For me, the classic mushroom ride has three broad phases: charging, tripping and vibing.

The onset may be gradual or sudden, but at some point early on, I find myself in a psychedelic palace of bright geometrical colourful light, soon to be plugged in to the great alien charger in the sky. Sometimes parts of my body, often starting with my teeth and jaw, are nuked one pixel at a time. Sometimes great surges of high voltage energy course through me in incandescent waves.

Then suddenly, it stops. I am unplugged. The energy drains away and the lights go out and I am left shivering uncontrollably. I reach for a blanket and pull it over me. And the journey begins. I know this place. It’s like waking up in a recurring lucid dream. I know that I am in for a hard and humbling existential journey into the heart of the human condition and the human story. There will be suffering and pain, but with it insight and compassion.

The trip varies in length and intensity, and can be more or less enjoyable or challenging. As it fades, I find myself back in the “real world”, ready for the third phase. In this phase, I surrender to the music. I listen so intently and intensely that I am almost aware of nothing else. It is a whole other trip in its own right, but dictated by the musical imagination of the artist. At this stage of the playlist, lyrics are introduced, which fires the imagination, as it resonates and vibes ever more deeply with the music.

This vibing phase has a strong emotional and then spiritual texture, as the music moves into sacred mode with a choral mass setting. We bless and are blessed.

As the sound of waves lapping the shore faded into silence, I caught a glimpse of myself through God’s eyes. Every experience, every impression, thought, feeling, every relationship, every event, every memory, everything that had ever happened in my inner and outer life, was one coloured piece of glass in a great stained glass temple. It was beautiful. God seemed to like it anyway. But I was just one among millions of temples he enjoyed visiting.

Jesus was in there. But He was only one small part of a much larger structure. He was in me, but not I in Him. In a flash I saw all the world’s religious personalities merely as elements in the great crystal mosaic that was me, but that God’s experience of Himself through me was much more than any or all of them, much more than any religious ideas or religious experiences. I saw that God is much bigger than “spiritual-God-related-sacred-stuff”, that He is literally everything I am.

What’s the point of religion then? What’s the point of Jesus? I understood in another flash that an organising principle is necessary in order to create a coherent, ordered structure of translucent beauty. A random jumble of chaotic impressions and experiences is not well pleasing to God, and neither is a tangled thicket of confused and frustrated desires and opinions. The point of religion then, and the point of Jesus, is to help us build a fitting temple for Him to enjoy during our brief sojourn here (not necessarily in three days!), that He may see us and Himself through us and that we may see ourselves through Him, that our joy may be full.

“One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple.”

Psalm 27:4

Alternatively, what I saw was the two dimensional quantum information boundary of the holographic projection of a three dimensional self in Hilbert space, which kind of looks like a stained glass temple.

“You are not a collection of things, you are a song the universe is singing, a temporary melody in an eternal composition. And when the melody ends, the music doesn’t stop, it simply moves on to the next note, the next pattern, the next moment of the eternal symphony. There are no particles, there is only the field, there is only the process, there is only the pattern, and you are one beautiful, temporary, infinitely precious pattern in the infinite creativity of the quantum fields. Not made of things, made of music, made of mathematics, made of the same fundamental reality as stars, stones and distant galaxies. You are not separate, you never were. You are the universe experiencing itself for a brief moment before dissolving back into the eternal field structure from which all patterns emerge and to which all patterns return. There are no particles, only fields, only patterns, only process, and you are that process aware of itself for one precious fleeting moment.”

Roger Penrose

“All that you touch, and all that you see, all that you taste, all you feel, and all that you loved, and all that you hate, all you distrust, all you save, and all that you give, and all that you deal, and all that you buy, beg, borrow or steal, and all you create, and all you destroy, and all that you do, and all that you say, and all that you eat, and everyone you meet, and all that you slight, and everyone you fight, and all that is now, and all that is gone, and all that’s to come and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

Roger Waters

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Moral of the story: Get your head out the way

For as philosophy professes purely the search and enquiry after knowledge, so Christianity supposes, intends, desires, and aims at nothing else, but the raising fallen man to a divine life, to such habits of holiness, such degrees of devotion, as may fit him to enter among the holy inhabitants of the kingdom of heaven.

William Law

A spiritual life is subject to many and wonderful changes, interior as well as exterior, and all are according to the mere will and good pleasure of God, who is tied to no methods or rules; therefore, following Him in all simplicity and resignation, let us wonder at nothing; let us neither oblige ourselves too rigorously to any exercise, nor refuse any to which He shall invite us, seem it never so strange, or to natural reason even senseless. For in His guidance there can be no danger of error, but, on the contrary, there is all security; and this may and ought to be a great comfort and encouragement to a well-minded resolute soul.

Reverend Augustine Baker

1

Through the gateless gate, the gate disappears: all is one. Nothing more can be said; nothing more can be thought: one hairbreadth’s difference and heaven and earth are set apart.

3 and 7

The shaman is a bridge between heaven and earth. So is the the prophet, the priest, the Christ, the Logos, the Mantra, the Shushumna, the Axis Mundi.

12

The garden is fenced about by the cycle of time, which is the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Without a fence, all things fall apart and all things fly apart.

There are many ways of breaking through (I suppose).

Here are six I have personally experienced several times (not necessarily in order of preference):

1. The Psychedelic Palace. More often than not the onset is sudden: vivid colourful geometric imagery which flows and dances with the music. It is a familiar space, a happy place.
2. The Black Hole. At some point in the proceedings you slip into a black hole and emerge some time later unsure where you’ve been exactly. You can’t remember much and the music has passed unnoticed.
3. Regeneration. This is an experience of intense energetic dissolution and regeneration. It feels like all the atoms in your body are simultaneously and individually zapped by an alien regeneration machine.
4. Death and resurrection. This takes the form of a physical descent into the underworld, either earth or sea or ice caves, followed by an ascent and rebirth into the light. It usually includes a period of intense discomfort and claustrophobia and identification with the sufferings of humanity and/or all of life before the blissful release.
5. Apocalypse. Potentially very frightening, especially the first time. The world disappears, dissolves, evaporates, revealing an infinite plenum void of mysterious awesome Godhead. There is a dreadful feeling that this is in fact the end of the world. Eventually however, existence reconstitutes itself, one veil at a time. For some musings on this breakthrough, see the blog post Apocalypse.
6. Everything/Nothing Whiteout. This is the classic ego dissolution experience of mystical union with God (for want of a better word). It can be experienced as strange or familiar, blissful or terrifying. There is a sense of timelessness and spaciousness. Sometimes there is the bare feeling “I Am” or even “I Am God”. Although it can feel like an eternity, with hindsight it is possible to estimate the time as a matter of minutes. The pure state (without any thoughts at all) doesn’t generally last very long.

If none of these breakthroughs bring you to a state of Dust and Ashes before the inconceivable Mysterium Tremendum, you’re not quite getting it.

“If you can understand, it is not God.” (Saint Augustine)

“You will realize that doctrines are inventions of the human mind, as it tried to penetrate the mystery of God. You will realize that Scripture itself is the work of human minds, recording the example and teaching of Jesus. Thus it is not what you believe that matters; it is how you respond with your heart and your actions. It is not believing in Christ that matters; it is becoming like him.” (Pelagius)

“A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.” (Reinhold Niebuhr)

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” (Jean-Paul Sartre)

“There’s a lot of space out there to get lost in.” (John Robinson)

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence.

T.S. Eliot

Humans being the fallible (perhaps fallen) creature they are, tend to create societies based on greed, hate and delusion, the “three poisons” at the hub of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. I call this Babylon.

Perhaps there was a happy paradisaical state of human society in a past golden age, perhaps not. But at some point, human beings became accustomed to life in Babylon, that is, a collective life of greed, hate and delusion.

The history of the world is a history of Babylon in all its multifarious guises. However, there is also a parallel history running beneath the surface events, of the violent rise and fall of empires, which is the resistance to Babylon.

A potted history of this resistance progresses through a Hegelian dialectic of three stages. It begins with a return to Nature, which develops and matures in the human imagination by means of poetry and myth. This is the thesis.

The conceptual limitations of poetry are then countered by philosophy. For example, the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle reacting to the mythos of the ancient poets Homer and Hesiod. This is the antithesis.

When philosophy fails to satisfy the emotional and spiritual longings of the human heart, people turn to religion, as happened in the Hellenic world of late antiquity with the move from speculative philosophical monotheism to the living God of the Jews and Christians. This is the synthesis.

Poetry, philosophy and religion can (and are) co-opted by the dominant forces of Babylon. Thus they become tools of further oppression and control. However, there is always a hidden stream which continues to liberate people from the “mind-forg’d manacles” of Babylon.

This stream becomes sullied with time. As religion grows stale and tired, it loses its regenerative and vivifying force and people lose faith. But the stream can be purified and flow clear glittering crystal again.

Return to Nature. Remember poetry. Rediscover philosophy. Revive religion. This has always been the way out of Babylon and always will be.