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.

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! ;))