Where is your mind when you aren’t working, problem solving, talking, listening, reading, writing, watching or being watched? When you’re just sitting there twiddling your thumbs? (And your phone is dead?)

If you’ve been following the recent research into the effects of psychedelics on the brain, you will know that this is when your “default mode network” comes online. This medial frontoparietal network is responsible for maintaining our sense of self by ruminating on relevant memories, envisioning the future and daydreaming. You will also know that one of the most striking effects of a high dose of a psychoactive compound like psilocybin is the inhibition of the default mode network, the experience of which is commonly referred to as “ego dissolution”.

When you are so engrossed and absorbed in a task that you forget about everything but the task at hand (in extreme sports for example) you are in a state known as “positive samadhi”. This means that you are completely present in what you are doing, the opposite of daydreaming. The same goes for absorption in a novel or film or being carried away by an enthralling piece of music. You might describe it as being in a state of “flow” or as being “in the zone”.

In psychedelic therapy, this typically happens when listening to music. This is really the same thing as the shamanic “trance” states induced in drumming and ecstatic dance. You are so lost in the music that you forget yourself completely. But what happens when there is no music and no other stimulus to focus on?

If you have tried meditating, you will know how difficult it is to stop thinking and enter a state of serenity and quiet when you’re not engaged in any specific activity other than meditating. The “monkey mind” will just keep chattering away as the “default mode network” keeps firing away. This is even more excruciating on psychedelics, if the DMN hasn’t been fully deactivated. Silence is not for beginners.

When there is music, we can engage our other major brain networks, such as the attention and salience networks. This relieves us of the mental loops associated with the self-oriented default mode network. However, although we may learn a lot about “positive samadhi” and reduce or even eliminate the distracting invasive thoughts characteristic of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), we won’t necessarily learn much about “absolute samadhi”.

Absolute samadhi is the state of quiet emptiness and clarity when “just sitting” (shikan taza). You are not engaged in any task, so none of your task-focused brain networks are active. But neither is your default mode network. In the Majjhima Nikaya the Buddha says, “Develop a mind that is vast like space, where experiences both pleasant and unpleasant can appear and disappear without conflict, struggle or harm. Rest in a mind like vast sky.” In Tibetan Buddhism, this state of “vast sky” is called rigpa, the pristine awareness of the fundamental ground of existence.

Imagine if your default mode was rigpa, instead of the usual running commentary of the ego’s tiresome broken record of self-concern. Imagine if between every action, instead of the background noise of the DMN, there was “vast sky mind”, and if during every task there was “one-pointed mind” and wei-wu-wei (effortless effort). Imagine if your life experience flowed between “absolute samadhi” and “positive samadhi”. This is what Zen training is all about, the cultivation of a life of meditation. It is also what Psychedelic Zen training is about.

Sometimes, however, the jiriki (self-power) way of Zen needs to be supplemented by the tariki (other-power) way of Shin. Especially in the intense throws of a heroic dose of psychedelics, we need prayer as much as meditation. Here is where Christianity comes into its own. Where Buddhism has perfected the art of meditation, Christianity has perfected the art of prayer:

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”

Matthew 7: 7-8

In this country (England) it is relatively unusual to meet someone who believes that the books of the Bible amount to the literal inerrant Word of God (relative to the U.S. for example). Here are two passages from the Gospels and St Paul’s Epistles that illustrate how idiotic this belief is.

1.

And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Mark 16: 17-18

Snake handling by Holiness, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches has caused over a hundred deaths. Presumably death by snake bite in these churches is a sign that the snake handler didn’t believe enough.

2.

And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.

For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:

And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.

1 Corinthians 15: 14-17

What if it turns out that the dead rise not and that Christ didn’t literally rise from the dead? Does that really invalidate the whole of Christianity? After two millennia can we simply say, “well that was a waste of time then”?

Paul was writing only a couple of decades after Jesus’ death, when the resurrection of the dead was a fairly common belief among Jews (the Sadducees being a notable exception). There wasn’t any Christianity then, at least not as we would recognise it today. There was no Sistene Chapel, no Palestrina, no Bach, no Augustine, no Milton, no Dante, no Saint Francis of Assisi. There wasn’t even any Gospels!

Yet Evangelical Christians routinely quote this passage in Paul to browbeat Christians into accepting the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus. Because if it didn’t actually happen, the whole thing is a lie. So you’d better believe it, because if you don’t, you’re not a real Christian, and even worse, you are basically agreeing with the unbelievers that the Christian faith is nothing but lies and chicanery. Which, the more you insist, is exactly what any healthy, rational skepticism will conclude.

Christianity is a magnificent, centuries old religion, the power and efficacy of which does not stand or fall on assent to a preposterous belief. Christianity is not about snake handling or drinking poison to prove your holiness, and neither is it about dead people miraculously coming back to life. That’s just silly.

Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

Matthew 7: 24-25

Christianity is founded upon several rocks: the Bible, the Church, Tradition, the Trinity and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However much we may stray from true religion, however much we may corrupt the teachings and distort them, intentionally or unintentionally, these things are fixed and incorruptible. We may interpret and translate the Bible in different ways, but we cannot fundamentally alter it.

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

Matthew 24: 35

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Matthew 6: 19-21

Shamanism is also founded on a rock: the rock of Nature. It is rooted in the wisdom of the body and our primeval connection to life. Through sacred medicines and timeless shamanic practices, through “trance, dance and magic plants”, we can re-member our essential embodied unity with our Mother Earth, Pachamama.

Zen is also founded on a rock: the rock of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Through disciplined meditation, we can share in his enlightenment and take refuge in the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Japanese Zen traces its lineage all the way back through Chinese Cha’an (and Taoism) and Indian Dhyana Yoga, which actually precedes Shakyamuni Buddha by hundreds if not thousands of years.

Human consciousness is ultimately founded on shamanic practices and traditions; Western civilization is ultimately founded on Judeo-Christian tradition; Eastern civilization is ultimately founded on Hindu-Buddhist tradition. The spiritual rock on which humanity is built is the tripos, Shamanic Christian Zen.

Build your house on Modernist or Postmodernist principles, on Science, Enlightenment Rationality, Secular Humanism, Marxism, National Socialism, Positivism, Fundamentalism, Critical Theory, Deconstruction, Neo-Liberalism, Neo-Darwinism, Identity Politics, etc. etc. and you are building your house on sand. It is the hubristic attempt to create a modern world cut loose from the past. It is a house without foundations, a world without meaning:

Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time

T.S. Eliot

In his brilliant lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, John Vervaeke discusses some twentieth century “prophets of the meaning crisis”, Martin Heidegger, Owen Barfield and Henri Corbin. But who are the twenty-first century prophets? I would say Roger Scruton, John Gray, Iain McGilchrist, Jordan Peterson, Yuval Noah Harari. In their various ways, they point out the arrogance and self-idolatry of Modernity, what the Rastafarians, the true Shamanic-Christian prophets of the meaning crisis, call Babylon.

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.

Matthew 7: 27

Everyone believes in some form of evolution or another. Our own personal growth and development from infant to adult is undeniable and those of us who have been adults long enough can hopefully discern stages of psychological, intellectual and spiritual maturity through our twenties, thirties, forties and beyond. At the same time we can identify developmental stages in the people around us as well as in the history of the species.

Putting the question of the Darwinian origin and evolution of species to one side, it is cleat that we all have an implicit or explicit “theory of evolution” when it comes to human consciousness. We generally associate it with certain belief systems: what you believe reflects and announces your position in the hierarchy of human evolution. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, people tend to write this story in such a way that their own belief system is at the top of the heap.

For atheists, religion is a superstition that belongs to our primitive past, an early evolutionary adaptation that mature modern human beings should really outgrow (as Richard Dawkins’ reminds us in his most recent atheist manifesto Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide), whereas for adult religious converts the opposite is true – they clearly feel that they have outgrown their atheism (compare C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy for example). There are countless conversion and de-conversion stories where the protagonists emphatically affirm their conviction that they have passed from unreality to reality, from falsehood into truth, regardless of which direction they happen to be travelling in.

Although atheists often protest that their atheism is not itself a belief system but merely the absence of belief, in most cases the “a” in atheism indicates a transcendent as well as a negative relationship to theism. In other words, “I know about theism but I see through it. I see your theism and I raise it to atheism.” A recent book by Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God, has introduced a term which goes one better: “I see your atheism and I raise it to anatheism”.

How long before some smart alec retaliates with “ananatheism”? (I saw that one coming. I have “anananatheism” up my sleeve). In the end it’s the same problem I had in my primary school spelling test when it came to “banana”: I didn’t know when to stop!

In my own personal “spiritual evolution” I can discern several stages. I would like to be able to say that as a child I started off as a naive religious believer (Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy included) but my parents brought me up as a strict atheist. (It should go without saying that Christmas was generally rubbish). But if I had, the story would unfold like this:

1. Naive Christian
2. Atheist
3. Spiritual but not Religious
4. Classical Theist
5. Christian

Most of my life I have been spiritual but not religious (SBNR). In my case, this meant that I was an adherent of the Perennial Philosophy, seeing the same universal truths variously expressed in different religious and philosophical traditions. Aldous Huxley’s famous book The Perennial Philosophy popularised this approach, as did the so-called Transpersonalists from C.G. Jung to Ken Wilber. Some use derogatory labels, like “New Age” or “Mysticism”, neither of which I have a problem with.

Sophisticated SBNR people think that they are more sophisticated than religious people and so put themselves at the top of the spiritual evolutionary tree. I certainly thought like that. It took some real humility and even humiliation to finally give up my spiritual aloofness and commit to an established religion. Which is not to say that I think “religious” is necessarily better than “spiritual”, just that for me, I couldn’t see a way forward without a serious religious commitment.

I actually used to think that I knew what Christianity was, and that I could simply accept or reject it. When I consciously decided to accept it, and get baptised and confirmed, I thought I knew what it was that I was accepting. But every time I reread the New Testament, every time I go to church, I see something I hadn’t seen before. It seems that the mystery of faith is like a magic well. Even if you occasionally touch bottom, the water just keeps on coming.

The existential anxieties of guilt and condemnation, doubt and meaninglessness and fate and death become occluded when they are screened out of consciousness by the defense mechanisms of false perfection, false certitude and false security or moral relativism, subjectivism and nihilism.

Without courage and faith, there is no getting past the two cherubim FEAR and CYNICISM barring the way back to the Garden of Eden. So cultivate courage and faith. Be a Warrior Monk or a Warrior Nun.

Every so often my mother sends me a cute video on Whatsapp. This morning she sent me an illustrated video of the secular humanist utopian leftist classic anthem, Imagine. In true John and Yoko fashion, my girlfriend and I spent the morning in bed discussing the philosophical assumptions and implications of Yoko’s lyrics.

I love Imagine. And I love Give Peace a Chance (especially because my teenage blissed out Whirl-y-Gig nights high on peace and love, DJ Monkey Pilot’s tunes, beautiful people, the parachute light show and a sprinkling of Ecstasy and Acid often ended with an emotional rendition of it.) Imagine is a great tune with an inspiring vision of the world as One. It is also a brilliant example of how confused hippy idealism really is.

John and Yoko ask us to imagine a paradise with no divisions of any kind, political, religious or economic. The attractiveness of this vision should be obvious. With the dividing lines removed, there would be no reason to judge or persecute one another and we would all live together in love, peace and harmony.

The song is a reminder that beyond all these man-made, socially constructed identities and institutions, we are all ultimately the same, all ultimately made “in the image of God”, a lovely mystical vision of unitive non-duality. As such, in the Imaginal, this is a beautiful spiritual hymn or kirtan. Advaita Vedantists would instantly recognise the technique of neti, neti (not this, not this) used in meditation to transcend all illusory separation and division. The Christian mystics of the apophatic tradition (the Negative Way) would also have no trouble with this.

But there is an important difference between neti, neti and anti, anti. The former is a spiritual realization of the ultimate illusoriness of all contingent distinctions and definitions, whereas the latter is the desire to literally destroy them. Consider how these lines from the song can be taken either way:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

…

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

What would no countries, no religion and no possessions literally be like? Taken out of the rosy context of John and Yoko’s utopian hippy haze, this actually sounds pretty bleak. As Thomas Hobbes put it, “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The only way it could conceivably represent a positive state of affairs would be if manna continuously fell from heaven and everyone was unfailingly helpful, kind, good-natured, cooperative, cheerful, generous and on a permanent natural high. In other words, if we were all basically gods in heaven.

But we’re not allowed to imagine gods in heaven, because this utopian vision is about ordinary people with their feet of clay firmly planted on the earth:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

In the Imaginal (in dreams, in Jung’s “Active Imagination” and on psychedelics for example) we can fly up to heaven and descend into the underworld. The Imaginal connects us to a vertical dimension of existence, what I call The Ray of Creation (Amun, Ra, Atum, Ka, Ba, Gaia, Jah). John and Yoko, faithful to the secular humanist creed, are asking us to imagine a world without this vertical dimension of the imagination. Everything is collapsed to the human (hence humanist) level, Ba.

Ba represents the social level of existence (Mind). Below it is Ka, the cellular, organic level (Life). Below that is Atum, the atomic, material level (Matter). Below that is Ra, the energetic level (Energy) and below that is Amun, the pregnant void (Emptiness). These are the levels we traverse in the Imaginal through “descent into the underworld” as we regress in our ontogenetic evolution. Unless you are a well-trained shaman, these level are experienced by the human ego as hell. Beyond Ba in the Ray of Creation are Gaia and Jah, representing the transcendent unity of the Earth and the Universe respectively. Ascent to these level is experienced as heaven, but it goes without saying that only well-trained mystics are capable of sufficiently transcending their personal egos to reach it.

The Ray of Creation can be visualized as a vertical line connecting all levels of existence. We tend to spend most of our time at the fifth level, the mental-social level, Ba. So much so that we can draw a horizontal line at Ba to represent the social world of human culture in which we are embedded. What we end up with is the classical Christian cross with a longer vertical line and a shorter horizontal line about three-quarters of the way up (actually five-sevenths). If you map this onto the human body, with each of the seven levels of the Ray of Creation associated with one of the seven chakras, you get the horizontal at the throat chakra, approximately at the level of your outstretched arms.

The secular humanist invitation is to imagine that there is no heaven above us (only sky) and no hell below us (only earth). In other words, no vertical dimension to reality. I began by pointing out that on a generous reading, the song Imagine is in the tradition of spiritual Remembering (Sati). It helps us to remember our basic unity and “brotherhood”. This is, of course, achieved through words and music, just like any other re-ligious (re-membering) song. However, unlike ordinary religious songs, and unlike religion in general, which reminds us to reconnect with the vertical dimension of existence, this song is encouraging us to disconnect from it.

Imagine there is no heaven or hell. There is no vertical. There is only the horizontal. There is only humanity. Imagine there is no religion. There are no reminders of the vertical. We would eventually forget about the vertical dimension completely. This is the secular humanist dream. What a relief! If above us there is only sky, then hey, we are the tops, we are “homo deus”, and no-one can tell us what to do. And we don’t need to feel guilty about being disconnected to stuff that doesn’t exist anyway.

John and Yoko were in love. And they were rich and famous. And they were brilliant artists. And they had an unlimited supply of psychedelic drugs. And they had a beautiful apartment in downtown Manhattan. They had a powerful connection to the Source of light, love and energy. Take away all that (neti, neti), and take away the connection, and what’s left? A depressed ego in a depressing world. The come down is a horizontal Flat Land where the powers that be, the institutions of Church and State and Capitalism (imagine no religion, countries or possessions) dominate and oppress a wilting population of wannabe Rousseauian noble savages who just want to be free.

When you get rid of the vertical, when you dissociate from the True Source of divine life and energy, you begin to hate everything related to the vertical, even seeing it as the ultimate source of social oppression (hence the prevalence of “misotheism”), but you also begin to hate the horizontal. You begin to see it as a fallen, corrupt world, as “Babylon”. I call this Ba-Babylon, since Ba dissociated from the rest of the Ray of Creation is a dystopian nightmare of disembodied, disenchanted, intertextual postmodern memes whose only real purpose is to clothe and disguise the naked machinations of will-to-power, class war and identity politics.

So what is John and Yoko’s solution? Get rid of the horizontal as well! Get rid of human culture altogether! Burn it all down! Let’s all go back to the simple paradise of a mythical prelapsarian Eden. And so neti, neti morphs into anti, anti. If Yoko Ono had the political clout of Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, might she have spearheaded a similar Cultural Revolution in the West? As it is, her hymn to the hippy revolution is anti-religious, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, in other words, Trotskyist.

The irony is that once you have done away with both the vertical and the horizontal, all you are left with is a single point, the zero dimensional point of atomised individualism. We become isolated and dissociated monads in a meaningless universe, redeemed only by a vague dream of a future International Socialist Brotherhood of Man. In the meantime, of course, we consume our way out of despair, falling over and over again into the welcoming arms of the Capitalists.

Then again, maybe John and Yoko will have the last laugh. Maybe a New World Order with no heaven or hell, no imagination, no religion, no countries, no possessions, no culture, no arts, no letters, is in the offing. Maybe we are in fact building a Brave New World, beginning with a Great Reset, where you will “own nothing and be happy”. Imagine!

We all know about our own negative patterns, our bad habits, our reactivity, our negative emotions and anxious negative thoughts (the “ants” crawling around inside our skulls). And we all know something about the patterns of our nearest and dearest. Everybody has bad patterns.

“Bad behaviour” refers to negative or dysfunctional behavioural patterns. When we talk about physical actions, we tend to use the morally loaded words “good” and “bad”, although these also carry a merely qualitative meaning (“bad posture” and “bad dancer” are obviously not moral judgments). At the aesthetic level, we talk instead of patterns that are “beautiful” or “ugly”. A pattern on a rug or on a dress, for example. Or the pattern of notes in a melody. When we talk about patterns of meaning, on the other hand, we talk about “true” and “false”, applied to lines of logical reasoning, theories and stories.

The Good, the True and the Beautiful are, of course, interrelated, although they are naturally associated with the optimal, “right”, patterns of body, mind and feelings respectively. We talk about “good moves”, “good balance” and “good posture”; “beautiful art”, “beautiful words” and “beautiful music”; “true accounts”, “true stories” and “true understanding”.

Mysticism famously dissolves all patterns. This is represented, for example, by the central “purification” channel (the shushumna) in Buddhist Tantra. On achieving satori (spiritual enlightenment) Zen Master Dogen said, “bodymind dropped”. This can be understood as referring to the mental and physical patterns of confusion, anxiety and tension. In that moment, he was free of his patterns. His freedom of mind made him a Mystic and his freedom of body made him a Shaman.

The Mystic and Shaman archetypes therefore point to the dissolution of all mental and physical patterns, the patterns of synaptic grooves in the brain and muscular and nervous tension in the body. This is “bodymind dropped”, or even more dramatically, “the Great Death”. The death-rebirth motif is ubiquitous in all spiritual and religious traditions, because new patterns cannot be established until the old ones are overcome.

The Warrior, Monk/Nun and Philosopher archetypes refer to the practice and mastery of Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Jnana Yoga, the yogas of action, devotion and knowledge. They are about establishing good, beautiful and true patterns of body, feelings and mind. This is the rebirth, the reconstruction, the reprogramming of the “new man” (or “new woman”) from the ashes of the old. (The King/Queen archetype refers to Raja Yoga, the royal road of the soul, the cosmic pattern of the individual’s relation to the whole, Atman to Paramatman).

With or without the aid of psychedelics, this is what the spiritual journey and the spiritual life is all about: giving up our habitual, negative patterns of movement, emotion and thought and training ourselves in new, better, truer and more beautiful patterns of body, mind and feeling. In Shamanic Christian Zen, we do this primarily through dance and martial arts (body), music and art (feelings) and study and discussion (mind). True therapy, true medicine, is not merely psychological, or merely spiritual, but holistic and integral. Patterns exist in all dimensions simultaneously.

Many years ago (how time fies!) I drank ayahuasca with some friends in south London. It was quite an eventful night, to put it mildly. At one particularly memorable point in the proceedings, I regressed to the consciousness of a unicellular organism and proceeded to recapitulate my phylogenetic evolution up to hominids and the historical stages of the cultural evolution of humanity. Somewhat irritatingly, my friends intervened at the agrarian stage due to concerns about the neighbours, because they felt that I was shouting too loudly (how else could I herd the cattle?!)

The music we were listening to aided my evolution, culminating in the ethereal sounds of Palestrina, sung for me by a literal choir of angels. As I attempted to sing along, I found that my own voice was becoming more refined and controlled, especially compared to the cowboy hollering of a few eons earlier. I was myself (almost!) singing like an angel, and feeling like one too.

This experience contributed to my deepening appreciation of the importance and centrality of the human voice. One aspect of this understanding is psychological: we have to loosen the repressive shackles modern civilization imposes on us and “find our voice”. Another is physiological: the sound vibrations of the voice reverberating in the chest and throughout the body clearly have transformative and healing power. By refining the quality of our voice, we can refine the quality of both our mental and physical energy. Both the unvoiced and voiced breath are crucial in bridging and integrating body and soul.

Fast forward a few years to the second ever Medicine Festival in West Berkshire. I am sitting listening to an act on the main stage, which turns out to be a young woman singing with an acoustic guitar. Having just smoked a joint, I relax and surrender to the music. And the voice enters me in waves of textured bliss. More powerfully than any showy set by The Rolling Stones or Rihanna. No need for a big band, orchestra, backing singers, electronic beats, special effects, auto tune, light show etc. etc. Just a simple, beautiful voice singing simple, beautiful lyrics to a simple, beautiful melody.

And I remembered the sacred power of the human voice. Thank you and bless you Alexia Chellun.

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body.

The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.

Franz Kafka

Make of this what you will. It is the unvarnished teaching of the mighty Mazatapec mushroom, a good example of the profound sense to be found in nonsense on psychedelics. Particularly striking is the intermingling of the personal and the transpersonal, the familial and the cosmic, and the importance of names.

The Virgin Mary is the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven. She is the Ultimate Source of All, the Mother of the Universe, the Womb of Existence. She is the Tao.

The Tao is called the Great Mother:

Empty yet inexhaustible,

It gives birth to infinite worlds.

Tao Te Ching 6

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

Tao Te Ching 4

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.

Tao Te Ching 25

The Virgin Mary is both the mother of God and the mother of the son of God. She created God out of herself (which is why she is a virgin). She is both older than God and greater than God. She is “the God beyond God”, or rather the Goddess beyond God.

When people imagine how Jesus was conceived, they think in terms of Greek myth. Zeus takes a fancy to Danae for example and comes to her in the form of golden rain, getting her pregnant with Perseus. However, this has it backwards. The Virgin Mary is not one more attractive young maid that God fancies, like Leda, Europa or Io. This is not about a randy God having his way with an unusually pretty mortal. The Virgin Mary is the Tao.

This is where it starts to get a bit weird. The real mother of Jesus, Son of God, is the Great Mother, the Tao. And the real father is . . . Saturn. And the Son of God is the Sun of God. Saturn is the Father, the Sun is the Son, and Earth is the Holy Spirit. But it gets even weirder: I am Saturn; my eldest son is the Sun; his brother is Mercury; and his younger sister is Flora, goddess of the flowering of plants, or life on Earth.

The brothers are in a yin-yang relationship. Think of an image of the planet Mercury in front of the Sun. It appears as a small black dot in front of a large white circle. This is one half of the yin-yang symbol. The other half is a large black circle with a small white dot. Too much sun is destructive. You end up with drought and desert. No clouds and everything dies. Clouds cover the naked power of the sun and produce life giving rain. And my second, mercurial, son is called Claudio, or “cloudy” for short.

Brotherly love brings peace and harmony. The authors of Genesis understood this. And they understood how it can go wrong. Think of Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob. Finally, with Joseph and Benjamin, the archetypal brothers are reconciled.

Raphael and Claudio are a symbiotic balance of light and dark, heat and coolness, dryness and moisture. Too much of one and the Earth is scorched. Too much of the other and it is flooded. The great flood in Genesis 6 – 9 was the result of too much Cloud and not enough Raphael. The global warming crisis we are going through now is the opposite, although it swings between extremes, with both wildfires and floods becoming more frequent and extreme.

The brothers must look after their little sister Flora. My brother in Chile tells me the trees are dying because of a terrible drought. It hasn’t rained all winter. Flora is life. She is Shakti to her brothers’ Shiva. She needs both sun and rain. And on a personal level, our own water tanks should be neither too full nor too empty (but that’s another story to do with a leak on my narrow boat and a Jewish friend staying on it who’s been made temporarily homeless because her basement flat was flooded in the July downpour).

Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune are “gas giants”. They are full of themselves but have no real substance. These are the pagan gods (Jupiter is Zeus). The real God of our Solar System is not Jupiter, but Saturn. Saturn’s consort is Pluto. Pluto was originally one of the moons of Saturn but escaped Saturn’s orbit and became a planet in its own right. This is the meaning of Eve being formed from a rib taken out of Adam’s side. Saturn and Pluto are somehow also Adam and Eve. And my Eve is Rachel, who left my orbit when we were teenagers.

The protagonists in this little family drama then are Saturn (me), Pluto (Rachel), the Sun-Mercury dyad (Raphael and Claudio) and Earth (Flora). Then there is the Virgin Mary, mother of Raphael, Claudio and Flora (Rose). The gas giants, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, are the “boomers”, that is, my parents’ generation. Jupiter is the dead and dying paterfamilias (my father and father-in-law).

Now, the Virgin Mary, as the Queen of Heaven, is in fact represented here on Earth by the Queen of England. She is the synthesis of two roses, the red and the white. The red rose is represented by the Catholic Queen, Bloody Mary. The white rose is represented by the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. The white Virgin Queen and the red Queen Mary fused together form one Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Mary. The War of the Roses, between the houses of Lancaster and York also represents the fundamental conflict between the red and white roses. Lewis Carroll may have been alluding to this when the Queen of Heart’s ordered her soldiers to paint the white roses red in Alice in Wonderland and pitted the Red Queen against the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass.

There are many other examples of this conflict. For example, the White Army and the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, and even the football rivalry between Arsenal (red) and Tottenham Hotspur (white). (Rachel’s family left Russia before the civil war because of the pogroms of the late nineteenth century, subsequently siding with the reds. Also, her father’s side support Arsenal and her mother’s side support Spurs.) Ultimately, it is only the miraculous activity of the Tao that can heal the split and put an end to the perennial conflict raging in the heart of human consciousness. This is the infinite mercy and compassion of the Virgin Mary.

Catherine Rose, my ex-wife and mother of my three children, is the granddaughter of the Earl of Longford. Her family is historically connected to the English royal family (Kitty Pakenham was the Duchess of Wellington). Catherine Rose, historically through Kitty (short for Catherine) and dialectically through the reconciliation of the red and white roses (Catholic and Protestant, Left and Right, etc.) is the nexus through which the Tao of the Virgin Mary flows.

One important take away from this train of thought is that we should honour our Queen, Elizabeth II, because she is the earthly representative of the Queen of Heaven. (I won’t go into the significance of the Sex Pistols and Freddy Mercury here, because it will take me even further off topic). She represents the ultimate womb of creation, the Tao, the mother of God. And she is the head of the Church of England.

So anyway, back to the Solar System. The two planets conspicuous by their absence in the story so far are Mars and Venus. Mars is the red planet and Venus is the white planet. Mars is the red rose and Venus is the white. They are Earth’s neighbours, and just as all the other neighbourly conflicts of red and white (all the way down to the North London derby), they must find a peaceful balance and coexistence. Otherwise the Earth gets caught in the cross-fire.

Flora, the goddess of the flowering of plants, needs to be protected from the destructive energies of Mars and Venus. Luckily, she has her brothers to look after her. It is the job of Raphael and Claudio, the Sun and Mercury, to keep Mars and Venus in check. When the Sun and Mercury are harmoniously integrated through brotherly love in a yin-yang equilibrium, then they can balance the polarity between the red and white. They can avert war (too much Mars) and degenerate love (too much Venus). They can also balance the natural polarities of hot and cold, dry and wet, stillness and wind, etc.

Saturn is an aging god. His children are greater than he. And it is their story that matters now.

Pero mi mamá es la reina del cielo.