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.

 

If you do not consider yourself to be a muggle you must have special knowledge which lifts you above the crowd. Not for you the herd mentality and slave morality of the masses. You see through the charade. Your magic talisman defends you from the sleep of ignorance.

So you’re not a muggle. You probably wouldn’t be reading this if you were. So what are you? And what is the magical superpower which makes you so special? Also, is it your own self-concocted magic or have you borrowed it? Are you your own self-made hero or do you have a champion?

If you are a Christian, your champion is Christ. If you are a Nietzschean, your champion is Nietzsche. Christ promises salvation. Through Him you can overcome the fallen world. Nietzsche also promises a kind of salvation, although his brand actually involves salvation from Christianity.

Ultimately, both Christ and Nietzsche promise salvation from muggles, but in seemingly opposite ways. They are rivals for the anti-muggle crown. The Supermen do battle with the Saints for the “top human” prize. The Communists famously did battle with the Fascists for the totalitarian prize. And there are many other rivals and many other prophets.

Who is your champion? Dawkins? Foucault? Marx? Ron L Hubbard? I picked these four because they are clear representatives of four general anti-muggle positions. They are not the only champions of these positions of course. They have rival champions as well as allies. However, their real enemies are to be found in the other three rival camps.

I call this “Muppet Wars”. Muppets think they are special. They look down on muggles. But they just can’t help bickering and fighting. “Type 1” muppets have the magic of science and reason on their side. They are atheist, neo-Darwinian, scientific materialists. “Type 2” muppets have the magic of critical theory and deconstruction. They are postmodernist, relativist, progressivist liberals. “Type 3” muppets have the magic of idealism and people power. They are utopian, collectivist, political activists. “Type 4” muppets have the magic of revealed truth. They are religious fundamentalists.

Perhaps it’s simpler to describe the Muppet Wars through the lens of basic political orientations. Type 4 muppets are the “Old Right” (royalists, imperialists, oligarchs); type 3 muppets are the “Old Left” (all forms of socialism, including National Socialism); type 2 muppets are the “New Left” (progressives, neo-Marxist postmodernists); type 1 muppets are the New Right (Libertarians, the Alt Right).

Type 1 muppets hate type 4 muppets and vice versa. Type 1 muppets also fight with type 2 muppets and type 3 muppets. Type 4 muppets hate type 2 muppets, which is generously reciprocated. Type 2 muppets hate type 3 muppets and type 3 muppets hate type 2 muppets as well as type 4 muppets. However, type 2 muppets sometimes forge alliances with type 3 muppets as do type 1 muppets and type 4 muppets. This can be extremely dangerous.

So where does Jordan Peterson fit in all this? He is critical of totalitarianism and collectivism; he hates type 3 muppets. He is critical of identity politics and postmodernism; he hates type 2 muppets. He is critical of  religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism; he hates type 4 muppets. He is critical of the New Atheism and the New Right; he disagrees with type 1 muppets.

There is a difference between hate and disagreement. Sometimes hate is justified and even called for. Peterson is arguably right to hate totalitarianism. He is also arguably right to hate the anarchy implicit in postmodernism. These fit nicely into his Order/Chaos hypothesis. Too much Order (totalitarianism) is hateful as is too much Chaos (postmodernism). Fundamentalism also is excessive Order, so he’s justified in hating fundamentalism as well.

That deals with types 2, 3 and 4. Peterson clearly hates them all, and his “hate speech” has certainly ruffled a few feathers. However, he employs a very different tone when it comes to type 1 types – he actually treats them with respect. Think of his disagreements with Sam Harris and Steven Pinker. He doesn’t treat them like muppets. He treats them like intellectual equals.

Both Sam Harris and Steven Pinker call themselves left wing. They are probably very close to Peterson’s own political stance: “classical liberal”. Politically, they are allied against progressives (type 2’s), political extremists (type 3’s) and ultra conservatives (type 4’s). Where Peterson (along with Ben Shapiro and Tom Holland) parts company with Harris and Pinker is on the issue of the Enlightenment.

Peterson et al. believe that classical liberal Enlightenment ideals derive from the Judeo-Christian tradition and cannot survive without it. Like cut flowers, they will wither and die. Pinker et al. believe that science and reason are enough to maintain a humane society. But is this enough to resolve the “Meaning Crisis”? They ultimately offer a flat vision of reality without any ultimate purpose or meaning. Which is, of course, what Peterson is most concerned about.

This is where I think the real action is. And this is where Jordan Peterson is most interesting. The big question is, how can we fill the spiritual void left by the secularization of the Western world? If we don’t deal with this central question, it will (perhaps) continue to be filled by parasitical ersatz religions such as Neo-Marxism or “Woke Religion”. In my view, the Culture War is a side show. It’s just a local battle between type 1 and type 2 muppets. It’s a symptom, not the cause of the problem.

Liberal secular humanism is unstable. It can be maintained for a while, but it will always devolve into nihilism , utopianism or fundamentalism eventually. It fails to answer the deep human need for transcendent truth and meaning beyond the everyday. In its weak form, it is a muggle creed and is easily overthrown by the more vociferous muppets. In its strong form, it becomes a muppet creed in its own right (think Auguste Comte or Herbert Spencer).

It is easy to misunderstand Peterson’s real significance because he aligns himself with type 1 muppets against type 2 muppets, which include right wing libertarians like Carl Benjamin and Alt Right provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos. But neither is he a champion of the Enlightenment like Steven Pinker. He is not a type 1 muppet at all. He is speaking to something deeper, something beyond the Muppet Wars altogether.

Of course there is a place for calling out the irrational, unreasonable excesses of the New Left. There is a place for politics. But that’s not my place.

Which is why I left the Jordan Peterson Discussion Group.

There seems to have emerged a new mini-genre of books dealing with the difficulty of having difficult conversations. There is Alan Jacobs’ How to Think and Mick Hume’s Trigger Warning and more recently Peter Bhogossian’s How to Have Impossible Conversations and Dave Rubin’s Don’t Burn This Book. You might include Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and, I suppose, Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds.

What’s it all about? I would say it’s about the re-assertion of classical liberal values in a post-liberal world. Liberalism is in something of a crisis at the moment (if you hadn’t noticed). In a way it is a victim of its own success, as the “negative” liberalism of John Stuart Mill has somehow morphed into the “positive” liberalism of progressivism. By “negative” I simply mean the principle of “negative liberty”, whereby everyone is deemed free to pursue their own version of the good life, so long as it doesn’t impinge on the freedom of others to pursue theirs. “Positive liberalism” on the other hand imposes a specific liberal vision onto everyone else through active coercion. This kind of liberalism was the subject of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism.

Classical liberalism is minimalist. The aim is to give people as much freedom as possible to live their lives as they see fit within the minimum requirements of public order established by the rule of law. That’s basically it. As long as you don’t break the law, your morals, your beliefs and your actions are your own business. Moral censure and social sanctions are naturally provided by the communities in which you live, but the state has nothing to say about the private lives of its citizens.

I have the right to follow my own version of the good life, but I also have the right to communicate my vision and even to attempt to persuade people to come round to my way of seeing things. I can write books, give talks and hold meetings. I can proselytize and cajole with all the rhetorical skills I can muster, and use everything in my power to convince people of my position. What I cannot do is force people to adopt my beliefs against their will. I cannot use violence or blackmail or any form of manipulation that exceeds the reasonable bounds of ordinary acceptable social intercourse.

What those reasonable bounds are will necessarily be blurred. Excessive force in one culture or context may be judged perfectly acceptable in another. These ambiguities and controversies should also be subject to open debate in a properly functioning liberal civil society. However, as soon as one section of society decides to take matters into their own hands and begins to silence another, through noisy or even violent protest and “no-platforming”, as soon as we have “politically correct” vigilantes, we have a problem. Freedom of speech is the core principle of liberalism, which cannot be violated without putting the very fabric of liberal democracy at risk.

Evelyn Hall put the principle most forcibly with the famous words, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This is the essence of classical liberalism, in contrast to certain modern strains of liberal fascism, which will defend to the death my right not to hear it or let anyone else hear it.

What unites podcasters and youtubers such as Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan and public intellectuals such as Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker (and our beloved Jordan Peterson) is their liberal Enlightenment values, which promote freedom of speech and negative liberty over virtue signalling and positive “liberal” bullying. This is really what ultimately defines the ragtag bunch of thinkers and talking heads known as the IDW (“Intellectual Dark Web”). They stand for open and free inquiry about any and every topic where anything goes, as long as it is done in a spirit of reason and civility.

The so-called “Culture War” is not really a battle of Left vs Right or Young vs Old or what-have-you. It is a battle for the soul of liberalism. Which is why the IDW includes people all over the political and religious spectrum. They are united by a belief in classical liberalism and a determination to defend it in the face of any and all ideologies, including liberal ones, like “Identity Politics”.

The problem with Identity Politics is that personal conviction based on identification with a particular set of doctrines trumps reason and civility. Indeed, reason itself is deemed by many self-styled progressives as an instrument of intellectual oppression. This view of reason as the “handmaiden of power” is only really plausible for people brought up on a postmodern diet of deconstruction and critical theory. But somehow this academic backwater has now taken centre stage in Western cultural discourse. The result is that “applied postmodernism” has relativised and therefore de-legitimised reason itself.

I have some sympathy with the postmodern turn in Continental philosophy. Of course the monolithic universal Reason with a capital ‘R’ worshiped by the Enlightenment philosophes is a myth. There are different ways to legitimately reason about things, and there is no Pure Reason beyond our emotions and intuitions. However, good reasoning is as recognisable to those well versed in rational deliberation as good writing is to seasoned writers or even good painting to good painters.

The fact that reason, like meaning, is inter-subjective, doesn’t mean it cannot express objective truths. It’s just that they are objective inter-subjective truths (they are obviously not the same kind of truths as scientific or mathematical truths). We might say that reason is an emergent social phenomenon that we all participate in to one extent or another. In a qualified sense we can even say that reason has evolved. This being so, we must not be naive enough to treat reason as a given characteristic of what it means to be human, like the fact that we have two legs. Our capacity for reason is hard-won, both historically and individually. And it can be lost.

The underlying liberal motivation for the flattening out of reason, either with the claim that it is an innate human capacity, equally shared by all members of the race, or that it is arbitrary and culturally relative, and therefore equally valid even when widely divergent, stems from the conviction that everyone should have an equal voice, regardless of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc. This is, of course, basic to classical liberalism. Prejudice is obviously bad. However, prejudice is not seen to extend to making judgments concerning the quality of somebody’s rational argument. That would be absurd.

But this is precisely where the de-legitimisation of “universal reason” leads. If hegemonic reason is in fact nothing more than the expression of Western Imperialism, or Colonial Patriarchy, then the logical thing to do is to undermine it. And the people best suited and most entitled to undermine it are precisely those groups who are traditionally considered the victims of Western culture. These are the ones we should listen to, not because they have anything interesting to say, or because they make any sense, but because they represent the alternative “marginal” voices overlooked or even suppressed by the Establishment.

So the theory of “Intersectionality” advocates for the empowerment of the dis-empowered by giving the biggest exposure to the most invisible, and the biggest platform to those with the smallest voice. The fact that black lesbian women tend to have quite loud voices already doesn’t seem to dampen the Intersectionalists’ zeal for social justice. In fact it works perfectly, because a shy Pakistani Muslim girl isn’t such a crowd-puller and she probably wouldn’t want everyone to listen to what she has to say anyway.

Where the logic really falls apart is in the insistence that those who, for whatever reason (educational disadvantage primarily), cannot construct a coherent sentence, let alone argument, should be on an equal footing with those who can. Nodding sagely and smiling politely does not make up for the fact that the emperor has no clothes.

Lack of reason goes hand in hand with incivility, partly as a consequence of frustration at not being able to make a rational case in the first place. Then emotion takes over, and the victim narrative quickly rises to the surface. As the old BDP (Boogie Down Productions) sample goes: “You’re quite hostile…” “I got a right to be hostile! My people been persecuted!”

Then reason and civility fly out the window. The old liberal idea is that reason and civility are the minimum requirement for participation in civil discourse and civil society. In classical liberal circles, if you can’t be reasonable and civil, then you have no place in the conversation, whatever your background. Furthermore, if you can’t reason well, then you should really defer to those who can.

Not any more. With reason and civility demoted to the status of middle class, male, white, bourgeois prejudice, there is no longer any compunction to be either “reasonable” or “civilised”. We don’t inhabit a rational universe any more. We have crossed over into a parallel “meme” universe. We are in “Muppet World”.

Unless we recover our faith in reason and civility, the whole edifice of liberal democracy will crumble and eventually fall. Then heaven help the hindmost!

 

At the risk of being grossly reductionist, here is a gross reduction of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos to the six archetypes on the “Orthodox Cross”.

Rule 1 : “Stand up straight with your shoulders back”. This is the Warrior archetype. It is also the King archetype. The top lobster is a Warrior King. It defeats the Victim Muggle.

Rule 2: “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping”. There are two you’s here. The you doing the treating and the you being treated. He could have said, “As a Warrior it is your duty to serve your King.” It resists Victimhood.

Rule 3: “Make friends with people who want the best for you”. This points to the need for satsang, good company and the love of true friendship, philia. In other words, surround yourself with people who recognise your innate sovereignty, who also treat you like a King.

Rule 4: “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Again, this is about the self-image we acquire from the people around us. This is how Muggles define themselves. Only the King is exempt from this social comparison on the status hierarchy.

Rule 5: “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.” As a parent, you have the moral duty to make sure your children behave in line with their own innate sovereignty. Your Warrior must discipline them on behalf of the King or Queen in them.

Rule 6: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” This is also the job of the Warrior, since it is about Karma Yoga, right action. Don’t shirk your basic responsibilities by retreating into idealism. Don’t be a Muppet.

Rule 7: “Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).” Here Peterson is appealing to the Philosopher, but also to the Monk. The Philosopher seeks meaning, and the Monk avoids self-serving short cuts.

Rule 8: “Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie.” Again we are in the realm of Jnana Yoga, the pursuit of truth by the Philosopher.

Rule 9: “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.” Again, be an open-minded Philosopher, not a closed-minded Muppet.

Rule 10: “Be precise in your speech.” The more precise your speech, the more precise your thought. More good advice for the Philosopher.

Rule 11: “Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.” In other words, let children take the necessary risks in order to develop their own Warrior natures and avoid turning into over-protected Victim wimps.

Rule 12: “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.” Appreciate and enjoy the simple beauty of life when it presents itself. Cultivate an attitude of wonder and care. This is Bhakti Yoga, the practice of the Monk.

The first six of Peterson’s 12 Rules are more concerned with the Warrior and the King, and with the composite archetype, the “Warrior King”. The second six focus on the Philosopher and the Monk and the “Philosopher Monk”.

These are powerful and effective antidotes to the “chaos” of the Victim, Muggle, Muppet and Addict archetypes on the Wheel of Samsara. However, there seems to be something missing. Peterson pushes the process of character reformation and character building with the Warrior, with direct action and will-power. It is a call to arms. He calls forth our inner Warrior, King, Philosopher and Monk archetypes.

But deep transformation isn’t as easy as that. It isn’t just a matter of heroic self-transcendence and wishful thinking. If you force yourself to stand up straight with your shoulders back and strike a Warrior pose, you will certainly look and feel like a Warrior. And there is plenty of mileage in “acting as if”. But there is still a strong element of “acting”. The Warrior stance may in fact be just a simulacrum, a pretense, a left hemisphere re-presentation of true Warrior spirit.

For genuine transformation to take place, you can’t start with a simple act of will, or with conscious intent. This is little more than positive thinking. The road to Hell is paved with the good intentions of the left hemisphere. This is a problem with self-help programs in general. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You’ll just end up getting your knickers in a twist.

Deep, lasting psychological transformation requires you to step out of the ego system altogether, otherwise the ego will always appropriate any changes for its own ends. And it never ends. You will find yourself in interminable analysis or in perpetual war with yourself and the world. The only way out it out. It’s no good walking the line between Order and Chaos, between “explored territory” and “unexplored territory”. You need to put both feet firmly in the right hemisphere. In other words, you need to become a Mystic and a Shaman.

There are no Mystic or Shaman archetypes in Peterson’s system. This is a serious oversight, since there is no escape from samsara without escape from samsara. And samsara is where we invariably end up, no matter how clever and enlightened we think we are.

 

Broadly speaking, there are three orientations to life. By far the most common is the first, which is a naive acceptance of reality, or “the unexamined life”. This is tantamount to total immersion in the Wheel of Samsara. You play the part of a muggle, diva, muppet, addict, victim or demon without the slightest flicker of self-awareness.

The second is a naive rejection of life. This is the condition of people who have examined life and found it wanting. They see through the charade and consequently suffer a chronic crisis of meaning. In the modern West we call this an existential crisis or a mid-life crisis, because it usually takes about forty years or so for the sheen of samsara to fade. These second types may become religious ascetics, puritans, or worse. They are the life-deniers.

The third orientation to life depends on the second. It is also built on a vision of emptiness and meaninglessness. However, it moves beyond the mere rejection of the world for the sake of a higher one. Instead, it discovers meaning in a return from the spiritual plane back down to earth. It is the difference between the Bodhisattva and the Arhat. It is “returning to the marketplace with open hands”. It is Jesus Christ as world redeemer.

In the first place, we are lost in samsara. In the second place, we escape from samsara. In the third place, samsara is redeemed. But it should go without saying that this is not a once and for all achievement. We get lost again and again; we have to escape again and again; and we must find redemption again and again. True, it’s a life of constant struggle, but at a certain point it becomes clear that it is in fact the only life worth living.

 

There is a lot of talk in IDW (Intellectual Dark Web) circles about the “Meaning Crisis”. The general claim seems to be that the secular worldview we have inherited from the Enlightenment is insufficient to satisfy the deep human need for existential meaning. The story of material progress and technological advance just isn’t a big enough story when it comes to the meaning of life.

So where do we find meaning? Well, on one level, there is no meaning crisis. We can find meaning anywhere. What is the meaning of life for an addict? Getting high. What is the meaning of life for a muggle? Belonging. What is meaningful for a victim? Resentment and self-pity. For a muppet? Fighting the good fight. For a diva? A sense of superiority. For a demon? Death and destruction.

The genius of samsara is that there are different sources of meaning. If one starts to wane, just move round the Wheel and pick up another. Bored of the cosy “sorge” world of muggles? Try getting high. You might risk the sense of belonging and acceptance you enjoyed before, but even if you get seriously addicted, you know you’ll be welcomed back eventually. Or you might decide to attack the muggle world, “the system”, and join a band of muppet brothers. Then you’ll derive meaning from your struggle for justice and freedom, from a sense of solidarity with your comrades and ultimately, from martyrdom.

But what happens when you see through the whole show? What if all these sources of meaning seem ultimately hollow and meaningless? What if even the fame and fortune, power and influence of a diva seems utterly pointless? That’s when you have a real meaning crisis. Then you are in the position of King Solomon in Ecclesiastes: “vanity of vanities; all is vanity” or of Camus’ existential anti-hero Meursault: “I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so?”

This is an uncomfortable place to be. But if you are on a spiritual path, it is unavoidable. If you want to escape samsara, the meaning has to be drained out of it, otherwise you will be continuously pulled back into its orbit. Your desire is directed beyond; your meaning must come from elsewhere. This is fine if you decide to become a hermit or take monastic orders. You can (to a certain extent) remove yourself from samsara. But what if you live in the world?

Jesus said, “If any man comes to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, yes and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple.” This is a hard saying. It makes sense from a spiritual point of view, but it puts a bit of a downer on everyday life. It’s not easy to live hating everyone. There is a serious problem here. It is not peculiar to Christianity, of course, but affects all religions. In order to transcend the world, you need to hate the world, but if you hate the world, how can you be said to have transcended it?

But Jesus was only talking about disciples. You should only “hate” everyone if you want to be a disciple. Apparently, Jesus only had twelve disciples, which isn’t many. Over and again in the gospels it is made clear that he has one teaching for his disciples and another for everyone else. They are his “inner circle”, privy to the deeper spiritual knowledge reserved for the elect.

So what were the disciples privy to? And why does it mean you have to hate your mother and father? I imagine it would have to do with Jesus’ most dramatic claim, that he was the Son of God: “I and the Father are one”. If we are to take this as the expression of an actual lived experience, as opposed to an abstract, theoretical statement of fact (which would then be the self-appellation of a liar, a fiend or a lunatic), it would have to be an experience of radical unity.

I find the usual Christian view that Jesus called himself the Son of God simply because he was the Son of God totally vacuous. How would you know that you were the Son of God unless you experienced being the Son of God? Or rather, unless you experienced something that warranted those words? Something that the words “Son of God” pointed to? My guess is that an experience of such transcendental insight would be something akin to the experience of unity produced by a high dose of DMT.

If Jesus had such an experience, he would understandably struggle to communicate it. He might say that he was one with God and that he was in everyone and that everyone was in him. But other than sounding pretty, it wouldn’t make much practical sense. If he were to say, “we are really all one person”, his followers would simply retort, “no we’re not”. To support their position, they would only need to point out the simple fact that they were patently not one person but different people. Jesus might respond with something like, “Alright fair enough, but when you transcend your ego and are united with the Universal Consciousness, then you will see that we are actually the same person, even though it seems as though we are different people.”

If the disciples had the same experience of unity, they would know exactly what he was talking about and they would be able to see the unity reflected in each other. They would treat each other with deep recognition and understanding, as if they really were in some mysterious sense the same person. Perhaps they had glimpses of unity. They must have at the very least believed that what Jesus was telling them was true and aspired to share in his vision.

But Jesus was clearly the only one who had the full-blown experience of unity. He was the only one who could say with any confidence that he was in everyone and everyone was in him. So in the end, since he was the only one who knew that he was God, he was the only one who could say that he was God (or more modestly, the Son of God). It then made as much sense to say that his disciples were one in Him as it was to say that they were one in God. He was the living proof of the living God.

If the twelve had all completely understood, if they had all had the same experience, there would have been twelve Sons of God, but then again, because they were all one, there would still actually only be the one, “only-begotten” Son of God. St Paul was alluding to this when he said, “Not I, but Christ lives in me”.

In any case, it seems that only with his death and resurrection did the penny finally drop for the disciples. Until that point, they believed in and followed Jesus, but they didn’t really get what he was on about. They knew how difficult it was to achieve and to retain the vision of unity. Which is why Jesus’ death and resurrection became the symbol of redemption. Jesus couldn’t destroy the world of samsara, the world of division, but He could redeem it. This great insight at the climax of the Christian story made Bodhisattvas out of his disciples and made Christianity a religion of redemption.

Redemption means that it is okay to be on the Wheel of Samsara. It’s okay to be a muggle, a diva, a muppet, an addict, a victim, even a demon. It’s okay to be human. We need to forgive and be forgiven. But this is only possible through “Jesus”, which means, through the vision of unity with God and all humanity. The ultimate meaning of life is incomprehensible to our petty human minds. It is ineffable. It is impossible to communicate to those who haven’t experienced it for themselves. But neither is it possible to remain in that state. We have to come back to the world of duality.

There is a place for spiritual community, where brothers and sisters in Christ can see the unity of God reflected in each other and establish a little Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth, or to use Buddhist terminology, where an Enlightened Sangha can create a Pure Land. This is ultimately what the institutions of Church and Monastery point towards. The hope is that the ultimate unity will be fully realised one day in the Eschaton. Until that day, however, we have to make do with the existential reality we find ourselves in. Until then, we have to accept the world as it is.

The world is redeemed through the vision of ultimate unity, not condemned by it. It becomes meaningful again. There is value and meaning in all six worlds of samsara. It is good to belong. It is good to succeed. It is good to fight for a just cause. Even a bit of greed, hate and fear are okay. But the meaning we derive from these things are not absolute. We can take it all a bit more lightly, with a pinch of salt,  in the knowledge that the greater meaning is beyond the wheel altogether. But this greater meaning does not destroy the lesser meanings. Jesus said, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”

This is the only real solution to the “Meaning Crisis”. The meaning of life is not about rejecting the world. It’s about redeeming it.

 

I recently had the guilty pleasure of a YouTube binge (when the cat’s away…). The algorithm on my computer decided I was in the mood for some Christian apologetics so I ended up watching Justin Brierley (of Unbelievable? fame) in debate with Stephen Woodford (Rationality Rules) swiftly followed by the latest episode of Word on Fire, in which Bishop Barron comments on the recent Joe Rogan interview with Richard Dawkins, on the back of the release of his new book Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide to Atheism, which I then obviously had to watch as well.

I was curious to see how “Rationality Rules” in particular would argue against the reasonableness of Christian belief. How would atheists respond to the theist arguments I was familiar with? What was the comeback? Interestingly enough, there wasn’t one. Woodford merely repeated the usual atheist anti-religious platitudes without engaging with Justin Brierley’s points at all, while at the same time taking great pains to present himself as the epitome of rationality. He came across as by far the more dogmatic, almost as if he was the one who held to a faith-based worldview immune to rational argument, instead of, as he clearly hoped to persuade us, his “irrational” religious opponent.

So what is the atheist worldview? According to both RR and RD, we are merely evolved apes. We are mostly if not wholly determined by our genetic inheritance and the chemical processes going on unconsciously in our brains. Free will is basically an illusion and there if no objective morality beyond socially agreed norms of behaviour, which are ultimately only “good” because of their “survival value”. Even out ability to reason is the product of an evolutionary process directed by natural selection based on survival.

We are just animals. All the fancy religious guff about the specialness of human beings is just an expression of speciesism and anthropocentric arrogance. At the end of the day, we are just animals, cleverer than walruses, but not any “better” than them. Maybe we can speak more eloquently than they, but when all is said and done, they are much better swimmers. Who says people are better than walruses? Maybe The Beatles were right all along.

This, it seems, is the great crime of religion, that it has alienated us from our true animal natures and the natural world of which we are an integral part. We have become the “Super Predator” destroying everything in our path precisely because we refuse to accept that we are just animals and have no rights beyond any other. Presumably, if we truly and honestly admitted to ourselves that we are nothing but evolved apes, we would stop lording it over all the other animals. Really?!

The false logic is breathtaking. Why should we then have any moral obligations at all? Why shouldn’t we dominate everything within our power? Isn’t that the whole point of the “survival of the fittest”? If we are driven by pure animal self-interest (even if dressed up in fancy clothes), why bother keeping up the pretense? We don’t need to pretend to the other animals of course. They don’t case what our motivations are. We pretend to each other simply because we prefer to live under the illusion that we are “human”. The more “enlightened” among us slyly wink at us. They know better.

If you sincerely believe that you are nothing more than a puffed-up animal, you can have no claim to Reason or Value beyond the self-interested demands of personal and collective survival (genes look after their own apparently). There is no such thing as the Good, the True or the Beautiful. These also are just pretty romantic illusions spun out of the loom of philosophical vanity. Things are only relatively or subjectively “good”, “true” or “beautiful”, if they somehow promote “survival”.

According to naturalist atheists like Woodford and Dawkins, we are animals. In which case we belong to the bottom right corner of the Tibetan Wheel of Life. Utterly determined by our biological needs and appetites, we have no free will, and therefore no possibility of rational or ethical choice. We may believe that we are rational, ethical and free creatures, but it’s just an illusion.

According to the Tibetan Buddhists, the animal realm is a close neighbour to the hungry ghost realm and the hell realms. This shouldn’t be terribly surprising. If you really are ruled by nothing but appetite and self-interest, what is to stop you taking this dismal state of affairs one step further? In one direction, you become a “hungry ghost”, an addict enslaved to all manner of desires which can never finally satisfy.

There are four broad types of addict: substance addicts (addicted to food and stuff, drugs and alcohol) and behavioural addicts (addicted to sex and love, entertainment and information). This is exactly what you would expect if you were really an animal with excessive desires and no free will. The other direction is into the demonic realms, which are ruled by the destructive negative emotions of rage, hatred and violence. Here manslaughter, torture and murder are commonplace. But these things are not “evil”, according to the naturalist atheists. They are just an expression of natural exuberance (Rationality Rules reasons that Genghis Khan cannot be called evil in any absolute sense for example).

If we are “animals”, we are also inevitably on occasion “demons” and “hungry ghosts”. But that’s fine because it’s all perfectly natural. We are not responsible for our actions anyway. It’s not as bad as all that, however, because atheists are also generally humanists. This means that although they believe that we are just evolved apes, they also believe that evolved ape societies have evolved in such a way that we have become highly socialised, and our animal instincts have to some extent been tempered and subjugated by social pressure, a condition we call the “human condition”.

Humanists don’t think we are just animals. They think we are human. What they mean by this is that we have evolved social structures and practices which have lifted us above the level of brute nature in which the rest of the animal kingdom lives. We have clothes and houses, read books and use knives and forks (or chopsticks as the case may be). In other words, we have civilization. Which is generally a good thing, notwithstanding Freud’s anxieties about “civilization and its discontents”.

This is in no way incompatible with the naturalist claim that we are evolved apes. We are simply evolved apes who have also evolved complex social arrangements. These arrangements obviously include concepts such as goodness, truth and beauty, although these ideas are ultimately socially constructed and have no absolute reality outside the social contexts in which they emerge.

The human world is thus a world of socially constructed conventions. Members of the human world are members of a “polis”, which only grants membership to those who abide by the norms, conventions and laws of the polis. It is thus based on a “social contract” and on mutually agreed values. Conform to the prevailing culture, with all it’s morals, laws, manners, aesthetics, etc. and you enjoy approbation as a valuable and valued member of that society. Those who are especially successful within any social system will inevitably rise to the top and enjoy greater powers than the rest of the population. These become the “high and mighty”. Don’t conform on the other hand, transgress or break socially accepted behaviour, and you will be punished, imprisoned, exiled or put to death.

But because human societies are only ever commonly agreed social constructions temporarily established by the coercive power of the majority, rival social conceptions will always emerge to challenge the status quo. When perceived injustices grow beyond a tolerable level, a portion of the population will fight to overthrow the existing system in favour of a more equitable one. If they are successful, a new social order becomes established.

This socio-political reality explains the top half of the Tibetan Wheel of Life, which consist of the three higher realms: the “Human Realm”, the “Asura (Fighting Spirits) Realm” and the “Deva (Heavenly Host) Realm”. Just as the Animal Realm is the default position in the lower half of the system, so is the Human Realm the default position of the higher. We are ordinary Animals, but sometimes degenerate into Hungry Ghosts and Demons. We are ordinary Humans, but sometimes become Devas or Asuras. In my updated terminology, we are either muggles, divas or muppets.

This sums up the atheist worldview: we are basically Animals (and therefore also Hungry Ghosts and Demons) but also Humans (and therefore also Fighting Spirits and Devas). It is a closed system. Our position on the Wheel is determined by extrinsic forces. All things are contingent and inter-connected and there is no absolute, objective truth, goodness or beauty. Since the conditioned nature of the system precludes anything acting on the system form outside, there is no Transcendent God but neither is there free will or consciousness. All these are merely clever illusions generated from within the system itself.

The religious worldview is very different. Here there is a God, which is the transcendental ground of goodness, beauty, truth and consciousness. Human beings are neither mere animals nor mere humans nor a strange amalgam of the two. Rather, human beings are “children of God”, made in the image of God.

The classical arguments for the existence of God are therefore also arguments for the existence of the children of God. I will consider seven such arguments. The first three deal with the question of Being. They are the Cosmological Argument (why is there something rather than nothing?), the Fine-Tuning Argument (why are the universe’s physical constants so precisely fine-tuned for life?) and the Origin of Life Argument (how could organic life emerge in a pre-biotic environment?). Atheist hold out for future scientific advances to eventually solve these problems, but only because they misunderstand the nature of the problems.

The other four arguments are more immediately relevant to our present lived experience. They are the Ethical Value Argument (how do you derive an “ought” from an “is”?), the Aesthetic Value Argument (what is Beauty and what’s the point it?), the Argument from Reason (a naturalistic explanation of reason undercuts itself) and the Consciousness Argument (how can consciousness emerge from purely material processes?).

These seven argument for the existence of God also describe the essential qualities of a human being according to the religious conception. If we combine the first two arguments, the Cosmological and the Fine-Tuning arguments, we end up with six. The archetypal human being who can embody the cosmic understanding of existence contained in the first two arguments is the Mystic. The next argument, which deals with the essential nature of life, is personified in the archetype of the Shaman.

The other four archetypes correspond to the remaining four arguments for the existence of God. The Warrior archetype represents Karma Yoga and our intuition of goodness and moral value. The Monk archetype represents Bhakti Yoga and intuition of beauty and aesthetic value. The Philosopher archetype represents Jnana Yoga and our ability to reason and intuit truth. The King archetype represents Raja Yoga and our intimate intuition of our own consciousness and will.

For materialist atheists, none of this exists. It’s just fantasy. They experience reality as consistent with their beliefs about it and therefore assume it must be true (for the simple banal reason that it is rational). For them, life is just the play of “animal nature” and “human nature” on the Wheel of Samsara.

For the religious on the other hand, whether Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Taoist, Jewish, Muslim or Christian, the experience of reality is very different. Reality is about communion with Being, Consciousness and Bliss, and with the transcendental realities of Goodness, Beauty and Truth. Human beings are not understood as deterministic biological creatures or socially constructed humanoids. Human beings are children of God, created by God in the image of God, just “a little lower than the angels”.

But only the religious worldview can accommodate the reality of free will, consciousness, goodness, beauty and truth. Only the religious worldview can rescue humanity from the modern atheist nightmares of totalitarianism, anarchy, rampant capitalism and techno-slavery.

It really is time we outgrew atheism.

 

The Wheel of Samsara is a thumbnail sketch of the human ego. By “ego” I don’t just mean the distinctive manifestations of selfish behaviour that invariably elicit moral censure in others, I mean the basic structure of the human personality – any personality. Think about your name. What’s in a name? Your name somehow contains the whole bundle of ego states which make you who you are. You are a bundle of muggles, muppets, divas, addicts, victims and demons, just like everybody else, though differently configured. Amazingly enough, you can actually dimly sense your own unique configuration, just by saying your name.

On an individual level, the Wheel of Samsara is the “Ego System”. On a collective level, it is what Rastafarians call the “Babylon System”. The tricksy bit is that, all claims to the contrary, most religious people as much part of the Babylon System as everyone else. They have just re-arranged the furniture a little. If they are only nominally religious and live reasonably good, moral lives, they will be predominantly Type 1 or Type 2 muggles (“Home Muggles” or “Work Muggles”). If they are excessively religious, they will most emphatically be Type 4 muppets (“Fundamentalist Muppets”).

Rational, scientific minded secularists who think that they see through all the illusions lesser mortals labour under (the self-designated “Brights”, or “Enlightenment Bunnies” as I like to call them) are just as wrapped up in samsara as those they patronize with such abandon. Their “Chief Feature” is Type 1 muppetry (“Scientific Materialism”). Again, if they are nominal materialists, they will most likely live on the muggle side of the street. They will probably call themselves humanists, and may even live as good and morally virtuous lives as religious muggles.

All so-called “exoteric” religions exist within the Babylon System. If they are genuine, well-intentioned and orthodox, they will promote the cultivation of positive, pro-social feelings and behaviours and will help people be good muggles. They will defend people from too deep or frequent a descent into the addict, victim and demon realms and will divert energy away from the muppet and diva realms.

Exoteric religion is for muggles. Which is a good thing. The more muggles in society, the better. Muggles don’t want trouble. They just want to get on with their lives, and generally get along fairly peaceably and harmoniously. They are good neighbours and good friends. They are not to be sneezed at.

However, problems arise when muggles start to get itchy feet. For some restless souls, Muggle Land is just not enough. They want adventure and excitement, or at least something more meaningful than the daily round. Oscar Wilde clearly felt this when he said, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all”.

But where can a bored, disaffected muggle dandy go? He could take a trip round the Wheel and enjoy a spot of hedonism and depravity à la Dorian Gray, or perhaps a taste  worldly success or, failing that, some good old fashioned protests and rioting. Alternatively, he could step off the Wheel altogether.

Stepping out of the “Ego System” is basically ego suicide. The person you thought you were, embodied in your name, disappears. Your old self dies. This is what “esoteric” religion means. You die to your self and are reborn as something else, hence the perennial esoteric motif of death and resurrection (which is why the essence of Christianity is esoteric, despite most practicing Christians being firmly exoteric).

Esoteric religion is also known as “mysticism”. A mystic is someone who enters the mystery beyond the egoic world of the Babylon System. In mystical consciousness there is no personality to speak of. What is there then? There is what Buddhists call “Buddha Nature”, the essential enlightened consciousness within each of us. No matter what twisted configuration of ego states we may play out on a rainy day in Babylon, behind it all is our intrinsic Buddha Nature.

In Christian Mysticism it’s called “Christ Consciousness”. As St. Paul succinctly put it, “Not I, but Christ lives in me”. In Vedantic Mysticism it’s called “Krishna Consciousness”. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. The important point is that it is not you. Not your usual you anyway. It is your “True Self”, your “Higher Self”, the Atman, Buddha Nature.

If you are ruled by your left brain hemisphere, you are automatically in the Ego System, and by extension, the Babylon System. If you are religious, your religion will be exoteric. It will have nothing to do with deeper spiritual realities. You will be you, identifiable (at least to yourself) by your name.

If you are ruled by the right brain hemisphere on the other hand, you are not that which your name points at. You are a Buddha, an “Awakened One”. You have escaped samsara and crossed to the other shore. If you identify with a religion, you will understand it esoterically, as a signpost to a completely different way of being. You will be a Mystic, and also, in time, a Shaman, a Warrior, a Monk, a Philosopher, a King, a Poet and a Priest.

And what’s more, you won’t be bored any more.