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.

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.