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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Chilean transpersonal psychologist Claudio Naranjo defines three broad classes of meditation practice: formless meditation, form meditation and expressive meditation. Mindfulness, vipassana and zazen are formless: you just allow thoughts, feelings and sensations to come and go without trying to force or control them in any way. The mind and body settle naturally. Mantras, prayers and visualizations are examples of form meditation: the mind has a specific object and a specific focus.

Expressive meditation is about embodying and expressing energy, the most obvious examples being singing and dancing. But singing and dancing as expressive meditation is very different from singing karaoke or dancing at a wedding or nightclub. We learn to sing and dance as it were “from the outside”, whether we have actual lessons or not. We mimetically acquire the correct vocal inflections and dance moves and mentally impose them on the body. Thus we learn the cultural conventions of song and dance.

If you can allow the body to do its own thing without external imposition, “from the inside”, you are doing expressive meditation. The breath is set free. The voice is set free. The usual social constraints and habitual self-repression are temporarily suspended. The body can express itself spontaneously in sound and gesture. It feels liberating. It feels great.

To a casual observer, it can look and sound amazing or completely ridiculous. As with any art form, either the person expressing is an experienced, skilled practitioner or a clumsy novice. But if they are doing it right, even beginners can express beauty and charm. Think of unselfconscious young children. Their sense of freedom and playfulness shines through whatever they do.

Mysticism is about mastering the arts of formless meditation and form meditation. Shamanism is about mastering the art of expressive meditation. Through practice, awareness shifts from the left to the right hemisphere. You learn to think differently, speak differently, sing differently, dance differently. And you get better at it. You refine your expression. You find the balance between order and chaos. No longer stuck in your head, you can express yourself fully, mind, body and soul.

 

The beauty of our modern connected world is that you can get instant information about anything. I don’t need to explain what Vortex Mathematics is because you can just look it up on the internet.

If you do, or if you’re already familiar with it, you may be inclined to wonder if it might have anything to do with the Wheel of Samsara and the Orthodox Cross. Some people love messing about with numbers and diagrams, especially esoteric ones. It brings complex ideas to life. Most people think it’s crackers.

For fear of being called crackers, I won’t go into any detail here. I will just point out the basic points of contact between the models and let you flesh out the details if you’re interested.

Vortex maths is all about the magic of base ten. The number 9 is the magic number, which draws all things to itself. It is at the centre of the vortex. In the diagram, 9 is at the top of the circle. It is connected to the numbers 3 and 6, forming an equilateral triangle. So far, so enneagram (search it up).

The remaining numbers are connected in a sequence derived from doubling the number and summing the resulting numbers. So 1+1=2; 2+2=4; 4+4=8; 8+8=16=1+6=7; 7+7=14=1+4=5; 5+5=10=1+0=1. The sequence is therefore 1,2,4,8,7,5,1. If you draw a line connecting the points on the circumference of the circle you create an infinity loop.

If you do the same thing with 3 and 6 you get 3+3=6; 6+6=3. The number 9 is the self-contained magic number, representing unity: 9+9=18=1+8=9.

How does this map on to the Wheel of Samsara? It should be fairly obvious. The infinity loop (1,2,4,8,7,5,1…) represents the endless transmigration of consciousness through the six realms. If we start in the Human Realm at point 1, and follow the order of the Tibetan Wheel, we arrive at the following:

1. Muggle; 2. Diva; 4. Muppet; 8. Victim; 7. Demon; 5. Addict; 1. Muggle…

The loop oscillates between two poles, the Muggle-Diva-Muppet pole on the right and the Victim-Demon-Addict pole on the left. This loosely corresponds to the upper and lower worlds, the conscious and the subconscious, Earth and Hell, the surface and the underworld, the upside and the upside down.

3, 6 and 9 are outside this system. The magic number 9 corresponds to the Mystic Shaman; number 3 corresponds to the Warrior Monk; number 6 corresponds to the Philosopher King.

Can you step off the infinity loop and stand firm at the centre of the vortex?

 

I spent Christmas Eve morning with a Romanian boat mechanic. My battery was flat so I had to jump start the engine with his. As he fiddled and I hovered, I couldn’t help thinking about the deeper lesson.

When we feel depleted, we need to recharge our batteries. We need a holiday. Like Christmas. But why did we get flat in the first place? Flat batteries are caused by leaks. But where are the leaks?

We leak energy all the time. Worry, anxiety, negativity, obsession, over reacting, over thinking. When we are ruled by our inner demon, addict, victim, muggle, muppet, or diva, we leak energy.

We accumulate energy simply by limiting its dispersion. Although negative thoughts and feelings are the biggest drain on our energy reserves, even ordinary thinking is a drain. To plug the leaks, you need to stop having negative thoughts, but ultimately, you need to stop thinking. Stopping thinking is meditation.

The energy we accumulate in meditation is experienced as inner vitality. It awakens the inner shaman. Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King. This channel charges your inner energy reserves and defends you from leakage. If you can establish yourself as a “Philosopher King” (or “Philosopher Queen”) you will find it easier and easier to stop thinking and acting like a muppet or a muggle. You will stop draining away your energy.

So keep practicing. And stop leaking!

 

To give credit where credit is due, Terry Eagleton certainly does a good job of “steel manning” his opponents in his highly enjoyable 2001 book of Marxist apologetics, Why Marx was Right. Each chapter begins with a short critique of Marxism, which he then proceeds to “debunk”. He does an excellent job of articulating the critiques, but in my view, a rather flimsy job of debunking them.

Eagleton insists that the real Marx is actually more interesting and more nuanced than his caricature. This didn’t exactly hit me with the force of revelation, but ironically the more nuanced, sensible and sane Marx is portrayed, the less interesting he seems. At least Eagleton seems to be having fun philosophizing though. He riffs off the themes introduced at the start of each chapter, taking us on a varied and never boring tour of the Marxist intellectual landscape, but without ultimately arguing his way to any definitive or satisfying conclusions. We may end up more knowledgeable and more thougtful, but the critiques stand. An image that kept coming up for me was of a witty, intelligent and slightly mischievous professor flinging straw at a steel man, just for the craic of it.

So for what it’s worth, here are ten reasons why I am not a Marxist, shamelessly lifted from Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx was Right:

“ONE : Marxism is finished. It might conceivably have had some relevance to a world of factories and food riots, coal miners and chimney sweeps, widespread misery and massed working classes. But it certainly has no bearing on the increasingly classless, socially mobile, postindustrial Western societies of the present. It is the creed of those who are too stubborn, fearful or deluded to accept that the world has changed for good, in both senses of the term.”

“TWO : Marxism may be all very well in theory. Whenever it has been put into practice, however, the result has been terror, tyranny and mass murder on an inconceivable scale. Marxism might look like a good idea to well-heeled Western academics who can take freedom and democracy for granted. For millions of ordinary men and women, it has meant famine, hardship, torture, forced labour, a broken economy and a monstrously oppressive state. Those who continue to support the theory despite all this are either obtuse, self-deceived or morally contemptible. Socialism means lack of freedom; it also means a lack of material goods, since this is bound to be the result of abolishing markets.”

“THREE : Marxism is a form of determinism. It sees men and women simply as the tools of history, and thus strips them of their freedom and individuality. Marx believed in certain iron laws of history, which work themselves out with inexorable force and which no human action can resist. Feudalism was fated to give way to capitalism, and capitalism will inevitably give way to socialism. As such, Marx’s theory of history is just a secular version of Providence or Destiny. It is offensive to human freedom and dignity, just as Marxist states are.”

“FOUR : Marxism is a dream of utopia. It believes in the possibility of a perfect society, without hardship, suffering, violence or conflict. Under communism there will be no rivalry, selfishness, possessiveness, competition or inequality. Nobody will be superior or inferior to anyone else. Nobody will work, human beings will live in complete harmony with one another, and the flow of material goods will be endless. This astonishingly naïve vision springs from a credulous faith in human nature. Human viciousness is simply set aside. The fact that we are naturally selfish, acquisitive, aggressive and competitive creatures, and that no amount of social engineering can alter this fact, is simply overlooked. Marx’s dewy-eyed vision of the future reflects the absurd unreality of his polemic as a whole.”

“FIVE : Marxism reduces everything to economics. It is a form of economic determinism. Art, religion, politics, law, war, morality, historical change: all these are seen in the crudest terms as nothing more than the reflections of the economy or class struggle. The true complexity of human affairs is passed over for a monochrome vision of history. In his obsession with economics, Marx was simply an inverted image of the capitalist system he opposed. His thought is at odds with the pluralist outlook of modern societies, conscious as they are that the varied range of historical experience cannot be crammed into a single rigid framework.”

“SIX : Marx was a materialist. He believed that nothing exists but matter. He had no interest in the spiritual aspects of humanity, and saw human consciousness as just a reflex of the material world. He was brutally dismissive of religion, and regarded morality simply as a question of the end justifying the means. Marxism drains humanity of all that is most precious about it, reducing us to inert lumps of material stuff determined by our environment. There is an obvious route from this dreary, soulless vision of humanity to the atrocities of Stalin and other disciples of Marx.”

“SEVEN : Nothing is more outdated about Marxism than its tedious obsession with class. Marxists seem not to have noticed that the landscape of social class has changed almost out of recognition since the days when Marx himself was writing. In particular, the working class which they fondly imagine will usher in socialism has disappeared almost without trace. We live in a social world where class matters less and less, where there is more and more social mobility, and where talk of class struggle is as archaic as talk of burning heretics at the stake. The revolutionary worker, like the wicked top-hatted capitalist, is a figment of the Marxist imagination.”

“EIGHT : Marxists are advocates of violent political action. They reject a sensible course of moderate, piecemeal reform and opt instead for the bloodstained chaos of revolution. A small band of insurrectionists will rise up, overthrow the state and impose its will on the majority. This is one of several senses in which Marxism and democracy are at daggers drawn. Because they despise morality as mere ideology, Marxists are not especially troubled by the mayhem their politics would unleash on the population. The end justifies the means, however many lives may be lost in the process.”

“NINE : Marxism believes in an all-powerful state. Having abandoned private property, socialist revolutionaries will rule by means of a despotic power, and that power will put an end to individual freedom. This has happened wherever Marxism has been put into practice; there is no reason to expect that things would be different in the future. It is part of the logic of Marxism that the people give way to the party, the party gives way to the state, and the state to a monstrous dictator. Liberal democracy may not be perfect, but it is infinitely preferable to being locked in a psychiatric hospital for daring to criticise a savagely authoritarian government.”

“TEN : All the most interesting radical movements of the past four decades have sprung up from outside Marxism. Feminism, environmentalism, gay and ethnic politics, animal rights, antiglobalisation, the peace movement: these have now taken over from an antiquated commitment to class struggle, and represent new forms of political activism which have left Marxism well behind. Its contributions to them have been marginal and uninspiring. There is indeed still a political left, but it is one appropriate to a postclass, postindustrial world.”

I was curious to see how Terry Eagleton would go about addressing and even perhaps refuting these claims. I was open to the possibility that the scales might fall from my eyes and that finally I would get it. Surely I had missed something? And what better hands to be coaxed back into the fold than those of my charming and erudite undergraduate hero (I read English Lit)?

But all I found were a jumble of half-baked arguments and assertions. Whatever the ins and outs of Marx’s thought and his intellectual relations to other nineteenth century thinkers, it seems painfully obvious that there is a wide gulf between Marx the man and Marxism, and that Marxism is closer to the ten vignettes copied and pasted above, than to the supposed subtleties of Marx’s personal intellectual genius. If only academics of Terry Eagleton’s caliber can distill the profound truths from the apparent nonsense, what hope for the rest of us? If we are attracted by Marxism, won’t it most likely be the bastardised version? The anti-capitalist “eat the rich” variety?

Don’t take my word for it though. Read the book and make up your own mind.

 

“Marx’s work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but one of leisure. Free self-realisation is a from of “production”, to be sure; but it is not one that is coercive. And leisure is necessary if men and women are to devote time to running their own affairs. It is thus surprising that Marxism does not attract more card-carrying idlers and professional loafers to its ranks. This, however, is because a lot of energy must be expended on achieving this goal. Leisure is something you have to work for.”

Terry Eagleton

Marx highlighted how grinding poverty robs people of leisure time because they have to work all hours of the day just to survive. Although he pointed to the tragic plight of the busy workers in newly industrialised British cities, this is even more true of traditional agrarian societies. Ironically, it was the industrial revolution and capitalism which began to free people from the servitude of labour and open up new vistas of leisure.

Fast forward to the labour saving devices of the 1950’s. Fast forward to the AI revolution and the further spread of automation throughout the manufacturing and even service industries. A bright future of endless leisure beckons. No more slaving over the washing or in the cotton mills. Plenty of free time for “self-realisation”.

Are we ready for the communist utopia then? Not quite. Even though we don’t really need to work all hours of the day to survive, we still work like dogs. Why? Because we want a bigger house and a better car. We do have plenty of leisure time left over though. But we don’t seem to use much if any of it for self-realisation. We’d rather spend it on entertainment.

This is what “the evil of capitalism” seems to amount to for Marxists. People work all day in pointless jobs and then spend their evenings being brainwashed by idiotic TV shows and advertising. What kind of a life is that? I call it Muggle Life. Aldous Huxley called it Brave New World.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how much money you have. You still end up being a cog in the capitalist machine. This is the half that Marx was right about. All his talk of “alienation” boils down to this dehumanising, superficial existence of material production and consumption. It sucks.

Marx was reticent about speculating on what the communist utopia would actually be like. We know that the communist dystopia looks something like George Orwell’s 1984, as has been fully realised in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But why wouldn’t the utopian version be something like Brave New World?

As Terry Eagleton says, “leisure is something you have to work for”, which is why Marxists cannot enjoy the fruits of their leisure. They are too busy. Busy doing what? Working for the future leisure utopia of course! And how do they keep themselves busy? Well, they read Marxist tracts. They attend meetings. They go on marches and demos. They talk incessantly about how awful capitalism is.

Marxists are too busy to “self-realise”. They will not rest until the communist leisure utopia has arrived. But what if the capitalist leisure utopia has already arrived? What’s the advantage of a communist one? Well, for a start, people won’t waste their time on stupid capitalist bourgeois nonsense. They won’t be greedy. They won’t be individualistic or materialistic. They will be communists. Which sound lovely if you happen to be a communist. But if you’re not, you’ll probably be hard pressed to think of anything worse.

In any case, Marx was right about leisure. You need leisure time in order to self-realise. But he was wrong about how to go about getting it. Perpetual revolution, perpetual Marxism, perpetual class struggle, don’t exactly free up time. You just end up swapping muggle pastimes for muppet ones. And you will never be content to put down your arms, because human nature being what it is, however history turns out, you will never accept that we have actually reached the longed for utopia.

The only way to truly “self-realise” is to realise that you are responsible for what you do with your time. You can choose how much to work. You can choose how to spend your free time. You don’t really need loads of money, so you don’t really need to work really hard. You don’t really need to buy that new jacket or watch that new series. You don’t have to be a capitalist muggle. Equally, you can choose not to obsess about how other people don’t have the same luxury. You don’t have to be a Marxist muppet.

If you really want a leisure utopia of endless time for self-realisation here and now, not in some fanciful imaginary future, why not be a monk or a nun? That’s what monasteries are for.

Marx was half right in that we need basic material conditions in order to be able to fulfill our human potential for self-realisation. But he was wrong in supposing that material conditions go all the way. At a certain point, a very close point in fact, the spiritual takes over.

Which is not to say you shouldn’t work for the material betterment of humanity. Some people are called to help the poor and to fight on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them call themselves Christians; some of them call themselves Marxists. But the poor are always with us. The way society is organised is not necessarily fundamentally corrupt and does not necessarily need to be completely overturned. In fact, the British model of parliamentary democracy works rather well. Locke, Smith, Mandeville, Hume, Burke, Ferguson and Disraeli were not stupid. In any case, the Marxist critique of capitalism as such is irrelevant to the actual amelioration of living standards for real people in the real world.

There is a world of difference between social democracy and democratic socialism. The former is committed to social justice and relief of the dispossessed. The latter is committed to upending the capitalist system. History has shown more incontrovertibly than any political argument that socialism is a disaster for everyone except the apparatchiks.

The only way to tackle the excesses of capitalism is through a spiritual revolution, not a material one. We are in the middle of a spiritual crisis. Sadly, Marxism is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

 

The eighteenth century Enlightenment myth of the Middle Ages was that it was an age of darkness, shrouded in the mists of superstition and mysticism. It was the same charge leveled against the Catholic church by Luther and the Protestants the previous century. With the Reformation and the Enlightenment, Europe was dragged out of ignorance and into the light of Reason and Common Sense.

Although it was a myth, it was powerful enough to persist up to the present. We still think of the Enlightenment as a watershed in history, as the beginning of the modern age. And in a sense, it is. But the light of the Enlightenment cast a big shadow: first the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars, and then the Twentieth Century.

It is true that the Middle Ages are shrouded in mystery and darkness. But the mistake of the Enlightenment philosophers was to assume that this was a bad thing. There is no light without dark and no dark without light. The Christian mystics of the first half of the second millennium understood this. The Cloud of Unknowing, written in the 14th Century, beautifully articulated the process by which the human mind could attain the true light of enlightenment, through unknowing and darkness.

We are only haltingly coming to appreciate this in the modern age, blinded as we are by the phosphorescent lights of Science and Rationality. Part of our re-membering is due to the discovery in the West of the treasure trove of Eastern mysticism. The first chapter of the Tao Te Ching sums it up beautifully:

Yet mystery and manifestations / arise from the same source. / This source is called darkness. / Darkness within darkness. / The gateway to all understanding.

T.S. Eliot understood that the banishment of mystery and darkness in the modern world was a spiritual tragedy:

Not here / Not here the darkness in this twittering world.

But there is good darkness and bad darkness. There is the pregnant mystery at the heart of creation and there is the impenetrable veil of ignorance spun by human minds. Of course there was plenty of that in the Middle Ages. But that was what the church was for. Orthodoxy mitigated the descent into madness and confusion that descent into the dark might occasion. Tradition was the ongoing conversation between the ineffable mystery and its representation in word, art, music and doctrine.

In my little Tibetan mind map, the Titans (muppets) can fall foul of either too much artificial light or too much artificial darkness. Type 1 muppets, the scientific materialist militant atheists, live in a false dawn of LED strip lighting. Type 2 muppets, the cultural relativist postmodern nihilists, live in a false dusk of cynical nonsense and obscurantism masquerading as wisdom.

Type 3 muppets, the revolutionary socialist utopians, live in the long shadow of the Enlightenment. Whether Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist, Jucheist, Mussoliniist or Hitlerist, these muppets believe that no amount of darkness can dim the radiant purity of their enlightened vision. Type 4 muppets, the religious fundamentalist jihadists (of all affiliations) likewise.

O dark dark dark. / They all go into the dark, / The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

That’s what you get when you cut yourself loose from the mystery of your own spiritual tradition.

 

The idea of evolution is implicit in religion. If there were no progress, there would be no point. In the Judeo-Christian tradition this is expressed in terms of our personal and collective relationship with God. Spiritual progress is defined by our increasing proximity to God. Spiritual regress is of course the opposite. We made a deal with God, back in the mists of time, a covenant. If we obey God’s laws and listen to his prophets, if we do our best to be a godly people and live godly lives, then things will go well for us. If not, not.

Evolution is at the heart of contemporary New Age thinking. The Potential Movement, Transpersonal Psychology and Positive Psychology are all about fulfilling our human spiritual potential by evolving. Ken Wilber’s classic door stopper, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality was subtitled The Spirit of Evolution for a reason. My personal favourite in the meta-narrative genre is Andrew Smith’s The Dimensions of Experience, subtitled A Natural History of Consciousness. This is an explicitly panpychist thesis, painstakingly tracing the evolution of consciousness through the three great domains of matter, life and mind (and beyond).

Then there’s the soporific Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential by Barbara Marx Hubbard and the worthy The New Cosmic Story: Inside Our Awakening Universe by John Haught. Haught is writing from a Christian perspective, though in a different vein to Teilhard de Chardin. However, it is Indian religion and philosophy which truly excels at evolutionary spirituality, most impressively in Sri Aurobindo’s classic, The Life Divine.

According to these religious narratives, it is the mystics who are sitting at the top of the evolutionary tree. You might call them Buddhas, Enlightened Ones, Saints, Ascended Masters. They’re basically mystics. They have realized the mystery of existence. But in the secular world, there are other things at the top of the tree.

Following Charles Darwin, who naturalized the idea of evolution with his theory of natural selection, secular humanists dreamed of other futures. The underlying concept, popularized as “the survival of the fittest”, appeared to justify the rule of the strong over the weak as “natural”. This led to Social Darwinism, the idea that societies could and should be organised along strictly Darwinian lines. The logical outcome of this was the Eugenics Movement, which believed that only the “fittest” human beings should reproduce, in order to ensure the healthy future evolution of the species.

George Bernard Shaw was famously a eugenics enthusiast, as was Adolf Hitler. The dream of a brighter, healthier future purged of cripples and dimwits cut across all party lines. The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche provided intellectual weight to the idea of a future Superman and Master Race. In his Genealogy of Morals he argued against the perverse Christian doctrine of looking after the poor and the infirm and for a return to the steely virility of the pre-Christian pagans, the Greeks, the Spartans, the Romans, and the Saxons and Teutons, the “blond beasts”. The Christians had turned the Western world into a smelly sanitorium, a culture enfeebled by the care of the feeble, when it should be a bracing battle field, strengthened by the death of the feeble and the survival of the fittest.

Nietzsche was a subtle and brilliant thinker. I feel bad caricaturing him like this. But he undeniably expressed this fascistic idea more forcefully than anyone. What is “the Will to Power” but exactly what it says on the tin? What is “Bad Faith” but a pathetic, pusillanimous, emasculated Christian response to the Will to Power?

There seems to be something of a revival of this way of thinking. The popularity of Ayn Rand, particularly in the United States is testament to the fact. Many self-proclaimed Objectivists or Libertarians are basically advocating for “the survival of the fittest”. Take away all the irritating and enervating restraints on individual freedoms imposed by an over-protective nanny state and let natural selection run its course. And let the devil take the hindmost.

This is why Libertarians are the enemies of Liberals. Liberals took a different path from Darwin. But before we get to the Liberals, let’s have a closer look at the Communists. Lenin and his acolytes were devotees of Karl Marx. Karl Marx was heavily influenced by Georg Hegel. Hegel’s great masterpiece, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, is basically an account of human history as the expression of deeper evolutionary currents, which he associated with Geist (Spirit).

New Age thinkers like Ken Wilber like this idea because it maps onto their conception of a spiritual undercurrent to history. This is also why Nietzsche remains so popular (apart from his eloquent Christian baiting). Zarathustra is an ambiguous figure who is both iconoclastic and mystical, and who can be equally appropriated by Nazis and hippies.

However, take away the religious overtones, and you are left with a stark choice: “Left Hegelianism” or “Right Hegelianism”. Marx was a Left Hegelian. For Marx, the underlying current of human history was leading inexorably to a classless society. His analysis of Dialectic Materialism suggested that through progressive struggles and revolutions and Class War (the perennial struggle over resources and means of production between the Haves and Have Nots), the workers, the Proletariat, would emerge victorious and usher in a Communist Utopia, where all private property would be abolished and all things shared in common in a great Brotherhood of Man.

In Marx’s reading, it wasn’t a Superman sitting at the top of the evolutionary tree, it was a Superstate. Instead of power being concentrated in the Powerful, power would be concentrated in one centralised, bureaucratic state, which would be “owned” by everyone. No-one would have any power at all, because the state would have a monopoly of power. Ergo, everyone would be equally free and happy (or rather, equally unfree and unhappy).

For the “Right Hegelians”, Darwinism implied the survival of the fittest in the Great Game, where power and resources were distributed naturally according to the laws of the jungle. For the “Left Hegelians”, it implied the ultimate concentration and therefore perfect distribution of power through the absorption of the individual into the collective. Surely this was the most highly evolved social organisation imaginable? For termites maybe.

Anyway, back to the Liberals. The absolute value for Liberals is tolerance. Everyone should be tolerated. Everyone should be free to do whatever they like. Without God, everything is permitted. In this, they are arm in arm with the Libertarians. However, as soon as people are free to do whatever they like, they can’t help stepping on each other’s toes. It doesn’t help much to say “you are free to do whatever you like as long as it doesn’t impinge on anyone else’s freedom” because it’s not just about the odd isolated thing. Over the long term, your freedom to live in a decent society will inevitably be compromised.

So Liberals are morally compelled to safeguard people’s rights through a kind of compulsory tolerance called Political Correctness. If you don’t like what other people get up to, you must keep it to yourself, for fear of social exclusion. This is of course implicit in any society. There are certain social norms and taboos which, if broken, lead to varying levels of moral censure and can be punished in extreme cases by exile, imprisonment or even death. The difference in Liberalism, is that there are no social norms. Any attempt to articulate social norms is indeed considered Illiberal.

The chaos and confusion surrounding the Transgender movement is perfectly illustrative of this problem. It is not difficult to imagine further, even more transgressive movements in the future, causing even more moral havoc, perhaps under the aegis of Transhumanism. Liberal will be committed to defending them all.

The popular historian Yuval Noah Harari describes the horrific events of the twentieth century as the Humanist Wars. He sees them as the humanist equivalent of the Religious Wars in Europe in the seventeenth century. The rivals for the humanist crown in this war are identified as “Liberal Humanism”, “Socialist Humanism” and “Evolutionary Humanism” (by “Evolutionary Humanism” he means Fascism and the Nazism, the “Right Hegelians”). According to Harari, the winner is Liberal Humanism. Socialist Humanism and Evolutionary Humanism are dead.

But all three humanisms are really evolutionary humanisms. They are all founded on a naturalistic neo-Darwinian conception of humanity as having evolved from apes some time in the distant past and currently evolving into an unknown future of infinite possibility. Perhaps Liberalism is the best of a bad bunch and deserved to win, but like it’s human ape cousins, it also seems to be foundering on the shoals of human vanity and ignorance. It seems to be leading us down some strange and frankly inhuman paths. Neo-liberalism is only the tip of the iceberg.

Humanists think they can forge humanity in the image of their own favourite idols and stick their own angel on top of the evolutionary tree. But the descendants of Abraham and Isaac (okay and Ishmael), the “chosen people”, whether Jew, Christian or Muslim, patiently remind us that we cannot mold reality according to our personal whims and ideologies. Whether we know it or not, we have made a pact with God. We are all of us people of God, made in the image of God. We are not the children of apes, we are children of God.

In reality, there is only ever one thing at the top of the tree, and whether it’s a star or an angel, it’s definitely not the work of human hands.

 

Delusion is the root of Samsara. If you are to escape from Samsara, you must cut the tree at the root. You may have to deal with your demons, with your anxieties and depressions, your addictions, your ignorance and arrogance. But if you don’t deal with your delusions, however hard you work on yourself, you will always be pulled back into the vortex of Samsara.

All spiritual traditions use the metaphors of sleep and waking and of death and life to point to the radical difference between two distinct states of consciousness. The Ancient Egyptians used the word “mut” to describe the state of the living dead, or the spiritually dead. Although you appear to be alive and awake, you are in fact asleep and dead. You are a zombie.

This insight is revealed at the moment of spiritual breakthrough. If you meditate or pray long and hard enough, if you are still enough, you will suddenly be flooded by waves of energy and light. You will be filled with bliss, “ananda”, and consciousness, “chitta”. You will feel intensely alive and wide awake. In that moment, you will appreciate how dead and asleep you were before.

Death and life, sleep and waking are relative. It’s actually a sliding scale. As you board the tube the following morning, you will see in the faces of your fellow passengers their degree of sleep and death, their degree of “mut”. Most of them will be hypnotized, gazing at their phones. Some of them might actually be zombies.

According to Daniel Dennett, we are all zombies in the philosophical sense. We behave as though we were conscious, we may even believe that we are conscious, but in reality, consciousness is nothing but a clever illusion conjured up by the brain. This is of course, as Galen Strawson pointed out, the silliest claim ever made. But it is the logical conclusion of materialism.

Maybe if you believe you are a zombie, you actually start acting like one. Maybe you lose your élan vital and your inner light is dimmed close to perfect darkness. Maybe. This is a plausible consequence of this particular delusion. It appears to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Disbelieve in consciousness and you don’t experience yourself as conscious.

The same is also true for disbelief in God. Disbelieve in God and there is no God. Surely this is clear evidence that He doesn’t exist? If His existence depends on belief, then He is obviously just a subjective phenomenon, another “optical illusion of consciousness” (sorry I forgot, there is no consciousness!)

But then again, maybe you are in fact conscious, whether you believe it or not, and maybe there is in fact a God, whether you believe in Him or not. You may have a diminished experience of life, consciousness and divinity, but if you are to any degree alive and awake, there will still be some, if only a trace.

I agree with Strawson. The denial of consciousness is the silliest claim ever made. The second silliest is the denial of God. In the end the two denials come to the same thing, as in some mysterious sense, God and Consciousness are identical. This, at least, is the claim of the Indian and Sufi mystics, and, in fact, of all mystics.

I have distinguished four basic classes of “muppet”. These represent four types of delusion. Type 1 muppets are scientific atheists. They are physicalists, naturalists, materialists. They believe in science as the ultimate repository of all knowledge about the universe. Type 2 muppets are philosophical atheists, or more commonly nowadays, postmodern atheists. They are relativists and social constructivists. Type 3 muppets are revolutionary atheists and therefore political activists. They believe in a human-made utopia, where “the world will live as one”. Type 4 muppets are religious atheists. They think they believe in God, but they don’t really. They believe in their religion and their idea of God. They are scriptural literalists and fundamentalists.

The common denominator is atheism. Muppets are “Fighting Spirits” because they are in rebellion against God. It is a permanent revolution, to coin a phrase. The result is dissociation from the well-springs of light and life. The consequence is the spread of ignorance, arrogance, addiction, depression and hatred. In other words, we become muggles, divas, addicts, victims and demons. All these archetypes ultimately derive from the basic delusion that there is no God.

But there is a God. If you don’t believe it, you need to work it out for yourself. You’ve probably seen through Type 4 muppetry. If not, the bookshelves are groaning under the weight of writers showing how deluded religious fundamentalism is. The most famous are the Four Horsemen, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris.

If you are tempted by Type 3 muppetry, you should read John Gray and Roger Scruton. If you are partial to  bit of Type 2 muppetry, read some real philosophy, Ancient or Analytical. And check out Stephen Hicks and James Lindsay.

The first and last, the most formidable bastion against belief in God is of course scientific materialism. This is the one we moderns have swallowed whole. This is the one that needs the strongest purgatives. This is the biggest delusion, which is ultimately at the root of all the others.

Fortunately, there are an increasing number of writers successfully countering this delusion through rational argument. I will nod to a few of my personal favourites: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Nagel, David Bentley Hart, Rupert Sheldrake, David Berlinski, Alister McGrath, Jonathan Sacks and John Lennox.

Once this delusion is dispelled, all the others will vanish in its wake. Then you will be free to enjoy the fruits of blessedness: enlightenment and eternal life.