There are many ways of breaking through (I suppose).

Here are six I have personally experienced several times (not necessarily in order of preference):

1. The Psychedelic Palace. More often than not the onset is sudden: vivid colourful geometric imagery which flows and dances with the music. It is a familiar space, a happy place.
2. The Black Hole. At some point in the proceedings you slip into a black hole and emerge some time later unsure where you’ve been exactly. You can’t remember much and the music has passed unnoticed.
3. Regeneration. This is an experience of intense energetic dissolution and regeneration. It feels like all the atoms in your body are simultaneously and individually zapped by an alien regeneration machine.
4. Death and resurrection. This takes the form of a physical descent into the underworld, either earth or sea or ice caves, followed by an ascent and rebirth into the light. It usually includes a period of intense discomfort and claustrophobia and identification with the sufferings of humanity and/or all of life before the blissful release.
5. Apocalypse. Potentially very frightening, especially the first time. The world disappears, dissolves, evaporates, revealing an infinite plenum void of mysterious awesome Godhead. There is a dreadful feeling that this is in fact the end of the world. Eventually however, existence reconstitutes itself, one veil at a time. For some musings on this breakthrough, see the blog post Apocalypse.
6. Everything/Nothing Whiteout. This is the classic ego dissolution experience of mystical union with God (for want of a better word). It can be experienced as strange or familiar, blissful or terrifying. There is a sense of timelessness and spaciousness. Sometimes there is the bare feeling “I Am” or even “I Am God”. Although it can feel like an eternity, with hindsight it is possible to estimate the time as a matter of minutes. The pure state (without any thoughts at all) doesn’t generally last very long.

If none of these breakthroughs bring you to a state of Dust and Ashes before the inconceivable Mysterium Tremendum, you’re not quite getting it.

“If you can understand, it is not God.” (Saint Augustine)

“You will realize that doctrines are inventions of the human mind, as it tried to penetrate the mystery of God. You will realize that Scripture itself is the work of human minds, recording the example and teaching of Jesus. Thus it is not what you believe that matters; it is how you respond with your heart and your actions. It is not believing in Christ that matters; it is becoming like him.” (Pelagius)

“A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God.” (Reinhold Niebuhr)

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” (Jean-Paul Sartre)

“There’s a lot of space out there to get lost in.” (John Robinson)

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence.

T.S. Eliot

Humans being the fallible (perhaps fallen) creature they are, tend to create societies based on greed, hate and delusion, the “three poisons” at the hub of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. I call this Babylon.

Perhaps there was a happy paradisaical state of human society in a past golden age, perhaps not. But at some point, human beings became accustomed to life in Babylon, that is, a collective life of greed, hate and delusion.

The history of the world is a history of Babylon in all its multifarious guises. However, there is also a parallel history running beneath the surface events, of the violent rise and fall of empires, which is the resistance to Babylon.

A potted history of this resistance progresses through a Hegelian dialectic of three stages. It begins with a return to Nature, which develops and matures in the human imagination by means of poetry and myth. This is the thesis.

The conceptual limitations of poetry are then countered by philosophy. For example, the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle reacting to the mythos of the ancient poets Homer and Hesiod. This is the antithesis.

When philosophy fails to satisfy the emotional and spiritual longings of the human heart, people turn to religion, as happened in the Hellenic world of late antiquity with the move from speculative philosophical monotheism to the living God of the Jews and Christians. This is the synthesis.

Poetry, philosophy and religion can (and are) co-opted by the dominant forces of Babylon. Thus they become tools of further oppression and control. However, there is always a hidden stream which continues to liberate people from the “mind-forg’d manacles” of Babylon.

This stream becomes sullied with time. As religion grows stale and tired, it loses its regenerative and vivifying force and people lose faith. But the stream can be purified and flow clear glittering crystal again.

Return to Nature. Remember poetry. Rediscover philosophy. Revive religion. This has always been the way out of Babylon and always will be.

Roberto Assagioli’s famous egg diagram is a very useful picture of the human psyche, especially when it comes to extra-ordinary states of consciousness.

Here is one way of understanding it, using Christ’s famous assertion, “I am the way, the truth and the life”:

I AM (Higher Self) THE WAY (Field of Consciousness), THE TRUTH (Middle Unconscious) and THE LIFE (Lower Unconscious and Higher Unconscious).

I AM is pure subjectivity, pure consciousness. When we are in this state, we are “One without a Second”, that is, subject with no object. THE WAY is our immediate experience of the world without the filter or mediation of thoughts or feelings, that is, a state of no-mind (mu-shin) and flow (wei-wu-wei). We simply experience whatever comes to pass in our field of consciousness. THE TRUTH is the wisdom stored in the middle unconscious, which is not present to consciousness, and does not interfere with the pristine clarity of our field of awareness, but is available for conscious recall at any moment, just below the surface of consciousness. THE LIFE is the energy released through accessing the depths and heights of the lower and higher unconscious, on psychedelics for example (Amun, Ra, Atum, Ka in the lower and Gaia, Jah in the higher).

“Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.”

Ephesians 4: 9-10

N.B. This also maps onto the 1,3,7, 12 model (see the blog posts The Ark of the Holy Imaginal and Between the One and the Many):

AHAM is 1 – HODOS is 3 – ZOE is 7 – ALETHEIA is 12.

AHAM is 1 – KENOSIS is 3 – GNOSIS is 7 – PISTIS is 12.

What does it take to be a Zen Christian Shaman?

Purity, faith and experience.

Also:

Resist the flattering voice of the devil with all the humility of a Mystic-Shaman; resist the lures of the flesh with the chastity of a Warrior-Monk; resist the temptations of the world with the purity of a Philosopher-King.

In other words, reject the world, the flesh and the devil.

Be humble, chaste and pure.

For a Zen Christian Shaman, the way is pure Zen – “a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)”, – the truth is Christian humility – “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless”, and the life is Shamanic transmuted sexual energy – “Love is the unfamiliar name behind the hands that wove the intolerable shirt of flame.” (T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets)

So:

Faith and experience are the bulwarks supporting purity.

And:

We need the humility to get over ourselves and put our faith in a Higher Power, and we need to be chaste if we are to experience our life force (Eros) non-sexually. The stronger the faith and the deeper the experience, the easier it is to maintain the pure awareness of mu-shin (no-mind) in everyday life.

‘Buddha, according to a sutra, once said: “Stop, stop. Do not speak. The ultimate truth is not even to think.”‘ (Quoted in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps)

Another way to understand this saying of Jesus (with apologies to the Buddha!) is as Integral Yoga:

The “I am” is Raja Yoga; the “way” is Dhyana Yoga; the “truth” is Jnana Yoga; the “life” is Kundalini Yoga. The “way” is also Karma Yoga and the “life” is also Bhakti Yoga.

Simply put, the “I am” includes Self-inquiry; the “way” includes mindful walking, cooking, working; the “truth” includes lectio divina, contemplative reading; the “life” includes sacred music, art, ritual and plant medicine.

Some people believe in God for intellectual, cultural or religious reasons. They believe through faith, consoled by Christ’s saying to doubting Thomas after his resurrection, “blessed are they who have not seen and yet believed” (John 20:29).

Some believers believe that you cannot see God and live anyway (Exodus 33:20). What could seeing God even mean, considering “God is Spirit” (John 4:24)? And as theologians are at pains to remind us, God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. How can you “see” Spirit or Being itself?

Strange as it may sound to sober ears, people do actually report seeing God on high dose psychedelic trips. They won’t be able to describe the experience in a convincing or even comprehensible manner, but it doesn’t seem to bother them – they know what they’ve seen.

Another strange psychedelic experience is seeing death. How can you see death? As Epicurus argued many years ago, it is irrational to fear death, since death cannot be experienced, being by definition the end of consciousness. Yet psychonauts commonly report experiencing death, or at least approaching it closely enough so as to “see” it.

Seeing death is unsurprisingly associated in the psychedelic experience with darkness, with silence, with emptiness and with the vanishing point of consciousness on falling asleep. There is also usually some anxiety and resistance present, which is also unsurprising. The will to life is strong enough that we generally don’t want to die, just in case!

Whether or not we actually see God or just imagine it, or whether we actually see death or just imagine that, the high dose psychedelic experience is profoundly existential, by which I mean that God and/or death are deeply felt in the core of our being. It’s not just belief in God or the thought of death as concepts, in the abstract, but actually seeing God and seeing death. Not literally, of course, but existentially.

“In the midst of life we are in death”, as the Book of Common Prayer has it. This is the basic existential insight. We are mortal and we will die, which you know as well as I do. But it’s one thing to know it intellectually and quite another to know it existentially.

So what? What’s the point? Is there any value in seeing death? Well, to put it somewhat poetically, so light shines in the darkness, music sings in the silence, and life blossoms in the grave.

Just as “our heart is restless until it finds its rest in God” (Augustine) so is our life restless until it finds its rest in death. We do not know who we are until we know God, and we do not know what life is until we know death.

We don’t know that we don’t know until we see it. And it should go without saying that it’s irrelevant whether you believe me or not.

One possible explanation for the empathic insights typical of psychedelic journeys is that we are saturated with positive psychic energy (whatever that is) so that the imaginative surveys of our life and the people in our life is refracted through the prism of love.

Many surprising insights arise as a consequence simply because thinking lovingly is thinking differently. We realise the error or our judgmental and dismissive ways and are painfully reminded that the people we habitually think about as jobs to be done or boxes to be ticked are actually complex sentient beings of flesh and blood just like us.

Psychedelic integration often focuses on ways to retain the messages we receive and apply them in our everyday life in a sensible and considered manner, whether it be to change jobs or call our mother more often. Not all insights, messages and visions are that practical and straightforward though. They can be pretty abstract, philosophical and downright cosmic, and it’s not always obvious what to do with them.

Although “love is blind” in ordinary states of consciousness, it actually makes us see clearer (most of the time) on psychedelics. Visions illumined by the light of love glow with noetic power. They reveal truths, especially uncomfortable truths, in ways we wouldn’t ordinarily perceive or appreciate.

Personally I love visions. Most psychonauts do. When the tide of love has receded, however, what I am left with often looks like tiddlers and baby crabs in a rock pool. But the vision of love remains. Plus the suspicion that it’s not really the insights from love, or gifts of the spirit, but the possibility of love itself that matters.

The vision of love is a glimpse of another way of being in the world. Not fantasy and not hippy idealism, but real and really attainable. With the vision comes the aim and eventually the method, which for me turned out to be the “way, the truth and the life” of Christ and Christianity.

If you have spent any time at all researching psychedelics, you will surely have come across the phrase “ego death” or “ego dissolution”, usually as a prelude to some kind of spiritual rebirth. The death-rebirth motif can of course be found all over the ancient world, not least in the central story of the death and resurrection of Christ. For an ancient Greek, an ego death and rebirth will have reminded them of Persephone or Dionysus. For a Christian, it will likely have reminded them of Easter.

Although I have experienced this a few times myself, primarily on ayahuasca, it doesn’t quite fit the bill with mushrooms. It’s very unusual to lose all sense of your self on mushrooms, even at higher doses (heroic doses and above are a different story). Generally speaking, instead if a death-rebirth experience, mushrooms feel more like just a rebirth, that is, like being “born again”.

Jesus tries to explain what this means to Nicodemus in John’s gospel:

“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

(John 3: 3-8)

William Law wrote about the need for Regeneration in the eighteenth century. He also insisted that the serious Christian had to be born of the spirit:

“When therefore the first spark of a desire after God arises in thy soul, cherish it with all thy care, give all thy heart into it, it is nothing less than a touch of the divine loadstone, that is to draw thee out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity.

Get up therefore and follow it as gladly, as the wise men of the east followed the star from heaven that appeared to them. It will do for thee as the star did for them, it will lead thee to the birth of Jesus, not in a stable at Bethlehem in Judea, but to the birth of Jesus in the dark centre of thy own fallen soul.”

(The Spirit of Prayer)

Mushroom regeneration is more like Christmas than Easter. It’s like a spiritual reset, as well as an opportunity for life reviews and resolutions, a bit like Christmas and New Year rolled into one. For some people, once a year is enough. For others, once a month is about right. Either way, as Philip Larkin sang (on behalf of the trees), “begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”