bread of life

Psychedelics are powerful amplifiers of consciousness. Used responsibly, they can deepen spiritual practices and accelerate therapeutic processes. They have the potential to transform and enlighten, teach and heal. They connect us to our senses, bodies, feelings and intuition. They connect us to each other, to Nature, to the Cosmos, to God. They balance the brain hemispheres and weaken the default mode network. They probably helped us evolve into human beings (the Stoned Ape hypothesis) and will in all likelihood help us evolve further into spiritually enlightened beings.

People are afraid of psychedelics because they are so revolutionary. They must be handled with care. But ultimately, if used with intelligence and maturity, the benefits far outweigh the risks. Ultimately, who dares wins.

Direct pointing to Reality outside the Scriptures:

“When I attained Absolute Perfect Enlightenment, I attained absolutely nothing. That is why it is called Absolute Perfect Enlightenment.”

The power of faith.

The power of forgiveness.

The power of words.

The power of prayer.

The power of music.

The power of meditation.

The power of the Bible.

The power of the Mass.

The power of Christmas.

The power of Easter.

The power of ritual.

The power of tradition.

The power of universalism.

The power of personalism.

The power of surrender.

The power of sacrifice.

The power of grace.

The power of love.

Kensho is the Japanese term for a spiritual breakthrough, a temporary, fleeting taste of enlightenment. On medium to high doses of DMT and other potent psychedelics such as LSD, mescaline or psilocybin, you can also experience breakthroughs to a radically altered state of consciousness, something that Jim Morrison and The Doors were famously keen to do (if you’re too young to get that reference, never mind).

Breakthrough is never guaranteed. But it can be facilitated by creating the right conditions. And there are different kinds of breakthrough. The Zen breakthrough to non-dual consciousness is not the same thing as a breakthrough to resolving psychological trauma, for example.

Zazen (sitting meditation) in a Buddhist monastery is geared towards spiritual breakthrough (Kensho) and spiritual enlightenment (Satori). But what about psychedelic trips? What are they geared towards?

It is common to set an intention before embarking on a psychedelic journey. This helps orient you towards a conscious goal, usually in the form of a request (Santo daime!) for guidance or healing. But breakthroughs are not always about solutions to personal problems. They can take other forms too.

The integrative psychedelic model I employ proceeds through seven discrete stages, with the potential for a completely different kind of breakthrough at each stage. These are as follows:

1. MYSTICAL BREAKTHROUGH: Through absorption in meditation, you enter a timeless and spaceless dimension of radical Emptiness or Vacuum-Plenum.

2. SHAMANIC BREAKTHROUGH : Through further absorption, you “enter the dragon” of your “energy body”. You may also experience radical changes in your breathing, “ocean breath”, “bamboo breath”, “bated breath”, “dancing breath” and may vocalise the breath, intoning, babbling, chanting or singing.

3. WARRIOR BREAKTHROUGH : Standing and stretching and adopting strong physical postures, your body flows into powerful sequences of learned and spontaneous warrior-like moves.

4. EMOTIONAL BREAKTHROUGH : Listening to beautiful music, you experience intensely cathartic heart-breaking and heart-melting emotions, usually accompanied by abundant tears.

5. PHILOSOPHICAL BREAKTHROUGH : Reflecting on personal and cosmic questions in a contemplative mood, you experience cascades of inspired insight, wisdom and understanding.

6. SOUL BREAKTHROUGH : Dancing to deep, conscious music (e.g. dub), you embody a state of poised integrity, nobility and inner stature, as if in the presence of “the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the conquering lion of Judah”.

7. FRIENDSHIP BREAKTHROUGH : Sharing and socialising with others, you discover a profound sense of connection, communion, solidarity and friendship.

In any one trip, it is unlikely that you will experience a breakthrough at all seven stages of the journey. One is enough. And there is no reason to be disheartened if no breakthrough is forthcoming. It will come with practice, and whether or not you manage to “break on through to the other side” this time, there is always something of value to take away from the experience.

Selah.

Religion (among other things) is a stepping stone to the ultimate reality, which is experienced as an apocalypse (a revelation or uncovering), especially on high doses of DMT.

It can be summed up in a simple syllogism:

God is everything. You are God. You are everything.

In a Gurdjieffian take on Christianity, the philosopher Jacob Needleman argues that there is a lost Christianity that lies hidden beneath the visible edifice of the established Church as we know it (Lost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery to the Centre of Christian Experience). Gurdjieff would call it esoteric Christianity.

Brian Muraresku makes a similar claim in his book The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. During his extensive investigations into the possible use of psychedelics among early Christians, he visits the Vatican Necropolis under Saint Peter’s Basilica. These catacombs were practically unknown until the middle of the twentieth century, and it is here that Muraresku believes early Christians partook in a ritualised recreation of the Last Supper using a psychoactive sacrament.

The symbolic resonance of the fact that the Catholic Church literally buried this original psychedelic Christianity under their headquarters in Rome is not lost on him. What a powerful image of institutional suppression and erasure!

In Needleman’s book, the enigmatic Father Sylvan reveals to the wide-eyed professor some of the hidden secrets of what he calls “lost Christianity”. But the central point is that Christianity is too advanced for people to understand and that what is needed is an “intermediate Christianity” as a kind of preparative. He believes that it is precisely because of this lack of intermediate preparation that the true significance of Christianity is lost, hidden in plain sight.

The clues as to what this intermediate Christianity might entail are hinted at throughout the book by the mysterious Father, who may or may not be a figment of Needleman’s imagination. The style of exposition is reminiscent of Ouspensky’s classic, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching: Needleman plays the Ouspensky role of questioning disciple to Father Sylvan’s Gurdjieff.

Many of the elements that the Father recommends are also similar to the practices that Gurdjieff recommends in what came to be called The Fourth Way, a comprehensive system of transformational psychology which works on the human organism as a whole.

Whatever the details of this “intermediate Christianity”, I agree that something like it is necessary to enter into “the centre of Christian experience”. This can be simply illustrated using the Wheel of Babylon and Armour of Christ diagrams (see the Home Page).

Ordinary, conventional Christianity can be one of three types on the Wheel of Babylon: Muggle Christianity, Muppet Christianity or Diva Christianity. Muggle Christianity is basically nominalist. In other words, you might go to church and read the bible, but your faith is rather superficial – you are primarily a cultural Christian. Muppet Christianity requires far more commitment. It is characterised by narrow dogmatic literalism and fanaticism, and defines itself in opposition to the prevailing status quo. In the modern world, this usually means decadent secular liberal humanism, but also the corrupt and decadent mainstream Church, which has sold out.

Muppet Christianity is therefore locked into a perpetual battle with Diva Christianity, “the Establishment”. Diva Christians have most of the resources: the cathedrals, abbeys, monasteries, art collections, schools, seminaries, charities, publishing houses, etc. etc. They take pride in all these spiritual riches. They feel privileged and exceptional. They have something of a superiority complex.

The Divas are a target for both Christian Muppets and Militant Atheist Muppets, both camps determined to cut them down to size. For their own part, Christian Divas enjoy the splendour of their spiritual palaces, their great organs and choirs, but never quite managing to get to the centre of Christian experience. There is always that nagging still small voice, and the inevitable cognitive dissonance that must accompany such a glamorous religion worshipping spiritual poverty.

My approach to Christianity points to a fourth way (pun intended) beyond the unholy trinity of Muggles, Muppets and Divas. It points to an intermediate stage, before Christianity proper can be meaningfully engaged. With Father Sylvan, I would say that Muggles, Muppets and Divas are not ready for Christianity. They need to first be purified, purged. You could say that they need to be bapitised.

The sacrament of baptism is a symbolic, physical representation of a spiritual initiation process. How many Christians have actually gone through this spiritual baptism though? And how many have been baptised by fire as well as water? I’ll leave that rhetorical question hanging.

My approach involves stepping off the Wheel altogether and extracting oneself from the closed logic of the Babylon system. This is pictorially represented by moving from the Wheel to the Cross, the “Armour of Christ”. Beginning at the top of the diagram, we must become mystics, by emptying ourselves of all preconceptions. This includes emptying ourselves of Christianity and even of God, as Meister Eckhart taught.

Then we must become shamans, by mastering the energetic body. Then we must become warriors, monks (or nuns), philosophers and kings (or queens) by mastering the will, the emotions, the mind and the ego. All this is “intermediate Christianity”, a prelude to Christianity proper, which as we are in our undeveloped form, is too advanced for us.

This is symbolically represented by the sign of the (double) cross. As we make the sign of the cross (forehead, navel, left hip, right hip, left shoulder, right shoulder, heart) we come to rest at the seventh point, at the heart. The corresponding body-mantra, Mystic (forehead), Shaman (navel), Warrior (left hip), Monk (right hip), Philosopher (left shoulder), King (right shoulder), is completed with the seventh archetype, which must come after all the others: Christian (heart).

How many undervalue simplicity! But it is the real key to the heart.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

You go down a rabbit hole and get lost in a bewilderingly labyrinthine warren. Eventually, exhausted, you sit down in a corner of the warren to watch a shadow puppet show someone has put on. Engrossed in the show, you soon forget that there is such a thing as fresh air and a sun shining in a gloriously blue sky.

Psychedelics can simplify your life and they can complicate it. They can cut straight through the Gordian knots of your entangled mind or they can spin more mind-webs to confuse the hell out of you.

Our culture is hooked on over-thinking. Is there free will? Are we morally responsible for our actions? Is consciousness an illusion? Is God just the collective projection of an existentially timorous species? Are goodness, beauty and truth just social constructs?

All interesting questions, no doubt. But these rabbit holes lead further and further from the clear light of day.

Computer scientists and analytical philosophers have one thing in common: they are left hemisphere dominant. Many of them, by the way they think and talk, probably also have a mild case of autism. And the cleverer they are, the further from common-sense they can go, without once breaking any rules of logic.

When it comes to philosophers, of whatever stripe, Nietzsche’s diagnosis that most of them merely rationalize their own pathologies is to the point. In his view, “the kind of person who engages in philosophical activity does so because she has certain physiological and psychological characteristics.” (Jared Riggs, A Nietzschean Diagnosis of Philosophers).

Nietzsche specifies what these characteristics are, from an ascetic morality to an anti-nature drive to “inactive, brooding, unwarriorlike elements” (Genealogy of Morals III: 10). But the simplest diagnosis, in my view, is left hemisphere dominance, with its ensuing dissociation and hyper-rationality. (If you don’t know about the brain hemisphere research, look up Iain McGilchrist).

This is why philosophy will never take the place of religion and why religion is so perennially important. Because in truth, it’s not that complicated. In the clear light of revelation, whether prompted by drinking an Amazonian brew or by non-psychedelic means (prayer, fasting, etc.), it’s actually very simple:

There is a God. God is infinite light and consciousness. God is love. God is good. We should move towards the light and be loving and good. We should worship God and give thanks and praise.

And that’s basically it!

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

It makes me laugh when conservative Christians lose their faith when they find out about all the problems and contradictions in Christianity. What? You mean Jesus never said those things in John’s gospel like “I am the resurrection and the life”? What? You mean the doctrine of the Trinity didn’t exist until the third century AD? What? You mean Jesus and his followers thought that they would live to see the end of the world? What? You mean Jesus probably never even existed?

Those who try to find the fundamentals of Christianity and stick to them will always be disappointed in the long run. Do you put all your faith in the Church and the infallibility of the Pope? Do you put all your faith in Scripture and the inerrancy of the Bible? Do you put all your faith in Reason and the ability of scholarship and science to get to the bottom of the truth about Christianity?

Whatever you pin your hopes on, Christianity will have the last laugh. Why? Because the truth is neither here nor there, neither this nor that. “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21)

And you’d better not conclude that the kingdom of God is within you and that Christianity is really all about inner spiritual experiences, because it’s not.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

The problem with Christianity is that it has it all. You will never be able to boil it down to its essence. It has too many moving parts. The following list is suggestive and by no means exhaustive. Like the Tao, Christianity is a bottomless well that cannot be exhausted.

(The Tao is like a well: used but never used up. It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities. It is hidden but always present.

Tao Te Ching, verse 4)

So what is Christianity? Well, at the very least, it contains the following multitudes:

1. The God of the Philosophers, ie. the God of Aristotle.
2. The God of the Jews, ie. the God of Abraham.
3. The God of the Greek Mysteries, ie. the God of wine, Dionysus.
4. The God of the Humanists, ie. the God of Enlightenment, Buddha.
5. The God of the Alchemists, ie. the God of the Inner Spirit.
6. The God of the Rationalists, ie. the God of the Inner Logos.
7. The God of the Mystics, ie. the God of Unknowing.
8. The God of the Pagans, ie. the Heavenly Host.

Let’s unpack and expand these basic elements a bit. The first two are concerned with “God the Father”.

1. Aristotle’s metaphysics is the main influence on Christian theological reflections on the nature of God, but we should really go back to Pythagoras. Traditionally, Christian theology has tacked between the two philosophical traditions established by Plato (Neo-Platonism) and Aristotle, most famously represented by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, Stoicism being another important influence (especially in the doctrine of the Logos – see below).
2. The monotheism of the Jews, which is at the heart the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is referred to in the Bible as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Jacob being renamed Israel after his struggle with the angel of God). In the Torah, this invisible, unutterable God, JHWH, is instantiated in the people of Israel through the covenant of the Law of Moses (the Ten Commandments and the Halakha). The personal relationship between the individual soul and God is worked out by Psalmist (King David) and that between the collective soul and God by the Prophets. Thus the God of Abraham is also the God of Moses, David and Isaiah.

The next two are concerned with “God the Son”:

3. The Christ of Faith is a divine God-Man, an Avatar, a Personal Saviour. He is akin to the mythical figures at the centre of the mystery cults of the ancient world, such as Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone, Mithras, Adonis, Attis, Cybele and Dionysus. His status as a new Dionysus is especially relevant because of the sacramental parallels: eating the body and drinking the blood of the sacrificial God in the bread and wine. The wine in both cases (Dionysian and early Christian rituals) was probably spiked wine with psychoactive properties.

4. The Jesus of History is a human spiritual teacher, a prophet, a rabbi, a reformer, a revolutionary, an enlightened holy man, a pure soul, a saint. Buddhists would say that he was a Buddha, an awakened human being who has seen into the truth of their essential nature, no longer subject to the delusions of ordinary mortals. This archetypal figure of the “perfect man” is the humanist ideal: the apogee of what humanity is spiritually capable of. Of course we will never know how “perfect” Jesus’ enlightenment really was, whether it was exaggerated or even a fictional construct.

The next two are concerned with “God the Spirit”:

5. The festival of Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples in a “rushing wind” and “cloven tongues like as of fire” (Acts 2). The charisma (gift) of the indwelling Spirit is an inner power or energy, akin to the Kundalini of the Indian Tantrikas and the Qi of the Taoist Alchemists. In Western alchemy, it is represented by Mercury (the messenger of the Gods) which has the power to transmute the Lead of mortal flesh into the Gold of immortality.

6. The inner spirit of Christ, or Logos, “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9) is later hypostatized in Christian tradition as the Holy Spirit. The “true Light” of the “Word” is associated with the principle of active Reason, a portion of the divine Logos inhering in all things, as the Stoics taught. This belief in the divinity of rationality eventually led to the methodical application of reason to the natural world, ushering in the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century.

The next element points to the apophatic tradition of the Christian mystics, who stress the ineffability of God. There is clearly a natural affinity here with mystics of all traditions, whether Sufi, Taoist, Zen or Advaita Vedanta.

Finally, the polytheism of the Pagan world is smuggled back into Christianity via the communion of saints, the heavenly host of angels and archangels, powers and principalities, and the demonic hordes of Satan’s brood.

Is it any wonder that there are currently over two hundred Christian denominations in the US alone?

Samuel Johnson famously remarked that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” The same could be said of Christianity. The more you dig, the more you see that Christianity really does have it all.

Psychedelics can be very distracting, to put it mildly. If you’re not careful, they can throw you into a chaotic maelstrom. To work productively with these powerful tools, therefore, requires skill, discipline and preparation.

A good set and setting is essential. But so is a good practice. It should be common knowledge by now that psychedelics and meditation in conjunction greatly improve the experience and increase the lasting benefits. Even a simple mindfulness practice makes a big difference.

Meditation both mitigates the risks of a bad trip and enhances the positive effects of a good one. However, the use of meditative techniques under the influence of a powerful psychedelic requires a certain amount of skill. There is an art to it, an intricate dance of surrender and control.

Meditation should be applied lightly. There should be no forcing. The plant spirits do not take kindly to any hint of arrogant human coercion. They are willing to enter into a symbiotic relationship, but only on equal, respectful terms.

They are also hyper-sensitive to thoughts, which is why it is so important to discipline the mind. Negative or disturbing thoughts can quickly mushroom into an entire nightmarish psychedelic mindscape. Confusing thoughts can lead to tangled webs of madness, which can be very disorientating and unpleasant.

A mantra helps orient the plant spirits. It also helps keep the mind from wandering and spinning unhelpful fantasies. It anchors both “your” consciousness and the “spirit” consciousness. Or if you prefer, if you are averse to personification or spiritual language, your OSC (ordinary state of consciousness) and ASC (altered state of consciousness). Although these two states occasionally merge, the greater part of the psychedelic journey unfolds in a kind of dual-consciousness, experienced, more or less, as “self” and “other”.

It’s best to keep it simple and consistent. I use two body-mantras, the Staff and the Armour. The Staff consists of seven mantras aligned with the seven chakras of Indian Tantra: Amun, Ra, Atum, Ka, Ba, Gaia, Jah. The Armour consists of two sets of seven mantras aligned with the seven points of the double cross (see the diagram on the Home Page). The seventh point (not depicted in the diagram) completes the body-mantra at the heart. The first mantra is Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk/Nun, Philosopher, King/Queen, Friend and the second is Peace, Love, Goodness, Beauty, Truth, Consciousness, Bliss.

(There are actually four sets of mantras associated with the Armour, but it’s easier to wear light armour while tripping.)

After a short group meditation, the ceremonial psychedelic session begins with the sounds of the rainforest. The instruction is simply to keep your awareness on the breath, the body and the sounds. The important thing is not to let the mind wander. If it does, just bring it back to the breath, the body and the sounds.

These three anchors are all you need: the Staff, the Armour and Breath, Body, Sound. The plant spirits are quick learners. Once they’ve got it, you will be able to collaborate in peace and harmony.

Nobody is one hundred percent real. We are all fictional semi-autobiographical characters in a neverending story. But we can be more or less real depending on how far we realize ourselves. To realize yourself is to materialize, to be incarnated, made flesh.

But what or who? You. But who am I? Where am I? You are you. Lost in thought. Lost in space.

The true aim of plant medicine vision quests is soul retrieval. You need to go in there to rescue yourself. You need to bring more of you back down to Earth. You need to talk yourself down, coax yourself down. You need to draw yourself to yourself like a lodestone drawing iron filings from a cloud.

What you don’t need to do is lose more of yourself. Remember who you are and what you are doing. You are not escaping from life. You are embracing it. Escapism is how your soul got lost in the first place. You escaped into books, films, music, television, sex, drugs, work, religion, politics, social life, social media. Don’t escape into your psychedelic experience as well. Nobody can go in there to get you out again. Only a shaman can do that. And the only shaman that can do it properly is you.

A real Shaman has gravitas. A real Zen Master has gravitas. A real Holy Man or Woman has gravitas. They are solid. Confident, Self-assured. Real. Their soul is firmly in their body, not floating about in the ether or the Twitterverse.

Use gravity to retrieve your soul from the cloud-capped windmills of your mind. Use the largest, heaviest body you have. Use the Earth.

You can also use the body-mantras (see the blog post Armour and Staff). The more you use them, the more effective they are at bringing you back to yourself. Each of the seven energy centres of the staff (the shushumna) and the armour (the double cross) act as a soul magnet, pulling your dispersed self back together. Whether in the throes of an intense psychedelic experience or stone cold sober, the body-mantras are an excellent way to ground you and anchor you and establish your own centre of gravity. Use them!