Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                              Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                             Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                             Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                             Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                             My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                             So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert (1593-1633)

You can’t go home if you don’t leave home. Odysseus, the Prodigal Son and Frodo are just three examples of wayfaring heroes whose homecoming is the real pivot of the story. Just as there is something magical about venturing out into unknown territory, so is there magic in coming home.

“Coming home” is a common refrain among communities and cultures who have experienced the dislocation and trauma of exile and emigration. I am a Chilean exile, and the songs of my homeland, especially the songs of return, such as Vuelvo by Inti Illimani and Vuelvo Para Vivir by Illapu, never fail to tug at my heart-strings. Irish music is also replete with this kind of patriotic nostalgia because of their own long history of mass emigration, something that Enya has extensively exploited in her music.

In her beautiful song Pilgrim, Enya sings about this condition of being a wanderer on the Earth, but in a spiritual rather than geographical sense. “Home” is not Ireland, or some other homeland, but “you”:

Each heart is a pilgrim
Each one wants to know
The reason why the winds die
And where the stories go
Pilgrim, in your journey
You may travel far
For pilgrim it’s a long way
To find out who you are…

Enya’s music has sometimes been called “New Age”, which she rightly objects to, but this idea of finding out your True Self is central to New Age thinking. Whether expressed in a spiritual or psychological idiom, this is a Religion of the Self, or Soul Mysticism, which many people see as an alternative to the traditional religious focus on an external God. This inward turn chimes with such mystical proclamations as “the Kingdom of God is within you” in Luke’s gospel and the bald Advaita Vedanta assertion that “the Self is Brahman” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad).

A corollary of this inner divinity is the sense that the natural world is itself infused with divinity, that is, pantheism (God is everywhere). This is clearly expressed in Thomas’ gospel: “the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.” In his Centuries of Meditations, Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) writes:

The world is a mirror of infinite beauty,
yet no one sees it.
It is a Temple of majesty,
yet no one regards it.
It is a region of Light and Peace,
did not humans disquiet it.
It is the Paradise of God,
the place of Angels,
and the Gate of Heaven.

“Coming home” can refer to a physical return to your homeland after years of absence, as in the Homeric epic The Odyssey, or to self discovery, as in the Disney film The Lion King. But it can also refer to a return to Earth itself, as in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film Gravity.

When I first saw the film, on a British Airways flight to Chile to see my dying father, little clues, such as the Russian ikon in the Soyuz and the Chinese buddha in the Shenzhou capsule, were not lost on me. Stranded in space, the sole survivor of a satellite debris storm, these two “rides” with their mystical symbols, were the vehicles that allowed her to get back down to Earth.

Most adventure stories, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, focus primarily on the outgoing arm of the narrative arc. The return is almost a coda. Even in science fiction films such as Star Wars or Star Trek, the story usually starts with a call to leave home and go off on an adventure, only to return back home at the end, even if “home” is an itinerant Starship Enterprise. Gravity begins with the hero floating out in space. There’s no take off or journey out, there is only the desperate struggle to get back, the return arm of the traditional arc.

Gravity is a Disaster Movie, in the venerable tradition of the 1974 classic The Towering Inferno. It is about the indomitable human will to survive, about courage and perseverance against the odds, inspiring us to keep calm and carry on, even in the jaws of death. But it also has another, subtler, subtext.

The final scene (spoiler alert!) where the hero Ryan Stone drags herself onto the sandy shore and joyfully scoops up a handful of wet sand, is the final revelatory moment of the film, which explains the film’s title, gravity not just in the literal sense, but in the metaphorical sense, “spiritually” coming back down to Earth after being lost in “psychological” space. Until that moment, partly because of grief over her dead child, Stone hadn’t fully embraced life. Her soul hadn’t fully incarnated. It takes a near death experience (NDE) for her to wake up to the miracle of life, with Friedrich Nietzsche “saying yes to life, even in its strangest and hardest problems.” (Ecce Homo) It is an initiation, a baptism, a resurrection.

Like a stone, Dr Stone is as susceptible to gravity as everything else, even the temple in Jerusalem:

⁶ As for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

Luke 21:6

¹⁹ Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

²⁰ Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?

²¹ But he spake of the temple of his body.

John 2: 19-21

As with all adventure stories, spiritual adventures commonly focus on the outgoing journey, as in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Thomas Malory’s knights of the Round Table and their quest for the Holy Grail. After all, swash-buckling adventures in exotic locations are more fun. This is why in psychedelic circles there is so much emphasis on the exotic psychedelia and colourful trip reports, the weird places and even weirder entities. The return journey is glossed over as uninteresting, a mere “come down”, accompanied by the inevitable anxiety that maybe this time you won’t come back in one piece.

“Grounding” is usually understood as the process of integrating psychological material arising from a psychedelic experience. Important as this is, there is a more fundamental grounding. There is nothing quite like the relief of coming back down to earth, to sky and trees and water after an exhausting night travelling through other dimensions on ayahuasca. How wondrous is the warmth of the sun on your face. How delicious the taste of pineapple! What a miracle is every blade of grass!

Hakuin Ekaku (1685-1768) famously wrote, “This very land is the Pure Land. This very body is the body of Buddha”. Ultimately, the point of working with plant medicine is not to “get high” or even to “get healed” or “get wise”, but to find out who you really are and where you truly belong, not out there on the perimeter of psychic space, but here on this beautiful planet, feeling the cool earth under your bare feet and the wind on your bare legs, like Dr Ryan Stone in Gravity.

On the Wheel of Babylon (see the Home Page) there are two types of religion: Muppet Religion and Diva Religion. The former is usually at war with the latter, or at least at loggerheads. Muppet Religion is extremist, fundamentalist, radical, revolutionary. It includes Jihadi fighters, Puritan iconoclasts, even Jacobins and Bosheviks. In all cases, whether the religion be theistic or atheistic, the destruction of traditional religious buildings and artifacts and the execution of priests and other representatives of the religious establishment is encouraged.

Diva Religion is the establishment. It is a complex hierarchical structure of religious scholars and ecclesiastical authorities. The Vatican is the nerve-centre of the largest of these, manned by thousands of religious professionals working around the clock to keep the show on the road. Sometimes this type of religion is separate from the State, sometimes it is intertwined, as was the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, and as is the case in Iran and North Korea today. In the modern examples, what was once a revolutionary Muppet Religion has been institutionalized as a Diva Religion (although they are probably better characterized as hybrids).

In any case, what these two types of religion have in common is that they exist on “the Wheel of Babylon”. There is a third type of religion, however, that exists beyond the Wheel. In all traditional depictions of the Bhavachakra or Tibetan Wheel of Life (on which the Wheel of Babylon is based) there is a solitary figure of a Buddha, usually standing on a cloud at the top right of the picture. This suggests that the Buddhist Way somehow transcends the world altogether.

This need not be an otherworldly, metaphysical claim, however. It can be understood on a straightforward psychological level. The six realms of the Wheel represent six distinct ego states. Throughout our lives, we transmigrate between them, one or twice or multiple times. Thus the Wheel of Life can be understood as a psychological typography of human identity. But who are you when you are not a Muggle, Muppet, Diva, Victim, Addict or Demon?

In a sense, you are “nothing” or “nobody”. In another sense, you are expressing your essential human identity beyond all ego states and ego games. You are expressing your Buddha Nature. The Buddhist claim is that we discover, or uncover, our original enlightened consciousness not by doing anything in particular, but by undoing everything.

In other words, when you step off the Wheel, you are automatically a Buddha. Or in the Christian tradition, you “put on Christ”: you have the mind of Christ or Christ Consciousness: you can say (with St. Paul) “Now not I, but Christ lives in me”. Further, you have “the body of Christ”, which is the resurrected body. The Christian death and resurrection motif is just a vivid way of expressing the ego dissolution of the whole bodymind, expressed in the Buddhist tradition by symbolically stepping off the Wheel of Samsara into the freedom of Nirvana.

Which is not to say that Buddhism cannot itself be a Diva Religion, or even sometimes a Muppet Religion. Diva Religions work by creating a persuasive simulacrum or copy of authentic mystical religion, what I am calling The Third Religion. As with all worldly religions, you can work your way up the Buddhist hierarchy through “good works”, by honest (or dishonest) hard graft, by passing exams and currying favour with those in power. This kind of religion is really all about paying homage to Buddha, or worshipping Buddha, and maintaining the requisite infrastructure and paraphernalia. It is rarely (except occasionally and accidentally) about being Buddha.

Zen is the direct challenge to this institutionalized fake religion of false prophets. According to Zen, until you step off the Wheel, you’re just playacting. The “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye” cannot be found in the Vatican vaults or even in Eihei-ji. It can only be found in the spiritual awakening of ego death, by stepping off the Wheel of Life, by dying in the flesh and being reborn in the spirit.

You can point to Zen, just as you can point to the moon. But if you want an actual trip to the moon, there comes a time when you need to stop pointing, stop “prattling about God” and get on with it. The monk said, “Atop the hundred foot pole, how can you step forward?” Ye of little faith! Just do it.

Easier said than done, of course. The apophatic, mystical path (often called the Negative Way) is a steep one. But there is a gentler ascent, using traditional Diva Religion as a vehicle. In Eastern high antiquity, the ride is represented by an ox. In the West, it’s represented by a donkey. Both are beasts of burden, but both are slow and plodding and a bit stupid.

Why did Jesus enter Jerusalem on a donkey? The conventional answer is found in Matthew’s gospel:

All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying,

Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.

Matthew 21: 4-5

Jesus didn’t enter the Royal City on foot, symbolizing his own perfect self-reliance. He entered in a way that would conform to the religious tradition he belonged to, fulfilling scripture, but at the same time allowing himself to be carried by a symbolic “vehicle”. This vehicle can be understood as religion as such.

But isn’t “religion as such” a fake religion full of false prophets? Isn’t is Diva Religion? Yes and no. It is Janus-faced, one side facing the mundane world of getting and spending, social advancement, power and status, or “spiritual materialism”, the other side facing a spiritual world that transcends all that.

The meekness of Jesus suggests that, although he is a king, he is a spiritual king, not a temporal one. He is facing the Kingdom of Heaven, not the Kingdom of Muppet Politics (represented by the Zealots) or the Kingdom of Diva Religion (represented by the Pharisees).

If the Third Religion is the apophatic, “Negative Way”, the Fourth Religion is the cataphatic, “Positive Way”. In the former, all the attributes of God are denied in a thoroughgoing negation (neti, neti: “not this, not this”) since anything we say is insufficient to capture the ineffable transcendence of the divine. In the latter, God is imaginatively conjured up through a suggestive, impressionistic superfluity of positive attributes.

Where the Third Religion is explicitly mystical, the Fourth Religion is implicitly magical. The various expressions of religion, which ultimately traces its genesis back to the authentic spiritual expressions of its founders, are pointers that can magically transport us back to the Source. However, the Fourth Religion must include the Third Religion if it is to maintain its connection and allegiance to the transcendent Source, which is the immaculate eternal present, Here and Now.

Religion is like a donkey we can learn to ride. And the only way to ride it is through faith, which means that you genuinely believe that it can and will take you beyond the material world. Without true faith, religion quickly degenerates into Diva Religion, which pretends to spiritual authority for the sake of worldly gain. With faith, however, the donkey becomes a magical beast.

Religion has come a long way since the time of Jesus, not least in the extraordinary development of its sublime expression in music and art. This imaginative flowering of religious sensibility, coupled with the power of magic plants, which are available to ordinary people on a scale never seen before in human history, means that we no longer need to plod up the mountain on a donkey. We can fly up on a unicorn.

“Set and Setting” has become something of a psychonautic cliché. It will never go out of fashion, however, because it so concisely and catchily expresses the essential conditions for a good trip. “Set” refers to mind-set. You should be in a relaxed and positive frame of mind, not racked with anxiety and worry. “Setting” refers to the place you take it in and the people you take it with. You should ideally take psychedelics in a safe and supportive environment.

People usually refer to set and setting in the negative or minimal sense. In other words, make sure you’re not in a bad place mentally or physically, and you should avoid a bad trip. But if you take set and setting seriously, why not make a conscious effort to create as conducive an environment as you can? Why not ceremonially prepare yourself and the place you are in to receive your magical guest with the utmost care? At this point, psychedelic use becomes sacramental.

To take a sacrament, you need a sacred set and setting. In the Christian Mass, you only take communion after having participated in the service, which is a kind of spiritual preparation and purification. In some churches, especially in the Catholic tradition, you can only take communion once you have been to confession.

Similarly, in a psychedelic ceremony, there must be a preparatory element as well as a sacred ritual element. In addition, however, there should be a carefully designed post-communion element, which is of course the heart of the matter. “Set” thus refers to the “pre-communion” preparation stage and “setting” to the “post-communion” tripping stage.

The essence of a good mind-set is meditation. This has a negative and a positive rationale. The negative is about avoidance of negativity emotion and negative thoughts. The positive is about getting “in the zone”, so that you are as receptive and open as possible and better able to “go with the flow”.

An important aspect of this positive preparation is increased suggestibility. Research has shown that meditation and psychedelics both increase sensitivity and suggestibility, so that any ensuing positive feelings and insights have a stronger and more lasting effect. This can be intentionally used to our advantage. On the meditation page, I describe how this observation applies to the Alignment Meditation system: first you “set yourself suggestible” by relaxing and inhibiting the default mode network, then you offer yourself positive affirmations in the form of a “setting mantra”.

When we come up on magic mushrooms, we find that our mind-set has shifted along with our altered state of consciousness. The important thing is to keep calm and carry on, to remain positive, relaxed and open. You can continue with the mantra in your elevated state of suggestibility, but you will also need some other sensory input, even if you are a very experienced meditator. Prolonged silence can be hard to bear on high doses. We need more “setting”.

It’s almost as though, on drinking the sacred drink, our souls become thirsty for spiritual drink. And because they are in such a suggestible state, the drink they are offered should be as healthy and wholesome and refreshing as possible. In other words, it should be beautiful. We bare our souls in the radical openness of psychedelic suggestibility in order that they may be remade in the image of transcendental Beauty.

The “set” is peace and the “setting” is love. The “set” is openness and the “setting” is beauty. Beautiful music, through the skillful interweaving of melody, harmony, rhythm, dissonance and concord, tension and resolution, guides our fledgling souls towards the celestial realms of the Good, the True and the Beautiful, where they receive the stamp of the divine, like a seal on hot wax. This is what I mean by “the seal of Apollo”.

The three great cults of the Greek Mysteries were the cults of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, Apollo at Delphi and Dionysus all over the countryside.

In the myth, Persephone is abducted by Hades while gathering flowers (she may have munched on a particularly psychoactive one) and becomes his queen in the underworld. Her mother Demeter, distraught with grief, implores Zeus to get her back. Hades eventually relents, but not before tricking her into eating some pomegranate seeds, which magically compel her to return to him for six months of every year for all eternity.

Persephone is a vegetation goddess as well as the goddess of Spring and Nature. The story of her yearly return to the underworld is an agrarian myth about the crop cycle, which is a kind of yearly death and rebirth. The esoteric meaning is not about farming, however, but about spiritual regeneration, which is also clearly what John was getting at in his gospel:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

John 12:22

On an esoteric level, Persephone represents what the transpersonal Chilean psychologist Claudio Naranjo calls “formless meditation”. This results in a kind of ego-death or ego-dissolution, where all habitual “default mode” objects of consciousness disappear. In the Buddhist traditions, this state is known as Samadhi.

The re-emergence from this state of quiescence and suspended animation is like a second birth into the phenomenal world of objects. These objects can take any form, but they can be arranged to include especially harmonious forms in a consciously designed “form meditation”. The newborn consciousness is thus moulded into shape by another Greek god, the god of music, poetry and the civilized arts, Apollo. In other words, you awaken from your death-trance in beauty, and your receptive soul is beautified.

The third type of meditation discussed by Naranjo is “expressive meditation”. This is the kind of full-blooded, full-bodied meditation typical of shamanic rituals in indigenous cultures, typically with lots of drumming and dancing. In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, this was known as a bacchanal, from Bacchus, the Latin name for the Greek god of (spiked) wine, theatre, madness and partying, Dionysus.

In The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, Brian Muraresku focuses on the pagan continuity hypothesis, with particular emphasis on the shift from Dionysus to Jesus. He claims that a psychedelically inspired “religion with no name” has accompanied humanity since the Stone Age in the form of psychedelic beer, later replaced by psychedelic wine, and that it was going strong immediately before, during and after the birth of Christianity in the first century AD.

It may have no official name, but there are in fact three names that usefully capture the nature of this secret religion: Persephone, Apollo and Dionysus. Together, they provide a powerful methodology for radical spiritual transformation via the threefold practice of formless, form and expressive psychedelic meditation.

If you are interested in how this works in a contemporary setting, see the Seven Week Psychedelic Course on the Meditation page.

Not everyone resonates with Christianity – many are put off by negative experiences in childhood and/or have imbibed negative views based on the real and/or imagined atrocities committed by the Church in the past in name of God.

Never mind! The essential practice I am promoting is Meditation plus Psychedelics or Mystical Shamanism or Zen Soma working itself through the whole person. I’ve described this process with reference to six archetypes, Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King, but what I’m really getting at is really very simple: Zen Soma, body, heart, mind and soul.

I happen to be a Christian and happen to find Christianity a helpful and well-suited religion to follow in tandem with my Integral Psychedelic practice, but it is by no means essential or obligatory. Anyone can benefit from this system, whether you are a card-carrying member of another religion or a “none”, whether you are an SBNR (spiritual but not religious) or a convinced atheist.

Everyone is welcome to the party. Everyone has something unique to contribute. If you’d like to get involved, drop me a line.

Half way through Brian Muraresku’s fascinating book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, a deep dive into the mounting evidence for an original psychedelic sacrament at the Eleusinian Mysteries and then later, via the pagan continuity hypothesis, in Christianity, I got to wondering about the essential differences between a psychedelic Christianity and a non-psychedelic institutionalized Christianity.

Muraresku makes the point that mysticism has always had a difficult relationship with institutional religion, due to its essentially subversive nature. This is most starkly illustrated within the Buddhist tradition in the famous Zen koan, If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!

He writes, “In what he [Brother David Steindl-Rast] calls the centuries-long “tension between the mystical and the religious establishment,” the technicians who yearn for real experience are always butting heads with the authorities who are trying to keep the house in working order.” He also quotes Brother David (a Benedictine monk) as saying, “Every religion has its mystical core. The challenge is to find access to it and to live in its power.”

Christianity is undoubtedly a profoundly mystical religion. However, it has in many cases become an empty shell of its former self, devoid of any trace of spiritual substance, such as is in its modern post-Enlightenment rationalist, secularist, literalist versions, “so that “live doctrine fossilizes into dogmatism” and the ethics and morality that attempt to translate “mystical communion into practical living” are reduced to moralism.”

This doesn’t mean that Christianity devoid of its mystical core is completely useless, however. It has a strong ethic of selfless service and “good works”, of what the Indian Vedic tradition calls Karma Yoga. It has a highly developed liturgical and devotional system, replete with some of the most sublime art and music ever produced, engagement with which in India is called Bhakti Yoga. It has a profound and sophisticated theological tradition, with some extraordinary deep thinkers, all practitioners of Jnana Yoga. It has prayers and sacraments which connect believers to their spiritual essence or soul, akin to the Royal Road of Raja Yoga in the Indian tradition.

Regular, exoteric Christianity, the common-or-garden church-going variety actually ticks a lot of boxes: ethical, aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual. Just like any of the mature world religions, Christianity continues to attract followers because it does indeed address the four yogas, and it does it exceptionally well. Maybe too well.

Because without the mystical core, these practices degenerate into mere empty ritual. The exoteric needs to be undergirded, supported, infused, energized, illuminated, by the esoteric, the inner spiritual essence of its very raison d’etre. The exoteric can only survive on the fumes of the esoteric for so long before it collapses under the weight of its own fossilized structure.

Just as the secular humanist Enlightenment project is running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition it emerged from, the Judeo-Christian tradition itself is running on the fumes of direct, esoteric, mystical experience. And when the fumes run out, civilization itself will inevitably collapse in on itself, as old, decrepit civilizations tend to do.

There has understandably been a passionate call for a return of the mystical element within Christianity for a long time now. Many mystically-inclined Christians now meditate, for example. However, as Brian Muraresku’s book persuasively and suggestively demonstrates, there is also the psychedelic element to consider. Christianity clearly has a mystical core, which is often lost sight of, but it also has a psychedelic core, enshrined in the central mystery of the Eucharist. And real, hard evidence is mounting that this defining sacrament was originally a psychedelic spiked wine with the power to transport its partakers into spiritual communion with God.

If the exoteric side of religion can be represented by the four yogas and their corresponding archetypes, Warrior (karma yoga), Monk (bhakti yoga), Philosopher (jnana yoga), King (raja yoga), the esoteric side can be represented by two further yogas, dhyana yoga and soma yoga, meditation and psychedelics, mysticism and shamanism.

At the core of true, living Christianity is mystery and magic.

The essence of mysticism is mystery. It is also secrecy. The word derives from the Greek muo, which means to close or shut, especially to close your eyes, but also to shut your mouth. Both actions are significant, the former indicating withdrawal from the outside world, and the latter a commitment to secrecy: what goes on inside, stay inside.

This vow of silence is crucial in the alchemical arts of both East and West. For example, in Neidan, the inner alchemy of ancient China, talking about your practice is compared to steaming rice in a broken, leaky pot. In other words, the alchemical process can only reach fruition in a hermetically sealed container – talking releases the pressure and dissipates the energy needed for the inner transmutation to occur.

The famous German mystic Meister Eckhart also cautions against talking about the mystery of God:

“Be silent, therefore, and do not chatter about God, for by chattering about him, you tell lies and commit a sin. If you wish to be perfect and without sin, then do not prattle about God. Also you should not wish to understand anything about God, for God is beyond all understanding. A Master says: If I had a God I could understand, I would not regard him as God.”

The practice of mysticism is meditation. Whether or not you close your eyes, or keep them open, the most important thing is shut your mouth and stop talking. After a while, you will find that not only have you stopped talking out loud, but you have also stopped talking silently to yourself in your head. In other words, you have stopped thinking. (There is an interesting parallel here to that seminal moment at infant school where we stop reading aloud and learn to read in our heads).

This state of no-thinking, or no-mind (mu-shin in Japanese) is a peculiar state of inner stillness and quiet, but it is not simple vacuity, rather a pregnant emptiness suffused with mystery, a “cloud of unknowing”.

Mysticism is therefore practically synonymous with meditation, or Dhyana in Sanskrit (transliterated as Ch’an in Chinese and Zen in Japanese). Therefore the Mystic archetype at the head of the Armour of Christ body-mantra represents meditation, or Dhyana Yoga.

The Shaman archetype represents psychedelic journeying. However, not any old psychedelic journeying. The psychedelic experience is radically different when undertaken in a meditative state. Therefore, unlike with the recreational use of psychedelics, where the attraction is chaotic hedonism and an easy high, a true shaman must have a disciplined meditation practice, and have mastered the art of mystical stillness and silence. In other words a true shaman must also be a mystic, a Mystic-Shaman.

A Mystic is a Dhyana Yogi, a master of meditation; a Shaman is a Soma Yogi, a master of psychedelic journeying. But you can’t be a Soma Yogi without also being a Dhyana Yogi – the two are inextricably linked. We might call the combined practice Zen Soma.

This mystico-shamanic foundation is a firm rock on which to build the edifice of our worldly abode, using the four yogas of the Bhagavad Gita as a guide: that is, Karma Yoga (the yoga of action and will), Bhakti Yoga (the yoga of devotion and higher feeling), Jnana Yoga (the yoga of knowledge and spiritual insight) and Raja Yoga (the yoga of Self-knowledge) corresponding to the four archetypes Warrior, Monk/Nun, Philosopher, King/Queen.

This is what an integral meditative psychedelic practice (Zen Soma) is all about: the holistic and balanced psycho-spiritual development of the human being, simply put, “character building”. Not content to stop at the otherworldly peace and tranquillity of the mystic or at the otherworldly spirit journeys of the shaman, both of which can lead to quietism and escapism, we can use these practices to establish ourselves firmly in this world, developing our bodies through martial arts, dance and other physical practices; our hearts through music and the arts; our minds through science and philosophy; and our souls through religious observances.

What better way to become the best you can become?

When you enter the psychedelic spirit world, it’s a good idea to take a couple of things with you. On Radio 4’s Desert Island Disks, you are automatically given the collected works of Shakespeare and the Bible to take with you to your imaginary desert island. In Integral Psychedelic Christianity, you are given the Armour of Christ and the Staff of Moses.

The Armour of Christ is made up of four body-mantras: Zen-Soma-Body-Heart-Mind-Soul-Spirit followed by Mystic-Shaman-Warrior-Monk-Philosopher-King (or Mystic-Shaman-Warrior-Nun-Philosopher-Queen), then Peace-Love-Goodness-Beauty-Truth-Consciousness-Bliss (the mantra of the first psychedelic revolution in the 1960’s was Peace and Love, an extremely powerful mantra, which I’ve just extended a little) and finally the Christian virtues, Humility-Chastity-Prudence-Temperance-Patience-Diligence-Gratitude.

The Staff of Moses is what I’ve been calling The Ray of Creation, The Cosmic Tree or The Tree of Life. It is the hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, reaching up from Emptiness to Energy, Matter, Life, Mind, Planetary Consciousness and the entire Universe: Amun-Ra-Atum-Ka-Ba-Gaia-Jah. These seven levels of existence are associated with the seven chakras of ancient Indian Tantra along the spinal column, forming another body-mantra.

The Armour and the Staff will help you safely navigate the psychedelic experience. You should also attend carefully to set and setting and dosage.

The rest of the time, which is to say, when you’re sober, you should simply try your best to be a good Christian, or a good Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or whatever other religion you identify with. If you can’t manage religion, just try and be a good person.

Namaste.

Die before ye die Hadith attributed to Nabi

If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die Inscription over a door at St. Paul’s monastery in Mount Athos

The death and rebirth motif in religion is really the key and the sum total of spiritual experience, from pre-historic shamanism to modern-day NRGs (New Religious Groups). “Death” here clearly doesn’t refer to physical death, and neither can it refer to loss of consciousness, since the process of death and rebirth is experienced by a conscious subject. If “feels” like a death, even though nobody can possibly know what death feels like, if anything. And it “feels” like a rebirth, even though no one can remember what their birth was like.

The traditional language of death and rebirth may just be a dramatic way of describing the temporary suspension of brain activity. It’s not really death and it’s not really sleep – it’s something else – and you come back changed. You come back feeling refreshed, revived, rebooted, as if your operating system was running sluggishly until you turned it off and on again.