Thor Among the Giants, Part IX: Unreal City

So, a summary of the last section: We can think of history as being the Intact Period, epitomized by the Middle Ages where faith and science were the same thing, the Rupture that came with the scientific revolution of the 16th  and 17th centuries when accurate science and greater skepticism set the cat among the pigeons, and the Fractured Period which is from then till now, where the more the technology improves, the more alienated we seem to be. The industrialization of the 19th century only deepened our sense of dislocation, and Nietzsche did nothing to cheer things up when he didn’t just tell us God is dead, but that we are the perps. The existentialists who statuesquely followed him in their smokey left bank cafes said, man up everybody, there never was a God in the first place, nothing is sacred, get over it and if you want meaning, make it up yourself. Meanwhile, as a poet, T.S. Eliot felt no obligation to look for explanations, he just depicted the sorry situation:

   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.

                                    The Hollow Men

 Eliot shows the self that is hidden behind modernity’s mask of status, power and happy creature comfort – incoherent beings in a realm of Hungry Ghosts, suffering more than anything else from an insufficiency of identity. While the Dorian Grey of modern society goes brazenly on with its skyscrapers, fashion shows, Academy awards and so on, up in the remote attic of our being is its lurid double, the terrifying portrait of our inner lives – the oil-polluted rivers of Nigeria, the toxic chemical blast in Bhopal, dying forests in the Amazon. Those of us who sense this horror in the room above us cannot feel entirely right with the world, we may do a poor job of covering up our suffering, and we risk a “mental health” diagnosis that will explain away both us and our malady. But as Krishnamurti pointed out, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” The mental health client, just like Socrates, has enough wisdom to know that they know nothing, while their provider casts unremitting positivity over the well of gloom. What we seek is redemption, not, as we once thought, from sin – or for that matter from a diagnosis – but from meaninglessness. The Hollow Men, in being aware of their suffering, can at least desire change.  

 One of Eliot’s core images is the Waste Land, from the poem of the same name, and it refers to the Arthurian myth of a land laid waste and infertile around the castle of the enfeebled Fisher King, the keeper of the holy grail. This devastated land where nothing grows may be the blasted forests and farmland round a grail castle, or it may as easily be the jostling hub of a cosmopolitan city:

 Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

                                                The Waste Land

 Lame Deer the Lakota wise man, saw this too, and in Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions he even added a slight dash of hope at the end:

 Your old prophets went into the desert crying for a dream and the desert gave it to them. But the white men of today have made a desert within themselves. The white man’s desert is a place without dreams or life. There nothing grows. But the spirit water is always way down there to make the desert green again.

                                                            Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

 A couple of years after The Waste Land came out, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that she saw people as “splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.” By that I think she means that the Victorian sensibility she grew up in could not tolerate seeing the splinteredness of humanity, and so held fiercely to a mask of respectability that covered the faces of the Hollow Men. The Victorians – let’s admit it, us back in an earlier day – ignored the alarm calls of the hidden, cringing self that was no more than an improvised conglomeration of fractured reactions against pain. In endorsing our masks, we cling to a belief that this apparent “consistent whole” can successfully function as it masquerades as the sum of its smashed-up mosaic parts. What we have to pin our hopes on now is that some central core, some noosphere-creating portion of us, will enfold this ragtag appendage of fragments in a journey towards real wholeness. We have to forgive our shattered selves in our own splintered way.   

 But when you think about it, nobody is just on their own personal grail quest through a localized Waste Land. That thing called “me,” is one tiny picture in the huge photomosaic that comprises humanity, or if you like, it’s one cell playing its part in the body of Blake’s image of humanity.  Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays said of this:

 If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star hundreds of million miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind, each individual man is one more incarnation. All properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises.

 Emerson assails the idea that a truly private life, isolated from other lives, is even conceivable, and if that is true then the dramas of my ‘mood disorders’ are inevitably written large in the nation and, conversely, the rumbling hidden moods of the nation will constantly seep into me – even though no-one has yet been diagnosed with “societal dislocation disorder.” Perhaps because there is no corresponding pharmaceutical to be prescribed for it. My disquiet, which I so often take as unreasonable, self-indulgent or the result of my own weakness, may not even be fully my own: it is there because of the fertile cultural ground it grows in. Blake portrays this dynamic with his own special force and outrage:

 The dog starved at its master’s gate

 Predicts the ruin of the state…

Each outcry of the hunter hare

A fibre from the brain doth tear

A skylark wounded in the wing

A Cherubim does cease to sing…                                

The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath

Writes Revenge in realms of Death 

The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air

Does to Rags the Heavens tear

                        Auguries of Innocence

 These little tragedies and indignities that at first glance make strike us as sad but unrelated, are not just profoundly related, but are signatures of the larger system: “And the hapless soldiers sigh/Runs in blood down palace walls.” But, says the writer and wildly unsuccessful presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, there are ways in which this can be empowering and enlivening for us as individuals:

 For the world is a projection of our own psyches, collected on a global screen; it is hurt or healed by every thought we think. To whatever extent I refuse to face the deeper issues that hold me back, to that extent the world will be held back. And to whatever extent I find the miraculous key to the transformation of my own life, to that extent I will help change the world.

                                                                        The Gift of Change

 However, so far at least, the world is not yet pulling on the t-shirt saying, “We’re All In This Together,” and the splintering of personhood percolates into the community, while fragmented communities continue to create splintered people. The psychologist Donald Kalsched calls it an internal democracy when the parts and factions inside us speak to each other with a measure of equality, and no-one gets shouted down. It may be lively inside there, but we are, essentially, at peace with ourselves. An inner Fascism however, comes when parts like an inner critic lord it over others, bullying them into a state of shame and submission, just as bosses, parents, and others are known to do in the larger system of our somewhat nominal democracy. When the mask of the “immaculate, monolithic, consistent” self disowns the more tender and inconvenient corners of our being, it fosters the riotous algae blooms of conspiracy theories, duplicity and blind self-interest we are dogged with today. Generation by generation we have carried and nurtured our sickness together, and if we now prepare to get well again, we must do so with and for one another.

 Religion is the institution most naturally charged with this repair job of humans, but conventional religion is not actually well-suited to the task – witness the body count. Too often the Good Shepherd spends his time keeping his flock in check and massacring rivals, rather than leading humanity towards some sort of “noospheric” promised land, or, again in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, towards the religion of the future. Teilhard wasn’t blind to the shortcomings of institutional religion, having suffered from them himself, but he had a vision of spirit in which, “for twenty centuries thousands of mystics have drawn such burning passion from its flame that their brilliance and purity far outstrip the impulses and devotions of any kind of human love.” Devotional love, then, is the core form of love, more basic than romantic love, love of country or love of family, because by loving what he calls God, we are loving the most passionate and personal source of all. As Meister Eckhart intriguingly put it, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. But how is this love to be best expressed and best propagated? Teilhard has a hopeful idea about this:

 What is truly a phenomenon of capital importance for the science of the human is that a zone of thought has appeared and grown over an appreciable region of the Earth, one in which a genuine universal love has not only been conceived and preached, but has shown itself to be psychologically possible and operational in practice – and what is more, far from dying out, the movement seems to be bent on gaining speed and intensity.

                                                                        The Human Phenomenon

 For Teilhard the “zone of thought” that shows so much promise is Christianity, but then, being a Catholic priest, you wouldn’t expect him to suggest it was Brazilian shamanism. No doubt he would have been aghast at the idea of taking drugs to reach the higher realms, but that was him in his time and place, and we are in ours. In our time we can begin by saying that in a world where “genuine universal love” is thin on the ground, tripping is one of the more reliable ways of getting in touch with it – as opposed to going to a monastery, meditating for 20 years, and hoping that you did it right. When Timothy Leary – you might say naively or you might say as an opening flourish to a cultural dialogue – suggested we put LSD in the water supply, I think he was getting at the idea that if the body politic, all of us in this together, could find this universal love, then the world could be transformed.

 It’s William Blake again who sketches things out for us here. Blake saw through religion the way you might see through a pane of glass that has been partially painted over with a picture. You see the picture and its representations, but you also see past that into the vast and active spirit world beyond. A religion of the future won’t necessarily try to do away with the pictures painted on the glass – we seem to like them – but it will see them as representations rather than dogmatized actualities:

 The religions of all Nation are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where called the Spirit of Prophesy…All men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) So all Religions, & as all similars have one source, the true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius.

                                                                        All Religions Are One

  Forgive him here for calling us the “true Man” – consistent with everybody else in his time, he was mistaking the high-energy spirit world behind the window for the sexist daubings on it. The piece about the Poetic Genius he did get right:

 The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

 And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

                                                            The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 Here we are in 1790 and Blake is already saying that the source of spirit, the Poetic Genius, is not external, but here inside us, in the human breast, – though you just have to wonder what he would have made of our own times, where we have forgotten that the Poetic Genius exists at all. It’s very noticeable how seldom the psychedelic experience corresponds to the visual imagery of conventional religion and how often it gives visions of universal love, living light, ineffable ecstasies – apparently a more direct communication from the Poetic Genius than a God with a face or a name. The core mystical experience is not owned by any particular system of belief or non-belief, just like you can be struck by lightning without holding any particular view on the nature of electricity. Teilhard’s idea of the noosphere, where we take an evolutionary leap into a more unified, communal and organized level of consciousness, is a plausible outcome, so long as we—the collective we including all the billionaires and politicians – choose to pursue it. If it sounds entirely implausible that this leap will come solely through our combined generosity and goodwill, we can remember that after having done psychedelics you might are also tempted to say that the forces of love are irresistible. As are the forces of climate change and environmental degradation which, if we don’t take action together, will take us down, down, down. As Teilhard said, we must “see or perish,” and since the seeing can be highly enjoyable, let’s hope we manage to do it.  

 They say that every country gets the government it deserves, which may or may not be true, but it’s certainly true that every culture gets the spiritual life it deserves, and it’s not someone else who has created this Waste Land all around us. If we can’t dig deep enough to find those wellsprings of spirit water that Lame Deer spoke about, we are compelled to erect images of false deities in the human breast, such as Success, Power, and Personal Abundance. These are not even trying to satisfy the longings of the soul, but they do anesthetize us from the suffering of being alone in a cruel desert. You could say that Mental Health is another one of these heathen gods, not that there is anything wrong with ameliorating your anxiety or depression, it’s just that it is not a deity. A mental health movement that can’t answer the questions of the soul will, in the end, only offer us adjustment to the sick society.

 The pinnacle of mental health is happiness and resilience, neither of which address the issues of meaning and purpose we bring to psychedelics, or, alternatively, that psychedelics will sooner or later bring to us. The mental health idea, which isn’t a very old one, is designed to approach the issue of well-being in a post-sprit age. When someone goes to a church and takes holy communion, psychology describes that as an act of self-soothing, without ever investigating the human need to ponder the incarnation of spirit into the material world, an incarnation that will set us free of all cares, even the pesky ones that don’t ever go away. Eternity, as Blake said, is in love with the productions of time, and if that’s true, then Eternity won’t stop making love to materiality for as long as there are still things around to manifest in. You don’t have to see this as a rescue scheme where spirit pitches in to save the mucky material world from itself, but instead you can see it as the higher vibrations, having a more expansive vision than the lower ones, perceive the beauty in our muddy puddles, our dirt, our grey moods, when we ourselves fail to. Thus, at the end of a trip, people will sometimes say, “Everything is just the way it should be,” suggesting that our warts and all reality is in fact a very fine one. As with Blake’s doors of perception that need a little cleansing, it’s the capacity to perceive what is there that is lacking, not the reality itself. Which, when you think about it, is a huge relief.

 The end-goals of mental health are about stability and adjustment, they are not aimed at the excitation of reverence and awe, the preserve of the Poetic Genius. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but that eye is conditioned by the perception-capacity the beholder possesses, which in turn will be influenced by mood, belief systems and unconscious presumptions. When we are set and ready to start the self-exploration of a trip, our wish is that our mental health will support us in this exploration and expansion, and we may hope that our mood, belief systems and unconscious presumptions get the proverbial “reset,” or at least don’t get too much in the way. When the Poetic Genius honours us by bursting into consciousness, we wish for strong enough egos to navigate the swirling waters of the mind, so we can get a proper taste of what’s really going on up there, or in there, or however you choose to locate it. And so, ask not what psychedelic journeys may do for your mental health, ask what your mental health may do for your psychedelic journey.  

Thor Among the Giants Part VIII: The Force of Ancient Memory

I am quite willing, many of us would say, to exchange give up a lifetime of what turns out to be quite bland materialist dopamine hits for the extraordinary ecstasies in the “immense world of delight” Blake talks about. Bring it on. The question that lurks across lifetimes though, is how do we bring on the spiritual connection that was maybe so immediate and palpable in a trip? Blake, who was somehow born directly and seamlessly into a pantheistic, utterly alive universe, talks about this as a condition where “every particle of dust breathes forth its joy,” a sentiment echoed by an ibogaine tripper I met, who said that “There is…a vital force in every atom.” Usually though, we are too encased in repetitive thought patterns and automatic moods to stop and sniff the infinite roses. What exactly is it that makes finding our own basic nature such a task?  After all, me finding me shouldn’t be all that hard… 

It is not just some native dullness that prevents us from seeing the world “as it is;” you can blame this closure on pain, fear and force of habit.  In the fear and pain department, I’d say there are three elements at play that clog our doors of perception: the personal trials and tribulations we have all been through, the vast ancestral traumas that sweep through our family lines from generation to generation; and the spiritual closure of the society we live in, the cultural air we breathe, the language we speak. In order to improve our “sensual enjoyment,” we need to be in, or otherwise create, a culture that is about the business of cleaning up its perception doors. Currently – you’ll notice we are not there yet.

These three elements – the personal, ancestral and societal – are not totally distinct from one another, they are basically one thing, known as the human condition, and they merge like the colours in a rainbow. So let’s look at the items in this construct one by one.  

We quite naturally think of our ‘personal’ problems as being restricted to our own persons, and given that, the solutions, as in most mental health treatment, will be restricted to our own persons too. This is the domain of cognitive therapy, where we redress the erroneous thinking that has developed on the back of difficult experiences; the therapy work is a reversing of bad mental habits, of inadvertent self-inflicted pain. And cognitive therapy addresses all this very well, so long as the pain does not chain down too deeply into old family traumas, or resonate too closely with the chiming of ancestral bells. The roots of some cognitive distortions go deeper than reasoning can reach, and it’s no good proving to myself that I need not be depressed this bright morning when this depression is a family heirloom from way back. This quintessentially person-based mental health method is a good start, but it doesn’t take us to the finish line, and you will notice that you never find yourself diagnosed with “beset by rampant capitalism disorder,” or “haunted by ancient religious shame syndrome.”   

The ancestral dimension brings us back to our old friend Thor, from back in Part I. When Thor visited the castle of the giants they gave him challenges, like trying to pick up the household cat and drinking one tankard of beer. It was basically a mythological version of the modern drinking game. Thor, who prided himself on both his strength and his drinking ability, was astounded when he could hardly raise one of the cat’s paws off the ground, and then with enormous pulls at his tankard, that he could barely bring down the beer level more than a few inches. What the giants knew and Thor did not, was that the cat was really the world-encircling Midgard Serpent, artfully disguised, and that the drinking cup was hooked up to the world’s ocean. While Thor was mystified and his self-esteem was plummeting, the giants were having a good chuckle to themselves. As it was for Thor, so it is for us: why can’t I resist this little slice of sweet cake, why can’t I control my temper, why, after all my efforts, can’t I control my anxiety when I am speaking to more than two people? And so on. Our “treatment resistant mental illness” is the same as Thor’s tasks: we totally misunderstand its dimension, and so we go about fixing it the wrong way.  I take pills to fix my broken brain, I address my cognitive distortions, but my personal Midgard Serpent loops back to ancestral pattern of pain from long before I was born; we forget about the pressure that the past exerts on us, conveyed, for instance, through: 

The homicidal bitching

That goes down in every kitchen

Over who’s to serve

And who’s to eat.

                        Leonard Cohen 

Violence and abuse are one vehicle of transmission, and simple osmosis is another, where we inadvertently leak our nervousness and despair out into the atmosphere, and the kiddies soak up it all up. Our forebears have been through endless migrations, famines, wars, all kinds of race, gender and caste-based hatreds, and then all the little cruelties we needlessly inflict on those we love and those we don’t even know. But we have to also remember that they have meditated together deep into the night, been unexpectedly kind, made sacrifices, and devised beautiful ceremonies with one another. Our ancestors have written their names into the structure of our bones, into the stance our bodies take, our thought patterns, and the way we hold or don’t hold our breath. We are the force of ancient memory, eating its way into the future. 

If you are around people who trip regularly, you will sometimes hear them say things like, “I wept for five hours straight, and I don’t even know what for,” or, “I cried tears that I swear were not my tears.” Sometimes pain is being released from who knows when or where, and at the end of it, it feels like the ancestors inside us are finally reaching resolution. When the songs say, “cry me a river,” that may be what it takes. Even though I may have gone to the medicine for personal healing, I am also there for the long-dead people I contain. It’s not just self-healing, it is setting a family curse to rest, a tearing up old and duplicitous contracts around shame and self-limitation.  

And now, as the mental health industry approaches the explosive possibilities of psychedelics, it tries to bend the genie in the bottle to its own will and its own worldview. It has latched on to the language of its bugbear and super-anti-hero, Timothy Leary, who first popularized the importance of “setting” for a psychedelic journey. Assuming themselves instant experts on what makes a good setting, the mental health researchers wheeled the medical instruments out of their clinic rooms, wheeled in a comfy couch, put artwork up on the wall, and piped in soft, spooky New Age music. Little have they considered how much there is to learn from the cathedral builders, the creators of the Eleusinian mysteries, and all the endless, varied ceremony makers across the world and through time. The porous surface of the collective unconscious remains unscratched by our culture as we remain addicted to the linear, and the new psychedelic experts have never paid heed to William Blake when he said, “Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius.”   

The ultimate “setting” though, is not any kind of physical space at all, it is the culture that has formed us, the assumptions and hidden prejudices that you, I, your psychedelic practitioner, and the people passing by on the street all share. Every culture has its own unwritten rules and no-no’s, and here are some of ours: You may not fall on your knees or raise your arms in a state of ecstatic union except in certain kinds of churches or at a rock concert; waterbugs are innately repulsive, fancy cars are innately desirable; birth is sacred, death is a tragedy; and we are all fundamentally selfish, violent and competitive at heart, even though we really have no idea what we are. And so on. This mixture of empty materialism with the dying embers of a self-flagellating religion undergoes a profound culture shock when it collides with psychedelic multi-dimensionality.  

It's natural to feel like your worldview is written in bold letters in the sky, when really it is embedded in the dendrites of our squooshy neural pathways. We can no more step outside our own culture than we can walk away from our own shadow, but it helps us, when we don an eyemask, eat a mushroom, and start to listen to the winds of spirit, to understand we are partway through a very long story whose ending is still unknown. We who don’t remember history are indeed forced to repeat it, and since all of us have come in halfway through the movie of western history, we can’t do anything useful until we know the story so far. And the 21st century story is that we are getting closer and closer a the splitting of the ways between climate disaster on one hand and Teilhard’s leap of faith into the noosphere on the other.  

What I am going to say is, like any other theory, is a mental construct. It is a game of seeing faces in clouds: the images are subjective, and the insights are quite fleeting. You can say that a cat is a thing, a jam jar is a thing, a doormat is a thing, but a scientific paradigm is not a thing, a diagnosis is not a thing, and a theory is not a thing, they are all just ways of looking at things. The value of these ideas is in the use we make of them: a diagnosis, for instance, might be a huge relief at times, while at other times it may be an unwieldy label, and at others a mind forged manacle. I choose my particular cloud-peering game to be the spiritual journey of humanity, a sport that has been strangely neglected issue, when you think about how important it is. All the better, to get some You Are Here signs like this one onto our psychedelic road maps.  

Think of western culture as having gone through three periods, with one hoped-for period to come:

·         The Intact Period (when there was a commonly held belief in a creator and a purpose-led universe, but most of the science was hopelessly wrong)

·         The Rupture, (the coming of the scientific revolution and, along with its benefits, a barren, non-purposed universe)

·         The Fractured Period (us ever since the scientific revolution, trying to make sense of what presents as a world without meaning)

·         The Synthesis (A possible future world where, in the coming noosphere of shared consciousness, we will combine science that works with spirit that has heart.) 

The Intact Period is epitomized by the Middle Ages, where there was certainly no less greed, treachery, and cruelty than at any other time, but there was considerably less doubt. What remained “intact” was a belief that God was real – realer than us – as the normal position. He ran human affairs from up there in the sky – slightly above the sky actually – as the stars rotated in celestial spheres between him and us, and rang with beautiful music far above our heads. Looking back at it from the seventeenth century, the poet John Dryden, more with nostalgia than anything else, captures some of its grandeur and imaginal integrity: 

As from the pow’r of sacred lays

The spheres began to move,

And sung the great Creator’s praise

To all the bless’d above;

So when the last and dreadful hour

This crumbling pageant shall devour,

The trumpet shall be heard on high,

The dead shall live, the living die,

And music shall untune the sky. 

            A Song for Saint Celia’s Day, 1687 

The Intact Period was certainly not a time of unity, and heresies of different sorts kept popping up all the time, but they were all squabbles about the fine details of this God, not whether or not the whole idea was a load of rubbish. Science and religion didn’t just get along at this time, they were the same thing, ruled under the heavy thumb of biblical and Aristotelean truth. The historian David Wootten described the world system like this: 

According to orthodox Christian thinking...the universe had been made to provide a home for humankind. The sun was there to provide light and heat by day, the moon and stars light by night. There was a perfect correspondence between the macrocosm (the universe as a whole) and the microcosm (the little world of the human body). The two were made for each other. The Fall had partly disrupted this perfect arrangement, forcing human beings to labour to survive; but the original architecture of the universe was still viable for all to see.

                                                                        The Invention of Science 

The first major blows to this Iron Age system of thought came when people like Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo started to throw some serious cold water on the heavenly spheres business. Copernicus calculated that the earth was not the centre of the universe as everyone had assumed. This medieval belief about our centrality was not as self-absorbed as it first sounds. According to this system, the higher you go more rarified things are, so that God was way, way up there, and the Earth, the region of corruption and decay, was as actually low as you could go. But Kepler did the math and figured that the perfect circles of the heavenly spheres did not jibe with the actual motion of the planets, while Galileo, gazing through his three-inch telescope, saw that the planet Jupiter has its own moons, debunking the idea that everything revolves around one God-created centre. Training his scope on the moon, Galileo then saw that it has mountains and depressions just like earth, not possible if the Moon is made of purer stuff than us. God’s celestial handiwork was starting to look more and more like a botched job, so what was going on? As the whole edifice of a divinely constructed universe began to crumble, God himself had to be put into question. 

Galileo tried to ditch us out of this conundrum by saying that “The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go,” but when in 1687 Isaac Newton showed that that the same force of gravity that makes apples fall on your head also makes the planets rotate in the sky, the inconsistencies had piled up too much. You can’t Spanish Inquisition our way out of every intellectual attack, and it was clear that the celestial spheres were a fantasy. Wooten tells us that, “By 1700 every educated person was familiar with the idea that the universe might be infinite and that there were probably other inhabited worlds. Indeed, the idea had become entirely respectable.” Blaise Pascal, the 17th century mathematician and essayist who clung on to his religion but didn’t have recourse to mystical unions or ecstasies, tells us what it looks like when there is only the little human pitted against this big emptiness:  

 When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then…The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me. 

This sense of eternity as cold, immense, and uncaring encumbered few minds before the 17th century, but even Galileo, the man who busily tried to stay out of trouble while constantly getting himself into it, put religion in its place when he said, “Measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not so.” If you can’t measure it, it ain’t there – so take that, infinite God! 

Much later, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859, the final hammer blow fell on Intactness with the destruction of the story that humanity started with one man and one woman in a magical garden. No, we started out as hairy apes. Pandora’s box of fondly believed myths had opened and all the standard orthodoxies had flown out, but unlike the Greek myth, hope was left trapped inside. This leads us in the end to a reductionist science that has little good news for us as personal beings: 

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

                                                Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis 

Is there any value to the Intact Period at all? Strangely, yes. The Christian mystics, such as Saint John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart, like all the great mystics of the world, had their own sophisticated system of thought based on direct experience with spirit, and though no-one seemed to be ingesting pretty red and white mushrooms at the time, their resultant reports got pretty trippy pretty fast. Here is Julian of Norwich, holding the universe in her hand, and contemplating her “oneing,” a union with God: 

In this same time our Lord shewed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving…He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marveled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall last for God loveth it. And so All-thing hath Being by the love of God.  

In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, -- I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss; that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.  

                                                                        Revelations of Divine Love 

Medieval Europe was like having thousands of meditation centres, going not for week-long or month-long retreats, but for lifetimes. Thousands of monks, nuns, and anchorites in the monastic system, with long hours of prayer, meditation and isolation, must have been quietly blissing out all the time everywhere, without the help of drugs and without fanfare afterwards. It would have made the mystical experience a regular part of life, something to be expected, mulled over and interpreted, and unlike today, not at all out of the ordinary scheme of things. This is the spiritual baby that the scientific revolution that drained out with the Medieval bathwater. Listen, for instance, to Meister Eckhart, a 14th century Dominican monk, on time, space and the ineffable: 

Nothing hinders the soul’s knowledge of God as much as time and space, for time and space are fragments and God is one. And therefore if the soul is to know God it must know him above time and outside of space; for God is neither this nor that, as are these manifold things. God is one!

                                                                                    Sermon Six 

Compare Eckhart’s musings about the meaning of Christmas with today’s depth of thought in wishing one another “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings:” 

We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity…But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.

                                                                        Meister Eckhart, Sermon One 

In another sermon (appropriately named This is Another Sermon) Eckhart speaks to our role as midwives of the divine: 

In fact, whatever the perfection that may come to the soul, let it be divine light, or grace, or any other blessing, it cannot come except by birth. No other way is possible. Cherish in yourself the birth of God, and with it all goodness and comfort, all rapture, reality, and truth will be yours…Moreover, in this birth you will have a part in the divine stream (that flows into life) and will share its benefits…It is the soul that is especially designed for the birth of God, and so it occurs in the soul, where the Father’s child is conceived in the core, the inmost recess, where no idea ever glowed or agent of the soul crept in. 

With the idea of birth comes the recognition that the divine light is reaching into a place it never was before, otherwise what exactly would be born? That suggests a divinity that is not perfect and unchangeable, but something changeable and capable of expansion, just as a noosphere may one day expand across a globe. With psychedelics comes the possibility, for an afternoon at least, or across the length of a night, of reaching into the “inmost recess,” that place of silence in the soul where we can engage in divine birthing. Our own personal Christmas Day. That, surely, puts our personal mental life, our despairs and worries, our relationship with emotional pain, our fears, joys and desires, into an altogether new perspective. The core anxiety generated by those vast interstellar spaces, what Teilhard de Chardin calls our “space-time sickness,” can only be assuaged by something yet more vast, and infinitely more comforting: 

In a flux, however incredibly vast it might be, that is not only becoming, but genesis, which is something quite different, consciousness is reinforced on itself. Actually, as soon as a definitive movement appears, giving them an expression and a face, time and space are humanized…But then, human of the twentieth century, how can you explain that you are waking up to horizons and therefore to fears your ancestors never knew? 

The truth is that half our present disquiet would be transformed in elation if we would only decide, in obedience to the facts, to place the essence and measure of our modern cosmologies in a noogenesis. Along this axis there can be no doubt. The universe has always been moving and it continues to move at this very moment.

                                                                        The Human Phenomenon   

This “noogenesis” means the genesis, birth, of the noosphere, not, I believe, an equivalent to Eckhart’s Christmas birth of the divine in us, but the same thing. What else that could topple our very understandable core anxiety and existential despair as we face the cosmic void? Mental health practitioners look at this through the other end of the telescope and celebrate the fact that their research subjects rate psychedelic journeys as one of the top five experiences of their life, touting this as evidence of the excellence of their new-found method. Well, why shouldn’t it be at the top of our hit parade, when the eternal birth of divine presence has tried, however stutteringly, to begin its birthing process in the piece of hominized matter called me? 

You could say that when we take psychedelics, we are working to restore the Christmas baby that went out with the Intact bathwater, but don’t take it that the Rupture is the bad guy here, shoving its way between us and our divine selves. The Rupture was inevitable and it was good that it happened. Even the most spiritual among us is quietly grateful to the scientific revolution for making life more comfortable, organized, logical and safe. In any case, we could not stay in the old system’s ignorance forever – sooner or later someone somewhere was going to pop the balloon of our fairy tale astronomy and our fanciful science. And if the Rupture is part of a natural progression, then in spite of all appearances, the ultra-artificial, bent on self-destruction, world we live in now is right on target in terms of our progress. You could call it a learning moment for humanity as we see that survival depends on giving up this comfort-through-sparkly-toys culture for more enduring, and actually far more entertaining stuff. If that is all true, then getting lost in materialism is not a dead-end, it's just a weird turn in the road, and once equipped with more substantial thought vehicles like noogenesis or the birth of the divine, we will then be able to stare down the terrifying face of empty immensity. 

In the Fractured Period, which we could say is from the scientific revolution to now, there is a level of self-doubt that humans never encountered before; down the generations people have suffered unspeakably, have endured all kinds of privations, oppressions and persecutions, but one suffering they were not subjected to was overwhelming doubt; they did not have to confront invasive thoughts that the universe is a pointless conglomeration of uselessly spinning atoms of which we are a whirling epicentre of supreme, pointless pointlessness. With the telescope, the microscope, then the steam train, the factory and eventually the computer, came a brand-new level of ennui and despair, based on the fact that the God who used to reign in Heaven is now residing in the homeless shelter. We are, as Max Weber said: 

Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.

                                                The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 

Fairly grim. On entering modernity we have cast foolish superstition aside, but we have also grown out of sorts with ecstasy. We see it as delusional, or weird, special or extraordinary in some way, something that the bulk of regular people will not, and probably should not, encounter. We have rendered it a niche subject. But what if, to tweak Rick Doblin’s vision of a future of “mass mental health,” we could enter an era of mass mysticism? Could we handle that, or is it safer for us to continue whistling in the dark of the interstellar spaces? Since the scientific revolution Western philosophy has been largely about trying, one way or another, to restore meaning to a world busted up by the Rupture. Descartes, recognising that he could no longer trust what a fact was any more, or even his own sense impressions, proposed the thought experiment that if there was an evil demon capable of deluding him into any sort of error or folly, the one piece of remaining solid ground that remained to him was that even his most deluded thoughts were still thoughts, demonstrating that he was thinking. If still thinking, then there must be a thinker, hence, “I think therefore I am.” This was not so much to propose the primacy of thought over everything else, but to establish an unshakeable bottom line of existence. From here, with rather fanciful logic, Descartes tried to prove the existence of a Maker, and so repair the Rupture, but quite rightly he is better remembered for being among the first to admit how devastating the Rupture had been. Maybe we who have tripped, who have conducted ourselves through all sorts of mazes of self-delusion and self-doubt, and who perhaps have been through ego deaths (and usually quite healthy ego resurrections) can sympathize with Descartes, puzzling over how to resuscitate his existential Humpty Dumpty. 

But hitting bottom had to go further than Descartes, and by the time of Frederich Nietzsche, we got a real taste of what a real nadir might look like, a level of existential despair that no Medieval person could have conceived of: 

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. 

One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with a gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. 

                                                On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense 

The Deists, who included a few signers of the US constitution, tried to split the difference between the busybody God of the bible and genuine godlessness by saying, yes there is a God, but he doesn’t take an interest in the day-to-day affairs of the world. This God, like an extremely brilliant clockmaker, created the universe, wound it up and set it ticking as it were, and then wandered off to do other things, leaving theologians to refine the moral laws, and smart people like Isaac Newton to tease out the scientific laws of “natural philosophy.” Like the early Protestant reformers, the Deists were dead set against the weirder, wilder forms of ecstatic religion, which they called superstition, seeing, for instance, the theatrics of the Catholic church as cynically playing on the credulity of a bunch of rubes. Who knows what they would have made of a sweat lodge or an ayahuasca circle. 

They didn’t at all notice how the ceremony in spiritual practice can – can – excite the imagination into journeys of discovery that pure reason could never fathom. As science brought the Intact Period to a close, it inevitably ended our contact with ecstatic states and mystical enchantments, making life a bit less exciting, a bit more reasonable. With nothing mystical to believe in any more, how could we have mystical experiences? Lacking the excitation of the ecstatic state, we slipped into a rather low-grade experiencing of everyday same-old, same-old life. Only young children, primed as they are for joy, go there, while we adults, who have not achieved sufficient improvement in the “sensual enjoyment” that Blake described, have become “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”  

We dare not dip too fully into the river of life, half in fear of the enormous interstellar emptiness and half in fear of an all-too intimate exchange with the divine. Many of us carry that emptiness as a physical/emotional “black hole,” or “abyss” inside us, a legacy of the interstellar spaces that first terrified Pascal, or perhaps the very same thing. We endlessly fill it with gadgets, preoccupations, addictions, and anything else that might suit. But the only thing that has sufficient gravitas to counter its enormity is love unfolding. Julian of Norwich, finding the universe sitting in the palm of her hand, no larger than a hazel nut, went on to say in Revelations of Divine Love: 

For this is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul: that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, All-good. For He is the Very Rest. 

If my personal black hole is the one the Rupture created, or is at the very least its close descendent, then any effort I make to unfold love into it is not just for myself, it is for all of us. This is a good thing, because every personal effort is in reality a communal contribution, and it is also a bad thing, because like Thor, I may become dismayed at the seemingly glacial rate of healing of what seems to be absurdly maladaptive emotional and behavioral bad habits.  

What is glacially slow for an individual may be quite rapid change on a cultural scale, and we have to remember that there is more even than the interstellar terror to deal with here. Christianity, the banner religious belief of Western civilisation, is unusual among religions for its bleakness. In Buddhism we go through many lifetimes, lots of suffering etc., but in the end everyone is going to find their Buddha nature and enjoy themselves throughout eternity. Presumably after a few billion years of enjoyment, the memory of the bitter struggle to get there will fade off a bit. It’s similar with Hinduism, although there is the matter of the universe dying and then periodically big banging back into existence, but the sense of a happy ending for all is certainly there. In Christianity, it is a happy ending for some. Our core nature is found to be so corrupt, so inclined towards corruption and sin, that only God can save us from eternal torments of absolutely unimaginable mental and physical agony. So, you had better toe the line and be good, the only catch being that, like a game show where you have to pick the right box to win the prize, you have to pick the correct sect out of the dozens on offer, to find the real savior and not some fake one. And in the Calvinist branches even that does not help you, because God picked out his elect long before you were even born, and if you don’t make the cut it doesn’t matter how pious you are or how many good deeds you do, you’re off to Hell anyway, no questions asked. 

I believe that for us in the western world this belief in sin and the terror of Hell has seeped into our collective psyche so deeply that we all carry a core belief about our own shameful worthlessness, silently brought down on us via the multiple lines of ancestral burdens. If a dozen people enter a room, most, I would wager, have the thought I don’t belong here, I am not worthy, all the others know what they are doing, I will soon be found out, and so on. The religious message that our self-worth does not come from us but from a God who may be nice enough to have mercy on us, has seeped deep into the culture, among believers and non-believers alike – that is of little importance regarding its dissemination – and, along with the terror of the abyss, we have this unfortunate belief that at heart we are all sinful wretches. Many of our decisions, reactions, even the way we reach out to other people, is subtly shame-based, and comes from what some long-ago bishop or preacher was saying to his flock to keep them in line.  

Factor in also the competitiveness of a warrior culture that became a capitalist culture, and you have the added torture of knowing that if you could become a champion at something and beat out all the other wretches around you for some materialist prize, then you could temporarily silence your own shame-based belief systems. As the structures of religion fall away, these old internalized beliefs, if anything, have seeped more deeply and secretly into us, with the competitive remedy firmly in place as our default mode.  

The mystical experience given us by psychedelics can – sometimes at least – overwhelm these messages. It reveals a world more glorious and fierce than we could ever have imagined, but also more gentle and comforting. The consistent message is that we are “enough,” that we can accept ourselves, not as we some day ought to be, but in our utter messiness right now. We are loved, we belong to something, and since there is room for every part of us in that love, we can wear the garment of our ego with a little more ease and forgiveness. Every culture creates its own pact with normalcy and although, like the force of a mighty river driving us forwards, the momentum of that normalcy wants to keep us as we are, all it is really, is a collective shrinking from the divine, a holding up of our hands to our eyes to protect us from the fierce light. Taking psychedelics is adjusting to that light so we don’t have to shield ourselves from it so much.    

Not surprisingly though, our modern psychology sees possession by the sacred as something to be boxed, trammeled, and contained. Boxed into a diagnosis, trammeled by pills, contained enough so that you can rejoin all the normal people in their unremitting normality dance. Our communal backs turn stolidly from the dozens of elephants filling up the room, and we continue whistling a happy tune. To be fair, in the day-to-day, psychology does help people, and if I my suffering is getting too much, by all means crack open the pill bottles or whatever else may work! That’s not the problem. But when the treatment goal is to diminish us back into acceptability, then by definition the whole person never gets treated, and if the whole person doesn’t get treated, then the problem of negotiating black holes and shame-based beliefs about worthlessness get kicked down the road for another generation to deal with. Or the next. Apollo, god of light and reason, is firmly, if somewhat uncomfortably, settled on his throne, knowing that Dionysius, the party person of the Unconscious, is seething underground, waiting to smash his way into daylight.

Thor Among the Giants. Part VII: Driven by the Forces of Love

Driven by forces of love, the fragments of the world are seeking one another so the world may come to be. Teilhard de Chardin

What world is it that, as Teilhard de Chardin says “may come to be”? Clearly, he doesn’t mean the one we live in now – besides already being here, this world is the location of the “fragments” who are charged with the job of creating the new place. We humans are those fragments of consciousness, scattered across the planet like mosaic pieces tossed into a random heap, while the forces of love are embarked on arranging us into a new and more coherent pattern. Teilhard’s name for the world waiting in the wings is the noosphere, (from the Greek nous, meaning thought), a sphere of consciousness he claims is even now layering over the geosphere and the biosphere of our planet and will, when complete, so transform the way we exist on earth that one day we will think of the current world as just a dry run for the real thing.

 Teilhard de Chardin, who lived until 1955, made evolution his life work. Being both a Catholic priest and a paleontologist, he saw evolution not as an alternative to the biblical notion of creation, but as a working scientific model for the unfolding of divine love in the world – which annoyed his bosses in the church no end, and probably bugged the scientists too. As he saw it, physical evolution has reached its apex in humans – and its leading edge has now moved into the cultural and spiritual development of humanity:

 The human is not the center of the universe, as we once naively believed, but something much finer, the rising arrow of the great biological synthesis. The human alone constitutes the last-born, freshest, most complicated and subtly varied of the successive layers of life.                                                                         The Human Phenomenon

 Teilhard sees our role in this transition from physical evolution to spiritual evolution as a movement from passive to active. In physical evolution we just had to let the forces of natural selection play on us as we adapted to different habitats, but now we have the chance to become active players in our own game:

 It is not surprising that from this moment on, and thanks to the characteristics of this new milieu, that the flowering of heredity is reduced to the pure and simple transmission of acquired spiritual treasures. 

From being passive, as it probably was before reflection, in becoming hominized, heredity springs up to become supremely active in its “noospheric” form.                                                                The Human Phenomenon

 For Teilhard, we are “hominized” matter, regular matter that has reached the very specialized form of being human. This hominized matter is now on the brink of another step forward, into a “noospheric” form, where we will reach a still greater level of organization, and become “supremely active,” as participants in a global consciousness. The building blocks of this future us might be seen in the “New Earth” that Eckhart Tolle speaks of in his book of the same name; the New Earth is the place we inhabit when our hearts have opened, our senses have sharpened, and we become more present to ourselves and one another. We tend to think of that kind of opening as happening for one person, as is the case sometimes during a trip or, say, on the return from a long meditation retreat, but the thought that we might reliably reach this state of mind communally, or even globally, is a revolutionary stretch. Right now, as we remain under the control of the survival/aggrandizement rule book of life, our vision of a workable trust/cooperation rulebook is bound to be limited to guesswork, intuitions, and hippy-based pilot projects.

 You could make the case that in some ways Teilhard is overly rigid and behind the times in his thinking, and I don’t believe that would be entirely wrong. Like any good anthropocentric person, he privileges human consciousness above all other kinds, presumably because that’s the one he knows best. He seems to be saying that we have little to learn from other life forms, like the distributive consciousness of the octopus or the possibility that trees might be much better meditators than we are, and so on, endlessly through the species. But I think his central point is undeniable: life evolves from simple to complex, and with greater complexity comes greater self-awareness. A sea cucumber is more complex than a single-celled organism, an armadillo is more complex than a sea cucumber, and we are more complex and self-aware than an armadillo, I think. Terence Mckenna, who said that “It’s time to be up and about the great and exciting business of being truly human for the first time,” called us the “point species” in the journey of life into spirit.

 This is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this. We are not acting for ourselves or from ourselves; we happen to be the point species in a transformation that will affect every species on this planet at its conclusion.

 What factors will help a random bunch of fragments like us get it together to meaningfully cohere into a new world? And how can we help the forces of love act on us in a way that will foster this process? When we apply the psychedelic magnifying glass of high levels of concentration onto our usual surroundings, we become aware that the physical world is the spirit world: the sky becomes a blue beyond all possible blues, the earth smells more deep and rich than we have ever conceived of, and life pulses brilliantly all around us. We enter this exulted state by the deepening of sense perceptions, or, you could say, by noticing what’s there. William Blake put it this slightly roundabout way:

 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 and corrupt. This will come by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

                                                The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 If Teilhard comes to us as a sort of holy scientist, Blake arrives as an out-and-out prophet. The cherub with the flaming sword stands at the gates of Eden making sure no one sneaks back in, after we were all kicked out. Blake’s next statement is interesting: when the cherub is relieved of his post (presumably making it then okay for us to re-enter Eden) “the whole of creation will be consumed.” Or will it? We are told that creation will appear as “infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite and corrupt,” suggesting that it’s not the world that will be annihilated or engulfed in fire and brimstone. Instead, our current manner of perceiving the world is what will be “consumed,” and most crucially, Blake says that this destroying of old ways of perception “will come about by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.” I don’t believe by “sensual enjoyment” he means a better appreciation of fine wines and having more fun in bed – at least not only those things – but that our physical senses will be a portal to spiritual joy, in just the same way as the full-hearted, mind-blown tripper experiences ecstatic states with reasonable regularity. That is when straight people, trapped as they are in normal consciousness, may snicker at someone who is tripping and entranced by a privet hedge or a spider web, or for that matter, the back of their own hand.

 What brings about the improvement of sensual enjoyment? Exposure to the forces of love. And in this day and age, psychedelics are a primary operative agent for those forces, through the action of material chemicals on physical bodies. This improvement of sensual pleasure that happens in tripping is an education program for hominized matter, a sneak preview of the infinite and holy world that Blake visions, and the noosphere that Teilhard predicts. It is what you might get when a bunch of disparate musicians wake up one morning and realise that they could play together “in concert,” and be an orchestra.

 Blake goes on to say:

 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.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’

Narrow chinks in his cavern.

                                                            The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 It’s pretty non-dualistic of 18th century William Blake to say that “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul has to be expunged,” and I believe that this matches with the experience we have when we enter a psychedelic trance-like state of deep perception: the mind/body distinction becomes rather wavy. In fact in another part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake says, “Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” You would be tempted to say that he is a thinker way ahead of his time, except that these issues have been confronted by all people across all ages. The corrosives that Blake talks about are the acids that dissolve away portions of the printing plates in his relief etching method, by which he creates his illuminated manuscript-style books. But the corrosives are also his uncompromising thoughts, words and illustrations, which will bite into our complacent and ingrained habits of self-limited perception, helping us – even if unwillingly – cleanse our senses, our doors of perception, and see into the infinite. We need a little waking up and shaking up:

 How do you know but every Bird that cuts the airy way

Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?

                                                Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Dante Alighieri, Tripping, and Paradise

Of the three parts of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy by far the best known is the Inferno, where the author meets a succession of people condemned to cunningly inventive and devilishly appropriate eternal tortures. Hell is the one place in the Comedy where everybody is guaranteed a dead end job for all time, so trust our culture to neglect the other two parts at the expense of this one. The Purgatorio is all about change and growth, while the Paradiso could be called a meditation on spiritual expansion, and it is here that Dante gives us a cohesive portrayal of what happens with sustained exposure to sacred light. It is one of the great Western depictions of a mystical experience.

 With the coming of the age of psychedelics, where we can all have visionary experiences in our own living rooms, interest in the Paradiso has a good chance of growing. In it, Dante ascends from the garden of Eden, through the crystalline spheres of the planets, up into to the empyrean, the sacred realm beyond the stars. There like any good pilgrim, he finally has his ego death moment.

 When we talk about the setting for a psychedelic experience we usually think of nice mood music, a soft couch, and no Francis Bacon paintings on the wall. We don’t think so much about the cultural setting, though anybody’s cultural surroundings are pervasive and inescapable. When Medieval mystics had a visionary experience, they would have expected it to make perfectly good sense to all their community; today though, the more ineffable we get, the harder it is for those around us to understand. We cast around to other cultures to render sense, (or no-sense) out of the experience, forgetting that here in the West there once was a thriving mystical tradition too.  It’s useful to see the commonality this tradition has with Asian and with shamanic traditions, and it may be a comfort to know that our own ancestors have “been here before,” and gone through experiences that we are encountering for the first time. For instance, have you ever had a psychedelic experience that was ‘beyond words?’ Dante opens the Paradiso by talking about that very thing:

 The glory of Him who moves all things

Pervades the universe and shines

In one part more and in another less.

I was in that heaven which receives

More of his light. He who comes down from there

Can neither know nor tell what he has seen,

For, drawing near to its desire,

So deeply is our intellect immersed

That memory cannot follow after it.

Nevertheless, as much of the holy kingdom

 As I could store as treasure in my mind

Shall now become the subject of my song.

 The Paradiso is not an easy read, largely because it makes constant reference to classical myths we may not know about, and to people of his time who are now entirely obscure historical figures, so you may want some support in getting the most out of it. Here then are some Paradisical resources:

This podcast is an outline of the full Divine Comedy, which you may want before you plunge in: Mythology and Fiction Explained

Or you might want to consult with your Thug Notes. Though he just goes through the Inferno it is hilarious enough to be well worth the ride: Thug Notes

 This one is a rather wry, very spoofy, but quite useful short summary of the Paradiso itself: Classics Summarized. And you might want to add in this other short: What Is Dante's Paradiso?

If you want to listen to the full Divine Comedy, I found this in Audible. The reader is very good, the verse jogs along quite happily, and you can listen to a sample to see if you like it too: Clive James translation

In this podcast, Mark Vernon explains the Paradiso canto by canto, and although he is a little on the serious side, he gives you a good picture of what is going on: Dante's divine Comedy

Please don’t take my uninformed word for it, but as I understand it this written translation is one of the best. If you buy the kindle version don’t try to read it on your phone, it gets clunky and hard to manage there, read it on a larger kindle device or buy the book: Hollander Paradiso

But, if you want a different translation, plus Gustave Dore’s famous illustrations, here it is for 99c! Cheap Divine Comdey

And finally, in this Youtube video Mark Vernon talks with Rupert Sheldrake about the spiritual significance of Dante’s work, and they discuss the relationship between Dante’s visit to Heaven and modern-day tripping. Mark and Rupert agreeing with each other

 In reading the Paradiso you are skipping past the combined 66 cantos of the Inferno and Purgutorio. If, however, the full 33 cantos of the Paradiso are still a bit of a mouthful, you can start at canto 30, where Dante goes from the spheres of the planets up into the empyrean, the place where God hangs out. It is the happiest of happy endings.  

Meditations on Meditating

Just like when Leonard Cohen spoke of “the staggering account of the sermon on the mount, which I don’t pretend to understand at all,” it’s probably foolish to think that we can understand meditation, because that would mean understanding the structure and the frame of our own being, the one doing the meditating. Can we, for instance, actually watch our own thoughts in real time? No more than we can have the pleasure of standing in our own shadow. What we can do is shut up and breathe – or at least try.

 But we can also try to notice some other things. I see that in order to concentrate enough to be present in any way, the agitated parts of me have to settle down. Concentration means not much more than doing one thing at a time. Under the conscious surface of me, there are many disconnected and agitated parts and pieces, agitated for different reasons, often not even aware of one other, or what day it is.

 In order for ‘me’ to concentrate, these parts have to contrive a way to quell their fears and rages, and be at ease. In order for them to have a chance to do that, the thing I like to call “I” has to connect with them and soothe them. The me who can do that will have a sense of self that is confident enough to address all the broken off bits of me, the shrapnel of my life, so they can hear and see, and finally be at ease. In order to have that confidence, this Me Central needs to genuinely know it has the information that somehow, in some mysterious way, all is well. “I accept and honour all my resistances,” says Me Central, with a knowing like T.S. Eliot’s knowing when he says:

 And all shall be well

And all manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knots of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

 The corrosive element of fire and the fiery delicacy of the rose become “one” in some sacred space unapproachable by our normal thinking and our normal laws of what is real, and in that space alone do we really know that all will be well. A space where, paradoxically enough, words can turn into other things, such as flesh, or so we are told. Our calming comes from a oneness that nothing can supplant. I’m sure people have been there through meditation, though, speaking purely for myself, I’ve never been at a meditation retreat long enough to see it. We can, I would say, reach it more easily through a psychedelically enhanced meditation, a chemically imposed mystical experience. Even so, this may still be a thing we spend a lifetime honourably pursuing, glimpsing occasionally in whatever way, while maddeningly, encouragingly, somewhere inside us we can sometimes notice that we know that the “all-is-well-ness” is always there. Though the quest is not quite redeemable, the only mistake is giving up. There is an “I” that can properly say:

 I wish soothing to you.

I wish peace for you

I wish you the joy you should always be having.

I wish you forgiveness

I wish you encounters with the sacred,

The source of all comfort,

Which can be known and deciphered

From somewhere deep inside you.

May we reach out to the divine together,

There is a process that wants to happen,

We are here to do nothing more than

“Kneel where prayer has been valid.”

 Our trouble – my trouble at least – is that prayer is no longer a simple matter. We have what Eliot calls, “the unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,” and in that condition, who exactly are we to pray to? Should our prayer resemble church prayers, written in the florid language of court flattery, trying to coax some special favours out of a monarch in the sky? That won’t work, nor will praying to the cold, dead science of a cold, dead universe. If we can just get a notion of that sacred space where – as we now remember, the trip being over – all is already well. Then we may deliberately wish for what we want and our hearts, trapped in the days long past, may finally start to blossom.

 Eliot puts it like this:

And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

For most of us, this is the aim

Never here to be realised;

Who are only undefeated

Because we have gone on trying;

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew tree)

The life of significant soil.

 That “temporal reversion” may be our death, but surely not the death of the body, since the soil that kind of death contributes to is not particularly “significant”; instead then, a death where the significant soil can grow things beyond our current imagining. We must die to beauty. In meditation, since there isn’t much else to do there anyway, maybe we can call on ourselves to breathe our way to a kind of dying, to a death that is not horror or even pain in the usual sense, but is, in Shakespeare’s words now, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” The transmutation of the rose.

"Till There Was You" -- but who is the You?

Did you ever look at the words of some schmaltzy old song and say, “My goodness, this could almost be a hymn!” Clearly I did, and the song is Till There Was You, which apparently came out in 1957 as part of the musical The Music Man. It didn’t enter my universe until the Beatles sang it, and most famously sang it at the 1963 Royal Command Performance (an annual event where the British stars of the day perform in front of a select audience including the royal family). This is the occasion where at the end of the show John Lennon said, “For our last number, I'd like to ask your help, the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry."

Some love songs are touching, some insipid, and some – somehow – stop being about one relationship or hot affair, and become about love itself, larger than the localization, let’s call it, of romantic love. Till There Was You speaks about perception. Until there was you, I didn’t notice a whole world out there, from bells in the hills to fragrant meadows and “wonderful roses.” This is just like tripping. Until I took this pill or ate this mushroom I simply didn’t notice just how deeply fragrant the meadows were, or the wonderfulness of the roses, I was missing out on a couple of dimensions. My enhanced perceptions became able to see deep into life and rejoice.

 Who then, is the “you” of the refrain? For the normal understanding of the song it’s some boyfriend or girlfriend who at least for a while was magical, but the “you” that fosters these enhanced perceptions is someone/something a bit more universal. And that’s what makes this song a hymn. The source of the magic, this enhancement of noticing things, is love itself, the divine energy let’s call it. While tripping, I notice that there is “love all around” and I also notice that until this day “I never heard it singing” because through the action of this drug or this plant, I see that living things are the expression of love when it sings out its name. I have no choice: for this little while my eyes are opened by a moment of ecstasy, and it is on me to remember what I heard and saw — perhaps by creating a song.

 There were bells on a hill
But I never heard them ringing
No, I never heard them at all
'Til there was you

There were birds in the sky
But I never saw them winging
No, I never saw them at all
'Til there was you

Then there was music
And wonderful roses
They tell me in sweet fragrant meadows
Of dawn and dew

There was love all around
But I never heard it singing
No, I never heard it at all
'Til there was you

Then there was music
And wonderful roses
They tell me in sweet fragrant meadows
Of dawn and dew

There was love all around
But I never heard it singing
No, I never heard it at all
'Til there was you
'Til there was you

The Startling Future of Future Me

Our future selves are like a seed, sitting underground in the dark, maybe even sprouting a little white shoot and embryonic roots, quite unseen in the light and air. In real seeds though, if they sit underground too long, they will begin to rot and be consumed by the earth that contains them. The seed of Future Me is not like that, it sits unseen, ready to do its slow unfurling for all my life if necessary, up to my final hour. And even then it might pop up its unfamiliar head and surprise us all.

 Another way in which the seed of Future Me does not conform to nature’s rules is that it may briefly appear above ground, in midspring or in midwinter, and then retreat back to its dormant state. It might appear with certain kinds of moods or circumstances, briefly flower, and then retreat back to its seed state, like a flickering image on a wall rather than your usual kind of seed. It may appear in the aftermath of a trip for days or weeks and then retreat again, presumably not finding itself in quite the right air. It may appear when you see the sun strike the surface of a leaf in a particular way.

 There are (at least) three types of me: Unreformed Me, Reforming Me, and Future Me. Unreformed Me we know perfectly well. It’s the acquisitive, somewhat selfish, often argumentative me that seems to dominate individuals, public discourse, and the world in general. It’s prone to self-righteousness and judgement on the one hand and addiction on the other; it has the blindness of angry right wing racist discourse and the close-minded Puritanism of left wing political correctness. This awful fellow dominates, we might say pollutes, the atmosphere of the entire world, and has done so for many generations. We all bend to the will of Unreformed Me.

Reforming Me is in the business of fixing the situation, though it’s fighting an uphill battle. Reforming Me sends me to yoga classes, tries to get me up at six in the morning in order to take a cold shower just because Wim Hof says so, makes me smile at people when I feel shitty or angry, and tells me such convoluted things as, ‘you shouldn’t say should.’ Poor Reforming Me spends a tremendous amount of energy trying to make the world a better place, but often it is simply commanding the oncoming tides to retreat, or believing that this time our New Year’s resolutions will really stick. Even if Reforming Me is successful, we may suspect that Unreformed Me is like a river temporarily tamed by levees, waiting for the next big rain.

 And Future Me. Future Me is that seed underground, pre-existent, if unseen, ready to appear under the right conditions. Its characteristics are openness and curiosity; it does not jump to judgment on things, because it sees that life is far more interesting without the judginess. Its predisposition is to laugh and to play, to look on the bright side, to sit back and enjoy a coffee at the end of day, rather than worry, criticize or fret. Future Me doesn’t get involved in impassioned, fraught politics, it agrees with Dave Mason:

There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy
There's only you and me and we just disagree

Future Me is the human personality that has been sufficiently exposed to divine love.

 Reforming Me, though it tries strenuously, at heart comes out of the same ground as Unreformed Me. Reforming Me does not understand the old adage that what you resist persists, and it’s stuck in a belief system that Unreformed Me is to be addressed in the way that one army addresses another. It’s about victory and defeat, tug of war, and self-discipline where the self being disciplined is the enemy. Even though the enemy is oneself. Oh, Reforming Me,  you have to give way in the end, and let some other action take over the work of encouraging Future Me out of its underground darkness.

 And what, Reforming Me asks, might that other agent of change be? That is where the wisdom of the plants comes in, or maybe it is the wisdom of the lost recesses of the brain, or the teachings of spirit guides, divine will, or who knows what to call it. It’s just a matter of, you can’t expect the expected to have unexpected results. As I get up in the morning and slip into my usual routine of worry and critique, I can remember that Future Me would be whistling a silly tune or remembering the mood of an interesting dream I had during the night. Future Me would be looking for opportunities for fun. If I have trouble reaching Future Me (and I will) I might just remember some of the Future Me characteristics and ponder on them; I might say to Unreformed Me, “I accept you,” I might see if I can breathe easily and peacefully even in my unreconstructed self.

 The Buddhists talk about working skillfully, and I think they mean, don’t let Reforming Me bulldoze through your entire practice. I don’t try to destroy Unreformed Me, I forgive it, because in the end, Unreformed Me may be the soil that Future Me was trying to grow in. Unreformed me may be an entirely shitty character, but, of course, where would fruitful soil be without shit? Where do the interesting mushrooms pick to grow? So remember, when it comes to helping Future Me to grow, please don’t lose your shit.

Self-Compassion

Each one of us has a war going on inside between the forces of shame and compassion. Shame, part of our cultural inheritance whatever our culture is it seems, engenders feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, and as the psychologist Christopher Germer says, you feel guilty because of what you have done, you feel shame because of what you are (or have been told you are). We have been given that feeling as children by adults who let us know how bad we are, whether that’s bad because we don’t share nicely, bad because we don’t do our homework, or bad at tying our shoes. And in case we might escape from this personal vortex, institutions like school, home, and sports continue the pressure to be a winner not a loser all the way into adulthood. Religion reminds us that we are sinful sinners who have sinned, while our jobs can’t resist co-opting shame as a way of keeping us quiet and in line. Shame is the main pollutant in the air we breathe. We’ve been told that hurt people hurt people but also, shamed people shame people. It’s the vehicle our automatic selves relate through.

 When I have no sense of okayness about myself I start developing mental health ‘disorders’ like anxiety, anger, depression, addiction and so on. There’s nothing ordered about it, and shame dissolves away the essential faith I have in myself. The being who believes itself unworthy in its core remains unworthy in all settings and circumstances, and cannot be redeemed by hard evidence to the contrary. At that point the only tools I have to deal with it are distraction from, compensation for, and the assuaging of these impossible feelings. Only to the extent that I can dissolve the shame that dissolves me, can I go to the world and dare to be an actor in it. Then I am free to be, without the usual propaganda.

 The magic pill, the antidote to this poison, is self-compassion. In sending self-compassion to the young parts of us that received the original wound, we become the comforter and loving witness they never had at the time when they were damaged. When there is compassion, shame has to go; and when there is a lot of shame there is a shortage of compassion. So it’s a good idea to send that compassion to yourself, even if you don’t fully believe it, even if you don’t believe in it the slightest little bit. Because this is not a belief system, it’s a let’s suppose system. In the spirit of build it and they will come, say the words, and the feeling eventually will penetrate through and through until it reaches our own lost children, deep down inside. Sometimes at night when I dream, the part of me that is covered in shame falls asleep, and then for moments the world comes alive, and wonderful adventures are possible. Our potential is alive for as long as we are.

 And the same is true for psychedelics. When/if that young part of us receives what we call divine love it can know, not believe, that all is right with the world, that “all will be well.” That is the reset humanity has been waiting for. So often though, after the impact of the drug has worn off, in the days and weeks that follow, we return to the prison cell of shame, hopelessly recalling what it had been like to dance outside in the sunshine. Then our only good recourse is to renew the words of self-compassion – you are loved, you are worthy – filing away at the prison bars of this cage with the one true weapon we have. The day in the sunshine was not a release but a precursor, a promise of what can be.

 When I don’t know which part of me should be in charge or what I should do next, when I am in a state of confusion I can, as a default, send self-compassion to all those who have sinned in my particular shame vortex. This shame in me is a fractal image of the entire fuck-up of the Western world, and it is on me to fix it, in my particular little corner. When I care about all things, then all things come under my care; compassion is the one true star of the north, around which all other objects spin. Fixing my eyes and my heart on that, a lot can be done in fractal me. It’s infinitely better to follow compassion than to spin round the black hole of shame, trying to assuage its cruel demands or to distract myself from them. From that voided centre the best I can do is suppress shame and push it down, knowing that like a cork in a pond, it keeps on bobbing back up again. The action of love, on the other hand, is to erode shame into its constituent parts. Hard as its surface seems to be, shame is in fact biodegradable.  

 All your childhood secrets are now locked away behind the walls of adult performance. The performance is really the sound of a little puppy yelping, “Love me! Love me!” translated of course into acceptable terms such as, “See how mighty I am, how cute I am, how natural I am…friendly, efficient, clever, fascinating…acceptable in whatever way you want to contrive for me!” But the real wish is for someone to say, “Relax, you are loved. All is well.” The thicker the wall of adult performance, the stronger and deeper was our sin-based conditioning. But all walls develop fissures in time, and in those fissures we can place, not destruction, but self-compassion, the urge to be sorry for our young selves, our non-believing selves, and our unworthy selves, so they can unfreeze and come back to life. That doesn’t usually happen fast, but we can make moment by moment choices to bring in the element of self-compassion. Even when we don’t believe it ourselves, we can still use self-compassionate words and send down the message, plumbing into our lower depths, like a coin dropped into the sink hole of a cave. Who knows who it may reach. Our fate can depart the realm of automatic shame-making and enter a different realness. Freedom can be birthed into our hands and we can receive it as we might a new-born child, chanting its love to the world.

 May all things be well

May all beings be filled with joy

May all beings be peaceful and at ease

May we all be free from suffering.

May love fill everything

May love cover and uncover everything

May love find us all.

 May the impulse of life fulfill itself

May the truest, deepest desire be fulfilled

May all things be bathed in love.

May I love and accept the many parts of me

As they were, as they are

And as they will be.

Let us walk in beauty.

Thor Among the Giants. Part VI: The Omega Point

Regular God is such a nut. He made everything, he knows everything, he sees everything, but he spends most of his time acting the part of a cosmic policeman, patrolling the humanity beat, bullying us into good behavior with outrageous threats of eternal damnation and torment. You’d think divinity would find something more exciting to do, or would at least have made us better people if he was so intent on high standards. It’s this God, I believe, that Frederick Nietzsche in 1882 declared was dead, though to be fair to organized religion, it seems that Regular God has well outlasted the old philosopher.  

Teilhard de Chardin’s version of divinity is far more plausible. His God is endlessly evolving, or as Henri Bergson put it, is in a state of “a perpetual becoming.” Not for Teilhard is the clockmaker who once upon a time set all things in motion and now sits back to admire his workmanship; to Teilhard the creation is an ongoing process that continues to unfold, and our own creativity is a part of it. Teilhard calls the epicenter of all sacredness the Omega Point, with the idea that if the start of existence was an Alpha point of pure potential then Omega would be the endpoint of actualization. The Omega Point is the “supercentre” of divine energy, simultaneously in and outside of time, or as he puts it, “At the same time that it is the term of the series, it is also outside the series.” It attracts us toward an ecstatic future while at the same time living at the heart of each one of us, the attracted.  

The human project, says Teilhard, is about building the noosphere, the sphere of consciousness around the planet, and once we have evolved a coherent noosphere with its own collective human consciousness, we will move towards uniting with the Omega Point in a fusion of the human with the divine. In this process all of our current preoccupations with materiality, our concerns about sin, our inherited feelings of core worthlessness would dissolve and we would become the ecstasy containers we have always secretly known ourselves to be. We could hardly imagine – or at least Teilhard doesn’t – that at this point the process would then grind to a halt with a Mission Accomplished sign hanging over the galaxies. For Teilhard, we (if we remain recognizably us) would then progress to still more immense unions. This contrasts sharply with the heat death theory of the universe, where, as entropy slowly winds everything down, we all get frozen to the bus stop of time.  

What, Teilhard asks, should we be doing to help move our evolving along?

 Our works? But what in the very interests of life in general is the work of human works if not for each one of us to establish in ourselves an absolutely original centre where the universe is reflected in a unique and inimitable way: precisely our self, our personality? Deeper than all its rays the very focal point of our consciousness is the essential thing for Omega to retrieve if it is to be truly Omega.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 When “each one of us” establishes “an absolutely original center,” we bring a new uniqueness to the world. Shakespeare is writing more Shakesperean plays, Liszt is playing yet more Lisztian piano, and you and I are cooking our fried eggs in our own “unique and inimitable way.”  My work is to develop more me, your work is to develop more you, so there is more genuine “me-ness” in existence. That’s me as a unique expression of the divine, not me as in “Me Generation.” To use William Blake’s language, we will be developing into our four-fold nature of Eternity, while Herbert Marcuse described it as freeing ourselves from alienation, a disconnection from self and others, and instead becoming at ease with who we are. That surely is exactly what we do when we trip – sorting out who we are and what is important to us, in us. Even the euphoric part of a regular “recreational” drug experience is forwarding humanity’s ecstatic exploration, though this particular euphoria is often condemned as a dead-end of self-indulgence, as if there was something disgraceful about experiencing intense private joy.  

So when all these centres (i.e. people) Teilhard talks about, meet and merge into a coherent noosphere, that noosphere starts to locate itself in relation to a “supercentre” – Omega.

  In every organized whole the parts perfect and fulfill themselves. By failing to grasp this universal law of union, so many kinds of pantheism have led us astray in the worship of a great Whole in which individuals were supposed to become lost like a drop of water, dissolved like a grain of salt in the sea…No, in confluence along the line of their centers, the grains of consciousness do not tend to lose their contours and blend together. On the contrary, they accentuate the depths and incommunicability of their ego. The more together, they become the other, the more they become “themselves.” How could it be otherwise, since they plunge into Omega? Can a centre dissolve? Or rather is it not its own way of dissolving precisely to supercenter itself?

                                                            The Human Phenomenon 

Which makes us think of that old singer of self-songs, Walt Whitman: 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

                                                            Song of Myself 

And later in the same poem he says: 

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. 

All the paradoxes of the normal tripper! 

The more the grains of consciousness (us) melt into the Omega Point, the more they become their true selves, as we like to say. Teilhard illustrates that with the idea of being in love. When you are in love you feel merged with, “at one” with, your lover, and far from that impeding your own identity, it makes you feel all the more complete and alive. When the beloved is the sacred, the plunging into the other and the feeling fully alive are still more profoundly felt. 

O guiding night!

O night more lovely than the dawn!

O night that has united

the Lover with his beloved,

transforming the beloved in her Lover. 

I abandoned and forgot myself,

I abandoned and forgot myself,

Laying my face on my Beloved;

All things ceased; I went out from myself,

Leaving my cares

Forgotten among the lilies.

                                                Saint John of the Cross  Dark Night of the Soul 

Clearly, Saint John’s dark night of the soul was not the dark night of isolation and abandonment we have turned that phrase into. If there is an ego death here at all, it is one where the ego is consummated – not consumed – in the Beloved. Not a passing away of all I thought myself to be, but a non-violent merging that ends in bliss, not destruction. The beautiful fate of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis: 

 With love of spouse, love of children, love of friends, and to some degree, love of country, we often imagine that we have exhausted the various natural forms of loving. But precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing from this list, that passion which under the pressure of a universe closing on itself precipitates the elements upon one another in the whole. The passion of cosmic affinity, and as a result the cosmic sense…A love that embraces the entire universe is not only something psychologically possible, it is also the only complete and final way in which we can love.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon 

In its first stage, the material stage, evolution was divergent – matter proliferated in complexity from the simplest bacteria and one-celled creatures, to living plants and animals, on to self-conscious beings such as us. With us, Teilhard maintains, evolution has reached a point where it becomes convergent, so that the grains of consciousness – us again – draw together towards the Omega Point in an exultant coming together. The God we merge with is “hyperpersonalized” energy, a sacredness so personal that the closer we approach it the more we realize who we are. It is the same god of whom Meister Eckhart said, “God is nearer to me than I am to myself; he is just as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it.”  It is through this lens of becomingness that we might view our joy and sadness, our accountable and unaccountable depressions – what I see as my disease is part of some larger and more interesting logjam.  

 Rick Doblin of MAPS anticipates a future of “mass mental health”, where psychedelics will sweep through the DSM like a new broom and clear out the depressions, anxieties and addictions that lie in its table of contents. And why shouldn’t this happen if relief of suffering is what we want? But another and more psychedelic goal lurks, one that involves “mass mysticism,” where our current religions, obsessed as they are with sin, social control and killing the heretics and infidels, will be seen to be insufficient. This mass mysticism could help us create a religion of the future, one fit for the upcoming noosphere, where, in Teilhard’s vision, (and ours too, at least when we are tripping) the expansion of love is the whole point of everything, the beginning, middle and the end of the sermon.  

Right you are John, all you do need is love.

 I believe that forming the universal being (species consciousness, Albion, the noosphere) will be based on love, trust and creativity. Love, as Teilhard puts it, is the be-all and end-all of our evolving; trust, through self-trust, our capacity to trust others and our own trustworthiness will produce the level of human connectedness needed to move us into a future of organized coherence; and it is the fun of creativity that makes us the playful, openly intelligent creatures who stay interested in all this evolving. From these three qualities the fronds of our evolution peek out and announce their magic.

 The Omega Point had a brief flash of celebrity when Teilhard was first published in the sixties and seventies, but then, along with a lot of other far-out thinking and art, it was firmly put on the back burner as we resumed politics, money and business as usual. It was Terence Mckenna who a couple of decades later reincarnated the idea as the transcendental object at the end of time:

 Based on 25 years of this stuff and a lot of reading and a lot of head scratching, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a transcendental object ahead of us in time, you could call it God, you could call it Jesus, you can call it her, you can call it flying saucers from Zata Reticuli…but whatever you call it, it’s an attractor, it lies ahead of us in the future and all of human history is being channeled toward it, pulled toward it, and I see the entire history of the universe as a journey across a landscape of energy and matter toward union with this transcendental object.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube          

 Where Teilhard is studious, poetic and dense, McKenna is performatively whacky. Teilhard predicted that the union with Omega could occur one day, some day; McKenna took the theatrical step of naming the date, which unfortunately was…December 21, 2012. Much sadder is that McKenna died long before the day the world didn’t end. No doubt if he had been there to (not) see that end date, he would have given a wry grin, made a goofy joke about the unreliability of aliens, and reminded us that:

 Everything hangs in the balance, because we are between monkeydom and starshiphood, and in the leap across those 25,000 years energies are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all these things which control power with greater or lesser degrees of ethical constancy. There is, as in the metaphor of dying, the possibility of mucking it up, of aborting the transformation of the species into a hyperspatial entelechy.   

We are now, there can be no doubt, in the final seconds of that crisis…which involves the end of history, the departure from the planet, the triumph over death, and the release of the individual from magic. We are in fact closing distance with the most profound event planetary ecology can encounter, which is the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter, the old metaphor of psyche as butterfly is a species-wide metaphor. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum of historical forces already in motion.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube 

Just as Teilhard speaks about divergence and convergence in our evolving, McKenna describes us as an “unevolving species,” in that we have replaced physical evolution with the far more agile agents of culture and technology. 

Technology is the real skin of our species. Man, correctly seen in the context of the last 500 years, is the extruder of a technological shell. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization, we put it through mental filters and we extrude Lindisfarne gospels, space shuttles, all of these things. This is what we do. We’re like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects.  

McKenna develops Teilhard’s beautiful proposition that the divine is “radiating from the heart of matter” by pointing out that nature has something of the divine about it, and we are undoubtedly part of nature, even if we simultaneously glorify and mistreat it: 

We all have a model of history, a model of the future, and we all feel capable of stepping into the shoes of our leaders and discharging that responsibility. Well in order to do that we need to overcome our amnesia about how we got to this place. You see, what science would have you believe and explicitly implies is that we are an aberration. Over here you have nature, the beautiful rain forests, the wonderful coral reefs, the symmetry of the humming bird, the sea urchin, the butterfly; and here you have us grimy, tawdry, polluting, ugly, driven, in disequilibrium, in denial.  

I don’t believe that. I believe that this kind of thinking that breaks humanity away from the rest of nature is the first of the great disempowering myths by which the western mind has enslaved itself, and we are not outside of nature, we are not a runaway toxic process, we are not a mutation, we are in fact that part of nature which has been deputized for a purpose. We are the energy-gathering aspect of the Gaian mind, we are the language-forming capacity of nature herself…The main effect of humans on this planet has been to greatly accelerate the speed at which nature has been able to creatively express herself…  

This is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this. We are not acting for ourselves or from ourselves; we happen to be the point species in a transformation that will affect every species on this planet at its conclusion.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube 

Like Teilhard, McKenna believes in a purposive universe, one that has things in store for us. Teilhard stuck to his guns, and for all the hard times his Catholic superiors gave him, maintained to the end of his days that Catholicism was the best bet for guiding us into this mystical future, even if he had no compelling reasons why. McKenna’s religion of the future does not come out of any of the old allegiances, but is one based on (primarily psychedelic) visionary experiences. Can we be guided by our trippy visions? Yes, if we are willing to play with them with love, trust and creativity:  

 If you think the universe is mundane, if you think there are no more adventures to be had, I’m telling you, you can turn your living room into the bridge of Magellan’s ship on a long Saturday evening with five grams of psilocybin in silent darkness.  

We are living in the most empowering age in human history, because all of the energy of the ancestors, not only the human ancestors, but our animal, our primate ancestors, all that energy pours into, is focused into this moment. We are the transition generation, we have one foot in matter and one foot in hyperspace, and we can redeem the trust of thousands of years, all of the horror of history can be redeemed if we don’t drop the ball – every pogrom, every instance of racial, sexual or minority persecution can be redeemed if we give the human adventure meaning, and we give it meaning by discovering the totality within ourselves and then exemplifying it for each other. And this dissolves boundaries, strengthens the weak, enlightens the strong, and brings hope to all, and this can only be done if we accept the gifts which nature has offered us.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube. 2:53 

The primary gift that nature has offered us is life itself, and we accept that offer by experiencing what is going on for us, moment by moment, in as fine a detail as possible, and it is this gift that is instrumental in guiding/luring us towards Omega. As McKenna puts it, this experience, “the felt moment of immediate experience” is our escape hatch from fractured and pained self-consciousness into the wholeness of being that Blake named as four-fold Eternity:  

It isn’t who you were, or what you were, or who you will be or what you will be, it’s the felt moment of immediate experience, and this has been robbed from us by media, and by our tendency to denigrate ourselves, to see the world in terms of the great ones not here – Aristotle, Madonna, Jesus, whatever your particular bent is. The overcoming of neurosis, of unhappiness, of toxic lifestyles is the felt presence of immediate experience, in the body, in the moment. Psychedelics, sexuality, gastronomy, sport, dance, these are the things that put you in the felt presence of the moment.  

And that’s all you really possess, your memories are eroding away, the futures you anticipate will probably not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. It’s not necessarily some kind of be here now feel-good thing, because it doesn’t always feel good, but it always feels, it is a domain of feeling. It’s primary. Language is not primary, ideology is not primary, the propagation of future and past vectors is not primary, what’s primary is the felt presence of experience, and that is the source of love, and that is the source of community.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube.  

There is nothing guaranteed about humanity’s happy ending with the Omega/transcendental object, far from it. McKenna says it will only happen “if we don’t drop the ball,” while Teilhard similarly warns it will only take place “if all goes well.” The fossil record shows far more dead-ends and die-offs than floridly successful species, and if we don’t make it, there is plenty of inert matter left lying around for another try. Both thinkers agree that we are poised at an inflection point where we may make the leap into some kind of spiritual hyperspace or just as easily crash and burn ourselves on Spaceship Earth. I hope Exon and Shell are taking note: 

We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

Terence McKenna This World...and Its Double 

Since the death of both of these visionaries, psychedelics have emerged into unexpected respectability, meaning that the cultural powers that be have focused their beady eyes on their potential. If psychedelics are domesticated into becoming a prime tool in the psychological repair shop of late-stage capitalism then, if all does not go well, these revolutionary, anti-materialistic forces will be co-opted into helping one-dimensional humanity stay in its robotic shell.  

Stressed out bankers, coders and sales managers can be whisked away from the industrial fray, treated for their mysterious depressions, anxieties, addictions and manias, have their mystical moment, and then be returned to the corporate battlefields. Real live soldiers can take their MDMA, get over their PTSD, and also return to the fray. Carolyn Chen in Work Pray Code has described how Silicon Valley has already perverted mindfulness practices into becoming a work-based spirituality, supporting the one true god – becoming a more productive worker. Though psychedelics would most naturally be the solvent of society, disintegrating our most embedded prejudices and cherished assumptions, they can easily be twisted into becoming a coagulant, and by becoming respectable, become dangerous. We carry a responsibility to keep psychedelics unpredictable, undomesticated, unmedicalized and uncommodified, so that we may some day be more that way ourselves. 

Self-improvement can go only so far. A persistent depression, an inexplicable anxiety, an embarrassing addiction you cannot control, are all signs that we have not managed to incorporate the whole of Albion or Christ in us, we need more help in what Teilhard calls noogenesis, the creation of a world soul that we can all knowingly partake in. We look for a Christ who synthesizes horror and doubt into new belief – a holy being possessed by wholeness – while a pure Christ has no wholeness to give us. I cannot lop off my arms and hands in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. You have to take all of lousy me for it to be me! 

Grandmother Christ

Fear of Death Christ

Outdoor Christ

Horror Christ

Worm Christ

Christ of our Supreme Laziness,

Eat our sins

And find their nourishment

For your next incarnation.

Until that time

We will hold back terror

With our ridiculous incantations.

Ruined Christ

Dancing Christ

Makeshift Christ

Fake Christ

Dead And Alive Christ

Forgive us our triumphs,

Guide us past the shoals

Of righteousness,

Remember our longing eyes

As we cast you onto the rocks

Of our lockjaw religions.

 What we call ‘mental’ illness is just one of our terrified incantations against the unbearable abyss of truth, as we cling frog-like to the one-dimensional world that William Blake called Ulro. The conventional treatments our society offers can only substitute our stricken posture with congenial disguises, a re-immersion into convention, an amazing makeover of outworn habits. There is no lift-off there. We are not here to scrub our behavioral health clean with bars of mental hygiene soap, we are here in our livid humanity, gazing as best we can upon truth, to further the cause of love. In the words of W.B. Yeats:  

Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

                                                W.B. Yeats

What To Do About Bad Habits

When we are not having enough joy in life, we will make up for it with compulsions and bad habits. If I am feeling active, engaged and alive in the world, I have no need for doom scrolling, over (or under) eating, repetitive thoughts, getting lost in regrets, getting drunk, gossiping, or whatever else might hit the bad habit spot. When the soul is hungry enough it will find dinner somewhere. If it can’t be good food, then bad food will suffice.

 We often think of self-improvement as picking the no-food option over bad food. It is the squeamish legacy of our (or somebody’s) Puritan ancestors. If I am dieting, I try to force myself into literal and emotional no-food, which seems to do not much more than turn snacking into the most utterly compelling activity in the world; if I am meditating and trying to pay attention to my breath some mission control center in my brain quite firmly decides that daydreaming is just the right thing to do, and even though my meditation teacher tells me to chill and just watch the wonderful cavalcade of my thoughts, I suddenly turn thinking into the Great Satan. Too Bad! I cry, as I try to force the square peg of rationality into the round hole of my actual being.

 If I wasn’t enveloped by my mental or physical bad habit, what would I be doing instead? In order to put the bad nourishment of the bad habit to one side, I need the good food of something else. This is where it gets tricky. I know what that good food might be – something like a fulfilling 6:00am yoga class, the exhilaration of a morning swim, that long sought-after regular meditation practice, joining a book club and then reading the book, the options are endless, but I often torture myself more than ever by feeling guilty for ditching the class and rolling over for another hour’s sleep.

 The art of life, let’s call it, is to find the particular yoga class, book, etc. that I find genuinely compelling. Then what we call self-discipline becomes relatively easy, and the good food becomes an attractor in my life, a refuge as they call it, not something I make myself do. That requires a more a diligent than usual search for what hits my particular spot. Wild swimming in a pristine mountain lake does not do it for me, though for someone else it may be just the ticket.

 Keeping the food metaphor going, would you go on a dumpster dive if you were literally starving? Most probably. I remember a news story of two men in Damascus during the war there, and they had not eaten for several days after government bombing of their part of town. As they searched through the rubble of bombed-out houses they found a rather ancient cake that was beginning to go mouldy. One of the men described this sudden, unexpected sweetness after weeks of survival food as the most delicious meal he ever had in his life.

 Certainly, in the spiritual and emotional realms we are all eating the mouldy cake of repetitive thought patterns, self-blaming, other-blaming, addictive consuming and so on, almost every minute of every day. They have their own sweetness. To resist this cake, you may have noticed, is virtually impossible. You best do it by finding something more enticing. Who would dumpster dive if they were offered a table at the restaurant? Our mission is to find good spirit restaurants that work for us. As a foodie obsesses over the best menus in town, we can become “life-ies,” connoisseurs of life chasing after the most nourishing, community-making, fulfilling activities we can find. Compulsions fill the spiritual vacuums of our life; fun drives out compulsion.   

Psychedelics can be a very good restaurant, giving us a ‘taste’ of wholeness. Whole people don’t do fractured things, and for a few hours or moments to be whole is a delight. After the medicine I can gather myself, gradually, gradually over time, getting to know fractured me more intimately, and so helping him/her/them, as we say, “heal.” Heal suggests there was disease or injury while wholeness suggests a reorganizing or an addition of missing parts. I think here reorganizing is the most useful word. Something gets fractured, shattered, and seeing how the jigsaw puzzle will look when it is back together is invaluable. But we do not just become whole for ourselves, as ourselves alone we are a small portion of another fragmented thing; we become whole as a devotional duty to the divine.

Emmanuel Kant and Demon Possession

Psychedelics have suddenly become the new cure for mental health issues, mainly because they give us that most novel of all experiences: a spiritual one. The idea is that a spiritual experience will brings us to a place of peace and wellbeing, which in turn will kickstart that mood reset we have all been looking for. But the variety of spiritual experience includes a lot more than gazing at beautiful sunsets or sitting at the bottom of a waterfall; you can also have encounters with extra-terrestrials, demons, hellscapes, angels, and all manner of other spirit beings that were not on your mind when you carefully set your intentions. If your worldview is basically a secular one, having these encounters can seriously rock that world and leave you feeling far less stable than when you started out. Wrestling with demons that can’t exist must be the one worry your poor anxious brain never considered.

 And when the trip is over, that world of yours may remain rocked for some while. Was my spiritual encounter an initiation into a huger and more bizarre universe than I ever imagined, or was it some drug-addled madness I need to forget about as quickly as possible? Oddly enough, I am going to argue that this apparently irreducible question of ‘which real is the real real?’ is simply the wrong one. But to get the right question we need the help of a new philosophy, or at least a wider and more deliberate one, and for that we go to Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), the Western world’s philosopher in chief.

Kant separated out our belief about what’s real, which is based on our sense impressions, from what he called “the thing in itself,” the something or other out there that we name as the world. The thing in itself, according to Kant, is by definition unknowable. We are like people in the matrix who have not yet been offered the blue pill or the red pill, naively mistaking the information of our sense impressions for direct knowledge of the thing in itself. Even if you then take the red pill and see that you are sitting in a vat being mind-controlled by evil aliens, how can you know that this world is not also a simulation that yet more powerful, commercial strength red pills will sweep aside, and so on ad infinitum? My wrestling match with a spirit being might have been just as I felt it, or it could have been an image conjured up by an exotic Jungian backwater of my brain, or it may have been a psychotic symptom curable by excellent prescribed pharmaceuticals, or something else entirely that I can’t even imagine. Perhaps the last. Kant’s point is that what I receive from my senses,that carefully crafted worldview of mine, are all inventions about a “thing in itself” that cannot in any way be known.

There is much in today’s science that agrees with Kant. Subatomic particles, rather than being reliably something, have properties that only come into being when someone is taking the time to measure them; the thing in itself remains a mystery. Matter, even the densest, hardest rock is mostly empty space with teeny tiny particles zooming around in it, and those particles may in fact be actual stuff or they it may be slightly tweaked light waves. Our eyes, which we take to be pretty reliable reporters of what is going on out there, only perceive three basic colours, while birds for instance also see ultraviolet light, meaning they can see a plethora of non-primary colours that we can’t perceive. So, when William Blake said that a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man, he could have added that even a wise man sees not the same tree as a humble sparrow. And after that there’s also string theory, which maintains that multiverses are perfectly plausible, in fact likely, and that there are eleven dimensions in all, the extra ones somehow tucked in this 3-D world of ours in unexpected little pockets that no-one can quite find.  

Neuroscience also agrees that we don’t know what we think we know. Perception is called “a controlled hallucination”, a hastily constructed sketch that the 86 billion neurons of our brain create while sitting in the darkness of the skull, trying to make sense, not of the world, but of the electric signals that are constantly being fed to it by sense organs. It would be massively wasteful for this brain to fiddle around with concepts like ultimate reality or truth, when its real remit is to create internal representations that are accurate enough to get us to survive through the afternoon. All the rest is self-promoting propaganda, and that right there is the brain’s dirtiest of dirty little secret.

So, when this slightly lazy but massively efficient brain of ours is confronted with a demon possession or with a beatific vision, it has to quickly make sense of something it has not encountered before. Let’s say it starts out on a trip with the rationalist template this culture provides it, but that all gets blown away with our very first chat with an extra-terrestrial centipede spirit-child. After the rationalist constructs have been shredded, the remaining cultural frame that we have is the ancient one of spirit beings, angels, demons, etc. The brain fulfills its job of making order from chaos, and apparently comes to the executive decision that it’s better to create an unpleasant world, even a previously impossible one, than to offer no world at all. We are story-telling creatures who will make sense of our experience, and while it’s happening we believe whatever the brain tells us about it, just as you believe you are flying when you have a flying dream, or that right now you are reading someone’s blog.

So, if no-one, from the pope to Christopher Hitchens, knows what’s really going on, then trying to figure out if this angel or if this demon is real, is pointless. We can no more discover the spiritual “thing in itself” than we can the physical one, and we have been stressing over the wrong question. The right question is: what’s next? Whatever the reality may have been, you have to figure out what the demon-free life is going to be like, and how you are going to keep yourself from inadvertently inviting the little monster back inside you. As Saint Matthew said, if the expelled demon goes back to his “house,” (i.e., you) and finds it “empty, swept and garnished,” he will invite “seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first state.” Turning to a more cheerful note, if you spent hours of unalloyed blissful adoration in a palpably real paradise, how do you infuse that utter bliss into your regular humdrum day-to-day existence?  

Let’s start with the demons. Whether the mythology I adopt is demon-based or psychological, I will probably feel “lightened” by my exorcism or whatever it was, and want to keep it that way. On the personal level you could say that demons get in through our weak spots, through windows left open or doors left ajar. These weak spots are things like negative patterns of thought, fears and aversions, and insufficiencies in our capacity to respond to others and live a full and creative life. Now that we have been purged of the bad guy, it’s our job to fix up those thought patterns, fears and insufficiencies. We do that with the normal tools of therapy, or whatever self-help gig it is that you most admire.

Where do these weak spots come from though? I believe they comes from negative inheritances in our particular family lines, which themselves come from the larger culture, and finally from us as a species. Human culture is the freight train that bad energy sometimes hops onto and will ride to the end of the line if we let it. Its most favorite caboose is those endless negative thought loops, the shame, the closure, the fear and rage that we are all wrestling with. It strikes me how many of us believe somewhere in our souls that there is something about us that makes us uniquely worthless, that I am the excruciatingly obvious odd one out in the room, that I am a child inside while everyone around me is a grown adult. This gets passed on to us through direct trauma and abuse, through parental shortcomings like an inability to speak out or advocate for oneself, and through a general societal silence, such as the unwritten rule that we don’t suddenly stop and stare at the beautiful sky while walking down the street, or uninhibitedly hug a tree or lamppost if we feel like it. This stuff has been going on a long time, and every measure I take to fix it is a blow for humanity and our collective trauma karma.

 And now for the beatific visions. Back in the Middle Ages these were a part of the regular cultural landscape, well understood by everybody. You just needed to check with the local churchman that your vision was not cunningly sent by Satan to deceive you, and after that you were good to go. Then along came the scientific revolution and we all, by and large, became secular. Visions went out of style. All in all that’s a good thing, because we also came to understand the world more accurately, learned how to feed ourselves better, invented the idea of human rights, and no longer think that the lord of the manor is the boss of our lives.

 Today we don’t have to starve in the desert for months or live in a monastery for years, we can pop a pill, have our visionary experience on a Saturday afternoon, go home in an Uber, and make it to for work on Monday. This is a good thing, because now we are on the brink of combining the commonsense fairness of the secular worldview with the richness of the visionary one. But since we left behind the Mediaeval inner mapping, we don’t have yet have a new cultural framework to replace it. Until that framework is built our visions will more easily slip away from us and six months after my union with God I may totally be back in the emotional doldrums, and that ego which so happily conspired its own demise while tripping is now happily up and running again.

 We will build this new cultural framework by giving ourselves a spiritual education. That may (probably should) include meditation or some similar kind of practice, prayer of some sort, and reading the spiritual literature. You don’t get an education without reading. We are very lucky that these days that the spiritual traditions of the entire world are at our fingertips, but oddly perhaps, I personally have grown interested in the mystical traditions of the local culture, the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, and from more recent times, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Anyway, there’s plenty to choose from, especially since there’s also the literature of near-death experiences, spiritual emergence, circular economy, and how to save the planet.

 These two things – putting the spiritual house in order so that the goblins don’t get in, and giving yourself a spiritual education – are what’s needed for the next step in human growth, what Teilhard de Chardin described as the development of planetary mind. Right now our planetary mind is still a pretty grumpy one. In the YouTube video The Most Important Moment of a Person’s Lifetime a woman named Reinee Pasarow describes how her near-death encounter led to a new perspective on the importance of simple human kindness:

 I moved into a sea of light. It was as if every atom, every molecule in this room had been electrified with love, with very creative and powerful love…this love I realised was the greatest force of all things, and it is as if every atom were singing and was welcoming me and was full of love. And yet I was more and more attracted to what I perceived to be the centre of this sea of light, it’s as if in the centre of this sea there was a sun, and my heart was irresistibly attracted to that…and in a tremendous and magnificent instant I entered this centre of the sea of light, this sun in the sea, the light,  the heart of the light, and it was as if I were devastated, it was as if I were, you know, just spider silk in the solar wind, completely devasted by bliss, and by rapture and by ecstasy…

 And it seemed as if I was in that non-place, that place of non-being as an individual forever, and then yet again my consciousness at some point was gathered back together as an individual, like sands upon a shore into an individual form, and I was accompanied now by a presence as opposed to simply being devastated by this holy storm of light, and I was called to recount for the deeds of my life…What was more important than just the choices I made were my motivations and my intent and the state of my heart in doing any single action.

 And I realised…how every action one takes is like a stone cast in the water, and if it’s loving, that stone that’s cast on the water goes out and touches the first person it’s intended for, and then it touches another person, and then it touches another person, because that person interacts with other people, and so on and so on, and every action has a reverberating effect on every single one of us on the face of this planet. So if I had committed a loving action, it was like love upon love, upon love, upon light and…if I had committed a truly pure and loving action it had reverberated throughout the stuff of every individual on the planet. And I felt that action reverberating through them and through myself, and I felt it in a way that is beyond what we can even feel ourselves on this plane of existence…so the significance of one’s actions totally changed.

 It looks like Pasarow’s realizations about loving kindness have moved from something that happened in her near-death experience into a “totally changed” understanding of regular life. She now has a deeper take on life than the culturally received one she was born into, and sees that apparently small actions carry huge significance when they come from a “pure and loving” heart. These actions reverberate far beyond what we can perceive, into “the stuff of every individual on the planet,” and this kind of self-transformation happens not as a strategy for improved mental health, but as a contribution we can make to the work of the world.

 Like the question of what’s real in the psychedelic, we don’t have to agonize over whether Pasarow authentically entered dimensions beyond time and space, that’s a “thing in itself” we will never know. Getting your mythology right is not a matter of nailing down what’s true, it is about making productive meaning. We have the freedom to pick from the smorgasbord of metaphors at our disposal, but whatever we light upon, our efforts are all about the further development of love. Love is at the heart of all our many and various worldviews, and how much we can love will be the measure of who we are. So, if we have found ourselves wrestling with demons or oddly at home singing in the heavenly choir, it is not important because it might improve or hinder our mental health outcomes, it’s important because it might soften our hearts.

Thor Among the Giants: Part V

THE NOOSPHERE

The 20th century paleontologist and spiritual philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin created a mythology that can help us in a different way to William Blake’s system. Where Blake saw the human enterprise as restoring what has been lost, Teilhard saw it more as creating the as-yet uncreated. Teilhard was a Catholic priest who believed in evolution at a time when such ideas were not in vogue with his church, so they sent him from his native France to China and forbade him from lecturing or publishing. Twenty-three years later the exile had clearly backfired, since Teilhard had absorbed Asian philosophy and it was in China that he co-discovered Home Erectus, a vital “missing link” in the chain of human evolution.

 But Teilhard didn’t please his fellow scientists either. Rather than seeing evolution on the usual materialist grounds of random mutations he viewed it as the unfolding of divine love. To him, as matter moves into ever greater complexity, the divine is expressing itself more and more fully and accurately. Our planet started as a rocky sphere with a molten core, out of which evolved a hydrosphere of water, an atmosphere, and eventually a biosphere of organic life. This transition from inorganic to organic was of course a great leap forward, as was the emergence of consciousness and self-reflection from, say, pond weed into us. Up until now, says Teilhard, evolution has been divergent, creating multiple different life forms, but now it has become convergent, as the self-aware spirit, in the form of humans, seeks to connect and cohere towards a planetary mind:

 Are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an assembling of an even higher order, the birth of some kind of unique focal point from the converging fires of millions of elementary focal points scattered over the surface of the thinking earth?

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 This “assembling” is the evolving of a new sphere around us, beyond the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere, and Teilhard calls this new one the noosphere, from the Greek noos, meaning thought or mind:

 From day to day the human mass is “setting”; it is building itself up; it is weaving around the globe a network of material organization, of communication, and of thought. Submerged as we are in this process and accustomed to regard it as nonphysical, we pay little attention to it. Suppose that we at last come to look at it as we would a crystal or a plant: we immediately realize that, through us, the earth is engaged in adding to its lithosphere, its atmosphere, its biosphere and its other layers, one more envelope – the last and the most remarkable of all. This is the thinking zone, the “noosphere.” Humankind…is indeed the “hominized” earth – we might even say “hominized” nature.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 The noosphere is not tangible like, for instance, the hydrosphere, but it is perceptible, just as radio waves and light are:

 For an imaginary geologist who might come in the distant future to inspect our fossilized globe, the most astounding of revolutions experienced by the Earth would unequivocally be put at the beginning of what has been so aptly called the Psychozoic Era. And at that very moment, for some Martian capable of analyzing sidereal radiations psychically as much as physically, the primary characteristic of our planet certainly would not seem to be how blue it is with seas or green with forests – but how phosphorescent with thought.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 From his earliest days as a child the mystic in Teilhard saw, as he recounts it, “the divine radiating from the blazing heart of matter,” something that the thoughtful tripper might relate to with some ease. It is this divine spark which has been driving evolution forward, realizing itself more and more completely as we evolve. Aldous Huxley saw this divine spark in the humblest example of matter when, as he recounts in The Doors of Perception, he looks at the painting “Judith” by Botticelli:

 My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim’s hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith’s pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.

 This was something I had seen before – seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli’s picture.

                                                                                    The Doors of Perception

 Cleaned up doors of perception create a different state of being in the perceiver, in this particular case, Aldous. To Teilhard, the insight of the mystic is not that spirit is superior to matter and we should all fly away to God Land, but that spirit is the energized dimension of matter which we have been mulishly disregarding all along. Blake said it too:

 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is

A portion of the Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets

Of Soul in this age.

                                                The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Given that today you can be in an online chat including people from all the inhabited regions of the earth, it has been natural for some commentators to equate the noosphere with the emergence of the internet. You might at first question that, since so much of the content of our global communication is nonsense, triviality and hate speech, but the fact that we can talk to one another from far and wide has significance for planetary mind. Human civilization does best when we are packed in together, as with the first Mesopotamian city of Ur, while the Renaissance kicked off in the close-knit cultural centers of a few small Italian city states, and the intensity of modern science came when we massed into huge industrial cities. More people talking to more people generates a vital intensity of innovative thinking.

 But Teilhard is saying something more. He suggests that besides exchanging fresh ideas with one another, global connectivity generates a literal planetary mind, of which we individuals are constituent “grains”. Or, as Blake would have it, an awakened Albion is a new consciousness composed of our many consciousnesses, an emergent property of coherently collected individuals. When he rises from his spiritual slumber, Albion’s consciousness will be made from all of us, just as we are made of cells which at an earlier evolutionarily stage were once individual micro-beings. What force is pitching us into this increasing coherence? Teilhard names this the Omega Point, and that’s what we will look at in the next section.   

Thor Among the Giants: Part IV

A Something Lost

Depression is a lamenting that something has been lost; anxiety is fearing that it will become lost, and compulsions/addictions are trying to make up for the fact that it has already been lost. But what’s lost?

 Some traditions call it the garden of Eden, others say it’s our Buddha nature, while others again might argue that it’s personal authenticity or even mental hygiene; we all just know that something very important inexplicably went missing in the mail between me and myself. In this essay we’ve looked at a few models that offer a description of what went awry for the human condition. The chemical imbalance theory of mental health says that what was lost is the proper amount of serotonin in the brain, get that straightened out and you can be happy again. This turns out to be the brainchild of the pharmaceutical industry and just a fable to sell more product.

 The trauma theory holds that our emotional well-being was damaged after devastatingly painful things that happened to us. This certainly is true, but it does restrict our thinking to the personal domain, and with that, just like Thor, we are wrestling with the world-size Midgard Serpent while taking it to be a household cat. Herbert Marcuse broke out of this limitation by showing us that nobody can be at ease with themselves in an alienated society, even one with unprecedented wealth and comfort. We have put ourselves in a candy floss hell of our own making, and only the Great Refusal of no longer participating as compliant consumers can get us out. Marcuse points out that we get our hearts broken not just by the families we come from but by the world we live in.

 William Blake takes it up a notch, from the societal to the cosmic. Blake envisaged humanity as one single person, who he names, in rather inbred English fashion, as Albion. Albion has a problem: he has fallen into spiritual sleep, and each one of us, as an individual cells in Albion’s body, suffers from the self-same ailment as the giant we compose. With our wounds of individual trauma and ancestral inheritance, and the inevitable spiritual doziness of living in an alienated society, we are dissociated from our feelings and from contact with spiritual vision, the Human Imagination. Our doors of perception are a mess. Blake saw this as a “fall,” like the fall of Adam and Eve, but Albion did not fall because he disobeyed the laws of a crabby and pedantic God, his discomfiture came when his dominant reasoning powers began to lord it over his other energies of emotion, sensation and imagination. In the moment of its fall, humanity entered the “one-fold” dimension of Ulro, so strikingly similar to the world of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man.

 In Blake’s longer prophetic works, Albion’s resuscitation  involves a somewhat dizzying host of characters battling it out in various ways, and in the end, he revives into a new heyday of wholeness that will live inside us individually and between us socially. When he is all well, Albion is reunited with his female self who, oddly enough is the city of Jerusalem as well as being his girlfriend. It’s that kind of an epic, and you and I can urge the process of Albion’s awakening along right now, when we lie down with an eye-mask, listening to a playlist, taking a little something for our brain, and sinking into the great unconscious mind.

 Seeing our personal problems from the societal and the cosmic dimensions helps us better understand what’s going on, as we work on healing ourselves and unclogging the doors of perception, not just for us as individuals, but for everybody. We don’t have to feel bad if it turns out to be a bigger job than we first thought. But while Blake saw the spiritual journey as a revival of an Edenic state we once had, another thinker much closer to our time saw it as an evolving into a something that has yet to emerge into existence. That thinker was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

And now...a Poem

So much of tripping seems to boil down to love — divine love, and love between humans. Being human, our part of this love thing is to get in touch with the divine stuff and spread it out as best we can among ourselves. But there’s a lot of accumulated inertia in the way, from the whirlpool of folly (our own crazy lifestyles, jealousies, attachments) to the valleys of the ghosts (the lives we lead where we fail to pick up the opportunities to love and let it die). The solution comes up in so many trips — let love be, that is let love be it’s own weird self, and follow the trails it wants to go down. Love will always bring surprises.

How does love grow?
Ask the holly bush.
Where did my love go?
Follow the bee.
Will the 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 wish 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.

When a Veterinary Surgeon is the Best Trip Sitter

Reindeer go wild for those red and white mushrooms, elephants get drunk on naturally fermenting fruits, while apparently some lemurs lick, or nip, toxic millipedes to get a buzz. Have a heart then for this young bear, who went all out on the rhododendrons. Is it fanciful to wonder if the vet used ‘the teddy bears’ picnic’ as part of the play list?
Tripping Bear

Thor Among the Giants: Part III

 When Marcuse wrote One Dimensional Man, he meant that title metaphorically, not, as it were, mathematically. It’s another way of saying that life in Western civilization had become automated, zombie-like, and it sucks to be us. The eighteenth/nineteenth century poet and artist William Blake however, had a vision of humanity that involved distinct dimensions, four of them in fact, and this vision encompassed a mythic roadmap for how to get from an alienated, one-dimensional world like Marcuse’s, into a four-dimensional world of freedom and fullness. We gotta get out of this place said William Blake, and pretty often he did.  

 Literary people don’t have all that much to say about Blake the artists, and art people tend to ignore him as a poet; but we will contrive to ignore both and consider him for his system of thought. Central to Blake’s thinking was the four-fold (i.e., four-dimensional) vision, which comprises of Ulro (the one-fold world), Generation (two-fold), Beulah (three-fold) and Eternity, or Eden (four-fold). That four-fold world is the one most often entered by mystics, saints, madcap poets, and people who took mushrooms 45 minutes ago.

 Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!

                                    Letter to Thomas Butts

 It may seem odd at first that Blake had it in for Isaac Newton, plus some other Enlightenment luminaries of his time like John Locke and Francis Bacon, who after all were the vanguard of the scientific revolution and the birth of liberalism. But for Blake Newton’s sleep is the triumph of reason over vision, it’s the dark side of the Enlightenment, where matter is just whirling lifeless particles, and consciousness is an emergent property of particles that have fortuitously arranged themselves into the shape of a brain. To Blake though, the world is “all alive…where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy,” and this world is animated by the Human Imagination, which is nothing less than the “divine body.” Imagination is the primary reality, and all others are secondary:

 In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within
In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.
                                                                                    Jerusalem

 One-dimensional Ulro is where Newton would take us – a mechanical, lifeless, monovision realm with landscapes of sand and stone and a thought-world composed of rule books and an unyielding moral law, the harsh machineries of the mind. It’s rock bottom for humanity. Blake describes, for instance, how in Ulro artisans and craftsmen are turned into slaves of complex lifeless wheels turning the cogs of other lifeless wheels whose spiritual outcome is:

To perplex youth in their outgoings and to bind to labours
Of day and night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file
And polish brass and iron hour after hour laborious workmanship
Kept ignorant of the use that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread
In ignorance to view a small portion and think that All
And call it Demonstration blind to all the simple rules of life
                                                            The Four Zoas

Given “a scanty pittance of bread,” the youth, the workers, suffer not only from physical deprivation, but from the spiritual deprivation of the “small portion” of reality assigned to them in this alienated world. Their life has shrunk into a travesty of humanness by the cold and linear world of proof, disproof and Demonstration, which at the time Blake wrote was in the process of creating the “dark, Satanic mills” of an industrializing society. We create machines, and then our machines recreate us, as in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where Charlie busily mends the moving cogs of giant machinery as they convey him through the bowels of a massive, dehumanized factory. Or in the darker vision of the automaton-like workers trudging out of the factory in the shift-change scene at the beginning of Metropolis. Such realities can only come as a result of impoverished Imagination:

 To the eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way...As a man is So he Sees.

 The two-fold world of Generation is a step up from Ulro, but not by all that much. It has at least organic life in it, but it is the life of what Blake calls “the Vegetative World,” a place, or state of mind, ruled by striving, sex and power, where everything has its opposite or contrary, like male/female, subject/object, predator/prey and so on. All the genes here are selfish ones and, “Life lives upon death & by devouring appetite all things subsist on one another.” It is better than Ulro because at least it has the pulse of life in it, but it does not have that divine spark, Imagination. In the Christian myth though, Generation is where the sacred snuck in and incarnated itself and, as they say, the Word was made flesh.  

 Beulah, the three-fold world, is an odd one. It is a dreamy, soft, paradisical dimension, lit by moonlight and bedecked with flowers where love, especially sensual love, rules – as opposed to the straight up sex of Generation. In Beulah there are people, not just forces, and those people are in relationship with one another, but it is a waystation, a resting spot, between spiritually dead Ulro and the fullness of Eternity. Beulah is where Imagination makes its first appearance in Blake’s schema, and you might be in Beulah when you enjoy a trippy summer’s afternoon with friends, Woodstocking around between trees and bushes.

 Eternity is the place where we fully live our humanness, the destination point for those emerging from the nightmare of one-dimensional existence, This is not the eternity of the Christian heaven where, as a reward for failing to do all the selfish things you wanted to do, you get to be singing forever and ever with your saintly chums. Blake’s Eternity is alive and engaged and has nothing to do with endless duration. Instead of the heavenly party you cannot leave, Blake’s Eternity is outside of time, as these couplets make clear:

 To see the World in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

 You reach Eternity not through good behavior but through improved perception, as his oft-quoted saying points out: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is -- infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” A cavern, we could say, composed of the stones of Ulro. But Eternity is a state of total enchantment with creation; as Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” and it was Henry David Thoreau who gave the corollary that: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” The tripping brain can go into a state of such powerful concentration that we may dutifully enter Eternity not only by being exposed to say, sublime music or spectacular scenery, but by perceiving any portion of creation, such as a weed or a pebble.  

 In the alienation model, Marcuse saw escape from the one-dimensional world through what he called the Great Refusal, where we choose to no longer indulge ourselves in the soporific consumer joys that chain us to the current economic (and we might say spiritual) system. Blake had an entirely different way to escape from Ulro. It is not so much a jailbreak as a consummation, where the other three states fold into Eternity – the reasoning faculty of Ulro, the bodily powers in Generation, the mortal love of Beulah, completed by the fire of Imagination in Eternity. It’s a four-fold completeness where the states are in balance and harmonized together, not unlike C.G. Jung’s process of individuation, where the four human faculties of thinking, sensation, feeling and intuition harmonize into one unity he calls Self. Jung’s claim was that these four human qualities correspond to the four elements of Mediaeval thought, and in that system the thinking function = air, sensation = earth, feeling = water and intuition = fire. To Jung the bad science of the Middle Ages turned out to be good psychology, or at least significant archetypal psychology that can be useful for us today.

 The four dimensions of Blake’s system correspond to Jung and to the four elements like this: Ulro = thinking = air; Generation = sensation = earth; Beulah = feeling = water; and Eternity = intuition = fire. As in these other systems, it is when the four things are harmonized into one whole that they find completeness. We may feel this too sometimes while tripping, when we experience the peace beyond all understanding, and we gain a temporary alignment, a true taste of paradise, where everything is “okay” and we don’t need to change a thing. In Eternity those bad boys Locke, Bacon and Newton finally fall in their rightful place, all friends together and counterbalancing the great and fiery poets Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer.

 Blake’s personal mythology is complex and sometimes bewildering, but there is simplicity in the fact that his main hero, called Albion, is the person where this harmonizing takes place. Blake was a tad chauvinistic in picking this name, since Albion personifies England and maleness, not something we will all totally identify with. If we forgive him this indiscretion, Albion can stand as a placeholder image for humanity as a whole. Albion, “the Four-fold Man,” is not in very good shape, because he has had a fall from grace rather like Adam and Eve in the Fall from Eden, except that Albion’s Fall has nothing to do with sin, it is a loss of his capacity for visionary experiences. He has divided from his Imagination.  Albion’s fall involves a profound and troubled spiritual slumber that has landed him in the dismal reaches of Ulro. Most of Blake’s prophetic works are about Albion’s fitful, reckless, and often quite violent efforts to wake up. It’s a compelling picture, though not a pretty one:

 I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep…
I see the Past, Present and Future, existing all at once
Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose.
For Bacon & Newton sheathed in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations
I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton, black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.
                                                                        Jerusalem

 Albion, however, has more than just sleep issues to deal with. In his fall from grace, he fractures into different parts, the main ones being his Emanation, his female side, and his Specter, the reasoning self. It is the Specter who is responsible for the “cogs tyrannic”, the churning, lifeless wheels that powered the dark Satanic mills of a rapidly industrializing merrie England. These wheels have hardly relented in the modern age, as they churn out the super-rationalist mindset of mass production, mass bureaucracy, and mass marketing, with a Midas touch for death of the spirit. This perilous circumstance, this cultural “setting,” is where we have no choice but to take our psychedelics and try to get an expansive taste of Eternity. Meanwhile, we risk taking a ride to Ulro, which we will experience as being trapped inside a fractal, or an endless computer game or some other kind of soulless hell region. 

 What, it’s worth asking, is the personal experience of Eternity? In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov Markel, the older brother of the saintly Father Zossimo lives a life of complete cynicism and dissolution until, when confronted by death at an early age, he suddenly and almost miraculously gets it how vacuous his life has been, and he finds his way into Eternity. This exchange on his sickbed is recalled by Zossimo:

 “Mother don’t weep darling,” he would say, “I’ve long to live yet, long to rejoice with you, and life is glad and joyful”
“Ah dear boy, how can you talk of joy when you lie feverish at night, coughing as though you would tear yourself to pieces.”
“Don’t cry mother,” he would answer, “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we don’t see it; if we did we should have heaven on earth the next day.”

  Markel says both that paradise is now, and that heaven on earth would be the next day. Why the delay? I think it’s that the tripping, or the ecstatic, brain can move into Eternity right now at this moment, as the doors of perception go through a thorough cleaning; but heaven on earth can only be experienced with other people, and it will take time for us to recognize each other and develop trust. Hence the tomorrow, and when in Jerusalem Blake said to Albion:

 Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine

he was looking towards the collective awakening, not just a private one. We can say that Markel, having found himself in the mutual love divine, is a bit of a spiritual early riser, and he reaches out to his fellow humans in a way they don’t yet understand. Blake’s mission was to let us know that we could all wake up to mutual love, and in Jerusalem he gives us a job description that is not just for him as an artist, but for all of us:

 I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination

The bosom of God is the Human Imagination, and once we realize this, experience it rather, Albion will start to rouse from his sleep. But this heaven is not the perfected heaven of Christianity, any more than being in Eternity stops the passage of time, death and corruption. It is the heaven we see in the little flower, the joy of an Eternity outside of time. Many people over the years have tried to wake up the collective by building Utopian communities which have flourished for a while, but all seem to flounder in the end, not always because there was anything particularly wrong with their ideas, but because there was too much Ulro in the personnel involved, as there inevitably has to be at this point in our evolving. This is perhaps why Marx was wise in saying that he would not try to write recipes for the cook-shops of the future.  

 Soon after that last exchange Markel was told he was expected to die in the next few days. He then said:

 “Why reckon the days? One day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dear ones, why do we quarrel, try to outshine each other, and keep grudges against each other? Let’s go straight into the garden, walk and play there, love, appreciate, and kiss each other, and glorify life.”

 “Your son cannot last long,” the doctor told my mother, as she accompanied him to the door. “The disease is affecting his brain.”

 The window of his room looked out into the garden, and our garden was a shady one, with old trees in it which were coming into bud. The first birds of spring were flitting in the branches, chirruping and singing at the windows. And looking at them and admiring them, he began suddenly begging their forgiveness too, “Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me, for I have sinned against you too.” None of us could understand that at the time, but he shed tears of joy, “Yes,” he said, “there was such a glory of God all about me; birds, trees, meadows, sky, only I lived in shame and dishonoured it all and did not notice the beauty and the glory.”

 We routinely dishonour our literal and imaginal birds and meadows by not seeing them from the eyes of Eternity, and indeed, the consumption-based society we live in has no regard for the sacred or for birds. Thoreau saw that it has no regard even for its inhabitants:

 Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistakes, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them…Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything other than a machine…  The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another so tenderly.
                                                                                                            Walden

 For those of us who do not have spontaneous mystical experiences, adherence to a psychedelic regimen is probably our best ticket to Eternity. Some of us were driven to psychedelics for solutions to what at the outset we called mental health conditions, and it would make sense that the ones more burdened by suffering should be a vanguard for change. No everyone has noticed that this dance we are doing is on hot coals.

 Psychiatry is coalescing around the idea that the peek into paradise can be a tool to alleviate a gamut of mental conditions, from fear of death, to PTSD, to nicotine addiction and so on. But this is like giving CPR to the canary that just keeled over in your coal mine. It’s a refusal to read the cultural warning signs so you can order everyone back to work. When the world bakes into an Ulro garbage heap of toxic waste what will it matter if we in the West have done enough therapy to become “well-adjusted”? The emotional anguish of the individual cells in the body of Albion signals that all is not at all well, not just for too many suffering individuals, but for the culture, with all humanity. When the scope of the problem is restricted to a model of personal mental health issues, of symptoms and intervention, that restricted view pushes humanity back towards spiritual doziness.

 To see things fully we have to shift from a paradigm of mental health disorders, interventions, and relief, and into creating Markel’s heaven on earth. Not that you will find that in the mission statement of most mental health clinics, I’ll admit, but I believe that nevertheless we must get serious about treating one another with kindness, like that tender fruit Thoreau mentioned. We have to take the time to see a tree as a living miracle, not a green thing in the way. “As we are, so we will see,” and if we practice new seeing we will incrementally change who we are.

 When we are burdened by “treatment-resistant” depression or anxiety, we are feeling the pain of being confined to the Imagination-free realms of Ulro and Generation. We don’t so much have mental hygiene deficits, as if we forgot to wash our mental hands, we lack vision, and as the Book of Proverbs says in the Bible, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” When I get depressed, or I despair, it’s not just me, it is me as part of a people that is perishing, and my struggle is our struggle. Psychedelics have the capacity to help us in a struggle that is not just for our own “wellness goals,” but part of a spiritual imperative to save the people. It’s just that the arena for the struggle is personal experience.

 When Blake says:

 He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise

 he is pointing out the offramp to the last exit from Ulro. The mental health industry, when it studies psychedelics and remarks on their efficacious effects at a six-month follow-up, it is trying to bind up “the joy” of our experience with logic and Demonstration. The mystical experience is suddenly in vogue today, and when psychiatrists declare it an effective intervention, they are overlooking its volatile nature and trying to trap it in the butterfly net of rational categorization. The mystical experience, by its very nature however, will work to disintegrate the cannon of psychological classification into the glory of Eternity’s sunrise.

 I remember one day, back when dentists were nice enough to give us nitrous oxide, being quite high in a dentist’s chair one day when I realized with a sudden shock that I was being duped. There was no numbing here, this was not a painkiller; it was just that the dance of consciousness had suddenly become so absolutely compelling to my mind that I couldn’t shift my attention back to the pain. I had moved from our usual mode of pain/defense/grab to one of explore/delight/express, and the capacity to focus on pain was just gone. Something similar may happen after a psychedelic journey – the emotional pain is not necessarily gone, but the moments of sheer ecstasy have changed our perspective on it and rendered it more marginal. “Everything has changed and nothing has changed,” we sometimes say after a journey, and in that aftermath, yes we still bring our fragmented selves to a fragmented world, but now we perceive the world and us differently, and the parts of us that were previously troublesome and shameful have now become a worthy object of interest and compassion.

 Culturally, we are not in a place right now where we can expect this heaven-on-earth perspective to remain durable. It slips away, and we forget ourselves until the next visit to Eternity. It’s good to do a practice of some sort not only to keep the fairy dust in our hands for as long as possible, but also to do the long, slow work of bringing that new perspective inside us until, eventually, we may become its spontaneous expression. We all have to find what works for us, and it’s worth trying different things until we find what really suits.

 A practice I like is walking among trees. If I can find a spot quiet enough and tree-ey enough, where I can walk very slowly, then I creep among the trees, as if tracking something. I do my best to pretend that my local park is mine alone and ready to turn itself into a personal fairyland. It’s not much more than a walking meditation really – except that I am not shutting off my surroundings in order to tune into my body, I am tuning into the props and cues around me, known as trees, so I can absorb some of their magic and remember my own. As a kid I used to do this, much more effectively, when I went birds spotting. It was like slowly creeping through my own secret cathedral as I tried, not so successfully, to be so quiet even the wild birds would not notice me.

 Whatever the practice may be, and I hope it will be different for everybody, it requires a shift in identity’s centre of gravity. For me as a child a good deal of my identity naturally drifted towards Eternity/Eden, as did yours, but when we go through the slings and arrows of regular life, we are forced to attend to our ego wounds and ego dangers until we move location to the worried, angry, self-recriminating day-to-day world of pain/defense/grab. And then you wake up one morning and say, “Oh, how strange, I don’t know who I am any more.” Instead of being ugly ducklings that grow into beautiful swans, we have somehow reversed the process, and are in danger of losing the essence of what Mary Oliver called our “one wild and precious life.”

 I believe our personal practice should not be a severe self-discipline but an act of delicately recapturing that wild and precious life. When I sat in that dentist’s chair something sacred was happening, as Eternity was once again falling in love with the productions of time, through the vehicle of one lucky human being. The thing about psychedelics is that they give us hope; it’s not a hope portrayed in MRI scans, where brain circuits “light up” in one way or another, it is the taste of heaven-on-earth that threw Mandel into an ecstasy, because he saw what was possible. It is within us to realize that.  

The Chemical Imbalance Theory Topples Off Its Pedestal

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is known as the therapist’s Bible, perhaps because we worship at the altar of health insurance reimbursements. In any case, the DSM has dictated treatment for the different kinds of human suffering world-wide for many decades. You would expect this domination of Western medicine would have been based on Western scientific research, but it hasn’t. In this talk James Davies shows what happened. He interviewed the main players in the creation of the DSM and he dug into the archival records of their meetings. He reveals that the DSM was made by a bunch of people getting together in a room and deciding by consensus (not research evidence) what seemed a likely mental health condition and what its criteria ought to be. In other words they basically made it up.

Davies goes on to describe how the psychiatric profession has been corrupted by pharmaceutical industry, with payoffs and bribes to promote their particular products, leading to a vast over-prescription of mental health drugs, falsifying of research, and the prescription of drugs with dubious efficacy. He explodes the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of mental disorders, which maintains that depression is caused by a shortage of serotonin in the brain. This myth has been the backbone of over-prescription for decades.

James Davis

Funnily enough just this week the University College of London came out with a study that shows serotonin levels are no different between depressed people and non-depressed people. One of the lead researchers pointed out in an interview that when anti-depressants help someone that is no proof of a chemical imbalance, since “having a headache does not mean you have a Paracetamol deficiency, or if you are socially anxious at a party that you have an alcohol deficiency.”

Serotonin study

None of this is to say that anti-depressants don’t work, and work well, for some people. But our science has been subsumed under the banner of marketing campaigns and promotions, while the inconvenient truths have been swept under the carpet. The mental health industry has fallen in love with classifying, numbering, and medicalizing. It forgot the fact that we become sad and despairing because of life conditions, trauma, or attachment wounds – not because something went wrong with our brains.  

The Flowering of Love

What I call my personal journey is the accumulated suffering, learning, and meaning-making that come in a lifetime. But why should I think of it as my journey only? If I am ‘part of’ a community, a species, a life-force, then what was distilled in my journey belongs not just to me, but that larger something as well. It’s like being one tiny picture in the much bigger picture of a photomosaic. Finding meaning is not about individual me, making sense of things on my terms, it’s about noticing how I fit into the various bigger pictures of which I am a part.

The biggest of these big pictures is the journey of love, love on its pilgrimage of soul-forming and universe-consummation. Love on a mission. Suffering is not my personal bad luck or bad karma, it is what happens when love does not reach into all the nooks and crannies of our beings. Suffering shows us how far the tide of love has yet to reach. If humanity is not just a concept but an entity with a living heart, then we are the atoms of its body, each with a role to fulfill. If the toes are hurting, the ears will sooner or later hear about it, because in the end the one great thing that all of us must follow, and that we cannot allow to be impeded, is the flow and the flowering of love.  

Dead-End Jobs

In life you probably want to have your heart broken a few times, to suffer disappointments, see a few setbacks that you either overcome or learn to reconcile with, so you can be seasoned into the full flavour of the human sauce. But it’s hard to even imagine a flavouring so complex and profound that it requires us to devise the pain of a soul-crushing job that repeats over and over again into stupefying boredom; the agony of being a child in a world that will nurture your body while it is enraged by the expression of your spirit; of being in a family relationship or a social setting where your personhood is treated as the enemy. Some deprivation and making-do is part of the adventure of life, and demanding that the adventure be adventurous all the time is asking too much, misses the point. There have to be dull bits to every story. But to weary your days away in drudgery is a bitter pill that simply denies life its reason for being there. Why do we hide from our own hearts how awful it is to squander the life force in constructs like a ‘soul-destroying’ job? No one can want that as part of the toxic waste of industry.  
And we who have been the victims of spiritual strangulation then continue the strangulation on our own time, because like those before us and around us, we don’t have a better gameplan. But you can say to yourself (that makeshift self we have been living in and responding to the world with since we left the crucible of childhood), enough! We do not need to be creating the same dilemmas and choosing the same dull options (like complaining and blaming) over and over again. We can breathe, enjoy, and do the be here now thing. It really is a perfectly workable option. We can agree to disagree with ourselves, and we are always allowed to wish for what we want in the face of our foolish self-programming. I can have deliberate conversations with the habitual version of me, the one on automatic, and tell him there is pleasure in the next breath if I just choose to scoop it up. Those conversations can happen whenever I choose, for as long as the listener is there to receive.

Thor Among the Giants: Part II

Poor old Thor, thinking he was doing ordinary tasks, like drinking a tankard of beer or tussling with a little cat, only to find out later that everything was happening on a cosmic scale he was totally unprepared for. And like him, we assume our persistent emotional afflictions are purely personal small-scale stuff when really they are part of a fierce and terrible wailing, reverberating through the centuries from the grief of long-forgotten bones. We have forebears who did not live in happy, rustic villages, but in harsh climates, warm or cold, where survival was touch and go, and one deception or betrayal might mean survival for one family and death for another. Where the rich were owners not just of property but of people, free to dispose of them at their whim or sadistic pleasure. The butchery of humans against humans has been going on a long time now, and the wreckage is all around us and in us.

 Trauma is unavoidable. We live in a world where life maintains itself by destroying itself, where animals eat each other, where cold, hunger and death are part of the deal. But the trauma we humans create in war, in the workplace and the household is totally gratuitous. The long, frozen East European winter is unavoidable, but the siege of Mariupol was a human-made catastrophe, as was World War II, the war in Iraq, etc. And on the smaller, household scale, there is the constant, moment-by-moment uncalled-for violence and micro-violence we do to each other that Leonard Cohen described as:

            The homicidal bitching
           That goes down in every kitchen
            Over who’s to serve
            And who’s to eat.

 The trauma theory of mental health, superior as it is to the “brain dead” chemical imbalance theory that came before it, looks away from the wailing of the bones down the centuries and keeps us in the personal realm of the here and now, today. But you know what happens to those who ignore their own history...It’s not that the trauma theory is in any way wrong, it’s just incomplete. Not only do hurt people hurt people, but self-limited people limit people, who themselves become self-limited people, and so on, involuntarily down the generations. To discover what trauma is part of, what it is transmitting, we have to go cosmic and grapple with the Midgard Serpent of our collective pain.

 To take an example, the average European citizen of the early modern period would likely have been wrestling with an overwhelming sense of guilt and original sin, chastising themselves in even the littlest expression of joy or exuberance, fearing that it will bring them to the gates of Hell and eternal torment. That guilt passes on down to today, quite possibly to someone who has had little contact with the ins and outs of the Christian belief system, but nonetheless carries a conviction that at core there is something wrong with them, that they must work day and night to lift the spell of their unworthiness, and that accolades and praise are, for them empty words. The source of my pain may be in my childhood, but it is also in some seventeenth century preacher inveighing against things like the crime of dancing, or of feasting on the Sabbath. In powerful, if slightly obscure language, William Blake describes the process:

The caterpillar on the leaf
Reminds thee of thy mother’s grief.

 In vain-glory hatcht and nurst,
By double Spectres, self accurst,
My son! my son! thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee.
On the shadows of the moon
Climbing thro' night's highest noon:
In time's ocean falling drown'd:
In aged ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipp'd the wings
Of all sublunary things,
And in depths of my dungeons
Closed the father and the sons.

The lines, “In aged ignorance profound…” are accompanied by an illustration showing a bespectacled old man, looking rather like God the father, methodically clipping the wings of an angel or cherub with an enormous pair of scissors.

 Those wings are still clipped today, and these personal traumas comes in the societal context of alienation. That is the theory with which we can make sense of our persistent, resistant pain. The idea of alienation was thought up by Hegel, developed by Marx and revived by Herbert Marcuse in the nineteen sixties. Alienation is the problematic estrangement and separation of things that really should belong together, and Marx saw four kinds of alienation: of people from their work, people from one another, from their environment, and finally from themselves. When the bosses treat us as widgets of the workplace, it is hard for us to keep our full humanity intact; when personal relationships are dominated by status, power and keeping up appearances, we struggle to hold on to authenticity; when the planet has descended from being Mother Earth to a resource for widget-making and a dumping ground for the resultant toxins, we lose touch with our own Source; and finally, when all these alienations have taken place, it’s really hard to be a happy bunny we are lost from our own selves, estranged from our own joy and sense of what’s real. Quite a mess.

 Marx’s interest was political, and he saw the core alienation as being alienation from work, since work produces money and money – capital – keeps whoever the current ruling gangsters are in power. He believed that the proletariat – the working classes – would inevitably get sick of being alienated and oppressed all the time, rise up to improve their condition and eventually become rulers of themselves. This ultimate Utopian condition was so far off that to predict its final shape was futile, and he said, “I don’t write recipes for the cook-shops of the future.” But he was confident that capitalism was at its heart an unstable mechanism for human existence and that economic forces that today keep us in a state of unrest would eventually toss us onto the shore of a just and equitable society.  

 Fast forward to the 1960s however, with the Communist countries making a complete hash of the human rights thing, while capitalist countries seemed to be ticking along quite nicely. It was time for a Marxian revamp, and it came in Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, which did a re-set on alienation as well. Western industrial society, Marcuse said, has made life so comfortable for people, or at least a sufficient number of us, that we have sunk into a soporific stupor of consumer goods and consumable entertainments, no longer feeling an impulse to tear down the system and start anew. As the old song goes,

I’ve got the foreman’s job at last
So stick the red flag up your arse.

 If Marx said we have nothing to lose but our chains, Marcuse observes these chains have not gone away, they have become so softly padded that we barely notice them any more – but they do still restrict us, just as much as in a full-on totalitarian state. According to Marcuse, we are just as totalitarian as anywhere else, but we are controlled not by state-sponsored terror but by this soporific, one-dimensional state we have lulled ourselves into – which makes our system infinitely more effective and stable.

 Our consumerism and our entertainment industry create “false needs” like the need for name brand clothing, cars that go vroom vroom, shows with A-list celebrities, and so on. If Marcuse knew about cell phones, Apple watches, the internet, social media platforms, and smart toasters, his hair would have probably jumped out. All these things, he says, have so co-opted our minds and lulled us into a mental passivity or sleep that if they were suddenly taken away from us cold turkey, we would all go quietly – or perhaps noisily – mad. We are so far away from our real needs that we have no idea what they are, let alone how to fulfill them. And so here we are, trapped in a cotton candy hell, barely able to notice the real situation. Who knows? Maybe Siri has the answer.

 For Marcuse and Marx, the solutions came down to political revolution, but, as we have noticed, regime change generally leads to a new set of stooges taking over and wearing the crown for a while.  More interesting is the spiritual take on alienation. What if the engine of alienation is not the lust for status, sex, political power and lots and lots of money, but spiritual timidity? At a dinner party in 1725 William Blake remarked that Jesus Christ was the one true and only God. Then he added to his fellow dinner guest, “And so am I. And so are you.” Anyone who has taken a psychedelic might follow the overwhelming bigness of what he said. That bigness of who and what we are is far more terrifying than scary ghosts or hairy monsters, and the spiritual destiny that beckons is so intimidating that any person of this world might easily take a raincheck on it and say thanks, but I think I’ll stay in my little closed world a while longer.

 The level of trust that is required from ourselves and from those around us to create, as Eckhart Tolle calls it, a New Earth, is almost shocking and quite frightening. After the great contracture of denying our full selves, it makes sense to amuse ourselves with power, money, and the shiny toys of high status, just to stay safe from the destructive beauty of love. If we cannot step into our fullness, we are compelled to retreat into our smallness, whether that is the traumatized world of homicidal bitching or the candy cotton consumer paradise that tries to cover it over.

 The pinch of alienation gives us a clue to our real situation, as may the fact that we have half the world enslaved or starved in order to fulfill our cotton candy needs, and that we are turning our beautiful planet into a convection oven filled with microplastics. Like having a drinking problem, the next sip is not a big deal, and so on. In the context of this profound collective insanity, it now makes sense to us that our anxieties, depressions and compulsions won’t go away by an act of rationality or of will. Or by having a weekly conversation with a nice person who doesn’t criticize us the way mom and dad used to. The promise of therapy, especially cognitive behavioral therapy, is that we will become the CEO of our own lives and whip that depression into shape. We really think we can outrun Thought or wrestle down Old Age, but no, what we have taken as a personal blight is the reality of the collective situation staring us in the face and refusing to go away.

 What I took to be purely my problem is part of the cosmic problem of humanity trying to wake itself up before it destroys itself. We’re not only traumatized, we are alienated from our own selves. For some of us, the level of disquiet that creates will just be the background radiation of what it means to live in the regular world; but others, whether by accident, fate, or predisposed sensitivity, are more exposed to the full ramifications of the nightmare of modern history, and for them the pain will be persistent and hard to bear. They are the ones who will get a “mental health” diagnosis. In the personal realm they have a disorder; in the collective context they are carrying a larger share of the burden of history. For things to deeply change inside me I need to have a super-sized understanding of what is going on. Otherwise, I will be like Thor, perplexed and enraged that my best efforts are just not good enough.

 The condition we are in today is where our inner lives, with their harsh, unyielding critical voices, their sudden plumets of despair, and their unassuageable cravings, are like a picture of Dorian Grey, growing more and more monstrous in the attic, while the outer appearance of gleaming skyscrapers, sparkly consumer products purveyed by sexy happy people, all organized by celebrity politicians, gives a false version on the outside. Some people think they still have a shot at always living in sexy/happy/celebrity candy land, while others seem to be condemned to fester in the attic. As a collective, we need to face down the portrait of Dorian Grey and more fully humanize ourselves; there are no mental health conditions, there are only spiritual conditions, and we all have an innate capacity to find the beauty behind the mask.