The problem child of the Enlightenment is worshipped like the golden calf. Instead of a calf, though, the idol of Modernity is a great big golden problem.

With great power comes great responsibility. And with great problem-solving capacities comes a whole lot of problems. The experimental cosmologist Brian Keating said that the greatness of science is that it makes puzzles out of mysteries. He also said (gleefully) that whenever a scientist solves a problem, she is just setting herself up to face an even bigger problem.

Scientists feed on problems. So do journalists and politicians. So do activists of all stripes. Even religious leaders bow to the graven image of the Golden Problem.

What is it that has filled the God-shaped hole in our hearts once filled with beauty and mystery?

Science. Politics. Economics. Social issues. Environmental issues. Health issues. Gender. Race. Class.

Problems.

Taking psychedelics in a clinical setting is serious. Taking psychedelics in a ceremonial setting is serious. Whether the intention is psychological or spiritual insight or healing, the therapeutic aspect is almost always at the top of people’s wish list. So we proceed cautiously and sensitively. We make sure everyone is safe and comfortable so they can take the inner journey into their troubled psyches in peace.

But sometimes the old skool way is the best. And when I say old skool, I mean old skool: hardcore rave, psy trance, techno, garage, jungle, dub. This is actually closer to the Shamanic Way. Why? Because it’s about energy.

The disease of modern Western civilization can be summed up in three words: TOO MUCH THINKING.

It can also be summed up in just two: INTERMINABLE ANALYSIS.

Or even in one: KNACKERED.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche describes two streams of human engagement with the divine: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian is ultimately about the mind and the Dionysian about the body and energy.

Shamanic energy accumulates with periods of intense stillness and concentration. Typically this involves playing or listening to music, singing, drumming or chanting. Or just listening to the rain. The Chilean transpersonal psychologist Claudio Naranjo calls this “form meditation”. It often has an intensely aesthetic element and so could also be characterised as “Apollonian meditation”.

The accumulated energy can then be channeled into what Naranjo calls “expressive meditation”. In traditional indigenous shamanic communities, this generally meant either dancing or fighting. The original Bacchanal was not a drunken orgy, but a “Dionysian meditation”.

This is what the early nineties rave scene was really all about, especially for those who knew what they were doing. It’s also what the sixties festivals were all about.

Although hedonistic and commercial forces took over and ultimately prevailed in both cases, this is not hedonism. This is “cutting off the green lion’s head” and “waking the baby dragon”. This is “the way of the peaceful warrior”, the “Mystic Shaman” turned “Warrior Monk”.

Remember God.

Parashiva Shiva Shakti.

Remember God.

Amun Ra Atum Ka Ba Gaia Jah.

Remember God.

Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King Friend.

Remember God.

Peace Love Goodness Beauty Truth Consciousness Bliss.

Remember God.

What is true practice?

The application of Great Faith.

Do not waste time.

Cease from erudition.

Avoid controversies, intrigues and debates.

You cannot argue with a sick mind, so don’t try.

Be unshakeable,

Immune from Project Doubt, Project Outrage and Project Fear.

Be steadfast,

Unswayed by the insinuations of Divas, Muppets and Victims.

Stand firm,

Unmoved by Project Greed and Project Normal.

Be yourself,

Free from the seductions of Addicts and Muggles.

Neither succumb to the Demonic temptation to destroy.

Be ever hopeful.

Shun Project Despair.

Have faith.

And what is the true essence of true practice?

The Bodhisattva Vow made in the heart of compassion.

“I had a mystical experience but still re-emerged a naturalist because what else was happening but the drug beautifully interacting with my brain?”

Someone tweeted this in response to my response to the Vice interview with Chris Letheby, Do Psychedelics Just Provide Comforting Delusions?

I replied, “Yes, that’s a common problem” and she came back with, “I don’t see it as a problem.”

Stale mate.

Is there a problem? Well, only if you want to be a mystic, that is, only if you want to continue having mystical experiences. Especially if you want to have them while sober.

But being a mystic requires hard work and commitment. It’s a perilous path. It could mess up your life. At any rate, it will turn it upside down.

Where does this path lead? It leads to a certain state of intimate connection with Reality, with the world and God. This state is precisely the mystical state, of which mystical experiences are brief glimpses. It is blissful, peaceful, blessed. It is like being in paradise.

The spiritual path, if followed faithfully to the end, leads back to that state of lost connection we seem to have lost somewhere along the way.

My Twitter friend was in Paradise during the time of her psychedelic-induced mystical experience. Then she was back in hard “reality”, the reality of hard soil and hard labour (in both senses of the word). Did she, like Eve, eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge? One bite is all it takes to be banished from the Garden of Eden, and the simple thought, “it’s just a drug” is a pretty good bite.

But she doesn’t see it as a problem. Presumably she’s fine not living in Paradise. But there are those who do see it as a problem. The writers of Genesis, for example.

Personally, I have dedicated my life to trying to solve this problem and to finding my way back to the Garden. Why do some people long for this return? Some people listen out for the clock to strike thirteen, like Tom in Tom’s Midnight Garden. And some people refuse to count beyond twelve. Why?

Who knows? It’s a mystery. It seems that not many are called, and even fewer are chosen. And there is absolutely nothing I can say to convince those who still re-emerge as naturalists that what they experienced is in any way real, that mystical experiences are more than just “comforting delusions”.

The testimony of the saints and mystics throughout the ages won’t do it. Jesus won’t do it. Buddha won’t do it. Rabbis, priests and imams won’t do it. Sadhus and bhikkhus won’t do it. Without metanoia, without a change of heart, there is no God, Nirvana, or Enlightenment, no Garden of Eden, Kingdom of Heaven or Pure Land. There is only, occasionally, “drugs beautifully interacting with the brain”.

Religious people don’t need drugs though. They seem to get their mystical experiences through prayer, meditation, fasting and engagement with the powerful symbols and artifacts of their religion, with poetry and music, sacred spaces and magical rites, smells and bells and stained glass windows. A naturalist would say, “what else is happening but religion beautifully interacting with the brain?”

For naturalists, religion itself is one great “comforting delusion”. The mystical psychedelic experience is just an extension of the general delusion. From a purely metaphysical point of view, however, the naturalist “God Delusion” claim is unverifiable and unfalsifiable. It isn’t a scientific claim, but a philosophical one. And, as I pointed out in my previous blog, Comforting Delusions, naturalism is far from a philosophically unassailable position. In fact, it has run into a whole host of internal contradictions and logical inconsistencies, making it currently the weakest metaphysical option on offer. David Bentley Hart even goes so far as to call it a “philosophy of the absurd”:

“Naturalism, as I have said repeatedly, is a philosophy of the absurd, of the just-there-ness of what is certainly by its nature a contingent reality; is it, simply enough, an absurd philosophy. As I have also said, however, there is a certain circularity in that claim, inasmuch as naturalism, if it is true, renders all reason debile; so it is possible to believe that what has the appearance of absurdity may in fact be the reality of things, even if one cannot consistently act upon that belief, or even conceive  what it would mean. I at least, am willing to grant naturalism its proper dignity as a kind of pure, unreasoning faith: absolute fidelity to an absolute paradox. Theism has nothing magnificently wild and rhapsodically anarchic to offer; the faith it supports depends at some point upon a consistent set of logical intuitions, and so lacks the sheer intellectual brio of that sort of madly, romantically adventurous absurdism. In a few of my more purely passionate moments I find myself a little envious of materialism’s casual audacity and happy barbarism.”

In any case, the typical naturalist claim that psychedelic mystical experiences don’t count because they are nothing but “the drug beautifully interacting with the brain” is also unverifiable and unfalsifiable. An equally possible explanation is that the drug opens a channel whereby some portion of the “divine” beautifully interacts with the brain. And this is much closer to how it actually feels.

The same can be said of all spiritual disciplines and techniques. Prayer doesn’t “beautifully interact with the brain”, but opens a space within which the devotee can commune with their God, with the transpersonal “spirit” beyond the usual limits of the mind. Psychedelics, like prayer, meditation or yoga, especially when taken in a spirit of piety and devotion, are about opening channels of communication between worlds:

“Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

Isaiah 40:3

If you think it’s more like creating beautiful colours by mixing reactive chemicals in a test tube, you have a severely limited understanding of the extraordinary potential of these sacred plant medicines. You will be unlikely to make straight a highway for God, and your naturalist worldview will end up being self-confirming. This is why, as I argue in a previous blog, naturalists don’t get high.

Remember God.

Not just the Sky God,

The Otherworldly God,

The Transcendent God,

The “Christian” God.

Remember God.

Remember the One,

All and Everything;

Not just Parashiva,

But Shiva and Shakti also;

Not just the Father,

But the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Remember God.

Practice the presence of God;

Practice Self remembering;

Practice mindfulness,

Practice Zen.

A theory of God is next to useless –

It’s the practice that matters.

Remember God.

Remember the One God,

The Lord Almighty;

Remember the Threefold God,

Parashiva, Shiva, Shakti;

Remember the Sevenfold God,

Amun, Ra, Atum, Ka, Ba, Gaia, Jah.

Remember God.

All the time.

Open individualism is the view in the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times.

The theory has been rigorously tested using the DMT vape method and confirmed to be true beyond all reasonable doubt.

In the recent Vice interview with the Naturalist Australian philosopher Chris Letheby, Do Psychedelic Just Provide Comforting Delusions?, Dr Letheby wonders whether a better predictor for the benefits of psychedelics is not the much-touted mystical experiences that commonly accompany high dosage trips, but the psychological insights:

“These [studies] find another construct predicting the lasting benefits more strongly than the construct of a mystical type experience—and this is the construct of psychological insight. When you look at it, it is all about changes to what they call the narrative self, changes to people’s self conception, the autobiographical sense of who they are and what matters to them and what’s happening in their life.”

From a Naturalist point of view, the only real value in introspection is to adjust our inner “predictive models” of the world so that they more accurately reflect “objective reality”. The most realistic and effective psychotherapeutic approach is therefore naturally considered to be some form of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). Unhelpful and unhealthy self-beliefs are challenged and replaced with more positive and pro-social ones. CBT psychotherapists basically help us challenge our limiting beliefs and destructive behaviours and re-write our badly written life-scripts.

This will necessarily involve compelling psychological insights that are felt to be meaningful and factually true. As Letheby says, “some of these psychological insights definitely do have the appearance of learning new facts. “I learned that my depression is due to these unhealthy emotional habits that resulted from this experience in my childhood.” Or, “I realized that the reason I keep failing in my relationships is because I’m self sabotaging myself because of this deep seated belief about who I am.””

It seems that these insights arise spontaneously under the influence of psychedelics. But where do they come from? One intriguing hypothesis put forward by the neuroscientist Andrew Smith is that it is on the return to our normal base level from a higher state of consciousness that we gain these insights and information, which are somehow associated with the release of accumulated mental energy. He discusses this phenomenon in the context of meditation, but it clearly also applies to the psychedelic experience. The prediction is that the higher you go, the more powerful the insights will be on your return. Whatever the reason for this is, the fact is easily verifiable through personal experiment.

In this view, psychological insight is clearly correlated with mystical experience, whether accessed through meditation, prayer, psychedelics or any other introspective “spiritual” practice. Which is not to say that it is not possible to have psychological insights without mystical experiences, of course, as CBT attests. However, the quality and “noetic force” (truth value) of these non-mystical insights appears to be inferior and weaker than those arising from mystical experiences. So there seems to be something of vital importance about “getting high”.

In the interview, Dr Letheby also discusses the possibility of extracting the non-psychedelic ingredients from compounds such as psilocybin, which might somehow cure mental health conditions such as depression without any experiential element whatsoever. “It certainly is conceivable that out of these experiments, lo and behold, someone will come up with a molecular variant of psilocybin that has exactly the same therapeutic potential, but none of the altered state of consciousness.”

Naturalists welcome the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. But imagine if we could produce the psychological insights without the mystical experiences! Wouldn’t that be great? But wait, imagine if we could get the therapeutic effects without the psychological insights! Wouldn’t that be even better? In other words, if only we could find the right mechanism, we could fix broken people like we fix broken machines. This is the logic of Naturalism, which is suspicious of messy, unquantifiable, airy-fairy mental phenomena and would rather stick within the materialist, mechanist frame of reference. In terms of the traditional “Great Chain of Being”, Naturalism naturally gravitates to the lowest links of the chain.

The famous line in the Catholic Mass, “hosanna in excelsis”, means something like “praise to the highest” or alternatively, “I believe in the highest”. This exclamatory phrase is actually short for “praise to the highest heaven”. What is “the highest heaven”? If we’re talking mysticism, this must mean something like “the highest state of consciousness”. Surely everyone (including Naturalists) know by now that “the kingdom of heaven is within”. When Saint Paul was “caught up to the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12), for example, he was talking about an inner state of consciousness, not first century space travel.

There is unsurprisingly no clear consensus in any spiritual tradition, East or West, about which is the “highest heaven”. It is often referred to as the seventh heaven, but that may just be convention (seven is considered to be a magic number plus seven rhymes with heaven!) Andrés Gómez identifies six levels of the DMT experience, the highest of which is “Amnesia” because it’s impossible to recall! Usually, however, the highest heaven we can remember is characterised by unity. In the West, this is expressed as “One God” or “One Love”. All other “heavens” are considered to flow down from the One. (If you are at all familiar with ancient philosophy, you will recognise that this vision is at the heart of Neoplatonism).

However much DMT you smoke, you cannot go higher than “the highest”. But if you do reach the highest, you will no longer be able to call yourself a Naturalist, because “One God/One Love” is not natural! But can Naturalists even get that high? Can they reach “the highest”? Without “hosanna”? That is, without belief? Without faith? It may happen on occasion, but even if it does, it can be easily explained away, especially be trained philosophers.

Naturalists don’t generally get very high on psychedelics, however much they take. Some of them, the psychedelic hedonists (the William Burroughs/ Hunter S. Thomson types) will get right royally “loaded”, but not really “high” in the mystical sense. Other, more sober types, may get some visuals and some useful psychological insights into their childhoods or their emotional habits or limiting self-beliefs, but that’s probably about it.

When the limiting belief of Naturalism itself is questioned and set aside, and only then, will the gates of heaven be opened unto them.

In a new book, Philosophy of Psychedelics, philosopher Chris Letheby explores the possibility that the mystical experiences reported by people on psychedelics are simply “comforting delusions”. Just because they are strongly correlated with improvements in mental health conditions doesn’t make them true. The same can be said for people who hold religious beliefs. The fact that they are generally happier and healthier doesn’t mean that God exists, although it might suggest that belief in God has some evolutionary survival value.

Chris Letheby is a naturalist, and he is arguing from a position where naturalism is taken for granted. What is “naturalism”? It’s really just another word for materialism:

“It’s a view that says the natural world, the world studied by the sciences, is the only world there is. …

… reality is made of ultimately “non-minded” things like atoms and subatomic particles, and minds are something relatively recent and complex that gets built out of stuff that is ultimately non-minded.”

(From a recent interview with Shayla Love, Do Psychedelics Just Provide Comforting Delusions?)

In the Vice interview from which these quotes are taken, he mentions some alternative philosophical positions to the naturalist/materialist one, such as panpsychism and idealism, but doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that they might actually be right. Apparently, the issue is pretty much settled:

“I think it’s probably true that most philosophers today consider themselves naturalists in this sense—and I think there are good arguments in support of this kind of view of the world.”

Naturally, there are good arguments in support of naturalism. But there are also good arguments against it. One perennial problem is precisely the problem of consciousness and minds. How can minds be “built out of stuff that is ultimately non-minded”? The only two options open to materialists are “emergentism” and “eliminativism”: either consciousness is somehow an emergent property of matter, or it doesn’t actually exist at all – it’s just an “illusion” created by the brain.

Letheby says that “naturalism, like everything in philosophy, is hard to define precisely, but it’s very easy to get an intuitive grasp on.” Once you see the philosophical implications of naturalism, however, it’s also very easy to intuitively grasp that it doesn’t make sense. Intuitively, it is clear that eliminativism is probably “the silliest claim ever made”, as philosopher Galen Strawson put it. And it doesn’t take much thought to see how the emergentist claim is just as philosophically problematic. How could any amount of complexly arranged non-minded stuff magically produce consciousness (unless you believe in magic)?

It may be true that most philosophers consider themselves naturalists. Does this mean naturalism is true though? Letheby is arguing that just because most psychonauts consider some form of mysticism to be true, it could be just a “comforting delusion”. But the same could be said of philosophical naturalists. Maybe they find naturalism comforting. After all, an indifferent universe that doesn’t care two hoots what you get up to is in itself quite comforting. There will be no final reckoning and no divine judgment – just cool nothingness. In any case, philosophical trends and fashions change all the time. There are philosophical golden ages and philosophical dark ages. And who’s to say that contemporary philosophy isn’t at a particularly low nadir of scientistic ignorance?

Be that as it may, there are important contemporary philosophers who make strong arguments against the materialist “consensus”. You will find a smattering of these here (as you may have noticed, I’m a sucker for the number seven!):

The Waning of Materialism by Robert Coons and George Bealer, ed.;

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel;

The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind behind the Universe by Stephen Meyer;

Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe, and Everything by Bernardo Kastrup;

Knowledge of God by Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley;

The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart;

Consciousness and Fundamental Reality by Philip Goff.

A crucial internal contraction reductive materialists (or “radical emergentists”) must grapple with is the contradiction between the two statements, “the natural world, the world studied by the sciences, is the only world there is” and “minds are something relatively recent and complex that gets built out of stuff that is ultimately non-minded”. How can minds be admitted to be real (even if they ultimately derive from non-minded particles) if they cannot be studied by the sciences?

Minds obviously can’t be studied by the natural sciences (you can’t see a mind with a microscope) but they can be studied by the phenomenological sciences, including psychedelic-assisted phenomenology. As Stanislav Grof said, “the potential significance of LSD and other psychedelics for psychiatry and psychology are comparable to the value the microscope has for biology or the telescope has for astronomy.”

If this is the case, then the mystical claims of people undergoing psychedelic experiences should be taken seriously. Once we admit that minds and consciousness are ontologically real, we are no longer tied to the scientistic worldview which insists that the world studied by the physical sciences is the only world there is. Hopefully, psychedelics can begin to loosen the stranglehold of this limiting materialist ideology on the minds of the mind-deniers and mind-skeptics, including the minds of philosophers like Chris Letheby.

In contrast to commonly practiced psychedelic trips, whether in recreational, clinical or even ceremonial contexts, this approach follows a strict routine, which requires a certain amount of discipline. The idea is not just to go with the flow and see what happens, but to channel the altered psychedelic state in a focused and constructive direction, to “go with the flow and walk with God”.

A session takes around six hours from start to finish. It proceeds through the following stages, following ingestion:

1. Mantra Meditation
2. Music Meditation
3. Movement Meditation
4. Chanting Meditation
5. Talking Meditation