The eternal significance of a full-blown psychedelic experience is that it is the basis of all genuine religion. Broken down into its component parts, it is simple: remember the One; remember the Many; remember that which connects the One and the Many. In Christianity, this is expressed in terms of the Trinity: the One is the Father, the Many is the Holy Spirit and that which connects the two is the Son. An old hippy formula makes the same point: “lose your mind and come to your senses”.

“Losing your mind” is mysticism. This means that you forget the world and remember God. You pass through a “cloud of forgetting” and a “cloud of unknowing”. This is what I mean by the One. “Coming to your senses” is shamanism. This is about forgetting God and remembering the world. Emerging from the unity of consciousness in the One, the world of the senses is experienced as vibrant and fully alive. It is as if the world were born again, as if you were present at the moment of creation.

Between the One and the Many, “heaven” and “earth” is a person. This person is represented in religion as the archetype of perfect holiness: Christ, Krishna, Buddha. In order to maintain the beatific vision of the eternal One and the infinite Many, you must re-member the elements of personhood, will, heart, mind and soul, represented by the archetypes Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King. In India these four elements are realized through karma yoga, bhakti yoga, jnana yoga and raja yoga respectively.

The psychedelic path is the religious path par excellence. Once you understand this, there is no limit to the spiritual progress you can make in this life.

The problem with social conservatives is that they tend to get easily depressed. Things were always better before and the signs of decline are always with them. Roger Scruton and Peter Hitchens never came across as the most cheerful of chappies.

But then liberal progressives have their own litany of reasons to be miserable. On the political front, they are depressed by the rise of right wing populism. On the social, they are depressed by the persistence of inequality and the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities everywhere from STEM fields to festival line-ups.

Conservatives are anxious about the constant “red menace” of potential socialist resurgence. They are also anxious about the “pink menace” of the LGBTQIAPK+ movement, the “green menace” of radical environmentalism and the “brown menace” of unchecked Muslim immigration.

Liberals are anxious about the “white menace” of white nationalist, white supremacist neo-Nazis. They are also anxious about anxious conservatives. And about climate change, which is exacerbated by their anxiety about climate change denying corporate CEO’s and corrupt politicians out to make a profit at any cost.

It’s not good to be depressed and anxious. You don’t need me to tell you that. Most of the conservatives’ worries are unfounded, as are most of the liberals’. There are, of course, legitimate causes for concern, some of which both sides share, such as the potential negative effects of Artificial Intelligence on the future society. But most things in life are either mixed blessings or mixed curses.

So don’t worry, be happy. Resist the advances of the victim narrative peddlers. Don’t be a victim. Remember the words of Julian of Norwich:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

 

When Hickey turns up at Harry Hope’s  drinking salon in Eugene O’Neill’s 1939 play, the regulars are expecting the usual party. But Hickey says he has stopped drinking. He has woken up from the drunken spell they are all still under. He tries to convince them to give up their delusional “pipe dreams” and to face the reality of who they are. But it doesn’t turn out to be as easy as that. When they do give up their pipe dreams, they are in an even worse state than before.

The three corners of the “ego triangle” as I call it, are the Muggle, Muppet and Diva subpersonalities. They maintain themselves primarily through ignorance, delusion and vanity. The live on the smoke of pipe dreams, and have absolutely no wish to be rudely awakened from their reveries.

Just like in The Iceman Cometh, it can be dangerous to wake sleeping dogs. The ego triangle keeps us from growing up and fulfilling our potential, but it also protects us from the “id triangle”, the Addict, Victim and Demon. It is an important defence mechanism. When we lose the myths and stories by which we justify our existence, we are apt to fall into existential despair and fall prey to rage, fear and an insatiable desire for unconsciousness.

T.S. Eliot was right: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”. If illusions are the only thing keeping people sane, then beware of shattering them. When the Iceman comes (always with the very best of intentions of course), those who are not ready to give up their illusions will end up not in a rosy Heaven of new life and possibility, but in Hell.

 

Enlightenment is for those who ask. If you don’t knock, it will not be opened unto you. Who to ask though? Where to knock? You could ask Buddha or Jesus, or you could ask God directly. Failing that, you could ask a priest or a monk or a spiritual teacher. But spiritual teachers are no good to you unless they actually know what enlightenment is. And knowing what enlightenment is actually means not knowing. If they think they know, they definitely don’t. So good luck with that!

There is paradox here, but paradox is good. It points to something deeper than mere logic. Spiritual enlightenment is one of those things that our mind cannot grasp[i]. It is invariably (and paradoxically) accompanied by an absolute conviction that, after possibly hundreds or thousands of lifetimes wondering about it, you now know, at last, finally and incontrovertibly, what reality is, what existence is, what God is, but that an essential part of that knowing is the certain knowledge that you don’t know and can never know.

 

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

 

God is a mystery. Existence is a mystery. When religion claims to know what God is, it lies. When science and philosophy claim to know what existence is, they lie. All religion can do is point to the mystery that is God. All science and philosophy can do is point to the mystery that is existence. Ultimately, the mystery at the heart of religion and science is one and the same. But out of the mystery comes understanding:

 

“Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.”[iii]

 

There is no pistis without gnosis and there is no gnosis without kenosis. In other words, there is no understanding without experience and there is no experience without the openness that comes from emptiness.

Faith in religion is misplaced if you think that religion has all the answers. This was the error of the Medieval Scholastics and of modern day literalists and fundamentalists. But equally, faith in science and philosophy are misplaced, if you think they hold the keys to the secrets of existence. The central fantasy of the Enlightenment, that through the intelligent application of Reason and Science, humanity could illuminate the darkness and demystify the mystery of existence, has failed.

Where are the Comtean Positivists now? The Utilitarians? The Social Darwinists? The Logical Positivists? The Behaviourists? The Eliminative Materialists? Perhaps it is unfair to say that they are already in the dustbin of history, but it is certainly debatable whether they are on the right side of it. Be that as it may, the practical success or otherwise of theories based on a scientific materialist paradigm say nothing about the underlying metaphysical questions of existence or reality as such.

Nevertheless, the project to construct a scientific morality has failed.[iv] The project to create a scientific psychology has failed.[v] The projects to develop a scientific philosophy and a scientific religion have failed.[vi] The project to explain existence itself along purely naturalistic, scientific lines has failed.[vii] So far. A committed naturalist will say we just need more time. Give us a couple of hundred years, or a couple of thousand – science will work it out eventually. This is of course a confession of blind faith, which in many cases has no basis in reality.

Early modernity in the Western world is to a great extent defined by loss of faith in religion. With the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the publication of the Origin of Species, faith in religion and revealed truth was in tatters. So thinking people shifted their allegiance and put their money on science to tell them what reality was, and to give their lives meaning. But now, at the tail end of modernity, we have lost patience and lost faith in science, just as we lost faith in religion at the beginning.

The Faustian fantasy of scientism is essentially over, except for a few diehards. Science cannot explain everything. It goes without saying that the natural sciences as well as the social sciences are good for a lot of things, and have improved our lives immeasurably. Science and technology have transformed the world. However, although they are very good at answering the “how” of things, they are utterly useless at answering the “why”, which is why we now find ourselves, in the Western world, in the middle of a “Meaning Crisis”[viii].

Science cannot provide us with ultimate meaning. Neither can politics (the Marxist-Leninist church, for example, has long since been converted into fashionable apartments). Neither can philosophy, psychology, or religion. Neither can fame, fortune, power, influence, drugs, sex or rock and roll. We cannot put our faith in any of these things, because they are all unstable, and it’s never a good idea to build a house on sand.

Man’s search for meaning[ix] leads finally to a dark nothingness, to the great mystery at the heart of all things. This is where true enlightenment is found: not in the harsh glare of scientific observation or the promise of unlimited technological progress, but in the deepest depths of the unfathomable mystery of existence. The solution to the Meaning Crisis will not be found in any of the answers offered us by science or religion or anything else, but in a cloud of unknowing, in a re-discovery of mystery. Paradoxical as it sounds, that’s the rock you should build your house on.

[i] Einstein, A., 2011. The world as I see it. Open Road Media.

[ii] Eckhart, M.J., 1994. Selected Writings, edited and translated by Oliver Davies.

[iii] Mitchell, S., 1988. Tao te ching (lao tzu). New York: HarperPerennial.

[iv] see Hunter, J.D. and Nedelisky, P., 2018. Science and the good: The tragic quest for the foundations of morality. Foundational Questions in Scie.

[v] see Mackenzie, B.D., 1977. Behaviourism and the limits of scientific method. Taylor & Francis.

[vi] see Stenmark, M., 2017. Scientism: Science, ethics and religion. Routledge.

[vii] see Nagel, T., 2012. Mind and cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford University Press.

[viii] Vervaeke, J., Mastropietro, C. and Miscevic, F., 2017. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. Open Book Publishers.

[ix] Frankl, V.E., 1985. Man’s search for meaning. Simon and Schuster.

 

It was with a certain level of boredom and frustration that I sat through the “debate” between the celebrity Christian apologist Glen Scrivener and the celebrity atheist Matt Dillahunty on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? podcast. It was late and I was tired. But when Mssrs. Dillahunty and Scrivener locked horns on whether the Christian story was actually true or not, regardless of its supposed social or psychological benefits, I threw in the proverbial towel.

I honestly cannot understand how people can argue endlessly for years about things they clearly haven’t the first clue about. What is “truth”? There are obviously different categories of truth. On what day was Christ crucified? Was it on a Friday or a Saturday? Or was it on Tuesday? This is the most banal level of truth, historical or literal truth. Who cares?

Even science doesn’t stop at this basic level of truth. A GCSE science textbook will give you a “true” factual description of a chemical bond. But a PhD biochemist will know that there’s more to it than that. A world expert will understand that the ultimate truth of the nature of chemical bonding opens out into a bottomless mystery.

Nobody knows the ultimate truth about anything. Science can describe certain features of the observable natural world. History can describe certain events. They can do this more or less accurately, more or less successfully. “Truth” is one word we use to determine the degree of success or accuracy of these descriptions. If we judge it to be close enough to the thing itself, we call it “true”. If it seems to be too far off the mark, we call it “false”.

But the description is not the truth. It points to the truth. This is because any description will always fall short of the reality it is trying to describe. Words, concepts and theories are just pointers. They describe phenomena, which are themselves pointers to the reality beyond the appearance, to the noumena, the “thing-in-itself” as Kant called it.

In the world of mathematics, it is true that 2+2=4. In the world of science, it is true that water boils at 100° C. In the world of Shakespeare, it is true that Othello was consumed by jealousy. Within the closed systems of mathematics, physics and literary criticism, we can make certain claims which are verifiable true or false according to the internal criteria of each system.

But what do these things mean beyond the system? What is jealousy? What is water? What are numbers? Every system exists surrounded by an unfathomable mystery.

“Is Christianity true? Does God exist?” What a ridiculous pair of questions! If science is just a pointer to truth, not truth itself, what do you think religion is? Religions are just pointers. They point to the truth, but they are not themselves the truth. The question is not whether or not they are true, but whether or not they are good pointers. The added complication is that the thing they are pointing at is explicitly a mystery. They don’t point to things we can observe in the physical world, like science does. They point to God. But what is “God”? Exactly. It’s a mystery. If you have no idea what “God” is, how can you ask whether or not He exists?

If you don’t believe in God then, you don’t believe in the Mystery of existence. Which means that you think that you understand existence. You know how and why existence exists. Does Matt Dillahunty know this? If he did, he would be worshipped as a god. “Science will one day discover the secret of existence” he might retort. “I put my faith in science”. What if science finally concluded that the answer to life, the universe and everything really is 42? Or some complicated equation? How does knowing this even come close to what religious people mean by “knowing God”?

The question to ask about religion is not, “is it true?” but “does it point to the Truth?” It is more like a question than an answer, more like “what is Reality?” than “42”, more like “what is God?” than “this is God”. Nobody can answer the question posed by religion, unless they already know the Truth, unless they have themselves personally experienced it. Otherwise, all we have to go on are the reports of others. Have people who have followed religion into the Great Mystery found that it delivers or not? Is the final verdict that it does or doesn’t point to the Truth? Does it, or does it not, lead to God?

If you look at the historical record, you will find many Christians who claim that Christianity is true in the sense that it leads to Truth. There is no way to corroborate or disprove this claim without following the Christian path to God. Just like any good experiment, you need to follow the correct procedures, which in this case, would involve faith and prayer.

However, even if you fail, that proves nothing beyond the fact that you failed. Perhaps you didn’t run the experiment properly. Perhaps you didn’t have enough faith (“ye of little faith!”) All you need to validate the truth claims of Christianity is to have at least one clear instance of a person for whom the experiment didn’t fail, by their own account, and by the account of those who knew them. And there are thousands. These are the positive results of this particular experiment. Of course you can discount them all. You can say that they were all liars or delusional. What basis would you have to do that, other than distrust? Why believe anything? You might have a religious experience yourself and write it off as a hallucination.

If you are of such a skeptical bent, you won’t believe what I am about to say, even if I swear that it’s true because I’ve been there. But that’s your problem, not mine.

Follow mathematics to the end, follow science to the end, follow religion to the end. What do they all ultimately point to? Follow the trail sincerely wherever it leads and you will find that they all ultimately point to the “One”, to the unity that comprehends all things. The ancient symbol of the One is, of course, the sun. Follow anything right back to its source and you will arrive at the effulgent, radiant source of all. You will arrive at the One God.

All religions point to God. Even science points to God. But when you ascend to the mystical heights, to the ever-shining One, then what? Well, what goes up must come down. You must return to the earth, to the river, to the bench, the trees and the sky. You must return from the One to the Many. But now the river, the bench and the trees are seen in a different light. They are seen as they are in themselves, not as they are through the filter of your ego. They are seen in the light of Zen. All things point to Zen, especially God.

You cannot look directly at the sun without blinding yourself. And you cannot look directly on the face of God. This is why, since time immemorial, the moon has stood in for the Most High as the reflected image of God. The moon is literally the mirror of the sun; the light of the moon is the reflected light of the sun.

The “finger pointing to the moon” of Zen tradition represents the human attempt to describe Ultimate Reality. Zen has also been described as “direct pointing to Reality outside the scriptures”. Here the minimalist finger of Zen is substituted for the complex, baroque finger of “the scriptures” or “religion”.

The moon represents Reality, but it is not terrestrial Reality. It is the reflected light of the sun. Only as the light of the moon illuminates the Earth below is the Reality of Zen revealed, like the “moon in a dewdrop”.

The “finger pointing to the moon” is religion, including Zen Buddhist religion. The “finger pointing from the moon” is the reflected light of the Sun, of the One, of Ultimate Reality, of God, pointing back down to Earth. Bathed in the cool light of the moon, we experience the world as eternal and eternally present. We experience Zen.

There is no point obsessing about the finger. Whether the finger is Zen Buddhism or Christianity, or any other pointer, it is the pointing, not the pointer, that matters. There is no point staring at the finger like a cat. Look where the finger is pointing. Equally, there is no point obsessing about the moon. The moon is just another finger, the “finger of God”, if you like, pointing back down to Earth.

Don’t worry about whether religion is “true” or not. Just follow where it points to. Don’t worry about whether God “exists” or not. Just follow where He point to. Religion points to God and God points to Zen.

Then you can just get on with your life, and “chop wood and carry water”.

 

The whole of the progressive agenda originates and is summed up in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous and oft-quoted line, “Man is born free and everywhere is in chains.”

If you were to sum up the religious belief and commitment of Modernity, it is belief in and commitment to “Progress”. Who can possibly argue with that? Progress means advance, betterment, improvement. Surely there is always room for improvement, therefore there is always a need for progress. This is so bleedingly obvious that it is a wonder more people don’t recognise how utterly trite it is. The question is, not whether progress is desirable, but what counts as progress.

If you claim to be “progressive” and your opponents as “reactionary” or “regressive”, you have simply smuggled in the implicit claim that your idea of progress is right and theirs is wrong. In the absence of any concrete instances, the general principle, as a principle of quasi-religious belief, devolves into the basic view that change is good and stasis is bad. If we believe in progress, obviously we have to keep moving.

Although there is a certain commitment to constant change, or in its extreme form, “permanent revolution”, mere change is too empty a concept to provide any definite sense of direction. Even progressives recognise that there are changes for the worse as well as changes for the better. They need a rule of thumb in order to distinguish between the two. Which is where Rousseau comes in.

Whatever changes are unfolding in society, they are bad if they add more chains to people and good if they break them. Human progress on the Rousseauian view is the progressive removal of the chains imposed by society on otherwise free individuals. Thus it would more accurately be called “progressive liberationism”.

Rousseau saw that the Catholic Church was a repressive institution. People therefore had to be liberated from the church. This meant they had to be freed from the external control and influence of the priests and functionaries of the church, but ultimately meant that they had to be freed from their inner slavery to the restrictive beliefs instilled by the church from early childhood.

The same logic applied to all social institutions, to educational institutions, government, the legal system, and ultimately to the family itself. Were not the original chains placed on the innocent, unsuspecting infant forged in the nursery by mother and father? All external authorities and their internalisations had to be expunged if man was to be truly free. In England, William Blake sang to this same tune in his lyric poems, Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Clearly, this is a powerful, emotive idea and it dominated the Romantic movement throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Revolution was in the air, and revolution meant freedom from the chains of all societal strictures and restrictions. This movement reached its apotheosis in the swinging sixties. “Free love” was the slogan and the dream, and for the first time since Rousseau wrote those fateful words, seemed within the reach of liberated libertarians everywhere. The hippies were poised to take over the world, not with guns, but with flowers in their hair.

The sixties saw the confluence of several strands of “liberationism”, creating a perfect storm of progressive frenzy. First, there was the social Darwinist legacy of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which gave a metaphysical justification to the idea of irresistible progress. Then there was the Marxist call to emancipation from class oppression, the Nietzschean call to emancipation from false consciousness and slave morality and the Freudian call to emancipation from the nasty super ego, which we had mistaken for “conscience”.

The combined promise of all these intellectual giants of Modernity was that, for the first time in history, we could utterly smash the mental shackles that kept us chained to the past. We could throw off our chains. We could rise up free and glorious and stride naked into the new dawn of the New Age of Aquarius.

But it didn’t quite turn out like that. Why not? It turned out that Rousseau’s “noble savage” was more savage than noble. Freed from the chains of familial piety, respect for authority, religion, education and morality, people found themselves enslaved in a different way.

There was the problem of addiction. People got hooked on drugs and sex. They became slaves to their passions. There were the twin problems of ignorance and delusion. People ceased to be properly educated in the liberal arts and humanities, but filled themselves with all sorts of strange and exotic liberationist propaganda, from Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Jean Genet and Michel Foucault.

The Paris riots of 1968 are the iconic moment of this liberation movement, which, appropriately enough, since it all started with the French Revolution, was spearheaded by French intellectuals. But the movement was quickly translated and soon came to dominate the Anglosphere as well.

The smashing of the chains of bourgeois society resulted in a host of societal ills and psychological problems through the nineteen seventies and into the new millennium:  higher divorce rates, higher suicide rates and self-harm, increases in anxiety and depression, domestic abuse, violent crimes and homicide.

What went wrong? The hippy dream seemed to have turned into a nightmare. Where was the “noble savage”? All you could see were vain and self-centred divas, ignorant muggles, delusional muppets, insatiable addicts, disconsolate victims and murderous demons. People seemed more enslaved than ever before.

Was Rousseau wrong? Were our chains necessary for our own sanity and safety? Chains have positive uses as well as negative ones – they connect as well as restrain. Perhaps cutting all our attachments was not the best way to achieve social and spiritual progress. Perhaps the surge of enthusiasm for Buddhist non-attachment, which underpinned all the other liberationist streams was misplaced?

As a psychotherapist, I was always looking out for the underlying need of my clients. Did they need help loosening up? Were they too repressed and emotionally cramped? Did they display obsessive traits? Did they have too much order in their lives? Were their chains too tight? Or did they need help tightening up? Were their emotions all over the place? Did they need to take control of their lives? Did they need more structure and discipline? Were they too chaotic? Were their chains too loose?

There is no simple answer to the eternal conundrum of human freedom. Sometimes we need “loosening up” and sometimes we need “tightening up”. Sometimes, as a culture, we veer too far in one direction and sometimes in the other. There are times and generations which need an antidote to excessive order, and times and generations where what’s really needed is an antidote to chaos.

 

I was saddened but strangely unsurprised to hear that Roger Scruton had died of cancer at the age of 75. I had somehow been expecting it, although I didn’t know that he was ill.

Reflecting on his life’s work, it occurred to me that his famous conservatism was simply a way of expressing in a political idiom a deeper current of thought, which actually has more to do with resistance than conservation. On the face of it, his passionate defence of high culture, for example, is about conserving the cultural riches of the past, particularly in music and architecture, for future generations. It is the expression of his sense of duty to the dead and the unborn. However, it is more than that.

It is a repudiation of equality. In aesthetic matters, some things are better than others. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. It is not just down to subjective taste or conventional consensus. There is such a thing as “aesthetic value”. This is the corner stone of his whole philosophy, which boils down to being a defense of value against equality.

C.S. Lewis makes the point forcefully through the mouth of the demon Screwtape in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, written shortly before his death in 1963. It is a very witty piece of satire, with Screwtape bemoaning the blandness of the Tempters’ Training College annual dinner meal (of the damned) due to the mediocrity of people’s sins. But he goes on to argue that quantity is better than quality and that in the long run it’s a good thing, because it means that at least hardly anyone gets to Heaven.

According to Screwtape, this is because of the prevailing doctrine of I’m as good as you masquerading under the guise of “democracy”. He might equally have used the word “equality”. Because anyone is able to say I’m as good as you (without actually believing it of course – it is a perpetual inner deception) there is no incentive to be any good at anything or to admire those things or people which are.

There is an obvious flaw in the idea or equality. You cannot raise everyone up to be equally good, on a par with the saints or the great composers. That’s clearly highly unrealistic, considering it takes years of sweat and tears and not a little natural talent or even genius. Who would make the effort given every conceivable opportunity? Only a handful. The rest would remain what they were.

The only way to achieve equality therefore, is in the opposite direction, by dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Who said “people are only perfectly equal when they’re dead”? For equality enthusiasts, people are only acceptably equal when they’re as good as dead.

The Utopian dream of “equalizers” is a world where everyone has made themselves so insignificant, that no-one can hurt anyone any more. Peace will only truly descend on Earth when no-one can pull themselves out of bed. Everyone is equalized and neutralized. No-one pokes their head above the bedclothes.

Aldous Huxley saw this. He called it Brave New World. C.S. Lewis saw it. Chesterton saw it. T.S. Eliot saw it. As did Nietzsche, the raging prophet of the “will to power”. Nietzsche was nauseated by the simpering Victorian Christianity he saw degenerating into the abject pathos of flaccid, facile, bourgeois domesticity. People should not be domesticated like cats and dogs.

Roger Scruton is in the same tradition, although he upholds authentic bourgeois aspirational values against the onslaughts of the radical socialist equalizers. He is a prophet against equality for the sake of individual freedom and self-realisation. So is Ken Wilber, another latter-day prophet of value. He makes much of the concept of hierarchy, which is of course anathema to equalizers, in fact, the very antithesis of their worldview. As does Jordan Peterson, the latest prophet on the block.

Jordan Peterson and Roger Scruton are well despised, as all good prophets should be.  They are dismissed by equalizers with the two magic words, “Right Wing”. But, as I said, this goes deeper than political ideology. This goes to the heart of what it means to be human, which is something to do with standing up straight with your shoulders back.

Nelson Mandela famously didn’t say, “As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same” (it was Marianne Williamson). But where does the light come from? Where do genius and inner strength and power come from? When you are inspired, you are in-spired. It is as if something or someone has breathed into you. It is as if you are filled with a holy spirit. Why not just go ahead and say you are filled with the Holy Spirit?

King Arthur was made King because he pulled Excalibur from the stone. This was evidence that he was filled with the Holy Spirit. When you are King, you don’t subject yourself to the demands of “equality” or “democracy”. You don’t hide your light so as not to offend those who don’t shine. But neither do you abuse your power. You do not become a tyrant, because you know that you must obey the King above you, the King of Kings, otherwise the Holy Spirit will be withdrawn from you.

The prophets are on one side of the present fissure in history, exhorting us to wake up from our soft, comfortable, modern sleep and to take our place beside the Kings and Queens of myth and antiquity. On the other side are amassed an army of modern and postmodern ideologies and isms. Don’t let them bully you. Don’t let them fool you into joining the Church of Nobody. Your sins may be trivial, and your flesh may be tasteless, but you’ll still end up on the banqueting table in Hell.

 

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis’ prolonged psychedelic trip about the afterlife, the protagonist finds himself on a bus holiday outing to Heaven. At first it is unclear whether the departure point is a particularly dreary corner of the North, Purgatory or Hell itself. It turns out it was Hell. And the quarrelsome day trippers turn out to be ghosts.

Ghosts come in many shapes and sizes. There are nasty ghosts, moany ghosts, hungry ghosts, ignorant ghosts, deluded ghosts and superior ghosts. In other words, all six types you would expect to find on the Wheel of Samsara. They are ghosts because they have failed to fully materialize. They are not quite up to the standard of reality. Which is why the grass in Heaven hurts their feet: it’s too real for them.

People lost on the Wheel are basically ghosts. Sometimes they seem like zombies, vampires, werewolves, dolls or puppets, but they’re basically ghosts. They’re neither fully dead, nor fully alive. They’re what the Ancient Egyptians called mut, the “living dead”.

Spirits, on the other hand, have made the quantum leap from the Wheel of Samsara to the Orthodox Cross. They have begun the process of becoming mystics, shamans, warriors, monks or nuns, philosophers and kings (or queens). These human archetypes point to different dimensions of the human encounter with reality. They have begun the process of becoming real.

Spirits have spirit.They have spiritual discernment and spiritual practices. But they are not fully realized or enlightened. They have not mastered themselves completely. They have not completely surrendered. They may be saints, but they are not yet angels.

Compared to ghosts, and even spirits, angels are infinitely holy, virtuous and wise. They are pure vessels of divine consciousness. It’s not often you meet an angel, if ever. And if you do, the chances are you won’t recognize them. Only advanced spirits have developed the eyes to see.

Do you believe in angels? Unless you believe in ghosts, you won’t believe in angels. But then, how do you know that you’re not a ghost, if you don’t believe in them?

 

We are meaning seeking creatures. Since the dawn of time, human beings have woken up from vivid dreams and wondered to themselves, “what does it all mean?”

We would sit around camp fires and tell stories. The best ones were the ones that had some deeper meaning, the ones that made us think and feel.

The elders would tell stories round the camp fire because they were trying to tell us something, trying to teach us something. Our unconscious would tell us stories in our dreams because it was trying to tell us something.

We listen because we are eager to learn. This is how we roll. This is how we evolve.

If you listen to a lot of stories, you will recognise that there are often several levels of interpretation. This is as true of the interpretation of dreams as it is of the interpretation of Shakespeare.

When it comes to the interpretation of scripture, the biblical scholars have helpfully identified four levels: the literal, the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical. The first three are familiar features of all stories. The last is reserved for spiritual teachings as it concerns spiritual truths.

How do we typically understand any event or narrative? What is our hermeneutical strategy? Think about a drama series such as Stranger Things. If you are engaged in the story, you will be watching and listening on at least three levels.

You will be processing the literal, and in this case historical details. Are all the 80’s references accurate? Would people have dressed and spoken like that? You will be tracking the moral behaviour of the characters. Was that a good thing to do or say? Are they behaving badly but good deep down, or conversely, are they a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

On a deeper level, you will be wondering about the allegorical meaning of the story. What does it tell us about our lives more generally? Is there a hidden message we can decipher, like the hidden messages contained in dreams?

Different people interpret the world differently. Not only that, they have different interpretative styles. Muggles veer towards the literal. Muppets cleave to the allegorical.

Muggles are more interested in brute facts. They get very upset if you get the facts wrong. They are less interested in hidden meanings. Muppets often overlook or disregard facts entirely. The deeper meaning of things trumps the historical facts.

Both muggles and muppets are sensitive to the moral implications of behaviour, although their moral outlooks will inevitably differ. But in both cases, judgments will be made on the basis of one or more of Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity or liberty.

They have no idea about the anagogical. Their experience of reality is based on the literal in the case of muggles and the allegorical in the case of muppets. Only mystics understand the anagogical.

When the anagogical is the basis of your experience of reality, literal, historical facts, moral judgments and allegorical meanings are understood in a completely different light. Everything points to the spiritual. Everything points to God. There is a sense of coherence, because everything points in the same direction.

Without it, there is chaos and confusion. We live as though in a dream. We see as through a glass darkly.

 

When people generally take powerful psychedelics like ayahuasca they expect to go on a trip. They expect a magical mystery tour of the Imaginal. And more often than not, they are not disappointed.

As has been shown in numerous studies, people’s experiences on psychedelics such as psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, MDMA and DMT are very susceptible to “set and setting” (mind set and environment) and to the expectations and intentions of the participant. Under the influence of psychedelics, the mind becomes extremely sensitive and suggestible.

Most people in the West who take psychedelics seriously, take it in the context of a therapeutic paradigm. The working model will usually have spiritual overtones, but will be basically Jungian in essence. In other words, it will be a form of depth psychology, with the intention of accessing the personal and collective unconscious in order to integrate the personality and so become more whole.

Much of Jungian analysis is focused on “shadow work”. This is all about integrating those dissociated parts of the personality which end up being projected out onto other people. If you take an irrational dislike to someone, it may be that you see in them an aspect of yourself that you don’t like. If it is something you are not aware of, something unconscious, then you are in thrall to your shadow.

If you acquire an instant dislike to someone you don’t know because of their political or religious views, then you are in thrall to a collective shadow. They belong to an enemy tribe. This is even known to happen between supporters of rival football teams.

Western spiritual seekers brought up on some form of Jungian gnosticism expect to deal with their shadow and venture bravely into the vast symbolic world of the collective unconscious (the Imaginal) when they take psychedelics. They live in the concrete world, like everyone else, but unlike everyone else, they take the hero’s journey down into the shadow world and into the imaginal world in order to heal and to bring back spiritual treasure.

These three worlds, the Concrete, the Shadow and the Imaginal are all part of the Wheel of Samsara. The Concrete World is home to normal people, that is, to muggles. Some muggles, however, have addictive personalities. They want the things of the world too much. The Shadow World is home to muppets and victims; the Imaginal is home to divas and demons.

If you take a trip into the Imaginal, you can end up in Heaven or Hell. It can go either way. But there are levels of Heaven and Hell. If you find yourself in a strange alien landscape that appears emotionally neutral, it will still be tinged, if ever so slightly, with a positive or negative tone. You will feel confident, diva-style, or uncomfortable, demon-style. You are either at the foothills of Heaven or the upper ring of Hell.

There is an alternative model, also consisting of three worlds. These are the three world I described in The Temple and the Pub, the One, the Opposites and the Many. These map onto the the Orthodox Cross: the Mystic is of course associated with the One, the Mystic with the Many, and the Philosopher King with the Opposites. However, because we must inevitably return to the Concrete World (until complete and final spiritual enlightenment), we also need the strength and restraint of the Warrior Monk.

The Warrior Monk is represented by the lower horizontal of the Orthodox Cross. This relates to the Concrete World. The rest of the cross, the vertical and the upper horizontal, expresses the Trinity: the top of the vertical, the Mystic, associated with the One (the Father, Parashiva); the bottom of the vertical, the Shaman, with the Many (the Holy Spirit, Shakti), and the upper horizontal, the Philosopher King, with the Opposites (the Son, Shiva). This is the Christian cross as we know it.

There is no need to wander in the Upside Down (the Shadow World) or the Imaginal (the Dream World). You can go straight to the source. This is the difference between the Gnostics and the Christians in the Early Church. This is the difference between depth psychology and religion generally. In my view, ayahuasca is most profitably treated as a religious sacrament, not as a therapeutic tool. This is how the traditional indigenous Amazonian shamans use it, and this is how we should too.