El agua limpia, limpia todo.

Alexander Beiner recently wrote an interesting article titled Indigenous Narcissism: Social Media, Belonging and WEIRDness. He points to the problems the peculiarly individualistic, often narcissistic, WEIRDos (Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic folks) face in negotiating society. Modern Westerners seem to have lost “the ties that bind” and hanker after the sense of belonging and community characteristic of traditional indigenous cultures. This compels them to seek out online communities by “voluntary association”, which partly explains the emergence of cultish movements such as the much-commented on “Woke” secular religion.

I was at the Medicine Festival last summer and saw Alex there. In his article he describes his discomfort at the contradictory mismatch between the touted “indigenous wisdom” of the Amazonian shamanic cultures and its WEIRD fans. How can this work in practice? How can it be more than playing Cowboys and Indians? The key question, though, is this: what is the sickness that we want the Medicine to cure?

The obvious response is to list the usual litany of mental health problems besetting modern urban Westerners, depression, anxiety, addiction, etc. Fair enough. The media interest in the Psychedelic Renaissance is all about the potential for these plant medicines to alleviate acute and chronic human suffering, which can only be a good thing. However, could it be that these conditions are actually symptoms of a deeper malaise? Could it be our culture that’s making us sick?

Or could it be less about what our culture is than what it isn’t? You can’t live on burger and chips without getting sick at some point, because you won’t get all the nutrients you need. Likewise, modern culture, dominated as it is by the (predominantly American) mass media and mass entertainment industries, is fine in itself, but lacks the essential nutrients we need to stay healthy and sane.

What are we missing then? What have we forgotten? The Medicine Festival is an important clue. We have lost our own indigenous shamanic tradition. We have forgotten how to be in our bodies, to be in nature, to have our feet planted on the earth and our roots in the soil. We have forgotten how to stomp, how to drum, how to dance (TikTok doesn’t count).

The indigenous traditions of the Amazon basin, of the Andes, of Native Americans, of Australian Aborigines, of Africa and the African diaspora, of Rastas, can teach us shamanism. We need their music and their wisdom because we have lost touch with our own. If you are worried about “cultural appropriation”, you’re missing the point. This is not a game. We’re not playing “identity politics”.

Not only have we lost our shamanic roots, and so need to borrow from other traditions (to be “grafted onto the vine” in the language of St. Paul) but we have lost our spiritual roots. But first things first. First we need to establish our earthy shamanic roots before we can establish our heavenly spiritual roots. We need to borrow some shamanism to establish our foundations. Once they are laid, however, what we build on those foundations need not be imported. We already have what we need in our own Western tradition.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the whole of it. We have also lost our mystical, unitive, nondual intuitions. To recover this, seekers have in the past few decades turned to the East, to the mystical elements in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism. Although there is a strong Western mystical tradition, it has become increasingly obscured in our increasingly materialist, rationalist culture. Its expression in Eastern religions is much clearer to us, free as it is from our own cultural baggage.

My contention is that WEIRD culture is missing three things fundamental to our physical, mental and spiritual well being, namely, shamanism, religion and mysticism. This is why I promote Shamanic Christian Zen as true medicine for our deracinated modern existence. I have identified six key archetypes which can help orient us towards these missing elements: the Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk (or Nun), Philosopher and King (or Queen). These align naturally with the three broader categories of Shamanism, Christianity and Zen, and point to the qualities we need to develop in order to truly “be the Medicine”, in the forms of the Warrior Shaman, the Philosopher Monk and the Mystic King archetypes.

It is not enough to keep ourselves moist with the contact of other fish floundering in the tub of consumer culture on this ship of fools. I for one would rather be a fish in the sea, even if it means I have to swim alone.

Clean out your inner didgeridoo.

O Rose thou art sick. 
The invisible worm, 
That flies in the night 
In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Todos estan enfermos pero no lo reconocen.

Por eso no toman medicina para el alma.

En vez de sanarse, tratan de convencer a los demas

Que no estan enfermos, sino “diversos”!

O Rose thou art sick. 
The invisible worm, 
That flies in the night 
In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

In his new book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen Meyer discusses three fundamental scientific discoveries in support of Intelligent Design. First, the cosmological discovery that the universe had a beginning in the “Big Bang”; second, the discovery that the physical laws of the universe are exquisitely “fine-tuned” for the possibility of life; third, the biological discovery that large amounts of information are encoded in DNA gene sequences.

For Meyer, this all amounts to strong evidence for a classical theistic God who created the universe and who can interact with it. This is the traditional Christian view. The atheist view is that the universe came to being by some kind of mysterious material process and then proceeded to evolve by sheer fortuitous accident. The extreme statistical implausibility of this view is mitigated by postulating an infinity of universes, among which ours was the “lucky” one.

So what is the universe? Is it the “Creation” of Judeo-Christian belief? A kind of artifact made by a Divine Architect who periodically tinkers with to make sure it doesn’t fall apart? Or is it a kind of miracle produced by Cosmic Accident with no rhyme or reason other than that projected onto it by its funny little conscious bipedal accidents?

Or is it something else? If we accept that the universe had a beginning, then we must accept that there was a moment of “creation” and that this “creation” must come from somewhere (as King Lear reminds us, “nothing comes of nothing”). But maybe “creation” is the wrong word. Creative people create things. For all their excellence and beauty, these things (like the Mona Lisa) are still things. We create works of art, artifacts and machines. When we look at the universe, it’s natural to think of it as a something like that, because it looks like an objective thing, a “creation”, something we would make if we could.

Another way of thinking about a beginning is not as a “creation”, but a “birth”. In chapter 25 of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu writes,

“There was something formless and perfect

Before the universe was born.”

But if the universe was born rather than created, then something or someone must have given birth to it, something “formless and perfect” (at least from our point of view). Lao Tzu continues,

“It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.”

For Lao Tzu, the Tao is the “Mother”. For Christians, it is the “Father”. For lack of a better name, they call it God.

Either way, the implication is that the universe is not like a piece of furniture created by a master craftsman, but like a child born of a parent. The “evolution” of the universe is then simply the “development” of the child, the universe “growing up”. In this scenario there’s no need to fret about the “fine-tuning” of the universe or the information rich “signature in the cell”. These are just the characteristics of the growing God Child. There’s no need for God to design anything or intervene in the inner working of the universe, because the nature of the universe is already intrinsically God-like.

But perhaps the word “born” is not quite right either. No one is born instantaneously out of nowhere. Humans need nine months gestation in the womb before they can be born. A better word for the origin of the universe is therefore “conception”. In which case it may well be that the universe has not been born yet, but is still at the embryonic stage of God Child development. If that’s the case, imagine what the actual birth will be like!

This organic as opposed to mechanistic view of the universe as a Super Organism, conceived 14 billion years ago and slowly developing into a fully grown baby Super Organism is difficult for a sober human mind to wrap itself around. For a psychedelic human mind, on the other hand, it’s easy, as easy and obvious as looking at yourself in a mirror, not darkly, but face to face.

Direct pointing to Reality

Outside the Scriptures

Outside the Church

Outside Science

Outside Religion

Outside Reason

Outside Myth

Outside Story

Outside Society

Outside Ba

Outside Babylon.

Getting and spending, fussing and fighting, preening and strutting.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

Vultures pick at bones;

Magpies feather their nests;

Peacocks quote Eliot.

Not here, not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

The spiritual man puts the care of his soul before all else; and whoever diligently attends to his own affairs is ready to keep silence about others. You will never become interior and devout unless you refrain from criticism of others, and pay attention to yourself. If you are wholly intent on God and yourself, you will be little affected by anything outside this. Where are you when you fail to attend to yourself? And when you have occupied yourself in countless affairs, what have you gained, if you have neglected your soul? If you really desire true peace and union with God, attend to yourself, and set aside all else.

Thomas à Kempis

In a recent conversation between NT Wright and Douglas Murray on the Unbelievable? Big Conversation podcast, both agreed that there was no story as powerful and serious as the Biblical story. All other attempts to construct an alternative story that people could actually “live into” had failed. No other grand narratives cut the mustard.

I disagree. There is the story of evolution for a start. And then there’s the Buddhist story of spiritual enlightenment.

These three. And the greatest is… well it’s not a competition. But allowing for slight variations, nothing compares to these three. And in a deep, mysterious sense, all three are true.

How can they be reconciled? It’s actually ridiculously simple. Forget all the Creationist vs. Evolutionist nonsense. Forget all the West vs. East nonsense. They all miss the mark. It’s like this: We are evolving. What are we evolving into? Enlightened beings. What is an “enlightened being”? Well, we have two excellent examples in Gautama Buddha and Jesus Christ.

From an evolutionary perspective, the next higher level above our own is Gaia Consciousness. I won’t go into the argument here (if you’re interested you can read my book, or even better, The Dimensions of Experience: A Natural History of Consciousness by Andrew P Smith). Christ Consciousness, Krishna Consciousness and Buddha Consciousness are all the same thing: Gaia Consciousness. In a very real sense, Christ, Krishna and Buddha are also the SAME person.

If you enter a state of higher consciousness, through meditation or a strong psychedelic trip for example, you can experience this for yourself. If you do, you will also understand it. You will know, with the deep knowledge that only comes from the depth of being, that YOU are THAT. You are “in Christ and Christ is in you”, but even more than that, you ARE Christ. And you are Buddha and you Krishna and you are Gaia.

There’s not really much point saying this in more elaborate ways, quoting from Scripture, etc. If you get it, you get it; if you don’t, you don’t. Here is a mystery. Here is an impasse. Buddha recognises Buddha. Christ recognises Christ. Unenlightened beings don’t. Unenlightened beings (ie. humans) can listen to the stories until the cows come home, but until the Second Coming (in them), they won’t understand what it’s really all about.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

1 Corinthians 13:12

Although most of the feedback I’ve received about my work is positive, there seems to be something of a sticking point when it comes to “Muppets”. Several people have advised me to use a less insulting word. Apparently it comes across as judgmental and dismissive. By anyone’s standards, it’s not exactly sensitive, let alone “politically correct”.

I’ve considered scrapping the Muppet label and replacing it with something less contentious and provocative. But nothing else quite seems to fit the bill. So here I would like to briefly explain and defend my use of the M-word.

Firstly, it alliterates nicely with “Muggles”. Secondly, it is closely related to puppets. This is a key feature of what I am trying to express with the term, namely, the tendency to parrot the tenets of a collective ideology. The ideology itself is the “Titan” or “Giant” and the individuals are the “Fighting Spirits” of the Giant (see the Bhavachakra or Tibetan Wheel of Life for the origin of these terms). I think John Gray is getting at something similar in his book The Soul of the Marionette.

Thirdly, I like its humorous, deflationary feel. A defining characteristic of the Muppet stance is that it takes itself so seriously. The pricking of this po-faced self-righteousness is both salutary and funny. Fourthly, it winds people up, which is itself a good test of Muppetry. The more enraged someone is at the word, the more of a Muppet they will inevitably be. From the psychological point of view, this is useful information, both for me and (hopefully) for the person concerned.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, let’s see if I can explain what I mean by “Muppet” in a bit more detail. Muppets often think of themselves as intellectuals, by which they mean that they are cleverer than Muggles. In fact, much of their identity is predicated on their superiority to Muggles, who are considered gullible, ignorant, brainwashed, unenlightened and prey to “false consciousness”. Muppets, on the other hand, have inside information into the reality of things. They are, to coin another contentious term, “Woke”. This can take several different forms, of which I distinguish five (technically the “Woke” label only applies to Type 3 Muppets).

1. Nerd Muppets. These are usually involved in either computing or science. They hold to one or other version of naive scientism, the belief that science can account for all of reality. Whether reductionists, emergentists or eliminativists, they all agree on the basic axiomatic premise that only matter exists and that everything else is an illusion. The brain is a computer and human beings (and other organisms) are soft machines. Muggles are regarded as too stupid and scientifically illiterate to appreciate the brute facts that consciousness is just an illusion and that there is no meaning to life or existence.

2. Hippy Muppets. These are usually involved in alternative therapies, alternative spiritualities and alternative philosophies, and often also mind-altering drugs. They have all sorts of bizarre beliefs, the more exotic the better. They look down on Muggles, who are too narrow-minded and superficial to understand the mysteries to which they are privy, and they have a hate-hate relationship with Nerd Muppets.

3. Woke Muppets. Even more touchy than the “New Age Stoner” type of Hippy Muppet are the more politicised “Progressive Liberationist” or “Critical Social Justice” Muppets (this is where I get into most trouble). I am not against progress or social justice per se, but there is a specific stream of Postmodern thought which has produced a veritable cottage industry of philosophical confusion and social distress. I could say more but I’ll leave it at that.

4. Radical Muppets. These are the old-school political revolutionaries and activists. Whether on the Far Left or the Far Right, they are political extremists, swinging between anarchy and totalitarianism. They are anti-establishment, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-conservative. They are starry-eyed Utopians who believe that only by overthrowing the current, irreparably corrupt socio-political system can we usher in the hoped for Utopia, overlooking the inconvenient fact that one person’s Utopia is another’s Dystopia. They have nothing but disdain for Muggles, those unwitting, witless slaves of the system, and nothing but pure hatred for Divas, those power-hungry oppressors.

5. Fundamentalist Muppets. These are religious fanatics, of whatever stripe or affiliation. They are implacably dogmatic and hold to an extremely narrow, literalist interpretation of their sacred scriptures. Their most extreme proponents take to violent acts of terrorism and martyrdom in the name of their divine calling to set the world right and glorify their god. They hate all Muggles and Divas, but most fervently hate all Muppets (apart from those in their sect, that is).

This is a very broad categorisation. I’ve tried to be as straightforwardly descriptive as possible and I don’t think I’m being unfair. To sum up, with this treatment of the derogatory term “Muppet”, I am being explicitly critical of 1. Naive Scientism 2. New Age Nonsense 3. Reified Postmodernism 4. Political Extremism 5. Religious Fanaticism. The details can be debated as to what and who actually belongs in each of these categories, but I make no apologies for the categories themselves.

I do have a word to say in defence of Muppets, however. They offer a powerful critique of the dozy complacency of ordinary Muggles, who are too wrapped up in the obvious, the superficial and the mundane. Muggles are too materialistic and unreflective, it’s true, which is why they miss out on so much of the magic of reality, and Muppets are right to shake them up now and then.

The Muppet attack on the Divas (the eternal war between the Asuras and the Devas in Buddhist mythology – see the Tibetan Wheel of Life) is also necessary in order to keep the powers that be in check and to keep those in authority on their toes. It is essential for any functioning, healthy society that people are able to “speak truth to power”. Does this mean that anyone critical of the status quo, the political elite, the ruling class or the government is therefore a Muppet? God forbid! But Muppets are particularly vocal in this capacity.

The underlying claim is that the rigid certainty and inflexible dogmatism of Muppetry is the result of excessive left brain hemisphere dominance. I won’t go into this now, merely point you in the direction of Iain McGilchrist. (One striking result of this left hemisphere dominance is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which explains the old adage that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”).

What I am not advocating for, of course, is the weaponising of the term “Muppet” as a term of abuse against those who hold different opinions to you. It should not be used as a moniker or casual insult against people you disagree with otherwise (as I hope is obvious) you will yourself be acting like a Muppet. The so-called Culture Wars are bad enough without them descending into Muppet Wars.

We are living through a time of great tension, polarisation, distrust, enmity and intolerance. People with differing views and opinions resort all too readily to censorship, ridicule or “hate speech”. Many people, myself included, worry that this dangerous breakdown in civil discourse and freedom of expression threatens the very foundations of Western democracy. We might all do well to rein in our inner Muppets right now.

However, a true Christian must avoid these five modern heresies like the plague. True religiosity and holiness is as much about what you don’t do as what you do, about what you don’t believe as what you do believe. Orthodoxy is, as G.K. Chesterton beautifully described it, a wild adventure:

“This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom–that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”