bread of life

It was with a certain level of boredom and frustration that I sat through the “debate” between the celebrity Christian apologist Glen Scrivener and the celebrity atheist Matt Dillahunty on Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? podcast. It was late and I was tired. But when Mssrs. Dillahunty and Scrivener locked horns on whether the Christian story was actually true or not, regardless of its supposed social or psychological benefits, I threw in the proverbial towel.

I honestly cannot understand how people can argue endlessly for years about things they clearly haven’t the first clue about. What is “truth”? There are obviously different categories of truth. On what day was Christ crucified? Was it on a Friday or a Saturday? Or was it on Tuesday? This is the most banal level of truth, historical or literal truth. Who cares?

Even science doesn’t stop at this basic level of truth. A GCSE science textbook will give you a “true” factual description of a chemical bond. But a PhD biochemist will know that there’s more to it than that. A world expert will understand that the ultimate truth of the nature of chemical bonding opens out into a bottomless mystery.

Nobody knows the ultimate truth about anything. Science can describe certain features of the observable natural world. History can describe certain events. They can do this more or less accurately, more or less successfully. “Truth” is one word we use to determine the degree of success or accuracy of these descriptions. If we judge it to be close enough to the thing itself, we call it “true”. If it seems to be too far off the mark, we call it “false”.

But the description is not the truth. It points to the truth. This is because any description will always fall short of the reality it is trying to describe. Words, concepts and theories are just pointers. They describe phenomena, which are themselves pointers to the reality beyond the appearance, to the noumena, the “thing-in-itself” as Kant called it.

In the world of mathematics, it is true that 2+2=4. In the world of science, it is true that water boils at 100° C. In the world of Shakespeare, it is true that Othello was consumed by jealousy. Within the closed systems of mathematics, physics and literary criticism, we can make certain claims which are verifiable true or false according to the internal criteria of each system.

But what do these things mean beyond the system? What is jealousy? What is water? What are numbers? Every system exists surrounded by an unfathomable mystery.

“Is Christianity true? Does God exist?” What a ridiculous pair of questions! If science is just a pointer to truth, not truth itself, what do you think religion is? Religions are just pointers. They point to the truth, but they are not themselves the truth. The question is not whether or not they are true, but whether or not they are good pointers. The added complication is that the thing they are pointing at is explicitly a mystery. They don’t point to things we can observe in the physical world, like science does. They point to God. But what is “God”? Exactly. It’s a mystery. If you have no idea what “God” is, how can you ask whether or not He exists?

If you don’t believe in God then, you don’t believe in the Mystery of existence. Which means that you think that you understand existence. You know how and why existence exists. Does Matt Dillahunty know this? If he did, he would be worshipped as a god. “Science will one day discover the secret of existence” he might retort. “I put my faith in science”. What if science finally concluded that the answer to life, the universe and everything really is 42? Or some complicated equation? How does knowing this even come close to what religious people mean by “knowing God”?

The question to ask about religion is not, “is it true?” but “does it point to the Truth?” It is more like a question than an answer, more like “what is Reality?” than “42”, more like “what is God?” than “this is God”. Nobody can answer the question posed by religion, unless they already know the Truth, unless they have themselves personally experienced it. Otherwise, all we have to go on are the reports of others. Have people who have followed religion into the Great Mystery found that it delivers or not? Is the final verdict that it does or doesn’t point to the Truth? Does it, or does it not, lead to God?

If you look at the historical record, you will find many Christians who claim that Christianity is true in the sense that it leads to Truth. There is no way to corroborate or disprove this claim without following the Christian path to God. Just like any good experiment, you need to follow the correct procedures, which in this case, would involve faith and prayer.

However, even if you fail, that proves nothing beyond the fact that you failed. Perhaps you didn’t run the experiment properly. Perhaps you didn’t have enough faith (“ye of little faith!”) All you need to validate the truth claims of Christianity is to have at least one clear instance of a person for whom the experiment didn’t fail, by their own account, and by the account of those who knew them. And there are thousands. These are the positive results of this particular experiment. Of course you can discount them all. You can say that they were all liars or delusional. What basis would you have to do that, other than distrust? Why believe anything? You might have a religious experience yourself and write it off as a hallucination.

If you are of such a skeptical bent, you won’t believe what I am about to say, even if I swear that it’s true because I’ve been there. But that’s your problem, not mine.

Follow mathematics to the end, follow science to the end, follow religion to the end. What do they all ultimately point to? Follow the trail sincerely wherever it leads and you will find that they all ultimately point to the “One”, to the unity that comprehends all things. The ancient symbol of the One is, of course, the sun. Follow anything right back to its source and you will arrive at the effulgent, radiant source of all. You will arrive at the One God.

All religions point to God. Even science points to God. But when you ascend to the mystical heights, to the ever-shining One, then what? Well, what goes up must come down. You must return to the earth, to the river, to the bench, the trees and the sky. You must return from the One to the Many. But now the river, the bench and the trees are seen in a different light. They are seen as they are in themselves, not as they are through the filter of your ego. They are seen in the light of Zen. All things point to Zen, especially God.

You cannot look directly at the sun without blinding yourself. And you cannot look directly on the face of God. This is why, since time immemorial, the moon has stood in for the Most High as the reflected image of God. The moon is literally the mirror of the sun; the light of the moon is the reflected light of the sun.

The “finger pointing to the moon” of Zen tradition represents the human attempt to describe Ultimate Reality. Zen has also been described as “direct pointing to Reality outside the scriptures”. Here the minimalist finger of Zen is substituted for the complex, baroque finger of “the scriptures” or “religion”.

The moon represents Reality, but it is not terrestrial Reality. It is the reflected light of the sun. Only as the light of the moon illuminates the Earth below is the Reality of Zen revealed, like the “moon in a dewdrop”.

The “finger pointing to the moon” is religion, including Zen Buddhist religion. The “finger pointing from the moon” is the reflected light of the Sun, of the One, of Ultimate Reality, of God, pointing back down to Earth. Bathed in the cool light of the moon, we experience the world as eternal and eternally present. We experience Zen.

There is no point obsessing about the finger. Whether the finger is Zen Buddhism or Christianity, or any other pointer, it is the pointing, not the pointer, that matters. There is no point staring at the finger like a cat. Look where the finger is pointing. Equally, there is no point obsessing about the moon. The moon is just another finger, the “finger of God”, if you like, pointing back down to Earth.

Don’t worry about whether religion is “true” or not. Just follow where it points to. Don’t worry about whether God “exists” or not. Just follow where He point to. Religion points to God and God points to Zen.

Then you can just get on with your life, and “chop wood and carry water”.

 

The whole of the progressive agenda originates and is summed up in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous and oft-quoted line, “Man is born free and everywhere is in chains.”

If you were to sum up the religious belief and commitment of Modernity, it is belief in and commitment to “Progress”. Who can possibly argue with that? Progress means advance, betterment, improvement. Surely there is always room for improvement, therefore there is always a need for progress. This is so bleedingly obvious that it is a wonder more people don’t recognise how utterly trite it is. The question is, not whether progress is desirable, but what counts as progress.

If you claim to be “progressive” and your opponents as “reactionary” or “regressive”, you have simply smuggled in the implicit claim that your idea of progress is right and theirs is wrong. In the absence of any concrete instances, the general principle, as a principle of quasi-religious belief, devolves into the basic view that change is good and stasis is bad. If we believe in progress, obviously we have to keep moving.

Although there is a certain commitment to constant change, or in its extreme form, “permanent revolution”, mere change is too empty a concept to provide any definite sense of direction. Even progressives recognise that there are changes for the worse as well as changes for the better. They need a rule of thumb in order to distinguish between the two. Which is where Rousseau comes in.

Whatever changes are unfolding in society, they are bad if they add more chains to people and good if they break them. Human progress on the Rousseauian view is the progressive removal of the chains imposed by society on otherwise free individuals. Thus it would more accurately be called “progressive liberationism”.

Rousseau saw that the Catholic Church was a repressive institution. People therefore had to be liberated from the church. This meant they had to be freed from the external control and influence of the priests and functionaries of the church, but ultimately meant that they had to be freed from their inner slavery to the restrictive beliefs instilled by the church from early childhood.

The same logic applied to all social institutions, to educational institutions, government, the legal system, and ultimately to the family itself. Were not the original chains placed on the innocent, unsuspecting infant forged in the nursery by mother and father? All external authorities and their internalisations had to be expunged if man was to be truly free. In England, William Blake sang to this same tune in his lyric poems, Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Clearly, this is a powerful, emotive idea and it dominated the Romantic movement throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Revolution was in the air, and revolution meant freedom from the chains of all societal strictures and restrictions. This movement reached its apotheosis in the swinging sixties. “Free love” was the slogan and the dream, and for the first time since Rousseau wrote those fateful words, seemed within the reach of liberated libertarians everywhere. The hippies were poised to take over the world, not with guns, but with flowers in their hair.

The sixties saw the confluence of several strands of “liberationism”, creating a perfect storm of progressive frenzy. First, there was the social Darwinist legacy of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which gave a metaphysical justification to the idea of irresistible progress. Then there was the Marxist call to emancipation from class oppression, the Nietzschean call to emancipation from false consciousness and slave morality and the Freudian call to emancipation from the nasty super ego, which we had mistaken for “conscience”.

The combined promise of all these intellectual giants of Modernity was that, for the first time in history, we could utterly smash the mental shackles that kept us chained to the past. We could throw off our chains. We could rise up free and glorious and stride naked into the new dawn of the New Age of Aquarius.

But it didn’t quite turn out like that. Why not? It turned out that Rousseau’s “noble savage” was more savage than noble. Freed from the chains of familial piety, respect for authority, religion, education and morality, people found themselves enslaved in a different way.

There was the problem of addiction. People got hooked on drugs and sex. They became slaves to their passions. There were the twin problems of ignorance and delusion. People ceased to be properly educated in the liberal arts and humanities, but filled themselves with all sorts of strange and exotic liberationist propaganda, from Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Jean Genet and Michel Foucault.

The Paris riots of 1968 are the iconic moment of this liberation movement, which, appropriately enough, since it all started with the French Revolution, was spearheaded by French intellectuals. But the movement was quickly translated and soon came to dominate the Anglosphere as well.

The smashing of the chains of bourgeois society resulted in a host of societal ills and psychological problems through the nineteen seventies and into the new millennium:  higher divorce rates, higher suicide rates and self-harm, increases in anxiety and depression, domestic abuse, violent crimes and homicide.

What went wrong? The hippy dream seemed to have turned into a nightmare. Where was the “noble savage”? All you could see were vain and self-centred divas, ignorant muggles, delusional muppets, insatiable addicts, disconsolate victims and murderous demons. People seemed more enslaved than ever before.

Was Rousseau wrong? Were our chains necessary for our own sanity and safety? Chains have positive uses as well as negative ones – they connect as well as restrain. Perhaps cutting all our attachments was not the best way to achieve social and spiritual progress. Perhaps the surge of enthusiasm for Buddhist non-attachment, which underpinned all the other liberationist streams was misplaced?

As a psychotherapist, I was always looking out for the underlying need of my clients. Did they need help loosening up? Were they too repressed and emotionally cramped? Did they display obsessive traits? Did they have too much order in their lives? Were their chains too tight? Or did they need help tightening up? Were their emotions all over the place? Did they need to take control of their lives? Did they need more structure and discipline? Were they too chaotic? Were their chains too loose?

There is no simple answer to the eternal conundrum of human freedom. Sometimes we need “loosening up” and sometimes we need “tightening up”. Sometimes, as a culture, we veer too far in one direction and sometimes in the other. There are times and generations which need an antidote to excessive order, and times and generations where what’s really needed is an antidote to chaos.

 

I was saddened but strangely unsurprised to hear that Roger Scruton had died of cancer at the age of 75. I had somehow been expecting it, although I didn’t know that he was ill.

Reflecting on his life’s work, it occurred to me that his famous conservatism was simply a way of expressing in a political idiom a deeper current of thought, which actually has more to do with resistance than conservation. On the face of it, his passionate defence of high culture, for example, is about conserving the cultural riches of the past, particularly in music and architecture, for future generations. It is the expression of his sense of duty to the dead and the unborn. However, it is more than that.

It is a repudiation of equality. In aesthetic matters, some things are better than others. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder. It is not just down to subjective taste or conventional consensus. There is such a thing as “aesthetic value”. This is the corner stone of his whole philosophy, which boils down to being a defense of value against equality.

C.S. Lewis makes the point forcefully through the mouth of the demon Screwtape in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, written shortly before his death in 1963. It is a very witty piece of satire, with Screwtape bemoaning the blandness of the Tempters’ Training College annual dinner meal (of the damned) due to the mediocrity of people’s sins. But he goes on to argue that quantity is better than quality and that in the long run it’s a good thing, because it means that at least hardly anyone gets to Heaven.

According to Screwtape, this is because of the prevailing doctrine of I’m as good as you masquerading under the guise of “democracy”. He might equally have used the word “equality”. Because anyone is able to say I’m as good as you (without actually believing it of course – it is a perpetual inner deception) there is no incentive to be any good at anything or to admire those things or people which are.

There is an obvious flaw in the idea or equality. You cannot raise everyone up to be equally good, on a par with the saints or the great composers. That’s clearly highly unrealistic, considering it takes years of sweat and tears and not a little natural talent or even genius. Who would make the effort given every conceivable opportunity? Only a handful. The rest would remain what they were.

The only way to achieve equality therefore, is in the opposite direction, by dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Who said “people are only perfectly equal when they’re dead”? For equality enthusiasts, people are only acceptably equal when they’re as good as dead.

The Utopian dream of “equalizers” is a world where everyone has made themselves so insignificant, that no-one can hurt anyone any more. Peace will only truly descend on Earth when no-one can pull themselves out of bed. Everyone is equalized and neutralized. No-one pokes their head above the bedclothes.

Aldous Huxley saw this. He called it Brave New World. C.S. Lewis saw it. Chesterton saw it. T.S. Eliot saw it. As did Nietzsche, the raging prophet of the “will to power”. Nietzsche was nauseated by the simpering Victorian Christianity he saw degenerating into the abject pathos of flaccid, facile, bourgeois domesticity. People should not be domesticated like cats and dogs.

Roger Scruton is in the same tradition, although he upholds authentic bourgeois aspirational values against the onslaughts of the radical socialist equalizers. He is a prophet against equality for the sake of individual freedom and self-realisation. So is Ken Wilber, another latter-day prophet of value. He makes much of the concept of hierarchy, which is of course anathema to equalizers, in fact, the very antithesis of their worldview. As does Jordan Peterson, the latest prophet on the block.

Jordan Peterson and Roger Scruton are well despised, as all good prophets should be.  They are dismissed by equalizers with the two magic words, “Right Wing”. But, as I said, this goes deeper than political ideology. This goes to the heart of what it means to be human, which is something to do with standing up straight with your shoulders back.

Nelson Mandela famously didn’t say, “As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same” (it was Marianne Williamson). But where does the light come from? Where do genius and inner strength and power come from? When you are inspired, you are in-spired. It is as if something or someone has breathed into you. It is as if you are filled with a holy spirit. Why not just go ahead and say you are filled with the Holy Spirit?

King Arthur was made King because he pulled Excalibur from the stone. This was evidence that he was filled with the Holy Spirit. When you are King, you don’t subject yourself to the demands of “equality” or “democracy”. You don’t hide your light so as not to offend those who don’t shine. But neither do you abuse your power. You do not become a tyrant, because you know that you must obey the King above you, the King of Kings, otherwise the Holy Spirit will be withdrawn from you.

The prophets are on one side of the present fissure in history, exhorting us to wake up from our soft, comfortable, modern sleep and to take our place beside the Kings and Queens of myth and antiquity. On the other side are amassed an army of modern and postmodern ideologies and isms. Don’t let them bully you. Don’t let them fool you into joining the Church of Nobody. Your sins may be trivial, and your flesh may be tasteless, but you’ll still end up on the banqueting table in Hell.

 

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis’ prolonged psychedelic trip about the afterlife, the protagonist finds himself on a bus holiday outing to Heaven. At first it is unclear whether the departure point is a particularly dreary corner of the North, Purgatory or Hell itself. It turns out it was Hell. And the quarrelsome day trippers turn out to be ghosts.

Ghosts come in many shapes and sizes. There are nasty ghosts, moany ghosts, hungry ghosts, ignorant ghosts, deluded ghosts and superior ghosts. In other words, all six types you would expect to find on the Wheel of Samsara. They are ghosts because they have failed to fully materialize. They are not quite up to the standard of reality. Which is why the grass in Heaven hurts their feet: it’s too real for them.

People lost on the Wheel are basically ghosts. Sometimes they seem like zombies, vampires, werewolves, dolls or puppets, but they’re basically ghosts. They’re neither fully dead, nor fully alive. They’re what the Ancient Egyptians called mut, the “living dead”.

Spirits, on the other hand, have made the quantum leap from the Wheel of Samsara to the Orthodox Cross. They have begun the process of becoming mystics, shamans, warriors, monks or nuns, philosophers and kings (or queens). These human archetypes point to different dimensions of the human encounter with reality. They have begun the process of becoming real.

Spirits have spirit.They have spiritual discernment and spiritual practices. But they are not fully realized or enlightened. They have not mastered themselves completely. They have not completely surrendered. They may be saints, but they are not yet angels.

Compared to ghosts, and even spirits, angels are infinitely holy, virtuous and wise. They are pure vessels of divine consciousness. It’s not often you meet an angel, if ever. And if you do, the chances are you won’t recognize them. Only advanced spirits have developed the eyes to see.

Do you believe in angels? Unless you believe in ghosts, you won’t believe in angels. But then, how do you know that you’re not a ghost, if you don’t believe in them?

 

We are meaning seeking creatures. Since the dawn of time, human beings have woken up from vivid dreams and wondered to themselves, “what does it all mean?”

We would sit around camp fires and tell stories. The best ones were the ones that had some deeper meaning, the ones that made us think and feel.

The elders would tell stories round the camp fire because they were trying to tell us something, trying to teach us something. Our unconscious would tell us stories in our dreams because it was trying to tell us something.

We listen because we are eager to learn. This is how we roll. This is how we evolve.

If you listen to a lot of stories, you will recognise that there are often several levels of interpretation. This is as true of the interpretation of dreams as it is of the interpretation of Shakespeare.

When it comes to the interpretation of scripture, the biblical scholars have helpfully identified four levels: the literal, the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical. The first three are familiar features of all stories. The last is reserved for spiritual teachings as it concerns spiritual truths.

How do we typically understand any event or narrative? What is our hermeneutical strategy? Think about a drama series such as Stranger Things. If you are engaged in the story, you will be watching and listening on at least three levels.

You will be processing the literal, and in this case historical details. Are all the 80’s references accurate? Would people have dressed and spoken like that? You will be tracking the moral behaviour of the characters. Was that a good thing to do or say? Are they behaving badly but good deep down, or conversely, are they a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

On a deeper level, you will be wondering about the allegorical meaning of the story. What does it tell us about our lives more generally? Is there a hidden message we can decipher, like the hidden messages contained in dreams?

Different people interpret the world differently. Not only that, they have different interpretative styles. Muggles veer towards the literal. Muppets cleave to the allegorical.

Muggles are more interested in brute facts. They get very upset if you get the facts wrong. They are less interested in hidden meanings. Muppets often overlook or disregard facts entirely. The deeper meaning of things trumps the historical facts.

Both muggles and muppets are sensitive to the moral implications of behaviour, although their moral outlooks will inevitably differ. But in both cases, judgments will be made on the basis of one or more of Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity or liberty.

They have no idea about the anagogical. Their experience of reality is based on the literal in the case of muggles and the allegorical in the case of muppets. Only mystics understand the anagogical.

When the anagogical is the basis of your experience of reality, literal, historical facts, moral judgments and allegorical meanings are understood in a completely different light. Everything points to the spiritual. Everything points to God. There is a sense of coherence, because everything points in the same direction.

Without it, there is chaos and confusion. We live as though in a dream. We see as through a glass darkly.

 

When people generally take powerful psychedelics like ayahuasca they expect to go on a trip. They expect a magical mystery tour of the Imaginal. And more often than not, they are not disappointed.

As has been shown in numerous studies, people’s experiences on psychedelics such as psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, MDMA and DMT are very susceptible to “set and setting” (mind set and environment) and to the expectations and intentions of the participant. Under the influence of psychedelics, the mind becomes extremely sensitive and suggestible.

Most people in the West who take psychedelics seriously, take it in the context of a therapeutic paradigm. The working model will usually have spiritual overtones, but will be basically Jungian in essence. In other words, it will be a form of depth psychology, with the intention of accessing the personal and collective unconscious in order to integrate the personality and so become more whole.

Much of Jungian analysis is focused on “shadow work”. This is all about integrating those dissociated parts of the personality which end up being projected out onto other people. If you take an irrational dislike to someone, it may be that you see in them an aspect of yourself that you don’t like. If it is something you are not aware of, something unconscious, then you are in thrall to your shadow.

If you acquire an instant dislike to someone you don’t know because of their political or religious views, then you are in thrall to a collective shadow. They belong to an enemy tribe. This is even known to happen between supporters of rival football teams.

Western spiritual seekers brought up on some form of Jungian gnosticism expect to deal with their shadow and venture bravely into the vast symbolic world of the collective unconscious (the Imaginal) when they take psychedelics. They live in the concrete world, like everyone else, but unlike everyone else, they take the hero’s journey down into the shadow world and into the imaginal world in order to heal and to bring back spiritual treasure.

These three worlds, the Concrete, the Shadow and the Imaginal are all part of the Wheel of Samsara. The Concrete World is home to normal people, that is, to muggles. Some muggles, however, have addictive personalities. They want the things of the world too much. The Shadow World is home to muppets and victims; the Imaginal is home to divas and demons.

If you take a trip into the Imaginal, you can end up in Heaven or Hell. It can go either way. But there are levels of Heaven and Hell. If you find yourself in a strange alien landscape that appears emotionally neutral, it will still be tinged, if ever so slightly, with a positive or negative tone. You will feel confident, diva-style, or uncomfortable, demon-style. You are either at the foothills of Heaven or the upper ring of Hell.

There is an alternative model, also consisting of three worlds. These are the three world I described in The Temple and the Pub, the One, the Opposites and the Many. These map onto the the Orthodox Cross: the Mystic is of course associated with the One, the Mystic with the Many, and the Philosopher King with the Opposites. However, because we must inevitably return to the Concrete World (until complete and final spiritual enlightenment), we also need the strength and restraint of the Warrior Monk.

The Warrior Monk is represented by the lower horizontal of the Orthodox Cross. This relates to the Concrete World. The rest of the cross, the vertical and the upper horizontal, expresses the Trinity: the top of the vertical, the Mystic, associated with the One (the Father, Parashiva); the bottom of the vertical, the Shaman, with the Many (the Holy Spirit, Shakti), and the upper horizontal, the Philosopher King, with the Opposites (the Son, Shiva). This is the Christian cross as we know it.

There is no need to wander in the Upside Down (the Shadow World) or the Imaginal (the Dream World). You can go straight to the source. This is the difference between the Gnostics and the Christians in the Early Church. This is the difference between depth psychology and religion generally. In my view, ayahuasca is most profitably treated as a religious sacrament, not as a therapeutic tool. This is how the traditional indigenous Amazonian shamans use it, and this is how we should too.

 

The Chilean transpersonal psychologist Claudio Naranjo defines three broad classes of meditation practice: formless meditation, form meditation and expressive meditation. Mindfulness, vipassana and zazen are formless: you just allow thoughts, feelings and sensations to come and go without trying to force or control them in any way. The mind and body settle naturally. Mantras, prayers and visualizations are examples of form meditation: the mind has a specific object and a specific focus.

Expressive meditation is about embodying and expressing energy, the most obvious examples being singing and dancing. But singing and dancing as expressive meditation is very different from singing karaoke or dancing at a wedding or nightclub. We learn to sing and dance as it were “from the outside”, whether we have actual lessons or not. We mimetically acquire the correct vocal inflections and dance moves and mentally impose them on the body. Thus we learn the cultural conventions of song and dance.

If you can allow the body to do its own thing without external imposition, “from the inside”, you are doing expressive meditation. The breath is set free. The voice is set free. The usual social constraints and habitual self-repression are temporarily suspended. The body can express itself spontaneously in sound and gesture. It feels liberating. It feels great.

To a casual observer, it can look and sound amazing or completely ridiculous. As with any art form, either the person expressing is an experienced, skilled practitioner or a clumsy novice. But if they are doing it right, even beginners can express beauty and charm. Think of unselfconscious young children. Their sense of freedom and playfulness shines through whatever they do.

Mysticism is about mastering the arts of formless meditation and form meditation. Shamanism is about mastering the art of expressive meditation. Through practice, awareness shifts from the left to the right hemisphere. You learn to think differently, speak differently, sing differently, dance differently. And you get better at it. You refine your expression. You find the balance between order and chaos. No longer stuck in your head, you can express yourself fully, mind, body and soul.

 

The beauty of our modern connected world is that you can get instant information about anything. I don’t need to explain what Vortex Mathematics is because you can just look it up on the internet.

If you do, or if you’re already familiar with it, you may be inclined to wonder if it might have anything to do with the Wheel of Samsara and the Orthodox Cross. Some people love messing about with numbers and diagrams, especially esoteric ones. It brings complex ideas to life. Most people think it’s crackers.

For fear of being called crackers, I won’t go into any detail here. I will just point out the basic points of contact between the models and let you flesh out the details if you’re interested.

Vortex maths is all about the magic of base ten. The number 9 is the magic number, which draws all things to itself. It is at the centre of the vortex. In the diagram, 9 is at the top of the circle. It is connected to the numbers 3 and 6, forming an equilateral triangle. So far, so enneagram (search it up).

The remaining numbers are connected in a sequence derived from doubling the number and summing the resulting numbers. So 1+1=2; 2+2=4; 4+4=8; 8+8=16=1+6=7; 7+7=14=1+4=5; 5+5=10=1+0=1. The sequence is therefore 1,2,4,8,7,5,1. If you draw a line connecting the points on the circumference of the circle you create an infinity loop.

If you do the same thing with 3 and 6 you get 3+3=6; 6+6=3. The number 9 is the self-contained magic number, representing unity: 9+9=18=1+8=9.

How does this map on to the Wheel of Samsara? It should be fairly obvious. The infinity loop (1,2,4,8,7,5,1…) represents the endless transmigration of consciousness through the six realms. If we start in the Human Realm at point 1, and follow the order of the Tibetan Wheel, we arrive at the following:

1. Muggle; 2. Diva; 4. Muppet; 8. Victim; 7. Demon; 5. Addict; 1. Muggle…

The loop oscillates between two poles, the Muggle-Diva-Muppet pole on the right and the Victim-Demon-Addict pole on the left. This loosely corresponds to the upper and lower worlds, the conscious and the subconscious, Earth and Hell, the surface and the underworld, the upside and the upside down.

3, 6 and 9 are outside this system. The magic number 9 corresponds to the Mystic Shaman; number 3 corresponds to the Warrior Monk; number 6 corresponds to the Philosopher King.

Can you step off the infinity loop and stand firm at the centre of the vortex?

 

I spent Christmas Eve morning with a Romanian boat mechanic. My battery was flat so I had to jump start the engine with his. As he fiddled and I hovered, I couldn’t help thinking about the deeper lesson.

When we feel depleted, we need to recharge our batteries. We need a holiday. Like Christmas. But why did we get flat in the first place? Flat batteries are caused by leaks. But where are the leaks?

We leak energy all the time. Worry, anxiety, negativity, obsession, over reacting, over thinking. When we are ruled by our inner demon, addict, victim, muggle, muppet, or diva, we leak energy.

We accumulate energy simply by limiting its dispersion. Although negative thoughts and feelings are the biggest drain on our energy reserves, even ordinary thinking is a drain. To plug the leaks, you need to stop having negative thoughts, but ultimately, you need to stop thinking. Stopping thinking is meditation.

The energy we accumulate in meditation is experienced as inner vitality. It awakens the inner shaman. Mystic, Shaman, Warrior, Monk, Philosopher, King. This channel charges your inner energy reserves and defends you from leakage. If you can establish yourself as a “Philosopher King” (or “Philosopher Queen”) you will find it easier and easier to stop thinking and acting like a muppet or a muggle. You will stop draining away your energy.

So keep practicing. And stop leaking!

 

To give credit where credit is due, Terry Eagleton certainly does a good job of “steel manning” his opponents in his highly enjoyable 2001 book of Marxist apologetics, Why Marx was Right. Each chapter begins with a short critique of Marxism, which he then proceeds to “debunk”. He does an excellent job of articulating the critiques, but in my view, a rather flimsy job of debunking them.

Eagleton insists that the real Marx is actually more interesting and more nuanced than his caricature. This didn’t exactly hit me with the force of revelation, but ironically the more nuanced, sensible and sane Marx is portrayed, the less interesting he seems. At least Eagleton seems to be having fun philosophizing though. He riffs off the themes introduced at the start of each chapter, taking us on a varied and never boring tour of the Marxist intellectual landscape, but without ultimately arguing his way to any definitive or satisfying conclusions. We may end up more knowledgeable and more thougtful, but the critiques stand. An image that kept coming up for me was of a witty, intelligent and slightly mischievous professor flinging straw at a steel man, just for the craic of it.

So for what it’s worth, here are ten reasons why I am not a Marxist, shamelessly lifted from Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx was Right:

“ONE : Marxism is finished. It might conceivably have had some relevance to a world of factories and food riots, coal miners and chimney sweeps, widespread misery and massed working classes. But it certainly has no bearing on the increasingly classless, socially mobile, postindustrial Western societies of the present. It is the creed of those who are too stubborn, fearful or deluded to accept that the world has changed for good, in both senses of the term.”

“TWO : Marxism may be all very well in theory. Whenever it has been put into practice, however, the result has been terror, tyranny and mass murder on an inconceivable scale. Marxism might look like a good idea to well-heeled Western academics who can take freedom and democracy for granted. For millions of ordinary men and women, it has meant famine, hardship, torture, forced labour, a broken economy and a monstrously oppressive state. Those who continue to support the theory despite all this are either obtuse, self-deceived or morally contemptible. Socialism means lack of freedom; it also means a lack of material goods, since this is bound to be the result of abolishing markets.”

“THREE : Marxism is a form of determinism. It sees men and women simply as the tools of history, and thus strips them of their freedom and individuality. Marx believed in certain iron laws of history, which work themselves out with inexorable force and which no human action can resist. Feudalism was fated to give way to capitalism, and capitalism will inevitably give way to socialism. As such, Marx’s theory of history is just a secular version of Providence or Destiny. It is offensive to human freedom and dignity, just as Marxist states are.”

“FOUR : Marxism is a dream of utopia. It believes in the possibility of a perfect society, without hardship, suffering, violence or conflict. Under communism there will be no rivalry, selfishness, possessiveness, competition or inequality. Nobody will be superior or inferior to anyone else. Nobody will work, human beings will live in complete harmony with one another, and the flow of material goods will be endless. This astonishingly naïve vision springs from a credulous faith in human nature. Human viciousness is simply set aside. The fact that we are naturally selfish, acquisitive, aggressive and competitive creatures, and that no amount of social engineering can alter this fact, is simply overlooked. Marx’s dewy-eyed vision of the future reflects the absurd unreality of his polemic as a whole.”

“FIVE : Marxism reduces everything to economics. It is a form of economic determinism. Art, religion, politics, law, war, morality, historical change: all these are seen in the crudest terms as nothing more than the reflections of the economy or class struggle. The true complexity of human affairs is passed over for a monochrome vision of history. In his obsession with economics, Marx was simply an inverted image of the capitalist system he opposed. His thought is at odds with the pluralist outlook of modern societies, conscious as they are that the varied range of historical experience cannot be crammed into a single rigid framework.”

“SIX : Marx was a materialist. He believed that nothing exists but matter. He had no interest in the spiritual aspects of humanity, and saw human consciousness as just a reflex of the material world. He was brutally dismissive of religion, and regarded morality simply as a question of the end justifying the means. Marxism drains humanity of all that is most precious about it, reducing us to inert lumps of material stuff determined by our environment. There is an obvious route from this dreary, soulless vision of humanity to the atrocities of Stalin and other disciples of Marx.”

“SEVEN : Nothing is more outdated about Marxism than its tedious obsession with class. Marxists seem not to have noticed that the landscape of social class has changed almost out of recognition since the days when Marx himself was writing. In particular, the working class which they fondly imagine will usher in socialism has disappeared almost without trace. We live in a social world where class matters less and less, where there is more and more social mobility, and where talk of class struggle is as archaic as talk of burning heretics at the stake. The revolutionary worker, like the wicked top-hatted capitalist, is a figment of the Marxist imagination.”

“EIGHT : Marxists are advocates of violent political action. They reject a sensible course of moderate, piecemeal reform and opt instead for the bloodstained chaos of revolution. A small band of insurrectionists will rise up, overthrow the state and impose its will on the majority. This is one of several senses in which Marxism and democracy are at daggers drawn. Because they despise morality as mere ideology, Marxists are not especially troubled by the mayhem their politics would unleash on the population. The end justifies the means, however many lives may be lost in the process.”

“NINE : Marxism believes in an all-powerful state. Having abandoned private property, socialist revolutionaries will rule by means of a despotic power, and that power will put an end to individual freedom. This has happened wherever Marxism has been put into practice; there is no reason to expect that things would be different in the future. It is part of the logic of Marxism that the people give way to the party, the party gives way to the state, and the state to a monstrous dictator. Liberal democracy may not be perfect, but it is infinitely preferable to being locked in a psychiatric hospital for daring to criticise a savagely authoritarian government.”

“TEN : All the most interesting radical movements of the past four decades have sprung up from outside Marxism. Feminism, environmentalism, gay and ethnic politics, animal rights, antiglobalisation, the peace movement: these have now taken over from an antiquated commitment to class struggle, and represent new forms of political activism which have left Marxism well behind. Its contributions to them have been marginal and uninspiring. There is indeed still a political left, but it is one appropriate to a postclass, postindustrial world.”

I was curious to see how Terry Eagleton would go about addressing and even perhaps refuting these claims. I was open to the possibility that the scales might fall from my eyes and that finally I would get it. Surely I had missed something? And what better hands to be coaxed back into the fold than those of my charming and erudite undergraduate hero (I read English Lit)?

But all I found were a jumble of half-baked arguments and assertions. Whatever the ins and outs of Marx’s thought and his intellectual relations to other nineteenth century thinkers, it seems painfully obvious that there is a wide gulf between Marx the man and Marxism, and that Marxism is closer to the ten vignettes copied and pasted above, than to the supposed subtleties of Marx’s personal intellectual genius. If only academics of Terry Eagleton’s caliber can distill the profound truths from the apparent nonsense, what hope for the rest of us? If we are attracted by Marxism, won’t it most likely be the bastardised version? The anti-capitalist “eat the rich” variety?

Don’t take my word for it though. Read the book and make up your own mind.