Sometimes one needs to be alone with one’s thoughts.

Sometimes one needs to be alone without one’s thoughts.

When you take a trip to heaven, for example.

If your mind is crowded with thoughts,

memories, images, voices,

you are not alone.

And only the alone can fly to the Alone.

The Alone is the All One.

The way to the All One,

the way, the truth and the life,

is through a cloud of forgetting

and a cloud of unknowing.

But to reach the clouds

you must lighten your load

and throw off your ballast

in zazen, or centering prayer.

This is kenosis,

Dogen’s “bodymind dropped”.

Kenosis is the art of self-emptying,

of emptying oneself of all thoughts,

feelings, desires,

of becoming like an uncarved block

or dead ashes.

This no-mind is Buddha Mind;

This Buddha Mind is the mind of Christ.

Remember:

No one comes to the Father but through Me.

If you go to heaven

You will burn in hell

Until you learn to bear the beams of love.

Put on the armour of Christ

And the robes of light

And approach the unapproachable.

Before God

In absolute faith

Alone.

The Wheel of Babylon (see the Home page) is really a schematic map of narcissism in the broadest sense. Each of the six ego states is a manifestation of narcissism in response to different environmental triggers and stressors. There are overt and covert, assertive and insecure, extrovert and introvert forms of narcissism, all of which are founded on excessive self-interest and self-concern, which itself arises out of unacknowledged existential anxiety.

Until we overcome our existential anxiety and give up our self-concern, we are doomed to live the life of a narcissist and to be surrounded by narcissists. However much we may normalize this, and rationalize it, even build sociological and economic theories around it, we cannot evade the existential despair it subsists on, what Kierkegaard calls “the sickness unto death”. In effect, narcissism is this sickness unto death.

The only escape from narcissism is to take the leap of faith off the Wheel of Babylon altogether, and to eat from the Tree of Life (see the Home page). “Absolute faith”, as Tillich calls it, has the power to remove your soul from the soil of Babylon to the limitless sea of spiritual possibility. However, as soon as you claim the power and the faith as your own, you become a spiritual narcissist, and find yourself right back where you started, on the Wheel of Babylon, in the Diva position. This explains why Jesus admonished the apostles to say, “We are unprofitable servants”.

“And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.

And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.

But which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit down to meat?

And will not rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink?

Doth he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I trow not.

So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.”

Luke 17: 5-10

According to Paul Tillich, faith is not just the antidote to doubt and meaninglessness, but to the existential anxiety produced by doubt and meaninglessness. He also argues that other sources of existential anxiety, such as guilt and condemnation, and fate and death, can only be overcome through faith.

Tillich makes a distinction between ordinary anxiety, “pathological anxiety”, and existential anxiety. Existential anxiety is ultimately at the root of all particular, neurotic, pathological anxieties, and whereas a certain amount of faith can assuage these, we need “absolute faith” to deal with the deeper, underlying anxiety.

Chronic anxiety is well understood to produce both mental and physical problems, through stress hormones such as cortisol, for example. And existential anxiety is by its very nature chronic. It is an underlying dis-ease, something akin, perhaps, to the suffering that the Buddha spoke about, dukkha.

This chronic, existential anxiety and suffering is usually pushed into the unconscious, below the level of awareness. It manifests itself in fits and starts through anxious thoughts and feelings, but also somatically, primarily through muscular tension. The physical discomfort can become quite unbearable and debilitating, experienced in its acute phases as a “pain body” (Eckhart Tolle).

Tolle makes the point that the central Christian image of a suffering man on a cross resonates with many people because it so powerfully represents the existential condition of the pain body. The Christian belief that Christ can take away the pain, that he has magical healing power to take away “the sins of the world” as well as the pain that goes with it, obviously requires a leap of faith.

But if absolute faith is the antidote to existential anxiety, which is the underlying cause of the pain body, then faith heals. And absolute faith in the saving grace of Christ heals.

“For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.

But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.”

Matthew 9: 21-22

A loving person will participate in and enjoy, give and receive, love in the form of storge, philia and eros, that is, affection, friendship and romantic love.

A moral person will act according to the moral demands of care vs harm, fairness vs cheating, authority vs subversion, loyalty vs betrayal, sanctity vs desecration and liberty vs oppression.

A moral, loving person, particularly one sensitive to the vital energy and force of love and will, would be perfectly justified in considering themselves “spiritual” as a token of their moral and loving nature. In a census, if they happen not to have any determinate religious faith, they would probably tick the box marked SBNR, that is, spiritual but not religious.

But what is “religious” exactly? According to non-religious people, a religious person is someone who assents to and abides by the particular set of predetermined rules and propositions established by some or other organised religion, who joins in their rituals and festivals and who perhaps engages in some of the recommended spiritual practices.

This is how it looks from the outside. For some people, how it looks is basically how it is.

However, a genuinely religious person, one with a living faith, which is to say, one who lives, moves, and has their being in the presence of the numinous and the holy, is something else besides.

A spiritual but not religious person, whatever their purported spiritual beliefs, will value human love and will (including love and will directed towards the non-human). The love of plants and animals, and of nature in general, is not just a casual aside, of course. It is precisely this love and sense of moral obligation which prompts SBNRs to consider themselves “spiritual” in the first place, since it transcends the merely human. Love of the natural world distinguishes them from the “un-spiritual” masses, who only seem to care for themselves and other humans like them.

Consequently, the implicit spirituality of SBNRs will in most cases find its explicit expression in some form of nature religion, whether neo-pagan, animistic, pan-indigenous, or New Age.

This is not something that can or should be sneered at or taken lightly. It provides a genuine spiritual core of meaning, purpose, kindness, love, compassion and good will towards all sentient beings, itself clearly a powerful force for good in the world.

But it is not religious. A religious person is oriented not towards human love and will, but towards divine love and will, love of God and obedience to God.

As C.S. Lewis argued, and as I have argued elsewhere (eg. in Hollywood Love Confusion), there is a love above and beyond storge, philia and eros. This is the love of God, agape. Similarly, there is a moral foundation above and beyond the six described by Jonathan Haidt (in The Righteous Mind). This is obedience vs rebellion.

The Bible, for example, can be read as one long, sustained meditation, over many centuries, on the activity of the love of God on a portion of humanity and of that portion of humanity’s obedience vs rebellion against it. The alignment of human love and will to the divine love and will are the sole or primary focus of the religious, who therefore says, with the Shema Yisrael, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your being, and all your might”, and with the Pater Noster, “Thy will be done”.

The three human loves and the six moral foundations listed above are, for the religious, contained within the one transcendent rule of the love of God and obedience to God. Human love and will are not ignored or discarded, but taken up in a holy embrace.

Moral, loving people, spiritual, sensitive, intelligent, educated though they may be, cannot understand this. It takes faith. And it seems that people either have it or they don’t.

Which is why it is much easier to answer negatively to the question, “are you religious?” than to the question, “are you spiritual?” Ideological reasons aside (apart from militant atheists and scientific materialists basically) everyone likes to think of themselves as spiritual to some degree. Everyone feels the pull of love and good will. But everyone also knows, deep down, that the mysterious category of the holy is the exclusive preserve of religious experience. The love of God and the will of God are alien concepts to the non-religious, even distasteful ones. So it’s easy to say “no”.

The leap of faith is a leap too far for most people, especially for modern, post-Enlightenment, post-Christian people, even if they do encounter the numinous, in powerful psychedelic experiences for example. But it has ever been thus:

“And when they agreed not among themselves, they departed, after that Paul had spoken one word, Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the prophet unto our fathers,

Saying, Go unto this people, and say, Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive:

For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.”

Acts 28: 25-27

“You have to throw some noise! And noise is noise – it’s distractive, it’s frame breaking – that’s horrific! That’s why the sacred always has a terrific or horrific aspect to it – awe is connected to awful for good reason. But you know the reverse! If you don’t ever throw any noise into the neural network, what happens? It over-fits to the data; it doesn’t generalise; it fixates; it gets locked into a local minima … I propose to you that we can have psychedelic experiences or meditative experiences or sensory-motor experiences that do that massive frame-breaking, but it’s not just the frame breaking! I don’t think that people should just have these experiences – I’m arguing the exact opposite – we need to have a proper, sapiential, sacred community around them so that that frame-breaking is compensated with a lot of resources for frame-making. That’s what I’m trying to propose.”

John Vervaeke

This is what should be done by the man who is wise, who seeks the good and who knows the meaning of the place of peace.

Let him be strenuous, upright, and truly straight, without conceit of self, easily contented and joyous, free of cares; let him not be submerged by the things of the world; let him not take upon himself the burden of worldly goods; let his senses be controlled; let him be wise but not puffed up, and let him not desire great possessions even for his family. Let him do nothing that is mean or that the wise would reprove.

May all beings be happy and at their ease! May they be joyous and live in safety!

Watch out for these three pitfalls on the psychedelic path:

Spiritual Emergency

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. Too much, too fast can provoke a spiritual emergency which, if not properly handled, can turn your world upside down and produce serious mental health problems.

Spiritual Bypassing

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. Spirituality and psychedelics can be engaged in as an escape from psychological problems, which may then manifest in disguised forms.

Spiritual Narcissism

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. Powerful spiritual experiences can inflate the ego, deluding us into believing that we are special, superior, even in some cases beyond good and evil.

Unintegrated spiritual emergencies lead to spiritual bypassing which leads to spiritual narcissism which leads to spiritual emergencies. And so on. The negative connotations of the “hippy” moniker are in large part due to this vicious circle.

St. John understood this well:

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

1 John 5-10

The psychedelic journey does not begin in earnest until you have realized the hippy mantra, “lose your mind and come to your senses”, that is, until your mind stops and your body takes over, until you stop thinking and start feeling.

Then the sevenfold path can unfold:

1. Lose your mind (Mystic = Dhyana Yoga)
2. Come to your senses (Shaman = Kundalini Yoga)
3. Come into your power (Warrior = Karma Yoga)
4. Open your heart (Monk/Nun = Bhakti Yoga)
5. Free your mind (Philosopher = Jnana Yoga)
6. Know thyself (King/Queen = Raja Yoga)
7. Love thy neighbour (Friend = Maitri Yoga)

The first six yogas correspond to the three points on the Gnosis, Pistis, Kenosis cycle:

1. Dhyana Yoga + Kundalini Yoga (Mystic Shaman) = Kenosis (“purification”)
2. Karma Yoga + Raja Yoga (Warrior King/Queen) = Gnosis (“perception”)
3. Jnana Yoga + Bhakti Yoga (Philosopher Monk/Nun) = Pistis (“dalliance”)

Although the yogas are to a certain extent a matter of personal temperament and predilection, so that an intellectually-minded, bookish person will be drawn to Jnana Yoga, whereas an active, practical person will find it off-putting, preferring the way of selfless work and Karma Yoga, none should be completely neglected, since doing so will disrupt the flow of Kenosis, Gnosis, Pistis.

However, one may prefer Dhyana Yoga over Kundalini Yoga, Karma Yoga over Raja Yoga, Jnana Yoga over Bhakti Yoga (or vice versa) without too much disruption. Problems arise when both yogas in each pair (Dhyana and Kundalini, Karma and Raja, Jnana and Bhakti) are skipped altogether. Eventually we will lose our capacity for purification, perception or dalliance and the whole process will stall and grind to a halt.

“Many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:14)

The only way to be spiritually called is through inspiration. In-spiration literally means the in-breathing of the Spirit. This in-breathing is the spiritual call. You know when you are inspired, when you have breathed in the Spirit, by the feeling it inspires. It feels a bit like being drunk, but not quite: “be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18).

What inspires you? What calls to you?

Inspiring words? Inspiring ideas? Wisdom literature? Holy scripture? Music? Drama? Myth? Poetry? Dance? Sacred spaces? Sublime natural landscapes? Magnificent places of worship? Devotional liturgies? Rituals? Indigenous tribal cultures? Spiritual exemplars like Jesus or Buddha? Miracles? Heroic acts of courage? Heroic acts of self-sacrifice? Special spiritual practices? Yoga? Martial arts? Athletic prowess? Meditation? Prayer? Psychedelic experiences?

There are many ways to be spiritually inspired, many ways to be called. However, for some mysterious reason, not everyone is inspired, not everyone is called. Many, but not all. And of those who are called, not all will convert the energy of their inspiration into the fuel of their transformation. Only a few will choose to make full use of the in-breathing of the Spirit and tread the spiritual path in earnest.

The few who choose are the few who are chosen.