The three wise monkeys depict the proverb “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil”.

The four wise monkeys include a fourth maxim, which cannot easily be represented pictorially: “think no evil”.

What if we were also to increase not just the number of monkeys but the scope of the concept of evil? What if we were to include the whole of the Babylon System?

We’d get the following: “hear no Babylon, see no Babylon, speak no Babylon, think no Babylon”.

The Wheel of Babylon (essentially the Bhavachakra, the Tibetan Wheel of Life) depicts six realms: Diva World, Muggle Land, Muppet Land above and the Victim, Addict and Demon Realms below.

All of these realms are available to us, through the miracle of modern technology, at the touch of a button. A TV Times that included everything on the television and radio, and satellite, cable, Netfix, Amazon, etc., everything on the Internet, YouTube, Podcasts, Wikipedia, Spotify, Porn Hub, etc., all social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok etc., everything on your games consoles, Playstation, Xbox, etc., in your local cinema, theatre, bookshop and newsagents, not to mention everything on your bookshelves and in your film and record collections, would be a fairly exhaustive guide to the cultural delights of Babylon.

Now, if you watch and listen to Divas, Muggles and Muppets, either in the flesh or on screen, or talk to or about them, you will inevitably also spend a lot of time and energy thinking about them. They will leave traces in your psyche that may linger for minutes, hours or days. The same goes for Victims, Addicts and Demons.

The key point to understand is that even just thinking about Tom, Dick and Harry, or Donald Trump and Aunt Sally, means that you are automatically and instantaneously in Muggle Land, Muppet Land or Diva World. And even just fantasising about Scarlett Johansson or Ryan Reynolds and you are instantly in the Addict Realm.

“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

Matthew 5: 27-28

You are never truly alone, because you carry a host of characters around with you wherever you go, even to the proverbial mountain cave. Even without your phone.

So remember the four wise monkeys. Stay away from Babylon, forget Babylon, stop thinking, even just for a few seconds, and you will enjoy the peace which passeth all understanding, and experience the freedom of the flight of the alone to the Alone. You will momentarily escape Samsara and enter Nirvana, and in that timeless moment, will enjoy your original Buddha Nature that you have since before your parents were born.

Character 7 (see The Free Guy post) is:

Beyond Babylon.

In the world but not of the world.

Beyond discriminative thought.

Free from desire.

Beyond good and evil.

A Mystic-Shaman.

A Warrior-Monk or Warrior-Nun.

A Philosopher-King or Philosopher-Queen.

Holy, virtuous and wise.

Faithful and courageous.

A Ray of Creation.

A Child of God.

In harmony with the Tao.

A Stream-Enterer.

A Tathagata.

A Bodhisattva.

Gaia Consciousness.

An angel in Babylon.

Beyond Ba.

Being-Consciousness-Bliss.

Imagine a multi-player computer game where everyone chooses from a set stock of characters with different missions. Something like Grand Theft Auto where some characters are played by real people and some are computer generated non player characters. Now imagine that one of the non player characters “wakes up” and realises it’s all just a video game. Wait, apparently that’s what the new film Free Guy starring Ryan Reynolds is about! A cross between The Truman Show, The Matrix, Groundhog Day, eXistenZ and Wreck-It Ralph I suppose…

Well, imagine that this computer game is so immersive, with such amazing VR graphics etc., that people actually forget that they’re playing a character and become completely identified with their avatars. Something like an actor on stage who for the duration of the play is so emotionally engaged that he comes to believe that he is Hamlet. The game would of course have to have a built-in time limit (like a play) so that people could return to their real lives. But you would be able to continue playing and pick up where you left off, which would be the dawning of a new day in the game: “And the evening and the morning were the sixth day”.

Imagine that you could choose between one of six kinds of character and that each of these had two missions:

Character 1 – Get Rich and Get Famous

Character 2 – Get On and Be Liked

Character 3 – Fight the Power and Change the World

Character 4 – Get Laid and Get Loaded

Character 5 – Get Hurt and Be Looked After

Character 6 – Kill and Destroy

If you’ve been following my ramblings, you will of course recognise that these six missions correspond to the six archetypes on the “Wheel of Babylon” (derived from the Tibetan Wheel of Life), the Divas, Muggles, Muppets, Addicts, Victims and Demons.

Now, imagine a computer game where you could switch missions mid-game so that you could potentially complete them all. Aren’t we getting uncomfortably close to our own real life “simulation”?

But what if there was a secret seventh mission? What if you could “wake up” and escape from the game world, like Neo, Truman and Guy?

Character 7 would be a kind of secret character that you could access through some kind of bug in the game. The irony is that then you would become a genuine non player character. Inside the game (in the film), the NPCs think that they are real people going about their business, whereas the strange larger-than-life characters who intrude into their lives as if from another dimension, with unfathomable motivations and behaviours, really have nothing to do with their world. In an NPC world, it’s the human players who are the NPCs.

Character 7 doesn’t play the game. Character 7 has no interest in money or fame or the rest of it. He (or she) is a non player character in a game full of players, free to do what he wants, a “free guy”. In the film it seems that he uses his freedom to do good: he becomes a “good guy”.

Doing good is important. But more important is the fact that, like Buddha or Christ, you are in the game but not of the game, in the world but not of the world, a “non player character” following a different program, called by some “the Dharma”, by others, “the will of the Father”.

Those who are called to the spiritual life are called to be angels in Babylon. Once you understand and accept that the world is in thrall to all sorts of deception and malevolence, and that human beings are continuously possessed by Diva, Demon, Victim, Addict, Muppet and Muggle spirits, you realise that all you can hope for is to be a light in the darkness.

Don’t be discouraged or depressed. Don’t be disappointed. If you dream of Sion, you will feel homeless in Babylon. Look to yourself and do your bit. The angels will guide us to the Promised Land, even if it takes hundreds and thousands of years. In the meantime, as much as is in your power, be an angel.

Grow your wings and spend time in Heaven. Remember that time is elastic – an hour in Heaven is like a year on Earth. But remember also that you are here to help. The treasures you are given in Heaven are a gift to people on Earth. Bring back peace, love, goodness, beauty, truth, consciousness and bliss. That’s all you can do.

If you understand the Trinity, you understand everything there is to know about spiritual cognition. Take three famous trinities:

Father, Son, Holy Spirit

Parashiva, Shiva, Shakti

Tao, Yang, Yin

In ordinary, non-spiritual cognition, we are aware of the phenomenal world as it presents itself to us seemingly arbitrarily, almost passively. This is the “third person” of each of these trinities, the Holy Spirit, Shakti and Yin. However, because we apprehend the “shining forth” of phenomena from the outside, so to speak, as surface, there is very little shining and very little holiness. There is just “objective reality”.

When we become self-aware and self-reflective, we start to realise that the world doesn’t present itself to us randomly or passively, because our attention and attitude powerfully effect the way the world discloses itself to us. The world is not (as Empiricists like John Locke thought) just independently out there to be discovered, but neither is it a blank canvas on which we project ourselves (as Romantics like Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought).

Rather, we co-create our worlds out of the continuous activity of “relevance realisation”. Out of the infinite potential of experience, we consciously (and unconsciously) pick out what is relevant to us. We are not passive agents, but intentionally directed towards the world through active attention, which is the “second person”, Yang, Shiva, Son.

The more philosophically and psychologically literate you are, the more agency you have, and the less you are a passive victim of events, blown like a reed by the winds of fortune. You are the helmsman of your ship and a master of the sea. This is what empowering therapies such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy aim for, and why “positive thinking” is such a constant in the Potential Movement. Our “subjective” psychological attitude has a real effect on how the “objective” world around us manifests.

This is as far as it goes for most people. However, the more spiritually minded among us seem to have a sense of a mysterious something beyond and behind both the phenomenal world and our consciousness of it. This is usually experienced as a vague spiritual background noise, something like the background radiation of the universe, sometimes expressed in terms of Energy, or Mind, or God. It is also referred to as “the Ground of Being”.

Parashiva refers to the light of consciousness beyond the horizon of our individual Shiva consciousness. Logically speaking, there could be no intentional consciousness, that is, consciousness of something, without it (see chapter 34 of my book, What’s Behind the Wall?).

But there is also the inexhaustible “moreness of things” as reality simultaneously discloses itself and withdraws itself. We never apprehend objects in their entirety. We can never grasp the ever-elusive, ever-receding “thing in itself”, because there is always the “thing beyond itself”. The “veiling of Shakti” is also part of the mystery beyond the horizon of our world. It is also part of Parashiva, although we might more accurately call it “Parashakti”.

The “first person” of the Trinity, the Father, Parashiva or the Tao, refers to the transcendent Consciousness-beyond-consciousness and World-beyond-world. This is what is commonly referred to as “God”. It constitutes a background sense of numinous divinity for religious people, but is largely abstract and mostly invisible to non-religious people. But what would it be like if it were actually foregrounded? What would it be like to live in “the presence of God”, as Brother Lawrence put it?

It would be to experience the world as the mystics experience it, as a Trinity:

Father, Son, Holy Spirit

Parashiva, Shiva, Shakti

Tao, Yang, Yin.

Seek ye first the Tao and its righteousness (Te), and all these things (Yin-Yang), shining forth (Qi), shall be added unto you.

If you are lucky enough to have had a taste of enlightenment, you will know that it is a radically different state of being compared to our ordinary state of consciousness. You will also know how difficult it is to recreate. As the adult is to the child, so is the sage to the adult. Just as a toddler can have no clear conception of what adult cognition is like, so will an adult struggle to understand what enlightened cognition is. Even if you do have a special insight it, the fact is that to stabilize it requires a lifetime of careful work and significant psycho-spiritual development.

The quest for enlightenment, like the quest for the holy grail, can lead you down some perilous paths and a plethora of dead ends, some heaped with the bones and skulls of those that went before. If you are serious about spiritual enlightenment therefore, you had better work out a Wise Way, a way that is viable and reliable.

There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to spiritual transformation. There are many factors at play in each individual’s specific personal and cultural context which open certain avenues and close others. We must all make do with what we’ve got and where we are. Not all of us were born into an aristocratic family in medieval Japan, for example. But we should all aspire to a wise cultivation of enlightenment using all the resources and possibilities at our disposal. If you lived next to Westminster Cathedral, for example, it would surely be churlish, if not foolish, not to attend services there.

So anyway, this is what I have come up with as a Wise Way. It works for me, and hopefully it works for others too.

This Way can be visualized as four concentric circles. At the centre is a mantra. Then comes Zen, then Christianity, then Shamanism. The mantra covers a surprising amount of ground and actually relates to all the essential elements in Shamanism, Christianity and Zen. I won’t try to unpack it here, as it is endlessly generative and “combinatorially explosive”, and I’ve already teased out some of the main associations and implications in my book and in many of the blogs on this website. Here it is again:

Remember God

Parashiva Shiva Shakti

Amun Ra Atum Ka Ba Gaia Jah

Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King Friend

Peace Love Goodness Beauty Truth Consciousness Bliss

This is the core practice, based on the principle of Sati, or remembering. Beyond this is the Zen practice of “direct pointing to Reality outside the scriptures”, based on mindfulness and presence. Beyond this is the comprehensive and inexhaustible legacy of the Christian tradition, rooted of course in the person of Christ and his memorial in the Gospels and the Mass. Finally, supporting and powerfully amplifying these three core elements is the sacred use of psychedelics.

I think it is also important to include a fifth circle, which provides a useful source of theoretical grounding for the practice. And for this I am indebted to John Vervaeke and others involved in the development of 3rd generation 4E cognitive science, which is a wonderful complement to Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis model and other more recent transpersonal psychologies. The best place to start if you want to learn about cognitive science and get a handle on what he would call “the machinery of enlightenment” is Vervaeke’s YouTube series of lectures, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, where he lays out a fascinating naturalistic, scientific account of wisdom, virtue and enlightenment.

The essential point of Shamanic Christian Zen as a spiritual path is that it is as comprehensive and holistic as possible, while at the same time managing to maintain a clear inner coherence and identity. I have suggested a schematic model of the various elements at play as concentric circles: the mantra at the centre, then Zen, Christianity, psychedelics and cognitive science. A clearer and more comprehensive schema, however, is provided by the seven archetypes included in the mantra, which function as “divine doubles” (see Vervaeke on Corbin).

Using the archetypes, we can draw the concentric circles in the following way: Mysticism at the core, followed by Shamanism/Psychedelics, Martial Arts/Dance, Religion, Philosophy/Psychology/Cognitive Science, and some as yet undefined Mastery, Spiritual Friendship and Communitas.

Or to keep things simple:

Mysticism

Shamanism

Religion

Philosophy

Psychology

Nb. Most of you will probably want to skip the “Religion” layer, especially if it’s the Christian religion, because of our powerful and pervasive Western anti-religious secular cultural training, which is absolutely fine by me. (You can always put it back later! ;))

As every spiritual practitioner knows, it’s no good just reading endless books and learning all the theory under the sun. You need to actually do it, not just think about it. The map is not the territory.

A cognitive scientific way of saying the same thing (courtesy of John Vervaeke) is that real transformation is only possible if you move beyond the propositional level of knowing to the procedural, the perspectival and the participatory. These four levels of knowing can be applied to any of the archetypes on the Cross of Enlightenment (see the Home Page). For example, you can learn about shamanism (propositional knowledge), you can engage in shamanic rituals (procedural knowledge), you can take the shamanic perspective and you can find your shamanic mojo or flow.

The first stage (propositional) is theoretical and the second stage (procedural) is practical. You are learning about shamanism and practicing it. The third and fourth stages are different. At this level, you begin to embody shamanism to the point where you have the perspective of a shaman can actually consider yourself to be a shaman. The fourth stage of participatory flow is where you discover your shamanic power and become, not just a shaman, but a powerful shaman.

The Cross of Enlightenment is divided into three lines: the Mystic Shaman line, the Warrior Monk line and the Philosopher King line. Although each of these six archetypes has its own qualities and characteristics, we can also consider them as acting within three broad arenas, which we might call “the spiritual”, “the physical” and “the mental” arenas.

In psychedelic work, we begin with the spiritual, which involves intense meditative techniques that transcend the habitual patterns of discriminative thought. This frees us to “enter the dragon” and experience the inner workings of our energetic, somatic system. The Mystic Shaman therefore aims at a state of “soma flow”, which points both to the flow of the exogenous psychoactive Soma (the psychedelic “food of the gods”) throughout the bodymind, and the free flow of our endogenous psychosomatic life force within us.

As the experience abates in intensity, we return to the physical plane and begin to move and be moved by the body in the spontaneous martial art and dance moves of the Warrior Monk. This stage typically includes drumming and/or live or recorded music. This is the “body flow” stage.

Finally, we enter the Philosopher King stage of contemplative reflection, insight and insight cascades. This is the “mind flow” stage. The profound insights received at this stage feed back into the 4P system by providing us with improved and updated propositional knowledge, which deepens our subsequent procedural, perspectival and participatory knowledge. And on we go, “going, going, going on beyond, always going on beyond, always becoming Buddha”, always awakening to an ever deeper, inexhaustible reality, “world without end”.

Note: For a proper understanding of this blog, you should watch Episode 37 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke (on YouTube) and ideally the previous 36 episodes as well.

The convergence of my work with Vervaeke’s is so striking that I can’t let it go unacknowledged. Watching his series has been enormously gratifying and encouraging for me. In Episode 37, entitled “Reverse Engineering Enlightenment: Part 2”, he begins to build a practical response to the “perennial problems” besetting human beings. These problems are the result of the self-deceptive and self-destructive patterns of behaviour that arise as a consequence of the adaptive machinery of relevance realization gone awry. And his solutions are incredibly similar to mine.

The first of these is the perennial problem of “parasitic processing”, a term which captures the way in which ordinary healthy psychological functioning is vulnerable to distortion by a superimposed dynamic self-organising system. This dysfunctional system is characterised by positive feedback loops of negative rumination, creating a whole host of cognitive distortions and negative biases.

Vervaeke points out that an intervention anywhere in the system is as good as useless, since the system, being self-organising, will simply reconfigure itself around the change and continue as before. What he advocates for instead, is an alternative system to counteract the parasitic one. He uses the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path as an example of an integrated system whose cultivation can counteract and eventually prevail over parasitic processing. The eight practices are specifically designed to overturn the wrong thinking of the “deluded” mind.

On the Pachananda Home Page you will find a depiction of two contrasting systems, the “Wheel of Babylon” based on the Tibetan Wheel of Life (the Bhavachakra) and the “Cross of Enlightenment”, which is its antithesis and antidote. In my book and blogs, I make exactly the same case as Vervaeke. The whole system must be abandoned and a new one created in its place. This is expressed in the Christian tradition as dying to the “old man” and being born again as a “new man”. It is a radical change of orientation, not simply an exercise in damage limitation and disaster management.

The idea is to withdraw energy and attention from the six worlds of the Wheel of Babylon and enter into a completely different agent-arena relationship. The Wheel of Babylon represents six dysfunctional personality types, but also six different ego states we all slip in and out of all the time, although we will tend to gravitate to one over the others. Yesterday, just for fun, I imagined what the UK population distribution might be for these six types: Divas are naturally 1%. Demons are also about 1%. Victims and Addicts are probably about 10% each. Muggles are around 50%, which means that 27.9% are Muppets.

What about the other 0.1%? This is reserved for those who have stepped off the Wheel altogether and are established on an alternative non-parasitic counter-system, such as the Cross of Enlightenment. The first position on the Cross is the Mystic, so the implication is that 0.1% of the population are at least mystics, if not quite shamans, etc. When I’m feeling pessimistic, I think it’s probably far less than that!

Anyway, to continue with Vervaeke’s “perennial problems”. The next problem in the functional group is the problem of “modal confusion”, which is to do with the confusion between the having mode and the being mode (see Erich Fromm’s To Have or To Be). The logical solution is to develop ways to remember the being mode. In the Buddhist tradition, this existential self-remembering is called Sati. (Self-Remembering is also central to the Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way). I have written at length about remembering and forgetting and pointed to various remembering techniques, for example the Parashiva – Shiva -Shakti mantra.

Parashiva is the inexhaustible transcendence beyond all horizons of sense and cognition, including the near horizon, which is “nearer to us than our jugular vein”, the ever-receding “I-I”. Shiva is the light of consciousness and Shakti is the illuminated objects of consciousness.

Third in the functional group, the reflective gap is dealt with by cultivating flow between immersion and detachment. This flexible flow state is represented in the Cross of Enlightenment by the Warrior and Monk archetypes.

The structural group of problems are absurdity, anxiety and alienation. Vervaeke’s answer to absurdity (which he defines as a “perspective clash”) is to practice scaling down and scaling up through a kind of perspectival accordion, moving through wider and wider perspectives and reconciling them together, ultimately achieving a simultaneous nondual view from above and below. He quotes Meister Eckhart’s famous saying that “the eye with which you see God is the same as that with which He sees you” (see chapter 3 of my book, The Gateless Gate).

This hierarchy of perspectival knowing and being is what I call “The Ray of Creation”. It is akin the traditional “Great Chain of Being” but consistent with our current scientific understanding of complex emergence. (If you’re interested in the science, see Andrew P. Smith’s The Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness). The seven levels of the Ray of Creation are: Emptiness (Amun), Energy (Ra), Matter (Atum), Life (Ka), Mind (Ba), Global and Universal Consciousness (Gaia and Jah). The mantra is rooted in the body, with each mantra corresponding to one of the seven chakras (see chapter 9 of my book, Seven Gods, and chapter 13, The Chakras).

I also deal with the anxiety resulting from the inner conflict of warring subpersonalities in the same way. Vervaeke mentions the Jungian technique of Active Imagination and the internalisation of “the Sage”. My training in Psychosynthesis introduced me to Guided Visualisation and dialoguing between our “inner actors” and making contact with “the Wise Being”. The whole business of integrating the conflicted and dissociated parts of the psyche was Assagioli’s specialty. And the internalisation of religious archetypes such as Jesus and Buddha gives an added power to these techniques.

The alienation problem can only really be addressed by participating in communitas, that is, being part of a genuine community, and specifically a spiritual community or sangha, dedicated to the spiritual development of its members. This is also something I am working towards.

The developmental group of perennial problems have to do with existential entrapment, arising from existential inertia and existential ignorance. Vervaeke’s proposed solution is gnosis, or deep insight. I completely agree. This is where the psychedelics come in. Although nothing is guaranteed, these powerful psychotechnologies do have an extraordinary capacity to break people out of their existential prisons.

In short, my proposal is Shamanic Christian Zen. It offers cogent and effective responses to the perennial problems and a powerful solution to the meaning crisis.

A small world network is a network which has achieved an optimal balance between efficiency and resiliency. It is neither too regular (and so low in efficiency with a high average number of degrees of separation between nodes) or too random (and so low in resiliency with a high chance of disintegration).

A small symbolic world network is a highly integrated but flexible system of symbols, which gives it enormous potential transformative power. However, this potential is only actualized through participatory engagement. The symbols have to be “held in mind” in order to activate the primordial structures of relevance realization with which they are associated.

The most powerful small symbolic world networks are what we call “religions”, which include sacred myths, rituals and art, where sacredness is understood as the numinous quality of the intrinsically revelatory self-disclosing nature of a symbolic world. Religions can thus be understood as virtual symbolic engines designed to stretch the boundaries of self and world in a mutually reinforcing process of expansion and transcendence.

“The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.”

Tao Te Ching – verse 4

If you take a psychedelic when you’re in an ordinary state of consciousness, you will most likely have a classic psychedelic trip with all the frills and thrills, a crazy kaleidoscopic electric kool-aid acid mind bending trip to the moon. There will be tangerine trees and marmelade skies etc. etc.

This is not what Shamanic Christian Zen is about. We do use psychedelic plant medicines, but with an important difference: we don’t take them in an ordinary state of consciousness, we pre-alter our consciousness.

In the ordinary state of consciousness (OSC) the mind is functioning on the semantic, linguistic level. You think in terms of words and images, which frame reality in a particular way, according to your ego structure and personal history. Taking a psychedelic in this state is like “shaking the snow globe” or shaking a self-portrait made with powdered paints. Thoughts and images fly in all directions.

In Shamanic Christian Zen, the idea is to reach a deeper, more primordial state of consciousness below the semantic level. This pre-linguistic, pre-egoic, pre-conceptual state of basic “relevance realization” can only be reached by moving beyond the discriminating mind (manas) in deep meditation. It means fundamentally giving up the will to knowledge and accepting the essential mystery of existence.

To practice Shamanic Christian Zen, you must therefore become a mystic. You must learn how to disrupt your habitual mental framing and enter a radically altered state of consciousness (ASC) beyond thought. You must learn how to sink below the agitated waves of discriminatory thinking to the quiet depths of simple primordial awareness.

Then, when the psychedelic begins to take effect, you can fully “enter the dragon” coiled at the base of the “tree of life”. Learning how to ride the dragon and then how to be the dragon is what shamanic training is all about. First you become a mystic, then you become a dragon-shaman.

As I’ve discussed in some recent posts, from the altered states of the MYSTIC SHAMAN we move to the flow states of the WARRIOR MONK and then to the insight states of the PHILOSOPHER KING. But it is important to understand that it all proceeds from the primordial root at “the still point of the turning world”. This is the essence of Shamanic Christian Zen.