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.

In my book The Confessions of a Psychedelic Christian I describe the problem of treating spiritual enlightenment as an aberration, an anomaly, a curiosity, a beautiful dream, an altered state of consciousness. It is almost inevitable that consensus reality is given ontological precedence over any other deviations from it, no matter how compelling. The peer pressure is enormous. Even the day after my mystical Satori experience of absolute certainty and penetrating insight into the unified, nondual nature of reality, I had to consciously fight this tendency of the mind to betray itself in favour of the status quo. The more I remembered it as an extraordinary experience, the easier it was for my mind to file it away under the “non-ordinary” category of experiences and simply revert back to the ordinary world, with the slightest sleight of hand eliding the “ordinary” with the “real” world.

But one of the most shocking and revolutionary aspects of my mystical experience was that it was more real than anything I had ever experienced in my life. It was definitely more real than the “ordinary world”. I could say with absolute confidence, “though the rest of the world be on that side, on this side am I”. Even if it was billions to one, I knew that I was right about the true nature of the world. Tant pis for the other billions.

Over the years and decades since that parting of the veil, it has been difficult to maintain the force of that original conviction, although I still know it to be true. I have had to seek corroberation in the writings of mystics throughout the ages, who have had similar experiences and shared the same conviction that the ordinary way we experience the world is not right. When it comes to nondual experiences, you can’t beat the Mahayana Buddhists and Advaita Vedantists. But the writer who, to my mind, writes most eloquently about this is the seventeenth century Anglican poet and mystic Thomas Thraherne:

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.”

Yesterday I re-read C.S. Lewis’ preface to The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth by Douglas Harding. He begins with these momentous words: “This book is, I believe, the first attempt to reverse a movement of thought which has been going on since the beginning of philosophy.” The philosophy that Harding is attempting to reverse is basically the philosophy of scientific materialism, which ultimately ends up in a nihilistic view of the world, the end point of a “process that has led us from the living universe where man meets the gods to the final void where almost-nobody discovers his mistakes about almost-nothing”.

Later that evening I had a conversation with my cousin in which I attempted to describe how the direct experience of our immediate surroundings radically change when we look at them through the lens of Parashiva, Shiva, Shakti. It is a shift in awareness analogous to Harding’s “headlessness”, where you stop inferring a “meatball head” with its “peep holes” on your shoulders mediating the world and instead experience the world directly, as thought the world was your head. It is a short-cut to a Berkeleian vision of phenomenological immaterialism. And it works. But it can easily be dismissed as little more than a fun thought experiment, as just another “altered state”.

But Berkeley was serious. Harding was serious. And – goddammit! – I’m serious. My cousin looked at me as if he thought I might be mad. In any case, we were meant to be talking about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, not weird mental tricks of perception. But I believe that precisely this, our most intimate, immediate and direct perception of reality, reveals the deep roots of the spiritual dis-ease and proliferating mental health crises of the modern world. Call it “the meaning crisis” or “the disenchantment of the world” or “cosmic pessimism” or what you will: the scientific worldview we have inherited from the Enlightenment philosophers is making people unhappy and unfulfilled because it is stopping them from enjoying the world aright.

When I read and write about the interminable debates between atheists and theists, it sometimes seems as though it were ultimately a case of temperament or personal preference. I am often tempted to throw up my hands in despair and say, “whatever!” Does it really matter? Some people believe in God and some people don’t. Get over it! But the issue goes far deeper than the abstract, theoretical argument you might find in a school debating club. It’s about the kind of world we live in. Either it is a divine world full of magic, purpose and meaning, or it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I know it is the former, but it seems that our society is so punch drunk on the latter, that it’s people like me that are considered the mad ones.

Ultimately, all the questions about materialism and spirituality boil down to one: is the world full of spirit, full of “the glory of God” or is it an intricate, interlocking system of mechanical forces devoid of anything beyond its own ceaseless and ultimately meaningless activity? Materialists will never tire of telling me that my spiritual visions and experiences of divine being, consciousness and bliss are illusions. They suppose that I may be suffering from some kind of poetic condition, but who’s to say they aren’t suffering from an un-poetic one? They think I am labouring under the illusion of a God-filled universe and I think they are suffering from the illusion of a Godless one. Stalemate.

There is, in the final analysis, no way of adjudicating between our conflicting worldviews, which are, after all, subjective. However, the sober materialist criticism of a religious person “filled with the holy spirit” on the grounds that they are clearly deluded seems to me as absurd as a miserable person pitying a cheerful person because misery tells them that there is no such thing as happiness.

Although atheism is dead (at least to me!) there are still plenty of atheists out there, and there probably always will be. One of my favourite atheists is the philosopher John Gray, who has written a smart little book called Seven Types of Atheism. There are undoubtedly more than seven. As with any complex phenomenon, you can always find ways to slice the pie as thinly as you like. In this post I will cut it into three big slices: muggle atheism, muppet atheism and mystical atheism.

My mate Paul is a muggle atheist. He doesn’t believe in God because God isn’t on his radar. He isn’t particularly interested in religion or spiritual matters. He’s more into music and football. You could say he’s “apatheist” (an apathetic atheist). Richard Dawkins is a muppet atheist. He doesn’t believe in God because he thinks God is a pernicious delusion. God is very much on his radar, but only as a piece of malicious malware, a “bad meme”. He is not apathetic about the question of God, but is actively opposed to it. He is really an “anti-theist”.

If you find the terms “muggle” and “muppet” confusing and/or insulting, you are probably unfamiliar with how I use these (admittedly childish) terms. They stand for two different states of consciousness represented in the Bhavachakra, the Tibetan Wheel of Life, in the top left and top right segments of the diagram respectively. Muggles live in the “human realm”, getting on with their everyday lives, working, playing and making cups of tea. Muppets live in the “titan realm”, which is the realm of fighting spirits, whose life purpose is to fight against the “gods” in the Devaloka (the “deva realm”). They are always anti-something and have a fervent (even if unacknowledged) desire to destroy that thing. This fanatical drive usually leads to “ideological possession”, which is what makes them act like muppets.

So the second type of atheist, “miltant atheists” if you will, represented by celebrity atheists such as Dawkins, Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, are motivated by a “rage against God”, a hatred of God and religion (“miso-theism”), although they can temper this hatred with a patronising tolerance of the ignorant masses who clearly can’t live without these comforting God-blanket illusions. Not everyone is blessed with “Brightness” (intellectual arrogance is also a feature of muppetry).

The third type of atheists are “mystical atheists”, represented for example by John Gray and the philosopher of mind Susan Blackmore. Gray has just written a book about cats and the meaning of life. He seems to be drawn to the Zen nature of cats, which we might all benefit from emulating. Blackmore (best known for her book The Meme Machine), is in fact a Zen practitioner and meditates regularly. She does not consider herself a Buddhist, since she refuses to follow any religious dogma, but rather follows a “secular spirituality”. Sam Harris is another example of a convinced and outspoken atheist who nevertheless values spiritual practices such as meditation (and psychedelics as it happens).

This type of atheism has a natural affinity to Zen. It is radically skeptical of all our mental fabrications and confections. It regards the usual workings of the human mind as ultimately illusory, and intuits that if we could banish this mental fog of beliefs, assumptions and projections, we would wake up to the immediacy of the real world. This is why Harris wrote a book called Waking Up and has a podcast of the same name. Mystical atheists take the materialist claim that only the material world is real very seriously. If that is true, then the only authentic way to exist in the real world is to somehow see through everything that is not material, in other words, to see through everything mental. Blackmore goes one step further in believing that not only thoughts and emotions, but consciousness itself, is an illusion. She is an eliminativist materialist, like Daniel Dennett.

On the face of it, this is very Zen. It makes logical sense. It has a certain pristine purity and simplicity about it. I call it mystical atheism because it shares with religious mysticism the apophatic “negative way” of dismissing all objects of awareness as mere illusion. In Vedanta this practice is summarised neatly as neti, neti: “not this, not that”. I like this description from H.H. Shantanand Saraswati:

“If you begin to be what you are, you will realise everything, but to begin to be what you are, you must come out of what you are not. You are not those thoughts which are turning, turning in your mind; you are not those changing feelings; you are not the different decisions you make and the different wills you have; you are not that separate ego. Well then, what are you? You will find when you have come out of what you are not, that the ripple on the water is whispering to you ‘I am That’, the birds in the trees are singing to you ‘I am That’, the moon and the stars are shining beacons to you ‘I am That’. You are in everything in the world and everything in the world is reflected in you, and at the same time you are That – everything.”

This is the essence of mysticism: ‘I am That’. It is a sense of unity, even of identity, with the whole world in a seamless vision of nonduality. There is no more self and other, no more ego pitted against world, no more limiting thoughts and feelings breaking the pristine experience of pure beingness. This is what Zennists call Satori or enlightenment. Mystical atheists aspire to this condition of spiritual unity and simplicity. The difference is that they conceptualise this as a liberation from the illusion of the mind and an entry into the real world of exclusively material processes. Enlightenment for them is conceived as “waking up” experientially not just theoretically, to the truth that only the material world is ultimately real.

This may seem like a very ascetic, puritan attitude, because it is. You can’t really get more ascetic, except that this particular brand of asceticism is in a sense a mirror image of the traditional religious asceticism which denies the material world in favour of the spiritual. In atheistic asceticism, you deny the spiritual world in favour of the material. Both types of asceticism can lead to an experience of nonduality. Both are effective. However, they both also have obvious drawbacks. Although Susan Blackmore describes herself as a humanist, this type of “illusionist” asceticism is in fact anti-humanist, because it denies those very things (inner subjective experiences, thoughts and feelings) that make us human.

Mystical atheism has the virtue of offering a powerfully simple vision of reality that can facilitate mystical experiences of inner quiet and emptiness (mu-shin or no-mind), leading potentially to unitive experiences of Satori. The problem is, what do you do when your thoughts, feelings, decisions, wills and ego inevitably come back again? They will have to be banished over and over again. Like a persistent toddler tugging at your sleeve in the supermarket, they will be an incessant nuisance, a thorn in the side of your peaceful samadhi. All mentation, all thoughts and feelings, are nothing but annoying crowds of makyo, nothing but illusions. The hope is that one day, they will give up and you will be free of them forever in perfect enlightenment, but for some reason, they just keep on coming.

There is therefore an element of self-hatred built into mystical atheism, as there is in all forms of asceticism. There is also an ideological barrier stiffly erected against the possibility of further spiritual development. How so? Compare my rough-and-ready model of psycho-spiritual development indirectly derived from the Tibetan Wheel of Life. It consists of six archetypes: Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King. And these archetypes are associated with six transcendent values: peace, love, goodness, beauty, truth, consciousness. The idea is that when you have come out of what you are not (through some version of neti, neti), you inhabit a place of peacefulness and embody the Mystic archetype. But this is just the beginning, not the end, of the process.

Bodily sensations (Shaman), will (Warrior), feelings (Monk), thoughts (Philosopher) and consciousness (King) inevitably arise out of the peaceful emptiness of the Mystical state, but they are considered to be real, not illusory. They are welcomed back, purified and refined in the crucible of meditation, and not simply dismissed as the latest manifestations of yet more insufferable makyo. The point of spiritual practice in this view is not about destroying our inner lives, or rejecting them as illusory. Rather, it is about transforming them.

The fundamental difference then between my brand of (traditional) mysticism and atheistic mysticism is that, while atheists like Blackmore are necessarily illusionists about mental experiences (in her case even about consciousness itself), I am a realist. In other words, I believe that our mental experiences are real and are directed towards real things. I am a moral realist, for example. I don’t think that morality is just a subjective elaboration of personal dispositions and preferences or a social construct or the product of a long process of evolution ultimately in the service of survival. I believe that there is such a thing as real goodness and its contrary, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I am similarly a realist about love, beauty, truth and consciousness. But since we can only ever move closer to the horizon of these transcendent ideals, and never seem to possess them completely, there is always wiggle-room, room for improvement, room for growth.

Our physical sensations, wills, feelings, thoughts and consciousness are not just illusory figments of our imagination. They are as real as the ripple of the water or the singing of the birds. But they can become polluted and corrupted, twisted and disfigured in all sorts of ways. So suspending their spontaneous activity temporarily in meditation (either sober or with the aid of psychedelics) is essential if we want to “cleanse the doors of perception” and purify our human-all-too-human faculties. How? By reconnecting them to their source in the bottomless mystery of the divine fountainhead of being, consciousness and bliss some people call God.

In case you hadn’t already guessed from the title, this is a provocative post. Which is not to say I don’t think the statement is true. I’m just aware that it will offend some sensitive atheists, especially those who were under the impression that, as Nietzsche’s madman insisted in the late nineteenth century, “God is dead!”

Nietzsche still has his share of loyal fans, as do Marx, Freud and Darwin. These four are probably the most famous modern critics of religion, towering figures in the intellectual atheist pantheon of God’s undertakers. They are not alone, of course. Read God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization by A.N. Wilson, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? by John Lennox, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister MCGrath and Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray if you want to get a sense of how pervasive atheism has been in the intellectual life of Modernity.

At the high watermark of atheism in the West, around the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed that the arguments against religion of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud were practically unassailable. As Nietzsche had it, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”. But the anti-religious ideas of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche (outside their fan base) are now largely discredited. And the classical Darwinian account of evolution as random mutation plus natural selection is now under serious strain. It just doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.

I recently re-read Thomas Nagel’s elegant little book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. It probably won’t convince committed materialists, but it does clearly illustrate how rickety the whole great scientific materialist cathedral really is. It seems to be still standing only by virtue of the dogged determination of its adherents to keep the faith and to ignore the writing on the wall pasted there by the demolition men.

It reminds me of the story of the Chinese Executioner (originally told by Claud Cockburn):

“There was once, in old China, an executioner of such immense skill and delicacy that he was famed throughout the land and called upon from afar to behead condemned miscreants so that witnesses could marvel at his handiwork.

One condemned man, a thief and murderer , was told that he must wait for the arrival of this executioner, because the local authorities had decided they wanted to see this master at work. The appointed day came, the criminal was seated , bound, on a stool in front of a carefully-invited audience, all agog.

The executioner, smiling gently, advanced towards him, delicately holding an exquisitely-crafted and softly gleaming sword. Playfully, the executioner made a few passes in the air in front of the murderer. He kept up this performance for perhaps two minutes until the malefactor, irritated, cried out ‘I really don’t know what all the fuss is about. What’s so special about you? Can’t you just get on with it, and get it over with?’

The executioner bowed, smiled again and said softly ‘ Kindly nod, please’.”

This is the state of atheism in 2021. It is dead but doesn’t know it. Scientific materialism cannot account for the existence of the universe, life, consciousness, reason or value. Reductive materialism is absurd, emergent materialism is pure magic and eliminative materialism is insane. There are no more legs to stand on. But the scientific consensus continues to be materialist, because the alternative is too appalling to contemplate: it shakes the very foundations of the atheist creed. As Richard Lewontin put it:

“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Two of the more extravagant and costly claims materialists have been forced into, simply to keep their worldview logically and probabilistically credible, are the existence of infinite universes and the illusoriness of all conscious experiences. Anything to keep out the Divine Foot. The logical contortions are beginning to strain the credulity of even those sympathetic to the atheist cause, and the die-hards are becoming ever fewer and ever shriller in their desperation to keep control. Which explains the slide into the dogmatic fundamentalism of the New Atheists.

The New Atheists cast derision and scorn in all directions at anyone who dares deviate from the materialist creed that, as Richard Dawkins famously wrote, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” But the New Atheist swagger and bluster is a bluff. They have neither the arguments nor the evidence to back up the cosmic pessimism of their ultimately nihilistic materialist metaphysics. They are running on the anti-religious fumes of Enlightenment secular humanism and on the continued good will of their supporters to go along with their “Darwin of the gaps”.

Atheism of dead. It is only a matter of time before the head actually nods off.

Proposition 1: Science applied to humanity is pseudo science.

Examples: Phrenology, social Darwinism, eugenics, evolutionary psychology, Utilitarianism, behaviourism, logical positivism, biological determinism, genetic reductionism, scientific materialism, eliminativism, transhumanism.

Proposition 2: Socio-Political theories claiming scientific legitimacy are pseudo-scientific theories.

Examples: Secular humanism, fascism, Nazism, Marxism, Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Neo-Liberalism.

Proposition 3: Cultural theories claiming scientific legitimacy are pseudo-scientific theories.

Examples: Postmodernism, Critical Theories (Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, etc.)

Proposition 4: Modernity is characterised by the colonisation of the humanities and liberal arts by pseudo-scientific theories.

Proposition 5: The great works of the human imagination in philosophy, art and literature are being progressively marginalised in academia and in the wider culture, and the self-knowledge and wisdom they represent is being progressively jettisoned in favour of pseudo-scientific theories.

Proposition 6: This development is welcomed by techno-utopians who envisage a future human society run according to purely scientific and technological principles.

Proposition 7: This pseudo-scientific vision of hyper-Modernity is the epitome of a “Babyon system” of totalitarian social control of deracinated individuals.

Proposition 8: A plausible (though speculative) hypothesis is that we are experiencing a collective drift towards left hemisphere dominance of the brain, which accounts for the desire for objective systems and control and dissociation from subjective, lived experience.

Proposition 9: Psychedelics are a powerful way to disrupt this process, although they too are vulnerable to colonisation and control by both science and pseudo-science.

Proposition 10: The responsible use of psychedelics in the context of the liberal arts and religion represent our best chance of reversing the tide of dehumanisation sweeping across the human world.

Theosis, or deification, is the mysterious process whereby human beings become God, or at least participate as fully as is humanly possible in His divine nature. In the Christian tradition, this is made possible by the incarnation: “God became man that we might be gods”.

So how do we become God? First, we must empty ourselves of our ego. This is called kenosis, or “self-emptying” in Christian mysticism. Easier said than done of course, but with practice it becomes second nature. You must abandon all memories, thoughts and feeling in a “cloud of forgetting” and enter a “cloud of unknowing”. A Zen Buddhist will know what I mean. It is a state of mu-shin, or no-mind.

This state is one of stillness and quiet. However, it is not a complete nothingness, since nature abhors a vacuum. Sooner or later, something will enter your field of awareness, whether that be a sensation, a thought or a feeling. The difference is that it will manifest itself with a certain pristine purity, with a mysterious force of truth and beauty, a revelation or epiphany out of the infinite blue. This is called gnosis, which is a direct apprehension of pure truth.

What do we do with this gift from beyond? Whether an intellectual insight or a physical rush of energy, where do we put it? We all receive these transcendental gifts all the time, though we rarely notice or value them enough to prevent them from evaporating as fast as they materialise. Easy come, easy go. However, in the attentive state of kenosis and gnosis, we can consciously absorb and integrate it so that it doesn’t just disappear. We do this be adjusting our existing Umwelt, or worldview, to accommodate the new piece of information, either mentally or somatically. In other words we learn something.

This process of integration and synthesis is called pistis, usually translated as “faith”. We don’t perfectly model reality, but rather approximate it as far as possible by continuously refining our understanding. This proceeds along with a deepening faith that we are moving ever closer to the truth of Being itself. However, this is not a purely abstract or theoretical matter. It’s not just a map of the territory. It involves countless cycles of kenosis, gnosis and pistis, of “purification”, “perception” and “dalliance”, and transforms us little by little and piece by piece, as though we were alchemically changing the constitution of a lump of lead one atom at a time into gold.

Faith is the substance of what we are. It is the accumulated substance of our ultimate deification. When atheists asks for proof for the existence of God, what they don’t understand is that faith is itself the proof. As we grow in faith to the point where pistis, kenosis and gnosis are one act of pure Being, Consciousness and Bliss, we find that we no longer need signs or wonders outside ourselves as evidence for God, because we ourselves are gods, or better said, children of God, partakers of the divine fullness of reality in all its wonder and glory.

For more on this process and its possible basis in neuroscience, see chapter 5 of the second part of my book, The Confessions of a Psychedelic Christian, The Hermeneutics of Faith.