In his essay ‘Self-Reliance’ Emerson wrote, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” The Apostle Paul reminds us that whoso would be a Christian must also be a nonconformist. Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

A conformist conforms to Babylon. He is a muggle slave, a muppet slave, an addict slave, a victim slave, sometimes a diva slave and a demon slave. Muggle slaves are the most recognisably conformist. They are slaves to things like social media, soaps, gossip, football, pop music and popular culture, and the strict demands of family and friends. Any deviation from the norm is curtailed through ridicule and peer pressure.

Muppet slaves are also conformists, while often deluding themselves that they are nonconformists. They are slaves to ideologies, often of a counter-cultural hue, whether political, philosophical, artistic, psychological, theosophical or religious. Many modern Westerners are slaves to a materialist worldview, which prevents them from straying beyond the narrow mental space delimited by the natural sciences. Others are slaves to the latest trends in the culture war. The defining features of muppet slaves are dogmatic fundamentalism and cultishness; they are easily identified by their fighting talk and tone of strident self-righteousness.

Addict slaves are slaves to the passions, both substance and behavioural addicts, slaves to alcohol, weed, sugar, nicotine, smart phones, box sets, shopping, gambling, sex. Victim slaves are constantly haunted by a victim mentality, and labour under persecution complexes and conspiracy theories. Certain minority ethnic groups, such as African Americans and secular Jews, are particularly prone to this form of mental slavery. It is also ubiquitous among radical feminists and those who fly the LGBTQ+ flag.

Fear God and you will fear no man. The fear of God is both the beginning of wisdom and the beginning of freedom, freedom from mental and spiritual slavery to man-made idols. Bob Marley sang, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, only ourselves can free our minds.” But the enslaved mind cannot free itself. Only God can do that.

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”

Romans 8:15

It makes no sense to ask whether Jesus actually rose from the dead on the first Easter.

All religious stories, maxims, doctrines, come from the religious imagination.

And what is the religious imagination but the mind of God?

And what is sacred scripture but the word of God?

If you think that the products of the imagination are human-all-too-human, man-made, made up, you don’t get it.

Where is God if not in the numinous, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans?

The religious imagination is the only possible interface between God and Man:

The kingdom of God is within you.

But why should I believe any of it? I hear you ask.

Well, faith is also part of the religious imagination.

Ye of little faith, where is your imagination?

Where is your God?

Love of the World = Storge + Philia + Eros = Babylon

Love of God = Agape + Philia + Eros = Father, Son and Holy Spirit

Beyond Babylon is Gaia; beyond Heaven is Jah.

Approach Jah in Heaven and return to the Source;

Approach Gaia in Earth and remember your Original Face.

Outside Babylon is Zen, Satori, Enlightenment, Salvation.

What is Babylon?

Disconnected from Jah and Gaia, Ba is Babylon:

Ba, Babel, Babble, Babylon.

When you have Gaia and Jah, you also have Ba.

Who needs Babylon?

I’m not here to make improvements to the Matrix,

But to help people out.

“Turn on, tune in, drop out.

My kingdom is not of this world.”

“The great intercessor must possess an extreme sensitiveness to the state and needs of souls and of the world. As those who live very close to nature become tuned to her rhythm, and can discern in solitary moments all the movements of her secret life, or as musicians distinguish each separate note in a great symphony and yet receive the music as a whole; so the intercessor, whether living in the world or enclosed in a convent (for these are only differences in technique) is sensitized to every note and cadence in the rich and intricate music of common life. He stretches out over an ever wider area the filaments of love, and receives and endures in his own person the anguish of its sorrow, its helplessness, its confusions, and its sin; suffering again and again the darkness of Gethsemane and the cross, as the price of his redemptive power. For it is his awful privilege to stand in the gap between the world’s infinite need and the treasuries of the Divine Love.”

Evelyn Underhill

Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, was a devotee of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. His symbol was a snake on a stick, known as the Rod of Asclepius.

The Hebrew Nehushtan is a bronze image of a serpent on a pole. Moses prayed to God, who told Moses, “Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he seeth it, shall live.” (Numbers 21: 4-9)

This story is taken up in the New Testament, where Jesus identifies himself with the fiery serpent, saying, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3: 14-15)

The image of a snake on a stick is dramatically realized in paintings and illustrations of the snake tempting Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, coiled around the trunk of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Plate 13 of the Great Canterbury Psalter, which dates from around 1200 AD, intriguingly depicts the tree as a giant mushroom (ninth panel).

So what does it all mean? Some snakes are extremely dangerous. Their venom is so strong it can kill an adult human with a single bite. The Australian Taipan is the world’s deadliest snake, but many other species, such as King Cobras, Black Mambas, Death Adders, Pit Vipers, Rattlesnakes and Tiger Snakes are also lethal. (The snake that ravaged the Israelites in the wilderness may well have been the Egyptian Cobra).

Some mushrooms are also poisonous enough to kill you, such as the Death Cap, the three Destroying Angels and the Fool’s Mushroom. There are others which are highly toxic but non lethal, such as the Amanita Muscaria, which have psychoactive properties.

One man’s poison is another man’s medicine. The Greek word pharmakon means both cure and poison. We can see this paradoxical connection both in conventional Western medicine, as in the development of vaccines, as well as in Mithridatism, Traditional Chinese Medicine and alternative medicines like homeopathy.

The snake on the stick image can be seen to symbolize the taming of poison and the production of medicine, hence its ubiquitous use in medical organisations around the world. This can be taken in a literal, material, molecular, chemical sense, with the development of new medicines in the lab, but it can also be taken in an esoteric, spiritual sense, in the controlled use of psychedelics in the astrolab of the soul.

A wild snake in the wilderness can kill you. A tame snake on a stick can heal you. If you can lift the fiery serpent kundalini up the energetic pole of the sushumna nadi along the central nervous system, who knows, you may even “have eternal life”.

In the beginning was the Word.

This was the first creation,

The primordial vibration,

the first Logos,

AUM.

From this primordial womb of sound,

From the undifferentiated,

Infinite source,

Other vibrations emerged,

Seed syllables,

Numerous as the sands of the Ganges.

This was the second creation,

The second Logos, Akasha,

The archetypal forms,

Constituting the heavens and all therein.

From the Akashic archetypes

Emerged the third Logos,

The third creation,

The coincidence of opposites,

Yin-Yang,

Shiva-Shakti,

And the manifest universe was born.

The One, Parashiva,

Descending through the Logoi,

The primordial AUM and the heavenly Akasha,

Became contingent Shiva

Eternally dancing as Nataraja

With his other half, Shakti.

Where there is Shakti, there is Shiva;

Where there is Shiva, there is Shakti.

Relative consciousness must have its objects

And objects must be apprehended.

There is no Shakti without Shiva.

Shiva draws Shakti from Akasha

By collapsing potential into actuality

With the light of consciousness,

Creating quantum fluctuations

In the Akashic Void.

And so the manifest universe evolves,

Through pattern recognition

And relevance realization,

Into higher order complex structures

Of consciousness and form,

Until a critical pitch of intensity is reached

in certain bipedal organisms

Who remember:

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

Before the beginning,

Before the first creation,

Before the first Logos,

Parashiva,

One without a second,

Infinite consciousness

Eternally conscious of itself,

Produced Unity,

The first state,

Deep Sleep.

The first Word, AUM,

And the second Word, the Akashic Logoi,

Made heaven,

A Dream,

The second state.

“Tao produced Unity; Unity produced Duality; Duality produced Trinity”:

But the earth was without form, and void;

And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And Shakti danced into being,

And there was a dancing universe, Shakti,

Experienced by a dancing Witness, Shiva.

“Tao produced Unity; Unity produced Duality; Duality produced Trinity;

And Trinity produced all existing objects.” –

Parashiva, Shiva, Shakti;

Tao, Yin, Yang –

A Waking tetrahedron universe,

The third state.

Over countless aeons,

Relative consciousness and form, Shiva-Shakti,

Finally discovers its source in Parashiva,

The eternal Father,

And the people walking in darkness saw a great light,

The true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

This is Turiya,

The fourth state,

Enlightened Buddha Nature,

Christ Consciousness,

The Son of the Father,

Who brings forth a new heaven and a new earth,

A new creation,

A new Logos,

Preached until the end of time

In the gospel of the kingdom of God.

I decided to limit the reading list to only that handful of books which I consider essential reading for a true understanding of the practice of psychedelic Christianity. Without an idea of the holy, the courage to be, experience of God and the love of God, we are lost indeed.

Beyond the horizon of the phenomenal world, beyond the horizon of your phenomenal world, is pure consciousness, one without a second. This pure consciousness is that which sustains your world, that which holds it in existence. Otherwise, an experienced world would be impossible.

On the other side of the dividing line between phenomena and noumena is pure, absolute consciousness, Parashiva. On this side of the line is subjective consciousness and its objective world, Shiva and Shakti.

Parashiva by definition cannot be in direct relation to the world, because as soon as there is an experienced world and an experiencer of the world, phenomena and consciousness, we are in the realm of subject and object, Shiva and Shakti, no longer the nondual “one without a second”.

Is the background consciousness of our worlds an inert world-enabler, a kind of cosmic microwave background? Is “God” basically irrelevant to the actual functioning of the world? The Original Cause merely, an Unmoved Mover who retired for good on the seventh day of Creation as Deists thought?

If God as absolute consciousness were to have any influence on the physical, contingent world of things and history, it would have to be through the medium of relative consciousness, Shiva, since Shiva shares the essential nature of Parashiva (consciousness), but in relationship with the phenomenal world, Shakti.

This is why it is said that the Son is both fully God and fully man. If it were otherwise, there would be no point of contact. Redemption, which really means “being put right with God”, is impossible without contact, without a bridge between God and the world.

This bridge is Christ, the Anointed One. The anointing consists of complete absorption of Shiva in Parashiva, of the Son in the Father. The transforming power of this immersion, this baptism in the waters of pure consciousness, is manifest on return to the world, now revealed as a pure land, or “kingdom of God”, filled with the glory of the Holy Spirit. Shakti removes Her veil in a revealing apokalypsis.

Thus, through the agency of conscious human beings, God patiently works His magic on the world, one soul at a time.

¹ These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee:

² As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.

³ And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

⁴ I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.

⁵ And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

⁶ I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word.

⁷ Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee.

⁸ For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.

⁹ I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine.

¹⁰ And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.

¹¹ And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.

¹² While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.

¹³ And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.

¹⁴ I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

¹⁵ I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.

¹⁶ They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

¹⁷ Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.

¹⁸ As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.

¹⁹ And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.

²⁰ Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;

²¹ That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

²² And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:

²³ I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

²⁴ Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.

²⁵ O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.

²⁶ And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.

The Gospel according to John, chapter 17.