The Alone is the All-one.

If you want to walk with God, you must walk alone.

Only then is “the flight of the alone to the Alone” possible.

Beyond Ba, beyond Babylon, the soul must commune with Gaia and Jah in solitude.

The saint must walk alone.

Neither Here nor There.

Neither New nor Old.

Neither From nor Towards.

Neither Arrest nor Movement.

Neither Traditional nor Progressive.

Neither Establishment nor Anti-Establishment.

Neither Modern nor Postmodern.

Neither Enlightenment nor Counter-Enlightenment.

Neither Orthodox nor Unorthodox.

Neither Elitist nor Pluralist.

Neither Bourgeois nor Bohemian.

Neither Popular Culture nor Counter-Culture.

Neither Secular Humanist nor Transhumanist.

Neither Idealist nor Materialist.

Neither Gnostic nor Agnostic.

Neither Bond nor Free.

Neither Woke nor Anti-Woke.

Neither Politically Correct nor Politically Incorrect.

Neither Diva nor Demon.

Neither Victim nor Addict.

Neither Muppet nor Muggle.

Neither Literal nor Metaphorical.

Neither Rational nor Irrational.

Neither Lawful nor Unlawful.

Neither Visible nor Invisible.

Neither Secret nor Hidden.

Neither Real nor Imagined.

Neither Known nor Unknown.

Neither Credulous nor Incredulous.

Neither This-Worldly nor Other-Worldly.

Neither Finished nor Unfinished.

Parashiva eleison

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Amun

Ra

Atum

Ka

Ba

Gaia

Jah

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Shiva eleison

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Mystic

Shaman

Warrior

Monk

Philosopher

King

Friend

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Shakti eleison

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Peace

Love

Goodness

Beauty

Truth

Consciousness

Bliss

What you have seen you cannot unsee. And the eye with which you see God is the same eye with which He sees you. Once you have broken through to the heavenly throne of the Almighty, a portal between worlds has been opened that cannot be closed. Now you are God’s.

What does this mean? It means that you cannot return to “riotous living” because God is no longer just a metaphysical abstraction: He is now your Father. He will rebuke you if you put a foot wrong. And His rebuke is like burning coals heaped on your head.

The Father loves you with a fierce love, “for the Father loveth the Son” (John 5:20), and if you are not to suffer the beams of His love, you must love Him back: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind” (Luke 10:27).

If you don’t want to suffer you must align yourself with the loving energy of the Holy Spirit and get straight with God. And if being the Son of God goes to your head, God will have no compunction in humbling and humiliating and even crucifying your ego.

So be careful what you wish for…

A certain man had two sons:

And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

Luke 15: 11-24

What’s the difference between the DMT peak experience and the psilocybin peak experience? On DMT (or ayahuasca) you forget yourself and become God. You are the One Consciousness sustaining the entire universe. On magic mushrooms (psilocybin) you don’t forget yourself but ascend to heaven and get as close to God as you can bear. God is experienced as an almost unbearable, alternately blissful and painful, source of infinite light and love.

On DMT you are God; on magic mushrooms you are the Son of God. DMT is Hinduism; psilocybin is Christianity. But if Bernardo Kastrup is right about the dissociative Cosmic Mind (our individual consciousness is just a dissociated aspect of universal consciousness) then which is closer to reality? DMT or mushrooms? If in reality all of reality is One Mind, then Hindu DMT is more real. But this unitive consciousness seems to be dissociated the other way: we remember the One but we forget the Many. If we grant ontological status to phenomena and the world of multiplicity, then Christian psilocybin is more real. As dissociated sparks of the One Mind, we can reconnect to the Source while maintaining our separate identities, like a child being reunited with a long-lost parent.

The relationship that is established on a breakthrough heroic dose of magic mushrooms is that between the Son of God and God the Father (to use the patriarchal Christian terms). This relationship affords the Son great power but also great pain and suffering, since he (or she) is simultaneously identical to and different from God. The unbroken thread between the world of the Many and the One is experienced as one of enormous energy and enormous tension, like a high voltage wire. On the one hand, the Son is God (“I and the Father are one” John 10:30) but on the other, the Father is infinitely greater than the Son (“the Father is greater than I” John 14:28).

This is why there is so much emphasis on suffering in Christianity and so little in Hinduism. When you are dissociated, you don’t feel pain (which is why we do it!) If you have completely transcended the world of multiplicity in perfect moksha, where is the pain? There is only One without a Second. Therefore there is no friction and no pain. Alternatively, if you have completely dissociated from God the other way, so that you are just a creature among creatures, your pain and suffering is limited to your relations with others, which is trivial compared to that arising from the friction between you and the immortal Source of all existence.

Buddhism is famously about the cessation of suffering; Christianity is about the harnessing of suffering. Self-realised yogis and enlightened Buddhists don’t suffer very much (and neither do materialist atheists). Christians do (especially psychedelic Christians). This is the price you pay if you follow the Way, the Truth and the Life of the Son of God.

“But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto him, We are able.”

Matthew 20:22

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 film 24 Hour Party People starring Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson is really a kind of parable about three personality types represented by three larger-than-life characters: Ian Curtis, Sean Ryder and Tony Wilson. If all this is before your time, you might not know who they are, but hopefully you will at least have heard of Joy Division and The Happy Mondays.

The Madchester rave scene centred around the Hacienda club was the epicentre of an Ecstasy-fueled psychedelic revival hot on the heels of the Acid House revolution of the late Eighties. These were exciting and heady times, drawing comparisons in some quarters to the psychedelic efflorescence of the Sixties. Sadly, however, the revolutionary promise of the second Summer of Love in 1988 dissolved as fast as the first one in 1967. Why?

24 Hour Party People gives a kind of symbolic answer in the three aforementioned figures Ian Curtis, Sean Ryder and Tony Wilson. Ian Curtis famously hanged himself at the tender age of 24; Sean Ryder famously became a crack addict; and Tony Wilson famously closed the Hacienda and disappeared from public view. Is this just an expression of The Wheel of Fortune, a concept brought up several times in the film, most memorably by a homeless beggar under a bridge quoting Boethius? Or are there forces other than luck, fate and fortune at play?

There were countless drugs casualties in the rave generation, just as there were in the hippy generation. Perhaps it was just the result of carelessness. Unlike the Sixties LSD guru Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley was of the view that powerful psychedelic drugs shouldn’t be bandied about willy-nilly but should be taken with due care and reverence if the great promise of spiritual transformation they afford isn’t to descend into mere hedonism.

Ian Curtis was a troubled, angry young man. He was basically a kind of indie-goth-mod-punk on speed. If we had to place him on The Wheel of Babylon, he would probably be a “muppet”. Sean Ryder, on the other hand, childishness notwithstanding, is much more of a straight working class “muggle”. And Tony Wilson, who in the film can’t resist telling people he went to Cambridge and is periodically called a c**t by his proteges, was clearly a bit of a “diva”.

Nobody knows what prompted Ian Curtis to commit suicide, but he clearly experienced some kind of descent via his inner victim to the hell of his inner demons. Sean Ryder, predictably enough, descended from muggle to addict via his inner diva fairly quickly. Tony Wilson, being a journalist, remained a diva pretty consistently throughout.

From Love Will Tear Us Apart to Hallellujah, the glimpses of supernal light from the musical psychedelic beyond failed to break any of them free. It’s like the parable of the sower:

“Behold, a sower went forth to sow;

And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up:

Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:

And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.

And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them”

Matthew 13: 3-7

Marx hit the nail on the head when he famously said that “religion is the opium of the people”. But not the nail he thought. To bring out the meaning as I understand it, the saying should really be “religion is the psychedelic of the people”.

Marx was committed to a Counter Enlightenment philosophy, heavily indebted to Hegel, among others. In other words, over and above the corruption and cronyism of nineteenth century democracy and trade, he believed that the principles of liberal Enlightenment thought were basically wrong. Like many German Idealists, he sneered at the petty economic success of Britain, seeing it, as Napoleon did, as “a nation of shopkeepers”.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Britain felt that, as Jeffrey Tucker said, “where there is commerce there is peace”. Several decades had passed since the Napoleonic Wars without any major military conflict. Classical liberal Enlightenment values of individualism, limited government, democracy, free trade, etc. seemed to be working a charm. However, the German view, fed on a diet of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche was very different. There was the prevalent idea, for example, that too much peace made for weak men – virile German men should be warriors and revolutionary heroes, not shopkeepers.

There are different ways of expressing this difference of outlook. One is by contrasting the “Enlightenment” (instigated by the British, especially the Scottish, the French and the Americans) with the “Counter Enlightenment” exemplified mainly by the Germans but also the French (and that great Dane, Kierkegaard). Another is by invoking Romanticism as a reaction to the so-called Age of Reason. Another is by identifying different versions of secular humanism: liberal humanism vs nationalist and socialist humanism.

Using the somewhat anachronistic terminology of the Wheel of Babylon, we can describe this as an ideological clash between Muggles (Enlightenment) and Muppets (Counter Enlightenment). A nation of shopkeepers is really a nation of muggles, or as Tolkien would put it, a nation of hobbits. A nation of Wagnerian heroes is really a nation of muppets, or Fighting Spirits (as they are usually translated from the original Tibetan Wheel of Life).

Muggles and muppets have different psychologies. A successful muggle is promoted to Diva status. They get rich and even better, rich and famous. They drink fine wine and go to the opera etc. An unsuccessful muggle is demoted to Addict status. They gamble their money away and get hooked on drugs and alcohol. Muppets feel nothing but disdain for the whole muggle “charade”. They would like nothing more than to get all the greedy capitalist divas against the wall and to blow up the filthy bourgeois opera house. Successful muppets (like Lenin and Hitler) become destructive Demons, whereas the unsuccessful ones become Victims. (See the Wheel of Babylon diagram on the Home Page).

The Great War of 1914 was a war between British muggles and German muppets. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a dramatic takeover by Bolshevik muppets. The street fights in Italy, Spain and Germany between the Reds and the Blackshirts were muppet fights. The horrific battles (such as the Battle of Kursk and the Battle of Stalingrad) fought on the Eastern Front between Nazis and Communists in the Second World War were muppet battles.

So anyway, back to Marx’s famous definition of religion. The “people” or “masses” that Marx is referring to are basically muggles in a muggle world. They are ordinary folk going about their business, spending time with their families, going to the pub, etc. Some are rich and some are poor. But rich and poor alike (but especially the poor) are blissfully unaware that they are really just cogs in a capitalist machine, partly because of the distractions of religion. Remove the pacifying, soporific effect of religion and everyone would inevitably wake up and smell the coffee, awaken their revolutionary spirit and overthrow the system.

This is the classical Marxist story. Marx felt that the world of “getting and spending” inhabited by muggles was both superficial and unjust. Society was divided into the “haves” and “have nots” and people were alienated and unfulfilled. If this sense of injustice and emptiness could be harnessed, revolution was inevitable. He wanted to make proletarian muppets out of proletarian muggles. But this was only possible if people’s deepest spiritual longings were unfulfilled, in other words, only if religion no longer worked.

Secular humanism is the modern “religion” that has supplanted Christianity across the Western world. It is the materialist religion of the Wheel of Babylon, where muggles have the possibility of becoming divas. However, those who don’t buy the empty promises of liberal secular humanist capitalism (as they see it) become muppets and dedicate their lives to political activism. But they are still on the Wheel. No amount of activism or revolution, no amount of dead muggles (75 million in World War II; around 100 million all told under Communism (according to the Wall Street Journal (Satter, 2017))), will satisfy the human longing for spiritual fulfilment. The longing is merely displaced.

Without religion, the secular humanist muppet wars will continue indefinitely. Everywhere is war. Internecine war between muppet factions (like The Judean People’s Front and The People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian), the larger ongoing culture war between muppets and muggles (currently Woke vs Anti-Woke), and then of course the ultimate war for the soul of the world, between secularism and religion, which is essentially a War on God.

Britain is no longer a Christian country. Callum Brown, in The Death of Christian Britain, marshals a mass of statistical data which clearly shows that Christianity has lost all semblance of cultural hegemony. It is fashionable to say that we are all “post-Christian” now, but what we really are is Secular Humanists (apart from small pockets of “private religiosity”), members of a new modernist religion of muggles and muppets, where “salvation” is only to be found either in a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or on the barricades at the end of civilisation.

“Man shall not live on bread alone” (Matthew 4:4) or even on bread and circuses, but neither shall Man live on blood alone. Political activism and bloody revolution will never make up for the spiritual shortcomings of a secular world. Ultimately, it is only the bread and wine, the “body and blood” of religion that can satisfy the human heart. Religion is the psychedelic of the people and people cannot live fulfilled lives without it. Who knows? Maybe we will find a way out of our secular nightmare when psychedelics are the religion of the people!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb opens his acclaimed book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder with the following:

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

Certain stressors make a system stronger rather than weaker. If your bones and muscles aren’t put under a certain amount of stress, for example, they will grow brittle and waste away. The same appears to be true of the mind. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explores how the fashion for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” in liberal American culture is having a detrimental effect on people’s mental health, particularly among young people, making them more rather than less psychologically fragile.

What’s the best treatment for somebody suffering from chronic depression or anxiety? Should we try to remove all potential shocks to the system and cover them in metaphorical cotton wool? Or should we help them to gradually face increasingly challenging situations, as we commonly do in Exposure Therapy for the treatment of phobias? King Sudhdhodhana and Queen Maha Maya attempted to protect their son Gautama Buddha from the harsh realities of the world by making sure he never left the precincts of the royal palace. It was only when he stole out of the palace in the dead of night and saw the reality of old age, sickness and death with his own eyes that he could begin his journey to spiritual enlightenment.

Psychedelic therapy is no walk in the park, royal or otherwise. Far from being an escapist flight from the dark existential reality of life, it puts you in profound relation with it. There are periods of enjoyment, bliss and fun, but there are also extremely difficult and painful periods of chaos and turbulence, grief and horror. To indulge in a couple of well-worn cliches, when it comes to plant medicines, “the only way out is through” and “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.

The almost unbearable intensity of psychedelic therapy makes it a true hero’s journey that calls forth the best we have. You could say it is profoundly “character building”. However, it works best when two key elements are in place: a deep sense of wonder and a deep trust in our innate antifragility.