We are all in the Matrix. What I mean by this is that we all inhabit a mental world of abstract concepts populated by hundreds of people we know and hundreds if not thousands of people we have never met. When we read or listen to the radio or watch anything on TV or the Internet, we are in the Matrix. When we go for coffee with friends, we are in the Matrix. This is the social-mental air we breathe, the social-mental cappuccinos we drink. This is what human minds do. Some would say, this is what human minds are for. We are enmeshed in social networks, and our individual minds are nodes in the Matrix.

Even when we are moaning about the Matrix, we are still in it. Yesterday I had a good moan about Woke Capitalism on an American podcast called Out of the Blank. Another day I might moan about people who moan about Woke Capitalism. There are real consequences to the ideas thrashed out in the Cultural War of course, but what goes on in the Matrix stays in the Matrix.

There is a way out for those who want a way out, however. It’s deceptively simple: just forget about it!

How do you forget? By entering a “cloud of forgetting”. How do you do that? By meditating and/or by taking a decent dose of any classic psychedelic.

This is “the portal of non-existence”. It leads to a whole other way of being outside the Matrix. If you are fond of cliches, you might say that you “lose your mind and come to your senses”.

So, for brevity’s sake, here is the order of events in Ex-Matrix Psychedelic Training:

1. Forgetting Everything
2. Entering the Dragon
3. Shadow Sparring
4. Mountain Sitting
5. Dancing with the Dead
6. Soaring Angelic
7. Walking with Plato
8. Commanding the Seas

These stages are associated with the six archetypes on the six-pointed cross. The first stage is associated with the Mystic. The second stage is associated with the Shaman. With the aid of plant medicines and deep shamanic music, you “enter the dragon” of your own body. If you have been there, you will know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, you will struggle to imagine it, because there is no analogy in non-psychedelic consciousness.

The third stage is associated with the Warrior. Like Bruce Lee, once we have entered the dragon, we can fight with laser-like focus: “the successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus”. In this stage, we perform an improvised Kata, that is, a flowing sequence of martial arts forms. As Bruce Lee said, “water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

The fourth stage is associated with the Monk (or Nun). This is the practice of Shikantaza, or “just sitting”. Ideally in lotus or half-lotus position, you sit quietly as silent and immovable as a mountain. “When walking, just walk. When sitting, just sit. Above all don’t wobble!”

The fifth stage revisits the Warrior, this time with music and dance. Traditional shamanic dance connects us with our ancestors, so that we are dancing with the dead as well as the living. It is a warrior dance, powerful and grounded. Andean music and Dub Reggae work particularly well for this type of dance.

The sixth stage revisits the Monk (or Nun), again with the addition of music, this time devotional or sacred music. Any tradition is fine, although I find that Western Art Music generally, and especially Christian settings and choral works by composers such as Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Faure, etc. reach the highest peaks of sublimity.

The seventh stage is associated with the Philosopher. This involves the practice of “dialogos”, which is all about putting things into words and communicating your experiences and insights with somebody else. This is the essence of the talking therapies, particularly the humanistic and transpersonal psychotherapies. Only by formulating and articulating our inchoate feelings and intuitions can we begin to organise and integrate them. This stage is what is commonly known as the “processing” stage in psychedelic circles.

The final stage is associated with the King (or Queen). This stage is about manifesting your “divinely sanctioned” authority. To truly understand what this means in practice, however, must await mastery of the previous seven stages.

The Swinging Sixties was all about sex, drugs and rock and roll. After the horrors of the Second World War and the rationing and dour conservatism of the straight-laced Fifties, it was time to party. And LSD was the heart and soul of the party. It turned the people on and tuned them in to the groovy sounds of the Beatles and the Stones and even got some of them to drop out.

There were casualties of course, as Alan Ginsberg noted in his epic poem Howl:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…”

But there was no stopping the Children of the Revolution. They had seen Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and awakened their Flower Power. They had smashed their Mind-forg’d Manacles and ushered in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. There would make Love not War and would spread the Free Love to everyone under the California Sun.

Psychedelics do that to people. And now we know how. By inhibiting the Default Mode Network in the brain, they loosen the hold of the ego and allow all sorts of new and novel connections to be made. By deconstructing established patterns and habits, they increase openness and creativity, so that it becomes possible to restructure the personality and even society.

In the Sixties, people in Britain, Europe and America needed to let their hair down. And they needed to get high and get laid. The psychologists, still under the sway of Freud, gave their blessing to the Sexual Revolution and the Summer of Love. And then, with the Stonewall riots of 1969, Gay Pride was born. Now the love that dare not speak its name was shouted from the rooftops, “and [they] saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, … or purgatoried their torsos night after night / with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls”.

Ginsberg’s poem is anachronistically bleak. Wasn’t the Sixties all Sweetness and Light and Orange Sunshine? Wasn’t it a beautiful dream, rather than a “waking nightmare”? As always, probably a bit of both, probably somewhere in the middle, probably six of one and half a dozen of the other.

In any case, the real or perceived threat of the Sixties Counterculture to the traditional American way of life prompted Nixon to brand LSD Enemy Number One and declare a War on Drugs, which was to last for decades.

Now we are witnessing the dawning of a new Psychedelic Renaissance. So should we expect a rerun of the Swinging Sixties? Do we just carry on from where we left off? Yesterday I was invited to a symposium organised by the Chacruna Institute called Queering Psychedelics. They declared: “We honor Black trans women––revolutionaries like Marsha P. Johnson––and the many queer protestors and advocates who today, continue to fight for our rights. Chacruna is proud to be queer!”

For Chacruna, it would seem that the role of psychedelics is intimately connected with Social Justice and gender fluidity. The Civil Rights activism of the Sixties needs to be taken further so that all oppressive social structures are progressively dismantled. The deconstructive effects of psychedelics can be usefully employed in service of this Progressive Liberationist project. This time around, though, hopefully they will be able to avoid the “waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls”.

The Psychedelic Renaissance of the 2020’s is focused primarily on medical research and clinical trials. The great hope is that psychedelics may be able to successfully treat and perhaps even cure seemingly intractable mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and addiction. Doctors and psychiatrists consider them to be potentially powerful medicines, which if administered carefully and sensibly, could revolutionize our approach to mental health.

Chacruna also clearly sees psychedelics as medicine. However, as well as the presenting issues of people’s specific psychological conditions, they also diagnose a deeper sickness in society which may even be the cause of these. This sickness is identified as the same as that social sickness challenged by the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960’s, namely, Institutional Racism, Sexism and Homophobia. Except that now it must extend to all marginal groups, including all those under the LGBT2QIA+ umbrella.

Well, well! It seems that psychedelics have landed bang in the middle of a Culture War! The clinicians will try to steer clear, keep a professional distance and remain scientifically neutral. They will want to dispense the drugs and cure people without having to dirty their hands. They will want to ignore the possible underlying cultural causes and stick to the symptoms. They will want to stay away from “politics”.

In the meantime, the two sides of the Culture War will want to deal with the underlying “social sickness”. Except that they disagree profoundly about what the sickness is. Chacruna seems to think that the social sickness is still some variation of straight-laced Fifties conservatism. The antidote is therefore even more freedom, more fluidity, more “liquid modernity”.

As a rough test of this hypothesis, we might compare the mental health of freedom-loving liberals and freedom-wary conservatives:

“White liberals are more prone to mental health disorders than individuals who identify as conservative or moderates, according to a Pew Research Center survey. 

Sixty-two percent of Whites who classify themselves as “very liberal” or “liberal” have been told by a doctor they have a mental health condition, as compared to 26% of conservatives and 20% of moderates, the study found. 

Young White people who identified as “very liberal” were almost one and a half times more likely to report mental health problems than those who considered themselves “liberal.””

The Washington Times, April 22, 2021

So if “very liberals” are one and a half times more likely to report mental health problems than “liberals”, who are three times more likely to report mental health problems than “moderates”, should we really be pushing hyper-liberal progressivism on the psychedelic community?

What about mental health in the LGBTQ+ community? Well, according to the NHS Foundation Trust,

“It has been consistently reported that in the UK, the LGBTQ+ community may experience increased levels of common mental health problems, including depression and anxiety. According to a research project conducted by Youth Chances, 52% of LGBTQ people reported self-harming, compared to 35% of heterosexual non-trans young people. Furthermore, 44% of the LGBTQ people reported suicidal thoughts, compared to 26% of heterosexual non-trans respondents.  In a study by Stonewall, it was also found that 13% of LGBT people aged 18-24 attempted to take their own life in the past year.”

Social conditions are clearly very different today than they were in the 1950’s and 60’s. Could it really be the case that the higher incidence of mental health problems among liberal and LGBTQ+ people are the result of social disapprobation and persecution? This is not the 50’s. Mental health issues are much more likely to be associated with the inner chaos of people’s lives than any external oppressive social order, particularly in progressive areas such as Buffalo and Portland in the US or Oxford and Brighton in the UK.

When gringos travel to Peru and Brazil for healing, what do the traditional indigenous curanderos make of them I wonder? What does Madre Ayahuasca make of them? And when they purge, what is the psychic poison they are vomiting up composed of? Is it the “phobic sins” (transphobia, homophobia, etc.) or is it the traditional vices (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride)?

Progressives would say the former; conservatives the latter. What would the shamans say?

In shamanic cultures, spiritual healing involves physical, emotional and mental healing. It involves sexual healing and moral healing. And all of this healing requires purification. This has nothing to do with “progress” and everything to do with repentance, contrition and amendment of life. As G.K. Chesterton said, “The false theory of progress maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass it.” But there is no fooling Madre Ayahuasca.

Shamanism is no different from major world religions such as Christianity in its emphasis on straightening yourself out and making the crooked straight. As the prophet Isaiah said, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

Shamanism isn’t interested in Queer Theory or Kink Theory. And it certainly isn’t interested in “Queering” or “Kinking” psychedelics. In the traditional shamanic worldview, purity and impurity, sanctity and profanity, are not just arbitrary social constructs for the maintenance of hegemonic power structures. They are necessary lines we must draw if we want to get straight with God.

In our post-Christian world, quoting from Scripture can count against you rather than for you. But I’ll do it anyway:

“Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that commiteth fornication sinneth against his own body.

Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?

For ye were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

1 Corinthians 6 : 18-20

Just to be clear, I am not saying that homosexuality is incompatible with shamanism or Christianity. Most gay people do not subscribe to Queer Theory at all. Saint Paul’s point is about fornication, which obviously applies to everyone, whatever their sexual orientation. As he says, this involves “sin against the body”, what we would probably call “sexual abuse”. This is a notoriously difficult thing to define or pin down, which is why it is legally reserved for abuse of minors – age is easy to define.

Psychedelics sensitise us to our energetic systems and reveal to us the harm we are doing to ourselves on all levels, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. In terms of sexual activity, psychedelics confirm what Damon Albarn sang all those years ago:

“Girls who want boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like they’re girls
Who do girls like they’re boys
Always should be someone you really love”.

Once you’ve taken the red pill, why take the blue one?

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.