There are good trips and bad trips. Good trips are when you hit that sweet spot between underwhelm and overwhelm. And when you achieve a generally positive valency. Bad trips are when nothing much happens or too much happens or the experience is frightening, sinister, disturbing, paranoid, unpleasant, nightmarish. I won’t go into the dark rabbit hole of bad trips here, though.

For a good trip, you need a positive mind set and a nice setting (set and setting). And you need the right dosage and preparatory practice to break through to an altered state of consciousness. The first sign of a good trip, then, is simply that you “get high”. Typical sign are visuals (geometrical patterns), somatic energy, heightened sensitivity and changes in your state of consciousness, such as the sudden absence of rumination. You may experience it as an altered state and/or as a higher state of consciousness.

The second sign of a good trip is when you enter a state of flow. This can be flowing with music, either in your mind or through physical movement and dance, flowing movements without music (eg. martial arts), or flowing breath, sounds, icaros, chanting or singing. Whatever you are doing, it feels effortless and natural – you are “in the zone”. Often there is an element of playfulness, although not necessarily. You could call it “serious play”.

The third sign of a good trip is that you have deep insights into your life or into the nature of reality. These can be experienced as “insight cascades”, one insight leading to another, or as a kind of “insight sun” with other insights orbiting around it. An important aspect of this is what Vervaeke calls “relevance realization”, which is the direct apprehension of what is most important and most relevant in any particular context.

We can relate these three signs of a good trip to the six archetypes:

1. MYSTIC SHAMAN: Altered states
2. WARRIOR MONK: Flow states
3. PHILOSOPHER KING: Insight states

Psychedelics can be hard work, but once you get the hang of them, they do reliably reproduce these three essential features, and you can have good fun along the way. Nevertheless, you should always be careful and vigilant. Ere be dragons.

If you’ve been following my recent posts, you will have noticed that I have discovered the work of John Vervaeke and that I’m very excited about it. Why? Because although our conclusions differ, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (his lecture series on YouTube) lays the “grammar” (and some cool vocabulary) for my own project, and explains why this work is so important.

A crucial aspect of John’s thinking is his formulation of the 4 P’s of knowing: participatory, perspectival, procedural and propositional. His contention is that the “meaning crisis” is in large part due to the fact that we have lost the first three ways of knowing and reduced knowledge to propositional knowledge, which is about holding true beliefs about things.

I have already briefly described the psychotechnologies at the heart of my system of transformative practice (in Psychotechnologies). These range from mindfulness practices to psychedelic journeying, martial arts, dance, chanting and singing, mantras and philosophical dia-logos. These practices are associated with the six archetypes, Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher and King.

In addition to offering a comprehensive, integral set of psychotechnologies, the archetypes also represent different ways of knowing. Modern science-based culture has reduced all knowledge to a single mode: the propositional mode. What we need therefore is to recover and cultivate the other three modes. And this is exactly what this model provides.

The Mystic-Shaman “holiness line” in the diagram represents participatory knowing. It is about embodying altered states of consciousness, about coming into intimate relationship with subtle spiritual and physical phenomena, about “losing your mind and coming to your senses” and “entering the dragon”.

The Warrior-Monk “virtue line” represents procedural knowing, which is about how to act, how to move, fight, dance, sing, worship, give thanks and praise. It is also about how to be virtuous, how to cultivate courage, diligence, temperance, prudence, patience, etc.

The Philosopher-King “wisdom line” represents perspectival knowing. This is all about seeing things differently, using different lenses and filters, taking different perspectives, developing cognitive flexibility and insight. As Vervaeke catchily puts it, it’s about “breaking frame and making frame”, which allows us to escape the pitfalls and dangers of narrow minded thinking, cognitive distortion, self-deception and “bullshit”.

Knowing thyself and knowing reality doesn’t just happen by itself, especially if you live in a culture awash with bullshit. We need to work on ourselves and help each other in supportive communities of self-transcendence and transformation if we want to realise our full potential as human beings. You are so much more than you have been led to believe by our deracinated secular Western culture. You just don’t know it yet.

The affordance of new insight depends on breaking the frame through which you ordinarily see the world. In the “Kenosis-Gnosis-Pistis” schema (or “Purification-Perception-Dalliance”) this is represented by the Kenosis/Purification stage.

I have described this in the mystical language of The Cloud of Unknowing as a type of forgetting. It is also often described as a kind of death, part of the death-rebirth trope identified by Brian Muraresku as the central experience of “the religion with no name” in The Immortality Key.

John Vervaeke talks about “the religion that isn’t a religion” to distinguish between traditional belief-centred religion, focused on propositional knowledge, from experiential and transformative “religion” focused on participatory, perspectival and procedural knowledge. This fits Muraresku’s “religion”, which may not have a name, but which has all the hallmarks of what we call Shamanism.

Shamanism is not any particular set of beliefs, but a set of disruptive psychotechnologies, “ways to go beyond” as Rupert Sheldrake puts it. The most familiar are those that induce a “trance” state, such as drumming, dancing, singing and chanting. And, of course, the ingestion of psychedelic compounds.

The idea is that by engaging in a disruptive practice, you “open your mind” or even “lose your mind” through the forgetting or emptying (kenosis) of your habitual frames of reference, allowing fresh perceptions and insights to occur (gnosis). This new information can then be integrated into the personality through a process of reciprocal correction and attunement (pistis), thus deepening your understanding and ongoing relationship with reality.

Meditation works in the same way. It is a psychotechnology designed to provoke a revolution in the Kenosis-Gnosis-Pistis cycle. Great poetry, art and music can achieve the same result. They are all psychotechnologies for the development of wisdom. What Vervaeke fails to appreciate, however, is that belief is itself a psychotechnology. The Credo is not just a set of propositional statements that are literally true or false, for example. It is a set of faith commitments or “acts of faith”.

Only through the radical transformation afforded by a revolutionary learning process based on powerful psychotechnologies and disruptive strategies can we grow into the fullness of our rational humanity. As the adult is to the child, so is the sage to the adult. You wouldn’t live your life as a child knowing that you could be an adult (unless you have Peter Pan Syndrome) so why live your life as an adult knowing you could be a sage?

What is DMT without the breakthrough?

What is an all night rave without the ecstasy?

What is Zen without Satori?

Just a glitch in the Matrix.

Break on through to the other side.

Break frame to make frame.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

“Do you know how you deal with a complex dynamical system that is operating against you? By cultivating a counteractive dynamical system that is operating for you.”

John Vervaeke

This is what I have been saying from the start. You cannot fix the off-kilter Wheel of Life by tinkering with it and tweaking it. Why? Because it is a complex self-organising adaptive system that will just reconfigure itself around whatever interventions you make. It doesn’t work.

Something more radical is needed. If you really want to be free from the suffering (dukkha) created by your dysfunctional ego system, you have to get off the Wheel altogether and establish an alternative non-dysfunctional system.

To escape the parasitic processing (Muppet-Victim), reciprocal narrowing (Muggle-Addict) and egocentrism (Diva-Demon) of the Babylon System you need to cultivate the decentring, reciprocal opening and anagogic awakening of the Enlightenment System (Mystic-Shaman-Warrior-Monk-Philosopher-King).

The only way to get beyond the prison of the ego is to be born again. And again.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

What does it mean to judge someone by the content of their character? What are we judging exactly? Most people would say something like, “whether they are a good person”. But what is a “good person”? Aristotle would say “a virtuous person”. He explains what he means by this in The Nichomachean Ethics.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an Aristotelian and a Christian. He believed in virtue and character and the possibility of cultivating them. He believed that being a good Christian meant having a good character and that having a good character meant that you didn’t judge people by superficial things like the colour of their skin.

King’s dream was that his children might live in a society made up of wise people who could see into the human heart, rather than foolish people who only judged by appearances. For King, as for Aristotle, wisdom and virtue are closely related. The better your grip on reality, the less egocentric you are. And the less egocentric you are (the more decentred), the holier you are. This is why King’s dream is ultimately a religious dream.

As a religious man, he dreamed that he might become as holy, virtuous and wise as possible. As a civil rights activist, he dreamed that his country might become as holy, virtuous and wise as possible. But he was a realist. He knew the depths of foolishness in the American psyche. This was part of his wisdom.

If you are familiar with my work, you will know that I make use of two different psychological systems based on the six realms of the Bhavachakra, the Tibetan Wheel of Life. The first is a loose translation in which I identify six ego states corresponding to the different realms, namely, Diva, Demon, Victim, Addict, Muppet and Muggle. The second is simply these ego states flipped over into their positive counterparts, that is, Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk/Nun, Philosopher, King/Queen. (The two systems are depicted on the Home Page).

These two “mind-maps” are really just descriptions of what a foolish character and a wise character look like. It is quite a radical claim, because what I am saying is that foolish people and wise people live in different worlds according to different principles. You find this idea expressed in Christianity in the St. Paul’s distinction between the “old man” and the “new man”:

“That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts;

And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;

And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”

Ephesians 4: 22-24

In my book, The Confessions of a Psychedelic Christian, I relate the six aspects of the “new man” to the three qualities of holiness, virtue and wisdom. The “Mystic Shaman” represents holiness, the “Warrior Monk” represents virtue and the “Philosopher King” represents wisdom. Thus to develop and embody these archetypes is to become holy, virtuous and wise.

Conversely, the six aspects of the “old man”, the unregenerate man or woman, are associated with the opposite tendencies. Thus, the “Diva Demon” represents selfishness, the “Victim Addict” represents weakness and the “Muppet Muggle” represents foolishness. The more entrenched these archetypes, the more selfish, weak and foolish we are.

Look at yourself. Are you cultivating wisdom or foolishness? And what are you doing to cultivate it?

Look at your culture. Is it growing wiser or growing more foolish? And what is your culture promoting? The development of character or the denial of character in favour of identity politics?

I still believe in Martin Luther King’s dream, but sometimes I wonder whether it will come true even in my own children’s lifetime.

“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.

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:

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: 24-27

A meaningful psychedelic trip undertaken for the purposes of insight, healing and spiritual awakening must be done in a spirit of mindfulness. This means that you must engage the same processes of paying attention and not judging as you do in ordinary meditation. You should apply “soft vigilance” to whatever comes up, without reactivity or judgment. Without straining or slacking, your attention should be flexible and responsive. Go with the flow. Use all your senses. Really look and really listen. Really feel. Then, eventually, you will remember what it means to be fully alive and fully awake here and now. You will remember yourself. Perhaps you will remember God.

Worldview attunement depends on the consonant co-identification of agent and arena.

The various aspects of the human ego, which I affectionately refer to as “Divas”, “Demons”, “Victims”, “Addicts”, “Muppets” and “Muggles”, are agents in the arena of the ordinary human world, what I call “Babylon”. Depending on which ego state predominates at any one time determines your existential mode.

“Mystics”, “Shamans”, “Warriors”, “Monks/Nuns”, “Philosophers” and “Kings/Queens”, as aspects of “Buddha Nature” or “Christ Consciousness”, are agents in the arena of the supra-mental, supra-human world of “Gaia”, “the Pure Land” or “the Kingdom of God”. Similarly, the existential mode is determined by which aspect is dominant.

There are actually six arenas (the six realms of the Wheel of Life) in which each of the six “worldly” ego agents can act and six arenas in which the six “spiritual” agents can act. “Babylon” and “the Pure Land” are meta-arenas containing within them the potential for any one of their six sub-arenas to manifest.

In Babylon, these are: the Heavenly Realm (Devaloka), the Hell Realm (Narakaloka), the Animal Realm, the Hungry Ghost Realm, the Titan Realm and the Human Realm. In the Pure Land, these are: the Pure Place (which can be either a Pure Consciousness Event (PCE) or Resonant At-Onement depending on whether you are attentionally scaling down in meditation or scaling up in contemplation), the Dragon, the Dojo, the Temple, the School and the Kingdom.

A sense of incongruity, meaningless or absurdity occurs when the wrong agent is in the wrong arena. The cultivation of spiritual character therefore depends on finding the appropriate arena within which to exercise the skills and virtues associated with each archetype. You need to find the right place for the practice of the six yogas (dhyana, kundalini, karma, bhakti, jnana, raja).

Only then can the virtual be realised. Only then can you actually live up to your potential.

If you spend too long on the Wheel of Babylon, you begin to lose touch with reality. This means that things stop being truly meaningful, since, as John Vervaeke puts it, relevance gets uncoupled from truth.

The Meaning Crisis is an existential crisis. In a post-truth world, how do you know what’s real anymore? It’s as though everyone were tripping all the time. Objectivity is lost. Truth is a fiction. All we have is “identity”, which means that we identify with things and ideas simply according to an intuited sense of their relevance. Subjectivism and relativism are the order of the day. The Sophists win.

This explains the exponential rise of bullshit in our culture. “Bullshit” is actually a technical term introduced by Harry Frankfurt in 1986. It differs from deceit or lying in that it is uninterested in the truth to begin with. Advertising and propaganda are the traditional purveyors of bullshit, but it is now endemic in academia and the media. Our culture is drowning in bullshit.

The result is self-deception and self-destructive behaviours. People progressively lose the ability to recognise bullshit and so increasingly bullshit themselves. They start by choosing expedience over truth and following the crowd for the sake of social approbation, what Nietzsche called “herd mentality”, and soon lose interest in the truth altogether.

This is why it is impossible to argue rationally with Muppets. “Ah, but we’re all Muppets now!” they retort. “The Age of Reason is over. Welcome to the Age of Bullshit!”

And they’re right. As long as you remain stuck on the Wheel of Babylon. As long as you remain trapped in Plato’s Cave. But there is a way out for those who want out. As C.S. Lewis said, “the doors of hell are locked from the inside”.

Get out of Babylon.

This very land is the Pure Land.