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.”

The birds of appetite flock around the Temple Courtyard. They are hungry and thirsty. They tweet and twitter continuously. They listen to learned disputations. They circle and swoop. The Temple functionaries throw them crumbs. They enjoy having them around. They like the attention. They hope they might persuade some of them to enter the Temple itself.

Christian Apologetics is that branch of theology which deals with the rational defense and explanation of faith, an attempt to “justify the ways of God to men”, as John Milton put it. It is essentially a conversation between believers and non-believers, exemplified in our time by Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? Christian radio show and podcast, which hosts debates between prominent public intellectuals from both sides of the faith divide.

The science versus religion merry-go-round is a central attraction, turning as it does around such fascinating topics as cosmology, biology, evolution, mind and consciousness. There are also endless debates about meaning, purpose, morality, suffering, the nature of evil, politics, art, etc. etc. In fact, it isn’t just science versus religion, but also science versus philosophy and philosophy versus religion.

Many people have made a career out of these debates on media platforms like YouTube. Honourable mention should go to Robert Lawrence Kuhn (Closer to Truth), Jonathan Pageau (The Symbolic World), Bishop Robert Barron (Word on Fire), Alex O’Connor (Cosmic Skeptic), Stephen Woodford (Rationality Rules), Jordan Peterson, Paul Vanderklay and John Vervaeke.

There are the New Atheists, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the late Christoper Hitchens and their Christian antagonists, William Lane Craig, John Lennox, Alister McGrath and David Bentley Hart. Many more names could be added to both lists. There is also a kind of Philosophical Apologetics, which argues for a saner approach to life than either the narrow scientistic or politically ideological worldviews afford, championed by the triumvirate of Roger Scruton, John Gray and Iain McGilchrist.

We have also recently seen a rise in Psychedelic Apologetics, the attempt to “justify the ways of psychedelics to men” (and women obviously). The recent conversation between Jordan Peterson and Roland Griffiths is a good example, as are the various drug enthusiasts on the Joe Rogan podcast, from Michael Pollan to Paul Stamets and Brian Muraresku.

These conversations are necessarily tentative and unbeliever-friendly. Too much devotional language or faith talk and the “birds of appetite” will simply fly away. Nudges and hints, crumbs and seeds is all they can handle. “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.” (1 Corinthians 3:2) But as as long as the non-believers and agnostics feel that they are getting “closer to truth”, they are happy to keep frequenting the Temple Courtyard.

I vividly remember one ayahuasca ceremony several years ago when the presiding shaman chided us for whispering amongst ourselves with the words, “less of the chitter-chatter”. This is how I feel now. Having talked and listened, read and written incessantly for years about this, that and the other aspect of religion and spirituality, it’s now time to be quiet, taking my cue from Thomas à Kempis in his treatise On The Blessed Sacrament:

“Go forward, then, with simple, undoubting faith, and come to this Sacrament with humble reverence, confidently committing to almighty God whatever you are not able to understand. God never deceives; but man is deceived whenever he puts too much trust in himself. God walks with the simple, reveals himself to the humble, gives understanding to little ones, discloses His secrets to pure minds, and conceals His grace from the curious and conceited.

All reason and natural research must follow faith, but not precede or encroach on it. For in this most holy and excellent Sacrament, faith and love precede all else, working in ways unknowable to man. The eternal God, transcendent and infinite in power, works mightily and unsearchably both in heaven and earth, nor can there be any searching out of His wonders. For were the works of God readily understandable by human reason, they would be neither wonderful nor unspeakable.”

What is consciousness?

First person awareness.

What is life?

First person awareness.

What is right brain hemisphere perception?

First person awareness.

What is mindfulness?

First person awareness.

What is Zen?

First person awareness.

What is headlessness?

First person awareness.

What is enlightenment?

First person awareness.

D.E. Harding’s “headlessness” is a simple and straightforward way of describing our unmediated sensory experience of the world. It dissolves the boundary between ourselves and the world, which is ultimately conceived or visualised as a “meatball head” with two peep-holes and other sensory organs. Headlessness is the already given state of affairs (we don’t experience or see a head), which we overlay and obscure with inherited theories of perception, such as the theory that the world and the mind are two different “things” mediated by a brain inside a skull-box.

Once you see the world headlessly, you can’t unsee it. Even if you revert back to your habitual way of seeing, you now possess a capacity for nondual vision which you can access at will. It is no different from the acquisition of any other skill, such as solving algebraic equations or riding a bike.

The always-already state of nondual awareness, however described or conceptualised, is available to everyone, but not everyone “gets it”. It depends on a sudden illumination, an “aha!” moment, a penny-dropping, jaw-dropping, world-shattering moment. This is called “seeing into your Original Nature” or “seeing your Original Face” in Zen Buddhism. In the Hindu tradition, this is the direct path or “royal road” known as Raja Yoga. Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi are probably the most famous exponents of this approach.

Everyone has a royal Raja birthright, but not everyone claims it. The same is true of Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion. In the West, this is best understood as a capacity for “faith”. Everyone is presumably capable of faith, but not everyone “gets it”, just as everyone should in principle be able to ride a bike (in the absence of certain physical disabilities), but not everyone can.

Once you have tasted “One Taste”, you can taste it again, just by remembering or un-forgetting (anamnesis). Once you have tasted “belief in God” and “trust in God”, you can also do it again, just by bringing Him to mind, for example simply by repeating the word “Lord” a few times. You can believe as an active verb, simply by remembering or un-forgetting God.

Headlessness and faith are both discrete, recognisable states of awareness. Once you have experienced them, it’s easy to recognise them. And the more you experience them, the more recognisable they become and the more discrete they become. They are clearly distinguishable from the “ordinary” state of consciousness.

Some people “get” faith but don’t “get” headlessness and vice versa. Most people don’t “get” either. I suspect this is because in the modern West, we live and breathe in a left-brain hemisphere dominant society, where “knowledge about” trumps direct “knowledge of” (see Iain MacGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary thesis). I would argue that both headlessness and faith are right-brain hemisphere capacities and that Raja Yoga and Bhakti Yoga are right-hemisphere activities.

Faith is obviously undervalued and discouraged in secular, materialist culture. For the most part, nonduality and headlessness don’t even register at all. The only pursuits recognised as worthwhile are action and knowledge, which, raised to their highest spiritual expressions, are represented in Hindu tradition by Karma Yoga and Jnana Yoga respectively.

Lama Yeshe said, “True religion should be the pursuit of self-realization, not an exercise in the accumulation of facts”. And St Paul said, “A person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law”. In other words, neither Jnana Yoga nor Karma Yoga are enough. Neither have the whole picture. We also need self-realization (Raja Yoga) and faith (Bhakti Yoga).

Man cannot live by bread alone, but neither can he live by the left-brain hemisphere alone. For a mature, balanced and integrated spirituality, we need reason and good works but also headlessness and faith. And if you don’t “get” either, it may just be because you’ve never tried.

In The Trial of the Man who Said he was God by Douglas Harding (author of On Having No Head), the protagonist is charged under a new blasphemy law in the fictional near future. It is a brilliant conceit, providing an engaging and entertaining vehicle for a thorough exposition of Harding’s own mystical philosophy. The structure, like the philosophy, is disarmingly simple, the prosecution marshaling all manner of arguments and objections via a series of witnesses, which are answered one by one by the accused.

The story (if you can call it that) is reminiscent of the trial of Socrates, who was also charged with blasphemy and corrupting the youth. Harding explicitly nods to Socrates towards the end of the book, as well as to that other famous blasphemy trial, the trial of Jesus.

Socrates and Jesus, probably the two most influential men in the history of Western civilization, were both put to death for blasphemy and for disturbing the peace. They were too revolutionary, too threatening to the status quo. In Dostoevsky’s story about The Grand Inquisitor, the second coming of Jesus ends exactly like the first, because although the Inquisitor recognizes who He is, he decides that maintaining social order is priority.

In a recent Meetup discussion about Psychedelics and Faith (https://www.meetup.com/Psychedelic-Meditation/) we talked about how psychedelic experiences undermine consensual reality and therefore naturally align them with the counter culture. As one participant put it, “in the Sixties, smoking a joint was a political act”. We talked about how the politicization of psychedelics in the first psychedelic wave was arguably their downfall. They were put on trial by the Nixon administration in the US, found guilty and summarily criminalized. And the rest of the world followed suit.

Coincidentally, the sermon last Sunday was about how an essential part of being a Christian is the willingness to take on the inevitable yoke of persecution. Although atheists will cry “foul!” and point at all the horrible persecutions (such as the Spanish Inquisition) carried out by the Church over the centuries, it does feel as though at the tail end of the history of Christianity, as it was at the beginning, Christians are under attack, “more sinned against than sinning”.

Many Christians have an aura of paranoia around them. Jews might quip that they are getting a taste of their own medicine and had better get used to it – Jews have been persecuted and neurotically paranoid for centuries. Paranoia also permeates the psychedelic community, for obvious reasons. No one wants to spend the next few years in jail.

Maybe we are all on trial, to one degree or another. In my book, The Confessions of a Psychedelic Christian, I describe a bad trip, a psychotic episode really, where I was propelled by an unwise cocktail of hashish, LSD and Ecstasy into a nightmarish version of Franz Kafka’s exquisitely crafted paranoid fantasy, The Trial. I am lucky to have escaped alive (and relatively sane!)

I love the work of Douglas Harding. He is a brilliant thinker and a brilliant writer. In so many respects, his philosophy and approach coincide with my own, and I feel a deep affinity between us. And I am a devoted follower of his “Headless Way”. But reflecting on the undercurrent of his admittedly masterful work, The Trial of the Man who Said he was God, I wonder how much he himself suffered from the paranoia that comes with “special revelation”.

Harding was misunderstood and ignored for decades before he finally managed to share his “seeing”, before anyone saw the way he saw. And he struggled with opposition and ridicule for the rest of his life. This goes with the territory, of course. It’s much easier to slip into an established religion than strike out on your own. If you were ever to emerge from obscurity, you would be extremely naive not to expect to be heckled from all sides. (Note to self!)

I am constantly amazed that Douglas Harding is not more well known than he is. Why is he not a household name? Why is Headlessness not common knowledge? This is an interesting puzzle. There are probably a raft of factors. Paranoia may be one of them. Another may be his over-emphasis on one experience and one way.

Harding’s central question was, “Who am I?” and his answer was, quite conventionally really, “I AM”. The Headless Way is really a version of the Royal Road, Raja Yoga. Ramana Maharshi is the archetypal Raja Yogi. Walt Whitman, especially in Song of Myself, was also an exemplary Raja Yogi.

Although he wrote profusely about all aspects of the spiritual life, it may be that his over-emphasis on Raja Yoga limited his general appeal. It may be that the Royal Road doesn’t suit everyone. It lacks the devotional element of Bhakti Yoga and the active element of Karma Yoga, which are arguably more accessible and appealing to people with vague spiritual leanings and longings.

For all I know, I may be erring in the opposite direction, by attempting to be too integral. I include six yogas in my model. For most people, that’s probably five too many. “Shamanic Christian Zen” is already a mouthful, but what I am really proposing is “Active Philosophical Headless Shamanic Christian Zen”, which includes Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Raja Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Dhyana Yoga. Not exactly catchy!

Whatever I call it, I will be judged. There’s no way round it. Hopefully I won’t have to do time, or drink hemlock, or be crucified. And hopefully I won’t become defensive, bitter or paranoid. But who knows whether my work will ultimately be ignored, excoriated or celebrated? I leave it in God’s hands. Whatever the world may think, God is my Witness and God is my Judge. In the end, that is the only Trial that matters.

The main focus of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance is on the therapeutic benefits of classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and empathogens such as MDMA. Research funding depends on clearly defined objectives and positive outcomes and mental health is an area where there is clearly great need and also great promise.

Everyone is writing about the mental health benefits of psychedelics, how they can help with depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD, fear of death, etc. This is a very exciting development which offers hope to millions of suffering people.

But should the use of psychedelics be limited to people suffering from mental health problems? What about healthy people? Can they benefit? If so, in what way?

Outside the therapeutic context, there is recreational use, exploratory use and ceremonial use. Recreational use is really just about having fun. This is not necessarily as trivial as it sounds. Having fun with friends on psychedelics is a very intimate and bonding experience which strengthens and deepens relationships. A society of people who have fun together with this level of intimate intensity is a healthier and happier society than a society of atomised individuals.

Exploratory use is about solving problems. The pioneers of the internet famously took LSD to help them solve intractable technical and conceptual problems. Many psychologists and philosophers also take psychedelics in order to give them insights into their respective fields. William James is a famous example. According to Stanislav Grof, researching consciousness without using psychedelics is akin to exploring the cosmos without a telescope. Peter Sjostedt-Hughes, the panpsychist philosopher of mind and author of Noumenautics, would concur.

Ceremonial use is about spirituality. Since psychedelic sacraments are primarily used in the Americas (ayahuasca in the Amazon basin, peyote and magic mushrooms in Central and North America), ceremonial use is strongly associated with these indigenous traditions. But alternative ceremonial contexts are emerging all over the world as psychedelics spread through the population.

Mostly, in the West, these take the form of syncretic New Age groups, combining elements of traditional shamanism and contemporary tranpersonal psychology and philosophy. There are also attempts to introduce (or re-introduce) the use of psychedelics into established world religions such as Christianity and Judaism.

I am interested in the therapeutic use, the recreational use and the exploratory use of psychedelics, but my main focus is on the ceremonial use. This is where I think that psychedelics can do the most good. In my view, Western civilisation is going through a spiritual crisis, and the mental health crisis is a symptom of this deeper crisis. Beyond “treatment” in a medical context, I believe we need “practice” in a spiritual context.

Psychedelics can help us reconnect with religion directly. Our culture has become so intellectualised, that people think that they are doing religion when they read books and listen to lectures and sermons and talk incessantly about religious ideas. There is value in this approach, of course. But it’s not really religion. It’s philosophy. It’s Jnana Yoga, the yoga of knowledge.

Religion is Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion. Faith, hope and love (St. Paul’s famous trinity in his first letter to the Corinthians) are things to be directly experienced and embodied, not just ideas for analytical debate. You don’t need to think about religion very much. You just need to experience it and follow it in simplicity and faith. Faith is key. And because psychedelics are such powerful experiential tools, they can shake us out of our habitual analytical, left hemisphere dominant, mode of being and hit us directly with religious feelings and concepts such as faith, hope and love, which cannot be reasoned out, but must be directly intuited.

I subscribe to an integral spirituality, which includes multiple modes of experience, perception and understanding. I have identified six modes, represented by six archetypes and six yogas:

The Mystic (Dhyana Yoga, the way of meditation)

The Shaman (Kundalini Yoga, the way of energy)

The Warrior (Karma Yoga, the way of action)

The Monk/Nun (Bhakti Yoga, the way of devotion)

The Philosopher (Jnana Yoga, the way of knowledge)

The King/Queen (Raja Yoga, the way of Self-Realisation)

It is important that none of these disciplines colonize the others. Each has its own autonomous field of activity, although they are all interconnected. For the Mystic, there should be nothing but meditation; for the Shaman, nothing but energy; for the Warrior, nothing but movement; for the Monk/Nun, nothing but religiosity; for the Philosopher, nothing but contemplation; for the King/Queen, nothing but presence.

In post-Christian Western culture, there is a hunger for genuine spirituality. However, among atheists and agnostics, even anatheists, religion is still problematic. There is huge resistance to the idea of devotion. There is no trust and no faith. Therefore, Bhakti Yoga is easily overlooked, neglected and ignored in favour of other practices. Typically, Jnana Yoga (philosophy) and Raja Yoga (psychology) step in as surrogate religions. However, a “Religion of the Mind” and a “Religion of the Self” can easily degenerate into intellectualism and solipsism.

Religion shouldn’t colonize everything else. But neither should everything else colonize religion. Without faith, hope and love, the whole spiritual enterprise is ultimately a waste of time.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.”

1 Corinthians 13: 1-10

There are three approaches to dealing with climate change and other environmental problems: technological, political and spiritual. Bjorn Lomborg and Bill Gates in their different ways promote the first approach. They advocate for increased investment in innovation and research as the best hope of finding real solutions to these real and pressing problems. George Monbiot and Greta Thunberg promote the second approach. They want a carbon tax, more regulation and more binding international treaties to legally force governments, corporations and the oil industry to change their ways.

Skeptics of the first approach call it “techno-utopianism” and “the myth of progress”. Skeptics of the second approach call it “eco-fascism” and “a communist plot”. As you can see, the fault line is political. It’s right wing bottom-up “big market” solutions vs left wing top-down “big government” solutions. The former are optimistic Pollyannas and the latter are pessimistic Eeyores. The former tend to think that everything will sort itself out eventually through the appliance of science and human ingenuity and the latter think we’re doomed unless we take extreme emergency measures right now.

The third approach is spiritual. It sees our ecological crisis as a symptom of a wider spiritual crisis. In this view, something has gone wrong with our relationship to the natural world which needs to be put right. If we continue to treat Nature as a resource, only there to satisfy our own greed and insatiable appetites, so what if we have unlimited clean energy or martial law? Won’t we eventually destroy ourselves and the planet anyway?

This approach is clearly more philosophical. It asks questions about intrinsic value and human nature. If we could manufacture a futuristic world of high-tech artificial intelligence running on an inexhaustible source of clean energy (some kind of nuclear fusion perhaps), so that we could live a life of limitless consumption and entertainment with no environmental costs, would we want it? Is this transhumanist vision recognisably human? Surely it would end up as some version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Alternatively, if we could establish a totalitarian surveillance state that uses artificial intelligence to impose strict limits on everyone’s consumption in order to reliably safeguard and protect the natural world, would we want that? Wouldn’t that be just another version of George Orwell’s 1984?

Advocates of the third approach, such as Paul Kingsnorth, are skeptical about the first two approaches. Perhaps there are partial political and technological solutions in the short term, but in the long term, we need to radically re-consider our modernist assumptions about our place in the world. We need to ask ourselves if we are acting like spoilt gods, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in Homo Deus, or if we are dangerously left-hemisphere dominant, as Iain McGilchrist argues in The Master and His Emissary. Can a culture with no place for the sacred survive? However politically powerful or technologically advanced? As W.B. Yeats put it, “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.

The spiritual approach is about inner change rather than outer change. It’s about a change in outlook and values, a revolution in consciousness. How is this possible? It is difficult to imagine how this might happen without a conversion experience. You can’t just reason yourself there. Climate data and environmental propaganda are not enough. The change must be emotional and psychological as well as rational. And it must be deep.

Sam Gandy, a researcher at Imperial College London, has been looking into the relationship between psychedelics and biophilia, the love of nature. It seems that psychoactive plants and fungi such as ayahuasca and psilocybe cubensis do indeed provoke a profound reorientation in our attitude to the natural world, which is often experienced as a kind of spiritual awakening. Could this be Nature’s way of bringing us back into alignment? Is it a coincidence that psychedelics have become so prevalent now, just at this crisis point in our collective cultural evolution?

It is our disconnection from any sense of the sacredness of Nature that has brought us to this pass. We have sacrificed Her on the altar of economic growth and progress, sold on an anthropocentric fantasy of technological mastery and independence. So, whilst continuing to pursue the first two strategies in our battle against environmental catastrophe, we really mustn’t lose sight of the third, without which we are surely lost.

When you’ve had enough of Babylon, and you’re heartily sick of all the Muggles, Muppets and Divas clamoring for your attention, it’s easy to get despondent, cynical and downright grumpy. Suddenly you’re not interested in all the news and gossip, the debates and controversies, the posturing and the posing. You feel like a dead tree, like burnt ashes. You feel dead to the world.

I call this “Steppenwolf Syndrome”. If you’ve read Hermann Hesse’s semi-autobiographical novel, you’ll know what I mean. Steppenwolf is a loner in the romantic Nietzschean tradition. He sees through the artificiality, inauthenticity and pettiness of bourgeois culture and retreats into himself, living the life of a lone “wolf of the steppes” whilst walking the streets of Basel.

Steppenwolf rejects the modes of being characteristic of the Wheel of Babylon, but has not yet found a stable alternative. The painful result is isolation, loneliness, resentment and depression. His bitterness at the superficiality and insanity of modern culture turns on him until he himself starts displaying Muppet-like characteristics, while believing himself to be free of them.

The underlying conundrum at the heart of Steppenwolf’s predicament is how to be “in the world but not of the world”. The allure of the hermit’s cell or the monastic cloister draws its psychological power from a Steppenwolf’s deep repugnance at the human ego in all its manifestations (Diva, Muggle, Muppet, Addict, Victim, Demon). He would rather escape to the forests and mountains like Henry Thoreau.

Bobby Dupea, the protagonist of the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces (played by Jack Nicholson) is another striking example of a spiritually restless character suffering from Steppenwolf Syndrome, who ends up hitching a ride on a truck bound for Alaska to get away from it all (sorry about the spoiler!).

How can spiritually inclined people be in the world but not of the world? What mode of being is resilient enough to not succumb to corruption by the Babylon matrix on the one hand or to Steppenwolfian sulkiness on the other? It’s no good joining in the fray and allowing yourself a little temporary Muggleness, Muppetry or Divahood. It will only make you feel worse afterwards. And it’s no good going to all the parties just to find fault and hate every minute of it.

One solution is to shift the focus towards the cultivation of a positive ego, instead of obsessively bewailing all the irritating forms of the negative. By flipping the six negative ego states of the “Wheel of Babylon” (based on the six realms of the Tibetan Wheel of Life) into their positive counterparts, you can focus on strengthening and fortifying yourself against the slings and arrows of outrageous egotism instead of just moaning about them.

The six negative ego states are Diva, Demon, Victim, Addict, Muppet, Muggle. Their six counterparts are Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King (see the two diagrams on the Home Page). However, this is quite a juggling act. It’s a lot to deal with. Where to start?

Well, we can helpfully simplify this six-fold model by simply noticing that the three archetypes at the top of the second diagram (which I call the “Armour of Christ”) represent the mind and the three archetypes at the bottom of the diagram represent the body.

Mental life and social life is really all about talking. This is where the three mental egos, Diva, Muppet and Muggle, come out to play. How they talk and what they talk about is circumscribed by their respective outlooks on the world, focused as they are on asserting their superiority, challenging authority or achieving social acceptance. Their opposites are the Mystic, the Philosopher and the King, who are not subject to these primal drives. These three archetypes can be integrated into one, that of the “Mystical Philosopher King”.

To be in the human world of social interaction, but not of the human world of social interaction, it is far better to be a Mystical Philosopher King or a Mystical Philosopher Queen than it is to be a Steppenwolf. Likewise, to be in the physical world of the human body, it is far better to be a Shamanic Warrior Monk or a Shamanic Warrior Nun.

This is a tangible and noble aim. Rather than drifting through life like a reed in a stream, you can dedicate yourself to being and becoming the best you can be, both in mind and body, a Mystical Philosopher King or Queen in mind and a Shamanic Warrior Monk or Nun in body. That way you will be able to brush off the Babylonian onslaughts of vanity, ignorance, delusion, craving, resentment and hatred, while at the same time resisting the “spiritual” temptation of wallowing in Steppenwolfian negativity and self-pity. That way you will be able to be in the world but not of the world.