I was fortunate enough to have a relatively good education. As a child I was naturally inquisitive and a voracious reader. English was always my favourite subject at school and I ended up studying English Lit at Cambridge. After university, I enrolled in a philosophy course with The School of Economic Science, an extraordinary organisation committed primarily to the synthesis of the wisdom of East and West. It has roots in the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff and his followers (the Fourth Way) and the Advaita Vedanta teachings of the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math. It is also very active in promoting music and the arts, holding a yearly festival at Waterperry House near Oxford called Art in Action. Although many different traditions are represented in the SES, they clearly have a penchant for the Renaissance, a central philosophical voice being that of Marcilio Ficino, the star of the Florentine Renaissance.

I stayed for several years, and learned a great deal, including their meditation practice (TM) and the value of the “second night duty” practice of service (usually in the kitchen). As someone once commented in passing, this was the closest you could get to the monastic life without retreating from the world. It was promoted as “the householder’s way”, after all. (I did actually also train in a Zen monastery in Northumberland, and even toyed with the idea of becoming a postulant, although I finally decided against it, so SES seemed a good compromise).

What I am interested in exploring here is the issue of education. At Cambridge there were modules focusing on particular historical periods. I had to study the Greek Tragedians, Medieval, Renaissance, Augustan, Romantic and Modern literature in poems, plays, essays and novels. Some of this was fairly familiar, some of it completely new to me. It opened whole words of thought and imagination, which I continued to explore after I left, partly in the context of the SES (I remember a particularly inspiring weekend course on Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra for example).

It is notoriously difficult to avoid the assumption that other people share the same assumptions we do. After a few weeks at a Zen monastery, it takes a while to adjust to “normal life”. The first stop at a motorway service station coming down from Northumberland is always a shock. I have to make a conscious effort not to gassho (bow) in gratitude. On their part, people seem thoughtless, ungrateful and strangely coarse and vulgar, as well as being mainly overweight and unhealthy looking.

There is an obvious elitism and snobbishness here. This is a charge often levelled at the SES, which is seen as some as irredeemably middle class. It goes without saying that Cambridge also suffers from (and enjoys) a reputation for elitism. The danger is that people withdraw into an ivory tower of “good company” and lose touch with “ordinary people”. This can happen if you live in a castle in Ireland, teach Classics at Oxbridge, or get involved in a hierarchical spiritual organisation like SES. There is inevitably the establishment of an in-group and an out-group, with the out-group being by definition uninitiated, unenlightened, ignorant and deluded. This is a problem.

While I was studying at Cambridge, there was a strong resistance to this in-built educational elitism, both within the English department and other subjects, especially SPS (Social and Political Science). There was excitement around new radical, cool approaches such as Post Colonialism, Deconstruction, Feminism and Queer Theory. In other words, there was Postmodernism. We read and attended lectures on Derrida, Lacan and Foucault. We were the “cool kids”, possibly the most snobbish out of everyone, looking down on all the “normies” (especially the public school rowers) who bought into all the Cambridge BS. We were so snobbish, even Cambridge itself seemed beneath us. We were the avante gard. We were the future.

People who have immersed themselves in the strange world of Postmodernism often display amazement when they come across people who have no idea what they are talking about. So it becomes incumbent on them to educate people. The same is true of those Socialist Workers immersed up to their eyeballs in Marxism, or of fanatical Freudians, Evangelical Christians or Militant Atheists. Each has special knowledge that puts them above the ignorant, unreflective and unthinking masses. This is a problem.

The funny thing about all this, which I soon realised, was that the more I looked into Postmodernism, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler etc. or into Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or any of the other great Modern and Postmodern intellectual giants, the less I was reading the great works of literature I was supposed to be reading. It takes a lot of time and effort to read all that stuff. However, there was a lot of pressure to switch from the traditional canon to this exciting new postmodern lingua franca which seemed to draw a deep line in the sand between the old and the new. If you wanted to be on the right side of history, if you wanted to be progressive and modern, you had to join the club and read the scriptures.

I half joined. Although my best friends were completely sold on it, with all the swagger, intellectual brio and moral righteousness of it all, I reserved a love of literature and quiet beauty and wisdom. My original love was the poetry of Keats. I loved Shakespeare. I was moved by Beethoven and Wagner. Although I was challenged and excited by some of the Postmodern ideas, I knew there was something wrong. It also seemed strange that someone from a working class background who made it to Cambridge against the odds would be diverted away from studying the great works of Dante and Milton in favour of the interminable ramblings of barely hinged postmodern thinkers. Wasn’t their rightful place in great tradition of the studia humanitatis, the liberal arts, being stolen from them? Where they perhaps the victims of an elaborate con?

Are we all the victims of a con? The great con of Modernity? What if it turns out that all the heat and smoke, all the self-promotion, all the touted brilliance and revolutionary genius of Modernity and Postmodernity is a lie? Perhaps a century or two from now people will look back at the late twentieth and early twenty first century as a cultural and intellectual dark age. A whole lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

I often forget that not everybody I meet has read Shakespeare and the Bible. I sometimes even assume that they have read or at least heard of Ficino. But not everybody has studied English Literature at university and not everybody has attended courses at the School of Philosophy. But how strange it is that a knowledge of our own rich cultural and spiritual tradition is reserved only for a few specialised elites! Shouldn’t it be our common heritage, regardless of class or background? Shouldn’t we be reading the great literary classics of the past for our edification and enjoyment as a matter of course, as the Victorians did?

Postmodernism has persuaded us that the past is anathema. Too much prejudice. Scientism has persuaded us that art, religion and culture are at best comforting illusions and at worst pernicious pre-modern cancers. The future is science and technology. Everything else is just bread and circuses, and should be treated as such by all self-respecting members of the intelligensia. These two strands of our modern landscape, Modernist and Postmodern, admittedly hate each other, but where they both agree is in their progressive obsession with the future and their almost obsessive compulsive desire to be rid of the moral and intellectual filth of the past. They both dream of wiping the slate clean, just as the great totalitarian regimes of Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler did.

In my estimation, this Brave New World of relentless Modernity is a Babylon system. Whether in the form of mindless consumerism and entertainment or narcissistic self-righteousness, we are subjected to a permanent propaganda campaign, in order to keep us persuaded that, to borrow from the famous Coca Cola slogan, “Modernity is it!” No it isn’t. As both Samuel Beckett and Damon Albarn saw only too clearly, “modern life is rubbish”.

The only way out of the nightmare of Modernity is to stop thinking of ourselves as modern. The only way out is authentic humanist education, which is about the human condition in all times and places, not about more and more Modern and Postmodern self-congratulatory propaganda. Modernity has created several generations of uneducated and mis-educated people who as a consequence can be manipulated as easily as little Subbuteo figures. Who can stand up against the might of Modernist ideologies without any appeal to the authority of the Bible, or Plato, or Emerson, because they’ve never read them? The con is that we are taught that the best way to think for ourselves is to avoid the influence of the great minds of the past. This is precisely why we cannot think for ourselves, and why we cede our thinking to politically-correct, cultural and technocratic experts.

Modernity is Babylon. It’s high time we wake up and smell the coffee and educate ourselves.

“The [Babylonian] exile began with the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and its Temple and the ending of the Davidic monarchy in 586 BC. Following a failed rebellion by the kingdom of Judah against the Babylonian Empire, Nebuchadnezzar besieged the city of Jerusalem, and deported most of its inhabitants over the period 597-581 to Babylon. […] They would remain in exile until the fall of Babylon to Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BC.”

Alister McGrath, The Great Mystery

In the Christian tradition, Babylon has come to symbolise exile in an alien land where we don’t belong. We are “strangers in a strange land”. It also carries the suggestion of a corrupt world, a socio-political system of oppression and injustice. This is a central concept for Rastafarianism, for example. Some Jamaican immigrants to Britain after the Second World War felt this sense of exile keenly, and developed a negative view of their host country, which they experienced as a demonic web of petty, complicated bureaucracy and arbitrary laws, a “Babylon System”. This then became associated in the popular counter-cultural imagination with the capitalist system, represented primarily by the most powerful capitalist country in the world, the United States.

In the original meaning given it by Medieval Christians, however, Babylon represented exile from our true spiritual home. There was a sense that, even safe in their own country and in their own homes, Christians don’t really belong in this world. We are like pilgrims on Earth, temporary travellers en route to another, better world. This “other world” was variously called The New Jerusalem, The Promised Land, Zion, Paradise, Eden or The Kingdom of God. The longing for this true home, the deep spiritual home-sickness that it engendered was personal evidence that we really were in exile. As St Paul wrote, “here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14) And as C.S. Lewis famously put it in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world”.

In my thinking about our place in the world over the past few years, I have made extensive use of the Bhavachakra, the Tibetan Wheel of Life, which seems to me such a powerful depiction of the different ways in which we become spiritually lost. It consists of six realms, which can be understood as six different ego states: the Heavenly Realm (Devaloka), the Hell Realm (Narakaloka), and four other realms, the Human, Titan, Hungry Ghost and the Animal Realms. We might say that during our brief sojourn on Earth, we find ourselves exiled in any one of these realms, populated respectively by Divas, Demons, Muggles, Muppets, Addicts and Victims. As a whole, the Tibetan Wheel of Life might be characterised as The Wheel of Babylon.

Things can seem hopeless, even bleak, as we survey the world around us with a critical eye. Babylon is strong. Sometimes it feels so strong that there seems to be no way out, as if it were the very fabric of existence, the creation of a malevolent demiurge perhaps, forming an underlying matrix from which it is impossible to escape. But as in the film The Matrix, could there be a red pill that can pull us out of the Wheel of Babylon?

When I think of mainstream Western culture and its formative ideas and influences, I cannot help agreeing with Iain McGilchrist’s pessimistic diagnosis in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Everything seems to point to the increasing disenchantment, mechanisation and dehumanisation you would expect from chronic left hemisphere dominance. The totalitarianisms of the twentienth century, the wars and genocides, the shallow consumerism of late capitalism, the Utopian myths of progress, the mass hypnosis of the media, the existential meaninglessness of materialism, all point to the tightening of the grip of Babylon on people’s hearts and minds.

But there is cause for hope. Starting in the the fourteenth century in Italy, the European Renaissance uncovered the treasures of the antiquity, which had lain almost completely forgotten for centuries. The humanities were born, invigorating Western culture through a rich education in the arts, rhetoric and philosophy. Plato and Aristotle, Pindar, Homer, Cicero, and a whole pantheon of classical authors were studied and used as a springboard for new insights into life and the human condition. Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, Marsilio Ficino and others spearheaded the great cultural and spiritual movement that came to be known as Renaissance Humanism. The word “humanism” is derived from the Latin phrase studia humanitatis, which basically means “humane studies” or “liberal arts”. It actually had nothing to do with “secular humanism”, an invention of the twentieth century, which defines itself in opposition to religion. The original humanists had a much broader and more liberal view of humanity, including religion and spirituality as central components of the human experience. The Renaissance humanists were almost exclusively Christians.

There is a lot of talk and excitement recently about a Psychedelic Renaissance, a rediscovery of the beneficial therapeutic and transformative effects of these miraculous compounds, which for decades have been demonised and criminalised as part of a wider war on drugs. The original pioneers, Albert Hofmann, Alexander Shulgin, Aldous Huxley, were actually initiating the rediscovery of a much more ancient tradition of the spiritual use of psychedelics (or entheogens) in the West, reaching right back to the Eleusinian Mysteries and earlier, in Egypt for example, as well as the shamanic traditions of Siberia, Africa and the Americas.

Since the end of the nineteenth century and picking up speed in the 1960’s, there has also been an enormous rise in interest in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and other Eastern religions in the West. This has fed into developments in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology, the Human Potential Movement and the New Age. Although under the surface of mainstream culture, and in some senses associated with the counter-culture, this blossoming of Eastern wisdom and practices such as meditation, yoga and martial arts, can itself be considered a significant renaissance of its own. We might call it the Eastern Renaissance.

Since the end of the eighteenth century and reaching its apotheosis in the middle of the nineteenth, there has also been another renaissance, associated with poetic sensibility and a deep human connection with the natural world, known as Romanticism. An associated trend was a renewed appreciation of Medieval chivalric culture, which represented for certain romantics a more authentic mode of being than the limited view of humanity peddled by the Enlightenment architects of the Age of Reason.

Babylon can appear all-powerful. It seems to almost completely control public discourse, and to strictly determine what we can and can’t say, think and do. But beneath the implacable surface of the “Babylon System”, there is the vital, spiritual dynamite of a germinating Spiritual Renaissance, at the same time Christian, Humanist, Romantic, Eastern and Psychedelic, which holds out the promise that we may yet chant down Babylon and enter the Kingdom of God.

There are muggle stories and there are muppet stories. Muggle stories are the ones we constantly tell ourselves about our lives. They tend to be rather mundane and parochial and although of great interest to us, are usually boring for other people, much like our dreams. These are the stories we pay psychotherapists to listen to and that our nearest and dearest have to constantly put up with. They are our personal soap operas.

Muppet stories go beyond our personal dramas in an attempt to make sense of the world. They are metanarratives which impose a single interpretive frame on the world, giving us a sense of reliable meaning and control. Ultimately, they are all examples of reductionism, reducing all complexity to one simple master narrative or theory of everything. They are totalising, veering towards totalitarian, dogmatic, ideological, fundamentalist, often characterised by passionate zealotry and activism. Current examples are militant atheism, rationalism, reified postmodernism, Marxism, fascism and religious fundamentalism. These examples derive their metanarratives from science (scientific materialism/ neo-Darwinism), philosophy (analytical philosophy and critical theory), politics and religion.

In the upper half of the Tibetan Wheel of Life, there are muggles (the human realm), muppets (the titan realm) and divas (the deva realm). So what about the diva/ devas? What about the stories of the gods? Well, the motto of the diva is; “neither a muggle nor a muppet be”. They see the limitations of our little, personal stories and their reflections in popular culture. They see the limitations of our fundamentalist stories and the way they inevitable embroil us in culture wars. They understand that we are meaning-seeking animals and story-telling creatures and that the best way to approach our lives and the world around us is through a rich tapestry of stories, not through the narrow lens of our own personal story (our “life script” as Eric Berne would say) or a single totalising grand narrative. Instead, they have multiple maps of meaning. They read old books, go to art galleries, theatres and concert halls, even occasionally to church. They are well educated, erudite, witty, sophisticated, cultured, refined. They resist simplistic and reductive visions of reality. They know how stories work. However, they cannot avoid being somewhat elitist and even snobbish, which is what gives them their veneer of diva-ness.

Matthew Arnold, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Dorothy L. Sayers, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, Iris Murdoch, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Jordan Peterson, Pinkola Estes, Alister McGrath, to name a few, are some of the more insightful and well-known advocates of the “storied life”. They divide their time and effort between reaping the imaginative benefits of a deep and serious engagement with culture, with “the best that has been thought and said”, and criticising the short-comings of muggle and muppet story-telling (which is when they get pulled into culture wars – remember that the titans and the gods on the Wheel of Life are perpetually at war).

Christianity is interesting in this regard, because it is such a central story, if not the central story, of Western culture and consciousness. Some of the writers I listed above, such as Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers and Northrop Frye, saw Christianity as a kind of meta story or Ur text, a great archetypal blueprint, “the greatest story ever told” to which all other stories must ultimately refer. Frye called it “the great code”. Whether the story is literally true is besides the point. It appeals to the deep-seated mythos of human consciousness, which goes far deeper than logos. (Karen Armstrong makes this crucial distinction between mythos and logos in her seminal book, The Case for God). However, it is not really good enough to be a thorough-going mythicist when it comes to the Christian story, since the whole thing turns on the coincidence of myth and history, of archetype and person, of the ideal and the actual, the Word made flesh and God made man.

The deep appreciation of the nature of art, myth and story and of how they interpenetrate the real world, is the essence of the deva realm. In the Christian context, this is best characterised as “Renaissance Humanism”, “Christian Humanism” or in its more recent incarnation, “Romantic Christianity”. Representatives of this imaginative religiosity are the English Romantics, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and the German Romantics, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Novalis, Wagner. This type of creative, mythical, poetic sensibility gave rise in the twentieth century to works of imaginative fantasy such as The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia Chronicles. The fact that they appeal to children is not accidental (think of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience), since children have not yet had their innate mythos beaten out of them by the James Mills and Mr Gradgrinds of rationalist modernity.

So there we have it: there are muggle stories, muppet stories and diva stories. There is muggle Christianity, muppet Christianity and diva Christianity. However, true spiritual freedom is to be found beyond the Wheel altogether, where all our stories are transcended in a cloud of forgetting and a cloud of unknowing.

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”.