bread of life

D.E. Harding’s “headlessness” is a simple and straightforward way of describing our unmediated sensory experience of the world. It dissolves the boundary between ourselves and the world, which is ultimately conceived or visualised as a “meatball head” with two peep-holes and other sensory organs. Headlessness is the already given state of affairs (we don’t experience or see a head), which we overlay and obscure with inherited theories of perception, such as the theory that the world and the mind are two different “things” mediated by a brain inside a skull-box.

Once you see the world headlessly, you can’t unsee it. Even if you revert back to your habitual way of seeing, you now possess a capacity for nondual vision which you can access at will. It is no different from the acquisition of any other skill, such as solving algebraic equations or riding a bike.

The always-already state of nondual awareness, however described or conceptualised, is available to everyone, but not everyone “gets it”. It depends on a sudden illumination, an “aha!” moment, a penny-dropping, jaw-dropping, world-shattering moment. This is called “seeing into your Original Nature” or “seeing your Original Face” in Zen Buddhism. In the Hindu tradition, this is the direct path or “royal road” known as Raja Yoga. Nisargadatta Maharaj and Ramana Maharshi are probably the most famous exponents of this approach.

Everyone has a royal Raja birthright, but not everyone claims it. The same is true of Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion. In the West, this is best understood as a capacity for “faith”. Everyone is presumably capable of faith, but not everyone “gets it”, just as everyone should in principle be able to ride a bike (in the absence of certain physical disabilities), but not everyone can.

Once you have tasted “One Taste”, you can taste it again, just by remembering or un-forgetting (anamnesis). Once you have tasted “belief in God” and “trust in God”, you can also do it again, just by bringing Him to mind, for example simply by repeating the word “Lord” a few times. You can believe as an active verb, simply by remembering or un-forgetting God.

Headlessness and faith are both discrete, recognisable states of awareness. Once you have experienced them, it’s easy to recognise them. And the more you experience them, the more recognisable they become and the more discrete they become. They are clearly distinguishable from the “ordinary” state of consciousness.

Some people “get” faith but don’t “get” headlessness and vice versa. Most people don’t “get” either. I suspect this is because in the modern West, we live and breathe in a left-brain hemisphere dominant society, where “knowledge about” trumps direct “knowledge of” (see Iain MacGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary thesis). I would argue that both headlessness and faith are right-brain hemisphere capacities and that Raja Yoga and Bhakti Yoga are right-hemisphere activities.

Faith is obviously undervalued and discouraged in secular, materialist culture. For the most part, nonduality and headlessness don’t even register at all. The only pursuits recognised as worthwhile are action and knowledge, which, raised to their highest spiritual expressions, are represented in Hindu tradition by Karma Yoga and Jnana Yoga respectively.

Lama Yeshe said, “True religion should be the pursuit of self-realization, not an exercise in the accumulation of facts”. And St Paul said, “A person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law”. In other words, neither Jnana Yoga nor Karma Yoga are enough. Neither have the whole picture. We also need self-realization (Raja Yoga) and faith (Bhakti Yoga).

Man cannot live by bread alone, but neither can he live by the left-brain hemisphere alone. For a mature, balanced and integrated spirituality, we need reason and good works but also headlessness and faith. And if you don’t “get” either, it may just be because you’ve never tried.

In The Trial of the Man who Said he was God by Douglas Harding (author of On Having No Head), the protagonist is charged under a new blasphemy law in the fictional near future. It is a brilliant conceit, providing an engaging and entertaining vehicle for a thorough exposition of Harding’s own mystical philosophy. The structure, like the philosophy, is disarmingly simple, the prosecution marshaling all manner of arguments and objections via a series of witnesses, which are answered one by one by the accused.

The story (if you can call it that) is reminiscent of the trial of Socrates, who was also charged with blasphemy and corrupting the youth. Harding explicitly nods to Socrates towards the end of the book, as well as to that other famous blasphemy trial, the trial of Jesus.

Socrates and Jesus, probably the two most influential men in the history of Western civilization, were both put to death for blasphemy and for disturbing the peace. They were too revolutionary, too threatening to the status quo. In Dostoevsky’s story about The Grand Inquisitor, the second coming of Jesus ends exactly like the first, because although the Inquisitor recognizes who He is, he decides that maintaining social order is priority.

In a recent Meetup discussion about Psychedelics and Faith (https://www.meetup.com/Psychedelic-Meditation/) we talked about how psychedelic experiences undermine consensual reality and therefore naturally align them with the counter culture. As one participant put it, “in the Sixties, smoking a joint was a political act”. We talked about how the politicization of psychedelics in the first psychedelic wave was arguably their downfall. They were put on trial by the Nixon administration in the US, found guilty and summarily criminalized. And the rest of the world followed suit.

Coincidentally, the sermon last Sunday was about how an essential part of being a Christian is the willingness to take on the inevitable yoke of persecution. Although atheists will cry “foul!” and point at all the horrible persecutions (such as the Spanish Inquisition) carried out by the Church over the centuries, it does feel as though at the tail end of the history of Christianity, as it was at the beginning, Christians are under attack, “more sinned against than sinning”.

Many Christians have an aura of paranoia around them. Jews might quip that they are getting a taste of their own medicine and had better get used to it – Jews have been persecuted and neurotically paranoid for centuries. Paranoia also permeates the psychedelic community, for obvious reasons. No one wants to spend the next few years in jail.

Maybe we are all on trial, to one degree or another. In my book, The Confessions of a Psychedelic Christian, I describe a bad trip, a psychotic episode really, where I was propelled by an unwise cocktail of hashish, LSD and Ecstasy into a nightmarish version of Franz Kafka’s exquisitely crafted paranoid fantasy, The Trial. I am lucky to have escaped alive (and relatively sane!)

I love the work of Douglas Harding. He is a brilliant thinker and a brilliant writer. In so many respects, his philosophy and approach coincide with my own, and I feel a deep affinity between us. And I am a devoted follower of his “Headless Way”. But reflecting on the undercurrent of his admittedly masterful work, The Trial of the Man who Said he was God, I wonder how much he himself suffered from the paranoia that comes with “special revelation”.

Harding was misunderstood and ignored for decades before he finally managed to share his “seeing”, before anyone saw the way he saw. And he struggled with opposition and ridicule for the rest of his life. This goes with the territory, of course. It’s much easier to slip into an established religion than strike out on your own. If you were ever to emerge from obscurity, you would be extremely naive not to expect to be heckled from all sides. (Note to self!)

I am constantly amazed that Douglas Harding is not more well known than he is. Why is he not a household name? Why is Headlessness not common knowledge? This is an interesting puzzle. There are probably a raft of factors. Paranoia may be one of them. Another may be his over-emphasis on one experience and one way.

Harding’s central question was, “Who am I?” and his answer was, quite conventionally really, “I AM”. The Headless Way is really a version of the Royal Road, Raja Yoga. Ramana Maharshi is the archetypal Raja Yogi. Walt Whitman, especially in Song of Myself, was also an exemplary Raja Yogi.

Although he wrote profusely about all aspects of the spiritual life, it may be that his over-emphasis on Raja Yoga limited his general appeal. It may be that the Royal Road doesn’t suit everyone. It lacks the devotional element of Bhakti Yoga and the active element of Karma Yoga, which are arguably more accessible and appealing to people with vague spiritual leanings and longings.

For all I know, I may be erring in the opposite direction, by attempting to be too integral. I include six yogas in my model. For most people, that’s probably five too many. “Shamanic Christian Zen” is already a mouthful, but what I am really proposing is “Active Philosophical Headless Shamanic Christian Zen”, which includes Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Raja Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, Bhakti Yoga and Dhyana Yoga. Not exactly catchy!

Whatever I call it, I will be judged. There’s no way round it. Hopefully I won’t have to do time, or drink hemlock, or be crucified. And hopefully I won’t become defensive, bitter or paranoid. But who knows whether my work will ultimately be ignored, excoriated or celebrated? I leave it in God’s hands. Whatever the world may think, God is my Witness and God is my Judge. In the end, that is the only Trial that matters.

The main focus of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance is on the therapeutic benefits of classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and empathogens such as MDMA. Research funding depends on clearly defined objectives and positive outcomes and mental health is an area where there is clearly great need and also great promise.

Everyone is writing about the mental health benefits of psychedelics, how they can help with depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD, fear of death, etc. This is a very exciting development which offers hope to millions of suffering people.

But should the use of psychedelics be limited to people suffering from mental health problems? What about healthy people? Can they benefit? If so, in what way?

Outside the therapeutic context, there is recreational use, exploratory use and ceremonial use. Recreational use is really just about having fun. This is not necessarily as trivial as it sounds. Having fun with friends on psychedelics is a very intimate and bonding experience which strengthens and deepens relationships. A society of people who have fun together with this level of intimate intensity is a healthier and happier society than a society of atomised individuals.

Exploratory use is about solving problems. The pioneers of the internet famously took LSD to help them solve intractable technical and conceptual problems. Many psychologists and philosophers also take psychedelics in order to give them insights into their respective fields. William James is a famous example. According to Stanislav Grof, researching consciousness without using psychedelics is akin to exploring the cosmos without a telescope. Peter Sjostedt-Hughes, the panpsychist philosopher of mind and author of Noumenautics, would concur.

Ceremonial use is about spirituality. Since psychedelic sacraments are primarily used in the Americas (ayahuasca in the Amazon basin, peyote and magic mushrooms in Central and North America), ceremonial use is strongly associated with these indigenous traditions. But alternative ceremonial contexts are emerging all over the world as psychedelics spread through the population.

Mostly, in the West, these take the form of syncretic New Age groups, combining elements of traditional shamanism and contemporary tranpersonal psychology and philosophy. There are also attempts to introduce (or re-introduce) the use of psychedelics into established world religions such as Christianity and Judaism.

I am interested in the therapeutic use, the recreational use and the exploratory use of psychedelics, but my main focus is on the ceremonial use. This is where I think that psychedelics can do the most good. In my view, Western civilisation is going through a spiritual crisis, and the mental health crisis is a symptom of this deeper crisis. Beyond “treatment” in a medical context, I believe we need “practice” in a spiritual context.

Psychedelics can help us reconnect with religion directly. Our culture has become so intellectualised, that people think that they are doing religion when they read books and listen to lectures and sermons and talk incessantly about religious ideas. There is value in this approach, of course. But it’s not really religion. It’s philosophy. It’s Jnana Yoga, the yoga of knowledge.

Religion is Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion. Faith, hope and love (St. Paul’s famous trinity in his first letter to the Corinthians) are things to be directly experienced and embodied, not just ideas for analytical debate. You don’t need to think about religion very much. You just need to experience it and follow it in simplicity and faith. Faith is key. And because psychedelics are such powerful experiential tools, they can shake us out of our habitual analytical, left hemisphere dominant, mode of being and hit us directly with religious feelings and concepts such as faith, hope and love, which cannot be reasoned out, but must be directly intuited.

I subscribe to an integral spirituality, which includes multiple modes of experience, perception and understanding. I have identified six modes, represented by six archetypes and six yogas:

The Mystic (Dhyana Yoga, the way of meditation)

The Shaman (Kundalini Yoga, the way of energy)

The Warrior (Karma Yoga, the way of action)

The Monk/Nun (Bhakti Yoga, the way of devotion)

The Philosopher (Jnana Yoga, the way of knowledge)

The King/Queen (Raja Yoga, the way of Self-Realisation)

It is important that none of these disciplines colonize the others. Each has its own autonomous field of activity, although they are all interconnected. For the Mystic, there should be nothing but meditation; for the Shaman, nothing but energy; for the Warrior, nothing but movement; for the Monk/Nun, nothing but religiosity; for the Philosopher, nothing but contemplation; for the King/Queen, nothing but presence.

In post-Christian Western culture, there is a hunger for genuine spirituality. However, among atheists and agnostics, even anatheists, religion is still problematic. There is huge resistance to the idea of devotion. There is no trust and no faith. Therefore, Bhakti Yoga is easily overlooked, neglected and ignored in favour of other practices. Typically, Jnana Yoga (philosophy) and Raja Yoga (psychology) step in as surrogate religions. However, a “Religion of the Mind” and a “Religion of the Self” can easily degenerate into intellectualism and solipsism.

Religion shouldn’t colonize everything else. But neither should everything else colonize religion. Without faith, hope and love, the whole spiritual enterprise is ultimately a waste of time.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.”

1 Corinthians 13: 1-10

There are three approaches to dealing with climate change and other environmental problems: technological, political and spiritual. Bjorn Lomborg and Bill Gates in their different ways promote the first approach. They advocate for increased investment in innovation and research as the best hope of finding real solutions to these real and pressing problems. George Monbiot and Greta Thunberg promote the second approach. They want a carbon tax, more regulation and more binding international treaties to legally force governments, corporations and the oil industry to change their ways.

Skeptics of the first approach call it “techno-utopianism” and “the myth of progress”. Skeptics of the second approach call it “eco-fascism” and “a communist plot”. As you can see, the fault line is political. It’s right wing bottom-up “big market” solutions vs left wing top-down “big government” solutions. The former are optimistic Pollyannas and the latter are pessimistic Eeyores. The former tend to think that everything will sort itself out eventually through the appliance of science and human ingenuity and the latter think we’re doomed unless we take extreme emergency measures right now.

The third approach is spiritual. It sees our ecological crisis as a symptom of a wider spiritual crisis. In this view, something has gone wrong with our relationship to the natural world which needs to be put right. If we continue to treat Nature as a resource, only there to satisfy our own greed and insatiable appetites, so what if we have unlimited clean energy or martial law? Won’t we eventually destroy ourselves and the planet anyway?

This approach is clearly more philosophical. It asks questions about intrinsic value and human nature. If we could manufacture a futuristic world of high-tech artificial intelligence running on an inexhaustible source of clean energy (some kind of nuclear fusion perhaps), so that we could live a life of limitless consumption and entertainment with no environmental costs, would we want it? Is this transhumanist vision recognisably human? Surely it would end up as some version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Alternatively, if we could establish a totalitarian surveillance state that uses artificial intelligence to impose strict limits on everyone’s consumption in order to reliably safeguard and protect the natural world, would we want that? Wouldn’t that be just another version of George Orwell’s 1984?

Advocates of the third approach, such as Paul Kingsnorth, are skeptical about the first two approaches. Perhaps there are partial political and technological solutions in the short term, but in the long term, we need to radically re-consider our modernist assumptions about our place in the world. We need to ask ourselves if we are acting like spoilt gods, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in Homo Deus, or if we are dangerously left-hemisphere dominant, as Iain McGilchrist argues in The Master and His Emissary. Can a culture with no place for the sacred survive? However politically powerful or technologically advanced? As W.B. Yeats put it, “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.

The spiritual approach is about inner change rather than outer change. It’s about a change in outlook and values, a revolution in consciousness. How is this possible? It is difficult to imagine how this might happen without a conversion experience. You can’t just reason yourself there. Climate data and environmental propaganda are not enough. The change must be emotional and psychological as well as rational. And it must be deep.

Sam Gandy, a researcher at Imperial College London, has been looking into the relationship between psychedelics and biophilia, the love of nature. It seems that psychoactive plants and fungi such as ayahuasca and psilocybe cubensis do indeed provoke a profound reorientation in our attitude to the natural world, which is often experienced as a kind of spiritual awakening. Could this be Nature’s way of bringing us back into alignment? Is it a coincidence that psychedelics have become so prevalent now, just at this crisis point in our collective cultural evolution?

It is our disconnection from any sense of the sacredness of Nature that has brought us to this pass. We have sacrificed Her on the altar of economic growth and progress, sold on an anthropocentric fantasy of technological mastery and independence. So, whilst continuing to pursue the first two strategies in our battle against environmental catastrophe, we really mustn’t lose sight of the third, without which we are surely lost.

When you’ve had enough of Babylon, and you’re heartily sick of all the Muggles, Muppets and Divas clamoring for your attention, it’s easy to get despondent, cynical and downright grumpy. Suddenly you’re not interested in all the news and gossip, the debates and controversies, the posturing and the posing. You feel like a dead tree, like burnt ashes. You feel dead to the world.

I call this “Steppenwolf Syndrome”. If you’ve read Hermann Hesse’s semi-autobiographical novel, you’ll know what I mean. Steppenwolf is a loner in the romantic Nietzschean tradition. He sees through the artificiality, inauthenticity and pettiness of bourgeois culture and retreats into himself, living the life of a lone “wolf of the steppes” whilst walking the streets of Basel.

Steppenwolf rejects the modes of being characteristic of the Wheel of Babylon, but has not yet found a stable alternative. The painful result is isolation, loneliness, resentment and depression. His bitterness at the superficiality and insanity of modern culture turns on him until he himself starts displaying Muppet-like characteristics, while believing himself to be free of them.

The underlying conundrum at the heart of Steppenwolf’s predicament is how to be “in the world but not of the world”. The allure of the hermit’s cell or the monastic cloister draws its psychological power from a Steppenwolf’s deep repugnance at the human ego in all its manifestations (Diva, Muggle, Muppet, Addict, Victim, Demon). He would rather escape to the forests and mountains like Henry Thoreau.

Bobby Dupea, the protagonist of the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces (played by Jack Nicholson) is another striking example of a spiritually restless character suffering from Steppenwolf Syndrome, who ends up hitching a ride on a truck bound for Alaska to get away from it all (sorry about the spoiler!).

How can spiritually inclined people be in the world but not of the world? What mode of being is resilient enough to not succumb to corruption by the Babylon matrix on the one hand or to Steppenwolfian sulkiness on the other? It’s no good joining in the fray and allowing yourself a little temporary Muggleness, Muppetry or Divahood. It will only make you feel worse afterwards. And it’s no good going to all the parties just to find fault and hate every minute of it.

One solution is to shift the focus towards the cultivation of a positive ego, instead of obsessively bewailing all the irritating forms of the negative. By flipping the six negative ego states of the “Wheel of Babylon” (based on the six realms of the Tibetan Wheel of Life) into their positive counterparts, you can focus on strengthening and fortifying yourself against the slings and arrows of outrageous egotism instead of just moaning about them.

The six negative ego states are Diva, Demon, Victim, Addict, Muppet, Muggle. Their six counterparts are Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King (see the two diagrams on the Home Page). However, this is quite a juggling act. It’s a lot to deal with. Where to start?

Well, we can helpfully simplify this six-fold model by simply noticing that the three archetypes at the top of the second diagram (which I call the “Armour of Christ”) represent the mind and the three archetypes at the bottom of the diagram represent the body.

Mental life and social life is really all about talking. This is where the three mental egos, Diva, Muppet and Muggle, come out to play. How they talk and what they talk about is circumscribed by their respective outlooks on the world, focused as they are on asserting their superiority, challenging authority or achieving social acceptance. Their opposites are the Mystic, the Philosopher and the King, who are not subject to these primal drives. These three archetypes can be integrated into one, that of the “Mystical Philosopher King”.

To be in the human world of social interaction, but not of the human world of social interaction, it is far better to be a Mystical Philosopher King or a Mystical Philosopher Queen than it is to be a Steppenwolf. Likewise, to be in the physical world of the human body, it is far better to be a Shamanic Warrior Monk or a Shamanic Warrior Nun.

This is a tangible and noble aim. Rather than drifting through life like a reed in a stream, you can dedicate yourself to being and becoming the best you can be, both in mind and body, a Mystical Philosopher King or Queen in mind and a Shamanic Warrior Monk or Nun in body. That way you will be able to brush off the Babylonian onslaughts of vanity, ignorance, delusion, craving, resentment and hatred, while at the same time resisting the “spiritual” temptation of wallowing in Steppenwolfian negativity and self-pity. That way you will be able to be in the world but not of the world.

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

John 3:3

The death and rebirth motif in comparative mythology is arguably at the heart of all spiritual and religious traditions. It is certainly at the heart of Christianity. The radical spiritual enlightenment Zen aims for is possible only through the “Great Death”, the death of the ego, and the experience of ego dissolution has been the cornerstone of psychedelic mysticism in the West at least since Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception was published in 1954.

“Die before ye die”. This is the the essence of the Sufi fana, or self-annihilation. It is the “immortality key” of what Brian Muraresku calls “the religion with no name”, a “religion” which potentially stretches back to the Paleolithic around two and a half million years ago, even to the dawn of human life on Earth. As it evolved, it found various expressions, primarily in the form of shamanic initiatory rituals, still practiced today among the Yanomani and other tribes throughout the world.

“The main aim of shamanic initiation among the Yanomami people of the Upper Orinoco River region in Venezuela is the metamorphosis of the human body into a cosmic body, or what I term “corporeal cosmogenesis.” During the initiatory ordeal, the neophyte undergoes an intense experience of death through dismemberment by the spirits and subsequent rebirth, thus overcoming the human condition and becoming an individual living spirit.”

Zelko Jokic

In The Psychedelic Experience, Leary, Metzner and Alpert note that “one of the oldest and most universal practices for the initiate to go through the experience of death before he can be spiritually reborn. Symbolically he must die to his past, and to his old ego, before he can take his place in the new spiritual life into which he has been initiated.”

This is a frightening prospect. Some writers, such as David Loy, go so far as to claim that the fear of egolessness can be even stronger than the fear of physical death. But you get used to it. After the first initiation experience, it is possible to “die” and be “reborn” countless times. It becomes as natural as falling asleep at night and waking up in the morning.

It really should come as no surprise that a culture without a living tradition and practice of ego death and rebirth, or one that has lost it, will begin to suffer from the evils of egotism: selfishness, narcissism, empathic failure, hyper-individualism, atomisation, addiction, rampant consumerism, domestic abuse, violent crime, racism, cultural fragmentation and the despoilation and destruction of the natural environment.

If we are serious about addressing these issues in our culture, we need to look long and hard at ourselves and at their psychological and spiritual causes. If we think we can come up with political or technological solutions and just carry on as normal, taking what we want when we want, we are still missing the mark. This is a spiritual crisis, and it requires spiritual solutions.

In my little psycho-spiritual system, I define six discrete ego states, based on the six realms of the Bhavachakra, the Tibetan Wheel of Life. These are the Diva, the Muggle, the Muppet, the Addict, the Victim and the Demon ego states. Because we move around the wheel, embodying different types of ego or sub-personality, we are under the illusion that we are only sometimes egoically possessed. The truth is that the mode may vary, but the ego remains intact.

The solution I have come up with is a simple mantra, carefully designed to counteract the activity and loosen the grip of these egos on our lives. There are actually five mantras. One is associated with the seven chakras of the Indian kundalini system, situated along the spinal column. The other four are associated with the seven points of the double cross (third eye chakra, sacral chakra, left hip, right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder, heart). They are “body-mantras”, rooted in the body. I have nicknamed them “the Staff of Moses” and “the Armour of Christ” respectively (see my blog, Staff and Armour).

The five mantras are as follows:

The Staff of Moses

Amun Ra Atum Ka Ba Gaia Jah (corresponding to the seven chakras from base to crown)

The Armour of Christ

Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King Friend (the six inverse archetypes of the six egos plus a seventh at the heart)

Zen Soma Body Heart Mind Soul Spirit

Humility Chastity Diligence Temperance Patience Prudence Gratitude (the Christian Virtues)

Peace Love Goodness Beauty Truth Consciousness Bliss

The full meditation has twelve steps:

1. The Grounding
2. The Clearing
3. The Tao
4. The Staff of Moses
5. The Jewel in the Lotus
6. The Armour of Christ 1
7. The Armour of Christ 2
8. The Armour of Christ 3
9. The Armour of Christ 4
10. The Lord’s Prayer
11. The Hail Mary
12. The Glory Be

Ego death and rebirth needn’t always be as dramatic and traumatic as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ or the dismemberment and re-assembly of Osiris and Dionysus. It can be as gentle, quiet and unassuming as a child praying the rosary at a deserted bus stop.

It’s easy to talk the talk. It’s easy to fool ourselves with spiritual materialism, spiritual bypassing, spiritual narcissism, spiritual complacency, spiritual apathy.

If your ego is in charge, whatever you do or say to fool ourselves or fool others, you’re just acting the fool.

Are you serious about the spiritual path? Are you serious about a life lived from a place of authentic being beyond ego?

If you are in Muggle mode, you’re not serious. If you are in Muppet mode, you’re not serious. If you are in Diva mode, you’re not serious. If you are in Addict, Victim or Demon mode, you’re not serious.

Unless you are seriously trying to resist these six egos, you’re not serious.

If you are content to settle down and feather your nest in one of the six realms of the Wheel of Life, even to acquire a second or third home in other realms, you might as well wave goodbye to eternal life.

“Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

Matthew 7:14

The real thing is neither Buddhist nor non-Buddhist, Christian nor non-Christian. It is neither psychedelic nor non-psychedelic. Zen is acutely sensitive to whether or not something is the real thing or not, but neither Zen nor non-Zen is it.

Zen is the real thing; Buddhism is the real thing; Christianity is the real thing; Shamanism is the real thing. But only real Zen, real Buddhism, real Christianity, real Shamanism is the real thing.

The real thing is neither material, spiritual, psychedelic, religious, holy or enlightened. But it is not the real thing if it is not all these things.

In the 2014 film Interstellar, the bond of love between a father and daughter separated in space and time is powerful enough to bring them back together and in doing so, to save the world. The only thing that can traverse interstellar space and connect the fallen, dying Earth and the new life-sustaining planet discovered in a galaxy far, far away, is love.

With hindsight, it almost seems as though the aged Professor John Brand (Michael Cain) chose the hero Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) for the mission not because of his piloting skills but because his love for his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy and Ellen Burstyn as the young and older “Murph”) provided the personal motivation to succeed. But beyond this, there is a more esoteric idea about the special line of communication between two people who are intimately connected through love.

This special connection is borne out by telephone telepathy. How is it that so many people report knowing who is on the other end of the line when the phone rings, or even thinking about the person calling just before it rings? Rupert Sheldrake has carried out carefully designed experiments to test this strange phenomenon scientifically. One important finding is that the incidence of so-called telephone telepathy is far higher between people who are intimately connected, that is, between romantic partners and family members.

Is Interstellar a Christian allegory? There are certainly some interesting parallels, especially the central theme of a special unbroken bond and line of communication between a parent and child across a cosmic chasm connecting two different realms. In the film, this situation was caused by an environmental crisis. In the Bible, it was prompted by a spiritual crisis.

The last books of the Jewish Bible, the books of the prophets, are an extended lamentation at the inability of the Jewish people to remain faithful to the covenant established between them and their God JHWH. Why were they so faithless, lukewarm, rebellious and sinful? Why did they keep falling away from their calling to be the people of God? The despairing frustration of the prophets comes through loud and clear.

How does the New Testament attempt to solve the problem of this apparent disconnect between God and His people? By creating a bond of familial love. Jesus refers to God as his father and to himself as the son. Just as in Interstellar, parent and child are separated across an impossibly large physical and metaphysical gulf. In both stories, the separation is not a total break, however. It is something like quantum entanglement, where two particles remain connected even when they end up at opposite ends of the universe.

In Christianity, the Father and the Son are connected by a bond of love (in Trinitarian terms, this love is the Holy Spirit). When the Son returns to the Father after his death and resurrection, this is spatially imagined as a return to heaven, the spiritual abode of God. Son and Father are reunited, not unlike the return of the Prodigal Son in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15: 11-31), and the Son takes his seat at the right hand of the Father.

The followers of Jesus had developed a bond of love with him on earth. He was their spiritual master, but also a brother and a friend. Love was the condition of discipleship: “You cannot be my disciple, unless you love me more than you love your father and mother, your wife and children, and your brothers and sisters. You cannot come with me unless you love me more than you love your own life”. (Luke 14:26 CEV)

Saint Paul is emphatic about this unbreakable bond of love:

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Romans 8: 38-39

Now that Christ was ascended to heaven, the original bond of love between God and the world through the Son remained intact, except that now it was established between Christ and his followers across the chasm of heaven and earth, through this more intimately personal and deeply human relationship with him.

The Christian solution to the problem of human indifference to the non-human (albeit anthropomorphized) transcendent God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was to humanize and personalize the connection through a bond of familial love in two directions: first the bond between Father and Son, then the bond between the Son and his followers and disciples, which are in a sense his spiritual children, adopted as the children of God. The key to this arrangement is the dual nature of Jesus as both fully divine and fully human. Only then can he act as a bridge between heaven and earth.

The Christian solution is love. When the lawyer asked Jesus what was the greatest commandment in the law, he replied:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22: 36-40

This is not an original saying. Jesus was quoting scripture. The Christian innovation, however, is in the mediation of Christ himself, which makes it psychologically easier to love God by drawing on a personal, intimate, human love. It is after all easier to love a person than an abstraction.

As the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing put it, “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.”

But isn’t this all a bit human-all-too-human? Don’t you lose the pristine idea of an invisible, transcendent God? Aren’t you in danger of falling into a kind of idolatry? And what about the non-human world of Nature? All this love talk is all very well, but doesn’t exclusive focus on the human-divine love of the Son of God in heaven mean that we neglect our love of the natural world here on earth, perhaps even creating the environmental crisis we’re now facing as a consequence?

Christianity is a Love Religion but it’s not a Nature Religion. Compared to the traditional indigenous shamanic religions of the world, it seems suspiciously detached from the natural world, even condescending and dismissive. Genesis 1:26 is often cited by environmentalists who blame the mass extinction of species and careless destruction of their natural habitats on Christianity, since God seemingly gives us free licence to do whatever we want with all life on Earth:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

This is debatable and continues to be debated, but there is clearly some truth to it. Over the centuries, we have developed an attitude of power and dominion over Nature, which has had some disastrous consequences, especially since the advent and rapid development of science and technology and their aggressive application in the service of purely human interests since the seventeenth century. All this was at least in part facilitated by this passage in Genesis and the attitude of superiority over Nature it engendered.

Is there a way of reading the Christian story in a more environmentally friendly way? Is there a way of including the non-human natural world in our circle of care and love? Not just as an afterthought but as an integral part of our religious commitment?

One way to do this is to notice a seemingly universal religious impulse that Christianity shares with its own religious parents, Judaism and Greek Paganism, as well as with all traditional indigenous religions: ancestor worship. In the Bible, this is most clearly seen in the genealogy passages, the “begats”. But what has this got to do with environmentalism? Bear with me!

The New Testament begins with “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” (Matthew 1:1) beginning with Abraham. In the gospel according to Luke (Luke 3: 23-28), the genealogy is recounted in the opposite direction, starting with Jesus and working backwards: “Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Jannai, the son of Joseph,” etc. etc. until we arrive at “the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.”

Jesus’ father was Joseph. Joseph’s father was Heli. His ancestors stretch back all the way to “the first parents”, Adam and Eve, and through them back to their father, God. The same is obviously true of all of us. If we trace our evolutionary lineage back, we are all descended from the same common ancestor we share with the chimps. If we keep going back, we eventually arrive back at the ultimate first cause where the backwards regress stops and on which the whole sequence rests, in other words, God.

When Jesus says that he is the Son of God, he is skipping all the generations of his ancestors back to the first father of this patriarchal lineage. He is ultimately “the son of Adam, the son of God.”

This is where we hit the root of the problem in the family tree (pun intended). In the Judeo-Christian genealogy, we are descended from Adam and Eve, who were created by God along with the rest of the natural world. He created the plants and trees on the third day, the animals on the fifth day, and mankind on the sixth day. Our ancestors stretch back to Adam, who was directly created by God in parallel to all other life on Earth. So the animals and plants are not really ancestors.

For the indigenous tribes of the Amazon basin, as well as for almost all First Peoples, ancestors also include animals and even plants. Our modern understanding of evolution confirms that this is literally true. Whether or not we accept a Creator at the beginning of the whole series, with the origin of life on Earth, or at least at the Big Bang, we now know that our ancestral lineage stretches far back beyond the human.

If the six days of Creation described so beautifully in Genesis are read as a sequential “book of the generation of Creation” in the manner of the genealogical “begats” of the Old and New Testaments, then we can also consider the animals and plants as our ancestors, as well as the herb, the vine, the cactus and the mushroom. As Paul Stamets says, human beings are essentially fungal in their basic cellular composition.

The interstellar bond of love connecting God and mankind includes all of space and time, passing from us via our ancestors from father to father back through our own species, genus, family, order, class, phylum and kingdom all the way to “Our Father in heaven”. Love is the way, the truth and the life, connecting us all and engendering an attitude of care and reverence for all things. If we truly understand and embody this, maybe we won’t end up in the desperate environmental straits that the people of the near future in the film Interstellar find themselves in.

On the other hand, our connection to the transcendent ground of Being is here and now. When Jesus says “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58) he is pointing to this identity beyond time and space. The great I AM is the name that God gives himself in Exodus: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” (Exodus 3:14).

Therefore Jesus is the Son of God not through ancestry in linear time on the horizontal plane of existence, but vertically, through the generative womb of the eternal present. This is what it means to be born of the spirit and not of the flesh. With this direct connection, which folds time and space together like a wormhole, the human and the divine are one. But this unity also includes the whole of Creation:

“As earth is my witness. Seeing this morning star, all things and I awaken together.”

Gautama Buddha

The “Meaning Crisis” in contemporary Western culture is not an intellectual but an existential crisis. It is a felt-sense of underlying meaninglessness, a peculiar lack of ontological, rather than epistemological, solidity. Milan Kundera expressed this modern malady beautifully in the title of his cult classic 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

What is called for, what is calling, is gravity. Gravity calls for groundedness and gravitas. It calls for fully-embodied, full-blooded life. It calls for existential seriousness and responsibility (which explains the enormous appeal of Jordan Peterson). Ultimately, it is the call of Zen.

Modernity has advanced to a point of technological prowess such that it seems eminently reasonable to sidestep the unpleasant and inconvenient existential realities of physical and mental suffering. The techno-utopians promise us a frictionless future where all our electronic devices are seamlessly woven into a protective comfort blanket that will defend us against the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.

For every frailty and shortcoming of human nature, there will be an app or a pill. The experts have it in hand. In this Brave New World, there is no need for personal responsibility or personal growth. There is no need to voluntarily confront suffering, no need to take up your cross. The appliance of science will sort you out in a jiffy.

This utopia, like all utopias, is unbearable. As Jesus so presciently put it, “What doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36