The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

Luke 18: 20-21

“Observation” is what we do when our senses are turned outwards to the world. The world itself is, as Berkeley and Kant pointed out a couple of centuries ago, a phenomenal, mind-dependent world. In Schopenhauer’s terminology, it is a “representation” or “idea”:

§ 1. “The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good
for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring
it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does
this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes
clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an
earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth;
that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e.,
only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is
himself.

Therefore the world we experience is not the “real world” as it is in itself (the noumenon), but a subjective representation of it mediated by our mind and senses. We can discover many interesting and useful things by a dedicated and applied observation of the phenomenal world. This is what scientists do. But we will never see ultimate reality, or God, except in an indirect, oblique way, “through a glass darkly”. The essential nature of existence cannot be found through the use of our external senses or through the exercise of our rational minds, no matter how perceptive or clever we are. Neither will we say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, all I can ever know is the world as my idea.

This is why it is written in the Katha-Upanishad:

God made sense turn outward, man therefore looks outward, not into himself. Now and again a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.

The kingdom of God is within you. Return to the source of your outward senses and your outward mind and you will find your self, or rather, your Self. This is not the psychological ego, but the Atman, or in Western parlance, the soul, a centre of pure consciousness and will. In Kashmir Shaivism, this personal consciousness is called Shiva. Return to the source of mind and you will find Atman; return to the source of Atman and you will find Paramatman. Return to the source of the phenomenal world and you will find Shiva; return to the source of Shiva and you will find Parashiva. Paramatman and Parashiva refer to universal Self or universal Consciousness, in other words, to God.

But what is the point of returning to the source? The answer reveals itself in the return back again to the world of the senses and the mind. The mind and the senses are regenerated and refreshed, and the world appears renewed, as if it were the first day of creation, as if the whole universe were born again. Everything appears suffused with new life, with the immanent spirit of Shakti. It almost feels as if you were experiencing reality itself, instead of your projected idea of reality, as if it were presented to you directly, rather than re-presented.

“Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding” wrote Lao Tzu in chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching. We might say, Parashiva within Shiva, the gateway to all Shakti; or in a Western idiom, God within Soul, the gateway to Eternal Life. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

“The new atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part. Seeing religion as a system of beliefs, they have attacked it as if it was no more than an obsolete scientific theory. Hence the ‘God debate’ – a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion. But the idea that religion consists of a bunch of discredited theories is itself a discredited theory – a relic of the nineteenth-century philosophy of Positivism.”

John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism

I recently found myself embroiled in this tedious debate on that great sinkhole of tedious debate, Twitter. The only thing that kept me going was a perverse fascination with the perverse human capacity for willful incomprehension. Added to this was the faintly surreal phenomenon of people brandishing their ignorance as if it were a virtue. Indeed the stupider they were, the cleverer they seemed to appear in their own eyes. This curious oddity can probably be put down to a kind of arrogant superiority complex: the belief that what is self-evidently nonsense (in this case, belief in the existence of God) deserves nothing but casual, dismissive ridicule and disdain with an absolute minimum of real argument (one doesn’t want to appear to be taking such nonsense seriously does one?) Richard Dawkins was explicit about this, when challenged on his casual dismissal of theology: “it is like someone saying they don’t believe in fairies and then being asked how they know if they haven’t studied fairy-ology”.

There is a distinction to be made here between two different types of atheist. The first is your common-or-garden atheist who doesn’t believe in God because their circle of friends and family don’t, or because they’ve never really given it much thought, or because they just don’t. They don’t believe, but they’re not bothered either way. This kind of default atheism has been wittily labelled “apatheism”. Apatheists don’t believe in God simply because they don’t find God interesting or in any way relevant to their everyday lives. This is part of the explanation for the deep-set ignorance of modern atheism. Terry Eagleton expresses some surprise at this cavalier ignorance, again in relation to Dawkins: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

But Dawkins is probably less ignorant than most, and has at least had some contact with religious ideas. He is not so much an “apatheist”, indifferent to the whole question, but an “anti-theist”, expending an enormous amount of time and energy (and indeed making a lot of money) attacking religion. He seems to honestly believe that humanity is being held back from its great rational and scientifically enlightened destiny only by the anachronistic shackles of superstitious religion. This belief is itself an article of faith of course, perhaps the foundational faith of this science-based creed: only when the last vestiges of religion are destroyed and buried deep underground will humanity be freed from the curse of its phantom God.

It’s not all that surprising then that casual observers have noted the evangelical and even cultish nature of much of the New Atheism. A fervent hatred of God (miso-theism) and antipathy to religion (anti-theism) gives people a sense of purpose and mission which may be lacking in their otherwise apatheistic lives, spurring them on to an odd kind of nonchalant activism, always trying their best to disguise their raw God-hatred behind a patina of enlightened indifference. (Peter Hitchens makes an interesting connection in this regard between the political (Trotskyism) and “the rage against God” he observed in his brother, Christopher).

In my somewhat idiosyncratic psycho-spiritual system based on the Tibetan Wheel of Life, I describe six different ego states, the three higher states represented by the Muggle, Muppet and Diva archetypes. When it comes to atheism, we can helpfully distinguish between apatheist muggles, who have no experience or understanding of spiritual matters, and are not really interested in it at all, and anti-theist muppets, who are ideologically committed to a scientistic worldview (science can explain everything) and feel that religion is not only wrong, but perniciously wrong, and are interested in it only in a negative sense, just enough to pull it down. The third type, the pantheist divas, can be spiritually proficient and knowledgeable about metaphysics and theology, but because they generally either underplay or fail to recognise the transcendent aspect of God, holding instead to a purely immanent, naturalistic view of reality, tend to fall prey to spiritual narcissism, secretly (or not so secretly) considering themselves to be the pinnacle of creation in an ecstasy of New Age enlightenment.

Clearly the best fit for my Twitter antagonists is the “anti-theist muppet” category. The persistent refrain, which continues unabated, no matter my response, is “there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God”. It matters not a jot that I completely agree with them. They continue to demand proof, repeating their demand like an incantation, or like someone with a severe case of Tourettes syndrome. There is no clearer expression of the inability to see beyond the great unwashed and unwarranted assumption of scientific materialism or “scientism” than this incessant demand for scientific proof, namely, that science is the only valid source of knowledge.

Of course I can’t scientifically prove that God exists, but equally, they can’t prove that He doesn’t. Or to put it another way (to avoid the predictable retort that they can’t prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist either), they can’t prove that the universe is self-created and self-sustaining. Believing in a Godless world has metaphysical implications which also need to be rationally defended. If the only way a naturalist conception of existence can work is to posit infinite universes and the magical emergence of something out of nothing (the universe out of a quantum void (but where did the quantum void come from if it’s not pure nothingness?), organic life out of inanimate matter and consciousness out of mindless physical processes), prove THAT if you please before badgering me about proving God.

The corollary of this demand for evidence is the demand for proof “beyond all reasonable doubt”. Applying this strict level of proof, appropriate in the context of clinical trials, and somewhat less stringently, to a court of law, when applied to the question of the existence or non-existence of God is obviously inappropriate, unreasonable and unrealistic. This is not the type of inquiry that could possibly pass such a high bar, either for or against. Which leads us to the question of “the burden of proof”. The constant, tedious, demand that theists “prove it”, is an aggressive move that automatically puts them in the dock. But if, as Mircea Eliade argued, we are best described as homo religiosus, and have always believed in God in one form or another, is the burden of proof not equally, if not more, on the atheist?

Belief in God is about faith, not proof. If we could prove it rationally and empirically, there would be no point in religion, which is about communion with God through faith. We don’t need (and can’t have) certain knowledge, or proof beyond reasonable doubt. In order to be able to believe at all, we don’t need 100% certainty, or even 90% certainty. All we need is more that 50%, in other words, a conviction that God is more likely to exist than not. We’re in the realm of plausibility here, not certainty, and should avoid that “irritable reaching after fact and reason” characteristic of incorrigible skeptics. The arguments in favour of theism (cosmological, ontological, etc.) are far stronger than the atheist arguments and counter-arguments, which seem to rely to an almost farcical degree on misunderstanding and caricature, and in my estimation, almost all the theist arguments remain unanswered, whereas almost all the atheist arguments have been successfully dealt with. Conversely, if atheists can’t honestly be more than 50% certain that purely natural, physical processes can explain everything about the universe, including how and why it exists at all, then they have no basis for faith in their materialist metaphysics.

If, however, our rational mind can be persuaded that materialist neo-Darwinism is “almost certainly false” (Nagel) or that “there is almost certainly a God” (Ward), then our intuitive mind can get on with the business of the actual, direct, spiritual experience of God. We need the green light of rational assent from our left hemisphere in order to take the leap of faith with our right hemisphere. The mystery is why some people need only a 50/50 possibility, whereas others need so much more. As the adage has it, “for those who refuse to believe, no proof is possible; but for those who believe, no proof is necessary”. Or consider the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16: 19-31 and the haunting words of Abraham to the rich man in hell, who begs him to send Lazarus down from heaven to warn his brothers to behave themselves: “And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead”.

Further reading: The Case for God: What Religion Really Means by Karen Armstrong; The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart; Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel; The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and it’s Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski; The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens; Can Science Explain Everything? by John Lennox; The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning by Jonathan Sacks; The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World by Alister McGrath; Why There Almost Certainly is a God by Keith Ward; Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray; The Waning of Materialism by Robert Koons; The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens; The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett; God the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist by Victor Stenger.

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?