In the blog post Between the One and the Many I elaborated a cosmic scheme with the One at the centre (the Sun), the Twelve at the periphery (the Earth) and Three and Seven between. Here I would like to relate these four numbers (1, 3, 7, 12) to levels of psychedelic altitude, with the One as the highest and the Twelve at the lowest.

Although I refer to planet Earth as 12 (representing cyclical time in the yearly orbit around the Sun), this is in the context of the collective unconscious, the imaginal or heaven. Everything that happens in the psychedelic dimension happens in heaven. The “12th heaven” is the lowest heaven. It designates a realm of personal and transpersonal images, ideas, fantasies, etc. similar to those that occur in ordinary dreams, or rather “big dreams” as Jung called them.

Get higher, beyond the “12th heaven”, and you’ll find yourself in “7th heaven”. This is where you experience one or more of the seven levels of the Ray of Creation (Emptiness, Energy, Matter, Life, Mind, Planet, Universe). If you are on the level of Matter (Atum), for example, you may experience dancing atoms and molecules, the elementals (air, water, earth and fire) and other natural forces. The level of Life (Ka) is experienced as cellular “organic goo”, whereas the Mind (Ba) level is populated by myriad organisms, plants and animals, or rather their souls/consciousness.

Beyond the “7th heaven” is the “3rd heaven” which is an abstract realm of primitive archetypes arranged into triads. The two primary ways these triads manifest is objectively as Tao, Yin, Yang (a dynamic polarity within a higher unity) or subjectively as Parashiva, Shiva, Shakti (consciousness and form within a higher consciousness). You either observe reality from a detached perspective as the endless play of infinite triads or participate in reality and experience it from within as the infinite play of one foundational triad. In the Christian context, the latter is experienced as interpenetrating dynamic relationships between the persons of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The “1st heaven” is absolute unity, plenum void, one without a second. In other words, God (or Godhead). This is very difficult to recall in consciousness, and only possible to remember at all because a trace remainder of self manages to steal a glimpse of the unfathomable Source and Goal of everything before being swallowed up like a firefly in the Sun. Talk of “ego dissolution” and “amnesia” often, but not always, refer to the “1st heaven”. You know you’ve been there, but you don’t know where you’ve been.

I would like to say that this is the highest level, if only for the sake of tidiness. However, I suspect that it may be possible that on the other side of God, so to speak, something like on the far side of a Black Hole, there is another dimension altogether. Perhaps “God” is the portal between this reality and a another parallel universe where the DMT entities live. Perhaps.

Be that as it may, I do think that this is a useful map with which to position various psychedelic ecosystems. Broadly speaking, I would say that the conventional therapeutic secular humanist community focuses mostly on the “12th heaven”. Their primary interest is in processing and healing personal, interpersonal and even transpersonal pathologies and traumas. New Age Neo-Pagan Hippies spend most of their time in “7th heaven”, especially in Atum, Ka, Ba and Gaia. Christian mystics, as well as mystics from other traditions, get as high as “3rd heaven” (e.g. St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 12:2), and sometimes “1st heaven” (e.g. Meister Eckhart).

Some Buddhists fall for “the peace trap”. All they want is to be calm and impassible. Preferably all the time. Nirvana is basically apatheia – the Stoic virtue of indifferent detachment. Shamanism is different. In ceremony we begin with meditation and with peace and quiet. We start with calm, with a balanced sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. But that’s just the beginning.

Shamanic rituals are intensely stimulating and energizing. You feel like everything is activated at the same time, like you are being flooded with life energy, filled with the holy spirit, singing the body electric. But then you need to calm down and come down. You need to soothe your overstimulated nervous system. You need to regain your balance. (What you don’t need is a kundalini emergency!)

The deeper spiritual lesson is this: seek peace but don’t be attached to peace. Life is a dance: peace and excitement, stillness and movement, equanimity and passion, joy and suffering. Shamanic training is training in the art of “coming up” and “coming down”, of intense flights and gentle landings, of self-transcendence and self-soothing.

Expect a wild ride but don’t make it an unnecessarily bumpy one through resistance. Go with the flow.

Peace.

The system is actually very simple, appearances to the contrary.

It is summed up in three practices: the Way, the Word and the Work.

1. The Way = the headless way and mindfulness.
2. The Word = wisdom literature and mantras.
3. The Work = liturgy and theurgy.

The Way is a continuous practice, “every minute zen” or “one eon zen”.

The Word comprises daily reading, meditation and prayer (see the meditation page for the canon).

The Work consists of weekly (Sunday Mass) and monthly (Mushroom Ceremony) rituals.

(Incidentally, these three practices map onto the Buddhist “three treasures”, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha.)

Practice means repetition: Way, Word, Work, Repeat. By doing this over and over again, we train the brain and balance the nervous system. We structure the Imaginal, form the Forms, embody the Archetypes, make the Word flesh.

Eventually, we discover a timeless place that becomes gradually and progressively more vividly real, paradoxically here and now, but somehow beyond time and space. Do we discover it or create it? Or both? In any case, we find ourselves entering the kingdom of God, again and again.

T.S. Eliot writes,

“But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—”

This simple system is for those who would seek the kingdom of God and be sanctified thereby. Whether understood clearly and explicitly or obscurely and implicitly to begin with, it is in truth an occupation for the saint, for holy men and women with bodhicitta, the “idea of the holy” and the “thought of enlightenment”.

For early Christians, the saeculum referred to the present worldly age. Christians looked forward to the eschaton, the end of the world that would usher in the kingdom of God. Until that mysterious time, humanity found itself in a fallible, less than ideal, state of sin and ignorance. The saeculum eventually morphed into the idea of the secular as opposed to the religious, which accepted human limitation and made the best of things according to human reason and human effort, which eventually led to the liberal democratic values of the Enlightenment.

Secular humanists decided that this temporary state of affairs was good enough, and that secularism was good in itself, and that we could enshrine it as the basis for a flourishing society indefinitely if not permanently. Religion was an optional extra, best kept private. To use tech language, secularism was seen something like the operating system on a smart phone and any religion or other faith commitment was like an app that could be downloaded or deleted at will.

The traditional Christian view was that the saeculum was maculate and imperfect, and was in principle non-perfectible and not-immaculate. In other words, it resisted any utopian dreams that heaven could be built on earth by political means, whether secular or religious. Communism and Islamism (political Islam), in contrast, both believe that societies and the people in them can be engineered and coerced into their desired vision of utopia.

Using Paul Tillich’s existential theory as laid out in The Courage to Be, I would like to argue for the value of the traditional Christian view. According to Tillich, most ordinary people labour under some form of “pathological anxiety”, or neurosis, what Sigmund Freud called “ordinary unhappiness”. Tillich believed that the multifarious psychological conditions diagnosed by psychologists are superficial. They cover a deeper, more painful “existential anxiety”, of which he describes three: the existential anxiety of fate and death, the existential anxiety of guilt and condemnation and the existential anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness.

Ego defenses against these three types of existential anxiety are formed of false security (against fate and death), false perfection (against guilt and condemnation) and false certainty (against doubt and meaninglessness). When these defenses break down in the face of reality, the dis-illusioned person is plunged into an existential crises of anxiety and despair.

Tillich’s antidote to all this anxiety and despair is “absolute faith”, which is a kind of pure faith without any particular object (it is not a faith in something or other, but faith itself, pure and simple). Now we might say that absolute faith appears to have no specific content, because there is nothing in this present world, the saeculum, to which it adheres. This being so, we could say that it is an absolute faith in the mysterious kingdom of God, beyond and outside time and space.

So the right attitude towards the two worlds of the secular and the spiritual is twofold. In relation to the kingdom of God, it is absolute faith. In relation to the world, it is a certain acceptance and tolerance of the fallibility of human imperfection, uncertainty and insecurity. We deal with guilt and condemnation through confession and forgiveness, not through false moral perfection. We stop trying to make ourselves right all the time. We deal with fate and death through the wisdom of insecurity, as Alan Watts put it, not through avoidance of mortality and a false sense of security. Finally, we deal with doubt and meaningless through negative capability. As John Keats famously described it, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

But then you have the crowning nondual mystical experience. The kingdom of God is at hand. This very land is the Pure Land. And it is absolutely perfect, certain and secure.

Nondual awareness, Christian holiness and psychedelic enchantment provide the threads that weave the fabric that is numinous, holy and just so. Whichever is foregrounded in the moment, all three are always at play. This is the essence of Zen Christian Shamanism – a perpetual, dynamic, spiritual weave.

Myth is the language of dreams and the collective unconscious, an enchanted world of heroes, villains, entities, archetypes, fantasy, imagination. Here be dragons. Here be tarot, astrology, Wicca, necromancy, esoterica, etc. etc. Here be New Age Hippy Pagans. Here be Psychedelic Astral Travellers.

Of course dreams are useful and necessary. We need to dream in order to process undigested psychic baggage carried over from our waking lives. But dreaming (in the literal and Aboriginal sense) is seductive and perilous. Spend too long here and you may find that you can’t wake up. The faerie folk have thee in thrall.

This way madness lies. Paranoid schizophrenia. Psychosis. Or just Away With The Faeries.

By all means paddle in the mythopoeic ocean of the collective unconscious, the “sea of stories”, and let its reflected magic bring some sparkle to your life. Let yourself be enchanted now and then. But don’t put your trust in the “spiritual world”, the world of spirits. Put your trust in the Lord.

In the nineteenth century, Max Weber described what he called the dis-enchantment of Modernity. Morris Berman and Thomas Moore call for its re-enchantment, as does Sharon Blackie. Rod Dreher worries that the real danger in our brave new world of New Age and Occult lunacy is not dis-enchantment but mis-enchantment, since when people cease to believe in God, they do not then believe in nothing, but in anything. Sharon Blackie thinks he’s a nutjob (sic).

Who are the orthodox here? Who are the heterodox? Who are the heretics? Of those who risk enchantment, which will find it and which will lose it?

When it comes to psychedelics, this is is a matter of (spiritual) life and death. Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the whole issue turns on the head of one tiny pin (on which are dancing an indefinite number of angels). Or perhaps thorn is more accurate. I’m talking about the OG – God.

This will annoy many people of course. Let it be known that I don’t mean “Old Grey Beard”, “Sky Daddy” or even “The Christian God”. I mean the actual, ineffable, living God that spiritual traditions the world over point to in their various different ways. It’s God or Babylon, whichever way you turn it, twist it or try to wriggle out of it.

The actual presence of God is primary. Everything else is secondary. In my idiosyncratic terminology, “One, Three, Seven” are primary and “Twelve” is secondary (see Between the One and the Many). And safety is found only within the orbit of the Twelve (planet Earth). Beyond that, you risk finding yourself lost in space, drifting between Saturn and the fixed stars (see William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

On earth Thou hidest, not to scare
The children with Thy light,
Then showest us Thy face in heaven,
When we can bear the sight.

Frederick William Faber

Imagine that the world around you exists in a bubble in the middle of the ocean. The domed sky above you is the inner surface of the bubble, as is the peripheral view as it disappears to your left and right and the ground as it rises to join the sky in front of you.

At this moment, you have a particular view of the world in the bubble from one point on the inner surface. You can’t see behind you, so it’s as though your view in is through an opening in the bubble.

What is behind you? You can’t turn around to look because wherever you turn, the invisible opening is behind you. You are not that which can be observed; the subject cannot see the subject; the eye cannot see the eye.

That which is behind you is the same as that which is beyond the sky. It is the ocean. The world is in a bubble in middle of the ocean, remember? But it’s not an ocean of saltwater – it’s an ocean of infinite consciousness. Call it “Parashiva”.

The thin film that constitutes the bubble itself is “Shiva”, which is to say, your individual consciousness aware of your individual world. This is what is directly behind you – your Self, behind which is the infinite “Parashiva”. Everything that Shiva experiences in the bubble is “Shakti”. This is your world.

Once you become cognizant of this state of affairs, you soon discover that Shiva can move in one of two directions; backwards or forwards. You can back up to the noumenal Source or merge with the phenomenal Stream. You can unite with Parashiva or Shakti.

Both movements result in a nondual mystical experience, one “introvertive” and the other “extrovertive”. Merging individual Shiva consciousness back into universal Parashiva consciousness is experienced as ego-dissolution, or ego-death. Merging with Shakti is experienced as an egoless state of Zen.

Parashiva – Shiva – Shakti

Lord – I Am – Zen

That’s all very well, I hear you say, but haven’t we missed something important? What about the mind? What about our feelings, sensations, desires, habits, memory, will, understanding? What about the unconscious? What about the soul?

It’s as if the bubble has another smaller bubble floating around it, like a moon. This is the “Imaginal”, the soul-space where all the soul-stuff happens. Shiva shuttles back and forth between these two bubbles all the time.

All the time, that is, while time exists. When Shiva is merged with Parashiva in perfect unity (as the One) or with Shakti in perfect multiplicity (as the Many), there is no time, at least not in the way we ordinarily experience it, and there is no Imaginal.

Maybe some real life,
to refresh beginner’s mind
all over again.

Zezan Tam

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

o

Moral of the story: Get your head out the way