Why Psychedelics?

If I had never taken psychedelics, going purely on the scientific research and reports of those who had, I would be inclined to think that they might actually be a good thing. Since I am interested in mental health and spirituality, I would at least feel obliged to take them seriously. But I have taken psychedelics. My first trip was on LSD at the tender age of sixteen, over thirty years ago.

My personal experience of psychedelics is that they elicit mystical experiences, stimulate somatic energies, enhance physical dexterity and movement, produce heightened emotion and catharsis, generate psychological and philosophical insight, and lead to Self realization. Which in my view are all good things.

There are down-sides, of course. Things can go very wrong and very dark. But the extraordinary benefits have persuaded me to repeatedly reaffirm my commitment to and respect for magic plant medicines. They are not to be taken lightly, that’s for sure.

One of the important lessons of psychedelics is the integral nature of genuine spirituality. If it is not to be unbalanced and partial, spirituality must be holistic, taking in the whole human being, mind, body and spirit. The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the Fourth Way of Gurdjieff and the Integral Psychology of Ken Wilber all point to this important truth. In fact, the essence of the New Age is its holistic integralism, which is why psychedelics are naturally associated with the New Age.

Why Christianity?

Much of my life’s psychedelic journeying has been undertaken in the context of the New Age, taking in the ideas and practices of Shamanism, Paganism and Gnosticism as well as those of the Eastern religions, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. But at a certain point, I decided to become a Christian. Why?

Here are five brief rational answers to that question:

1. My ancestral heritage is Christian, all the way back through many family generations in Chile to the sixteenth century, and in Spain before that, to at least the sixth century. Although my parents turned their backs on their Catholic faith, in conformity with the anti-establishment mood if the 1960’s, in the long view of the family line, this was just a break in a single link of a very long chain. On several occasions, the plant medicines have shown me how my ancestors live in me and through me, and how their religion is an integral part of who I am, at a deep cellular level, so to speak. So although my parents refused to have me christened, I was, in a mysterious, spiritual sense, born Christian.
2. Christianity has been in contact with the indigenous beliefs and practices of Latin America for centuries, both the native and imported traditions accommodating each other in different ways. There is thus already a long-standing relationship between psychedelics and Christianity in my own native Chile, as there is all over South America, from Peru to Ecuador and Brazil. These synchretic traditions are largely hidden and secret, as is often the case with psychedelic mysteries (notably the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries), but are now coming to light as a result of Western interest, through ayahuasca tourism, for example.
3. In my experience, Christianity is a better fit than other religions, such as Buddhism, when it comes to psychedelics. I agree with Rick Strassman on this point: the personal, relational nature of encounters with the plant spirits is in tension with the often abstract, philosophical, nondual traditions of the East, but is perfectly suited to a Biblical way of thinking. Although Strassman argues for an Old Testament, Jewish framework, I believe that Christianity is even more closely aligned to the psychedelic landscape.
4. Three key elements in Christianity which make it such a good fit with the psychedelic experience are: a) the central religious rite of Holy Communion, b) the central mystery of the Resurrection and c) the mysterious workings of grace through a personal Saviour.
5. Christianity also has a cosmic-historical vision of humanity coming together as one holy people of God. This is also an important part of the psychedelic mystical vision (at least in my experience). In other words, the further evolution of the species depends on a universal conception of the radical unity of humanity and possibly of the Earth as a whole. Whether or not this will turn out to be recognizably Christian in the long run, at least the vision itself is profoundly Christian: “Christian hope is concerned with eschatology, or the science of last things”.

Why the Mantra?

My interest in psychedelics came out of an underlying dissatisfaction with the secular world I grew up in. It seemed to be missing something important. Where was the magic? Where was the spirit? Perhaps I read too many fantasy books as a child, and had unrealistic expectations of the world, but for whatever reason, I intuited the disenchantment of our secular, materialist world that was later confirmed for me in the writings of Max Weber and others.

Psychedelics seemed the perfect thing to rectify this problem. If everyone took a dose of orange sunshine, the world would erupt in a riot of colour, just like at the end of The Yellow Submarine, where the Fab Four defeat the Blue Meanies with Love, Love, Love. But then I discovered that psychedelics on their own were too chaotic and created problems of their own. The psychedelic revolution wasn’t working.

Christianity seemed the perfect thing to rectify the problem: a moral and religious framework was exactly what the psychedelic doctor ordered. Instead of wondering, “was that trip really necessary?” after another confusing mess of spiritual hedonism, we could channel the psychedelic experience constructively and meaningfully along well established lines of spiritual development, tried and tested over millennia.

However, traditional Christianity also seemed to be missing something. It wasn’t holistic enough. So perhaps what we needed was a new kind of Integral Christianity, one that fully included body, heart, mind, soul and spirit in a healthy, balanced way. A Christianity that included psychedelics was a good start, but just as my personal consciousness couldn’t help but expand under their influence, neither could Christianity itself.

At the start of this blog, I mentioned six things that I experience on psychedelics, which bear repeating: they elicit mystical experiences, stimulate somatic energies, enhance physical dexterity and movement, produce heightened emotion and catharsis, generate psychological and philosophical insight, and lead to Self realization. These six things correspond to six yogas in Hinduism: dhyana yoga, kundalini yoga, karma yoga, bhakti yoga, jnana yoga and raja yoga associated with spirit, energy, body, heart, mind and soul. They also correspond to six archetypes: mystic, shaman, warrior, monk, philosopher, king.

If we want to maintain a truly integral spirituality, we need to remember all six of these essential aspects of human spiritual flourishing, for if we forget or neglect any of them, our development will be unbalanced. So what’s the best way to remember them? How about a mantra? Even better, how about a mantra rooted in specific energetic points in the body?

If you think about how Christians cross themselves (when they run onto a football pitch for example), from forehead to heart and shoulder to shoulder, you will see that this is in fact a mantra rooted in the body: “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. However, compared to the Indian chakra system, this body-mantra is clearly very top-heavy. What about the lower chakras?

In order to include the whole body, we can extend the cross downwards to create a double cross with two horizontals at the hips and the shoulders. This gives us six points, at the forehead, the hara (belly), left hip, right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder. Then we can add the mantra: Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King. Now, if we identify these six archetypes with one ideal “uber-archetype” personified in Christ, by bringing them (and their associated qualities, peace, love, goodness, beauty, truth, consciousness) to mind, we are in fact connecting with our spiritual essence in a way which is perfectly compatible with a broadly Christian outlook.

The mantra reminds us of these archetypes, but it also acts as a kind of talisman, a magic charm to protect us against any negative or demonic psycho-spiritual forces we may encounter on our psychedelic journeys. This is why I call it “the armour of Christ”. Just like we made the sign of the cross with our fingers to ward off vampires as children, we can make this whole-body, holistic cross to ward off all malevolent spirits as (mostly) mature adults.

Psychedelics correct for the disenchanted world of secular Modernity. Christianity corrects for the chaotic anarchism of psychedelics. The mantra corrects for the unbalanced partiality of Christianity. What we end up with is a truly Integral Psychedelic Christianity. If this isn’t the future of religion, I don’t know what is.

When it comes to drugs, patience really is a virtue. If you ingest a high dose of magic (unless you have an anti-magic antidote – which you don’t) you know that you are in it for the duration. And in the case of ayahuasca, the duration can be up to ten hours (!) Especially if things have taken a turn for the worse and the bad angels are dragging you through a bad trip backwards, you had better have a bit of patience.

The same is true of our inner drug cartels. When your partner says something that really winds you up, a certain cocktail of drugs is released from the various glandular distribution centres of your inner endocrine drug factory. If you’re really pissed off, your whole system will be flooded with adrenalin. And if it starts to get particularly stressful, it will also be flooded with cortisol. This is probably not a good time to sit down and work it out between you – probably best to just smash a few plates and slam a few doors.

Alternatively, you can patiently wait for the drugs to wear off. Which may take a while. No clicking your fingers or expelliarmus magic spells can relieve you of the hormones swilling about in your bloodstream. But if you are patient, take some time out, and stop producing more fight or flight drugs by continuing the argument in your head, you will calm down and come down soon enough. Then we can talk.

Psychedelics famously (and infamously) produce altered states of consciousness. But so do all drugs, including coffee, Red Bull and prescription psychiatric drugs. And so do our own inner pharmacies. Since time immemorial, human beings have experimented with altered states. They are kind of fun and kind of fascinating. They also seem to give us superpowers. For example, when I am perfectly level-headed, calm, relaxed, integrated and equipoised, I don’t tend to write very much. When I am manic, and my creative juices are flowing, I can write reams of (to my mind) inspired prose.

This manic state is addictive. When I’m deep in an intense conversation, firing on all cylinders, I feel great – energized, excited, intellectually stimulated. Many celebrities have built huge followings from creatively harnessing their manic energy, Kanye West, Russel Brand, Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones and Madonna, for example. But often celebrities crash and burn, or rather, burn out and crash: the other pole of mania is depression and all five examples above are excellent examples of this.

If you are addicted to mania, you are an inner drug addict. If you can manage your habit and keep it within reasonable bounds, all well and good – you can use it to your advantage as a performance enhancing drug. If it goes too far, however, the magic turns sour and toxic and begins to poison you. In excess, all drugs are poisonous. Which is to say, in excess, all altered states, and all emotional states, are poisonous.

Even love can be poisonous. If you fall head over heels in love, it’s the most wonderful feeling in the world. You want to dance and sing in the rain. But if you overdo it, it becomes obsessive and weird. Introspection and psychological self-awareness are good, but in excess, they becomes narcissistic and weird. Generosity and selflessness are good, but in excess, they becomes martyrish and weird.

Then again, you should take everything in moderation, including moderation, because the converse error to that of “excess addiction” is “excess phobia”. How many middle aged couples do you know that have settled into a placid truce of non-sympathetic-nervous-system-arousal? No raised voices, no crazy conversations, no crazy adventures. No alarms and no surprises. The discomfort of stress hormones persuades them that the benefits of arousal and excitement are just not worth the costs.

The extreme cases are those psychiatric patients who are so tortured by their emotional altered states, that they would prefer the whole thing be shut down, whether through surgical or medicated lobotomy. They would rather be a member of the walking dead than of suffering humanity. In the absence of such radical interventions, however, there is always that commonest and most time-honoured form of shut-down, self-medication with alcohol.

The point is not to avoid altered states altogether. We don’t want to be cold, rational, calculating Dr Spocks or unfeeling zombies. Neither is it to chemically excise them with some psychiatric brain suppressant. We don’t want Brave New World style regulation. Or to slowly kill yourself with booze and fags. The point is to ride the waves of alterity, but with skill and restraint. In other words, to know how and when to pull back from the brink of toxic overdose, where life-giving drugs becomes pure poison.

Drug addicts are not addicted to drugs in general. They are addicted to a specific drug. What’s your poison? Heroin? Cocaine? Love? Mania? Anger? Stress? Depression? It can get very messy of course, especially when alcohol is mixed up with the others, but generally speaking, addiction is usually associated with specializing too much in one particular direction, with poisoning yourself with one particular poison. Heroin addicts are rarely also Coke addicts and vice versa.

A fulfilling life is one that is filled with a wide range of human experiences, which means a wide range of emotions and altered states of consciousness. If you are addicted to one or two to the exclusion of all others, you will narrow yourself down horribly, to the point where you may even appear sub-human to yourself and others. On the other hand, if you are phobic of all states other than your base-line “sober” state, you will soon become a cardboard caricature of a regular guy or gal, fine for a lifestyle magazine perhaps, but no good for real life lived deeply and fully. That’s a painfully slow and boring death.

We need to be patient with ourselves and others. And we need to be patient with drugs. We can’t live without them, but only when we learn to live with them, will we learn to truly live.

There is a long tradition of Christian meditation stretching all the way back to the early church. Sometimes it is called “contemplative prayer” or “recollection”. One of the most famous forms, developed by the desert fathers of the third century AD, is the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Hesychasm: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Simpler still is the repetition of the Holy Name of Jesus as a kind of mantra. In recent times, there has been a significant revival in Christian meditation, particularly through the work of Thomas Keating, who popularized the “Centering Prayer” and John Main, who re-introduced the mantra “Maranatha”.

Another important figure is Thomas Merton, who had a profound effect on my own prayer life. He was a Trappist monk who wrote eloquently about the Christian monastic life and calling, but who was also very interested in learning from other faith traditions, especially Zen Buddhism. One book I found particularly helpful is Zen and the Birds of Appetite, where he dissects with great skill and subtlety the human propensity to indulge the ego in spiritual materialism. A fourth important figure that deserves mention is the Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths (Swami Dayananda) who established a Christian ashram in South India where Christian practice is deeply infused with the spirit of meditation.

Jumping continents to South America, we find a plethora of syncretic Christian churches, such as the Santo Daime and União Vegetal in Brazil, which use psychoactive sacraments such as ayahuasca in their services. They use a variety of prayers, meditations and icaros, special “magic songs” for use during ceremonies, as well as a simple step dance, with the emphasis on personal and collective religious experience and the holistic integration of mind, body and spirit.

I have been interested in both the contemplative “mystical” path and the dynamic “shamanic” path for many years now. It seems to me that these crucial elements of authentic, full-blooded religiosity are sadly missing from most modern forms of Christian worship. Those who want something stronger than the somewhat diluted draught on offer at conventional churches are forced elsewhere, to Buddhism, Sufism, yoga, and to shamanism and psychedelics.

The psychedelic renaissance is upon us. So far it has manifested itself primarily in the context of secular therapeutic medicine, with clinical trials popping up all over the place, most prominently at Imperial College London and John Hopkins University in the US. The results so far are extremely promising. However, there is little movement in the religious sphere, which arguably provides a much more conducive and capacious context for the transformative spiritual use of entheogens (“generators-of-God-within”).

As a step towards the holy grail of CSPU (church sponsored psychedelic use), I am therefore offering “virgin psychedelic” meditation to any churches who are interested. The idea is to introduce the basic framework of psychedelic worship, incorporating essential elements such as meditation, music, movement and singing to create an embodied spiritual experience, but without the psychoactive component. Hopefully this will help people deepen their faith and practice, and integrate it better into their everyday lived experience.

The flyer goes something like this:

Virgin Psychedelic Christian Meditation

Two hours of meditation, music, movement and discussion

This is a non-drug “virgin psychedelic” meditation experience using the power of meditation and music to awaken our inner mystic and inner shaman.

We begin with a guided mindfulness meditation followed by the Core Mantra:

1. Amun, Ra, Atum, Ka, Ba, Gaia, Jah (corresponding to the Father)
2. Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King, Friend (corresponding to the Son)
3. Peace, Love, Goodness, Beauty, Truth, Consciousness, Bliss (corresponding to the Holy Spirit)

This is followed by some simple stretching exercises, after which we settle down to listen to a piece of beautiful devotional Christian music.

After some more stretching, there is a period of guided movement and/or dance.

We end with a simple chant based on the Core Mantra and some time for questions, sharing and discussion.

If this sounds like something your church (or a church you know) might be interested in, please get in touch at sebgsynthesis@gmail.com

But it is my habit to find motion, and therefore depth, only in my middle regions. All other planes collapse. The near (like the fast-revolving flywheel) is still because it is too swift; the far, because it is too slow. And the real hierarchical universe, inexpressibly deep and mobile, is hidden from me by my own shallowness.

D.E. Harding

Time is the measure of all things: the orbit of an electron around its nucleus, a fleeting impression, a breath, a day, a year, a lifetime, an age, the life of a planet, a star, a galaxy, a universe. We only really experience those things whose time-frames play out in our middle regions, from seconds to years. But the time range of the universe extends so much further in both directions, towards the impossibly fast to the impossibly slow. The foreground of our lived world, our near regions, are invisible to us because they too small and too fast; the background, our far regions, are invisible because they are too large and too slow. Those things that are neither too fast nor too slow to actually perceive (but are still very fast or very slow) we experience as actual foreground and background, a tingling sensation in the chest, a setting sun.

Mystics experience a slower and larger dimension of the universe. To achieve this, they employ special slowing-down techniques, classed under the general headings of “meditation” and “prayer”. The breath slows down and the mind slows down. One breath can last minutes rather than seconds, with the hiatus between breaths also lasting a minute or two. Thoughts slow down to such an extent that it seems as though the mind had stopped altogether. The very slow, the very far and the very large now come into range. Thus the mystic becomes “macro-cosmic”.

There is also the converse process: the breath can speed up to hyper-ventilation levels, as Stanislav Grof discovered through his experiments with “holotropic breathwork”, or as the pranayama yogis have known for millennia. The mind can also reach levels of activity that make the sharpest wit seem a positive sluggard. These are levels of superhuman “genius” cognition as described for example by Sylvia Nasar in A Beautiful Mind.

As well as impossibly fast, subtle and intricate mental activity, the inner workings of the body also become accessible to awareness when time speeds up. These are felt as vibrations, buzzings, tingles and surges of energy, unusual sensations, inner lights and colours experienced in specific regions of the body. Traditional shamans are adept at this inner somatic journeying, this “fantastic voyage”, by which they purportedly heal themselves. Thus the shaman becomes “micro-cosmic”.

If you are familiar with the dramatic transformations of consciousness produced by psychoactive compounds such as DMT, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin etc. this should all sound familiar. Sometimes consciousness expands out far enough that you are able to listen in on grand cosmic symphonies, the music of the spheres; sometimes it reduces down far enough that you can eavesdrop on hyper-kinetic synaptic conversations. Sometimes it seems to shrink to the size of a cell or an atom; sometimes it grows to include a universe.

Psychedelics are useful tools for reflecting on our place in our middle regions of human relations and human society, that is, for illuminating the horizontal dimension of human existence. They can provide psychological insight and emotional healing. However, their greatest gift is their magical ability to open us up to the vertical dimensions of the very large above us (the macrocosm) and the very small below us (the microcosm), thus uniting the two poles of Heaven and Earth.

The Ray of Creation presents us with a schematic picture of the hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. It has its origin in Amun, “the Hidden One”, which is absolute vacancy, nothingness, nada. How something can come from nothing is an intractable mystery, which has taxed the greatest minds of every generation and has made the God hypothesis irresistible for almost everyone who thinks about it deeply enough.

The Ray of Creation is a map of the evolution of the universe from the seemingly inauspicious beginnings in Amun through the Big Bang, Ra, the formation of the atomic elements, Atum, the arrival of cellular life, Ka, the development of intelligent soul-life, Ba, and the emergence of planetary consciousness, Gaia, and universal consciousness, Jah.

This is the Ray of Creation: seven discrete yet interpenetrating levels spanning the entire hierarchy of existence from Absolutely Nothing to Ultimate Whole. Embedded within the human organism, they correspond to the ancient chakra system discovered by the Indian yogis: Amun at the base, Ra at the sacral, Atum at the solar plexus, Ka at the heart, Ba at the throat, Gaia at the third eye and Jah at the crown. This correspondence powerfully illustrates the fact that the Ray literally passes through us, and that each one of us is a microcosm of the whole universe.

However elastic our consciousness, scaling the heights and plumbing the depths of the hierarchy, our natural resting place is the human soul, Ba. This is located at the throat chakra, about three-quarters of the way up the cosmic tree. We exist as individual souls, but also as parts of a collective entity, Humanity. One cannot exist without the other. I cannot exist without the other, in a hierarchical network of family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, compatriots, citizens of the world. This social network of communal soul-life can be pictured as a horizontal line, which, superimposed onto the Ray of Creation at Ba forms a traditional Christian cross.

Ba is the intersection point of the horizontal line of humanity that marks you out as an individual. Look down through the vertical hierarchy of existence and you will see Ka (your life-force) arising from the trillions of living cells of which you are composed, and then Atum (the All), comprising the atoms of which your living cells are composed, of which there are estimated to be around 100 trillion per cell.

Since Amun-Ra transcends the limits of the physical universe, let’s put this Nothingness and Energy to one side for the moment. We now have Atum-Ka-Ba-Gaia-Jah. You will notice that there is symmetry between the levels above and below us. At the centre of the hierarchy is the soul, Ba. Immediately below and above this are Ka and Gaia, life-force and world-soul. This makes sense if we conceive of the integrated totality of the planet as depending on the synthesis of its living, biological substrate, the biosphere. The larger whole that encompasses and embraces out little Ba is Ka-Gaia, stretching from organic cellular life below us all the way up to the Anima Mundi above.

One step lower and one step higher reveals a natural affinity between atomic matter, Atum, and the universe in its entirety, Jah. Ka-Gaia is only possible in the context of this larger reality, which spans the whole breadth of existence, from atoms and electrons to universal consciousness. But the enormity of Atum-Jah is itself necessarily contained within two further shells, Ra and Amun, Energy and Nothingness.

At the lower end of the hierarchy, Ra is simply the E in Einstein’s E=mc². A the higher end, it is the pure uncreated energy of a Creator God. Let’s call this pairing Ra-Shiva. Finally, we have the ultimate pairing of the inner, immanent emptiness at the centre of everything, Amun, and the outer, transcendent emptiness beyond everything, Parashiva. This is the coincidence of the Centre-Whole, Amun-Parashiva.

As well as expressing a linear hierarchy, the Ray of Creation also describes a series of nested pairings, Amun-Parashiva, Ra-Shiva, Atum-Jah, Ka-Gaia, at the centre of which lies the human soul, Ba. If you recall, Ba also exists on the horizontal dimension of collective humanity. Therefore, there is always the danger that we forget the vertical dimension altogether, forget the life-force that sustains us, our Mother Earth, Pachamama, that embraces us, and the deeper and higher layers beyond these, in which we live and move and have our being.

When I forget the vertical, I live as though the only thing of any significance were people and society, that is, the horizontal. When this happens, society, divorced from the vertical dimension, becomes a kind of mental prison, a Matrix, a Babylon. Ba-Babylon is the pairing of lost human souls and the man-made world of culture cut off from nature and spirit. There is no longer a Cosmic Tree (or Cross) reaching from Earth to Heaven and back again, just a flat line, fittingly representing the flat-lining of spiritual death.

It is impossible to wake up from this slumber, to rise again from this grave, to heal this sickness unto death, without realizing and embodying our unique place at the juncture of Heaven and Earth:

“As man I bisect all the Pairs and their linking processes, for I include inferior members of every Pair, but am included in the superior member. I am at home in the upper half of the hierarchy because I am the lower half. To use more familiar language, man the microcosm reflects the macrocosm – a doctrine which, in its many forms, is as ancient as it is universal. And it is generally implied that man’s business is to recognize and restore the links between what is above and what is below, between the universe without and the universe within. That is to say, while man is man because he cuts the hierarchy in half, his office is to heal that wound, to restore the unity of the Pairs, and so to realize himself as much more and much less than man. His task is to re-seat the suprahuman rider on the infrahuman horse, to join ruler and ruled, to realize the ancestral cave and the ancestral mountain imply each other, to link the nine circles of Hell with the nine circles of Heaven, to reunite the rising branches of the universe-tree with its deepening roots – and so to regain his own balance. The common-sensible part-man who is only human, and the scientific part-man who finds himself only in the bottom half of the hierarchy, and the religious part-man who finds himself only in the top half – all three need to be conjoined in the symmetrical and vertical man who is whole because his universe is whole. Such, more or less, is the suggestion of a long esoteric tradition, of the experience of mystics and poets in every time and country, and of much psychological analysis.”

D.E. Harding

When Christians say things like that (believe and you will be saved) non-Christians tend to roll their eyes. From the outside it seems like a classic case of delusional wishful thinking: say three Hail Mary’s, turn around and touch the ground and you’ll go to heaven when you die. It seems a bit like people with chronic OCD who need to tap the door seven times before they open it otherwise something terrible might happen.

Except in the Christian case, it’s not a magic incantation or a special rite that will “save” you: it’s not something you say or do, not any particular Mumbo Jumbo or bizarre religious observance (pulling out a virgin’s heart on a sacrificial altar being an old favourite). It’s what you believe, not what you do. This is why Christianity, unlike Judaism and Islam, is more interested in orthodoxy (right belief) than orthopraxy (right practice).

It’s why Saint Paul keeps on about grace being more important than works:

And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work. (Romans 11:6)

And Saint John has this:

For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. (John 1:10)

So what is grace? It seems to be something like a gratuitous gift from God, freely given, rather than a reward or payment for doing something good. The “law” of Moses can be understood in the broadest sense as akin to the law of karma: what goes around comes around: do good works and good things will come back to you. In the Eastern religions, this is understood as an impersonal cosmic law, something like Newton’s third law in the physical realm. In the Jewish tradition, it is referred back to the source of all good things and all right justice, JHWH.

So in the game of life, Christians have a “cheat mode”. They don’t need to notch up Brownie points and live faultless lives in order to impress Saint Peter and persuade him to let them through the pearly gates on the last day. They have this special thing called “grace”. And how do they get this grace? It seems that all they have to do is “believe”. This is where the eye-rolling really gets going. Really? You just have to believe and shazam kazaam? So if you want to be rich you just have to believe that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I suppose?

And what do you have to believe? You have to believe that this man called Jesus was crucified, died and after three days rose from the dead and ascended up to heaven, and now sits at the right hand of God, and that he died for you, for the forgiveness of sins and for your eternal salvation. Just believe that if you can and you’re good to go! But how on Earth can Christians be so gullible to believe that if they believe that then they automatically receive this amazing saving grace? And why do they need to be saved anyway? It’s crackers!

When non-Christians hear these kinds of things from Christians, this kind of reaction is perfectly understandable. Not only do Christians seem crazy and deluded, but also self-satisfied and smug. They seem to honestly believe that just because they believe this bag of nonsense, they are somehow better than everyone else. They are saved because they believe, and so it follows as night follows day that everyone else who doesn’t believe must therefore be damned. Really? Eternal hellfire and damnation just for being rational and sane? What kind of a sick God is this anyway?

If you read my post Tripping is Believing, you will know that there are two different modes of belief related to the two brain hemispheres. Left hemisphere belief is about explicit assent to a factual proposition, which may or may not be true. For example, I believe that we’ve run out of milk (but I’m not 100% sure). Right hemisphere belief is about implicit trust in an unverifiable proposition. For example, I believe in my mind’s ability to grasp truth (something that cannot be objectively demonstrated).

Sometimes it seems as though Christians are talking about left hemisphere belief (especially certain Evangelical Christians and Fundamentalists). This is infuriating for non-Christians, but also for other Christians. What do you mean you literally believe this story, just so you can count yourself among the elect? Isn’t that totally mercenary? Aren’t you essentially being dishonest in believing something unbelievable just for personal gain? Does being in the Church give you benefits? Friends maybe? A sense of community? What if you had to believe in a Spaghetti Monster instead? Would you do it?

This common atheist critique carries with it a certain amount of outrage against the apparent violation of the elementary principles of rationality in favour of some superstitious nonsense. What flagrant disregard for reason, surely our highest and most prized human faculty. People don’t come back from the dead. And they certainly don’t float up into the sky. Surely any hope for the future of humanity lies in unswerving fidelity to Truth, which means at the very least that we should only believe things that are reasonable and not flat-out insane?

Fair enough. To believe that Jesus literally died and rose again and ascended into heaven and that by believing that you will get your golden ticket to go to heaven too might be excusable for a five year old child, but surely not for a rational adult. But what else is there? Please don’t tell me it’s all just symbolic!

Well here’s my ha’penny’s worth. Religious belief is not what we ordinarily think of as “belief”. In other words, it’s not left hemisphere belief. Grace is not what we ordinarily think of as grace. And salvation is not what we ordinarily think of as salvation. To understand how the title of this post can be literally true and not arbitrarily crazy, you must shift the direction of your gaze from the future to the present. We can’t help instinctively thinking about the Christian faith within the framework of the “law”, which is about punishment or reward in the future for present behaviour, and so miss the real meaning. We are stuck in a karmic paradigm.

The statement “believe and you will be saved” is not a promise or a prediction about the future. It is a description of what happens in the present if you believe. It’s not just a hypothesis or theory. It’s not wishful thinking. If I do something now which has no discernible effect on me (take communion and accept Jesus Christ as my personal saviour for example) in the hope that this will magically safeguard my future in this life and the next, that’s wishful thinking. However, if I do something now which utterly transforms me and turns my life upside down, that’s not wishful thinking. That’s real.

The fact is, as countless Christians have attested, if you truly believe, if you truly repent, if you truly trust in God, and if you do this existentially, which is to say, not just abstractly, left hemisphere style, you will receive abundant grace and eternal life here and now, not in some hypothetical future there and then. You will be saved from the endless rounds of the ego-driven Wheel of Life. You will be saved from yourself. How does this happen? I have no idea. But that’s no reason not to believe my own experience and the testimony of millions of people throughout the ages.

The proof is in the pudding and by their fruits shall ye know them.

I am that bread of life.

John 6:48

There is a hidden mystery within Christianity which is slowly coming out of the shadows in our time. This is the secret of the Psychedelic Christ. It has recently been explored in Brian Muraresku’s 2020 book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name and Jerry Brown’s 2016 book, The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, but first entered public consciousness fifty years ago with John Allegro’s 1970 book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East.

The claim is that Christ is a magic mushroom. Barely stated like this, it sounds preposterous. You can just see the village parson spluttering over his tea or the Vatican Curia over their cappuccinos. So let’s temper and refine the claim a little to save their stoles. Firstly, Christ is not just a mushroom, but a cactus, a vine, and indeed any psychoactive substance with entheogenic properties (entheogen means “God manifesting”). Secondly, Christ is not exclusively understood as an entheogen: this is just the Psychedelic Christ. The traditional God-man of the gospels remains intact.

Allow me to quote further from chapter 6 of the gospel according to John:

Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.

He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me , even he shall live by me.

This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.

John 6: 54-58

When it come to the claims of eternal life and living for ever, I have personally experienced this under high doses of ayahuasca and pure DMT. These “immortality keys” unlock the innermost secrets of existence and life and death. However, the understanding they reveal doesn’t translate well into ordinary human words, and I won’t attempt it here.

Just yesterday I tripped out on some Aztec Gold mushrooms, which got me “thinking”. I became acutely aware of the relationship between us: I was the “host” and the mushroom was my “guest”. In a sense I had offered myself as a channel for the mushroom “intelligence” to live through me. (For an interesting exploration of the parasitical nature of magic mushrooms, see Merlin Sheldrake’s illuminating Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures).

At the peak of this strange symbiotic communion between the human and fungal, I experienced a certain level of ego dissolution, so you could say that I sacrificed myself for the sake of the “self” of the mushroom. But the mushroom, in being consumed by me, could also be said to have sacrificed itself.

As I reflected on the idea of the Psychedelic Christ, it was unclear who was the Christ in this situation. If I considered the mushroom itself as God, then I was somehow, as the “product” of its working through me, the Son of God. However, it wasn’t really “me”, rather the elevated consciousness inhering in me, the “Christ Consciousness”, so that it felt more appropriate to say with Saint Paul, “yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Yet I was a man and the mushroom was a mushroom, so I certainly seemed the more Christ-like. I felt a lot of discomfort in my body, which I associated with the suffering on the cross; I felt myself undergo a process of death and rebirth; I felt myself to be a holy sacrifice; I felt human and fallible yet divine and perfect. With hindsight it seemed the height of presumption and spiritual arrogance to call myself the Psychedelic Christ, even though I kind of was. The boundaries between God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, me and the mushroom were blurred and confused and we all seemed to blend into each other.

In the cold light of (sober) logic: If “that bread which came down from heaven” refers to psychedelic food and drink (“flesh and blood”) and is therefore “sent by God”, and if Christ is directly associated with it (“I am that bread of life”), then clearly it is the mushroom that is the Son of God and the partaker of the psychedelic sacrament (the “Christian”) merely participates in the life of the Son and through the Son with the Father that sent him.

(If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.

John 14:7

At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me and I in you.

John 14:20)

So that the mushroom, the “bread of life”, is the Psychedelic Christ and the mushroom-eater, the “communicant”, is the Psychedelic Christian.

All the Christian themes of communion, sacrifice, regeneration, death and rebirth, immortality, etc., plus the themes of Jesus’s ministry, teaching, healing, forgiveness of sins and performing of miracles, plus the twin spiritual processes of sanctification and deification, are contained in the mystery of the Sacred Mushroom, the Psychedelic Christ.

When I’m under the influence of one psychoactive substance or another, I often experiment with how thinking certain thoughts affects my experience. If I’m struggling to enter into the experience, on a low dose for example, I find that reciting a mantra or using some other form of meditation or prayer helps. But the most powerful way in is simply to “believe”.

(The easiest way to gauge how immersed you are in a psychedelic experience is through music. Sometimes you can listen to a favourite piece and it’s little more than background music, whereas at other times it transports you to the celestial spheres. This is of course more likely to happen if you’re tripping. But even while tripping it varies.)

I was listening to Enya. It wasn’t really doing it for me, so I started experimenting with my thoughts. What would happen if I tried believing in Jesus? I said to myself, “Credo” (I believe). Miraculously, in that very instant, the music came alive and I was “in”, floating on a wave of E.B. (Enya-Bliss). Continuing the experiment, I said to myself, “I believe in Enya”, and lo and behold, my musical enjoyment became even more immersive and beautiful!

I wondered, “Does it matter what the actual object of my belief is?” What would happen if I just aroused the thought, “I believe” in my mind without attaching it to any particular person or thing? Well, it still worked: my sensual experience of the music and of everything else around me was fuller, deeper and richer. I was absorbed in my experiences instead of being detached from them.

Recent neuroscientific research into the effects of psychedelics points to the phenomenon of “default mode network” inhibition. It seems that these psychoactive compounds somehow deactivate the usual round of continuous rumination we usually engage in, thus aiding direct sensory experience of our surroundings. We “lose our minds and come to our senses”.

Another possible neurological explanation concerns the brain hemispheres. It may be that psychedelics help to shift the locus of our awareness away from the analytical left hemisphere towards the more receptive right hemisphere. Perhaps they are useful tools that can begin to redress the balance between “the Master and his Emissary” as Iain McGilchrist puts it. (McGilchrist’s thesis is that the right hemisphere is the rightful “Master” but that our culture has become left hemisphere dominant, creating a whole host of mental and social problems).

There is an illuminating discussion in McGilchrist’s book where he looks at what “belief” looks like from the vantage point of the two hemispheres. Left hemisphere belief is about believing a factual or logical proposition in the absence of sufficient evidence. From this perspective, you only “believe” something that you don’t “know” is true. Right hemisphere belief, on the other hand, is more like trust. You believe in someone, or you believe in yourself, not in the sense of deficient knowledge about that person or yourself, but in the sense of a kind of willed commitment.

This second type of belief is about attitude. Take Enya. Many people snort derisively at the mention of her name. She’s “naff” or “corny”. She’s certainly not “cool”. When they listen to her music, they do so skeptically, with a certain critical aloofness. In other words, they listen with the left side of their brain. The same goes for Jesus. A non-believer is by definition skeptical about certain historical claims about Jesus, but even more so about the possibility that he is actually a living spiritual presence you can relate to in the present.

Someone who doesn’t believe in Enya’s music could, with some encouragement, conceivably change their minds and hear it with fresh, right-hemisphere ears. There are also, of course, cases of atheists who convert, who suddenly “believe”, not on the basis of rational arguments, but because they somehow discover the transformative power of right hemisphere belief. (It is extremely rare for someone to come to religion through rational left hemisphere deliberation, as if they were to say, “I have impartially considered the arguments on both sides and have come to the conclusion that the weight of evidence favours belief in the supernatural, therefore henceforth please consider me a believer”).

If you believe in Gustav Mahler (another personal experiment), you trust him enough to surrender to his music and allow it to take you where it will. If you don’t “believe”, you will only hear a musical composition laid out before you, as if it were nothing more than the musical notations made concrete. You will take the attitude of a detached, critical observer.

The distinction between “belief” and “non-belief” in relation to music actually applies to all experiences. Why? Because “believing” in the right hemisphere sense is really just shorthand for empathic right hemisphere engagement, unmediated by left hemisphere analysis. Temperamentally, we could identify people as being predominantly “believing” (or “trusting”) people and skeptical (or “distrustful” people).

The interesting thing, in relation to McGilchrist’s historical thesis, is that philosophers since the eighteenth century (the successors of David Hume you might say) have been predominantly skeptical. And not just about the specific claims of religion, but about the fundamental features of reality itself, which have therefore been subjected to sustained radical doubt. How can we even know that the world perceived by our senses is the real world? How do we know that morality isn’t just an arbitrary social construct? Etc. etc.

Modernity itself can be characterised as an experiment in unbelief. We tried belief for hundreds of years, so why not see what happens if we try unbelief? Why don’t we actually try believing only those things that warrant our logical assent? In other words: let’s throw out right hemisphere belief and live by the left-hemisphere variety alone. Reason and science in. Religion and art out.

A philosophical realist (a moral or epistemological realist for example) in this skeptical climate is dismissed as a “naive realist”. Instead, sophisticated moderns are relativists, which is really just another way of saying, skeptics. You can’t believe anything that isn’t provable beyond reasonable doubt, and since nothing other than the most basic scientific facts pass the test, you can’t really believe in anything.

This is why psychedelics are enjoying such a resurgence of popularity. In an age of right hemisphere alienation, they help people believe again.

Health warning: If you’re not careful, tripping can make your incipient “ontological skepticism” worse, resulting in temporary psycho-mimetic paranoid schizophrenia (commonly known as a “bad trip”).

It is a truth universally acknowledged but seldom discussed that no one gets very far in any serious endeavour without discipline. it is an inconvenient truth, but everyone knows it’s true. If you want to be Rocky, you need discipline. If you want to be Gandhi, you need discipline. If you want to acheive something or be someone, you need discipline.

In the spiritual life, discipline means spiritual practice. However, when people say that they are “spiritual but not religious”, what they mostly mean is that they don’t practice. Religious people go to church and pray and what-not: their religion imposes a formal rule of discipline on them, just like school imposes homework. But if you are “spiritual but not religious” you can apparently get all the benefits of religion without the costs. You are basically a free-loader.

This is not always true. Their are “spiritual but not religious” people who do have a regular spiritual practice, either a personal one that they’ve devised themselves or one they have picked up from a spiritual teacher or NRG (New Religious Group) to which they may be strongly or loosely affiliated. The most common practice is some form of meditation. And now, with the advent of meditation apps, you can do this in the comfort of your phone without any affiliation whatsoever.

Discipline is a particularly important issue when it comes to the sacramental use of psychedelics. The unpredictable and chaotic nature of psychedelics, particularly at higher doses, means that any semblance of control seems to go out the window. However, it is widely recognised that the context, the “set and setting”, in which psychedelics are taken increases the possibility of a positive and productive experience. This requires an element of conscious intention and discipline. If you attend an ayahuasca ceremony, for example, you be expected to participate in a formal ritual, which will vary in strictness according to the group or tradition. There will be explicit or implicit rules for what you can and can’t do before, during and after the experience.

Most people treat powerful psychedelics like ayahuasca or peyote like a kind of oracle. You need some help or advice about something, so you go and ask the plant gods. Then you take the knowledge back into your everyday life, keep calm and carry on. For this kind of use, you will typically take a psychedelic once every few months or years. For others, it is a more frequent event, perhaps a weekly one, like a regular Sunday service. In Christian terms, it’s a bit like the difference between regular church-goers and Christmas and Easter attendees.

People who take psychedelics recreationally don’t generally apply much discipline to it. They’re there for the ride and so just go with the flow. Usually it’s fun, and sometimes not so fun. At the back of their minds, they know that they’re not really getting anywhere, and that there is always the danger of psychological, if not physical addiction. If they want transformative experiences, over the long haul, they know that they will need some kind of discipline.

The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote that “to be religious and to pray – that is really one and the same thing.” The sacramental use of psychedelics for spiritual growth is necessarily a religious undertaking, which requires disciplined practice. And when it comes to religion, practice means prayer. Western post-Christians prefer the word “meditation”, but it really comes to the same thing. If you’re not praying or meditating, you’re not really doing religion, although you may be doing “spiritual but not religious”. Religion is nothing without practice: it is just a hollow relic of a by-gone age. A true, living religion is only possible in the context of a life of prayer. As the German poet Novalis put it, prayer is “religion in the making”.

I am the first to admit that my interest in ideological possession sometimes verges on obsessiveness. I even occasionally feel like I am actually possessed by the idea of possession. This is certainly transparently the case for many YouTubers who seem to have made it their life’s mission to expose and debunk all the ideological muppets out there, from the woke and the anti-woke to the anti-theist and anti-anti-theist brigade.

The Wheel of Babylon is all about possession. If you’re possessed by hate, rage, resentment, revenge fantasies, violent impulses or murderous intent, you are probably possessed by a “demon”. If you’re possessed by fear, anxiety, worry, regret, despair, depression or severe self-criticism, you are probably possessed by a “victim” archetype. If you’re possessed by lust, desire, craving, greed, gluttony or the bottle, bong or needle, you are probably possessed by an “addict” archetype.

That’s how possession looks in the lower three realms of the Wheel. In the upper realms, you are ideologically possessed when the muppet archetype takes over, culturally possessed when the muggle archetype holds sway, and pleasantly possessed when the diva archetype is in charge.

The six opposite archetypes don’t function possessively. They emerge through samadhi, or absorption. So that absorption in dhyana yoga manifests the mystic archetype, absorption in kundalini yoga manifest the shaman archetype, absorption in karma yoga manifests the warrior archetype, absorption in bhakti yoga manifests the monk/nun archetype, absorption in jnana yoga manifests the philosopher archetype and absorption in raja yoga manifests the king/queen archetype. In fact the word “yoga” could itself be interpreted as meaning something like absorption.

Absorption is closely related to the experience of flow, which positive psychologists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identify with optimal human flourishing. When you are in flow, or “in the zone”, you are fully absorbed in what you are doing, whether that be a physical activity like dancing, fighting or playing sports, an emotional one like listening to music or a mental one like writing.

There is a large body of research that points to the same conclusions as common-sense: absorption makes us happy and possession makes us unhappy. If we want to make this fundamental insight the basis of a conscious practice of self-improvement, we could do worse than resist possession by our inner demon, victim, addict, muppet, muggle and diva and cultivate absorption through our inner mystic, shaman, warrior, monk/nun, philosopher and king/queen.