Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

John 3:3

The death and rebirth motif in comparative mythology is arguably at the heart of all spiritual and religious traditions. It is certainly at the heart of Christianity. The radical spiritual enlightenment Zen aims for is possible only through the “Great Death”, the death of the ego, and the experience of ego dissolution has been the cornerstone of psychedelic mysticism in the West at least since Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception was published in 1954.

“Die before ye die”. This is the the essence of the Sufi fana, or self-annihilation. It is the “immortality key” of what Brian Muraresku calls “the religion with no name”, a “religion” which potentially stretches back to the Paleolithic around two and a half million years ago, even to the dawn of human life on Earth. As it evolved, it found various expressions, primarily in the form of shamanic initiatory rituals, still practiced today among the Yanomani and other tribes throughout the world.

“The main aim of shamanic initiation among the Yanomami people of the Upper Orinoco River region in Venezuela is the metamorphosis of the human body into a cosmic body, or what I term “corporeal cosmogenesis.” During the initiatory ordeal, the neophyte undergoes an intense experience of death through dismemberment by the spirits and subsequent rebirth, thus overcoming the human condition and becoming an individual living spirit.”

Zelko Jokic

In The Psychedelic Experience, Leary, Metzner and Alpert note that “one of the oldest and most universal practices for the initiate to go through the experience of death before he can be spiritually reborn. Symbolically he must die to his past, and to his old ego, before he can take his place in the new spiritual life into which he has been initiated.”

This is a frightening prospect. Some writers, such as David Loy, go so far as to claim that the fear of egolessness can be even stronger than the fear of physical death. But you get used to it. After the first initiation experience, it is possible to “die” and be “reborn” countless times. It becomes as natural as falling asleep at night and waking up in the morning.

It really should come as no surprise that a culture without a living tradition and practice of ego death and rebirth, or one that has lost it, will begin to suffer from the evils of egotism: selfishness, narcissism, empathic failure, hyper-individualism, atomisation, addiction, rampant consumerism, domestic abuse, violent crime, racism, cultural fragmentation and the despoilation and destruction of the natural environment.

If we are serious about addressing these issues in our culture, we need to look long and hard at ourselves and at their psychological and spiritual causes. If we think we can come up with political or technological solutions and just carry on as normal, taking what we want when we want, we are still missing the mark. This is a spiritual crisis, and it requires spiritual solutions.

In my little psycho-spiritual system, I define six discrete ego states, based on the six realms of the Bhavachakra, the Tibetan Wheel of Life. These are the Diva, the Muggle, the Muppet, the Addict, the Victim and the Demon ego states. Because we move around the wheel, embodying different types of ego or sub-personality, we are under the illusion that we are only sometimes egoically possessed. The truth is that the mode may vary, but the ego remains intact.

The solution I have come up with is a simple mantra, carefully designed to counteract the activity and loosen the grip of these egos on our lives. There are actually five mantras. One is associated with the seven chakras of the Indian kundalini system, situated along the spinal column. The other four are associated with the seven points of the double cross (third eye chakra, sacral chakra, left hip, right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder, heart). They are “body-mantras”, rooted in the body. I have nicknamed them “the Staff of Moses” and “the Armour of Christ” respectively (see my blog, Staff and Armour).

The five mantras are as follows:

The Staff of Moses

Amun Ra Atum Ka Ba Gaia Jah (corresponding to the seven chakras from base to crown)

The Armour of Christ

Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King Friend (the six inverse archetypes of the six egos plus a seventh at the heart)

Zen Soma Body Heart Mind Soul Spirit

Humility Chastity Diligence Temperance Patience Prudence Gratitude (the Christian Virtues)

Peace Love Goodness Beauty Truth Consciousness Bliss

The full meditation has twelve steps:

1. The Grounding
2. The Clearing
3. The Tao
4. The Staff of Moses
5. The Jewel in the Lotus
6. The Armour of Christ 1
7. The Armour of Christ 2
8. The Armour of Christ 3
9. The Armour of Christ 4
10. The Lord’s Prayer
11. The Hail Mary
12. The Glory Be

Ego death and rebirth needn’t always be as dramatic and traumatic as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ or the dismemberment and re-assembly of Osiris and Dionysus. It can be as gentle, quiet and unassuming as a child praying the rosary at a deserted bus stop.

It’s easy to talk the talk. It’s easy to fool ourselves with spiritual materialism, spiritual bypassing, spiritual narcissism, spiritual complacency, spiritual apathy.

If your ego is in charge, whatever you do or say to fool ourselves or fool others, you’re just acting the fool.

Are you serious about the spiritual path? Are you serious about a life lived from a place of authentic being beyond ego?

If you are in Muggle mode, you’re not serious. If you are in Muppet mode, you’re not serious. If you are in Diva mode, you’re not serious. If you are in Addict, Victim or Demon mode, you’re not serious.

Unless you are seriously trying to resist these six egos, you’re not serious.

If you are content to settle down and feather your nest in one of the six realms of the Wheel of Life, even to acquire a second or third home in other realms, you might as well wave goodbye to eternal life.

“Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

Matthew 7:14

The real thing is neither Buddhist nor non-Buddhist, Christian nor non-Christian. It is neither psychedelic nor non-psychedelic. Zen is acutely sensitive to whether or not something is the real thing or not, but neither Zen nor non-Zen is it.

Zen is the real thing; Buddhism is the real thing; Christianity is the real thing; Shamanism is the real thing. But only real Zen, real Buddhism, real Christianity, real Shamanism is the real thing.

The real thing is neither material, spiritual, psychedelic, religious, holy or enlightened. But it is not the real thing if it is not all these things.

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.