than I do” works so much better than the “I’m going to get what’s mine” of our rugged individualism, in the same way that for us, going to the store and buying stuff works better than the more “rugged” story of let’s smash the windows and grab everything we can get. We tend to call that “chaos,” but it's not chaos, it is just a more vicious and less efficient rulebook than the one we have; and the one we have is a “chaos” compared to smooth-running Ladakh. According to Wikipedia, those few people who persisted in their selfishness in Ladakh would eventually risk complete social ostracization, which up in those mountains would be a far more ominous fate than having your neighbors not talk to you in your apartment building. Rather than be emboldened by the success of taking Sonam’s window frames, that man would probably want to lie low for quite a while, before too many community eyebrows were raised.

 Our innate nature, then, has the capacity for extreme competitiveness and extreme cooperation, and they will get drawn out, depending on conditions. Violent conditions bring out the violent kid in us, and Ladakhi conditions, challenging as they are physically, bring out the super-cooperator. And are there any changes in conditions approaching us? Well, there’s the climate disaster, the pollution disaster, the extinction disaster, plus the plastic bags filling up the oceans disaster, don’t forget that, and all the other environmental apocalypses that will lead to a dead planet choked with garbage, unless we get a grip. As our predicament becomes more extreme and stark, our need to turn into something more Ladakhi-like becomes clearer, and Sonam’s words, “Anyway, we have to live together” applies to a lot more than window frames. We have to change our low down ways.  

 One part of this change is to retool our understanding of evolution. Teilhard de Chardin wove a story of evolution where matter progresses into greater and greater complexity: inorganic matter leads to living matter, which leads to self-conscious matter (us), which leads to a noosphere of globally connected self-consciousness. Our popular understanding of evolution as “survival of the fittest,” gets us through the night of modern times: in this story the strongest and most aggressive survive, and although it’s sad that the sweet and the kind don’t make it, that’s just how nature works. But when Darwin said, “the fittest,” he never did mean those of us who make it to the gym every day, or even the smartest and most ruthless entrepreneurs; by the fittest he meant those who are best fitted for current conditions, whatever they are. We think of the great white shark as king of the ocean, but actually that’s only in certain parts of it; go 2000 metres below the surface to the super-hot thermal vents on the ocean floor, and the shark, like most creatures, would immediately die. Other creatures, little tube worms and squiggly crab-like things, are nicely fitted out for thermal vent conditions, and they are the ones who hold sway there.

 In the same way, Neanderthals were bigger than us, used energy more efficiently, and probably had larger brains than us, but apparently they didn’t master the fine details of team work and organization, and so they were strong but unfit, and died out; who knows, maybe no one wanted to be second in command. Future conditions may consign the ruthless entrepreneurs and the cynical politicians to the role of Neanderthals, as we move into a world where super-cooperation becomes the most important survival skill. We have painted ourselves into a corner where the challenges of climate change will either propel us into greater cooperation and value revamping, or we come to a sticky end. They say it would take five planet’s worth of resources to sustain the world’s population at Western levels of consumption. I never was good at math but…we either have to evolve into Sonam-like nice guy creatures, or die in one of the 57 varieties of our own toxic soup. And it is psychedelics that can help us do that leap into enhanced reciprocation and nice-guyness, just as the development of lungs helped some of the sea creatures check out what was going on outside of the water.  

The mystic vision of the psychedelic experience says that part of us is in the noosphere already, or rather all of us is, but our normal fragmented attention does not see it. When tripping, we can realise the truth of ourselves, our wholeness, the fact that we never were broken in the first place. We might notice that the emotional inheritance of our culture, the mood state handed down through generations, is one of despair; despair that comes out of our materialism and/or the despair that comes from religions that keep their adherents in line by making them feel small. The soul is only satisfied with one thing – divine light, truth, whatever name you want to attach to it. We cannot live forever in the inherited despair, under the internal goad of “have to do better, have to do better,” not if the goal is to be resolved and at peace. This goad, which has been implanted in us through school, through work and doing even the simplest chores, is nothing more than a program left to run endlessly until we die. What got me through some junior high school exams may not be the tool for my next phase of spiritual evolution, and in fact I could have done with much better in junior high. We can’t be at peace until we are all bathing in the light, and we reach the light by reaching for the light, not by being our own taskmasters. And since  this light appears to be infinite light, we’ve got everything we need, we are artists, we don’t look back, as Bob Dylan more or less said.

"You get the trip you need, not the trip you want." Oh really, how do you know that?

It’s a common response these days to people who have had a bad trip – “You Get the Trip You Need, Not the Trip You Want.” But how do we know this? Getting the trip you “need” suggests there is some kind of agency inside you, or outside you, that is evaluating what that need is, and making some smart, if rather hard-nosed, decisions about what will suit you best. But who, or what, is this agency? My soul, a celestial being, the inner reaches of my brain, the intelligence of the plant, the “universe”? Whoever it is, what is the process of their information gathering, and how do we know that their judgement calls are so accurate? What about the people who go into a mental health crisis during their trip and never emerge: did the trip-making deity just have a bad day with them?

 Even though people might not be so blithely reassuring about other traumas, like difficult childhoods or bad marriages, “You get the trip you need, not the trip you want” has a tough love, warmly parental feel to it when applied to the disembodied, bizarre and terrifying experiences of a bad trip. With the belief that it was actually engineered for your benefit after all, you might be able to take up Robert Browning’s declaration that:

The lark ’s on the wing;
The snail ’s on the thorn;
God ’s in His heaven—
All ’s right with the world!

Unless of course you still feel like crap, because then, piled on to your regular post-trip woes, you now have the added shame and humiliation of having been too small-minded, too blind, too weak or too unspiritual to appreciate the benefits of this trip you apparently needed but still don’t want. How much cachet does that get you in the psychedelic community?

 The fact is, you have just taken a drug that has catapulted you into spaces that are very unfamiliar to the modern Western mind. Yes indeed, quite often a bad trip is a useful experience and sometimes it does teach us valuable wisdom that could never have been taught any other way; sometimes despite the terror, it was worth it simply to have been unequivocally located in spiritual spaces while in the flesh, in this lifetime. And then sometimes, being in that space is just traumatic and it would have been so much better if it had never happened.

 For a movement that still needs to sell psychedelics to a somewhat skeptical public, (Schedule A and all that) this trauma business is a very inconvenient truth that needs to go on the backburner, because what it means is that there are always going to be some wild cards in the psychedelic pack. For all our controlling for set, setting, sitter, and the client’s psychology, rather like Frodo venturing out from The Shire into the Wide World, you never quite know what is going to happen, for good or for bad. Maybe that’s even the point.

  Psychedelics are an entry way into a realm that our culture long ago stepped away from, as we grew out of magic and mystery and into scientific materialism. And, as I sit here under an electric light, bashing away at my laptop computer, on the third floor of a building that is heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, having just eaten a meal of my choice, cooked on the gas stove, let me say how glad I am that we had a scientific revolution. If you disagree, you can always email me from any corner of the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that we gave up a lot of darkness and useless superstition, and we should be glad for that. But as we re-enter the world of spirit, of the unconscious, whatever name you want to put on it, we are a little like Hansel and Gretel, entering the deep, dark forest, hoping that our breadcrumb trail will lead us back to the world we know. Sometimes though, it lets us down.  

 C.G. Jung addressed this renewed encounter between ourselves and the eerie world of the inner unknown in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

 Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway over the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today and why we speak of an unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols…Our unconscious hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But “the heart glows,” and a secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being.

 Not just the psychonauts and the freaks, but the collective “we” is gearing up to develop new symbols in our renewed encounter with the ineffable, and we are in the cultural moment of bracing ourselves for disturbing those living waters. There will be casualties as we re-enter the unconscious with our conscious minds – just as there will be casualties if we don’t. I believe the psychedelic casualties are primarily people who have spiritual sensitivities that they are probably quite unaware of, and when they enter that spirit world unequipped and unprepared, then the trouble can begin. Our culture has no college courses on the summoning and subduing of spirits or on the practical applications of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so tripping can be like entering a boxing ring without even knowing what the gloves are for. There’s a decent chance you will get beaten up, perhaps quite badly; sometimes the beat-down will lead to good things in the end, and sometimes all you will get is lasting wounds and “this lousy tee shirt.”   

 If we go in there en masse, pursuing what we like to call “improved mental health outcomes,” some of us will get damaged, and there is no way around it. Gradually, the culture may develop ways to negotiate with the world of darkness, demons, birds made of gold, and lost fiery gems, so that we can have, if not greater safety, greater meaning-making and hence greater enrichment and recovery after our experiences. In the meantime: if you hastily go for a heroic dose, just remember that the whole point about heroes is that some of them never make it back. Instead of aspiring to be the Clint Eastwood of your spiritual universe, try on a judicious dose, which might in fact give you the best learning. You may not get the trip your dreams of glory wanted, but it could be the trip your commonsense needs.

Thor Among the Giants: Part XI

“Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sung a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle’s feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another’s loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

                                    William Blake

 The world is made by how we look at it: the Pebble sees it as a place where you are either a winner or a loser, maybe  noticing that in this race to the top we create a violent, loveless Hell. The humble Clod of Clay on the other hand, goes in for cooperation and selflessness, producing a Heaven where everyone can all relax and enjoy. When we take psychedelics we can become acutely aware of how easy it is to create your own Heaven or crash into your own Hell, and that the choice sometimes lies in our own hands. If that is true at the microcosm level of me, it could also be true at the species level as well – and as Blake points, the principles of the Clod and Pebble are both equally real. Today’s world is far too Pebbly for comfort, and it has been that way for so long we might take it for the natural order of things, but what if there is some kind of a Get Out of Hell Free card that we could use, to become happy, heavenly Clods of Clay?

 Teilhard de Chardin, with his idea of the noosphere, the promised land of a next step in evolution, certainly thought so. As the biosphere and the atmosphere evolved out of a lifeless rocky planet, and as consciousness then emerged from among the life forms of the biosphere, so, in de Chardin’s vision, the noosphere will be an invisible sphere of human consciousness encircling the planet with the higher energies of love. In this Clod-based setup, the emergent property of our greater connectedness would lead to a superorganism composed of billions of “cells” of individual people’s consciousness, but it is a race against time, given our Pebblish penchant for drama and self-destruction. To de Chardin, the Pebble mentality is a half-step, or possibly a misstep, in evolution, and as our ‘business as usual’ lane runs out of space, we will either evolve into one more extraordinary flowering, or collapse under the weight of our own nastiness. So, next stop: Utopia or Dystopia? We decide.  

 In Part X, (no, not the thing that used to be Twitter) we started looking at people who are helping create that noosphere, a Clod-based Heaven of connected humans. The first of these was the economist Kate Raworth, who focused on a responsible economics, where nations neither allow their people to endure debilitating poverty, nor indulge in absurdly unsustainable luxuries. Surprise – zero nations so far are hitting this rather obvious target, though Costa Rica, as a matter of fact, is the closest. And now in Part XI we will look at another noosphere-promoting hero, Helena Norberg-Hodge. In her journeys to Ladakh, a province in the far north of India, she found a people who not only comfortably operated within what Raworth calls the “economic doughnut” of not too much and not too little, they also seem to have a key to Clod-based happiness as well. She calls her book about them Ancient Futures, I think because their old-timey lifestyle has some of the qualities we will need to make it into a Cloddy future.

 Situated in the Himalayas and known as “Little Tibet,” Ladakh is, at the best of times, an inhospitable environment for humans to live in. The crop growing season is little more than four months while the rest of the year descends into frozen lockdown; the soil is thin, water is scarce and other resources are tight as well, with for instance, animal dung being the main fuel for cooking and heating. At least that’s how it was when Norberg-Hodge arrived there as an anthropologist in 1975, and the more she stayed there, the more she was impressed with how the Ladakhis thrived in this forbidding setting. In Ancient Futures she says:

 With each day and new experience in Ladakh I gained a deeper understanding of what self-reliance means. Concepts like “sustainability” and “ecology” had meant little to me when I first arrived. With the years, I came not only to respect the Ladakhi’s successful adaptation to nature, but was also forced to reassess the Western lifestyle I had been accustomed to.

 Here, where they ought to be desperately scratching out a living on the very edge of survival, the Ladakhis seem unencumbered by stress levels we take for granted in the West; in fact, up there among the glaciers, they seemed to be having quite a chill time of it:

 I found the Ladakhis had an abundance of time. They worked at a gentle pace and had a surprising amount of leisure time…Even during the harvest season, when the work lasts long hours, it is done at a relaxed pace that allows an eighty-year-old as well as a young child to join in and help. People work hard, but at their own rate, accompanied by laughter and song. The distinction between work and play is not rigidly defined.

 Remarkably, Ladakhis only work, really work, for four months of the year. In the eight winter months, they must cook, feed the animals and carry water, but work is minimal. Most of the winter is spent at festivals and parties. Even during summer, hardly a week passes without a major festival or celebration of one sort or another, while in winter the celebration is almost nonstop. 

Ancient Futures

 Wait a minute! If people living in one of the harshest landscapes on earth are relaxing and partying for two thirds of the year, how come I, in the rich industrialized West, have been slaving away my entire life just to make ends meet? What have I been doing wrong, (other than failing to be part of the 1%)? Aristotle once said, “We are only unleasurely in order to be at leisure,” and it was in that spirit that the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that 100 years on from his day that Western economies would be so well-developed that we would only need to work a fifteen hour week. (Think automation in factories, combine harvesters on farms, and computers everywhere.) Keyne’s main concern was with how we would adapt to having all that time on our hands, never imagining that as we increased efficiency we would contrive to become more stressed and burned out, and work longer hours. Here it is then: Hell-building in action.     

 Stupid Pebbles, it’s all their fault! With their mindset of mistrust, aggression, fear and competition, the rat race has to speed up, because everybody is in terror of being last among rats.  But why do we fall for it every time, when leisure, apparently, is so close at hand? What great power fuels this neat self-entrapment? The answer is: stories.

 The writer Yuval Noah Harari describes humans as the great story-telling animal and this seems to be the mechanism we use to build our Heavens and Hells. To make his point, Harari asks us, what is the best story ever told? No, it’s not Shakespeare or the Bible, or even some super-amazing blog about Teilhard de Chardin, instead Harari claims that the best story ever told is money. When I go to the supermarket and give a complete stranger a piece of paper with scribbles and numbers on it, that person does not judge my personal trustworthiness, they believe the money story and hand over my bacon, eggs, and cheese, etc. Without this unflinching universal buy-in to a story, society would cease to function, and all money would become Monopoly money. Given this, what story is it that keeps us Westerners in thrall to Pebble consciousness, and what on earth are the Ladakhis telling themselves that makes their Cloddish lives so much more manageable?

 The Pebble story is that human nature is innately selfish and violent. When I take this for a fact, then if I don’t extract the oil out of the ground, knock down the rain forest, or save money by polluting the local river, then the next person/country/corporation certainly will. Since we all have the same expectation, I may as well get the jump on the rest of them and – and there you go – we have just made Hell in Heaven’s despite. Once we think that this is simply the way things are, like rocks are hard and two plus two equals four, it seems like sheer insanity to act outside of the paradigm. A lot of what people are trying to integrate after a psychedelic journey is the experience they had of falling into the vastness of a glorious and insuperable love, and then trying to deal with the rule book of the “real” world of normal consciousness, where in large swathes of our lives qualities like trust, vulnerability and openness are almost unthinkable.

 Here in the Western world, whatever your belief system, your conclusion about human nature comes down to the same thing. If you follow the Bible, you will believe that we have been sinning ever since Adam ate apples, while if evolution is your gig, you will note that aggression and greed have been on the go since the first barnacle. And it’s not just us in the West who think so poorly of humanity, in almost anywhere in the world that was fertile enough to be worth fighting over, the Pebblish construct seems to hold sway.

 The few exception seem to come from parts of the world not worth fighting over – the deserts, the deep forests, and the mountains – such as the Himalayan mountains of Ladakh. In these places that the empire builders can’t be bothered with, the Clod story has the chance to take root. It’s hard for us to believe a Clod story could even hold sway in a community, but then people who lived before the money story could have made no sense of the shopping in a store experience, it would have seemed like madness to them. So we, in our pre-Clod madness, might take on the lesson of Ladakh as part of a possible future where car bombs, hostile invasions and mass starvation are not part of the daily news. As you will see, Ladakh appears to have a level of social cohesion and trustability that is at first hard to credit. Norberg-Hodge describes it as a place where miscreants become too ashamed to get away with excessive amounts of selfish stuff, and their victims aren’t really all that bothered, because they know they will get their needs met anyway. Ladakh is an inconvenient truth for the pessimistic view of who we are.

How Old Are You, Really?

This is an obvious thought, and yet a startling one: the stuff of the universe has been here all along, no subtractions, no additions, just evolving into greater and greater complexity. The stuff of my body, which used to be the stuff of my mother’s body, which used to be the animals and plants that she ate, which, going back, used to be, as they said in the sixties, stardust, which itself used to be the elements that formed those stars, originally came from a mixture of the two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, created in the first minutes of the big bang. The matter that composes my 13.7 billion year old body has gone through more changes than most matter, while the self-awareness of this body is a novel level of all this evolving.

 We, in this brief moment, are the living front of all this, and a fairly special front we are too, since we are able to consciously partake in, perhaps even help design, what comes next. And it turns out that the experiences of the mystics point the way forward in the next step of our journey, showing how we can summon ourselves from regular awareness to infusion with, for want of a better word, the divine. This self-awareness can help burn off the karma of all the cruelty, torment, tragedy, and closure that has preceded us, and with that same awareness we can open ourselves to the glories that lie ahead in what Teilhard de Chardin calls the Omega Point, the end point of a process in which the big bang was Alpha. In our own bodies, as de Chardin puts it, we are a more knowing part of, “the Divine radiating from the depths of a blazing matter.”  

 When our suffering is suffered unknowingly, we quite rightly call for the pain killers, whether that is morphine or burying ourselves in our own small compulsions or our consumer heavens; when we suffer knowingly, we can burn off the karma and open to the divine, and with that the suffering can turn to exaltation. Psychedelics, by focusing the mind and by opening the mind to divinity, helps us turn our suffering to that exaltation. That is the role psychedelics may play in the world, as we accelerate from geological time frames to the time frame of the trip, which speeds and slows in alarming ways, and which also bends the mind in quite peculiar and original directions.

 Then why, if we struggle so in our ordinary lives to enter the magnificent forum of our evolutionary destiny, do we choose so often to doom scroll on our phone or watch a movie trailer rather than join the great enterprise? The astounding amount of time that we all simply waste. I think it just means that you and I, like the rest of heaving humanity, are not yet evolved to that state of being where we can fully inhabit ourselves. Collectively, we are like a person fitfully turning in their sleep in early morning, knowing in some far corner of their brain that there is something that needs to be done, somewhere to get up and go to, but quite what – can’t remember. We fight between the sleep we are in and the waking we aspire to. In this collective fitful slumber, we spend an uncomfortable amount of time in an earlier, more painful, stage of our evolving; but our personal struggle to awaken is not time wasted on trying to reach life’s starting line, it is the cutting edge of love and life’s evolving. When enough of us have struggled and stirred, our incoherent efforts may create a possibility for the following generations to blink, open their eyes and see the next tasks ahead. They may be the ones more magnetized towards the waking world, the glories of the Omega Point, where there will surely await new, and from where we stand now, quite inconceivable wakings to be done.

307.42: Primary Insomnia

A complaint of difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep or non-restorative sleep that lasts for at least 1 month (Criterion A) and causes clinically significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning.

                                                            Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

It was so stupidly late

Yet she let herself stay up,

Surfing the channels

Like a refuge  

Searching for a long-lost family.

She held her life together

With a stack of little post-it notes  

She kept inside her bag

That was under a chair

Somewhere in the last bar.

Bars are filled with mirrors

Because there is never quite enough of us,

Because there is never enough noise,

And night after night, crowd after crowd

Our ancestors are always trying to sneak back

Into the shiny bright present.

The bartender restlessly cleans a glass,

Out of sorts that his life is

So emptied, so filled, so emptied.

Soon, when his shift is over

He will step into the night air,

Shrug his hands into his pockets

And no longer be a personality.

Finally, it was a relief

To meet ugly men

Because they would not ask her

To be someone else.

They too could be simple and grateful.

She wondered in those days,

As the City shook so vigorously

And was bathed in many glorious lights,

If anyone could ever speak to anyone again.

Shall we still scorn the anguish of the sparrows?

She cupped her heart in her hands

And offered it at each window

While the full but skeletal moon

Smiled and sailed on.

Oh City of the endless blinking tail lights,

Whose traffic gives and whose traffic takes away,

Can I trust myself into stillness

While you hum so tight around me?

When the all-night office cleaners

Haul out the trash from under

The desks of our endeavors,

I hear your wailing,

The ceaseless calling of unsolved needs,

Your savage intendedness.

And somewhere far ahead,

Out among the fading stars

Is the outline of the saintly figure

Who will one day cover you

With the long true branches

Of her sad, forgiving tears.

She closes the shades,

Forbids the rich dawn,

And sleeps.

ONE WILL

“I can resist everything except temptation.” Oscar Wilde

One attention makes one will. One will: no compromises and negotiations between different impulses because they are all of the same mind. Healing is the restoration of one will from split wills through listening to them instead of being them. The watcher of the inward world is the one with one will, who then becomes the speaker to the outside world. The joy of speaking with one voice.

 There are two kinds of discipline: one that submits wayward immature parts of us to the rod of grownup voices, and another that finds one will, and with that you may do as you wish. The first is not stable, because the immature and wayward parts remain unvoiced and unsatisfied. The second remains stable because the wayward voices have withdrawn back inside the city before the gates were closed for night. They may speak without condemnation.

 When we battle inside we may win, we may lose, but we always split the will. When we watch with compassion we become, we unify.

 For the sake of those who brought us here

We the poor benighted ones

Have only names that we can wear

Or else return from where we’ve come.

A Poem for the New Year

Let Love Be

 How does love grow?
Ask the holly bush.
Where does love go to?
Follow the bee.
Will this night last long?
Only the blood-red moon knows.
What does love ask for? 

To be seen, and to see.

In the quiet of the night
I hear it rising,
The great wise salmon
Of the Western Sea.
True death, true life
Is all we long for
In the whirlpool of folly
That we struggle to flee.

Down the far wide valleys
Of the moonlight
The bitter and the doleful
Ghosts are howling
For the love they forsook
And allowed to fly free.
If of love you would be given
Let love be, let love be.

Thor Among the Giants Part X: The Synthesis

We are looking at the spiritual history of the western world, and it goes like this: Intact Period →Rupture → Dislocation Period → Synthesis. Right now we are in the Dislocation Period, and our hope is that we can set up conditions where we move into a Synthesis of old and new – which is where psychedelics could help.  It is a story of how we moved from being a Medieval religion-based society to a technology-based secular one, and where we might – or might not – go next.  

The Intact Period was the time before the scientific revolution, when science and faith were fused into one (as it turns out, erroneous) belief system where we thought for instance that God is literally somewhere above the stars we see in the night sky, while the planets revolve below his feet. “Intact” does not suggest that the world was a friendlier or more honest place than it is now, but it was a place where people were more likely to believe that because there was a god up there life made sense, and that there was going to be a next chapter to their story after this one was over. They would not have agonized anywhere near as much over issues of meaning and purpose, and an innate feeling of “God is in his heaven, all’s right with the world,” will surely get you out of bed in the morning better than watching Bergman movies. 

The Rupture was the scientific revolution that undermined all the foundations of the Medieval belief system. It turned out that crystalline celestial spheres being pushed being along by angels was just a fantasy, it could all be explained by gravity; and if God really did live in an empyrean above the spheres, why hadn’t his realm been spotted by the newly invented telescope? The doctors of the church had it all wrong, the once-revered ancients had it all wrong, and it certainly didn’t help that at this time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thousands of godfearing Christians were slaughtering each other and burning one another alive over fine points of doctrine. Many a humble peasant or townsperson, having heard everybody accuse everyone else of being the Antichrist, would have been forgiven for saying a pox on all your houses, and quietly wondering if any of this God stuff was true at all. Scientific ingenuity and human tomfoolery made us start to question the unquestionable.  

After the Rupture comes the Dislocation, which is from the scientific revolution (1543 to 1667, says Wikipedia) until now. I’m calling it a Dislocation with the full understanding that none of us regrets that it happened. In terms of technology, medicine and public health, plus new-fangled concepts like human rights and democracy, this was a building-up, not a breaking down. But the secular worldview this science gave us is entirely materialistic, and in the package deal of materialism the afterlife idea is simply a sop to make credulous people less scared of dying, while morality is little more than a social convention designed to stop us murdering the next-door neighbours. The inescapable core of materialism is that the Big Bang doesn’t really care if we exist or not, that sooner or later we will have to face the terror and despair of dying, and that our spiritual journeys are no more than the self-soothing flourishes of our active imaginations.    

It was inevitable. Sooner or later, the beautifully organized worldview of the Middle Ages was going to get busted. Our worldviews, especially when we are short on good information, tend towards an emotional unity and a sense of harmony that turns out to be internal, not external, discovery. We make up creation tales of gods, good and bad, who usually take an interest in human affairs, and we project our inner dramas onto the world around us, it’s just a thing that we do. But in the end the factuality of the fable will be exploded, and the religion that was once so vibrant becomes a rear-guard action of outworn ways of being. I’m looking at you, Evangelism. For those of us who can’t go along with the creaky old-time religions, the faith we might be able to generate in “something bigger than us” feels like a neglected Tinkerbell, feeding off crumbs of self-generated belief in a half-starved life. C.G. Jung put it a bit more eloquently in his The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: 

Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway over the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today and why we speak of an unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols…Our unconscious hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But “the heart glows,” and a secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. 

The whole DSM, the therapist’s bible as it is interestingly known, could be reduced to that one diagnosis – a secret unrest gnawing at the root of our being. But Jung is shining his flashlight into the darkness ahead of us in a way that leads towards a Synthesis of the healing spirituality of the Intact Period with the useful science of the Dislocation. For Freud, the unconscious was just a basement where we put all the nasty, smelly, and unacceptable parts of ourselves and then slammed the door; but for Jung, if you were brave enough to go down there and burrow beyond your own personal crappiness you would find yourself in an ancient, sometimes enchanted, sometimes terrifying, world. A world of dreams, nightmares, reveries and mystical visions that people have been interacting with and scratching their heads over for a long time. The secret unrest comes when we are divorced from imagination, from this world of scary enchantment. We become, as Herbert Marcuse put it, “one dimensional,” partly to avoid the responsibility of going down into the spooky basement and partly because we don’t know any better. We may live longer and more comfortably these days, but it stinks to not be a complete person.  

The unifying principle, I believe, and the one that can lead us to the Synthesis, is the mystical experience. After a mystical experience a person does not need their inherited religious belief structures, they just have to remember what happened to them. You have had an experience of the divine that is as real as any other real you care to mention, like the real world of test tubes, traffic lights, and bureaucracies. Or maybe it could even be more real. With a lasting visceral contact with the divine we can struggle to retrieve ourselves from the materialist dark, and some day have the best of both worlds. The only trouble is that in the normal run of things, very few of us have spontaneous mystical experiences, and they are such rare and ill-noticed events that there is little chance they would ever transform a deeply secular society like ours.    

Cue the entrance of the chemically induced mystical experience. Suddenly the realm of the hermits, saints and desert fathers becomes just a hit away for all of us. Many people I work with have said that before psychedelics they were atheists, but now they are not so sure, they believe in something, even if it’s hard to put their finger on what that is. So far though, for whatever reason, maybe because we’re just a bunch of scaredy cats, Western culture has steered clear of letting psychedelics in its mainstream. They may have been used by the Greeks at Eleusis, but that was a long time ago; it’s quite likely that the witches used psychoactive plants in their rustic ceremonies, but you know what happened to them. After that, it was pretty much tumbleweed until psychedelics burst on the scene in the sixties, but even then, it was a cool, hippy rebel kind of thing to do, not a normal person thing. Only now are psychedelics creeping into respectability, via the mental health industry and the cottage industry of ayahuasca circles. As the mystical experience is on the brink of being undertaken by millions of secular people, that marriage of spirit and science may be ready at last to take off, and it should be an interesting ride.  

The Synthesis then, is the next step where spirit can resurrect itself so that science will talk nice to it again, and maybe they will even start dating. The new god of the Synthesis is the one of people’s trips; its belief system is full of ideas like: all is one, we can accept ourselves for what we are, everything is energy, love is the greatest power, and the divine loves us unconditionally. Unlike the old god, this one is not dogmatic, bossy or interfering, it is not obsessed with sin, it has no in-crowd or out-crowd, and it is not interested in hierarchy. Sometimes this new god is light or energy, sometimes a presence, and anyway, as the Tao De Ching points out, the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.  

When Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the Omega Point, I believe he had this new, divine-energy type of god in mind, rather than the old rulebook one; he saw this divine expansion in a visionary way, as sparkling lights seeping over the planet as a new atmosphere, not of air, but of consciousness. This new atmosphere, this noosphere (from nous, the Greek for mind) will be a network of linked minds, our minds, eventually forming into the emergent property of a new global mind. What he didn’t do was outline how that was going to work its way into the world of test tubes, traffic lights and bureaucracies. Maybe he was already in enough hot water with the church authorities to push his luck no further, or maybe it was too early to look for the nuts and bolts of exactly how his ideas would be operationalized. Now, as we start turning on our air conditioners in early May, it is time. There are two paths ahead of us: one of self-annihilation through the global madness of pollution, habitat destruction and climate change, and the other one that brings us over the threshold of human evolving and into the noosphere. Let’s look for who is helping us along the second road.  

A good place to begin is Kate Raworth, an English economist who became disenchanted with the conventional economic models because they see continuous growth as a requirement for our survival, rather like a shark that always needs to swim forwards. She believes that standard economics, with its focus on endless growth and ever-burgeoning GDPs, has thrown us under the ecological bus, and is throwing more of us under more buses all the time. Raworth proposes instead the idea of Doughnut Economics, where the hole in the centre of the doughnut represents the zone where an economy is not yet meeting the basic needs of the people, while the space beyond the outer edge of the doughnut represents an economy that is burning up resources and overshooting the planet’s capacity. Right now, no country in the world is living in the doughnut, while economies that are blessed with the names “developed” and “advanced” are the ones overshooting. The closest country to being in the doughnut turns out to be Costa Rica, good old Costa Rica, too bad you are so tiny.  

Without actually using the word “capitalism,” Raworth tells us that our current way of doing business is “degenerative and divisive,” and in her Youtube talk,  “How radical ideas can turn into transformative practice,” she says that the “take, make, use, lose” economy “is what takes us over planetary boundaries, and that is what runs down the living world.” To the “advanced” countries of the world she says, “You are just destroying the life support systems of the planet for yourselves and everybody else.” Fortunately, there is a solution, and it comes from “transformation within and between every nation,” and “no country can get into the doughnut alone, this is a mutually dependent project.”  

Raworth does not call for revolution, but for everyone to follow their own true interests, i.e. not frying ourselves inside a cesspool of toxic sludge. She remarks that the transformation we need cannot happen while the richest 1% of the world’s people own 50% of its resources, but she isn’t clear on how the one percent can be persuaded to give it all away – but then, I’m not if sure anybody is. Since it is not going to come from violence (we tried Communism, but all we got was this lousy Che Guevara tee-shirt) then it must come from a combination of two things: through desperation and sheer panic as we face down the ecological endgame, and through Teilhard’s “forces of love” beginning to penetrate all of humanity in significantly new ways.  

In Raworth’s thinking, the vehicle of world transformation is business. Transformed businesses, she says, will not only be out to make money, they will have the needs of the planet in their core mission, they will design products that are not only sustainable but actually regenerative, they will give employees a meaningful share in power, they will encourage competitors to take on the good practices they have discovered, they will reinvest in communities, and they make sure their mission does not get undercut by greedy financial backers. “Don’t just design your product,” Raworth says, “design your company to protect yourself from excessively powerful finance. Design yourself so you can stay true to your purpose, even as you scale.” And in case we get discouraged, Raworth reminds us that, “Economies and companies are entirely a human construct. We invented them, and we can reinvent them.”  

And so we have a broad picture, an outline at least, of what the businesses of the noosphere might look like: connected to their community and ready to put the quick buck aside if it furthers the interests of the species. This goes against the Adam Smith dictate that by following their own selfish interests, businesses necessarily serve the commons. That worked best when the businesses in question were local little stores, and it more arguably worked through the industrial revolution, but now it is simply not true anymore; in a way Raworth is describing the Buddhist idea of right livelihood, of keeping true to ourselves while making money, or you could say, designing a world where we can make the jump into the noosphere. It’s being in the doughnut or bust, it’s understanding the power of love or bust! 

Mystical experiences never were private concerns, and mystics have always been yelling out the message of love at the rest of us. Though we don’t have a Terence McKenna any more to lead the party, large scale chemically induced mystical experiences do have a chance of bringing love and vision into the mainstream of life. They might help businesses stop greenwashing and start greening, and They might help politicians start taking care of the polis and not themselves. In the Middle Ages we built extraordinary cathedrals that literally brought light and love to all who entered them. Indigenous cultures see the earth, and the way we interact with the earth, as sacred. With a new impetus of direct experiences of divine love, we can set a collective intention to enter the noosphere and save the world. In the words of Jesus, as reported to me by someone after their MDMA encounter, “At every moment the choice is always between love and not love, and the answer is to always act in the service of love.” He always had a way with words, that guy. And can psychedelics help us collectively be in the service of love? Yes they can!

Why Psychotherapy Doesn't Work...And Religion Doesn't Either

A couple of days ago I googled how many kinds of psychotherapy are there, and a 2012 article in Scientific American Mind told me that a study out of Scranton University found over 500 of them. Now if I went into hospital with heart disease or cancer, I would be despondent if I was told there are over 500 competing methods for how to deal with my problem and no one knows which is best. We have had psychotherapy for about 150 years, give or take, and rather than narrowing the options down, our scientific method seems to have been used to create a huge marketplace of therapies that battle it out like brands of toothpaste or competing designer clothes.   

 You might point out that some studies suggest that it is the relationship between the therapist and the client that is the real healing agent, and not any given method at all, but to my mind this complexifies the question rather than solving it. If the psychotherapy method is simply the ice breaker for the party, why should there be 500 of them at all? Why do some therapists swear by the polyvagal theory while others strictly enforce Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. etc., etc., etc.? Why then should therapists be like everyone else and take time to hone their skills or learn new ones? In my own experience, I have found that the methods I use are crucial in helping people get to the next step in their healing.

 Another issue: Since we live in a finite world, surely we can only accumulate a finite number of emotional wounds and traumas. It can only make sense then, that after an appropriate amount of work over a reasonable period of time, we should be able to check the emotional wounds off our list until they are all fixed, or fixed well enough. So why, after endless extended time with therapy, yoga, meditation, and a bunch of other practices, so many of us are still crazy after all these years? Puzzling.

 Next, I turned to religion. A quick google search showed that there are 4000 plus of them. But that is only the tip of the ecclesiastical iceberg: a study by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity counted 200 versions of Christianity in the United States, and a staggering 45,000 denominations worldwide. Now if there is a God in the way we ordinarily think of him/her/it, then why would it/her/him play footsie with us like that? A God who wanted things to work would leave some sort of clear breadcrumb trail past all the fake religions so we could find it/her/him and let the worshipping begin. But just like psychotherapy, there is a huge marketplace filled with perfectly plausible, and often very intolerant, competing brands. I’m not sure I even want a God with so little common sense.

 This leads us to an unavoidable conclusion: in everything that matters the most in life, we are either living in a Kafka’s castle of pointless torture or else we are asking completely the wrong questions. Let’s go positive and explore the second alternative.  The Hassidic scholar Martin Buber gives us an all-important lead:

 One of the main points in which Christianity differs from Judaism is that it makes each man’s salvation his highest aim. Judaism regards each man’s soul as a serving member of God’s Creation which, by man’s work, is to become the Kingdom of God; thus no soul has its object in itself, in its own salvation. True, each is to know itself, purify itself, perfect itself, but not for its own sake – neither for the sake of its temporal happiness nor for that of its eternal bliss – but for the sake of the work which it is destined to perform upon the world.

                                                                                    The Way of Humanity

 When I read this, I felt like the fish that was finally alerted to the fact that it was swimming in water. My water – I mean our water in the Western world – is the idea of the primacy of the individual. Speaking as an ex-Catholic, I accuse the Protestants of foolishly bringing this idea of extreme individualism to its apogee when Martin Luther declared that it was the relationship of the individual to God that was of the greatest importance. He asked, what is my personal relationship with my Savior, and each person in a sense became their own chapel. But, as an ex-Catholic, I accuse the Catholics of inventing the idea of personal salvation in the first place, where my deeds or misdeeds will secure my salvation – or not. It’s nice if I pray for the souls of my brothers and sisters, but in the end it’s their idiotic choice if they go in the wrong direction. For as long as getting to Heaven is purely the business of the individual, the Christian sense of “us,” as in “us all in this together,” is rather nominal. And when psychotherapy took up the baton of religion in the race towards well-being, it didn’t for a moment question the idea that the unit of salvation was the individual, it just kept on running. An abused wife is prescribed Prozac to assuage her depression, but the community and the culture she is in take no equivalent medication to heal their hardness of heart over how they could let this happen.

 By insisting that in Judaism “no soul has its object in itself, in its own salvation,” Buber puts the whole idea of personal salvation on the backfoot. Buber was writing in 1948, and I have no idea if this is how modern Judaism sees it, I just like his idea from back then. Buber is not saying we may as well give up on the therapy the meditation or the yoga class, in fact he says please continue: “each [of us] is to know itself, purify itself, perfect itself, but not for its own sake.” We have a larger belonging than our own private selves, we are not just sad little isolated specks trying to carry inordinately heavy burdens of communal karma all on their own. We are part of “man’s work,” which is to make “God’s Creation” (the world as it it) become “the Kingdom of God,” (the world as it could be) though I prefer Phillip Pullman’s expression, “the Republic of Heaven.”

 Now I understand why I was so taken with the story of Thor among the giants that I made it the title of a rather long (and as yet unfinished) blog. Thor is challenged to simple-looking tasks by a gang of giants, and to his shock, rage and absolute horror, he can’t do any of them. Thor, who prided himself as being the great drinking guy of antiquity, is challenged to down one tankard of beer, and he can’t do it – not knowing that the giants have magically hooked the tankard up to the world’s oceans. This is like our relationship to our mental health issues; how come I, as the individual speck of me, with all these medications and therapies, can’t overcome simple anxieties that don’t even make sense, or shake a downer mood on a perfectly nice day? Or, even worse almost, after a lot amount of therapy, and maybe a lot of psychedelics too, I have all the insights in the world about what is wrong with me, but I still can’t shake that mood. The whole process is far more dark and mysterious than the linear world of mental health would let on.

 The reason I can’t drain my own little personal tankard of grief, pride, fear, depression, etc. is that it is hooked into an ancestral ocean of human pain, you might say species pain, or you might go so far as saying the pain of life itself. My task never was to figure out me and thus attain “temporal happiness,” (or what we might call “mental health”) the task of the little speck of me is to contribute to humanity’s understanding of suffering and put in my very little, but very actual, effort towards creating a Republic of Heaven. Not for my own sake, “but for the sake of the work which [I am] destined to perform upon the world.” By doing something little, like wrestling with my own personal pain, I am actually doing something big, and contributing to making the brave new world we all really want.

 That is why I like Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the noosphere. He casts the noosphere as a next phase in our evolving where we, as purveyors of consciousness, spread that consciousness across the globe as it works to become a communal consciousness where the little specks start to treat each other better by not having wars, not exploiting one another, and all those good things. Instead we work in cohesion with one another to make a world where creativity and joy are what’s on everybody’s mind – a serviceable Republic of Heaven. Teilhard describes his vision of this upcoming new world, this noosphere like this:

 It was not merely that I found no difficulty in apprehending, more or less intuitively, the organic unity of the living membrane which is stretched like a film over the lustrous surface of the star which holds us. There was something more: around this sentient protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like an aura. This envelope was not only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first became aware of it, it was always there that I found concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form, the essence or rather the very soul of the earth…

                                                                                   The Heart of Matter

 I said before that either we are in Kafka’s castle or else we are just asking the wrong question. The wrong question of religion is: how do I find my own personal salvation, and the wrong question of psychotherapy that picked up where it left off is: how do I heal from my personal wounds and traumas? It seems like in the Enlightenment we learned very little after all. The right question is: how do I better contribute to the creation of the noosphere, the Republic of Heaven, or whatever name you wish to lay on it. Healing is certainly part of that process, but not a healing along the lines of reducing my score on a depression scale administered to me by a qualified practitioner. Many of our wounds are ancestral, as in Phillip Larkin’s “they fuck you up, your mum and dad, they didn’t mean to but they do” and these wounds, the deliberate self-limiting of the soul, go back as far as the eye can see, and it makes sense that it might take more than one decade, or one lifetime, to redress what took innumerable generations to create. If we look at our personal work as a program of self-improvement, we so often get stuck in it; if we look at it as a contribution, not only does every little bit count, but we have no idea in this lifetime how much it may count, and how much a little opening of the heart across many years may contribute to a healthy future noosphere for everybody. If we are all here together building, let’s say, an enormous pyramid that will take thousands of years to finish, I should not expect to be at the apex when I am done with my little bit, just because I worked very hard at controlling my temper, going on meditation retreats, or whatever it may be.

 I think this new viewpoint frees us from expectations that are not just unrealistic, but don’t relate to our needs. As someone said to me recently, “I am every card in the deck of who I am,” and I may come round to cards and faces that I thought were done with long ago, just to find that my jealousy, my down mood, my small-mindedness, have gone and shown up in the shuffle again. As in Rumi’s poem of the Guesthouse, is there a way in which I can be welcoming and unfazed by these “guides from beyond,” when they come to my door? Psychotherapy wants to be the science of suffering reduction/eradication, but its very starting point – the individual as the container of the problem and its solution – is the wrong formulation. As well as the self- wrestling and course corrections we do in relation to our pain, we also need the experiences of awe, wonder, and joy that psychedelic experiences – and nice sunsets – can give us. These experiences will contribute to the Republic of Heaven, and even if they happen out in the woods with nobody there for miles around, they are the lasting treasures that won’t rust. With enough of these experiences we may get into new relationship with our suffering selves, and sometimes mitigate that suffering, or, just as important, dislodge it from being the centrepiece of my life’s “wellness” project. Let’s stop playing defense all the time in the dynamic between pain, healing, and ecstasy. I don’t look for spiritual insights as part of my personal healing project; I look towards “symptom alleviation” of my personal pain so I can contribute to the far more precious project of the triumph of love in this world.