o

I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

John 6: 48-51

o

I heard Thy voice from on high: “I am the food of grown men: grow and you shall eat Me. And you shall not change Me into yourself as bodily food, but into Me you shall be changed.”

Saint Augustine (Confessions)o

o

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

Matthew 9:17

o

Therefore we before him bending,

this great sacrament we revere.

Types and shadows have their ending,

for the newer rite is here.

Most High, all powerful, good Lord,
Yours are the praises, the glory, the honour, and all blessing.

To You alone, Most High, do they belong,
and no man is worthy to mention Your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendour!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars,
in heaven you formed them clear and precious and beautiful.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind,
and through the air, cloudy and serene,
and every kind of weather through which you give sustenance to Your creatures.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water,
which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you light the night and he is beautiful
and playful and robust and strong.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
who sustains us and governs us and who produces
varied fruits with coloured flowers and herbs.

Praised be You, my Lord, through those who give pardon for Your love,
and bear infirmity and tribulation.

Blessed are those who endure in peace
for by You, Most High, they shall be crowned.

Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whom no living man can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin.
Blessed are those who will find Your most holy will,
for the second death shall do them no harm.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give Him thanks
and serve Him with great humility.

o

Saint Francis of Assisi

At the centre of the Tibetan Wheel of Life are three animals, a cock, a snake and a pig, chasing each others tails, symbolizing the “three poisons” of greed, hate and delusion. These three conditions can be understood psychologically as a pathological or unskillful response to the existential problems associated with time, that is, with the past, the present and the future.

Greed is directed to the future. We want something from the future, something that will satisfy our desire. Hate is directed to the past. We hate someone or something because of accumulated resentment and bitterness over past wrongs. Delusion is directed to the present. We misconstrue present reality because we fail to see it as it really is.

We can understand greed, hate and delusion as psychological coping mechanisms that defend us against the existential anxieties of life associated with time future, past and present. In The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich explores three types of existential anxiety: the anxiety of fate and death, the anxiety of guilt and condemnation and the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness. These can also be understood as relating to our existential orientation to future, past and present.

If we suffer from existential anxiety, we experience dread (existential anxiety of fate and death) in relation to the future, regret (existential anxiety of guilt and condemnation) in relation to the past and despair (existential anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness) in relation to the present. Psychologically speaking, these are very uncomfortable states. So we choose greed over dread, hate over regret and delusion over despair. All this does, however, is demote our anxiety from the existential level to the pathological level, which, although more bearable, is less authentic.

There is a more excellent way: hope instead of pathological greed or existential dread; love instead of pathological hate or existential regret; faith instead of pathological delusion or existential despair. The greatest of these three is love (agape) because without compassion and forgiveness of sins, we remain slaves to a false self and cannot find the inner spiritual fount from which flow hope and faith.

Dogen Zenji said that, “to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things”.

This is the via negativa.

However, it is also true that, to commune with myriad things is to forget the self.

This is the via positiva.

The end result is the same: “your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”

The via negativa is practised in “formless meditation” and dis-identification from all the various contents of the ego and discriminative mind (i.e. the left hemisphere).

The via positiva is practised in “form meditation” and communion with various objects of awareness and attention using the intuitive mind (i.e. the right hemisphere).

Both ways support each other. They are complementary, not contradictory.

If you are communing with Nature, you become immersed in your environment. The boundary between you and the world around you begins to soften. You may even reach the point of “no boundary” and feel completely at one with life. But this is only possible with an attitude of openness and non-judgmental acceptance. You are not trying to analyze, interrogate, categorize or understand Nature objectively or scientifically. You are simply there to commune with it.

The same is true of reading or listening to music. If you are straining to decode, deconstruct, critique or interpret a poem or sonata, you are setting yourself against it in the controlling mode of the left hemisphere. You are identified with your analytical mind and experience it through the filter of your ego.

On the other hand, if you read a poem with an attitude of lectio divina, and savour every word and phrase for its own sake, simply and trustfully, in good faith, you will find that the boundary between reader and read also begins to soften and dissolve. You find yourself communing with the text rather than merely studying it or analyzing it. You are reading with the right hemisphere. You are reading for pleasure.

To enjoy and appreciate art and Nature, we need to commune with art and Nature and we need to forget the controlling, thinking self. The same is true of religion and psychedelics. Religious experiences and psychedelic experiences are experiences of intimate and intense communion and ego dissolution.

So The Way of the Holy Mushroom is primarily a positive way of communion, although it necessarily also includes the negative way of dis-identification. We commune with the mushroom, commune with the mantra, commune with the music, commune with the silence, commune with friends, commune with Nature. And we let go of the ego.

Holy communion is communion that heals us and makes us whole. The word is made flesh, touched by and touching “the peace that passeth all understanding” and “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”. For we have the mind of Christ, and the body and the blood. Bone of my bone, marrow of my marrow, He is nearer to me than I am to my self.

Taking the famous Chinese T’ai Chi symbol as our model – a circle divided into a curved black fish with a white dot and a curved white fish with a black dot – we can imagine seven permutations of the trinity, Kenosis-Gnosis-Pistis.

Consider the original Chinese elements in the T’ai Chi. The white half represents yang (active) and the black half represents yin (passive). The circle itself represents tao (unmanifest). We can adapt this schema to the idea of consciousness and say that the white half represents the conscious, the black half represents the unconscious and the circle represents the subconscious/superconscious.

As with the Rubin Vase optical illusion, where you see either a vase or two faces, depending on where your focus is, we can take the white and black halves of the T’ai Chi symbol to represent figure (conscious) and ground (unconscious). The black dot in the white fish symbolises the vestige of awareness of the unconscious ground which persists in our awareness of the conscious figure and vice versa.

What happens when we apply this understanding to the trinity Kenosis-Gnosis-Pistis?

When gnosis (mystical experience) is foregrounded and conscious, kenosis (emptiness) is backgrounded and unconscious. When kenosis is foregrounded and conscious, gnosis is backgrounded and unconscious. This oscillation of emptiness and form occurs within the horizon of intelligibility, which means that it must be held in intelligent awareness, which is inferred from the fact of emptiness and form but is itself subconscious/superconscious. This is pistis (faith).

The same dynamic obtains when we pair gnosis with pistis and pistis with kenosis. This gives us six possible relationships in total:

1. Conscious gnosis and unconscious kenosis held in superconscious pistis.
2. Conscious kenosis and unconscious gnosis held in superconscious pistis.
3. Conscious gnosis and unconscious pistis held in superconscious kenosis.
4. Conscious pistis and unconscious gnosis held in superconscious kenosis.
5. Conscious pistis and unconscious kenosis held in superconscious gnosis.
6. Conscious kenosis and unconscious pistis held in superconscious gnosis.

And the seventh? The seventh is the eternal cycle of kenosis, gnosis and pistis in linear time.

Let yourself be colonised by the playlist.

Let yourself be colonised by the reading list.

Let yourself be colonised by the meditation.

o

Let yourself be colonised by the mushroom.

Let yourself be colonised by Jesus.

Let yourself be colonised by zen.

o

Let yourself be colonised by gnosis.

Let yourself be colonised by pistis.

Let yourself be colonised by kenosis.

What do you do if you are committed to Naturalism and believe that the world you live in is the product of a long process of Darwinian evolution by natural selection but nevertheless feel strangely dissatisfied with this picture of reality? And what do you do if you are committed to Naturalism but have the strange feeling that there must be more to life?

You might go for one of these: politics, therapy, prescription drugs, meditation and shamanism. Perhaps you are discontented because of the socioeconomic conditions of late capitalism and need to work towards reform or revolution. Perhaps you are discontented because of a chemical imbalance in your brain and need medical treatment. Perhaps you are discontented because of psychological blockages and traumas and need to uncover and heal them. Perhaps you are discontented because your mind is too busy and you need to find stillness and quiet to appreciate the present moment. Perhaps you are discontented because you have lost touch with your body and the natural world and feel the need to “return to the source” or “go native”.

If you are committed to Naturalism and feel the discontents of civilization keenly enough, you will probably set up a dichotomy between Culture and Nature, Delusion and Enlightenment. This is why scientifically-minded rational Westerners are drawn to Buddhism and Taoism, which offer a path of liberation from alienation and discontent (dukkha) within a Naturalistic paradigm. It also explains why Westerners are drawn to shamanic traditions and to psychedelics, which hold the promise of restoration to a natural state of connection with Nature.

Of the five options listed above, the first three are more worldly that the other two. Politics and psychotherapy generally move within the orbit of human culture (apart from the further reaches of Humanist/Transpersonal therapeutic modalities) and prescription drugs can’t do much more than alter your mood. You may feel better up to a point, less alienated and discontented, and enjoy “ordinary unhappiness” as Freud put it, but you won’t scratch the spiritual itch.

If you take meditation and shamanism seriously and practice assiduously, you will begin to get results. You will start to feel more connected, more natural and more yourself. If you persist, however, you will also start to feel something else, an ineffable and mysterious sense of “the holy”. In deep meditation, the experience of the moment is imbued with holiness. In shamanic immersion, everything begins to glow with other-worldly numinosity. The forest glade feels like a sacred place. The drumming and chanting sound like sacred music.

In the presence of the holy, you begin to have a deeply-felt, intimate sense of the holiness of all things. In those moments, you no longer feel alienated and discontented. You feel connected and whole. You feel reverence and awe. You begin to have recognizably religious feelings, even if intellectually you are still a committed Naturalist.

Many people stop here or pull back. The re-sacralization of the world has been adequately achieved and they can get on with their lives a little wiser and happier, with a deeper sense of the sacredness of life. Others press on to “the source of all holiness”. However, once God has put his foot in the door, religion inevitably comes flooding in. It becomes clear that the true aim of human life is holiness and that the most direct way to holiness is exposure to the holy, and that the greatest human repository of the holy is, naturally, religion.

Listen to the birds.

Listen to the silence.

Listen to the fridge.

Listen to Chopin.

Listen to your body.

Read the Scriptures.

Read the signs of the times.

The One is what we commonly call “God”.

It is One without a Second,

the Absolute,

All and Everything.

We can get a taste of it in breakthrough experiences of ego death

on high doses of DMT.

o

The Three is what we commonly call “the Trinity”.

It is the basic structure of existence,

that which makes the world of form and multiplicity possible.

In Trika Shaivism, it is consciousness and form (Shiva and Shakti)

held in absolute consciousness (Parashiva).

In Christian terms, Parashiva is the Father, Shiva is the Son and Shakti is the Holy Spirit.

In Gnostic Christianity, the Holy Spirit is also Sophia (Wisdom), the feminine principle,

which is also the manifest Creation, like Shakti.

o

The Seven is what I call “the Ray of Creation”.

It describes seven levels of existence in the evolution of the universe:

Emptiness, Energy, Matter, Life, Mind, Planetary and Universal Consciousness:

Amun, Ra, Atum, Ka, Ba, Gaia, Jah.

“Amun” is the Plenum Void out of which the universe emerges,

what Lao Tzu called “the mother of the universe”.

“Ra-Atum-Ka” is the Holy Spirit/Shakti (energy, matter, life),

called “the Lord, the giver of life” in the Nicene Creed.

“Ba-Gaia” is the Son/Shiva (higher consciousness).

“Jah” is the Father/Parashiva (a fully evolved and unified conscious universe).

Parashiva, as the transcendent principle, is therefore both “Amun” and “Jah”,

both Mother and Father, embracing the entire family of Creation

as Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end;

and Shiva and Shakti are Son and Daughter, the Christ and Sophia/Holy Spirit,

completing the quaternity of the Cosmic Family.

o

The Twelve represents the cycle of time through the zodiac and thus the months of the year.

It represents the outer movement of the inner workings of the Seven-in-Three-in-One.

It will repeat endlessly until the last syllable of recorded time.

It is the history of the eternal return of the same intersected at every point by a ray of eternity.

In the midst of life, we are in death;

in the midst of the world, we are in God;

in the midst of earth, we are in heaven.

o

The Many is the life of this world on earth;

the One is the death of God in heaven.

That which mediates between the One and the Many is the Trinity.

o

Without the Trinity, the One cannot become Many and the Many cannot become One.

The Trinity is that which gives breath to the universe,

that which allows it to exhale from the One to the Many and to inhale the Many back to the One.

o

Without the Trinity, we are either lost in death (the One) or lost in life (the Many).

All things fall apart in a world without the One,

because the centre cannot hold.

o

In a dissipated, ever expanding universe we forget where the centre is.

Ten thousand things clamour for our attention,

but every thing has meaning only relative to some other thing.

o

Our postmodern condition is a condition of utter alienation from the One;

lost in the forests of the night of the Many,

we are lifeless because deathless.

o

History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake;

the Mushroom our alarm clock,

the Trinity our dawn.