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.

Liquid modernity is a bourgeois brave new world of limitless material, cultural and spiritual consumerism justified and sustained by an illusory transhumanist progressivism.

Surely this also is vanity and vexation of spirit.

Ecclesiastes 4:16

All is One.

There is One God.

God is All.

o

But what about us?

And what about the ten thousand things?

How can we reconcile the One with the Many?

o

If there is only Self there is no Other;

if there is only One without a Second

there is no Universe.

o

If we insist that All is One,

we may conclude that appearances can be deceptive

and that the Many is actually just an illusion.

o

This is the claim of Advaita Vedanta:

the world of appearance is Maya,

the dream of Brahma.

o

If we hold to the One,

either the phenomenal world is an illusion

or consciousness is an illusion.

o

If Monism holds,

either immaterialism is true

or eliminativism is true.

o

Alternatively, we can give up on Unity

and say that there is Duality.

This is traditional Theism:

o

If the Universe is real,

there must be a Creator and a Creation,

God and not-God.

o

In traditional Theism

to say that you are God

is the highest sacrilege.

o

You are not God.

You are a Creature

created by God.

o

Traditional Theism is dualistic:

God is One,

but God and not-God is Two.

o

However, Two logically entails Three.

If there is God and not-God,

we have God, not-God and “God plus not-God”.

o

In the Chinese Yin/Yang symbol

we have the black half, the white half

and the circle uniting them.

o

In Vedanta,

we have sat, chitta

and ananda.

o

In the Hegelian dialectic

we have thesis, antithesis

and synthesis.

o

In Gurdjieff’s system

we have active, passive

and neutral.

o

In the Indian guna system

we have tamas, rajas

and sattwa.

o

In Trika Shaivism

we have Parashiva, Shiva

and Shakti.

o

In Christianity

we have Father, Son

and Holy Spirit.

o

The simplest geometrical three dimensional shape,

the basic building block of reality,

is the tetrahedron.

o

In fact, the very possibility of a dynamic, relational universe

of multiplicity and diversity

depends on the Law of Three.

o

One is static.

Two is unstable.

Three is infinitely creative.

o

Hence the Trinity:

God is One

and God is Three-in-One.

Shamanic consciousness is soul consciousness.

Master shamans don’t do psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy;

they do soul retrieval and character building.

o

Mind and body are contained within soul,

therefore physical and psychological healing are natural side-effects;

but the focus is spiritual.

o

The sacramental use of plant medicines is a spiritual practice, not a therapy.

It is about creating great souls,

not psychologically well-adjusted egos.

o

Great souls are beyond self-concern,

personal needs,

personal problems.

o

They are not fragile; they are antifragile.

And this is not “spiritual bypassing” –

it’s spiritual training.

o

The Master leads by emptying people’s minds

and strengthening their cores.

Lao Tzu