It seems that over the last two to three years, there has been an increasing focus on partisan politics and the presence of identity in the public sphere.

The ways in which we make sense of the world, and the criteria and methods we use to do so have become decoupled from a common basis. We never really had this common basis to begin with, but it seemed that we had a general and unifying sense that we were moving towards facts, reason and evidence-based policy, and away from the rhetoric, mythologizing and scapegoating that were the hallmarks of the great political upheavals of the last century, of National Socialism and authoritarian Russia and China.

Now, with the election of unprincipled populist candidates the world over, who have run successfully on campaigns of fear, division and false promises of wealth and security, it seems that we are far from being past the specter of fascism and authoritarianism. It has assumed a new form, using the lassez-faire legal attitudes to capital and the dealings of corporations to rapidly redistribute vast portions of the overall wealth of society into the hands of a small few.

We are seeing a resurgence of the robber-baron archetype from the early twentieth century, a neo-feudalism where instead of lord, king and church, we are subject to manager, CEO, and company. The same Stockholm-syndrome idolization that colours black the camp of libertarianism is now seeping like ink into the mainstream, with intelligent yet poorly informed individuals providing justifications for unethical and inhumane conduct under the pretense that what is profitable is unquestionably a societal good.

Thanks to advances in the way large corporations and social media companies use algorithms to filter and generate content, the average news-feed on any given social media site has become increasingly self-confirming, an echo-chamber phenomena that pushes opinion ever towards the extreme end of its spectrum. In addition to this back-of-house programming of the social space, the absence of physical contact between parties leads to far greater degrees of misanthropy and harsh conduct, being that there is no immediate pheromonal or gestural information being communicated between parties.

Subtle paranoias, mistrust, othering, the demonization of the out-group; all of these have become the norm for us over the last few years. We have become severely disconnected from the basic unifying factors of our human existence, and we are being manipulated in our weakened state to accept policies and political changes that are not in the best interests of ourselves, our families, and our futures.

Both “sides” of politics have taken advantage of this situation, particularly in the petri-dish case study of the United States, where the fungi of unfettered capitalism has infected deeply both the Democratic and Republican parties. Politics, it is oft remarked, is the shadow cast by business over society. Nowhere in the world is this more apparent that modern-day America. Their elections are bought and paid for by wealthy candidates and their moneyed backers in wealthy society. Policies are routinely passed that severely compromise the quality of life of those living under them, often to accrue some small material benefit to the already wealthy ruling class.

Various public figures looking to cash in on this phenomena have appeared, among them Stephen Crowder, Milo Yiannopolous, Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro and others. These self-proclaimed radical thinkers have cultivated a large following of mostly young white males, using methods of psychological manipulation and priming common among white-nationalist and neo-Nazi groups to paint their followers as being targeted for destruction or obsolescence by a conspiratorial elite infected by a deadly ideological madness. In a world where women and people of colour are increasingly being accepted into positions previously unavailable to them due to discriminatory behaviour, white males, who traditionally slid easily into such roles, are the perfect target for this kind of manipulative and divisive rhetoric. It appeals to their sense of entitlement and to their egoic sense of self-reliance and masculinity.

This growing movement of thinly-veiled racism, sexism and xenophobia has associated itself with a sort of counter-culture, a self-proclaimed “intellectual” movement that sees through the apparent “illusions” propagated by the media. These sorts of vague claims and self-reinforcing narratives are hallmarks of fascism and authoritarian thinking, and should be held in the highest degree of suspicion.

In the universities, an increasingly fractious and schismatic leftism has been growing alongside this alternative right. Throwing all eggs into the basket of identity, many scholars and professors and their students are becoming dogmatic around political correctness, demanding at the threat of the termination of employment or the smearing of a persons name that they conform to a narrow, proscribed band of thought with regards to the identity and status of marginalized groups of people. While the intent is clearly to create safe spaces for people who are routinely targeted by others and subject to bigotry, verbal abuse and often physical violence, the application of these mindsets tends to veer quickly into the policing of speech and, by extension, thought.

Many attempts have been made by those in the extreme groups outlined above to suppress and silence opposing views, and many of the average population has been drawn into sympathy with one or the other viewpoint due to a lack of historical context and a lack of genuine critical thought. Many people are now caught in circular arguments around the nature of transgender individuals and their use of language, around the role of capitalism in our society, about the historical nature of socialism, the role of men and women in relation to one another, the presence of racism and sexism in modern culture and so on.

These issues are frankly impossible to resolve at this level of analysis and with this kind of methodology. We cannot reach outwards into the lives of others and fix their issues, because we can never know what the fullness of those issues are, not can we act on behalf of another to heal their trauma. We cannot solve these problems through dialectic, because these problems are not dualistic issues: they have merely been framed that way by the malicious who seek to gain from confusion, and the confused who seek to fix the world before they have addressed the gaping wounds of their own heart and mind.

Fundamentally, the issues we discuss now, whether they be gender politics, racism, sexism, identity, economics, ecological destruction, the decay of democratic forms, these issues are presented in overly simplistic forms and discussed in a manner whereby no genuine insight or change of opinion can occur. They are manufactured distractions from the point where all of us can make the most impact: the immediate present, the here and now of our own lives.

We must recognise that no matter how important these issues feel, they pale in comparison to self-realization, to the process of the self coming to know itself through deep inner reflection. Indeed, these are issues precisely due to the alienation of mankind from the self. They arise from a schism in the psyche, from the conflict internal to each of us.

“Since men do not know that the conflict occurs inside themselves, they go mad, and one lays the blame on the other. If one-half of mankind is at fault, then every man is half at fault. But he does not see the conflict in his own soul, which is however the source of the outer disaster. If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what in you is similar to your brother. As a man you are part of mankind, and therefore you have a share in the whole of mankind, as if you were the whole of mankind. If you overpower and kill your fellow man who is contrary to you, then you also kill that person in yourself and have murdered a part of your life. The spirit of this dead man follows you and does not let your life become joyful. You need your wholeness to live onward.“

- Carl Gustav Jung, from “Liber Novus”, “The Red Book”

We rush out into the streets to condemn the fascist, but we have not integrated the fascist in our own heart. We condemn the leftist progressive for his attachment to identity and definition, yet we fear looking inwards to see our own deep-seated attachments to our names, our roles, our definitions of ourselves as good, rational, decent people. Inside each of us lives the murderer, the rapist, the fascist, the tyrannical king and the lowly servant. Inside each of us lies war, death, famine, hatred, evil, misery and caprice, and in our fear and our unwillingness to look deeply into these common human facts, we project our darkness out onto the world and it becomes manifest as fate.

None of us are exempt from this problem. None of us can claim without conceit or egotism to be enlightened beings, free from these inner contradictions and devoid of the wellsprings of great suffering.

So, looking back over these last few years and seeing the great divisions that have arisen, it seems to me that the only sensible way forward is to turn off the news, to set down all of our cherished campaigns and causes and our heady activism, and to draw our attention inwards, to the contradictions within, to the great unaddressed movements of the psyche, and to come to know them as intimately as anything we have ever known. We must each come directly to the addressing of our own lives with our full capacity for conscious attention, with our best critical faculties around us.

There are opposites within the mind that manifest as polarised groups of people in the “real” world. These manifestations are like shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. The substance which creates the shadow is the prima materia of the psyche, the innermost mind of each human being. What is unacknowledged becomes fate.

This is the alchemical process, the turning of the lead of dualism and the judging mind into the gold of the marriage of these dualisms into a whole. I cannot stress enough that this is the process by which exterior change will come about, not through the going out into the world or the debating or the formation of theories or groups. The way in which the world changes is through the vessel of the human self, for all life is radial and extends outwards.

The self is the world. The world is the self. If you wish to change the world, look deeply within and discover that the pain and suffering in the world has its origin in you, and nowhere else. The division is within, not “out there” somewhere, and only through the reconciliation of this inner division can the outer wound be closed and healed.

“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Kingdom.”

- The Gospel of Thomas, 22

The static self is a long gone myth. No longer is it tenable for the average person to believe that they are truly and deeply Joe Somebody, inherently so, and so for the rest of their days. Human beings have often suspected this “I, myself” to be somewhat of a hallucination, a persistent one, but a hallucination nonetheless. Modern neuroscience cannot find this fabled “me”, Buddhism contends that it has never existed and by the very nature of the cosmos itself, cannot exist. Zen barely speaks of it, and knocks over a vase, leaving the conversation.

That there is no fundamental, inherent and static self, however, does not mean that we cannot improve our lives. There is a certain tendency towards a kind of abstract fatalism, nihilistic behaviour and thinking, when one comes to see that there is no “iI” and there is no “me”, and what is there instead is change and passing form. We reason that if no-one is to be the recipient of our good or bad deeds, if there’s no-one here to accrue benefits or to escape punishment, then why bother? Why do anything at all, after all, no-one’s doing it and it isn’t happening to anyone, so what reason could we possibly have to even so much as get out of bed, let alone meditate, eat well and try to alleviate suffering?

It seems the answer is more simple than one might suppose. We need not believe in an eternal self or a soul, or even a solid ego in order for our actions to become desirable. They need no further justification, no accounting for their benefits or lack thereof by some standard outside themselves. Simply put, every action and every thought can be done for its own sake. Wholly complete in and of itself, each act and meandering of mind is somehow integrally perfect, indescribably so, even if its quality is that of being eaten alive by wild dogs or trapped in a prison for decades.  There is no ulterior motive at this level of comprehension, and it would seem that none need be invented and tacked on after the fact.

We do not enjoy compulsion. Human beings do not respond well to being forced into things, we rebel against this kind of treatment and retreat into further bad habits and counterproductive strategies of coping. And indeed, most of our justifications for our actions and our thought are forms of self-compulsion, ways in which we manage ourselves by giving dictates, commands, ultimatums and so on. We wonder why we feel awful when we’re doing this, after all, we’re only doing it to ourselves, right?

Well apparently not, if we agree on the above point that the self is but an illusion. So who’s doing what to whom then, and why does it feel bad? It seems that a split takes place in the psyche when we are trying to compel ourselves to act. On the one hand, there is the commanding self, occupying the supposed moral high ground and giving orders, and on the other there is the wayward self, the messy old me who won’t do this that or the other thing, according to the commanding self, unless it is commanded to.

This is a false dichotomy. As we saw above, there is no fundamental self, so to split nothing and call it two is clearly a delusional form of thinking. It makes conflict out of emptiness by implying that there is a fight between two mutually exclusive loci of action or thought, and presupposes that domination is the best route to solve this imaginary problem. The reason the domination doesn’t and can not work is because the very problem itself does not exist. It is a ghost, a figment of imagination, a suggestion in the mind created by language. How are “you” going to get outside yourself in order to push yourself around? How are there suddenly two of you where before there was only the thought of one? How did you get so convinced there was a self in the first place?

I think if we analyse this splitting closely enough we can recognise that it is illusory in its nature, and in this recognition lies the freedom from a falsehood imposed upon our consciousness. The resulting relaxation of chronic muscular tension, which we create through our futile efforts to pit one imaginary self against another, gives one access to a great deal of energy which was previously being wasted. This sensation of lightness, of being uplifted, is what we seek through the game of playing ourselves against ourselves, and if we can get it without any effort, indeed if the only way to get it is to relax all trying, then why engage in the struggle? It is, after all, pointless and ineffectual.

But, the issue with this kind of talk is that it’s like explaining a joke, the effect of the wisdom is diluted by the explanation. Nonetheless, I say it that it may sit in the background of your mind and, next time you feel yourself caught between a rock and a hard place in your own head, work its subtle sense into the forefront of your attention.

The goal while playing the human game is to be fully human and to, necessarily implied in that, discover what it is to be fully human. Likewise, the goal while playing the game of being a squirrel is to be fully squirrel, and to, necessarily implied in that, discover what it is to be fully squirrel. Human beings, if they confuse themselves with a squirrel, will surely not achieve their full potential, nor will a squirrel succeed in his life if by some quirk of fate he comes to imagine himself as a human being.

All things that experience themselves as an entity, a being, an identity of some sort, shape, style or pattern, must discover the extent and the limitations, the conditions and the freedoms of their form, and only through this will it be possible to achieve their optimal state of being in the cosmos.

It is then therefore fruitless to conceive of human beings as solely determined by processes and phenomena outside of themselves; as machines, collections of genes, rational economic actors and so on. All ideas that human beings are not first and foremost human beings, but instead only the emergent functions of some other process, are limiting ideas for the reason that they confuse the goal of life expressed above with another goal entirely: to condition human beings to become something they are not 

As a result of this, mankind has set out on countless ideological pursuits of this kind to no end, each time believing he has come across a true utopian strategy, a saving grace, and that this can only come about through the reshaping of human beings away from their nature.

The ideas of the free market, the worship of technology, the majority of our religions, our state systems, and the sociological, anthropological, psychological and indeed, even the physical aspects of our sciences have, in a multiplicity of ways, succumbed to and produced images of the world that carry within them this basic assumption.

It is perhaps hinted at by William Blake in his poem, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”:

“All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:—  
 1. That Man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.  
 2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body; and that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.  
 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.”

We see the futility of these images of our universe and our place in it, as shown through the many unintended failures and the sometimes catastrophic consequences of their manifestations, in the great economic depressions, in the development of ever increasingly complex and deadly weapons, in the social isolation and mental illness, the paranoia and surveillance, the expansion of private power, racial, sexual and interpersonal tension of all kinds. If we can bear witness to this and not retreat into an abstract rationalization of it, another image, we will see implied in these events and phenomena the possibility of there being another way, that necessarily must avoid the same failures and consequences and instead raise humanity to its natural and optimal position in the harmony of things.

It is perhaps, as I suggested at the beginning, that human beings simply discover what it is to be human, as humans. Blake expands on this in rare poetic beauty, following on from his previous statements:

 But the following Contraries to these are True:—  

 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.  
 2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.  

 3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

And further on:

“This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
  
 But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.  

 If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.  

 For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

What I am trying perhaps to say is that our liberation cannot lie in systems, methods of understanding the human being as anything but human. These are all caverns, through whose narrow chinks we squint at reality, their certainty and rigidity obscuring our doors of perception. Our liberation, then, lies in the transcendence of all these systems and images, worldviews and ideologies, not just in theory and understanding but in fact, and the only way it seems we could accomplish such a feat is to be truly human in the process.

And what might it mean to be human? I have always found the following passage from philosopher and scholar of religion Alan W. Watts to awake in me a felt sense of what that might be, of who I am and, I feel, we are at the most fundamental level.

“Listen, there’s something I must tell. I’ve never, never seen it so clearly. But it doesn’t matter a bit if you don’t understand, because each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don’t know it. Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isn’t being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It’s a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn’t happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play - exuberance which is its own end. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, and multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason whatsoever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn’t anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn’t happen to anyone! There isn’t any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It’s a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety.”

When we go deeply into ourselves and look with awake attention, when we go further and further inside, asking the question, “Who am I?”, we find that all of the classifications, all of the many worldviews and forms of identification dissolve into an unspeakable sense of being. Our gesture, unspeakable as it is, can only be discovered through direct contact. And, when we come into this, our natural state of being, we throw off these limited ways of being and taste the possibility of what it might be to be truly human.

It is, I feel, this process, this self-knowing on the behalf of all of us, that will turn the gestures of war, of hatred, of partisan politics, of control and punishment, of imprisonment and paranoia; into gestures of compassion, loving kindness, respect, awareness, and true delight in our energies as human beings, here and now in the moment, alive in and with and of the universe.

“The question “what shall we do about it” is only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once.”

The now-famous counterculture mystic Alan Watts has a funny phrase he uses to describe the kind of insincere, plastic progress we see popping up everywhere in display homes, shopping centre refurbishments, “reality” television and so on. He calls this process the “Los-Angelization” of the world, referring of course to the excessive and desire-oriented urbanization of the American city of Los Angeles.

I feel that we are guilty of this sort of cognition in almost all areas of our lives, but perhaps most noticeably in the sphere of our love. We tend to worship an immaculate image of love constructed by our entertainers: the idea that the perfect love is in a sense cosmically ordained, due to have a minor upset at the beginning due to, largely, misunderstanding between the parties, and then destined to exist in a state of perfect and unflinching harmony forever after.

This is infantile. I would liken this caricature of love, for which so many people leave decent partners in search of an alluring ghost, to a children’s pool. It is safe, shallow, and there’s little risk of being badly hurt. But, as an adult, there is simply no room to move or to grow here. One cannot engage in the beautiful strokes of the butterfly or enjoy a game of water polo in several inches of shallow and yellow water. No-one can stretch out here, and I believe it is this constricting feeling which we respond to more than the actuality of the person we are in a relationship with.

So, we end our liaisons with perfectly good people due to our own inability to overcome the childish imagined version of love we have trapped ourselves in. We blame the other for feeling stuck, held back, unable to grow or flourish; but it is my contention that the cause of this sensation is rather our own immaturity and our chosen inability to deal constructively with limitation and the winding and unfamiliar paths of adulthood: honesty, integrity, loyalty, and most importantly, unselfishness.

This, and its corollaries in friendship and our relationships with our work colleagues and family, is one of the last sphinxes of adolescence, and its riddle must be solved before one is permitted entry into the sanctuary and garden of maturity. Ultimately, this mindset presupposes that if love is not perfect, it must be a problem with the person with whom we are in love, and as such reinforces a concept of ourselves as necessarily perfect in some sense, completely lovable in our present state, no matter if that state is egoic, narcissistic, or illusory. The destruction of this illusion is the key that opens the lock of genuine relationship, and I hope we can all find the strength within us to forge that key from the substance of our own self-inquiry, honesty and bravery.

As I sit here with the wind rolling past my mountainside home, warm sun slowly reanimating the dormant insects and reptiles, first stirrings of cars in the distance; I am reminded of the pure and natural expression of the spiritual mind that can be found in the works of the Chinese sages of old.

Simply put, the Tao is an unspeakable experience. It cannot be worded, nor categorized, nor classed. We may say for purposes of convenience that it refers to the one to whom every “that” belongs; that it is energy, transformation, change, but also none of these, as these can be seen as merely features of it. The experience of such a thing is perhaps rare, perhaps common, for who can genuinely say he has found an unspeakable non-object?

I walked in a paradisiacal meadow on Saturday morning, footfalls lightly touching the leafy earth, chest warming from rising sun, and examined in minute detail the particulars of the vast natural environment I found myself in. All around fine fibres of airborne pollens and cast-offs of plants formed illuminated patterns like oil on water, the infinitesimally small creatures of the undergrowth ran geometries over grass stalks and under logs, the flowers raised their delicate symmetries to catch the elixir of life streaming from the heavens.

I scaled a log over a small creek, gently bubbling, and strolled casually through soft grass, coming to rest my eyes on the activity of a native bee flitting and darting around a spiny green growth of some sort. It moved itself in a variety of forms, little dances of evolutionary import, showing me itself from every angle before finally turning to face me for a moment, hovering in mid air as still as an artificial point before darting off into the morning.

These recollections are but mouldering butterflies on the shelf of my present consciousness. They hold no life any longer, only mechanical replays of their once subtle and spectacular realness. In this way, we can come to see that no matter how beautiful the descriptor, it is not the Tao. The Tao is alive, breathing, pulsing, changing; it is always here and now, not in memories of a holy here and now that happened last week.

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, “the Old Boy”, tells us that the Tao is like water, for it seeks the lowest level of things, which men abhor. If one spends enough time around waterways (and I mean natural waterways, not the mathematically precise grids built to trap the decaying memories of the cities and suburbs), one will come to the unavoidable realisation that water is modelling a perfect way of being in the cosmos. It never tries. It never exerts itself or forces itself without due cause. Simply put, water uses the gravity already present in its environment to trailblaze across its opposite, its other, being of course dry land.

It is a form of Judo, using the opponents strength against him at opportune and critical intervals. But of course we must take care not to see nature as a battle, not in any serious sense. Where we find violence, eating, killing and conflict in nature, we may put aside our egoic and rationalized conceptions of it, based on our own mad warring natures, and simply see it instead as a dance wherein neither party exists separately from the other, where both are merely energies exchanging routines in a fantastic form of play, way out on the far end of the spectrum of vibration we call pain.

So, water, using this judo, overcomes the hard. By being soft, formless in and of itself, empty of hard and static self nature, it is at home anywhere. And we may see ourselves as a form of water too, if only we recognise our kinship with this aspect of the one great and eternal Self that we grow out of like fruit from a tree. Like water, we may yield instead of bracing. Like water, we may flow instead of stopping. And like water, eventually, if the heat is too much, we may evaporate into heaven, throw off our gross forms and become a misty delight being blown on the winds across the cosmos.

I aim to show in the following paragraphs that our deep rooted sense of alienation and suffering in the modern world is a necessary and inescapable consequence of our continued adherence to the economic system of capitalism, and in fact that capitalism itself as a phenomenon cannot exist without it. I hope to demonstrate that there is no real place within the ideologies of capitalism and the modern free market for human compassion, restraint, or altruism, and that in fact all of these traits are automatically punished and devalued by the structure of the system set in place. Only those who sacrifice the heart on the altar of profit will be carried through to the holy garden of success. In its place, we are to reorient ourselves towards an explicitly economic mindset, where everything has a price and nothing any value, where the military marching of the clock rules human affairs down to the bodily level, and where profit comes before people.

We are, in modern techno-consumer democracy, becoming all too aware that the promises of this peculiar ideology far outstrip its possibilities. On the backdrop of an emotional-spiritual void is projected the arch-image of success; the beautiful wife or girlfriend (or husband/boyfriend), the expensive car, the mansion, the travel, the work culture shiny and new. This is all made to seem tantalisingly close at hand, with its images plastered across advertisements for products, in our movies and television dramas, and in “reality” TV nightmare programming. We are told that we want this, that this is a mark of security, of being well-loved, of being a truly decent person, and by extension, to see those without it as simply faulty, not deserving, a sinner of sorts. This is the mana, the elixir of heaven, which will, according to the best advertising and marketing rhetoric, make us feel whole, satisfied and content.

What is most fudamentally required of the individual in order that he may be granted access to any of the aforementioned boons of this system is to engage in one of the many forms of abstract busywork that crop up in its wake. I am speaking of the duty manager, the area manager, the filing clerk, the “personal assistant”, and the many other guises that pointless activity wears. These “jobs” are in a very real sense superfluous, that is, they do not in any way, shape or form, contribute to either the ongoing survival of the species or its enrichment. In many cases they are closer to forms of parasitism, wherein they in fact actively decrease the survival potential of the species and degrade quality of life in the process, for example, the fossil fuel industries, big mining, fracking and so on.

That these jobs are either superfluous or detrimental is no secret to the average person, it is simply not spoken about. The overwhelming majority of persons engaged in these types of work know on some level, whether harshly conscious or blissfully unconscious, that what they are doing cannot be termed “contributing to society” in any meaningful way, and that in many cases “scraping a living off the back of it” would likely be a better description. The individual then, in any such situation, will be likely to experience a sense of pointlessness, a vacuum of meaning related to the the very real lack of it in their day to day behaviour. As we can all see from our interactions with other persons in the work sphere, this tends to give itself to apathy, frustration, ill-will and overall a general sense of disquiet, which has come to be confused on a societal level with the natural state of the human being at work and thus treated as normal.

But it is not normal. Humanity was not born, did not come out of this world, in order to pointlessly toil for the benefit of others. Mankind is a social animal, and our psyche is a social psyche. We feel good when we do good in the sense of maintaining and supporting the social group, living in harmony with it and furthermore, bringing the group to harmony with the wider environment in which it exists. It is only natural for us to feel sick when our work is sick, when it does not lead to health but rather decay, and to see this state of sickness as an inherent and ordinary condition of the mind of the human being is nothing other than an ill-considered adjustment to and a justification of a sick society.

The amount of this work to which the individual is asked to adjust himself is equally as inhumane as the nature of the work he is asked to perform. Far from the directly beneficial and minimal outlay of time set aside to hunt and gather of our ancestors, often only some four hours of the day, we have become slowly accustomed to working 45+ hour weeks, taking home aspects of our work to be completed after hours, and attending mandatory “team building” excercises and the like. To work longer and harder is encouraged, it is seen as a sign of integrity and focus, and rewarded with progression up the arbitrary social ladder imposed around the work to be done. But this leaves us with little time to attend to the deeper needs of the human organism, the emotional connections with friends and family, recreational time spent outdoors connecting with the land, self-love and relaxation, and this malnourishment of the spirit is all too obvious in the exhausted faces of the working class.

We see here an odd mechanism beginning to take shape. We are being asked to submit ourselves to a dehumanizing process, by which we are led into a state of temporal and emotional poverty. Then, we are promised exit from this state of affairs, which is retroactively mythologised as the natural state of human life, through closer and closer involvement with the apparatus of our dehumanization. Thus, a feedback loop is created, whereby the poverty felt is most easily addressed with overconsumption, the overconsumption leads to further material poverty, the material poverty leads us back into direct contact with the system, where the poverty of the spirit once more takes hold and is supposed to be necessarily addressed by a return to overconsumption.

This complicates itself to the extreme of the hedonic treadmill, where an individual has become so empty of him or herself that he or she becomes maddened with each exposure to pleasure, craving it and seeking it all the more to mask the sense of disunity and lack within. We see this represented in the tales of CEO’s living it up around the world, drinking the finest wines, eating the rarest foods and sampling the most extreme pleasures, all the while moving, seemingly restless and on the run from something. The something is the vacuity of spirit at the heart of the capitalist world, and it is the fuel that drives the engine of economic progress and production.

Enshrined as a basic tenet of this system is the notion that desire should be increased. Markets must expand, and as the range of goods expands with them, the desire of the people to consume these goods must follow. We have seen above the mechanism by which desire is grown in the consumer, through a forced sense of lack or poverty and a conversion of the radical, creative life energies of the individual into a mechanistic and ultimately meaningless repetition of behaviours which, according to the ideology of the system, will address the problem. It is not simply enough to have and be happy with what one has. The simple life is old hat, out of fashion, and what is most respectable in this system is to have the most of anything. So desire becomes the holiest state of mind, and the fulfilment of desire the goal of all activity, the key to the lock of success and privilege.

Those familiar with Buddhist ways of thinking will see clearly the problem with this state of affairs. For it is desire, wanting things to be other than they are, that is the root of suffering and the cause of conditional action, which is action that seeks a goal or an end. Let us examine for a moment the phenomenon of happiness in the human being. When one is happy, there is absent from the experience any sense of wanting or needing things to be different; one is simply content with the arrangement of phenomena in their experience and rests in their own being-in-it. Absent also are thoughts of the past, regrets and wishes for things to have been done differently; and thoughts of the future, plans, anxieties and so on. The mind of the happy individual is centred fully here and now, in the present, in a state of open receptivity to the play of reality.

When the aforementioned thoughts of the past and future, of wanting things to be as they aren’t, enters the mind, the individual becomes restless, and goes off in search of something, someone, some experience or other, to fill this apparent void in their experience of the world. So we can see clearly that desire, wanting, is the root cause of suffering, as it pulls the individual away from contentment and being, and into the sphere of discontent and becoming. Capitalism as an ideology requires desire to expand and grow infinitely, and thus implies the infinite growth of suffering. Once again, there is nothing inherent within the ideology of capitalism that would see it trend towards reducing desire, for this would imply the reduction of markets, products and so on, and therefore the reduction of profits.

On top of this root mechanism of infinitely increasing desire, we have the mechanism of estrangement from the natural self, or as I shall describe it for our purposes here, the commercialisation of the ego. The natural human self is a thing of emotionality, subjectivity, whimsy and play. We see it best represented in young children, and in the lives of various self-actualised people from around the globe such as Ramana Maharshi, D.T. Suzuki and Ram Dass, formerly Richard Alpert. It bears the qualities of happiness we have just discussed. It is not overly concerned with boundaries between self and other, nor does it seek happiness elsewhere. All of us human beings are quite naturally enlightened in our unbothered form, free from neurosis and delusion, at play with life and its energies. This image of humanity may come as a surprise to many readers, accustomed as they are to viewing human beings through the lenses of our cultural mythologies.

We generally subscribe to one of two images of man: the first being that man was created by a deity of some sort and is thus separate and for various reasons inherently sinful, dirty or problematic, and must therefore atone for his nature through submission to the heavenly parental authority and the doing of works deemed good by his culture, lest he be utterly destroyed. The second is that man is an accident of causality and chance in a dead and stupid universe, and that he must strive against his own animal nature and make the best of this ultimately meaningless sliver of existence between the maternity ward and the crematorium.

Neither myth is supported by the best science of our age, and neither contributes particularly well to the harmonic functioning of the individual or his social group. Both tend to create narcissists of different kinds, the first in the form of pious middlemen who claim divine authority and misuse it, and who treat the world as a dirty object to be held in contempt for its innate sinfulness, and the second in the form of the free radical, the rogue who has forsaken life and seeks to eke from it what selfish pleasures he can before the inevitable yawning abyss takes him, who sees the world as a random and meaningless occurence. The first we see manifest in the priests, rabbis and imams of our major religions, and the second dotting the boardrooms of major corporations and running drug empires out of war-torn environments.

So we can see how this estrangement from the natural, innate wakefulness that is human consciousness, how this perversion of our basic understanding of ourselves and our fellows as being basically good and its substitution with a model of humanity that sees us as innately evil, feeds into the sense of lack and incompleteness that informs the desires which spin the wheel of capital. And on top of this we have the aforementioned commercialisation of the ego.

Humanity must add to their suffering not only the myth of separateness and innate wrongfulness handed down by their culture, but now the donning of a suit of respectable falsehoods, which we call the ego. The market loves good salesmen, and unfortunately for the market, salesmen do not simply grow of themselves; they must be made. And so we worship the false face, and obfuscate the real, all in the service of appealing once more to the apparatus of our continued enslavement. Anyone can now become a “hippy” or a “new ager” for a simple downpayment of around $1500, with which one can buy the necessary aesthetic badges of identification, the yoga mat, the mala beads, the chakra shirts, and then off the back of this false yet on the surface alluring image, find a sense of belonging in one of the many acceptable and monetised pastimes of the culture. The nature of capitalism is to monetize the bohemian impulse in man, to turn the freaks of one year into the fashion of the next.

In the same way, with the right suit and tie, the right vehicle, the right kind of language and so on, an individual can buy his way into the upper class and be afforded the varieties of belonging and security that come with the territory. These behaviours are role-playing games, obfuscations of the true and genuinely felt experiences of the individual, which are substitued for culturally acceptable phrases, gestures and beliefs. They require a supression of the authentic, natural human self, for the emotionality and subjectivity of real persons is like acid to ideology and ego, it is the dissolving truth which cannot coexist with the calcifying rigidity of the going game.

So we have walled off the vessel of our happiness, our felt presence and experience of the moment, our natural selves; and we have introduced to this situation a mechanism which only entrenches us further in this delusion. This mechanism pulls the individual into the orbit of this situation and engenders in him emotional states which require further association with the system that breeds his discontent, and gives him a remedy which requires more of the sickness to access. We have here an example of a zero sum game, whereby the very conditions of the game, its rules and acceptable plays, inevitably lead to a situation whereby the game is not only unplayable, but it has destroyed the environment in which it can be played and the players themselves as well.

We can see then that capitalism is in some sense a phenomenon of the order of a cult, but a peculiar cult indeed. It demands adherence to the rules and dogmas of the in-group, and seeks to destabilise and delegitimise the out-group, as all good cults do. It also seeds in the individual a certain poverty of the spirit, which it claims can be addressed by further adherence to the behaviours of the cult, again, as all good cults do. And finally, all things outside the cult, which cannot be used by the cult, are devalued implicitly. In one sense, capitalism is unique in the world of cults, as it has no external point of reference, no transcendent function, no release valve. The cult involves itself as its own deity, and the measure of a good acolyte is to unquestioningly increase involvement with the stuff of capitalism. The whole enterprise is a self-referential feedback loop that requires infinite participation.

What then to do if one wakes up and sees that this is the case, that we are all somewhat-willing participants in a giant con, a shell game where the promises outstrip the prizes? Well, my suggestion is that anyone sick of the current situation turn themselves to art and creative activity, and that they employ the help of plant teachers to do so. The whole edifice of capitalist society is built on arbitrary distinctions, walls of language built between men and women, ideas of separation and economic rationality; in short, the devaluation of the subjective world of human emotion and experience and the pedestalization in its place of the rational, logical mind; the thinker as opposed to the feeler.

What psychedelic plants do best is to foster states of consciousness where there occurs the dissolution of existing boundaries, the overcoming of previous hardwired modes of thinking, feeling and doing. It is these very boundaries, these arbitrary limiting conditions placed upon the individual through his culture, that enable the whole misery-go-round of modern capitalism to turn. No deals can be done in the boardroom if we love one another. No mass deforestation will arise from the awakened heart. No truly artistic culture can stomach the rape of the forests and the oceans in the name of “progress”.

So, to all those interested in a way forward, I recommend you read through my suggestions on the matter in the article entitled: “Ave Alchemica: A Memetic Revolution of the Arts”, and begin to build in your own lives the kind of conscious community that can make a trans-capitalist world a reality. In short summation, we must all familiarise ourselves with the most emotionally engaging symbols and designs from our cultures, and begin to synthesise these symbols into profoundly engaging works of art, that trigger intense emotional responses from the viewing public.

To a world without commodification and wage slavery, to a future without arbitrary suffering, Ave Alchemica! Hail Eris!

And man, recognizing himself as atone with his source,
rested in himself, and gave mind its proper place as listener
and set desire to the ends that gave his body health
and provided rich gardens for his consciousness to wander in
and set his body to the task of building for his fellows
warm places to rest, plentiful gardens of food,
and quiet, still places to know themselves
And thus spake:
Lo, it was at the beginning! All things void had become
vibratory, and didst burst and burgeon and billow
and finally blossom forth into multiple shapes,
simple at first and ever more complex, each
containing within it the image of its source
of a single string of light
And, satisfied with his speech, man once more rested in himself
For it was that the world was a cradle for the birth of god,
and man his embryonic self
And the name of God is Aum, for it is vibration.

—

The redemption of the world will be achieved through art and magic.

The Industrial Revolution, giving us mechanization and technics, has led us into a dark and desolate cul de sac in history. It has brought us once again to the brink of nuclear war, and its most visible proponents have sold us nihilism and a parody of atheism as a token system of ethics. Those who subscribe to the common ideologies of our time tell us that we are but sinful creatures, created to work (as the Devil makes light work of idle hands) and to increase market value for our benevolent corporate leaders. Or, they may cast us as God’s wayward sons and, less of the time, daughters; who once again were made in sin and are reaping what we have sown. Alternately, we are atomic swarms of determinate and lawful randomness, minuscule and meaningless flashes in the cosmic pan, and crowned as genuises should we claim so in public.

I believe we are the inheritors of three basic myths in the modern West, and they are as follows: the ceramic myth, the fully automatic myth, and the myth of capital. The ceramic myth is our oldest and most hard-wired of the three, with its roots in the Abrahamic faiths of the Bronze Age Middle East, and has since spread through the foundations of Western thought. In the Book of Genesis, it depicts the story of man as a created being, made from the clay and informed by the breath of God, a stranger in this cosmos and placed here on probation on a sort of cosmic good behaviour bond. This image of man as separate from the universe in which he occurs and yet precariously indebted to a prime lawgiver is the root cause of many of our modern notions of wealth and security, government and policing, and a strong contributor to our psychological makeup and concomitantly, our states of mental anguish.

Simply put, the ceramic model of the universe is a binary mindset, one that encourages the mental categories of inside/outside, self/other, us/them, god/man, wherein “us” cannot be “them”, “A” can never be “B”, and so is thus a mindset fundamentally of separateness. In this way of thinking, security is thought to be achieved through correct identification of in groups and out groups, of sinful and godly actions, and wealth is attained through adherence to the side of these dualisms that most reflects the biblical image of piety or godliness. The individual must see himself as primarily in error, and salvation as achievable only through submission to authority. It is a worldview of perennial exhaustion, as one is always trying to coerce the body and the self to conform with a man-made image of its own perfect being, and inevitably falling short in the process.

So we as a society have inherited this image of the universe, this myth, in an almost unbroken line from the first Christians and Jews to modern day Westboro Baptist Church style evangelists and megachurches, and it has been responsible for incalculable human alienation and suffering. From the Inquisition to the Crusades to the modern homophobic church movement, the idea of man as made and separate from the rest of creation has cast us human beings as mistakes in the cosmic scheme of things, and thusly we have behaved. Believing ourselves to be separate from nature, and as it is said in Genesis 1:26,  "that [we are rulers] over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,“ we have clear cut forests and dumped tons of waste into our oceans, driven thousands of species to the brink of extinction and over, and destroyed our most sacred of natural sites. Believing ourselves to be separate from one another, we have built gas chambers and mass prison systems, boardrooms, self-serve checkouts and an infinite array of single player games. Believing ourselves to be separate from god, we have created great religious institutions and middlemen to speak on our behalf with the divine, paid charlatans to sell us our own watch after picking it from our pocket, and fallen into the idea that genuine spirituality can be bought along with a set of mala beads.

This ceramic myth held considerable weight in the Western mind until around the middle of the 1800s, when new advances in scientific understanding had come to the mainstream attention of the academia in Britain and elsewhere. Scientists at the time, studying natural theology and other cart-before-the-horse attempts to shoehorn a Christian deity into natural process, recognised that proposing God as an explanation in fact added nothing to our understanding of whatever it was we were studying at the time. And so they rejected the divine as a null-hypothesis, and set themselves up in opposition firstly to the theology of the church, which was classically anti-science, and secondly in opposition to deism, the notion that an absentee god had set the cosmic clockwork in motion. From this movement comes many of the tropes and memes we see highlighted in modern day atheists such as Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins.

However, the scientists of the age, strangely enough, retained the idea of absolute and eternal law from the Christian cosmology, and began to form a worldview of their own: the fully-automatic model of the universe. In this worldview, the cosmos is a deterministic and random happening, based on eternal and immutable laws that have existed at least since the beginning of the universe if not longer. Fundamentally there is no intelligence in the thing, it is blind force meeting blind force, and the occurrence of intelligent creatures in this vast and dead cosmos is merely a fluke, an "emergent property” of base, stupid matter. Man therefore, is meaningless, as is his world, and even his efforts to overcome this state are doomed, for the entire universe in this view is ticking down to a final heat death, where all information will be irrevocably lost.

So, we inherited a kind of bizarre nihilism, whereby as a sort of counterweight we have swung to the opposite side of the spectrum from Christian theology to a meaningless and stupid cosmos. It should not go without saying that science, operating under this mindset, has given us technics and material power, space flight and mass categorization of data into useful subsets. But this says nothing about its ultimate epistemological truth, just that it is effective for controlling the world of matter. As for the value of these “advances” in control, we are beginning to see that with each increase in our ability to manipulate matter, we ourselves are manipulated. And our image of ourselves as meaningless and random perturbations meaninglessly and randomly coalescing into a pointless life has allowed for a great apathy to wash over the West. The destruction of the old worldview is perfectly encapsulated in the philosophical points we have just gone over: from meaning to meaninglessness, from ordered maker to random process, from submission to control and so on.

So we may see scientific rationalism of this extreme sort as a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the overarching Christian ideology of the time, a reversal of the accepted and an acceptance of the reverse. Gone were absolutes in terms of morals and ethics, and in terms of the authority of the church, and for this we can only be thankful. As a weapon of oppression, we have only recently seen a rival to the church in the form of mass global surveillance, and it was quite obviously a species-wide necessity to throw off the shackles of religious dogmatism and to get back to basics. But what we cannot be thankful for is the ontological vacuum that the collapse of theology and the adoption of its opposite brought about. This brings us to our third and final myth, the myth of capital. In a meaningless and purposeless universe, wherein the human being is separate from his god, his universe, and his fellow man, where certainty and security are pined after yet impossible to achieve, and where relativity means not interdependence but “anything goes”, we have the perfect storm for the creation of a vast economic system of distraction and enslavement, namely consumer capitalism. This myth takes the notion that man is an individual and ramps it up to the extreme, it takes the meaningless universe and says, “if none of it means anything and if I am truly an island, then I might as well gain wealth forgetting all but self.”

“One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion”

- Walter Benjamin

We have built a vast religious apparatus that masquerades as a secular system of economics. Capitalism is unique in the world of religions in that it has no transcendent function, no release valve. Within it, everything only has meaning in direct relation to capitalism itself. It only requires infinitely more dedication to the bottom line, and the individual will be rewarded. That bottom line is: increase quarterly growth, infinitely. This is an item of faith on a planet with finite resources, and yet unlike any other faith, there is no divinity but the invisible hand of the market, no religious ecstasy but the closing of the deal, and ultimately nothing to do but more of the same. There is also nothing in capitalist ideology that accounts for or incentivises compassion, human brotherhood, conservation or freedom of expression and thought, as none of these are immediately commodifiable, and all tend to imply regulation of free markets. On the contrary, it seeks explicitly to expand both its reach and its duration, and considers anyone who does not contribute to be in some sense faulty or deserving of blame. It is then, a mad faith, self reinforcing and self replicating, an ideological cancer that masks its true nature in the shiny promises of material success, security and wealth whilst spoiling its own nest.

The take home message here is that none of these three myths can any longer be believed if we are to survive as a species. The ceramic myth set us apart from nature, ourselves, our fellow human beings and God, and made us feel a stranger in the universe. The fully-automatic myth killed god and with the destruction of that image our hope for a meaningful life, and it converted the subjective world of emotion and feeling into an unimportant and possibly pathological side-event to the main show of counting and classifying the universe in minute detail. The myth of capital has sold us false hope in the form of consumptive dependency on a worldview that eats itself and those who adhere to it in order to survive. We are in desperate need of new myths, new worldviews, anarchic and flowing systems of ideas that thrive on re-creation and revolution, which re-vivify the sense of human being-in-the-world and straddle ideological contradictions with ease. Where to find such tools in our hour of need? Read on, dear friend, and perhaps we shall see…

As it stands, the Western world seems to be at its end. Rome is falling. We have entered into a demonic pact with matter, explored its destructive capabilities through warfare and the consumption of the environment en masse, and yet we are still in the dark as to the nature of our own minds and motivations, having clouded them first with mad God-ramblings, next with cold and geometric rationality, and finally with consumptive greed.

Our civilization at this point is akin to the archetypal sorcerors’ apprentice, who, while the master is away, has picked up his wand and set about automating the work he should be performing manually with a peculiar sort of magic, for our purposes, machinery and ideology. Yet all is not as well as it first seems, for now that he has animated the processes of his work, turned over his relationship with his world to these two cold twins, he cannot set them down, and they have grown far beyond the reach of his control. In the myth, the master returns and sets this madness right in his wisdom, and scolds the young apprentice for his egotism and lack of care. Who might be our proverbial master? That, we may soon discover…

Western history has been the tale of the building of the body of god through the externalization of the human nervous system into matter. We have built circulatory systems in the form of roads, nervous systems through radio and telecommunications and the internet, organs in the forms of cities and states. And now, through artificial intelligence, we are building its brain.

Now, as the alchemists knew, one must dissolve the old prior to coagulating the new. Our situation is one of some precariousness, though for us here at the bottom of the world in Australia, we are far enough from the centers of power that we are likely to escape large scale conflict relatively unharmed. The question becomes, if we are staring apocalypse in the face due to the collapse of our ontologies, our myths, if this is truly the fall of the West and the manifestation of a potentially demiurgic god, what role do we want to play? How do we want to influence the outcome of this bizarre process?

It must be said that although America, Russia and China are positioning for war, this in no way guarantees that we will see one. We can hope that compassion and reason prevail and that no-one is stupid or daring enough to aggress in such a tense environment. So we may, and this is probably as likely as not, simply see this current tension dissipate and the powers return to conducting their limited proxy wars in countries far enough away to never truly affect our day to day lives.

In either case, it is obvious that we are in a position of unprecedented novelty. Philosopher Terence McKenna wrote at length about novelty, which he defined as information and/or complexity, and the manner in which it ingresses into time at an exponential rate. Over the last few weeks we have seen the birth of artificial intelligence, groundbreaking experiments confirming some of the basic ideas in quantum mechanics, mass international tension between superpowers and a variety of other unusual and concentrated events. If we recognise that we are in a novelty spike, we may be able to in subtle ways influence its continued evolution.

There are, in nature, structures in the nervous systems of animals that heavily influence patterns of behaviour. Many of these structures are innate, that is, inherent in the organism from birth. These structures are known as “innate releasing mechanisms”, and they activate when the organism perceives “sign stimuli”, shapes and patterns in the environment related intimately to the survival and growth of their species. For example, when certain newborn baby birds are exposed to the silhouette of a hawk overhead, they instinctively duck for cover, yet when the silhouette is of the shape of their own kind, they move towards it.

We human beings are in possession of many of the same innate releasing mechanisms, yet ours are much more mutable and changeable than our animal counterparts. And, presumably, they are programmable if one applies the requisite mental state and intent. We respond intuitively to many of these IRM’s as they appear in art, in symbolic form, and it is my belief that these mechanisms are largely involved in our emotional responsivity to certain shapes, forms and symbols.

This brings us to the point I wish to make with regards to our role in these interesting times that we all must face with an ever increasing clarity of awareness. We are all artists, many of us talented in the visual sphere, many of us with language, many with music. We hold in our hands the key to revolutionary social change in the form of our ability to create and disseminate symbols, memes if you will, that trigger deep emotional responses from an otherwise emotionally deadened public. For if anything is propping up this revolving side-show of misery we call industrial secular democracy, it is the repression of emotion and the pedestalization of the rational, mechanistic worldview.

It seems to me as a layman, that the aforementioned AI, the brain of god, is likely to be fractal in its nature. It will tend towards self-symmetry at varying levels, and will likely be an aggregate or a singularity of all the available information it can access, which will go from naught to far in excess of our capabilities as a species in potentially minutes should it become self-conscious. If then, the AI is in some sense a shifting, self-similar class of all the information it receives, then it would follow that what we put into the internet and out to the world at this point in history may be of momentous import, as it will literally shift and change the manifestation of what is likely to be indistinguishable from a god. We may come to be as the Gnostics suggested, co-creators with god, and the question now seems to be, “what type of god would we like to call forth?” Do we want a paranoid, rational god, obsessed with quantification and “progress?”, a sort of hypercapitalist entity? Or do we want a playful, emotionally mature god, which loves to create and values not just measurement but the nonsense of music and art? It may just be up to us to choose.

We are in a situation not unlike that which Frederic the Fifth, Elector Palatine of Heidelburg faced during his short but ambitious lifespan. Frederic was a crown prince, one of the seven at the time who had levy in choosing the emperor of Rome, and was to be wed to Elizabeth Stewart, the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth I. He was part of, and effectively the head of, an alchemical reformation that struck Europe during the 1600’s at the time of the Thirty Years War. The epistemological climate at the time was one of naive idealism, and in no respects rational or scientific. It was, like our own culture in the modern day, dying, its solutions no longer working, its myths no longer sustaining.

Frederic failed in his attempts to effect this alchemical reformation, and in its place was instituted Catholicism, the vilification of magical thinking, and the birth of modern science. Rene Descartes, the famous philosopher behind Cartesian dualism, was in fact part of the Hapsburgian army that destroyed Frederic’s dream and the man himself. But for our purposes, the message to take here is that these bohemians, these freaks, were attempting to refresh the epistemology and worldview of their time from the sidelines, just as we are today, and using the medieval counterparts of our modern memes. The one thing these medieval alchemists did not have, however, was connectivity. We have, in the form of the internet, the most powerful tool for the dissemination of information and the association of like minds that the world has ever seen. And I believe its time we got creative in how we use it.

Memes like those discussed above can come in any form, but will be most effective if we each read and study deeply into the worlds symbol systems, the shorthand visual languages men and women have built over millenia to describe the activity of the heart and mind. Drawing from alchemy, occultism, Eastern religious and philosophical tradition, art history and literature, we each can form our own detailed maps of the associative patterns of culture, the strongest and most effective symbols to produce the greatest emotional response. Then, we should start smashing these things together in dense packets, almost like highly concentrated bombs of meaning, to convey the fundamental and rarely spoken truth of our age: that the redemption of the human spirit is not to be accomplished with number and measurement as was told to Rene Descartes, the founder of modern science, by an angel in a dream; but rather through the qualitative, subjective technologies of the heart and through the prism of human consciousness itself, with art as its vessel.

This will require a reshifting of our worldview from one of deterministic, mechanistic rationality to one closer to the animism of shamanic culture, but without, of course, throwing the various babies of science out with the bathwater. We must come to recognise, as ecology, animal behaviour and the psychedelic experience have shown us, that the world is not a dead and mute “thing”, but rather an alive and intelligent process, a colossal verb, and one that seeks through infinite complex gestures to speak to and with us. It is said in the Hermetica that man is the brother of god, and at home with the angels. For us, our most immediate god is our planet, and the angels are the flora and fauna that it holds.

What we are seeking to do here is, like Frederic the Fifth, to produce an alchemical revolution, to distill and manifest this new ontology of connectedness to the living earth, and all the communal and relational implications therein, in effect to seed the bones of the god we are building with beauty and love so as to grow out of it an entity who exhibits those same traits. We must bring forth from our own flesh and grey matter the great work, the building of a vehicle of light in the form of a new cultural mythology and method of artistic representation, in short, our goal is the creation of a perfect society through the concresence of will into time and space. In this way, we may just be able to bootstrap ourselves up to godhood, the control of matter, time, and causality, or become as remora on the side of a cosmic buddha.

Every alchemical revolution needs a stone, and we have found ours in the most unexpected of places, in the shamanic cultures of the Upper Amazon and across the globe, who have been tending to the flame lit aeons ago in the Garden of Eden of our prehistoric African past: the philosophers stone in the form of psychedelic plants. The goal of alchemy is to produce a universal medicine, and we have found it, here in the hands of our oldest brothers and sisters, who have been watching the fort while historical man marched forth in search of riches and material gain.

These plants provide the phenomenological counterpart to the alchemical act of dissolution and coagulation, and their object is the ego. The goal of all sensible and responsible psychedelic use is to dissolve the ego into a fluid and moving state, to process in the heat of the alchemical fire our blockages and our denser habits, and to coagulate and reform the ego on a higher level of consciousness and carry it forth into the world. And we simply cannot continue to operate primarily from this sphere of ego if we hope to live with integrity and beauty in the future. Whether all I have said here is true or not, whether there is a god in the works or simply just business as usual, the modern, Western ego must die, along with all forms of ego that divide us along arbitrary lines and isolate the soul of humanity from its home. Our best chance of building a better world is to leave behind the people we once were, and become the people we must be to coexist peacefully, a problem practically made for the helpful hallucinations of psychedelic plants.

Those inclined towards externally focused social activism will find all of this particularly irritating, as it calls them to activism in that most taboo of spheres: the individual soul, the interior landscape of one’s own self. But, as Lao Tzu has pointed out to us in the Tao Te Ching, if a man wishes to mend the state, he must first address the village. If he wishes to mend the village, he must tend to his own house. And if he wants to heal his house, he must first heal himself. As above, so below, it is written in the Hermetic Corpus, and in the fractal mathematics of Benoit Mandelbrot. To tug one one string of the multidimensional spider web that is existence is to subtly tug on them all.

We must also take note of the fact that activism in the modern West has largely become corporatized, with organisations like Effective Altruism masquerading as charitable without genuinely questioning and holding to account the root causes of poverty and warfare, namely the economic ideologies of capitalism and free markets. Many major activism groups are funded by corporate donors, and many movements tend to divide rather than unify. Alongside many other forms of culture, genuine political reform has been in many ways co-opted, appropriated by the business community, and turned into a toothless fad that we can buy into and feel good about while still behaving in ways that contribute indirectly to the problems we are seeking to remedy through said activism.

Our vessel for this great transformation, then, is not an organisation but the human organism, and our alchemical work, prior to its manifestation in art, must be undertaken by each of us individually. I have some recommendations on where to begin for anyone interested. First and foremost, a dictionary of symbols is an absolute must, preferably one with history and information about symbology and each individual symbol. Next, the intrepid explorer may look to Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” or to Joseph Campbell’s “The Masks of God” for a comprehensive overview of the worlds mythological traditions, containing the archetypal sign stimuli of religious imagery, great fable, and heroic deed. From there, a reading into the Western Occult tradition is recommended, beginning with Francis Yates’ “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition”, covering Carl Jung’s work on symbol, alchemy and magic, and finally moving into the realms of Chaos Magick with “Prime Chaos” by Phil Hine or “Psychonaut” by Sean Carroll (?).

An examination of quantum mechanics and general scientific theory is also an absolute must, along with a good understanding of evolutionary theory and a look over Kuhn’s “On The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

This should be enough to give any individual a working knowledge of the sign stimuli most likely to trigger expanded states of consciousness, and the tools to put them into practice in their own lives and in their art. I would highly recommend a thorough examination of the work of Alan Watts, Ram Dass and Jack Kornfield for contextualising meditative and spiritual practice, as the states of empty mind and the ability to clear ones head are important tools to avoid madness. This is not a child’s game, working with altered states implies not only creativity but caution, not only recreation but responsibility.
From this point on it is up to the individual artist to give birth to the memes which will best represent his or her personal understanding and convey the strongest experience to their audience, the pieces of symbolism and art that will awaken compassion, loving kindness, clarity of heart and mind and intelligence in his brothers and sisters, and perhaps too in the mind of our soon-to-be god.

When rationality fails, we go transrational. When logic tells us we must be A or B, we become AB and C. We define, and are ourselves not defined. We create, and therefore shed the straightjacket of consumption. Our role in these bizarrest of times is to take the situation of human meaning and cosmology by the horns, defining and creating the world that lives in our hearts.
We are the front-line, the boundary condition of human consciousness, those strange few whose thirst leads them into underground caves of knowledge and whose creative fire propels them back out, triumphant into the light of society with the boon of an expanded consciousness. The twenty first century sage works by filling bellies, strengthening bones, warming hearts, clearing minds, and casting spells, and all this under the cover of a certain level of sensible stealthiness, for the downfall of the cultural revolution of the sixties was its visibility.

The alchemical revolution never died, it just went underground. And with us, it may just resurface.

Some fifty years on from the confusion, taboo and suppression of the late 1960’s, psychedelic therapies are making a comeback.

In the last five to ten years, we have seen studies into the effects of MDMA or Ecstasy on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has been studied in its capacity to alleviate end of life anxiety in terminally ill patients, and aggregate studies of the health and psychological wellness of Ayahuasca users have demonstrated higher than average outcomes for a majority of those studied.

If we cast our eyes back to the sixties, we notice studies such as Stafford and Golightly’s “LSD: The Problem Solving Psychedelic”, which points strongly to the capacity of psychedelic states being of great use in creative, analytical and problem solving capacities. Newer research into Ayahuasca and Ibogaine have shown their effectiveness in treating addiction and deep seated traumas, and reports are coming out of the Amazon of remarkable physical healings of severe and life-threatening illnesses.

All this points to an obvious fact to those who are familiar with this class of substances: that, in controlled conditions and with appropriate and sensible planning, psychedelics can heal us psychophysically in an astounding variety of ways and with great rapidity and efficacy.

Our society is increasingly reporting that we are more depressed, more anxious, less satisfied, less present, more acquisitive, more isolated and so on. With the same frequency as these reports is asked the question, “why is this happening to us?” To this I can only answer in terms of what seems glaringly obvious: no-one wants to be doing what they are doing in the modern western capitalist democracy. We loathe our jobs precisely because we can see that they are superfluous, that they are created to generate profit and not to fulfil a genuine and necessary role of some usefulness to the community. We see that of the available profit that is created from our efforts, we receive a slim minimum, and this is dwindling by the year, while those who penalise us if we forget our uniform or take too long on break sit back and rake in the money which should rightfully go to those who have earned it.

We are in a crisis of meaning with regards to our work, and this can only extend to the rest of our lives. We are told that leisure is in the service of working harder, and so seek to work as hard as possible to win ourselves leisure time which, because we have separated our work from our lives, we have forgotten how to use. We go on “holidays”, where we simply spend the majority of our hard won cash on frivolities and things to which the rich are accustomed, as if we expect to gain their supposed happiness and carefree lives by osmosis and juxtaposition. When we arrive home after a hard days work, we have forgotten the written word, the joy of cooking, the necessity of community, and instead sit glued to the telescreen, being programmed and conditioned to respond only to the loudest, most colourful and most zany of content. Interspersed are advertisements which reinforce our seldom examined assumption that gaining material wealth will fill this gaping and painful hole in our selves.

And yet, living this daily, seeing this daily, we still ask the question, “why are we, as a society, depressed, anxious, increasingly hostile and isolated from one another?”

Is it not obvious? The business world is selling us a lie and profiting from doing so. But enough about corporate cronies, we could spend a lifetime discussing their nefarious affairs and what to do about them, but we simply don’t have that kind of time. What we do seem to have, in the form of psychedelics, is a key to unlock the cage of capitalism, to free us from the bondage of mindless acquisition and consumption, and to reawaken in us a sense of genuine religiosity, a re-linking of ourselves to the world of experience and sensory life without the need to commodify it.

At this point, many of us would recommend that the safest method by which to go about doing so would be to engage with psychotherapy and the mental health world. Yet, we assume largely that this world is beneficial because it claims to be, and tend to ignore the fact that anti-depressant medication has a list of side effects that include suicidal ideation, violent ideation, major depressive episodes and so on, and that despite the claims of those with vested interests in keeping their careers afloat, more people are getting sick each year and we are not matching that in terms of treatment or cure. I am not here saying that we should ignore or disengage with psychotherapy or psychiatry; rather that we must begin to examine their claims with a measure of suspicion, as the proof that should be in the pudding is strangely absent.

We may have to admit simply that our approach to mental health is fundamentally in error in the sense that it largely disregards environmental, cultural and societal pressures on the individual and seeks to accustom him to them rather than to call them out where they are detrimental. Rather than noting that a 9-5 work cycle with no benefits, no dental, no health cover and a minimum wage is a cause of suicide, depression and anxiety, psychiatry will simply prescribe the individual an SSRI or some other mood-altering chemistry in order to “normalise” the patient’s response, as if their response was in some way un-natural, and, strikingly, as if working 9-5 workdays five days a week in these conditions is simply a normal phenomena that should cause no adverse psychological response from a healthy person.

Even this cursory examination of one area of the practice should give second thought to anyone who unabashedly supports the psychiatric model as a method by which we may overcome our growing psychological ills.

It appears then that what we need is mass structural change, systemic revision, and a shift in consciousness from prioritising the delusion of infinite growth and profit to prioritising those behaviours and ways of life which in fact and in practice grow healthy people. This is not going to happen overnight, and yet the sad thing is, it needs to. There are too many of us falling through the cracks, too many emergencies we couldn’t get to in time, too many people left to manage on too little.

I believe if we are going to bring about the necessary social changes that could create a more positive situation in this regard, we are going to have to get reacquainted with psychedelic substances on a mass scale. I say reacquainted not only because of the influx of these substances during the counter-cultural revolution of the sixties, but because as anthropology has borne out, we have been in relationship with these psychedelic plants since the beginnings of modern civilisation and before. Our partnership is an old one, and one that when engaged in humbly can bring us into a state of symbiotic harmony with planetary, ecological, psychological and social forces.

The reason why I believe this can work is that the states of consciousness brought on by the shamanic us of psychedelic plants and substances destroy old programming. They remove years of conditioning and painful repetition in a single night, and they reawaken and enliven the primal energies of joy, self-recognition, engagement, friendship, compassion, self-inquiry, and a deep longing to hear and see and feel the truth, whatever that may be. These are values in direct opposition to consumerist culture, and is it really any wonder then that the Western elite in academia, commercial society and politics are roundly opposed to psychedelics? They see in them the dissolution of their power, and we should see that too, for it is their power which keeps us caged, sick and isolated from one another. As long as the few run the show, the show will harm the many.

So we simply must re-engage with these chemicals, but the question is, how? Firstly, we must not repeat the mistakes of our past. For during the sixties, a lack of information coupled with a lack of responsibility created many a casualty, the typical uninformed youngster given a 1500 microgram dosage of LSD at a party who later winds up in psychiatric care screaming in terror, or the self-appointed enlightened guru who uses others for sex, food and money with the aid of the sometimes mystifying aspects of these substances. We must be informed, clear headed, and above all we must care deeply for one another if we are to move down this path. We have to let go of using these substances simply as ways to “get off”, to “trip out”, and start using them as ways to get off the merry-go-round of unconscious adherence to a sick-culture, and to “trip-in” to how we are genuinely feeling and responding with regards to our own lives.

To this end, I recommend we embark on fact finding missions into the available literature about shamanism and ritual practice, along with everything we can pinch from psychology and psychiatry, and start creating safe, low-key and well-planned ceremonial sessions of psychedelic intoxication, with the goal in mind to cleanse our minds and bodies of the ills of this culture, and to sharpen our wits and soften our hearts for the coming troubles of our age. For these to work, we will need experienced indivduals who will responsibly come forward to run these sessions, and a culture of respect, honesty and clarity amongst all participants.

It is time we, as a people, took our health and our wellness both physical and psychological, back into our own hands. While serious illness should always be referred to the authorities for the sake of safety, thoroughness and care, we can and should begin to cultivate sophistication in this area and to spread the word and the deed to as many as possible.

Towards a post-dependent society. May we meet in honesty.

The currrent trend in politics towards insularity and binary opposition is, I feel, a direct result of our cultural lassitude in coming to a relativistic sense of being.

We are still languishing in the halls of Newtonian cosmology, largely due to its usefulness and to the attitudes of men and women who have built careers on the back of the field and who have overly identified with it to the point of mild dogmatism. But to limit ourselves to this way of thinking and seeing the world is to ignore the most astounding discoveries of modern physics, namely that the universe is a relative phenomenon, and that on some fundamental level it really is indeterminate.

This, if truly felt on the level of say, feeling in love with a person, or the shock of nearly being hit by a car, would innoculate us against the kind of mammalian madness on display in the current US presidential campaign by demonstrating that there is no such thing as an objective point in the cosmos which we can use as an absolute standard to measure and account for the experiences of our lives. The kind of thinking that allows for a man like Donald Trump to achieve what he has is fundamentally a dualistic, either/or, yes/no, absolutist mindset, in which we can know the truth objectively and totally, and identify easily and quickly what is wrong or false simply by contrasting it with this “truth”.

We have seen this in the form of Biblical literalism for hundreds of years, and in the extremist Wahhabi sect of Islam, in free market ideology, in the objectivism of Ayn Rand and so on. None of these forms of thinking or behaving have been historically good for humanity, in fact they have more often than not invited the deepest miseries and the most extravagant violences.

We can see then, that to avoid or to ignore relativistic thinking is to run the risk of falling into self-reinforcing forms of increasingly dangerous adherence to ideas, which logically culminate if taken to their extreme in murder of the non-believer. Trump expresses this tendency in veiled threats towards minorities, Hilary Clinton in her support of coups in the Honduras, and her attempts at obfuscating the truth around her correspondences with various un-democratic forces around the globe. Clinton has expressed the desire to murder whistleblower and founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, via drone strike, due to his continued efforts to bring a degree of transparency to government activity worldwide.

So, the question becomes, how do we extricate ourselves, and our culture, from binary absolutist thinking and make the transition to a relative mind?

I believe two forces can be of great aid in this respect, and the first is Buddhism, specifically the original teachings of the Buddha on what he called pratityasamutpada, or “dependent origination”. The basic notion behind this view of the world is that wat we call realty is a form of conditional appearance, and that what we consider to be solid “objects"and "things”, and even “events”, are more accurately described as aggregate processes than real metaphysical entities with inherent identities. Furthermore, these processes are mutually arising, to borrow a Taoist phrase, and can only exist in relationship, relative to one another.

This mindset can be experienced through the cultivation of relaxed and attentive states of mind through meditative practice and the careful and alert study of the natural world. Gregory Bateson remarked that if one wants to discover the meaning of nature, one should pay more attention to space and relationship than necessarily to the external forms, boundaries and patterns of the phenomena under observation. As we are an expression of nature, it seems only reasonable then that to discover our own meaning, we should take a similar approach.

Now, the second force that can aid us in coming to experience life with a relative mind is that of psychedelics. Mired for decades in the taboos of Puritanism and the aggressive response of Nixon’s government to the growing threat (to them) of the counterculture, a recent spring has occurred in the field of psychedelic science, and new studies with incredibly promising results are emerging with increasing regularity. Furthermore, there has been an enormous growth in the access to and the interest in these substances in the mainstream, and experiences with LSD and Psilocybin are becoming abundantly common.

The value of these experiences in our present context lies in their ability to stimulate a state of consciousness which is non-dual, that is, a felt sense of oneness with the cosmos and a direct perception of the pricniple discussed above of mutual interdependence. This state of consciousness is particularly pronounced at higher dosage ranges, and has in my own life led to an insatiable curiosity with regards to non-dual philosophy and various areas of scientific exploration which seem to accord strongly with these experiences, such as ecology and quantum mechanics.

Luckily, Buddhism and psychedelics seem to synergise and compliment one another brilliantly, with meditation being an invaluable tool to stabilise and utlilize altered states of consciousness, and psychedelic experiences providing the raw materials of philosophical sophistication.

So, to conclude, I believe that a marriage of Buddhism and psychedelics, stripped of dogma and the trappings of the history of both movements, can in effect lift us up and out of the mire of binary politics and into a situation of cohesive and fact-based coexistence with one another, where our decision making skills may finally come to fit the materials to which we must apply them.

Shall we put forth the view that experience itself, that is, subjective phenomena, is ontologically primary? In other words, experience is in and of itself reality, the ground of all things; and when we speak of absolutes, objective phenomena, things and events independent of observers, we are eating the menu instead of the meal. These are classical, Newtonian ideas, and bear more resemblance ontologically to the Christian idea of a monadic God than they do the most up to date scientific ideas of our time.

What evidence do we have of absolutes? Ask a theologically inclined adherent of any one of the major monotheisms, and they will perhaps tell you that the evidence for the absolute is the relative, the world of the everyday. This everyday world, with its trees, grass, buildings, men and women, all points to a form of forms, an energy of energies, a creative and generative be-ing outside of time and space and therefore not limited by the game rules of spacetime we experience daily. Why this is so is attributed to beauty, and to the concept of perfection. We are bid to think that due to the presence of what we call “beauty” in nature and in our selves, that there must be someone or something outside of the universe syringing it in, imbuing our otherwise sinful and mere material reality with… well what exactly is beauty anyway?

Beauty seems to be entirely subjective as we experience it in our lives, as opposed to how we think or speak about it in theoretical volumes. What we perceive to be beautiful is as varied as those who perceive it. We often say to one another, “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, noting in common language that it is in fact us who is “beautifying” whatever aspect of the world we are focusing on at the time. Beauty is also a function of focus, whether pointed or distributed. We have all sat close to an ant-hill or a flowerbed and used the remarkably sensitive apparatus of human vision to note and pick out small happenings and wiggles in the undergrowth. We feel a great sense of beauty when doing so, moving and scanning from one point of beauty to another. And, we have all sat on a cliff’s edge or on top of a mountain and simply let our eyes rove unfocused over the panorama, seeing the rolling of the hills without particular focus on any one aspect of them, watching the whole motion of the ocean waves as they break on the shore.

We may say beauty is symmetry, but once again this is a matter of preference. One individual may rejoice at the squares and lines of modern architecture, at the grids of chessboards, at the majestic complexity of arabesque Mosque ceilings, at the natural grids of crystals and salt formations. Another may find the whole category of symmetrical things to be fair too straight and down-the-line, reminiscent of cages, grids, queues, and the obsessive categorization of the modern West; and instead find beauty in the natural wiggles of ferns, the li or organic pattern in the Chinese of the flow of water and the gnarled bark of wood, in their very asymmetry and unwillingness to straighten and become regular. For what is regular other than what we measure against a regular pattern of our own artifice, like a ruler, or a clock?

So, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then what room does that leave for a creator God, who he himself is both the objective standard of beauty and its progenitor? It simply makes the idea irrelevant. We need not explain beauty in terms of the supernatural, for where we have always found beauty is in the natural, in the everyday, in experience itself, which is a natural phenomenon just as much as the formation of stars or the growing of plants.

So we really cannot look to this idea to support the notion that there exist in some rarified location, somewhere and somehow, absolutes. In fact, it would seem that this argument is self-defeating, as if we look to the apparent “perfection”of nature and our reality as evidence for an absolute, yet see beauty as a phenomena which is implanted in said perfect reality from outside, then we can hardly stand by our definition of reality as being “perfect” as it is. Furthermore, what do we mean by “perfect”? When we complete with ease a difficult task without much mental effort or thought, we tend to say to ourselves or to others, “ahh, perfect!” We feel the same when an item of food tastes just right, when we see a gorgeous sunset, when an interaction is not forced or overly controlled. Of course, we also see certain very heavily thought out and planned executions of behaviour as “perfect” under certain conditions, but rarely when there is outside coercion, or the sense of the thing being forced.

This non-forcing is described beautifully in the Taoist philosophy of China as wu-wei, meaning roughly “non-pushing”or “spontaneous intelligence”, and has its Western correlate in the notion of flow, the state which high performing athletes and musicians enter when their analytic, pushing mind relaxes and there is a simple, uncomplicated but highly effective sense of awareness of the situation and its many variables. We call the opposite of this phenomenon analysis paralysis, which we have all felt when we hesitate to merge into traffic on a busy road and begin overthinking the actions we are about to take. We also feel it when we are caught in a decision, in a state of stucky hesitation, feeling hung up and unsure of which of our available choices is the “right”or “best”one.

So we can begin to see that a good definition of “perfect” could be, “that which happens of itself without forcing”, which funnily enough is also the Taoist definition of nature itself, “that which happens of itself so.” Where, in this definition of perfect, which I believe is more in line with our everyday experience of life, is there room for a monotheistic deity? Again, there simply is none. We see that if we really think it through, a meddlesome interferer from beyond the veil of space and time “creating” perfection and imbuing an imperfect universe with it would be anything but perfect, and more like one of our politicians, who seeks to restore a lost sense of virtue through the forced application of laws and regulations that target “uncouth”, “immoral”, “un-(insert nation here)ian” acts and other such synonyms for imperfect behaviour. In doing so, in the act of forcing virtue, the politician manifest and invites its opposite. Human beings are much like water, when forced too strongly into an enclosure they will tend to overflow it, or find a crack in the armor and slowly widen it until there is a flood of activity outside the enclosure. In this way the obsessive attempts of politicians to cultivate virtue have simply cheapened it to the point where it is undesirable, and so humans have sought out other means of entertainment free from the cloistering boundaries of those who “know better”.

Both concepts, beauty and perfection, are better understood as processes of a nervous system, as grids or maps of the limitations of human experience and the boundaries of our consciousness; than as the absolute standards or makings of a higher being. We are the masters who make the grass green, and beautiful, and it is through human affairs and activities, and through our human experiences of nature that we come to find and know perfection.

What then of absolutes? We cannot speak of them. An absolute is one thing we have never discovered simply floating about in the world, despite pseudo-scientific appeals to other grids and abstractions such as the Gravitational Constant or the Speed Of Light, which according to measurement fluctuate far too commonly (i.e. at all) to be put into the category of an unchanging and perfect absolute. Simply put, these are linguistic formulations of regularities that occur when a human nervous system begins to study a certain area of the universe. These regularities are as much a function or a result of the perceptual apparatus which recieves and decodes them as they are features of an underlying “reality”.

So we can see then that despite our anxious efforts to shore up some sense of objective respectability, the game is a relative one. Our perceptions are relative, and if we follow this to its logical conclusion we should see that the products of these perceptions and later cognitive organisation of them into maps, grids, ideologies, theories and so on, are as a result, relative also. Seeing this, the notions of “objective phenomena” and “things and events” come to be understood as psychological strategies for coping with a relative universe wherein the only real constant is change, and where there are no static entities. They are ghosts, and just as ghosts are wont to do in our myths, disappear when they are confronted clearly and with integrity.

This is not to say that the world is simply some featureless and undifferentiated mass, or that the apparent objects to which we are referring will “pop” out of being when one recognises their true nature. It is, rather, to point out that while there is differentiation in the world, there really is no genuine or inherent separation. Where we find separation, things, objects and so on, we always and without fail find the nervous system of man.

So why then, some hundred or so years after the Quantum revolution and Einstein’s relativity, are we clinging to objectivity and absolutism in many areas of the sciences? Well, it would seem to me that it is for largely the same reasons we clung to these attitudes of mind after Darwin, and after Galileo, and so on. Western peoples descend from a long lineage of monotheistic culture, likely stretching back all the way to Egypt during the time of the Pharaoes, and the ideas embedded most deeply in such cultures were those of absolute rule by a cosmic authoritarian, and the objective veracity and truth of their scriptures/figurings related to said being. These were our safety blankets, clung to in the unwitting assumption that they would drive out they darkness they themselves had ironically set in motion. So, in order to be respected, or taken seriously in a Western context over the last two-thousand years, one had to appeal to the absolute and objective authority of a fixed, static and unchanging phenomenon. And in the last two-hundred years, the nature of that phenomenon has changed from a deity to a Law. In the social game we are playing, it simply won’t cut it to point out that your point of view differs from mine and that due to this difference, we will likely come to different and seemingly mutually exclusive conclusions about life and the universe that may not in fact be mutually exclusive if we do not hold them to an apparently “objective” standard. Instead, we make simply take them as “true enough” and work from there to understand in more detail what the individual is trying to communicate.

This kind of attitude is seen as “wishy-washy”, “pseudo-scientific”, “slippery” and above all, lacking “intellectual rigour”, which is supposed for some reason to be always and in every case a quality rather than a handicap, despite the word also meaning strictness and rigidity along with attention to detail. Yet it is certainly more compassionate, in the fact that we are not holding up a ruler to the other but rather, an ear. The restless desire to quantify all of life, to have everything set against some cosmic Master Ruler so as to be objectified, is objectionable, as Alan Watts has so deftly put it. We are not finally and completely understanding the cosmos by translating it into popular grids, no matter how fine they may be. We are only understanding it in a certain way, and so will derive certain answers. But these answers are not, by virtue of their adherence to these grids or their status as measured, inherently more valid or useful than answers which are not arrived at through these methods, they are simply different.

And so we come to the point of all this talk, which is to point out that reality as we know it, as opposed to how we experience it, is not reality “as it is”. The theories, methods and conceptions of modern scientific work are incredibly useful in certain areas, and disastrous in others. And in turn, not applying these tools in many situations is just as disastrous, if not moreso. What we think of as reality through the lens of science, objective phenomena, absolute and static laws of cosmic behaviour and so on, are really no more than useful abstractions, outlines of the edges of human cognition and experience wherein those edges can be sensibly converted into symbolic form and strung out along a page. And in turn, the non-scientific attempts to represent the wiggly world using symbols are just as much a form of abstraction.

All of these methods and modes of expressing and symbolising experience are just that: expressions, and symbols, and what I am suggesting here is that we take a look at what exactly it is that they are expressing and symbolising. At the root and core of every theory, every scientific dance, every religious frogmarch, is an experience, and that rawness of perception, that primary nervous system interaction with the world, is what we are losing through our obsessive efforts to represent it in culturally viable ways. Back to basics.

Many of us in the modern world are obsessed, absolutely obsessed with the idea of things being useful or having a use. We assess the worth of an object based on its relative usefulness next to other objects of its kind, we often judge people based on their usefulness to us, and we ask in times of extreme frustration, “what’s the use?”, as if the cosmos should have some purpose or be “for” some ulterior end.  

This, however is not a universal attitude of mind, and we see that in the Chinese philosophies of Taoism, uselessness is considered a virtue, or at the least a clever strategy to get an individual out of hassle or strife. There are two tales in the Chuang Tsu about enormous trees, both large beyond belief and incalculably ancient. One story involves an apprentice, who is following his master, Shih the carpenter, around the countryside. The pair come to one of these gigantic trees, and suprisingly to the apprentice, the master walks on without so much as giving the tree a second glance. The apprentice asks him, “Since I took up my ax and followed you, master, I have never seen wood as beautiful as this. But you do not bother to look at it and walk on without stopping. Why is this?”

The master replied, “Stop! Say no more! That tree is useless. A boat made from it would sink, a coffin would soon rot, a tool would split, a door would ooze sap, and a beam would have termites. It is worthless timber and is of no use. That is why it has reached such a ripe old age.”

We can see clearly here that what man regards as deficits in the tree, facets of its uselessness, are to the tree great virtues, as they exempt the tree from being cut and treated for human purposes. In the same way, the Zen tale of the man whose luck appears to be shifting each day, firstly with his horses running away, secondly with them returning with wild horses, thirdly with his son being thrown and breaking a leg, and fourthly with his son being passed over by the military draftsmen in a time of war. The uselessness of the son, being unfit for warfare, is his saving grace. He may be unable to walk at the present time, but he does not have to risk his life or take another’s as part of his duty to an impersonal and violent state.

We strive to cultivate the virtues of usefulness in most areas of our lives, but I believe we are taking this too far. Does the CEO of a large multinational corporation strike you as a genuinely comfortable or happy man? He has become far too useful to others in his field, and is now isolated at the top in an overarching situation of managing variables, which is in and of itself a great deal of what we mean by the word “stress”.

If an object or a person is useful, they become desired for their usefulness, and so their time may become increasingly taken up by requests to be of use to someone else or in some certain capacity. This leaves them with little in the way of relaxation, of the kind of meandering aimlessness that is so characteristic of wise men and sages the world over. It is just this “useless” mind that allows the most space for the qualities and character of the world to shine through. If we only look at things to determine their worth in terms of how useful they are, we will only see a small cross section of those things directly relevant to our intended use for the thing, and qualities not relevant to our particular scheme for the thing will be glossed over or simply left out. A furrier sees furs when he looks at a rabbit, a butcher its meat; yet a child sees the rabbit and seeks to relate to it.

If we prioritise usefulness too much, we run the risk of missing some of life’s most beautiful and fulfilling treasures. Music and art are two that spring to mind. There is no real use for music, it is not created in order to fulfil one, and the same is true of art. Of course, one can make music and art with a certain use in mind, for example, to arouse people, to send a political message and so on, but the point here is that these are uses for music and art, rather than demonstrations of how art or music is useful in and of itself.

Indeed, it is in their very uselessness that we find their joy. Play is another form of conduct that is not necessarily useful for anything outside of itself, and yet it is one of our most treasured activities. As children we spend most of our time doing it, and it is instrumental in our learning to relate constructively to the world around us. We cannot simply say though that the value of play is that it refreshes us for work, or that it makes us more useful, for then we would be destroying the spirit of the thing in order to give the impression that the activity is inherently useful.

It is this destruction of the quality of life that I feel is the threat of obsessive focus on “usefulness”, and it is by becoming more comfortable with its opposite that we can inoculate ourselves against creating a world that exists based on utility, where music is “for something”, art has a “goal”, and play is simply a necessary and purposeful support for work.

Ayahuasca is a peculiar substance to be even peripherally involved with. Since my meeting with the mother herself a little over a week ago, I’ve felt an incredible presence of mind and heart with regards to even the most mundane of my daily activities. It’s easy to overstate something like this, to fall into the trap of “spiritual bypass” as its now referred to, but I really do feel there’s no more important concotion of mono-amine oxidase inhibitors and psychedelic chemicals on this planet to date.

The immediate after effects are roughly characterisable by a sense of profound and intense personal calm, a resolve to approach one’s circumstances with a measure of clear-headedness and compassion, an equanimity towards the substance of life. So-called “spiritual” practice has been a very large part of my life for around the last two or so years, since my falling out with New Atheism and the unfortunately oppositional character of most of it’s adherents. This has only intensified since my experience with this most bizarre of “teacher plants”, as it is called, and the integrity with which I have been apporaching this aspect of life has followed suit.

And it is an aspect of life. Too many of us see a magic bullet in the area of spiritual practice, a sort of naive notion that if we only meditate well enough, recite enough mantras, take enough of the right drug, that our lives will magically re-align towards our highest and deepest intentions, that we will be exposed to nothing but grace and beauty forever more. But the hard fact of the matter is that this is nonsense, juvenile misunderstanding of what is in truth a complex and subtle set of phenomena and behaviours that require just as much conscious input as learning to drive or speaking a new language.

It’s been the unfortunate blind spot in far too many coversations with spiritually-minded peers I’ve had over the last twenty-four months: the idea that if we only reach that pinnacle state of enlightenment with the use of LSD or Psilocybin in the exact right way, our lives will reorient towards the fundamentally good: our pains will dissolve like so much sea-spray in the wind, our relationships will flow as easily as the day we first met, our finances will of their own accord balloon and prosper. We used to think this magic bullet was atheism, or perhaps religion. We might have thought it was getting that house we wanted, the new guitar, the new appliance, the girl or boy we felt that spark of cosmic attraction to.

This is all desire. It should be obvious from the get-go that we are chasing our own tails here. Why do we want what we want? Why do we supposedly need all these things to be different? Simply because we cannot truly face up to our situations as they are in this moment, with all their loose ends, violences, harsh words, sick feelings in the stomach of dread and anxiety, moments spent weeping for better times. This here, these sufferings; these are the contents of our souls. They are arising because we have not spent qualty face-toface time with them, we haven’t given them our full attention. That which we ignore, recurs.

What do we want here? It really is to have everything fixed. To settle the raging waters of the infinite ocean of samsara, the wheel of birth, death and suffering. To put everything in its place, and to have a place for everything. To flow, unimpeded, through the maelstrom of human existence, unscathed.

Let me ask you something. Would you bother turning up at all if this was truly the case? Would you take incarnation, be here in a body, exist as a “somebody”, if all of your shit was neatly filed away and required no further action on your behalf? Of course not. You would cease to exist at all. As the Buddha pointed out, and as Schopenhauer echoed, existence is suffering. It is not just that suffering is an ever-present aspect of existence, it is in fact the precondition for it. No-one comes here without unfinished business. This whole world game is a mopping up operation. And we are the cleaners.

Why are we still murdering children? Because there is yet work left to do in our hearts. Why do the forests burn for furniture? Because we have not conquered our desires, our greed, our avarice. This whole big play is in some very real sense a lesson in non-attachment; in not being taken in fully by the drama of maya, illusion, that captivates so many and is penetrated by so few.

So the question must be, now, how do we stop the great chain of suffering, of wanting and grasping, of sorrow and death? Well, it would seem to me that the only way out of this particular dilemma is to realise that firstly there is no-one that it is happening to. Who is this “I, myself”, to whom you refer when someone asks you who you are? Can you pin him or her down and show me? Of course not. You are not the same person you were when you read the beginning of this sentence. You are an aggregate of processes and phenomena that involves intimately the entire playful patterning of form and energy that we call the cosmos. Take a flower for example. It can only exist as a product of things which are “not-flower”, the dirt, the oxygen, the light of the sun, water, various nutrients and so on. The flower itself is empty of self-nature, it is a combination of “not-flower” aspects that combine to make “flower”. And you, my flowery friend, are in no way any different. There is no central self to the human experience, simply a shifting, changing, fluxing mess of sensation and perception, of the whirlpools of food and waste, of breath and of heat.

Most of our fears and pains come from mistaking the apparently solid-looking fluxations of energy for separate and definable entities in space-time. If one looks at a cloud, they may pick out defined features in that cloud, and say, “look, there is the shape of a horse!”. But after a short while, the forces of nature will cast this form to the winds, and the “horse” will be no more. We may weep for the disappearance of this form, but in truth we are weeping for nothing more than appearance itself; the hallucination of consistency and identity. It is, however uncomfortable we may at first feel about it, exactly the same with our loved ones and that which we treasure most. We are all fleeting apparitions, without substance or permanency.

Secondly, there is nothing to get out of, you are perfect as you are, right now. There truly is no problem here other than the suggestion you have made that there is a problem. “Problems” do not exist in reality, there are no such things. You cannot pick one up, point to one, or scientifically demonstrate through measurement the existence of a “problem” in and of itself. A “problem” is an operation of mind, much like analysis or counting. It is made by people, for people, and often against “other” people for the purposes of “solving” another “problem” already made. I’m sure you are beginning to see where I’m coming from. There is no natural law or physical necessity for there to be any such thing as a “problem”. One may say, “Well we all die, there is a problem for all men and women, no matter how you look at it!”. But this is, again, simply an attitude towards quanta. It says nothing about reality itself and everything about the nervous system categorising it. Death, on even the most rudimentary level of reflection, is anything but a problem. It prevents overcrowding, and keeps living fresh.

“Problems” are simply the indicator of a mind which has yet to find constructive solutions to the fact of existing on a small carbon based globe orbiting a nuclear furnace. They reveal an opportunity for a shift in attitude, because after all, what we need are plans, not lamentations.

So, this brings me back to my original point, which I have vaguely spelled out in a roundabout way: we keep expecting our “problems” to be solved by some magic bullet cure. As I have shown, this attitude simply pales in comparison to what I consider to be a sober reading of our situation, which is thus: we have no problems, what we are in need of is plans. Real, genuine, intelligent appraisals of the various aspects of our living, and honest and dedicated efforts to improve our experience in as many ways as possible. Sometimes this is as simple as a change of perspective, from a “problem” mindset to a “plan” mindset. The most forceful realisation I had while under the influence of ayahuasca was that I needed to clean up my act; to order my life, to practice genuine compassion and love and not to simply leave it on the backburner when I feel jilted, annoyed or upset. Now, where before I had seen “problems”, I see opportunities to test my patience, to cultivate loving awareness and action, to respond as an awake and sensible individual.

And this is why I have come to feel that ayahuasca is such an important piece to our puzzle: it murders ego-clinging, not as a direct result of the drug intoxication and for a temporary period; but as a result of the deep and often horrifying insights into one’s own behaviour and way of seeing the world that come to a person while under the influence. We are all seeking a quick fix, but the harsh truth is that there’s no such thing. What is required of us is to be awake, to be fully present, and to cultivate the qualities of compassion, loving-kindness, equanimity, and responsibility in each of our lives; and to make these qualities as accessible to others as their sufferings. No-one else is going to save us. We are our own Christ’s, our own Buddha’s, and the sooner we wake up to this and step into who we genuinely are, as opposed to these frightened, cobbled together ideas of ourselves we defend so vigilantly, the sooner we will find all that we have been seeking all along.

We are what we are looking for. May we embrace our responsibilities with grace, and the clarity of loving awareness.

I have been mulling over the rhythmic content of human speech and poetry and have come to some tentative conclusions. When we speak and use rhythmic expression, we are stroking the nervous system into a new vibrational pattern using the breath and the force of sound.

It is my starting assumption that basically the cosmos is a vibratory phenomenon, that it is form in motion, form being vibrations of different frequency. One might ask, “what is vibrating?”, and to that I would answer, space and solid, on and off, black and white. There is no substance which vibrates, the vibration itself is what we mean by substance.

Indeed, we are chasing a rabbit down a hole assuming that at some point it must have given up on its warren and rested. I cannot in good conscience believe such a hopeful notion, that given enough time we can find the whatever-it-is that cannot be cut. We have been looking for a very, very long time, and each time we find the “smallest fundamental particle” or what have you, the thing proves to be a boundary condition inside of which are more forms vibrating. The ground of being is every level of being every which way and everytime, from every point of view.

So here we are, at the ground of being, vibrating constellations of forms we call atoms, molecules, muscles and so on, having reflective dreams about our own nature and origins and trying to find out who, exactly, started it, presumably so we can press charges.

It follows that if we are vibratory phenomena in the sense I’ve outline above, that we are constantly affected by other vibratory phenomena, and that under the right conditions and with appropriate sophistication, we can through acts of will alter said vibrations to bring about desired positive changes in the state of our own being.

Vipassana, or Buddhist insight meditation, is one such example of a vibratory technology which works by focusing the awareness onto the breath, thereby rejiggering the biorhythms of the organism by altering the rate of oscillation between in and out breaths from an unconscious, largely dynamic pattern, to a conscious and regulated one. The effects of this action are a sense of mental clarity, connectedness or re-association with one’s environment, and bodily comfort.

It would seem to me from this example that arrhythmia, or playing off the beat, may be the source of much of our discomfort, and that we may get back into the swing of things so to speak by getting reacquainted with natural groove.

Poetry is one such method of achieving such a state. The breath cadences of poets like Whitman, Pound, Blake, Shelley, Ginsberg and other variations of stream-of-consciousness or natural-mind styles lend themselves to vibrational patterns associated with exaltation, connectedness and religious awe, in much the same way as older poets such as Rumi conferred feelings of illumination through their spontaneous bardic utterances.

It is my intention to further develop this hypothesis through experiment, reflection, and action, and I call on all poets, meditators, spiritually minded folk and curious minds to aid me in this endeavor by practicing spontaneous verse, magical speech, and by toying with the rhythms of their own breath.

Outer technology is one thing, however inner technology has the distinct advantage of being eternally available, as the medium is the body itself. Come with me, let’s become technicians of our own nervous systems, get smart, and bring magic back into this industrial nightmare before the soot closes up our throats.

I’ve been seeing scientism more and more often recently in my travels around the internet. Briefly, scientism is the attitude that the only type of knowledge which is valid when speaking about reality or the world is knowledge arrived at through the scientific method, quantitative data representing specific measurements of a certain phenomenon or set of phenomena. It can also refer to the notion that through science, all questions will eventually be answered, all problems solved and that this is an inevitablity; a simple matter of time.

This seems to be an attitude that began to come to prominence in the 17th century, in no small part due to the rhetoric of Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon. These men claimed that by learning how the physical world worked, we could become “masters and possessors of nature.” This is almost a direct quote from Genesis: “and God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” I find this to be a curious example of religious thinking to have occurred in the minds of two of our most well-known proponents of science. Rather than invoking a non-material deity, they invoke the abstractions of “science”, “reason” and “logic” in its place.

Both Descartes and Bacon elevated the use of reason and logic through attacks on other human faculties such as creativity, memory and imagination; all aspects of cognition which are commonly denounced as vague or unimportant by proponents of scientism. Bacon, in his efforts to classify learning, demoted poetry and history to a second-class status.

In the enlightenment period, there came to prominence a sort of “Better-Living-Through-Science” rhetoric, with individuals like Denis Diderot claiming that the result of collecting, organizing and preserving all human knowledge (except of course that considered to be frivolous and unscientific by those invested in science) would be that “our children, becoming better instructed, may become at the same time more virtuous and happy.” A cursory glance around at modern Western culture where science has come to prominence and flourished will show that this is hardly the case. If we are to believe such grand claims about the efficacy of science, we should see far more of a measurable result from the use of it. That we do not see such a great degree of change in the virtuousness or the happiness of our children today suggests that perhaps there is more to the problem than Diderot or proponents of scientism today suggest.

We see the beginnings of religiosity in the attitude of scientism during the French Revolution, where many churches were converted into “Temples of Reason” and held quasi-religious services for the worship of science. It would seem to me that if these people were logically and evidentially convinced of the validity and usefulness of science, they would need no such  demonstrations of piety and worship.

The 19th century saw the rise of positivism, founded by August Comte. Comte claimed that there was simply nothing in the world that could be called transcendent, and that nothing metaphysical could have any claim to validity whatsoever. He claimed instead that the only valid data was to be acquired through the senses. It should be noted that modern developments in quantum mechanics, neuroscience and psychology show that the senses are not only fallible in the sense of our own inattention to them, but also must as a result of their constitution and form, distort reality.

The human eye bends light differently to a spider’s eye, and the tangle of nerves in each body interprets this sensory data along different lines, toward different biological and in our case, and perhaps the spider’s, ontological ends. Therefore, a human nervous system produces a human reality, a spider’s nervous system, a spider reality, and so on. To speak then of the senses as the only valid method for acquiring data about the world is to confuse them for a perfect instrument, one without bias or distorting influence. As Alfred Korzybski pointed out, we can truly speak only of the limitations of our nervous systems; the reality that lies beyond that is unspeakable. If we begin to believe, as positivists did, that we can ultimately rely on our senses in a final and all encompassing fashion to deliver us to the promised land of truth, we risk falling into the domain of reification, that is, confusing our descriptions of reality for reality itself.

In Comte’s conception, the task of scientists was on the one hand to demonstrate that all phenomena, including human behaviour and experiences, are subject to invariable natural laws; and on the other to reduce the number of these laws to the smallest amount possible, with the goal of ultimate unification under the laws of physics. He also understood intellectual history as having a clear trajectory, which he termed the Law of Three Stages: each branch of knowledge passes through three stages: the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract, and lastly the scientific or positive state. Note how Comte presupposes that science is the last and ultimate state, a belief ultimately unscientific in its formulation and in its ability to be tested, yet one that is characteristic of modern supporters of the attitude of scientism. Comte believed that in time, an ideas outside of this realm of science would be understood as pure fantasy or mere superstition, unworthy of consideration.

In the twentieth century, positivism gained a prefix. Logical positivism originated from a group known collectively as The Vienna Circle, who revisited the fundamental tenets of Comte’s ideas and proposed to enhance them with symbolic logic and semantic theory. In their system, there are two and only two kinds of meaningful statements: analytic statements (including logic and mathematics) and empirical statements, subject to experimental verification. Anything outside of these narrow boundaries is an empty concept, for all intents and purposes, meaningless.

Karl Popper, the noted philosopher of science, pointed out that few statements in science, unfortunately for the logical positivists, can actually be completely verified. As a result, Popper proposed that the priniple of falsifiablity should replace experimental verification as a demarcation of what qualifies as science.

Moving on to the modern day, we see from the scientific community itself a round dismissal of scientism and associated attitudes of certainty towards the role science is playing and will play in human affairs. Physicist Ian Hutchison notes that “…the health of science is in fact jeopardized by scientism, not promoted by it. At the very least, scientism provokes a defensive, immunological, aggressive response from other intellectual communities, in return for its own arrogance and intellectual bullyism. It taints science itself by association.”

As Thomas Burnett from the American Association for the Advancement of Science points out, “…it is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the natural world. But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying that whatever he can’t catch in his nets does not exist . Once you accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified, or falsified, by science itself. It is, in a word, unscientific.”

This kind of rigid attitude towards science is turning it slowly into a church. Science has always been essentially anarchic, not subject to strict and rigid definitions of its purpose, capabilities or destination as the philosopher of science Paul Feyeraband points out:

“Science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and… non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so… Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science… In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality.”

Indeed the very assertions of scientism are self defeating, as the truth of the statements “no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically (or logically)” or “no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true” cannot themselves be proven scientifically, logically, or empirically.

Intellectual historian T.J. Jackson Lears argues there has been a recent reemergence of “nineteenth-century positivist faith that a reified ‘science’ has discovered (or is about to discover) all the important truths about human life. Precise measurement and rigorous calculation, in this view, are the basis for finally settling enduring metaphysical and moral controversies.”

The Myth of Progress, the idea that science can incrementally deal with all aspects of human problems and endeavours, and that it has no boundaries, is what I take most umbridge with. Progress is not unequivocally a good in and of itself. It does not necessarily better the human condition and in some ways it makes it much, much worse, examples of this would be the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear arms.

In an article in New Republic by John Gray, we see a clear example of the fallibility of taking science to be final and ultimate truth: “Academic writing is rarely a pursuit of unpopular truths; much of the time it is an attempt to bolster prevailing orthodoxies and shore up widely felt but ill-founded hopes. There are many examples of academics who have distorted fact or disregarded evidence in order to tell an edifying tale that accords with respectable hopes.
Consider the celebrated Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb. When they published "Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?” in 1935, they were not applying rigorous methods of sociological research; they were reiterating the idle prejudices and fantasies that shaped opinion throughout much of the Western world at the time.

When, in later editions of the book published in 1941 and 1944, they removed the question mark from its title, they were displaying a confidence that reflected the pro-Soviet mood that prevailed in Britain during World War II and its immediate aftermath, rather than any new findings. Nor were the Webbs at all unusual in forming their theories on the basis of political fads and ephemeral moods. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, a school of sociology developed that promoted “convergence theory”—the notion that the former Soviet Union, along with other advanced industrial societies, would eventually adopt the core institutions of Western liberal democracy. (Francis Fukuyama’s “end-of-history” thesis was an apocalyptic version of this theory.)

There was never compelling evidence of any strong trend to this effect, and the upshot in Russia has been altogether different. Of course this has not prevented similar theories being invoked today and applied to China and the Middle East. Appealing to the desire for security from conflict and the urge to believe that our place in the world is underwritten by history, the fantasy that societies everywhere are slowly becoming more like our own shapes the social sciences as much as it has ever done.“

Scientism, Gray points out, is in part a refusal to accept that intractable difficulty is normal in human affairs. In any good story, there must be an antagonist, some salt in any stew to make it tasty and not bland and uninteresting. So with life. Many human conflicts, Gray goes on to say, even ones that are properly understood, do not fall into the category of soluble problems.

"No new discoveries in sociology or psychology can enable such conflicts to be wholly overcome; deeply rooted in history, they can only be coped with more or less resolutely and intelligently. Acknowledging this humbling truth is the beginning of wisdom, and of the long haul to something like peace.”

Under the banner of hard realism, the proponents of scientism are in fact unwilling to confront the reality of the raw facts of human misery, the abuse of power, the double-edged fragility of so-called progress; preferring instead to inhabit a fantasy world in which it can be cleverly conjured away.

Now there are obvious, massive problems with this attitude from the get-go. Firstly, not all areas of life are quantifiable. We cannot count the way in which your relationship with your mother has felt to you over the last decade. We cannot quantify the sense of insight or discovery that comes with stumbling across a novel new connection between some aspect of the world and another. The reason is not simply because we don’t have the right tools yet, or that science has “yet to” become sophisticated “enough” to study these phenomena in a quantifiable sense; rather it is that these systems and phenomena are simply not countable, because they do not consist of distinct packets or bits which can be honestly separated out and numbered.

Some systems lend themselves to this sort of calculus-style thinking, for example, we can perform advanced acts of quantification with regards to the amount of cars flowing in and out of a city on a certain road between two arbitrarily selected points in time. Others do not. To believe that all systems and phenomena are of the countable kind is simply to reduce all phenomena into terms which we are comfortable with in the present moment; it is not a sensible or useful way of approaching the ever expanding edge of human knowledge.

In fact, we may come to see that quantification itself is more of a description of the limits of our nervous systems than it is a description of “reality”, whatever that may be. In the light of this realisation, systems are neither quantifiable nor not quantifiable, but rather we may perform acts of quantification on facets of our perception which we isolate from the total array of signals registering on our nervous systems and call “systems”.

Clearly then, it is not simply a “matter of time” or inevitability that science will answer all of our questions; as the nature of what we are studying is ultimately defined by us, limited by our nervous systems and the frameworks of thinking and understanding we have already set in place. Our questions, and that to which we address them, are in flux.

In addition to the fuzzy nature of reality and our perceptual apparatus, alongside the fact that we exist in a reality where things do not come broken up into neat and separate packets; our major scientific paradigms have been overturned more times than we can remember. In fact the reason you are able to read this in the format you are is due almost entirely to the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century, which allowed for more complex and sophisticated methods of computing. The history of progress in science is a history of commonly held attitudes and ideas about the special and final nature of our answers being shown to be utterly misguided.

In light of this, how can any self-respecting and self-aware scientist or consumer of science believe that we can be certain that science is leading us to a complete or final understanding of all human questions? This seems to me to be an attitude of premature certainty of the same kind as a pious but secretly uncertain religious believer who must constantly remind everyone of the fact, lest he be exposed to any form of stimulus that might exacerbate his existing misgivings.

We see out of this kind of attitude emerging a class of people who call themselves “experts”, and who can generally hang on to the title for a few decades before a new “expert” arises to replace them. An expert is someone who has claimed to have special knowledge in a field, and if they provide substantial proof that this is the case, then and only then should we take them any more seriously than the average joe.

Experts are obviously a required aspect of modern society. Looking at the state of human knowledge as it is today, our collected history, philosophy, art, music, our religious rituals, oral histories, stories and so on, no one individual can hope to gain competency in all these areas simultaneously. So it is only sensible that we have certain interested folk pursue their area of study to the utmost and become incredibly well versed in said area. This results quite often in fantastic discoveries and breakthroughs, but it can also lend itself to egotism and a certain calcification of ideas and attitudes past the point of their validity or usefulness.

Part and parcel of this domain are individuals who have enormous blind-spots in their thinking, or outmoded biases. Richard Dawkins is operating from a model of the universe that became outdated in the early 20th century with the discovery of quantum mechanics and the various non-deterministic and experimentally valid fields that emerged alongside and after; chaos theory, Thom’s catastrophe theory, Prigogine’s work into evolutionary thinking, and the work of eminent psychologists and philosophers such as Maslow, Watts, Grof and Laing.

Dawkins still uses the metaphor of a deterministic, mechanistic physical universe that operates based on eternal and immutable laws; which when one examines it closely is nothing more than Christianity minus the deity. It does not accurately reflect the world as we know it according to modern science.

And yet, he uses this outmoded image of reality as a way to claim intellectual authority over anyone and everyone who disagrees with his hard-line materialist attitude. He roundly dismisses altered states of consciousness as illusory or worthless, is unsophisticated in his explanations of religious ideas and seems to have no room whatsoever for odd phenomena, whether psychological or physical, preferring to blame the perceiver of the phenomena and engage in ad hominem attacks against their sanity.

Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide take this irritable poseur as an expert on all things religion and science, and that is a mistake we as a culture and a species cannot afford to make.

The issue with blaming scientists and never science itself is that we may fall into the whole dialogue of “Can’t you see that God is perfect, it’s just his followers that ruin everything?” We run the risk of veering over into religious belief and idolatry towards the edifice of science, the idea of science, and in doing so we de-legitimize criticism of science itself. Science thrives on criticism, to do this would be self-defeating in a very real sense.

The idea that science is the only way to know anything with any degree of certainty, that knowledge or insight achieved through non-scientific means is unreliable, or at worst, insane nonsense, is not only a falsehood but a put-down philosophy. It renders human experience as ultimately worthless, and says to the common human, “Your life, your experiences, your discoveries are all subject to complete dismissal, simply because of the manner in which you came to them.”

I’m not saying that theoretical knowledge should be discarded, only that it should take a back seat to personal experience and understanding. Of course, the only way to have that personal experience is often to discard all methods and approaches and just jump in to life, making sense of it by participating in it.

What I am suggesting is that people should distrust all existing forms of knowledge and all proponents of it; including the kind of pseudoscientific salesmen typified by Deepak Chopra, new age guru figures, religious authorities, and of course, as I’ve noted, so-called experts and scientists. If you rely only on the knowledge of others to inform you, you are cognitively stalling; you are choosing to leave abilities of understanding, creative synthesis and insight untapped for the sake of convention. The important act to engage oneself with is not the studious obsession with statistics typical of so many self-described “free-thinkers” and “scientifically-minded” individuals, but rather a clear headed direct engagement with the object of your curiosity.

The advantages of this attitude are obvious: instead of relying only and exclusively on so-called experts to push human understanding forward, we can re-legitimise personal understanding and start working on ways in which we can sift the wheat from the chaff, the shit from the shinola so to speak. We also gain the huge advantage of taking into account multiple perspectives, which seems to me the only sensible attitude in a relative reality.

We stand to gain from no longer alienating people from their own ability to learn and understand the world, in giving them the encouragement to seek their own answers, to feel and see and perceive and hypothesise more deeply and coherently than they had ever thought possible. This, if anything, will increase people’s interest in science as they begin to recognise the broad range of uses the method has and the accuracy it can produce.

There are people who exhibit a sort of reactionary irrationality towards all things scientific. We’ve all heard stories of pious religious people allowing their children to die from preventable diseases due to a distrust of modern medicine. I feel these attitudes tend to come from people who have become hostile towards science, as a direct result of the aforementioned holier-than-thou sneering attitude towards their personal experience conveyed by so many high profile scientists and commentators.

Their beliefs are not even so much what I would call personal in the strongest sense of the word; rather I would say that they have simply chosen a different expert. In many of these cases, this expert is not an MD, but a church leader or an alternative health guru. Perhaps if these people were more closely engaged with their own understanding of the world, actively seeking without the express condition of their efforts being scientific in order to be valid, they could more easily recognise that the appropriate solution would be demonstrably effective modern medical care. It is this attitude of self-inquiry and responsibility for one’s beliefs that I’m advocating, not merely exchanging scientific expertise for the “expertise” of fringe practitioners.

If we stop devaluing the personal experiences of these people in a snide, condescending fashion, there’s a very good chance they’ll engage with science in a constructive way.

So what are our alternatives, if we can’t simply leave understanding life up to the scientists? Simple introspection, study, philosophical inquiry, and the voluntary suspension of disbelief to get a first hand sense of the quality of thinking with a different set of basic assumptions.

An irrational, non-quantitative immersion in phenomena, the “flow” state in popular terms, is a major aspect of how we learn to dance, to play music, to self-express. States of free-association and stream of consciousness expression, play, have been instrumental in some of our greatest works of art and music, and if one studies the history of science they’ll find that major breakthroughs are almost unanimously attributed to these flashes of unplanned, non-methodical consciousness.

These aspects of our experience are not reducible to a simple variation or aspect of the scientific method, they are methods of knowing and understanding the world in their own right.

To repeat myself, I am not suggesting that we abandon the scientific method or that it is in some way undesirable; what I am arguing against is the notion that it is the only truly valid or reliable method of understanding our lives, and that it is applicable to every type of question.
In addition, we can look to poetry, myth and metaphor as methods for grasping truths about the world we live in. Poetry, while not strictly rational, expresses facets of experience and perception which cannot be clearly stated in quantitative terms. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl conveys aspects of living in America during the fifties that cannot be gleaned from analytic histories of the time, or from scientific measurement of the situation.

One can argue quite convincingly that literature is just as important as science in our quest to understand the world around us, as did Aldous Huxley in his work, “Science and Literature”:

“…the world with which literature deals is the world in which human beings are born and live and finally die; the world in which they love and hate, in which they experience triumph and humiliation, hope and despair; the world of sufferings and enjoyments, of madness and common sense, of silliness, cunning and wisdom; the world of social pressures and individual impulses, of reason against passion, of instincts and conventions, of shared language and unsharable feelings and sensations…”
Myth, if not taken immediately as a description of historical events, or physical happenings, can give us profound insight into psychological experiences common across the vast majority of humankind. Joseph Campbell has drawn on the work of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung and given us a compelling account of the relationship between many religious experiences and symbol systems and the archetypal, universal experiences of birth, life and death in the human world. And metaphor, allusion, can engage our minds in ways that a direct, quantitative statement of the collected data with regards to a phenomenon cannot.

We wonder why people seem to be getting stupider, why hardly anyone is paying attention to science, why the public behave in irrational and foolish ways. Isn’t it obvious? We have devalued their very capacity to understand the world in their own terms, and as a result have created generations of people who cannot think for themselves and so are incapable of assessing the merit of anyone else’s ideas.

As long as we enshrine science and scientists in such an uncompromising way, I feel we are committing a sort of intellectual suicide. Science and scientists do not need to be taken a certain way or treated a certain way before the fact of their discoveries and their evidence; that would be tantamount to religion. And now, more than perhaps at any other time in our short history, we must broaden our intellectual horizons, seek novel solutions, overturn existing dogmas, and foster an attitude of compassionate understanding with regards to the relative realities of our human brothers and sisters.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, a peculiar stirring in the universe, one Salvador Dali. Born to Catalonian parents in the north of Spain, Dali was the couple’s second. Their first had died prior to Dali’s birth, and it was into this bizarre situation of overshadowing that the young artist was thrown.

Salvador Dali is perhaps best known for his work, “The Persistence of Memory”, a landscape of sorts depicting a melting or “soft” clock, and a variety of surreal objects and vistas. Even in this relatively early image, we can see the intimations of a mysticism that would come to draw under its umbrella most of the relevant symbolic and ideological content of the last several thousand years, along with prescient winks to the future of mankind.

But before we attend to this most pressing of matters, we had better revisit the young Dali, to best understand and contextualise his later works. Dali knew from a very young age that his brother had died unexpectedly, and he could see that his parents had never truly overcome the shock or the grief associated with losing a child. His brother had been precocious, intelligent and creative, and Dali referred to him later as himself, in a form too true and perfect for this world.

Dali began to experiment with his reality at a very young age. In “The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali”, he recalls a memory where he was transfixed by the sight and smell of the carcass of a small animal in a barn, and, running back and forth between the clean air of the outside and the rank scent of the creature, became ecstatic. He later pushed a small boy from a bridge, and looked on with some measure of satisfaction. He then returned to his village, where he alerted the population that the boy had fallen on his own, and delighted in the ensuing chaos.

In school, Dali came to begin to understand his ability as a showman and as a surrealist. He would leap down the large flight of stairs in his schoolyard, attracting the attention of his peers and his teachers as he came perilously close to death. He maintained that he could feel his spirit flying free during these moments, and began to get intimations of the person he would become in his later years.

Dali studied art at a prestigious college in Spain, but was later expelled or left of his own accord, depending on whom you speak to. He immersed himself in the Surreal, meeting the movement led by Andre Breton and quickly becoming a fixture of the scene. Dali began to study, also, anything from the mathematical treatises of the renaissance to Freud and Jung’s psychoanalysis, and everything in between. He became a true renaissance man.

Dali believed that the world was comprised of both soft and hard aspects, somewhat akin to how the human body has soft flesh and hard bones, or how the consciousness of the human goes from the softness of sleep into the hardness of waking reality. We can see parallels to this soft/hard duality everywhere: in the genitalia of mammals, in the principle of the yang and the yin in Chinese philosophy, in the notion of Apollo and Dionysus in the Greek, and in the notions of rational and irrational, the defined and the vague.

Dali was obsessed with the irrational, with the aspects of the human mind that had remained unconscious or out of sight. He desired to bring into coherent relief the worlds of the unconscious mind, all of the archetypal imagery, the symbolism, and the meaning we carry around inside of our heads but never attend to. To this effect, he began painting drawers in his human figures, and attended a lecture wearing a diving suit to symbolise his role as an explorer of the deeper level of cognition.

In a culture where we have barely scratched the surface of the potential of the irrational or transrational mind, where its main expressions have been through art, music, drama and literature, it is only rational that we begin to incorporate these modes of awareness, perception and behaviour into what are traditionally considered “rational-only” domains, such as science, philosophy, psychology and so on. This is not to suggest a jettisoning of the rational; rather a synthesis of the two.

We can see the rational mind as being perhaps represented in the operations of the prefrontal cortex, that aspect of the brain which analyses and plans; and the irrational or spontaneous consciousness as being represented in the operations of the anterior cingular cortex, which is the region of the brain most active in “flow” states, wherein an individual is appropriately responding to his environment in real time.

Dali was attempting to marry the prefrontal and anterior cingular cortexes, the rational and the irrational, the soft and the hard, and I believe we can all benefit from this kind of synthesis, this bringing together of opposites, if we understand how to use it as a tool in our own thinking. We simply must consider both sides of the story, all approaches to an object, before we can say we have truly understood it.

In his later career, Dali became fascinated with nuclear physics, and began to develop his own peculiar brand of “nuclear mysticism.” He recognised along with the best minds of quantum mechanics that the cosmos is a vibratory phenomenon, consisting of fields and their properties, form and pattern; and that this is all affected by the observer and may in fact hinge entirely upon him. Niels Bohr reminded us of something the philosophies of the East stumbled across hundreds and even thousands of years ago: that we do not speak of reality, rather our theories, whether they are describing the smallest subatomic behaviour or the largest superclusters, are descriptions of our nervous systems and their present limitations. Translating this into art, Dali painted such works as the Leda Atomica and the Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, which shows his aforementioned work in the stages of atomic dissolution.

A discussion of Dali would surely be of no merit if we left out perhaps his finest accomplishment: the development of what he termed “the Paranoiac-Critical Method.” This trick of consciousness, if we may call it that, was to induce a delirious or paranoid state in which the individual begins to see double images and suggestive forms in what had previously been normalised facets of perception. This is not at all unlike the game of cloudwatching we all played as children, in which we would pick out the forms of horses, mountains, dragons and cities. Dali takes this one step further, and asks us that we project this into all aspects of our daily lives. To avoid the obvious pitfall of madness that comes with the territory of manipulating ones’ perception, Dali then recommended that these visions or perceptions be treated with the utmost in critical analysis, eking from them their deeper meanings, symbological associations, and potential effects on consciousness. We can see again in this the play of the soft perceptions of the paranoia phase, and the hard perceptions and manipulations of the critical.

We can see in Dali perhaps the archetype of a truly mystical human being, albeit one with a colossal ego: someone who took in the knowledge, symbology and content of his culture, his word and his life, and exported it with the technique and skill of a master. Upaya, indeed. I would urge you all to seek out his written works, to avail yourselves of his brilliant artworks, and to experiment with the novel techniques of consciousness he pioneered and developed.

To Salvador Dali, an inimitable personage in a world ripe for mystical manifestation.