When a trippy hippy says “All is One” the natural response is to roll your eyes. Yet there is no other way to say it. The universal message of a breakthrough mystical experience on psychedelics is just this: the world of separation and division is actually an illusion and the ultimate truth of reality and the ultimate meaning of life is contained in the fact that All is One.

But then what to do with this knowledge? When you come down from your high, that One seems to be very many separate people and things indeed. Soon the vision of the One is just a distant memory and ordinary everyday reality is just “one damn thing after another”. Either you just forget about it, or you keep the knowledge in your heart as a precious secret, jealously guarded against the scoffing and mockery of unbelieving cynics and skeptics.

Some people have a full-blown experience of this mysterious Unity of Being or Is-ness, which they might describe using more philosophical or religious language, depending on their background. Others will have only heard about it second-hand through the reports of mystics and more traditional religious channels, and will take it on trust (call it “faith”) even if what they actually believe is a little hazy.

Talk of the One is a very Greek way of talking, more specifically, very neo-Platonic. The more common religious term is “God”. So what do you do with the belief or certain knowledge that All is One or that All is God? How do you reconcile the One with the Many or God and the World?

At the very least, you try to live the best you can in the light of this knowledge, loving your neighbour as yourself, and so on and so forth. This “so on and so forth” is what is commonly called exoteric religion, or the Outer Mysteries. It is a complex of symbols, rituals and teachings designed to help you remember the One/God and is most concerned with, although obviously not limited to, moral conduct.

Some people are not satisfied with this “acting as if” and want to experience this All is One/All is God not once, not fleetingly, not vaguely, but over and over again, powerfully, incontrovertibly, ecstatically. They may follow a calling to dedicate themselves to prayer and meditation as a monastic. Or they may heed the call of psychedelics. Some will fail in this quest for the Holy Grail, the Beatific Vision, and some will succeed.

Those that succeed establish a cycle of remembering and forgetting, journeying back and forth between the One God and the the world of multiplicity. This is often expressed as a kind of death or ego death, as the separate self dissolves into the One, and a rebirth or resurrection, as the world reemerges with the freshness of a new creation. Here we are dealing with the Inner Mysteries, the esoteric, hidden teachings of religion.

Eventually the One and the Many become experienced in close succession, so that neither one nor the other is completely forgotten. This is described in religious terminology as “the practice of the presence of God”. Finally the One and the Many fuse in a nondual synthesis, where Samsara and Nirvana are not-two. It is the third step in Shankara’s famous formula, “the world is illusion; Brahman is the only reality; the world is Brahman”. Here there is no more doubt or confusion: Tat Tvam Asi (Thou Art That).

P.S. The living human organism that you call yourself is the bodymind of a unified Sovereign Self (Ras); the living planet on which your life unfolds is the bodymind of a unified World Soul (Gaia); the living universe in which this planet lives, moves and has its being is the bodymind of the One God (Jah).

The component parts of your bodymind are many but you are one; the component parts of the planet are many but the planet is one; the component parts of the universe are many but the universe is one.

To understand and experience that All is One and that All is God is to understand and experience an essential unity, not just that “everything is connected” or that “we’re all members of a very large set of things in a very large universe”, but that every bodymind, including your own, is both a whole (Ras) and a part of a greater bodymind (Gaia), which is a whole and a part of an even greater bodymind, whose ultimate unity is given by the Absolute Godhead (Jah).

From this nondual point of view, the universe is not God’s creation but God’s bodymind. And incredibly, we are able to identify with and merge with the higher unities of the one planet and the one universe in a mysterious and ineffable unio mystica. Who would have thought?

“The flight of the alone to the Alone” is to be alone before God. This is the essence of Christian Zen. The saint must walk alone.

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.