In the 2014 film Interstellar, the bond of love between a father and daughter separated in space and time is powerful enough to bring them back together and in doing so, to save the world. The only thing that can traverse interstellar space and connect the fallen, dying Earth and the new life-sustaining planet discovered in a galaxy far, far away, is love.

With hindsight, it almost seems as though the aged Professor John Brand (Michael Cain) chose the hero Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) for the mission not because of his piloting skills but because his love for his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy and Ellen Burstyn as the young and older “Murph”) provided the personal motivation to succeed. But beyond this, there is a more esoteric idea about the special line of communication between two people who are intimately connected through love.

This special connection is borne out by telephone telepathy. How is it that so many people report knowing who is on the other end of the line when the phone rings, or even thinking about the person calling just before it rings? Rupert Sheldrake has carried out carefully designed experiments to test this strange phenomenon scientifically. One important finding is that the incidence of so-called telephone telepathy is far higher between people who are intimately connected, that is, between romantic partners and family members.

Is Interstellar a Christian allegory? There are certainly some interesting parallels, especially the central theme of a special unbroken bond and line of communication between a parent and child across a cosmic chasm connecting two different realms. In the film, this situation was caused by an environmental crisis. In the Bible, it was prompted by a spiritual crisis.

The last books of the Jewish Bible, the books of the prophets, are an extended lamentation at the inability of the Jewish people to remain faithful to the covenant established between them and their God JHWH. Why were they so faithless, lukewarm, rebellious and sinful? Why did they keep falling away from their calling to be the people of God? The despairing frustration of the prophets comes through loud and clear.

How does the New Testament attempt to solve the problem of this apparent disconnect between God and His people? By creating a bond of familial love. Jesus refers to God as his father and to himself as the son. Just as in Interstellar, parent and child are separated across an impossibly large physical and metaphysical gulf. In both stories, the separation is not a total break, however. It is something like quantum entanglement, where two particles remain connected even when they end up at opposite ends of the universe.

In Christianity, the Father and the Son are connected by a bond of love (in Trinitarian terms, this love is the Holy Spirit). When the Son returns to the Father after his death and resurrection, this is spatially imagined as a return to heaven, the spiritual abode of God. Son and Father are reunited, not unlike the return of the Prodigal Son in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15: 11-31), and the Son takes his seat at the right hand of the Father.

The followers of Jesus had developed a bond of love with him on earth. He was their spiritual master, but also a brother and a friend. Love was the condition of discipleship: “You cannot be my disciple, unless you love me more than you love your father and mother, your wife and children, and your brothers and sisters. You cannot come with me unless you love me more than you love your own life”. (Luke 14:26 CEV)

Saint Paul is emphatic about this unbreakable bond of love:

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 8: 38-39

Now that Christ was ascended to heaven, the original bond of love between God and the world through the Son remained intact, except that now it was established between Christ and his followers across the chasm of heaven and earth, through this more intimately personal and deeply human relationship with him.

The Christian solution to the problem of human indifference to the non-human (albeit anthropomorphized) transcendent God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was to humanize and personalize the connection through a bond of familial love in two directions: first the bond between Father and Son, then the bond between the Son and his followers and disciples, which are in a sense his spiritual children, adopted as the children of God. The key to this arrangement is the dual nature of Jesus as both fully divine and fully human. Only then can he act as a bridge between heaven and earth.

The Christian solution is love. When the lawyer asked Jesus what was the greatest commandment in the law, he replied:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22: 36-40

This is not an original saying. Jesus was quoting scripture. The Christian innovation, however, is in the mediation of Christ himself, which makes it psychologically easier to love God by drawing on a personal, intimate, human love. It is after all easier to love a person than an abstraction.

As the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing put it, “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.”

But isn’t this all a bit human-all-too-human? Don’t you lose the pristine idea of an invisible, transcendent God? Aren’t you in danger of falling into a kind of idolatry? And what about the non-human world of Nature? All this love talk is all very well, but doesn’t exclusive focus on the human-divine love of the Son of God in heaven mean that we neglect our love of the natural world here on earth, perhaps even creating the environmental crisis we’re now facing as a consequence?

Christianity is a Love Religion but it’s not a Nature Religion. Compared to the traditional indigenous shamanic religions of the world, it seems suspiciously detached from the natural world, even condescending and dismissive. Genesis 1:26 is often cited by environmentalists who blame the mass extinction of species and careless destruction of their natural habitats on Christianity, since God seemingly gives us free licence to do whatever we want with all life on Earth:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

This is debatable and continues to be debated, but there is clearly some truth to it. Over the centuries, we have developed an attitude of power and dominion over Nature, which has had some disastrous consequences, especially since the advent and rapid development of science and technology and their aggressive application in the service of purely human interests since the seventeenth century. All this was at least in part facilitated by this passage in Genesis and the attitude of superiority over Nature it engendered.

Is there a way of reading the Christian story in a more environmentally friendly way? Is there a way of including the non-human natural world in our circle of care and love? Not just as an afterthought but as an integral part of our religious commitment?

One way to do this is to notice a seemingly universal religious impulse that Christianity shares with its own religious parents, Judaism and Greek Paganism, as well as with all traditional indigenous religions: ancestor worship. In the Bible, this is most clearly seen in the genealogy passages, the “begats”. But what has this got to do with environmentalism? Bear with me!

The New Testament begins with “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” (Matthew 1:1) beginning with Abraham. In the gospel according to Luke (Luke 3: 23-28), the genealogy is recounted in the opposite direction, starting with Jesus and working backwards: “Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Jannai, the son of Joseph,” etc. etc. until we arrive at “the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.”

Jesus’ father was Joseph. Joseph’s father was Heli. His ancestors stretch back all the way to “the first parents”, Adam and Eve, and through them back to their father, God. The same is obviously true of all of us. If we trace our evolutionary lineage back, we are all descended from the same common ancestor we share with the chimps. If we keep going back, we eventually arrive back at the ultimate first cause where the backwards regress stops and on which the whole sequence rests, in other words, God.

When Jesus says that he is the Son of God, he is skipping all the generations of his ancestors back to the first father of this patriarchal lineage. He is ultimately “the son of Adam, the son of God.”

This is where we hit the root of the problem in the family tree (pun intended). In the Judeo-Christian genealogy, we are descended from Adam and Eve, who were created by God along with the rest of the natural world. He created the plants and trees on the third day, the animals on the fifth day, and mankind on the sixth day. Our ancestors stretch back to Adam, who was directly created by God in parallel to all other life on Earth. So the animals and plants are not really ancestors.

For the indigenous tribes of the Amazon basin, as well as for almost all First Peoples, ancestors also include animals and even plants. Our modern understanding of evolution confirms that this is literally true. Whether or not we accept a Creator at the beginning of the whole series, with the origin of life on Earth, or at least at the Big Bang, we now know that our ancestral lineage stretches far back beyond the human.

If the six days of Creation described so beautifully in Genesis are read as a sequential “book of the generation of Creation” in the manner of the genealogical “begats” of the Old and New Testaments, then we can also consider the animals and plants as our ancestors, as well as the herb, the vine, the cactus and the mushroom. As Paul Stamets says, human beings are essentially fungal in their basic cellular composition.

The interstellar bond of love connecting God and mankind includes all of space and time, passing from us via our ancestors from father to father back through our own species, genus, family, order, class, phylum and kingdom all the way to “Our Father in heaven”. Love is the way, the truth and the life, connecting us all and engendering an attitude of care and reverence for all things. If we truly understand and embody this, maybe we won’t end up in the desperate environmental straits that the people of the near future in the film Interstellar find themselves in.

On the other hand, our connection to the transcendent ground of Being is here and now. When Jesus says “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58) he is pointing to this identity beyond time and space. The great I AM is the name that God gives himself in Exodus: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” (Exodus 3:14).

Therefore Jesus is the Son of God not through ancestry in linear time on the horizontal plane of existence, but vertically, through the generative womb of the eternal present. This is what it means to be born of the spirit and not of the flesh. With this direct connection, which folds time and space together like a wormhole, the human and the divine are one. But this unity also includes the whole of Creation:

“As earth is my witness. Seeing this morning star, all things and I awaken together.”

Gautama Buddha

The “Meaning Crisis” in contemporary Western culture is not an intellectual but an existential crisis. It is a felt-sense of underlying meaninglessness, a peculiar lack of ontological, rather than epistemological, solidity. Milan Kundera expressed this modern malady beautifully in the title of his cult classic 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

What is called for, what is calling, is gravity. Gravity calls for groundedness and gravitas. It calls for fully-embodied, full-blooded life. It calls for existential seriousness and responsibility (which explains the enormous appeal of Jordan Peterson). Ultimately, it is the call of Zen.

Modernity has advanced to a point of technological prowess such that it seems eminently reasonable to sidestep the unpleasant and inconvenient existential realities of physical and mental suffering. The techno-utopians promise us a frictionless future where all our electronic devices are seamlessly woven into a protective comfort blanket that will defend us against the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.

For every frailty and shortcoming of human nature, there will be an app or a pill. The experts have it in hand. In this Brave New World, there is no need for personal responsibility or personal growth. There is no need to voluntarily confront suffering, no need to take up your cross. The appliance of science will sort you out in a jiffy.

This utopia, like all utopias, is unbearable. As Jesus so presciently put it, “What doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36

Psychedelics are powerful amplifiers of consciousness. Used responsibly, they can deepen spiritual practices and accelerate therapeutic processes. They have the potential to transform and enlighten, teach and heal. They connect us to our senses, bodies, feelings and intuition. They connect us to each other, to Nature, to the Cosmos, to God. They balance the brain hemispheres and weaken the default mode network. They probably helped us evolve into human beings (the Stoned Ape hypothesis) and will in all likelihood help us evolve further into spiritually enlightened beings.

People are afraid of psychedelics because they are so revolutionary. They must be handled with care. But ultimately, if used with intelligence and maturity, the benefits far outweigh the risks. Ultimately, who dares wins.

Direct pointing to Reality outside the Scriptures:

“When I attained Absolute Perfect Enlightenment, I attained absolutely nothing. That is why it is called Absolute Perfect Enlightenment.”

The power of faith.

The power of forgiveness.

The power of words.

The power of prayer.

The power of music.

The power of meditation.

The power of the Bible.

The power of the Mass.

The power of Christmas.

The power of Easter.

The power of ritual.

The power of tradition.

The power of universalism.

The power of personalism.

The power of surrender.

The power of sacrifice.

The power of grace.

The power of love.

Kensho is the Japanese term for a spiritual breakthrough, a temporary, fleeting taste of enlightenment. On medium to high doses of DMT and other potent psychedelics such as LSD, mescaline or psilocybin, you can also experience breakthroughs to a radically altered state of consciousness, something that Jim Morrison and The Doors were famously keen to do (if you’re too young to get that reference, never mind).

Breakthrough is never guaranteed. But it can be facilitated by creating the right conditions. And there are different kinds of breakthrough. The Zen breakthrough to non-dual consciousness is not the same thing as a breakthrough to resolving psychological trauma, for example.

Zazen (sitting meditation) in a Buddhist monastery is geared towards spiritual breakthrough (Kensho) and spiritual enlightenment (Satori). But what about psychedelic trips? What are they geared towards?

It is common to set an intention before embarking on a psychedelic journey. This helps orient you towards a conscious goal, usually in the form of a request (Santo daime!) for guidance or healing. But breakthroughs are not always about solutions to personal problems. They can take other forms too.

The integrative psychedelic model I employ proceeds through seven discrete stages, with the potential for a completely different kind of breakthrough at each stage. These are as follows:

1. MYSTICAL BREAKTHROUGH: Through absorption in meditation, you enter a timeless and spaceless dimension of radical Emptiness or Vacuum-Plenum.

2. SHAMANIC BREAKTHROUGH : Through further absorption, you “enter the dragon” of your “energy body”. You may also experience radical changes in your breathing, “ocean breath”, “bamboo breath”, “bated breath”, “dancing breath” and may vocalise the breath, intoning, babbling, chanting or singing.

3. WARRIOR BREAKTHROUGH : Standing and stretching and adopting strong physical postures, your body flows into powerful sequences of learned and spontaneous warrior-like moves.

4. EMOTIONAL BREAKTHROUGH : Listening to beautiful music, you experience intensely cathartic heart-breaking and heart-melting emotions, usually accompanied by abundant tears.

5. PHILOSOPHICAL BREAKTHROUGH : Reflecting on personal and cosmic questions in a contemplative mood, you experience cascades of inspired insight, wisdom and understanding.

6. SOUL BREAKTHROUGH : Dancing to deep, conscious music (e.g. dub), you embody a state of poised integrity, nobility and inner stature, as if in the presence of “the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the conquering lion of Judah”.

7. FRIENDSHIP BREAKTHROUGH : Sharing and socialising with others, you discover a profound sense of connection, communion, solidarity and friendship.

In any one trip, it is unlikely that you will experience a breakthrough at all seven stages of the journey. One is enough. And there is no reason to be disheartened if no breakthrough is forthcoming. It will come with practice, and whether or not you manage to “break on through to the other side” this time, there is always something of value to take away from the experience.

Selah.

Religion (among other things) is a stepping stone to the ultimate reality, which is experienced as an apocalypse (a revelation or uncovering), especially on high doses of DMT.

It can be summed up in a simple syllogism:

God is everything. You are God. You are everything.

In a Gurdjieffian take on Christianity, the philosopher Jacob Needleman argues that there is a lost Christianity that lies hidden beneath the visible edifice of the established Church as we know it (Lost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery to the Centre of Christian Experience). Gurdjieff would call it esoteric Christianity.

Brian Muraresku makes a similar claim in his book The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. During his extensive investigations into the possible use of psychedelics among early Christians, he visits the Vatican Necropolis under Saint Peter’s Basilica. These catacombs were practically unknown until the middle of the twentieth century, and it is here that Muraresku believes early Christians partook in a ritualised recreation of the Last Supper using a psychoactive sacrament.

The symbolic resonance of the fact that the Catholic Church literally buried this original psychedelic Christianity under their headquarters in Rome is not lost on him. What a powerful image of institutional suppression and erasure!

In Needleman’s book, the enigmatic Father Sylvan reveals to the wide-eyed professor some of the hidden secrets of what he calls “lost Christianity”. But the central point is that Christianity is too advanced for people to understand and that what is needed is an “intermediate Christianity” as a kind of preparative. He believes that it is precisely because of this lack of intermediate preparation that the true significance of Christianity is lost, hidden in plain sight.

The clues as to what this intermediate Christianity might entail are hinted at throughout the book by the mysterious Father, who may or may not be a figment of Needleman’s imagination. The style of exposition is reminiscent of Ouspensky’s classic, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching: Needleman plays the Ouspensky role of questioning disciple to Father Sylvan’s Gurdjieff.

Many of the elements that the Father recommends are also similar to the practices that Gurdjieff recommends in what came to be called The Fourth Way, a comprehensive system of transformational psychology which works on the human organism as a whole.

Whatever the details of this “intermediate Christianity”, I agree that something like it is necessary to enter into “the centre of Christian experience”. This can be simply illustrated using the Wheel of Babylon and Armour of Christ diagrams (see the Home Page).

Ordinary, conventional Christianity can be one of three types on the Wheel of Babylon: Muggle Christianity, Muppet Christianity or Diva Christianity. Muggle Christianity is basically nominalist. In other words, you might go to church and read the bible, but your faith is rather superficial – you are primarily a cultural Christian. Muppet Christianity requires far more commitment. It is characterised by narrow dogmatic literalism and fanaticism, and defines itself in opposition to the prevailing status quo. In the modern world, this usually means decadent secular liberal humanism, but also the corrupt and decadent mainstream Church, which has sold out.

Muppet Christianity is therefore locked into a perpetual battle with Diva Christianity, “the Establishment”. Diva Christians have most of the resources: the cathedrals, abbeys, monasteries, art collections, schools, seminaries, charities, publishing houses, etc. etc. They take pride in all these spiritual riches. They feel privileged and exceptional. They have something of a superiority complex.

The Divas are a target for both Christian Muppets and Militant Atheist Muppets, both camps determined to cut them down to size. For their own part, Christian Divas enjoy the splendour of their spiritual palaces, their great organs and choirs, but never quite managing to get to the centre of Christian experience. There is always that nagging still small voice, and the inevitable cognitive dissonance that must accompany such a glamorous religion worshipping spiritual poverty.

My approach to Christianity points to a fourth way (pun intended) beyond the unholy trinity of Muggles, Muppets and Divas. It points to an intermediate stage, before Christianity proper can be meaningfully engaged. With Father Sylvan, I would say that Muggles, Muppets and Divas are not ready for Christianity. They need to first be purified, purged. You could say that they need to be bapitised.

The sacrament of baptism is a symbolic, physical representation of a spiritual initiation process. How many Christians have actually gone through this spiritual baptism though? And how many have been baptised by fire as well as water? I’ll leave that rhetorical question hanging.

My approach involves stepping off the Wheel altogether and extracting oneself from the closed logic of the Babylon system. This is pictorially represented by moving from the Wheel to the Cross, the “Armour of Christ”. Beginning at the top of the diagram, we must become mystics, by emptying ourselves of all preconceptions. This includes emptying ourselves of Christianity and even of God, as Meister Eckhart taught.

Then we must become shamans, by mastering the energetic body. Then we must become warriors, monks (or nuns), philosophers and kings (or queens) by mastering the will, the emotions, the mind and the ego. All this is “intermediate Christianity”, a prelude to Christianity proper, which as we are in our undeveloped form, is too advanced for us.

This is symbolically represented by the sign of the (double) cross. As we make the sign of the cross (forehead, navel, left hip, right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder, heart) we come to rest at the seventh point, at the heart. The corresponding body-mantra, Mystic (forehead), Shaman (navel), Warrior (left hip), Monk (right hip), Philosopher (left shoulder), King (right shoulder), is completed with the seventh archetype, which must come after all the others: Christian (heart).

How many undervalue simplicity! But it is the real key to the heart.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

You go down a rabbit hole and get lost in a bewilderingly labyrinthine warren. Eventually, exhausted, you sit down in a corner of the warren to watch a shadow puppet show someone has put on. Engrossed in the show, you soon forget that there is such a thing as fresh air and a sun shining in a gloriously blue sky.

Psychedelics can simplify your life and they can complicate it. They can cut straight through the Gordian knots of your entangled mind or they can spin more mind-webs to confuse the hell out of you.

Our culture is hooked on over-thinking. Is there free will? Are we morally responsible for our actions? Is consciousness an illusion? Is God just the collective projection of an existentially timorous species? Are goodness, beauty and truth just social constructs?

All interesting questions, no doubt. But these rabbit holes lead further and further from the clear light of day.

Computer scientists and analytical philosophers have one thing in common: they are left hemisphere dominant. Many of them, by the way they think and talk, probably also have a mild case of autism. And the cleverer they are, the further from common-sense they can go, without once breaking any rules of logic.

When it comes to philosophers, of whatever stripe, Nietzsche’s diagnosis that most of them merely rationalize their own pathologies is to the point. In his view, “the kind of person who engages in philosophical activity does so because she has certain physiological and psychological characteristics.” (Jared Riggs, A Nietzschean Diagnosis of Philosophers).

Nietzsche specifies what these characteristics are, from an ascetic morality to an anti-nature drive to “inactive, brooding, unwarriorlike elements” (Genealogy of Morals III: 10). But the simplest diagnosis, in my view, is left hemisphere dominance, with its ensuing dissociation and hyper-rationality. (If you don’t know about the brain hemisphere research, look up Iain McGilchrist).

This is why philosophy will never take the place of religion and why religion is so perennially important. Because in truth, it’s not that complicated. In the clear light of revelation, whether prompted by drinking an Amazonian brew or by non-psychedelic means (prayer, fasting, etc.), it’s actually very simple:

There is a God. God is infinite light and consciousness. God is love. God is good. We should move towards the light and be loving and good. We should worship God and give thanks and praise.

And that’s basically it!

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

It makes me laugh when conservative Christians lose their faith when they find out about all the problems and contradictions in Christianity. What? You mean Jesus never said those things in John’s gospel like “I am the resurrection and the life”? What? You mean the doctrine of the Trinity didn’t exist until the third century AD? What? You mean Jesus and his followers thought that they would live to see the end of the world? What? You mean Jesus probably never even existed?

Those who try to find the fundamentals of Christianity and stick to them will always be disappointed in the long run. Do you put all your faith in the Church and the infallibility of the Pope? Do you put all your faith in Scripture and the inerrancy of the Bible? Do you put all your faith in Reason and the ability of scholarship and science to get to the bottom of the truth about Christianity?

Whatever you pin your hopes on, Christianity will have the last laugh. Why? Because the truth is neither here nor there, neither this nor that. “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21)

And you’d better not conclude that the kingdom of God is within you and that Christianity is really all about inner spiritual experiences, because it’s not.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The problem with Christianity is that it has it all. You will never be able to boil it down to its essence. It has too many moving parts. The following list is suggestive and by no means exhaustive. Like the Tao, Christianity is a bottomless well that cannot be exhausted.

(The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present.

Tao Te Ching, verse 4)

So what is Christianity? Well, at the very least, it contains the following multitudes:

1. The God of the Philosophers, ie. the God of Aristotle.
2. The God of the Jews, ie. the God of Abraham.
3. The God of the Greek Mysteries, ie. the God of wine, Dionysus.
4. The God of the Humanists, ie. the God of Enlightenment, Buddha.
5. The God of the Alchemists, ie. the God of the Inner Spirit.
6. The God of the Rationalists, ie. the God of the Inner Logos.
7. The God of the Mystics, ie. the God of Unknowing.
8. The God of the Pagans, ie. the Heavenly Host.

Let’s unpack and expand these basic elements a bit. The first two are concerned with “God the Father”.

1. Aristotle’s metaphysics is the main influence on Christian theological reflections on the nature of God, but we should really go back to Pythagoras. Traditionally, Christian theology has tacked between the two philosophical traditions established by Plato (Neo-Platonism) and Aristotle, most famously represented by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, Stoicism being another important influence (especially in the doctrine of the Logos – see below).
2. The monotheism of the Jews, which is at the heart the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is referred to in the Bible as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Jacob being renamed Israel after his struggle with the angel of God). In the Torah, this invisible, unutterable God, JHWH, is instantiated in the people of Israel through the covenant of the Law of Moses (the Ten Commandments and the Halakha). The personal relationship between the individual soul and God is worked out by Psalmist (King David) and that between the collective soul and God by the Prophets. Thus the God of Abraham is also the God of Moses, David and Isaiah.

The next two are concerned with “God the Son”:

3. The Christ of Faith is a divine God-Man, an Avatar, a Personal Saviour. He is akin to the mythical figures at the centre of the mystery cults of the ancient world, such as Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, Mithras, Adonis, Attis, Cybele and Dionysus. His status as a new Dionysus is especially relevant because of the sacramental parallels: eating the body and drinking the blood of the sacrificial God in the bread and wine. The wine in both cases (Dionysian and early Christian rituals) was probably spiked wine with psychoactive properties.

4. The Jesus of History is a human spiritual teacher, a prophet, a rabbi, a reformer, a revolutionary, an enlightened holy man, a pure soul, a saint. Buddhists would say that he was a Buddha, an awakened human being who has seen into the truth of their essential nature, no longer subject to the delusions of ordinary mortals. This archetypal figure of the “perfect man” is the humanist ideal: the apogee of what humanity is spiritually capable of. Of course we will never know how “perfect” Jesus’ enlightenment really was, whether it was exaggerated or even a fictional construct.

The next two are concerned with “God the Spirit”:

5. The festival of Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples in a “rushing wind” and “cloven tongues like as of fire” (Acts 2). The charisma (gift) of the indwelling Spirit is an inner power or energy, akin to the Kundalini of the Indian Tantrikas and the Qi of the Taoist Alchemists. In Western alchemy, it is represented by Mercury (the messenger of the Gods) which has the power to transmute the Lead of mortal flesh into the Gold of immortality.

6. The inner spirit of Christ, or Logos, “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9) is later hypostatized in Christian tradition as the Holy Spirit. The “true Light” of the “Word” is associated with the principle of active Reason, a portion of the divine Logos inhering in all things, as the Stoics taught. This belief in the divinity of rationality eventually led to the methodical application of reason to the natural world, ushering in the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century.

The next element points to the apophatic tradition of the Christian mystics, who stress the ineffability of God. There is clearly a natural affinity here with mystics of all traditions, whether Sufi, Taoist, Zen or Advaita Vedanta.

Finally, the polytheism of the Pagan world is smuggled back into Christianity via the communion of saints, the heavenly host of angels and archangels, powers and principalities, and the demonic hordes of Satan’s brood.

Is it any wonder that there are currently over two hundred Christian denominations in the US alone?

Samuel Johnson famously remarked that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” The same could be said of Christianity. The more you dig, the more you see that Christianity really does have it all.