bread of life

A small world network is a network which has achieved an optimal balance between efficiency and resiliency. It is neither too regular (and so low in efficiency with a high average number of degrees of separation between nodes) or too random (and so low in resiliency with a high chance of disintegration).

A small symbolic world network is a highly integrated but flexible system of symbols, which gives it enormous potential transformative power. However, this potential is only actualized through participatory engagement. The symbols have to be “held in mind” in order to activate the primordial structures of relevance realization with which they are associated.

The most powerful small symbolic world networks are what we call “religions”, which include sacred myths, rituals and art, where sacredness is understood as the numinous quality of the intrinsically revelatory self-disclosing nature of a symbolic world. Religions can thus be understood as virtual symbolic engines designed to stretch the boundaries of self and world in a mutually reinforcing process of expansion and transcendence.

“The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.”

Tao Te Ching – verse 4

If you take a psychedelic when you’re in an ordinary state of consciousness, you will most likely have a classic psychedelic trip with all the frills and thrills, a crazy kaleidoscopic electric kool-aid acid mind bending trip to the moon. There will be tangerine trees and marmelade skies etc. etc.

This is not what Shamanic Christian Zen is about. We do use psychedelic plant medicines, but with an important difference: we don’t take them in an ordinary state of consciousness, we pre-alter our consciousness.

In the ordinary state of consciousness (OSC) the mind is functioning on the semantic, linguistic level. You think in terms of words and images, which frame reality in a particular way, according to your ego structure and personal history. Taking a psychedelic in this state is like “shaking the snow globe” or shaking a self-portrait made with powdered paints. Thoughts and images fly in all directions.

In Shamanic Christian Zen, the idea is to reach a deeper, more primordial state of consciousness below the semantic level. This pre-linguistic, pre-egoic, pre-conceptual state of basic “relevance realization” can only be reached by moving beyond the discriminating mind (manas) in deep meditation. It means fundamentally giving up the will to knowledge and accepting the essential mystery of existence.

To practice Shamanic Christian Zen, you must therefore become a mystic. You must learn how to disrupt your habitual mental framing and enter a radically altered state of consciousness (ASC) beyond thought. You must learn how to sink below the agitated waves of discriminatory thinking to the quiet depths of simple primordial awareness.

Then, when the psychedelic begins to take effect, you can fully “enter the dragon” coiled at the base of the “tree of life”. Learning how to ride the dragon and then how to be the dragon is what shamanic training is all about. First you become a mystic, then you become a dragon-shaman.

As I’ve discussed in some recent posts, from the altered states of the MYSTIC SHAMAN we move to the flow states of the WARRIOR MONK and then to the insight states of the PHILOSOPHER KING. But it is important to understand that it all proceeds from the primordial root at “the still point of the turning world”. This is the essence of Shamanic Christian Zen.

After watching the 2021 Euro Cup Final between England and Italy and witnessing the tragic penalty shootout in a pub garden in Islington, I went with a friend to get some provisions from the Turkish shop down the road. There were other football fans there somewhat aimlessly milling about and I overheard one young lad in an England shirt say, “I can’t see the point of living any more”.

I don’t think he actually took his life that fateful night and I don’t know if anyone else did. But it did get me thinking about the meaning of football. What’s going on? Isn’t it “just a game”? Obviously not!

I’ve been thinking a lot about what John Vervaeke calls “The Meaning Crisis”. His claim is that people in modern Western societies have lost a sense of meaning in life, with a whole host of negative consequences and related crises, such as the mental health crisis, the opioid crisis, the obesity crisis and even the environmental crisis.

He makes a strong argument to the effect that meaning is closely associated with what he calls “Relevance Realization”, which is the ability to identify relevant information in any given situation. This is also obviously connected to the ability to be a general problem solver (G.P.S.) and thus to general intelligence.

What’s that got to do with football? Bear with me!

Optimal relevance realization is when your theoretical construct, insight or idea has strong convergence (many lines of supporting evidence or argumentation), making it trustworthy, while also having strong elegance (many lines of applicability and explanatory power, or “multi-aptness”), making it interesting.

What if your theory is high in convergence but low in elegance? Then it’s true but trivial. It doesn’t explain much beyond itself. What if your theory is low in convergence but high in elegance? Then it’s far-fetched. The former set of theories and ideas are trivial and boring. The latter set are interesting but far-fetched – the stuff of conspiracy theories.

So what? What about the football? Hang on!

If we put triviality at one end of a relevance spectrum and far-fetchedness at the other end, with optimal relevance realization bang in the middle, like this:

TRIVIALITY ———————— RELEVANCE REALIZATION ———————— FAR-FETCHEDNESS

we can more easily see where we can and can’t find existentially satisfying meaning.

On the triviality end, there is very low entropy – information is highly ordered – which means that there isn’t much meaning. At the extreme, everything is meaningless, a state of mind experienced by people with severe clinical depression.

On the far-fetched end, there is high entropy – information is chaotic and things easily fly apart – which means that there is too much meaning. At the extreme, this results in psychotic and paranoid delusional states of consciousness, where everything is pregnant with meaning and esoteric significance.

In the Wheel of Babylon model, these two ends of the relevance spectrum are represented by two archetypes, the Muggle and the Muppet:

MUGGLE ———————– RELEVANCE REALIZATION ———————– MUPPET

The Muggle archetype is associated with narrow-mindedness and triviality. The Muppet archetype is associated with careless thinking and far-fetchedness. Muggle culture tends towards the conservative and conformist, circling around well-worn patterns of thought and behaviour, whereas Muppet culture tends towards the revolutionary and counter-cultural, rejecting established modes of being in favour of wildly creative flights of fancy.

But as I pointed out, there is no satisfying intrinsic meaning at either pole. So where do Muggles and Muppets find meaning? In victory. They are both motivated by philia nikea, the love of victory. This is because when there is no intrinsic satisfying existential meaning (there is either too little or too much meaning-making), you end up with a meaning crisis, and the meaning associated with power, success and victory promises to plug the gap. The motivating factor in both cases, then, is the desire to be Top Dog.

The Top Dog is at the top of the Muggle or Muppet status hierarchy. In the Wheel of Babylon model, this is called the Diva. Part of the meaning of football, then, is “the love of victory”. Just like in a war, we want our team or our country to come out victorious by defeating all opposition. The same logic obviously applies to other situations where there is a competitive arena or competitive market. For example, doing well at school and achieving success in a career.

By winning a competition like the Euros, we obtain the emotional rewards of achieving Diva status. We are the champions. This provides us with a powerful sense of meaning in life. (Presumably Italians woke up this morning with a stronger sense of meaningfulness than English people). When we lose, especially when we have defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, it feels as if life has been drained of meaning. We feel depressed and “can’t see the point of living any more”.

If you base the meaning of your life on philia nikea, you will be continually haunted by the meaning crisis. You can’t always win. You can’t always be Top Dog. And even if you are one of the “lucky few” and manage to secure your position at the top of the heap, power, success, fame and fortune cannot deeply satisfy your need for existential meaning.

But football is not just about the winning. It’s also about the taking part (to roll out the parental cliche). Football is “the beautiful game” and it is the appreciation of this beauty, of the skill, intelligence, athleticism and elegance of the players working together in harmony, that we can glimpse the deeper meaning of football. The Arsenal F.C. motto, victoria concordia crescit, or “victory through harmony”, nicely brings both meanings together.

The “harmony” side of the equation is related to the idea of “flow”. When you are in flow, or “in the zone”, that’s when you play beautiful football. And we can appreciate the graceful beauty of this state as spectators, both in the flow of individual players and in the collective flow of the team as a whole. When the players are in harmony with each other and within themselves, they can enter the flow state, where real football magic becomes possible. Which also, as a side-effect, means that they have a greater chance of winning.

So as well as the love of victory, there is the love of flow. In Ancient Greek, this is philia rheo. (A rheophile is an organism that prefers to live in flowing water).

If we turn back to the work of John Vervaeke, we can see that a defining characteristic of the flow state is precisely relevance realization. This is experienced as an intuitive grasp of the right thing to do and the right way to do it, via a kind of body intelligence. Vervaeke also points out that flow states are experienced as profoundly meaningful. The more often and more deeply you can enter a flow state, the more you will experience your life as meaningful. And this is a more satisfying source of meaning than the meaning derived from nikea.

As well as the physical flow state achieved in competitive sports like football or tennis (Novak Djokovic won the Wimbledon men’s final, notching up his twentieth Grand Slam and creating a triumvarate of joint record-holders with Nadal and Federer on the same day that Italy won the Euros), there is the mental flow state of “insight cascades”. This is a state of deep understanding beyond mere logic, which is neither trivial nor far-fetched. It is the essence of relevance realization, of what we call “wisdom”.

So as well as the love of victory, philia nikea, and the love of flow, philia rheo, there is the love of wisdom, philia sophia, from which we derive the word “philosophy”.

The only kind of meaning available to Muggles and Muppets beyond the trivial and the far-fetched is the meaning that comes with the pursuit and achievement of victory, which is the drive to Divahood, or “the will to power”, as Nietzsche called it. But as we begin to release ourselves from the hold of philia nikea and to pursue philia rheo and philia sophia instead, our lives become oriented along a different dimension of value, where flow and wisdom become more important and meaningful than victory.

By optimising our relevance realization, therefore, we create the possibility of connecting more deeply with the body through flow states and with the mind through insight states. These states are often experienced as higher states of consciousness, typically described in spiritual and mystical terms. Considering that they are closely related to radical self-transcendence, this should be unsurprising.

Psychedelics work by disrupting the habitual meaning-making machinery of the Muggle and Muppet systems and facilitating a state of flow and insight. This is not automatic, however. If the underlying motivation is still philia nikea, the movement towards flow and insight will be sabotaged by egocentric obsession with victory. This is why the spiritual-therapeutic use of psychedelics should be accompanied by the cultivation of philea rheo and philia sophia.

This insight provides us with a simple heuristic for assessing people’s suitability for psychedelic work. If you don’t care much for football (or for music or dance) and you don’t know much about Socrates, Plato or Aristotle (or Buddhism), then you probably don’t have much love of flow or love of wisdom and you will struggle to achieve the necessary relevance realization needed to deepen your connection with life and meaning.

The sacred meaning of psychedelics is to be found in the interplay between altered states, flow states and insight states made possible through relevance realization. (These three states are represented in my model by the MYSTIC SHAMAN, WARRIOR MONK and PHILOSOPHER KING archetypes). The true meaning of football is similarly to be found in these states, and in the victory of rheo–sophia over nikea, not just “victory through harmony” but genuine “harmony over victory”.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you shouldn’t talk about politics or religion at dinner parties because you might end up having a flaming row, especially after a few drinks. Why is that? Because in the West we are embroiled in two culture wars: one between science and religion and the other between progressivism and conservatism. And these two culture wars have been raging for centuries.

We can map these two interminable struggles onto the Muggle-Muppet axis of the Wheel of Life (or “Wheel of Babylon”). The anti-religion science camp views the anti-science religion camp as a bunch of irrational Muppets and the anti-science religion camp views the anti-religion science camp as insensitive Muggles. The anti-preogressive conservatives regard the anti-conservative progressives as irrational Muppets and the anti-conservative progressives regard the anti-progressive conservatives as insensitive Muggles.

The funny thing is that the antagonists in each culture war find allies in the other culture war, but they are on the opposite pole of the Muggle-Muppet axis. The “Science Muggles” are allied with the “Progressive Muppets” and the “Conservative Muggles” are allied with the “Religious Muppets”. In the US, where both culture wars have reached fever pitch, I have heard the former alliance referred to as “The Blue Church”. People on the “right” talk about “red-pilling” people on the “left” (a reference to the film The Matrix), so we might as well call them “The Red Church”. (Blue and red are the colours of the Democrat and Republican parties respectively).

Political centrists of both persuasions – centre left and centre right – are not involved in the culture war. The same is true of religious centrists – agnostics and non-fundamentalist religious people. At least they needn’t be. The problem is that more and more people in the centre are being affected by the reactionary and revolutionary fire of the extremes. Centrists on both sides of the religious and political aisles increasingly feel that the centre is at risk and must be defended against the encroachment of the radicals of the other side. Some are balanced enough to see that the risk is from both sides.

Both “The Blue Church” and “The Red Church” represent unstable alliances between Muggles and Muppets. This exacerbates the culture wars further, by adding the fuel of civil war into the mix. There is tension and distrust between the Science camp and the Progressive camp and between the Religious camp and the Conservative camp. Often it seems that they are united only in virtue of their common enemy: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

On the other hand, the Muggles and Muppets balance each other out. On the plus side, this means that the extremism is checked, so that it doesn’t devolve into outright madness and violence. On the minus side, it means that the two Churches achieve a level of stability that allows them to survive and even thrive. And so the two culture wars rumble on.

What shape is the hole at the centre of the Meaning Crisis? In his lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, John Vervaeke zeroes in on the idea of “relevance realization”, which he argues is at the heart of intelligence, insight, general problem solving, connectedness, meaning and wisdom. A wise person, after all, is someone who can see the relevant information in any given situation without getting side-tracked by the irrelevant details.

Is the hole at the centre of the Meaning Crisis “relevance realization”-shaped? Does this mean we have lost the ability to deeply ascertain what is most meaningful in our lives? That we have lost the capacity to realize relevance? I would say yes and yes. Because these are ultimately the same thing. Although not synonymous, meaningfulness realization and relevance realization are obviously closely related. But what is behind this loss of relevance and meaning?

I think the simple religious answer is right: the hole at the centre of the Meaning Crisis is a God-shaped hole. God is the only thing that can ground and organise reality in a satisfyingly meaningful and relevant way. There is nothing more convergent or elegant than God. There is nothing more “multi-apt”. All things ultimately flow into God and flow out of God.

God is One. All things flow to and from the One (Plotinus). So within the One there is the Many. The One is also Three and the Three is also Seven. To remember the One God is also to remember the Triune God and the Sevenfold God. This is what the “God Mantra” does. It is a psychotechnology for remembering the fullness of God. Using the Christian Trinity, we can formulate it as follows:

God the Father = Parashiva

God the Son = Shiva

God the Holy Spirit = Shakti

This the first mantra, Parashiva Shiva Shakti. But the other three mantras are also associated with the Trinity:

God the Father = Amun Ra Atum Ka Ba Gaia Jah

God the Son = Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King Friend

God the Holy Spirit = Peace Love Goodness Beauty Truth Consciousness Bliss

When you remember the fullness of God at the heart of Reality, you fill the hole at the heart of the Meaning Crisis, and your relevance realization cognitive machinery starts working smoothly again.

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Matthew 6:33

However, if you are a non-theist and don’t care much for God-talk, you might prefer to call the fullness at the heart of Reality something like “optimal relevance realization”, which you could equate with spiritual “enlightenment” or “awakening”, in which case awakening is itself the solution to the Meaning Crisis, which I guess is Vervaeke’s point. Either way, whether you call it “God” or “Awakening”, as I said in my blog The Way Out, you are in a room without a roof and the only way is up.

There are good trips and bad trips. Good trips are when you hit that sweet spot between underwhelm and overwhelm. And when you achieve a generally positive valency. Bad trips are when nothing much happens or too much happens or the experience is frightening, sinister, disturbing, paranoid, unpleasant, nightmarish. I won’t go into the dark rabbit hole of bad trips here, though.

For a good trip, you need a positive mind set and a nice setting (set and setting). And you need the right dosage and preparatory practice to break through to an altered state of consciousness. The first sign of a good trip, then, is simply that you “get high”. Typical sign are visuals (geometrical patterns), somatic energy, heightened sensitivity and changes in your state of consciousness, such as the sudden absence of rumination. You may experience it as an altered state and/or as a higher state of consciousness.

The second sign of a good trip is when you enter a state of flow. This can be flowing with music, either in your mind or through physical movement and dance, flowing movements without music (eg. martial arts), or flowing breath, sounds, icaros, chanting or singing. Whatever you are doing, it feels effortless and natural – you are “in the zone”. Often there is an element of playfulness, although not necessarily. You could call it “serious play”.

The third sign of a good trip is that you have deep insights into your life or into the nature of reality. These can be experienced as “insight cascades”, one insight leading to another, or as a kind of “insight sun” with other insights orbiting around it. An important aspect of this is what Vervaeke calls “relevance realization”, which is the direct apprehension of what is most important and most relevant in any particular context.

We can relate these three signs of a good trip to the six archetypes:

1. MYSTIC SHAMAN: Altered states
2. WARRIOR MONK: Flow states
3. PHILOSOPHER KING: Insight states

Psychedelics can be hard work, but once you get the hang of them, they do reliably reproduce these three essential features, and you can have good fun along the way. Nevertheless, you should always be careful and vigilant. Ere be dragons.

If you’ve been following my recent posts, you will have noticed that I have discovered the work of John Vervaeke and that I’m very excited about it. Why? Because although our conclusions differ, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (his lecture series on YouTube) lays the “grammar” (and some cool vocabulary) for my own project, and explains why this work is so important.

A crucial aspect of John’s thinking is his formulation of the 4 P’s of knowing: participatory, perspectival, procedural and propositional. His contention is that the “meaning crisis” is in large part due to the fact that we have lost the first three ways of knowing and reduced knowledge to propositional knowledge, which is about holding true beliefs about things.

I have already briefly described the psychotechnologies at the heart of my system of transformative practice (in Psychotechnologies). These range from mindfulness practices to psychedelic journeying, martial arts, dance, chanting and singing, mantras and philosophical dia-logos. These practices are associated with the six archetypes, Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher and King.

In addition to offering a comprehensive, integral set of psychotechnologies, the archetypes also represent different ways of knowing. Modern science-based culture has reduced all knowledge to a single mode: the propositional mode. What we need therefore is to recover and cultivate the other three modes. And this is exactly what this model provides.

The Mystic-Shaman “holiness line” in the diagram represents participatory knowing. It is about embodying altered states of consciousness, about coming into intimate relationship with subtle spiritual and physical phenomena, about “losing your mind and coming to your senses” and “entering the dragon”.

The Warrior-Monk “virtue line” represents procedural knowing, which is about how to act, how to move, fight, dance, sing, worship, give thanks and praise. It is also about how to be virtuous, how to cultivate courage, diligence, temperance, prudence, patience, etc.

The Philosopher-King “wisdom line” represents perspectival knowing. This is all about seeing things differently, using different lenses and filters, taking different perspectives, developing cognitive flexibility and insight. As Vervaeke catchily puts it, it’s about “breaking frame and making frame”, which allows us to escape the pitfalls and dangers of narrow minded thinking, cognitive distortion, self-deception and “bullshit”.

Knowing thyself and knowing reality doesn’t just happen by itself, especially if you live in a culture awash with bullshit. We need to work on ourselves and help each other in supportive communities of self-transcendence and transformation if we want to realise our full potential as human beings. You are so much more than you have been led to believe by our deracinated secular Western culture. You just don’t know it yet.

The affordance of new insight depends on breaking the frame through which you ordinarily see the world. In the “Kenosis-Gnosis-Pistis” schema (or “Purification-Perception-Dalliance”) this is represented by the Kenosis/Purification stage.

I have described this in the mystical language of The Cloud of Unknowing as a type of forgetting. It is also often described as a kind of death, part of the death-rebirth trope identified by Brian Muraresku as the central experience of “the religion with no name” in The Immortality Key.

John Vervaeke talks about “the religion that isn’t a religion” to distinguish between traditional belief-centred religion, focused on propositional knowledge, from experiential and transformative “religion” focused on participatory, perspectival and procedural knowledge. This fits Muraresku’s “religion”, which may not have a name, but which has all the hallmarks of what we call Shamanism.

Shamanism is not any particular set of beliefs, but a set of disruptive psychotechnologies, “ways to go beyond” as Rupert Sheldrake puts it. The most familiar are those that induce a “trance” state, such as drumming, dancing, singing and chanting. And, of course, the ingestion of psychedelic compounds.

The idea is that by engaging in a disruptive practice, you “open your mind” or even “lose your mind” through the forgetting or emptying (kenosis) of your habitual frames of reference, allowing fresh perceptions and insights to occur (gnosis). This new information can then be integrated into the personality through a process of reciprocal correction and attunement (pistis), thus deepening your understanding and ongoing relationship with reality.

Meditation works in the same way. It is a psychotechnology designed to provoke a revolution in the Kenosis-Gnosis-Pistis cycle. Great poetry, art and music can achieve the same result. They are all psychotechnologies for the development of wisdom. What Vervaeke fails to appreciate, however, is that belief is itself a psychotechnology. The Credo is not just a set of propositional statements that are literally true or false, for example. It is a set of faith commitments or “acts of faith”.

Only through the radical transformation afforded by a revolutionary learning process based on powerful psychotechnologies and disruptive strategies can we grow into the fullness of our rational humanity. As the adult is to the child, so is the sage to the adult. You wouldn’t live your life as a child knowing that you could be an adult (unless you have Peter Pan Syndrome) so why live your life as an adult knowing you could be a sage?

What is DMT without the breakthrough?

What is an all night rave without the ecstasy?

What is Zen without Satori?

Just a glitch in the Matrix.

Break on through to the other side.

Break frame to make frame.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

“Do you know how you deal with a complex dynamical system that is operating against you? By cultivating a counteractive dynamical system that is operating for you.”

John Vervaeke

This is what I have been saying from the start. You cannot fix the off-kilter Wheel of Life by tinkering with it and tweaking it. Why? Because it is a complex self-organising adaptive system that will just reconfigure itself around whatever interventions you make. It doesn’t work.

Something more radical is needed. If you really want to be free from the suffering (dukkha) created by your dysfunctional ego system, you have to get off the Wheel altogether and establish an alternative non-dysfunctional system.

To escape the parasitic processing (Muppet-Victim), reciprocal narrowing (Muggle-Addict) and egocentrism (Diva-Demon) of the Babylon System you need to cultivate the decentring, reciprocal opening and anagogic awakening of the Enlightenment System (Mystic-Shaman-Warrior-Monk-Philosopher-King).

The only way to get beyond the prison of the ego is to be born again. And again.