bread of life

Religion literally means “re-connection” (from the Latin, re-ligare). Psychedelics also have a mysterious but powerful capacity to reconnect us in all sorts of ways. They reconnect us to ourselves, to our our feelings, hopes and dreams, our imagination and creativity, our senses and bodies, to our shadow side and all the disowned, dissociated parts of our personality. They reconnect us to our spiritual nature, to our soul, to God, to life and the Source of life.

Us moderns are lonely creatures, and never more so than in a crowd. We feel disconnected from the people around us, or at least not fully, deeply connected. Our social and romantic relations are weak and tenuous, superficial and trivial, easily displaced by others, washed away in a “liquid modernity”. We relate to family and friends at levels of intimacy barely above those of colleagues and acquaintances. We are constantly told that “we’re all connected”, but deep down we feel profoundly disconnected from people, from society, from politics, from religion, from nature. The more severely alienated among us feel disconnected from our own bodies and minds, from food, from love, from sex, from gender, from place, from purpose, from meaning, from beauty, from humour, from joy, from the past, from the future, from the present moment.

Of course I am exaggerating to make a point. My point is that ultimately, we are either connected to life, through all the threads of human experience that converge upon it, or else we are disconnected. And that when we are disconnected, we need to reconnect. We need to re-member, to re-join, to re-ligare. We need religio. Traditionally we have done this through rituals, which have been planted in the world to remind us to reconnect to life and the Source of life. We have done this weekly, by attending religious houses of worship, or daily, through morning and evening prayers. Practicing Muslims do this at least five times a day.

Ultimately, we have an existential choice: God or Babylon. Either we stay connected to Babylon, to the “web”, to the “matrix”, through filaments of emaciated desire, or we remember God and reconnect with the living flame of Love at the centre of life, the universe and everything.

Most of us are so lost in Babylon, that we don’t even know we are lost, or else know it, but refuse to be found. We are in unconscious despair, suffering from the “sickness unto death”. We would rather stay disconnected than reconnect.

For many people in the grip of this existential Kierkegaardian despair, the only way out is through contact with the power of psychedelics. For many of us, we are so far gone that the psychedelic experience is the only way we can rediscover the fullness of life. A Hindu might say that in the Kali Yuga, people need strong soma to wake them up. A Christian might say that in deepest, darkest Babylon, we need strong medicine to graft us back into the True Vine.

“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.

If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”

John 15: 5-6

“But – we may well be asked – has it any meaning to ask for ‘the presence of the Divine’? Does not that Sacramental idea at once cancel itself, when thought out? Is not God ‘omnipresent’ and ‘really present’ always and everywhere?

Such a view is often put forward, and with a confident air of assurance which is in sharp conflict with the testimony of genuine religious experience; so much so, indeed, that one is tempted to venture a very blunt reply to it. We say, then, that this doctrine of the omnipresence of God – as thought by a necessity of His being He must be bound to every time and to every place, like a natural force pervading space – is a frigid invention of metaphysical speculation, entirely without religious import. Scripture knows nothing of it. Scripture knows no ‘Omnipresence’, neither the expression nor the meaning it expresses; it knows only the God who is where He wills to be, and is not where He wills not to be, the deus mobilis, who is no mere universally extended being, but an august mystery, that comes and goes, approaches and withdraws, has its time and hour, and may be far or near in infinite degrees, ‘closer than our breathing’ to us or miles remote from us. The hours of His ‘visitation’ and His ‘return’ are rare and solemn occasions, different essentially not only from the ‘profane’ life of every day, but also from the calm confiding mood of the believer, whose trust is to live ever before the face of God. They are the topmost summits in the life of the spirit. They are not only rare occasions, they must needs be so for our sakes, for no creature can bear often or for long the full nearness of God’s majesty in its beatitude and its awefulness. Yet there must still be such times, for they show the bright vision and completion of our sonship, they are a bliss in themselves and potent for redemption. They are the real sacrament, in comparison with which all high official ceremonials, Masses, and rituals the world over become the figurings of a child. And a Divine Service would be the truest which led up to such a mystery and the riches of grace that ensue upon the realization of it. And if it be asked whether a Divine Service be able to achieve this, let us answer that, though God indeed comes where and when He chooses, yet He will choose to come when we sincerely call upon Him and prepare ourselves truly for His visitation.”

Rudolf Otto

Give up everything; cut all ties.

Let go and let God.

Die before you die.

o

Drop down into the body.

Relax.

Enter the dragon.

“Religion is a defense against religious experience.”

What does this mean?

All pistis and no gnosis makes Jack a dull boy.

So should we forget about religion then?

No.

All gnosis and no pistis makes Jack a dull boy.

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

Matthew 7:14

We come to ceremony for guidance and healing. We are beset by the six modes of suffering on the Wheel of Babylon and want release and relief. We want to break free.

Mostly, people who come are Divas. The first step on the Way therefore is to break free from our Diva Nature. This means that we must let go of everything we think we know and understand. We have been Birds of Appetite for years, but must leave the carcasses we feed on if we are to take flight.

We must leave the mytho-poetic world of our imaginations behind, our favourite stories and dreams, our pet ideas and theories. We must become like little children, poor in spirit, free of thought. We must become mystics.

The second step on the Way is to drop into the body and enter the dragon. We must awaken our living flesh and blood into electric life. We must become shamans.

The third step is to train our warrior spirit, to channel the true power of the peaceful warrior. Not the power of self will and effort but the power of selfless will and effortlessness.

The fourth step is to develop a monk’s simplicity and sufficiency. Like Brother Lawrence we must learn to see the divine beauty shining in all things, especially the humblest, the stones, the leaves, the air.

The fifth step is to deepen our philosophical acuity. The sixth is to remember our divine sovereignty.

The final step is to be a good friend.

“Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.”

John 15:15

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

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

When you take a trip to heaven, for example.

If your mind is crowded with thoughts,

memories, images, voices,

you are not alone.

And only the alone can fly to the Alone.

The Alone is the All One.

The way to the All One,

the way, the truth and the life,

is through a cloud of forgetting

and a cloud of unknowing.

But to reach the clouds

you must lighten your load

and throw off your ballast

in zazen, or centering prayer.

This is kenosis,

Dogen’s “bodymind dropped”.

Kenosis is the art of self-emptying,

of emptying oneself of all thoughts,

feelings, desires,

of becoming like an uncarved block

or dead ashes.

This no-mind is Buddha Mind;

This Buddha Mind is the mind of Christ.

Remember:

No one comes to the Father but through Me.

If you go to heaven

You will burn in hell

Until you learn to bear the beams of love.

Put on the armour of Christ

And the robes of light

And approach the unapproachable.

Before God

In absolute faith

Alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luke 17: 5-10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew 9: 21-22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acts 28: 25-27