The Trouble with al-Llah

Gabriel shows Muhammad the Jewelled Tree in Paradise on his Night Flight

Before making any decision that there is no God but al-Llah and Muhammad is his prophet, or that belief in God is beneficial to us, or that religion is essential, to save, or to win the world, we need to look a little more closely at the radical ways the prophets who founded Judaism, Christianity and Islam overthrew existing fixed beliefs about God, and how humans have related to God and the mystery of existence, over much longer time scales than the fourteen centuries since Muhammad, and the few millennia since Jesus and Moses. At the same time, we need to ask ourselves what we are doing to ourselves, and our possible relationship with God, if we fall into the trap of revealed beliefs held without question.

Unless we do, we may find that we have made god and religion into something truly diabolical that, no matter how much we treat it with devotion, and believe it to be true, ultimately manifests itself in violent oppressive ways, leading to conflict and destruction. Indeed it may be that unswerving belief in God is the greatest obstruction to knowing God, and that prescriptive religions take us further and further from the truth, and from the presence of God, for the very reason that, rather than freely resonating with the mystery of existence, they demand unflinching submission to an idea of God that has become a prison constructed by visionaries of another generation, which holds us apart from God as living beings, in a way we do not realize is a fatal trap.

‘Al-Llah’ is simply “God” in Arabic. Muslims believe that al-Llah is the same God of reality, that is worshiped by Christians and Jews alike, and is indeed the God of Abraham, who is referred to in the Pentateuch as El – again simply meaning “God” in an older Semitic tongue. El is referred to in various forms, anciently in Genesis as El Shaddai – “Lord of the Mountain”, reinterpreted as “God Almighty” and later as El Elyon, or God most high. Likewise we have Islamic invocation to “al-Llah the merciful, the compassionate”. However the name El also refers to a more ancient deity - the old father god of the Canaanites, who had as partners Athirat and Anath, before the tumultuous natural power of Ba’al took over the agricultural consciousness of Canaan.

Al-Llah is praised by Muslims as being the ultimate God of reality – a God acting in history, not limited by any iconic form, or name, just as YHVH, or Jehovah, the God of Moses is lauded as being the true god of reality, in contrast to the profane idols of the gods and goddesses of the nations. And just as YHVH was in Genesis said to also be the god of Adam and Eve in Eden, so is al-Llah said to be the God of Adam. Yet despite his abstract aloneness in Eden, Jehovah was originally paired with Asherah and Anath in the older Hebrew cultures at Geza and Elephantine, before the Goddess was later cursed as a pagan icon in Josiah’s reign and the Asherah was burned in the Vale of Kidron. Just so in Islam, al-Llah, was paired with al-Lat, as “God” and “Goddess”, along with al-Uzza and Manat, as the banat al-Lah or daughters of God, until Muhammad cast the ‘Satanic Verses’ against the banat, and the shrines of the Goddess, beloved to the Arabs of Mecca, were destroyed upon his victorious entry into Mecca.

Some of the worst features of Gods, or God, as portrayed by man, is the vindictive jealous personality, displaying love conditional on worship, and vengeance and retribution, particularly in the hell fire of the days of judgment, if people do not submit themselves in submission, as literal slaves to the jealous God. If God is really the one true God of existential reality, why should ‘he’ mind what way people express their devotion? Why not every which way, masculine and feminine, as lovers and partners, as much as slaves, as all embody the respect of sacredness? These features of personality, even of love and compassion, let alone anger, show us that the nature of God is as the nature of man, and in his jealousy as the male sex seeking sexual control over the female, and dominion over nature, not at all the cosmic creator of everything, from living tissues, to stars, planets, and the big bang.

Although Jews, Christians and Muslims believe their God is the one true God of reality, more real than the pagan deities of the stars, and of statues and idols, the idea that smashing an icon makes the God or Goddess unreal by comparison with the God of a revealed religion is a naive error of idolatrous hubris. Just because God doesn't have an idol doesn't mean he is the real God. Simply replacing one form of idol – a stone - with another material object – a revealed scripture to be obeyed and feared in spite of its manifest conflict with reality – is no divine revelation at all. Both are idolatrous and neither is more real. It is absolutely clear, both from the Gods and Goddesses of history, and those of iconic religions today, that iconic deities were regarded as receptacles of a spiritual reality as abstract as the claimed realities of Jehovah and al-Llah.

Street shrine Kathmandu

Religions, such as Hinduism, are perfectly capable of celebrating the godhead in all manner of iconic or idolatrous shrines, statues and personalities, of many gods and goddesses, and yet Upanishadic spiritual philosophy and meditation is in many ways the quintessence of spiritual attainment, and a path of discovery each person can follow and test for themselves meditatively and contemplatively, without having to be enslaved to any one point of view. Christian Catholicism is also manifestly idolatrous, despite claiming to worship the one true God. Because Hinduism has retained the diversity of its deities, it is still possible for women in India to gain empowerment and spiritual autonomy from the presence of the black Goddess Kali still present in their midst as a symbol of female empowerment not subject to the dictates of men. Jewish women are similarly reaching out to Shekhinah, Lilith and Asherah as spiritual symbols of a new autonomy. Buddha entered into the void of enlightenment denying any assumptions of the existence of God, implying that a fixed belief in God may be an impediment to enlightenment, rather than a spiritual necessity.

Given the common monotheistic belief in the one true God of reality, one would expect there to be a fundamental agreement between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, that they worship the one true god merely in different ways, and are therefore bosom partners in a democratic reality. However, here a dark shadow of male supremacy enters this celestial realm, because each religion has its own version of apocalyptic supremacy, in which the other paths are subservient and subordinate in a vision of ultimate utopian domination of one religion of “God” over another in the end of days, which could lead to a final nuclear confrontation and an Armageddon we all need to avoid for the future of life itself.

The Jews have long cast themselves as the chosen elect priests of the Lord and preach an apocalyptic Zionism today. Christians in turn have cursed the Jews for disowning Jesus, and consider his second-coming in Parousia, the ultimate end-of days, in the cosmic victory of their Lord and the Father God, and of Christianity as the predestined religion of the Earth. Muslims likewise preach that Muhammad is the final prophet of al-Llah, that Jews and Christians, although also followers of the path of the book, unlike the accursed idolaters, are subject religions to be taxed and subservient, and that in the end of days, all will be converted to the one true faith of Islam, poosibly in association with a return of Jesus and the Mahdi as 'perfect humans'.

Worse still, each of the three, while claiming to protect the rights of women, have actually suppressed them and made women subject to the will of men, just as men are subject to the will of God. Although many Muslim women claim the religion protects the rights of women and protects them from molestation by ravenous Muslim men, this is in reality far from the truth and a deception created by the belief itself. Women are regarded as men’s property, so sexually enticing that to protect family and husbandly honour, they must be covered, sometimes from head to toe, they must be chaperoned by a male relative, cannot move and work freely and they are only half the value of a man in law. Women are subject to dire punishment of stoning to death for adultery and honour killings remain rife in many Muslim countries. Female circumcision is practiced as a sunna or tradition in several Muslim cultures, in the light of the prophet’s purported comment favouring it in moderation because it made the husbands happy.

Each of the three religions, despite claiming God is merciful and compassionate, have committed violence and genocide in the very name of God. The Hebrews committed genocides at Ba'al Peor, Hazor and Jericho, although their actual scale is debated. Christians, in the shadow of Jesus’ crucifixion, have become obsessed with death in martyrdom, and then turned to bloody Crusade against more cultured Muslims, such as Saladin, and their own peoples, and committed Inquisition against their own people in the form of burning women and men alive and drowning them for perceived sins of witchcraft or Gnostic heresy.

Muhammad condemned the Arabs needlessly to jihad or holy war, because he had cursed the Goddess, beloved of the people of Mecca. He then committed a genocide of 700 Jewish men in Medina, for fear of a betrayal which had not actually occurred. This proved a waste of human lives and a disgrace to any pretense of being a spiritual master, because there was no final battle with the Quraysh, since Muhammad negotiated and then abrogated the peace Treaty of Hudaybiyah and then marched on Mecca by force of numbers. Ever since, Islam, while professing to be a religion of peace, has committed itself to a violent confrontation for supremacy, dividing the world between the domain of submission, as slaves in submission to God and the domain of war – Dar al-Harb.

All who would stand apart have been converted by the sword or killed as idolaters, or repressed, like the original Sufis and the Bahai’s today, because they challenge the notion that Muhammad is the final prophet, or claim that the individual can become one with God, as al-Hallaj was crucified for saying ‘Ana al-Haqq’. While Muhammad rightly decried the paganism of launching Jesus into the status of only begotten Son of God, so Muslims today commit the same pagan error, threatening anyone who would depict the Prophet with death, particularly if these depictions are critical or satirical. Ultimately this violence comes to its own reckoning, in the struggle between Sunni and Shia, just as the Christian violence has, between Catholic and Protestant.

In the end of days, Islam has become a religion purporting to be one of peace, but committing mindless terror and murder of the innocent, in violent martyrdoms and suicide bombings that are an affront to any God of reality, and certainly to al-Llah the merciful and compassionate. Because the peace of Sakina has been subjugated to the deception of takiya, the old evil of jihad continues to emerge as the Shaitan of Islam.

In the modern era of scientific discovery, ideas about God need to get up to speed with our discoveries of the natural world and transform themselves from the religion of end of days high noon confrontation and retribution to the religion of tolerance, of the immortality of the Tree of Life and the closing circle of ecosystemic coexistence. Archaic tribal and religious laws struck in the 6th century cannot fairly be applied in the 21st without committing grave oppression of the people.

We now know that the universe is literally full of billions of stars and galaxies amidst annihilating forces, the big bang and black holes. The idea that the one and only God of reality has such tunnel vision that he communicates only, or even principally on one planet’s end of days through a couple of final prophets revealed laws, or an only begotten Son he has sacrificed for the sins of man, shows no comprehension of the ways of the universe. The idea that the key defining events of human destiny in heaven and hell have been cast in stone centuries before we discovered the cosmological laws of nature, nuclear weapons of mass destruction, the genetic code, and are now having dangerous consequences of a mass extinction of the diversity of life through our own impact on nature, is fatally maladaptive.

If there is any truth at all to the existence of God, it is a truth that remains as real for each generation to experience, and to interpret from the very source in new ways, as it was for Jesus or Muhammad. We are the living sentient beings of this generation, who must bear witness to the ultimate nature of reality, and take full personal responsibility for the consequences, if we allow our religious beliefs to damage the planet, and compromise the future of life in paradise. We thus have to learn to come of age and grow up. We are no use to God as his slaves, who mindlessly follow the Sharia of past centuries. We need to learn to take cosmic responsibility for our actions, and to live in peace and mutual respect with the other living beings, who take their turn as each living generation, to act as stewards and guardians of the future of life on Earth. We thus need to move from religion to responsibility and from imposed law and revealed truth to personal experience and a spiritual democracy, in which no party tells another what they should believe.

If we go further back in human origins, we know that it is a fantasy that there was a first man Adam and a first woman Eve living with God in Eden. This is a cultural myth of our falling out with nature in a future shock, which is only coming to a completion this generation in the unveiling of our scientific and cultural knowledge of existence and the universe. In fact Homo sapiens came out of Africa as part of our evolutionary emergence, and the founding societies, far older than the 5,000 years of the fertile crescent and the paths of the book, possessed just such a degree of personal autonomy and personal responsibility, as scattered bands that only seasonally gathered into larger groups.

Peoples such as the Bushmen, who come closer to these origins, do have Gods surprisingly similar to the best aspects of Jehovah and al-Llah, as creator gods of life and misfortune, each with their consorts, but they do not play a coercive role on human actions, but are rather informative of the meaning and continuity of life. Moreover, although the men like to consider themselves elders defining culture, the women are not corralled, veiled or forced into submission, or sexual obedience by threat of torture and capital punishment and despite the threat of individual male violence affirm their own right and ability to make sexual choices in the ongoing flow of life and reproduction. Moreover practices such as trance dancing ensure that the members of society share an egalitarian experience of the spiritual realm, which they affirm from their own personal experience rather than the imposed will and doctrine of prescriptive belief.

We are, like all animals, a species of two sexes, and all the evidence is that humanity emerged and became super-intelligent, not because men controlled women, or because people were the slaves of God, but because women were able to make sexual choices, and neither sex had the upper hand, but had to put on their very best performance in good hunting, music, story-telling, craft and emotional affection to have an opportunity to procreate their genes with the opposite sex, amid the ecstasy and longing of sexual fruition and falling in love. No religion which assigns women to be half the worth of a man in law, or which denies women their heritage of sexual choice, can be a religion of the true God that generated nature.

In the evolutionary scheme, the religious impulse may have a significant genetic basis, promoting societies with strong internal cohesion, which limit internal conflict by enforcing moral codes, so as to become dominant over other competing societies. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all show strong tendencies in this direction. This needs to be held in check for human society, in the closing circle of the planet, for us to remain free from utopian oppression and survive and enrich the sustainable paradise of nature throughout our generations.

The idea that humanity is intrinsically sinful and needs a God to pass judgment on our sins in the day of the apocalyptic unveiling is manifestly in error. Humans also possess original virtue and are capable of great compassion, love, ethical selflessness, and moral rectitude, which compensates and complements individuals' natural tendency to compete for survival. This is part of our evolutionary endowment, and the idea that God is going to disrupt the natural life flow of this one little planet to bring about an end of days judgment, is merely a self-centered reflection of our own cultural future shock and our gravitation to a final cultural high noon of our own religious making.

Despite nature being partly a matter of tooth and claw, in which predation, injury, or disease can become a condition of traumatic pain and suffering, nature is also splendid and magical in its genesis, and life in human emergence has been both rewarding and enduring. Hell is not some punishment in an afterlife, but what we make this life into, when we are prepared to commit ourselves to violence and annihilation in the name of religion. Hungering for the afterlife is a delusion which takes us ever further from taking personal responsibility for the brief time we do have on Earth, which in the blessed flowering of the universe, we should be using compassionately, not violently, to make this paradise heaven on Earth, rather than a polluted limbo, heading down towards hell. The idea that heaven is full of black-eyed virgins, who are made pure each night for the sexual pleasure of men in the day, is a false sexually chauvinistic vision, that leads to an evil path of destruction and violence. It is also a travesty of the interdependence of sexuality in procreating life, as flawed as the Christian fantasy that there will be no sex in heaven.

To be able to discover the deepest mysteries of the spiritual realm, the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life, we each need to be free as living sentient beings to witness the nature of existential reality, and interpret all religious and spiritual ideas for ourselves, without casting any assumptions over the nature of living existence, or the inner spiritual depths of conscious experience, that will limit our ability to resonate with the mysterium tremendum. We thus seed to set aside any fixed belief in God, or we will never be able to know truly what our part in the cosmic process actually is, nor to enter the inner abyss of the mystery of existence.

Human societies have, throughout the ages, sought such direct communication with the mystery of existence through the shamanic vision quest, and later through contemplative insights, such as those of the Sufis, Christian mystics, Jewish Kabbalists, Indian sadhus, and Buddhist and Taoist sages. No religion which denies the right of the individual to worship or communion with the mystery as they see fit, which converts by the sword, or casts a death fatwah for apostasizing, or insulting God, or making sexual choices, can be a true religion of God.

Tags:
al-Llah, God, Hindu, Tao, Kabbalah, religion, Messiah

Life, the Universe and Everything

Here is my perspective on the scientific ‘mysteries of the universe’. Some of these ideas are fashionable in one form or another, but many features are unique to my own view of cosmology.

You can download the full article in pdf at: King, Chris 2003 Biocosmology Monograph

The Fractal Cosmology of Biological Tissue

The first is that life is a fractal consequence of the laws of nature. I sent you before an illustration of the inflationary theory which links the microscopic relationships between the fundamental forces, in symmetry-breaking, with the cosmological level, in the big-bang and the idea that the biota are a cosmological Sigma – the culmination of interactive cosmology, in which the Alpha of the big bang and the Omega of the final heat death, or big crunch, are really only more trivial aspects of a greater living synthesis.

Hierarchical interaction of the four forces results in molecules. Wave orbitals and their non-linear charge interactions result in fractal molecular dynamics emergent structure. Tissue is fractal in structure from molecular complexes (a) through cellular organelles (b) to whole organs (c).

We can see how this works initially as a hierarchy of the forces, the quarks firstly forming protons and neutrons by the colour force, and then atomic nuclei by its secondary effects, all balanced by the weak force turning protons into neutrons and vice versa, generating the periodic table, as stars reaching the end of their life use up their hydrogen and reach their final stages of gassy red giants. We then have the electromagnetic force kicking in at lower energies to form electron-bound atoms and then molecules. Even though the electromagnetic force is the most understandable of the forces, it never completely resolves itself, because of the intrinsic non-linearity of the charge potential involved in the chemical bond, so we find a cascade of chemical bonding effects, beginning with strong covalent and ionic bonds, disseminating into polar, H-bonding, van der Waal’s and other effects, which also become more globally cooperative as their strength weakens.

This means that tissue, i.e. biological matter, is the ultimate product of the laws of nature, in much the same way that the Mandelbrot set is said to be the most complex mathematical object discovered. And it is the brain that is the quintessential expression of this process in interactive terms, in a closing circle, in which the quantum realities underlying biology and all physics merge with the mysteries of subjective consciousness and ‘free-will’.

A number of people write a lot of fantasy, particularly on the internet, about emergent properties of life, fractal structures, and theories of everything, and I spend some of my time debunking these hopeful monsters, yet the overall picture is genuinely fractal.

The Quantum Butterfly Entangling the Will to Order

The next connection is between chaos, fractality and the quantum realm. There are two kinds of unpredictability that confound the pristine deterministic straight-jacket of the Newtonian or Laplacian universe. The first of these is the butterfly effect of chaos – its unpredictable sensitivity to initial conditions, in which a vanishingly small initial variation can lead to catastrophic fluctuations of the outcome.

This links to another fallacy of the will to order – the idea that new order comes, not out of manipulating old order, but out of the rich fractality of the chaotic regime, and transitions from chaos to order. Many studies lead us to the idea that complex systems, from biological evolution to the conscious brain, operate on the edge of chaos and use transitions from chaos to order to induce new structure and hence new complexity.

Walter Freeman’s model of olfaction uses the broad spectrum chaotic dynamics (above) to invoke a transition (bifurcation) from high energy chaos (inhalation) to existing or new attractors (exhalation) as the energy is reduced (below).

One key application of this idea is to perception, cognition and the sudden insight of ‘eureka’. Many brilliant discoveries, including Archimedes’ principle, come about because an intractable problem, which has resisted all logical brute force attempts to conquer it, becomes solved in a flash of insight. Likewise perception, say of smell, is conceived as a neurodynamic transition from high-energy chaos to a lower energy attractor, or a creation of a new one, through learning, in a bifurcation from chaos to order.

When we come to look at the brain, although the actions of neurons might seem to operate away above the level of single quantum transformations, there are a variety of ways in which events at the quantum level can become amplified to become a global change of brain state. Chaos, self-organized criticality (a system which tunes itself to critical & often fractal instability) and so-called stochastic resonance can each result in the effects of a single ion channel triggering a neuron which then succeeds in altering the global dynamics. When the global brain state is critically poised, it may become super-sensitive to perturbations at the quantum level thus enabling quantum fluctuations to influence the brain state enough to cause a bifurcation altering conscious experience.

At the molecular level, quantum effects in biology are central to many processes. Vision, at least in the frog’s rod cells, is capable of responding to a single photon. The limit of hearing involves oscillations of the cochlear membrane of only the order of magnitude of a hydrogen atom. One molecule of a pheromone is enough to signal the presence of a female butterfly. Furthermore, similar couplings of one or two molecules will trigger an ion channel and and trigger neuro-excitation. Other effects, such as quantum tunneling are critical to enzyme action.

Right: Ordered and ‘chaotic’ wave functions of an excited hydrogen atom, in a strong magnetic field. Scarring in the left hand diagrams shows how wave aspects of quanta can suppress classical chaos by enhancing the probability of periodic orbits which would classically be repelling. This restriction does not apply to open systems.

We thus find there is a diffuse interface between classical chaos and instability, and the quantum fluctuations we associate with the second form of unpredictability – quantum uncertainty. Although in closed quantum systems, such as the atomic nucleus, the wave nature of the quantum appears to suppress many of the features of classical chaos, even when the dynamics would favour it, the situation is very different in open systems such as the kinetic billiards of biological molecular dynamics where quantum chaos remains a reality.

Quantum uncertainty has been the other great loophole cited by physicists as a possible basis for the unpredictability we associate with free-will and has been put forward by physicists, as a potential solution to the problem, from Heisenberg to Eddington’s suggestion that the uncertainty of the position of the synaptic vesicle in relation to the thickness of the membrane is sufficient to trigger free-will, on down to modern speculations in consciousness research by people such as Roger Penrose.

Although a ‘building block of the universe’ determinist, living in a Pavlovian paradigm of social conditioning, might see the whole notion of free-will as a subjective delusion of a biological robot, all sane people, and the rule of law and accountability, depend on the concept of personal autonomy we feel over our individual actions. Without this, we would, in all honesty, become catatonic over our morning cup of coffee, there being no autonomous basis for any action, and the truth a helpless unconscious determinism.

Into this heady mix has entered the intriguing discovery of quantum entanglement, stemming from the ‘EPR experiments’, in which seemingly unrelated phenomena which are linked by more than one particle in the same wave function, have a hidden connection, so that measuring the state of one, instantaneously results in the other having a complementary state, without requiring the time light would take to pass between to cement the relation. Although this cannot be used for classical signaling, it has become the basis of a variety of intriguing paradoxes and potential avenues to quantum computation through superposition.

This brings us to a related paradox that is at the core of the arrow of time and the apparent reversibility of all quantum interactions and is an oracle for all our ideas of temporal mortality and the seemingly eternal nature of space-time, which may explain the mysterious role of consciousness in the universe.

I want to describe to you an idea about quantum entanglement that may help to explain why we are conscious and why free-will may be a real part of how the sentient universe works.

This theory comes a couple of decades later, from a weird experience that happened to me as a student. We had just had our first baby daughter. I had read a famous book called “An Experiment with Time in which JW Dunne proposed that people dream as much about the future as about the past. I had a double nightmare that I was being horribly stung, told my wife about it as she got up to feed Arwen, and went back to sleep. About an hour later I was stung wide-awake by a wasp that flew in the morning window she had opened and got caught in the bed covers. This event seriously undermined my Newtonian view of the causal universe, but it took a very long search to find a possible answer in physics.

Back to the Quantum Future

Having looked at all kinds of faster than light interactions and exotic particles such as gravitinos, I finally discovered a much simpler explanation, right at the foundation of the quantum fabric. It has to do with real and virtual particles and the paradox between reversibility and the arrow of time.

The most distant galaxy with a red shift of 6.99 is only 700 million years after the big bang.

If we look out at a distant star or galaxy, the light reaches one’s eye long after it was emitted, sometimes so long ago that we are looking back almost to the origin of the universe. This is because all real quanta are retarded – that is they are absorbed after they are emitted and reach subsequent points at later times. Why are all the real positive-energy particles retarded? It’s not entirely clear, because quantum theory is time reversible and special relativity specifically admits both retarded and advanced solutions, the latter of which tend to be summarily discarded. One theory is that the big bang is a reflecting condition that reinforces only the retarded ones.

However all the forces of nature are mediated by virtual particles, which come into existence only by uncertainty and these don’t have to have positive energy and their Feynman diagrams are exactly the same if you replace a particle by its anti-particle (and a photon is its own anti-particle) traveling backwards in time.

Moreover virtual photons do become real if we give them some extra energy, as for example when we oscillate the field in a radio transmitter, when the virtual particles in the electromagnetic field become the real photons carrying the top ten and the world news.

Transactions result from constructive interference between offer and confirmation waves from the emitter and absorber.

One intriguing model of quantum theory is John Cramer’s transactional interpretation, which explains this situation nicely. It posits that when any quantum e.g. a photon is exchanged between an emitter and an absorber, the emitter first sends out an ‘offer’ wave and the potential absorbers respond with a ‘confirmation’ wave traveling backwards in time. Once the two have settled on a transaction, which is much like an internet match-making service hand-shaking across space-time, the transaction is formed by the constructive interference of the two, which could be interpreted either as a positive retarded or negative advanced quantum.

The transactional interpretation neatly explains all the spooky quantum entanglement situations as well. In the traditional EPR experiment, the two particles in the same wave are correlated because the two detectors send back confirmation waves to the common source, which thus has implicit information about their configuration at the outset, in forming the transaction across space-time, without any signal passing between the detectors.

Wheeler (1983) delayed choice experiment shows that different forms of measurement after light from a distant quasar has been gravitationally lensed around an intervening galaxy can be determined to have passed one or the other way around it or a superposition of both, depending on whether detection of one or other particle, or an interference is made when it reaches Earth. (b, c) An experimental implementation of Wheeler's idea along a satellite-ground interferometer that extends for thousands of kilometers in space (Vedovato et al. 2017), using shutters on an orbiting satellite.

This also explains a very puzzling aspect of quantum theory typified by the Wheeler delayed-choice experiment. If we go back to star-gazing, suppose I am looking at a very distant galaxy, gravitationally lensed by a closer galaxy. By choosing whether to make an interference test or put in separate particle detectors, I can establish that a given photon either traveled round one side of the lensing galaxy or both – after the photon has already passed the lens! Thus by changing how we receive it, it is as if I can retrospectively alter how it traveled here! Even more paradoxical, my own existence in the future is only a quantum contingency, like Schrödinger’s cat – just one of many parallel probability futures.

Many scientists object to the idea that the observer’s eye can have any active role, because it is the positive energy of the emitter that determines the process. Naturally it is hard to image that my passive eye, which is only a future contingency, can play any part in determining how a photon is released on the hot surface of a bright young star, which might also radiate its energy into empty space if the universe expands forever. But if the universe is self-contained and we are all part of the cosmic wave function, perhaps all particles, like the virtual ones, are ultimately suspended between an emitter and absorber and all events are caught in the cosmic quantum entanglement in a kind of eternal ‘implicate order’ – a network stretching from Alpha to Omega, which however has the paradoxical property that, as we cut a swathe through life we are altering which eternal multi-verse is the one actually being manifest in history. Everyone, from Jesus to Napoleon, and you and I too, alter the history of the universe in this way without having an eschatological handle on the final cause, because our boundary conditions are only a part of the matchmaking with the undetermined future, enticing us in a handshake, just as our eye does, to the distant galaxy at the dawn of time.

My understanding is that free-will and consciousness exist because the universe is super-abundant – there are far more possibilities can exist than the number which can coexist in space-time simultaneously, just as there are far more viable DNA sequences than the number of organisms that can exist on planet Earth, even in a million years, so a major part of how the universe functions is to reduce the super-abundance of possibilities to a realizable set of realities. This is also where multi-verses and parallel universes come into the picture and the idea of some physicists that consciousness collapses the wave function, thus causing Schrödinger’s cat to be alive or dead, rather than suspended all the way in between, as the probability interpretation and wave superposition suggests.

The brain uses the phase coherence of it’s excitation waves in very much the way quanta use the phase of their waves to maintain coherence e.g. in a laser. In the brain, in one key model of attention and perception, those excitations which oscillate in phase together are recognized from the random groundswell of other excitations and become a connected dynamical system, leading to the perception or recognition of a stimulus.

My idea is that the brain does more than this. It also acts as a transactional emitter and absorber of excitations, which leads to it having an intrinsic biophysical way of anticipating the immediate future, that is entirely complementary to the sort of deductive logic we usually associate with the computational idea of intelligence, reason and cogitating brains.

Humans by and large are very bad calculators. Except for a few idiot savants and the rare numerical genius, we can barely keep seven digits together let alone manipulate them, which for a brain with 100 billion neurons and maybe a thousand trillion synapses, this looks a trifle silly. Maybe the brain is doing something else altogether.

Try to look back at how we got to be conscious sentient beings and to imagine all these wild-eyed ideas like God and divine destiny of apocalypse and you run straight into life at the water hole.

What makes subjective consciousness valuable, and why it may have been selected by evolution, is not mental calculation, but an immanent sense of foreboding that enables the antelope to jump out of the way and thus survive against the odds, just as the leopard leaps on the prey. No amount of computational calculation can tell us which is the safest route to the water hole, because, whichever route might look safer, or figures to be so, this will have also been taken into account by the predator and compensated for in the hunt. The computational open problem is intractable, and so a robotic antelope would be pounced upon at the forking of the paths, catatonically unable to decide which way to go, because the computation times involved stretch out exponentially towards the entire lifetime of the universe.

This is why the brain evolved to be conscious and why the ephemeral phenomenon of free-will interacts with physical matter. Rather than merely being a computer, subjective consciousness is intuitively and immanently anticipating reality in the raw, and free will is not subject to the dictates of circumstance, or conditioning, because most of the time there is no ‘right’ choice, but a plethora of enticing possibilities beckoning us, all of which are viable alternatives, and it is up to us, as the ‘grim reapers’ of reality, to decide which route to take, and thereby collapse the wave function of the universe irretrievably, all the way to the river.

This is another manifestation of the superabundance of the universe and in my view is central to the quest of meaning and being. We are here to participate in the unfolding of the universal state of awareness and bring about the joyous cosmology of existence, by anticipating the very process we are invoking and through our compassionate awareness bringing about a more blessed and more conscious state of existence.

References:
King, Chris 2003 Biocosmology Monograph

Tags:
life, fractal, quantum, chaos, entanglement, transaction, uncertainty

Rites of Reunion and Renewal

Millennial Sabbatical Vigil

In 1999, I embarked on a millennial world vigil in the form of a sabbatical academic leave, to investigate and comment on human impact on biodiversity.

We embarked on the journey through South America, filming the burning season in Bolivia and making a transit of the Amazon basin from the Andes altiplano down the Urubamba, Ucayali, Solminoes and Amazon researching the destruction of the Earth's greatest Eden by human impact. At Iquitos I pronounced the names of the plants and animals, vanishing all too quickly from the face of the Earth, in remembrance of the first Adam in the Garden, following the preface of Caesar Calvo’s ‘Three Halves of Ino Moxo’. We then traveled back up the Madeira and through the Pantanal to Rio, filming the human impact on diversity, pronouncing the apocalypse of the life tree in a warning, from the Cristo Redemptor about the consequence of genetic holocaust of the diversity of life.

On our arrival in England we made a pilgrimage to Avalon and entered the Earth at Kennet Long Barrow to celebrate the descent. I was represented here as the green man as a healing process for Christianity, with Jane counterbalancing in the persona of Morgan le Fay. Jesus was the true vine and we have a tremendous epoch of destruction, we have bloodshed, we have the bloodshed of the cross, we have the burning of Armageddon, we have now the burning of the great rain forests, so we have the green element is being put to hell fire essentially and so the antidote to this process is reuniting of feminine and masculine and the reuniting of humanity and nature and Jesus also descended into hell and ascended again. The descent, is done by Inanna in three days and she returns to the surface and by threading together the underworld and the world of heaven and the world of Earth we gain a sense of unity and appreciate the cosmic perspective in reuniting heaven and the underworld, and Earth and the world of living experience together. Auspiciously as we arrived there was an artist painting the green man with green candles set up in a shrine in the depths of the barrow.

St. Sarah the Black Madonna said to have come ashore with the Marys Salome and Jacobi in an oarless boat as a girl child at Saintes Marie de la Mer. Jane and I traversed Europe from the sacraments of Amsterdam to Saintes Marie, via Albi, coinciding in the moment of our arrival synchronously with the church bells chiming the hour of her tri-annual festival. In Rome with the bell toll of papal annunciation for the Immaculate Conception where I made a public statement in St. Peters square challenging the hierarchical stewardship, pronouncing the sacred union until the police intervened.

Liberation, Mount of Olives Millennium Eve.

We then flew to Jerusalem to celebrate the millennial rites of passage of renewal. I hosted a twelve day seminar on the Shekhinah as feminine face, biodiversity and the Tree of Life. We journeyed in the mountains and in the wilderness, between Galilee and the Dead Sea, through the West Bank, and among the ancient oaks and terebinths in the hills around Miriam’s well. We anointed one another in the wastes of Bethany beside Lazarus’ cave. She anointed my head with olive oil from Jericho and I wiped her feet with my hair in recognition of the sovereignty of woman.

On Millennium Eve we performed a rite of renewal for the tree of life in bridal reunion in the name of Shekhinah or Sakina, the abstrcat feminine face of God and of Gaia as the Earth feminine. We were offered a grove next to Gethsemane by a member of the family who kept the keys to the Haram-i-Sheriff under the Jordanians, but we were driven out by a court injunction and police prohibition. We moved higher to a garden on Scopus peak overlooking Moriah, the Dome, and the Old City. With a sacred circle of a hundred participants, we pronounced the acceptable year in liberation in the names of God and Gaia in an all night vigil to the sunrise.

The spirit of God is upon us
the spirit of Gaia is within us
because they hath anointed us
to sing good tidings unto the meek
they hath sent us to bind up the brokenhearted
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and the opening of prison to them that are bound
to proclaim the acceptable year
to comfort all that mourn
to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion
in Palestine, in Sidon, in Syria, Arabia and the world
to give unto them beauty for ashes
the oil of joy for mourning
the garments of love for the spirit of heaviness
that they might be called trees of compassion
the planting of the divine
that all might be glorified in the abundance of wisdom
and we shall renew the old wastes
and we shall restore the former desolations
and we shall repair the waste cities
the desolations of many generations
they hath clothed us with the garments of salvation
and I as a bridegroom decketh myself with ornaments
and I as a bride adorneth myself with jewels
for as the Earth bringeth forth her bud
and as the garden causeth the things that are sewn in it to spring forth
so shall harmony and fulfillment spring forth among all the nations
this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

In this celebration the collective mashiach was invoked by speakers of several faiths in the spirit of peace:

“We are here together the collective mashiach and our vision here tonight will spread peace in our hearts and peace on the City of Peace below Yeru-shalom Jerusalem and bisrata shem in Jah Allah we’ll be as a light and a source for peace in the whole world and in the whole universe”

The vigil ran from dusk till dawn with a circle of performances from fire dancing, Hebrew folk music, and chants to the Shekhinah, poetry and drumming, including the Hymn to the Epoch. We greeted the sunrise and released messages of peace over the ancient city of peace.

The Gates of Mercy or Compassion on the Eastern Wall are currently filled with rubble to deter the return of the mashiach. We made four journeys to the Gates, both outside and inside, to call them open in reunion of all paths and all peoples.

On the Epiphany, we gathered a circle of twelve people who marched from the ascension site to the Gates of Mercy calling the gates open in the sacred union as a healing of the epoch in the Tree of Life:

‘your gates shall be open continually
they shall not be closed day or night
the glory of Lebanon shall come to you
the juniper the box tree
and the cypress together’ (Isa 60).

The vigil continued to the Wailing Wall to celebrate the sacred marriage in the Song of Songs:

I sleep but my heart waketh :
it is the voice of of my beloved that knocketh,
saying open to me my sister,
my love, my dove, my undefiled :
for my head is filled with dew,
and my locks with the drops of the night.
I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on?
I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?
My beloved put his hand in the hole of the door,
and my bowels were moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved
and my hands dropped with myrrh,
and my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh,
upon the handles of the lock.

Set me as a seal upon thine heart,
as a seal upon thine arm:
for love is strong as death;
jealousy is cruel as the grave:
the coals thereof are coals of fire,
which hath a most vehement flame.
Many waters cannot quench
love, neither can the floods drown it.

After this vigil, I embarked on an in depth research study of the emergence of human society and the deeper sexual roots underpinning the patriarchal religious epoch, to complement the apocalyptic with its biological and sexual foundations. This lead co-authoring “Sexual Paradox: Complementarity, Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence”. This provides a different sense of unveiling, exposing the contradictions in the patriarchal epoch and its fallacy in the light of a sexually paradoxical human emergence, in which culture and intelligence were phenomenally accelerated by a red queen sexual selection in which neither sex had the upper hand and each had to run while standing still to gain the sexual favours of the other.

A true messiah is a flesh and blood human, as the Hebrew ‘mother’ tradition declares, who brings about a paradigm of long-term future goodness. In the healing of the apocalyptic paradigm, this has to mean reunion with the feminine, the reflowering of the biosphere and securing a place for humanity as a co-participant and guardian of Earth’s living future. The true apocalyptic messiah is thus the messiah of the verdant reflowering of biodiversity in sexual reunion. Looking out at a fallible world, I am mildly skeptical that anyone else, including the powers that be, really have a finger on this pulse, which resonates in our collective consciousness, from our Edenic alpha to the Armageddon or Renewal of our unveiling omega.

As well as sexual reunion and the reflowering of the Tree of Life, the messiah has a key role as a critic of the violent and repressive dictates of the religious paradigm, unpronouncing repressive religious scripture, abrogating the following passages as key examples:

1. Exod 22:18 Death curse on the Witch Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
2. Lev 20:27 Familiars A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.
3. Lev 24:16 Blasphemy And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.
4. Deut 21:22 Hanging on a Tree And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged is accursed of God;
5. Deut 20:12 Genocide and Sexual Slavery And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee. Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; ( justifying Muhammad's genocide at Medina)
6. Deut 22:20 Stoning for Adultery But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: ( justifying stoning for adultery in Islam)
7. Deut 22:22 Death for Adultery If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel. If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
8. Deut 21:18 Rebellious Son If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: ... And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
9. 1 Cor 16:22 The Anathema curse "If any 'man' love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let 'him' be Anathema maranatha".
10. 1 Cor 14:34 Women to keep silent "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church."
11. 1 Timothy 2:11 Women not authorized to Preach "I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent with all subjection; for Adam was first formed then Eve. Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor".
12. 1 Cor 7:29 Negating sexuality in marriage "Blessed are they who have wives as if they had none, for they shall inherit God".
13. Sura 4:34: Men superior to women, Beating "Men stand superior to women in that God hath preferred the one over the other ... Those whose perverseness you fear, admonish them and remove them into bed chambers and beat them, but if they submit to you then do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great."
14. Sura 4.11: Male worth two Females Allah enjoins you concerning your children: The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females
15. Sura 4.15: Confinement unto death And as for those who are guilty of an indecency from among your women, call to witnesses against them four (witnesses) from among you; then if they bear witness confine them to the houses until death takes them away or Allah opens some way for them.
16. Sura 24.2 Flogging for adultery (As for) the fornicatress and the fornicator, flog each of them, (giving) a hundred stripes, and let not pity for them detain you in the matter of obedience to Allah, if you believe in Allah and the last day, and let a party of believers witness their chastisement. The fornicator shall not marry any but a fornicatress or idolatress, and (as for) the fornicatress, none shall marry her but a fornicator or an idolater; and it is forbidden to the believers.
17. Sura 24.31 Enforced veiling And say to the believing women that they cast down their looks and guard their private parts and do not display their ornaments except what appears thereof, and let them wear their head-coverings over their bosoms, and not display their ornaments except to their husbands or their fathers, or the fathers of their husbands, or their sons, or the sons of their husbands, or their brothers, or their brothers' sons ...
18. Sura 5.33 Crucifixion for mischief The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement, Except those who repent before you have them in your power; so know that Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
19. Sura 9.5 Killing idolators So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

References:

1. Sexual Paradox: Complementarity, Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence

Tags:
reflowering, Tree of Life, Gaia, Shekhinah, millennium, Messiah, Jerusalem

Religion, Prophetic Impulse, Genome and Sentient Brain

Richard Alexander wrote “The Biology of Morality” in reaction to concern at the mutually assured destruction of the planet through the apocalyptic confrontation between the Soviet Union and the West over nuclear weapons. The basis of his thesis is that morality is an evolutionary process that arises because societies possessing the capacity to sacrifice personal gains through moral principles better succeed in inter-social competition because they reduce intra-social conflict.

In “The God Gene” Dean Hamer traces the case that religiosity is up to 40% inherited, a trend that is close to estimates for the genetic component of intelligence and eclipses male gayness with only about 14% attributed to the fertile mother effect and 7% to the serial brother effect.

One can see in this a clear echo of the authoritarian aspects of revealed religion as a moral mechanism liable to phalanx societies, in which belief in a Lord and master, from Marduk to al-Llah and Jehovah, also personified in the eschatological Christ, leads to hierarchical control over the social and reproductive process. One very strong trend in religious conviction is belief in a higher power as an act of commitment, regardless of truth or even plausibility, because, in so doing we are committing to an ordered society in which God is on our side, even though the costs may be high in control of women, desecration of nature and totalitarian and often violent means of social control. Inquisition, Crusade, Jihad, and Martyrdom all fall into the violent context, driving the lion’s share of our contemporary apocalyptic violence. Literalism both in the divine word of biblical authority and in the conception of the universe as law bound by an act of God is the bedrock of fundamentalism and its readiness for final violent confrontation - an extrapolation of the biology of morality taken to its lethal contradiction beyond the tipping point of the closing circle.

One of the attributes of god touted by monotheists is that, while iconic deities are idolatrous images, or just features of seasonal fertility, or superstition about the weather, the more abstract god of covenant and the apocalyptic end of days is the real Lord of the universe, not a fantasy of cultural creation.

It is true that apocalyptic consciousness is a real description of our future shock and falling out with nature whose cycle is not yet fully completed and whose implications remain dire for our own future, so the Zoroastrian invention of the end of days purging of ignorance is a prophetic description of our evolving existential dilemma. In a Jungian sense it may have a deep potential reality as an archetypal process in the collective subconscious, whose implications and reverberations we have yet to fully understand.

However the god acting in history is still an angry man at heart. The anthropomorphic features, if not of a white bearded son of man, are certainly of human personality, beset by emotions, from love to anger and particularly jealousy and of severe punishment for infidelity of a morally coercive nature. Adherence to the word as revealed truth is itself a linguistic form of idolatry, as fatal to the claim of true religion as statues of Ishtar, Mary, Jesus and Buddha.

But this isn’t all religion is conveying, nor is it the only aspect of culture to respond to Alexander’s evolutionary dynamics. We can see from the !Kung gods that they also provide sense and sensibility to the universe, recognizing the vulnerability of the mortal coil and offer a compassionate, if often uncompromising, view of our place in the cosmic scheme.

They also provide the spectre of an inner doorway to the deeper mysteries of conscious existence, through prayer, meditation and visionary experience. The !Kung not only have gods, but also participate personally in trance dancing in which the person is carried to the spirit world providing a vehicle to communicate personally with the mysterium tremendum, sometimes using sacraments such as cannabis, rather than second hand through the mouths of the prophets.

The Vedantic tradition of the Upanishads and the central tenets of Buddhist teaching form the basis of an inner path of discovery to the cosmic roots of the mind, described in the Upanishads as the ‘Self’ and denied by Buddha as another illusion of the void within and without, in escaping the circle of life and death into Nirvana. Whether reality and/or illusion the ‘Self’ is the signature of a cosmic dimension to consciousness, in which the inner journey can take us to the point of becoming one with the cosmic mind: “Thou art That”.

This brings us to one of the profoundest mysteries of the integrity of visionary religious experience. People experiencing a flash of enlightenment frequently combine ecstatic emotional exhilaration, or equally intense trepidation, with an overpowering sense of the meaning and significance of what is happening. The experience thus passes the existential acid test – totally fulfilling and overwhelmingly significant. The neuroscientist Ramachandran refers to the part of the cortex between the limbic system and amydala, on the one hand, and the temporal cortex on the other as the ‘god spot’. The amygdala is the organ of emotional dynamics, from fight and flight, through paranoia to ecstasy, joy and fulfillment. The temporal lobe contains our sense of semantic and symphonic significance. Temporal lobe epilepsy can generate profound spiritual and religious feelings, experienced as states of epiphany by the subject. The idea that the brain has also evolved to provide such a complete and compelling subjective experience of psychic redemption raises a host of intriguing questions.

Transformative experiences open new Pandora’s boxes, and so they are generally transgressive to the social and particularly the religious order of the day. Many visionaries are committed as lunatics, whether drunk on their wine, or knowing too much for their own good. Others have lived in seclusion as shaman healers. The prophets were voices crying the wilderness, eating locusts and honey, wearing sackcloth and ashes and accursed, molested, or even murdered by the people, because they question the hypocrisy of the status quo and tear all complacency and expedience to shreds. The transgressive visionary thus becomes an accursed outcast, like the foolish shepherd of Zechariah, who becomes the accursed one, just as Jesus, in his footsteps, was crucified for blasphemy.

By contrast, the role of God, as the allegorist Carlos Castaneda said, is to keep the assemblage point - our umbilical connection to the visionary world - firmly fixed in one place. God is on the table top of the tonal and is thus a principal instrument of the world of order, in diametric opposition to the nagual realm of chaos and vision, and the transgressive power of the messiah.

Likewise the diverse varieties of religious experience espoused by the gnostics became a prime nemesis of the orthodoxy and were suppressed. This is why the Free Spirit author Marguerite Porette became the first person burned at the stake in Paris for her book “Mirror to the Simple Mind” and why Meister Eckhart stands so alone in the mystical tradition of Christianity.

Occasionally a transgressor, be he Jeremiah, Jesus, or Muhammad, manages to break out of the box and trigger a paradigm shift in the description of reality. Although a transgressor, the ‘founder’ may become the source of a new order of coercive covenant, as both testaments of the Bible and the Quran illustrate. Nevertheless, once the new paradigm becomes established, the forces of orthodoxy and control take over and the ‘founder’ evolves into a trickster hero larger than life, then inflating to become the Lord, the Son, or the final Prophet. Jesus has suffered this fate, as has Buddha, who is worshipped as a primitive icon from Nepal to Saigon, despite professing there was no god, but Nirvana. Muhammad is likewise idolized under pain of death for insult, or event depiction of his face. Christianity is constructed specifically to be a steward only until the Lord returns, but despite Jesus dripping in every church pulpit and the faithful drinking the wine of salvation, his inflated second coming is a doomsday made intentionally unachievable by the very hyperbole of the expectation, maintained by the orthodoxy, so that the rule of the clergy will never be released to the transgression of the new messiah. In this sense the church, while professing the second coming, is also devoted to preventing it.

Central to the debate about God in the modern world remain two very different descriptions of complexity – evolution and intelligent design. The former is stochastic and unpredictable, the latter both ordered and forming a direct analogy to human creativity and industrial design in just the way we have seen religious inflation turns men into gods. While these two are not necessarily entirely at odds, the explanatory power of evolution is immense, detailed and refutable. By contrast it’s hard to make a falsifiable claim about intelligent design, particularly if you don’t have any real evidence for the designer, or even any reliable idea what they might actually be like.

There are however deeper abysses in which the apotheosis of God can shelter. Despite the human genome being laid bare, the mind-body relationship remains a scientific enigma. No description of reality which fails to explain why we are conscious sentient beings and what the relationship between, conscious volition and the universe is, can hope to carry the weight of spiritual conviction.

Another serious question driving religious conviction is “Why did it happen to Me?” We know the vagaries of fate. We know some people get tuberculosis, but why did it happen to me? This is a basic question about whether the world has a ‘divine plan’ or whether it is buffeted by unruly, unfeeling forces of randomness – an existential condition from which many people recoil.

This arbitrariness is a feature of the mortal coil and it is why the !Kung set the lesser god in the Western sky to rule over those darker aspects of life that lead to accident, disease, misfortune and death. Without variation of opportunity, life could not strive for survival. Predators, parasites and diseases are all necessary parts of the bundle of life and the whetting stone of its enrichment. Sex itself is a paradox between individual mortality, individual diversity and evolutionary success. In sacrificing parthenogenesis, we sacrificed clonal immortality, but in the process gained a new form of genetic altruism transmitting only half our genes in a true merging of identities, which became the most potent force for viable genetic diversity imaginable.

Partly this is an aspect of a super-abundant quantum universe in which there are far more possibilities and combinations than can exist in a given location in time and space, so the universe has a decision-making process revealed through uncertainty, which results in the cat being either alive or dead, when Schrödinger opens the box, rather than both. We are only beginning to understand the full implications of quantum entanglement, and how hidden relationships may come to be coincidentally expressed.

But underneath all this is a profound question: Is the universe just blind groping and consciousness just and incidental epiphenomenon of a cosmos full of annihilating forces, in which life is a mere accident, and the organism is little more than a vehicle held together by selfish genes? Or does life have some sort of cosmological role in generating the conscious condition as a manifestation of the evolutionary process coming to a climactic crest?

The Noosphere

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin espoused just such an emergent cosmology when he wrote “The Phenomenon of Man” which, like the Gnostics, remained suppressed by the Catholic church until his death. Such a cosmology is apocalyptic in the sense that evolution rises to a crest, in which a new awareness and connectivity emerges in the noosphere.

This is all a bit orderly and a little too close to intelligent design for comfort, but it is consistent with an emergent quantum universe in which there is a cosmological Σ of complexity on the equator of space time mid-way between α and Ω, of beginning and end, cumulatively integrating the forces of nature, in which life and the biota become the quintessential expression of the four forces, electromagnetism, gravitation and the strong and weak nuclear forces in interaction, giving rise to the supra-molecular matter of tissues and their most elegant and sensitive collective reverberations, in the experiential consciousness of the brain.

Darwin sits in paradise on the cosmic equator manifesting cosmic consciousness in co-participation with the biota, regardless of the final heat death, big crunch or fractal inflation

It is only a small step from here to an evolutionary cosmology based on quantum reality in which the biota become the principal generators of the stream of consciousness in the universe and the means by which the creative process manifesting itself in space-time can become aware of itself and how it has come into being, through our collective compassionate understanding of one another and of the conscious process we are irreversibly participating in.

There is a central truth to apocalyptic reality and that is that once a species gains the fruit of the tree of knowledge, as we have, there is no turning back, and although life has taken four and a half billion years to reach this point on Earth, life now dangles on the thread of our own folly, for we have discovered the human genome, the forces of nature and weapons of mass destruction, and unless we destroy ourselves, this is a focal turning point of the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, or millions of years to come.

I prefer to follow a formless path of sacramental integration with nature than the dharmas and sadhanas of a structured path, as the noble savage is wont to do, but, in this, I recognize a deep truth, which is that, although I am just one organism on planet Earth, I am also in the likeness of the cosmic source – one only begotten in the likeness also – cosmic in my wilderness as we are each also cosmic in the likeness, if we recognize the truth and take responsibility for our existential condition, and this is the Power of the mysterium manifest.

I also come to realize that as the ‘Self’’ that is not a self, but both at the source of each of us, and a paradox of the subject object relationship, we are also compassionately aware of ourselves from beyond the mortal coil, ever merciful of the journey of mortal engagement and the fear of the disengagement - of certain death - and the travail that is the flesh, and yet its incomparable beauty as the full manifestation of the conscious spirit co-participating in the creative realization that we ARE the mysterium tremendum coming to know itself as one is to one, even as we slip in reverie and ecstasy beyond the confines of our physical incarnation.

Shiva-Krishna paying respects to Kali after leaving Jerusalem

And in all our interactions, that may be subtly interconnected in the quantum entanglement, over space-time eternal, we step into a truly supernatural realm, without ever coming to a final conclusion about its powers and properties, because, in the winds of fate, and in the turbulent winds of the hurricanes that surround us, in the leaves blowing past us that may be whipped up by the little breezes emerging from the shadows of our minds, and in the uncertainties within the flux of life and fortune, all these remain pregnant to the visionary mind and can never be captured as a predestiny, or ever repeated for convenience, or proof, for the very reason that, as the grail bearers and trail blazers of cosmic consciousness, we are both transgressors and co-participants in the unfolding creative process, with all its unpredictable synchronicities, so that by our very existence, nothing becomes repeatable, or predictable.

Thus it is never a matter of believing, but of having to believe, as holding one’s breath, while watching a bud burst, or the play of a fountain in the sunlight, never knowing for certainty which way the next drop will fall, although feeling it, from our very bones to our innermost soul, if we can but free ourselves from the prison of our mortal distractions.

References:
Alexander Richard 1987 The Biology of Moral Systems Aldine de Gruyter, NY.
de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard 1955 The Phenomenon of Man, William Collins &
Sons., London.
Hamer, Dean 2004 The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired Into Our Genes Random House.

Tags:
Noosphere, God, cosmology, evolution, genetics, Messiah

The ‘Other’: Kali and the Feminine Power of Living Space-time

If we now turn to the female side of the fatal attraction, there is no personality of more ancient and enduring affection than the black Madonna Kali. She is both the grim black Madonna of creation and destruction and is the most long-lived Goddess we know of, pre-dating the Aryan invasion of the Vedas and harking back to Mojendaro where we find her consort - a trident clad Shiva, and yet alive and manifest in both Hindu and Buddhist cultures, as the original verdant planter Goddess, from whom all fecundity and fertility arises.

Kali standing on Shiva at Varanasi. Nepalese girls personifying the mother tongue.

Kali in her ecstatic apotheosis as Shakti the erotic cosmic feminine is also at the root of the most sumptuous Tantric creation, eclipsing the parochial sabbatical creation of Genesis, in a true meeting of the complementary aspects of Yin and Yang, the universe beginning in a deep sacred union of female and male, and giving rise to all the manifestations of existential complexity as the lovers retreat from ecstatic union to the relationship of the objective world and its teeming phenomena, reflected in the passive gaze of Shiva’s sentient mind, thereby encapsulating the totality of the existential dilemma. Indeed her ancient primacy is reflected in her being the mother of all the gods and of the three realms:

In the beginning the supreme Goddess Adi Shakti
laid three eggs in a lotus.
From these three eggs emerged the three worlds
and the three gods: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

In contrast to the patriarchal sky Gods, eternal, unchanging and abhorring the impermanent transformations of the physical, Kali acts in space-time in the world of sap and dew, spawning countless offspring from her birth canal and consuming creatures alive, as Lilith was alleged to have done, her body smeared with the blood of sacrifice.

Kali standing on lifeless Shiva with sacrificial goat Kathmandu

Indeed until human sacrifice was outlawed a little over a century ago it was not only black goats that were sacrificed, but humans and particularly those standing in the person of the Lord of Death, in a reflection of the same male sacrifice performed by Inanna, Ishtar, and of the sacrificial principles which saw John the Baptist’s head on a plate after the dance of Salome, and Yeshua, anointed by a woman, hanging on a cross, overlooked by the three Marys, Salome and the women of Galilee.

In the rural areas of the Khonds, whole families were raised to be sacrificed to the harvest, torn slowly to pieces on whirling wooden elephants by the fingernails of frenzied farmers waiting to take back some of the sacred flesh and blood to ensure the coming harvest.

Nevertheless Kali rules over a physical world in which birth and death are the inevitable gateways of living existence, so in an important sense, it is more relevant to worship the Dance of Maya than the inscrutable Nirvana of the Void.

Moreover, in a sometimes damnably patriarchal culture that thinks nothing of killing off its girl children by the thousands, in which young brides are often burned to death for the dowry, and widows suffer death by neglect and attrition, Kali represents the ancient unquenchable spirit of an older Dravidian culture, in which women possessed a degree of power, stemming from the continuity of life that passes in unbroken flesh in the female line, from the bloody birth process, down the umbilical cord to the next generation.

Kali thus represents female power in a way that is psychologically redeeming. In the words of Rani Jethmalani, Kali is an energizer and saviour of oppressed women through social and political empowerment. “It is possible through the revival of an energized feminine principle symbolized by Kali, ethically dynamic and control free, autonomous and active, who challenges the civilized order and status quo”.

Certainly, in coming to terms with the claims made by monotheism for an abstract God acting in history, even unto the end of days, we have to accept that Kali is where time itself gets its name Kal, and it is time that is the grim reaper that turns our hair grey and ultimately casts us to the winds of entropy.

Tags:
Kali, Messiah, Shakti, time

!Kung Gods and the Genesis of Jehovah

The !Kung San Bushmen represent the Mariana trench of the mitochondrial African Eve. They are thus an oracle of the founding emergent culture from which we came. In “NISA”, Marjorie Shostak captivatingly recounts the tales of a !Kung woman, illustrating her turbulent life and loves, in a society where although the men profess to be the elders, women possess an autonomy of choice - in which gathering brings in the staple and hunting is as much for sexual favours as for food value, in which nominal patriliny is complemented by common sense maternalism, in which a young mother will often have her first child with the maternal grandmother. The rite of menarche is a time of both joy and such female power that a girl having her first period might disable the power of a hunter if she looked him in the eye.

Fulton’s Cave Rite of Menarche

In addition to accessing the ‘supernatural realm’ in trance dancing, which they now combine with cannabis smoked from holes in the ground, the Bushmen have intriguing stories of their founding creator deities. The extreme ancientness of these traditions, is clear from the discovery of evidence of religious ritual and remains 70,000 years old from the San “Mountain of the Gods”.

The !Kung creation story has intriguing parallels with that of Genesis, and the male gods come in a dark and a light being, but the two are not at war, but rather, more subtly the creative and destructive forces of life and mortality. And the Gods come with female partners. And the gods are paradoxical trickster heroes, both Gods and men who were heroic ancestors in the dawn of time.

The discovery of carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads from a cave in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, a mecca of sorts for the local San people, who call it the Mountain of the Gods.

=/Gao!na, the !Kung Great God, using one of his seven divine names, created himself:

“I am Hishe. I am unknown, a stranger.
No one can command me.
I am a bad thing. I follow my own path.”

Then he created a Lesser God who lives in the western sky where the sun sets; and after this two wives for himself and for the Lesser God. =/Gao!na, tallest of the Bushmen, was in his earthly existence a great magician and trickster with supernatural powers, capable of assuming the form of an animal, a stone or anything else he wished, and who changed people into animals and brought the dead back to life. But as the Great God who lives beside a huge tree in the eastern sky, he is the source and custodian of all things.

He created the earth with holes in it where water could collect and water, the sky and rain, both the gentle ‘female’ rain and the fierce ‘male’ rain thunder and lightning, the sun, moon, stars and wind. He created all the plants that grow on the earth. He created the animals and painted their individual colours and markings, and gave them all names. Then came human beings, and he put life into them; and gave to them all the weapons and implements they now have, and he implanted in them the knowledge of how to take all these things for themselves. Thus their hunting and gathering way of life was ordained from the very beginning and =/Gao!na ordained that when they died they should become spirits, //Gerais, who would live in the sky with him and serve him. He set the pattern of life for all things, each in accordance with its own rules.

The !Kung gods, are endearing in that they provide a sense of meaning about life, death and existence for a people who live largely in autonomous small family groups, which only seasonally gather in bands, without the coercive aspects of deity we find in the moral imperatives of Near Eastern Monotheism. They are thus in a sense ancestors, advisors and arbiters of the paradoxes of mortal fate without jealously demanding the slave-like fealty of their worshippers. One can also see how universal the transition is, from Son to God, as trickster heros become creator deities. Here we have all the components of sophisticated theology from a graduated genesis of life the universe and everything to the sense of affinity between raw physical existence and the spirit realm beyond. We can also see how gods gain personalities with all-too human emotions such as love and jealousy, in the cosmic inflation from hero to deity.

References:

1. Fielder, Christine and King, Chris 2004 Sexual Paradox Lulu Press
2. Johnson, Peter; Bannister, Anthony; Wannenburgh, Alf The Bushmen, New Holland Publishing Cape Town.
3. Shostak, Marjorie 1981 Nisa, Harvard Univ. Pr., Boston.
4. van der Post, Laurens and Taylor, Jane Testament to the Bushmen Penguin Books, UK.

Tags:
Bushmen, God, nisa, Kung San, Messiah

Sacrament and Consciousness

Christianity is a prime example of a world sacramental religion, founded on ‘holy communion’ - a flesh and blood sacrament - the sangre and soma - symbolic of a sacrificial death. These simple wafers of bread and sips of diluted wine carry no effect in themselves, but claim to infer a reality so powerful that merely to partake of the ‘eucharist’ is deemed to be the innermost mystery of communion with the godhead. If such a sacrament is going to be of functional effect, shouldn’t one expect it to actually be a potent psychoactive substance in biological terms?

Huichol yarn painting depicting themes from their genesis myth: The Nierika or cosmic portal opened by peyote, linking the underworld with Mother Earth, through which the gods came and all life came into being. It unifies the spirit of all things and all worlds.

The notion of sacrament as a natural substance consumed to make ‘holy’, or whole, poses a central paradox in consciousness. How is holy completion achieved in the universe? Is it arrived at through an outer journey of scientific, or empirical discovery in the material world? Is it to be found through philosophical analysis and discourse? Is it to be found in a covenant of submission to the will of God? Is it to be pursued through an arduous or painful flagellation, or a meditative journey into the innermost reaches of the mind and soul to the cosmic self? Or is it to be found in sexual reunion and in the interactive mysteries of the ‘living sacraments’? Lying beneath this is the fraught question of what subjective consciousness actually is. Is the complete mind - the visionary state - something we possess alone and sufficient unto ourselves, a pure state in inner devotion, separate from the material world, or are the highest experiences of unification achieved not alone but in interaction? Is mystical consciousness somehow not only collective, but interactive? Is its ‘purpose’, rather than communication with the absolute or an unseen God, rather the genesis of a more compassionate and aware natural condition - of living co-participation?

No one in their right mind would consider humanity, for all its domination of the living species of the planet completely independent of them. Man must eat and eat the living flesh of plants fungi and animals to exist. Merely to consume other life forms we are interdependent with them. This interdependence is accepted as central and fundamental to our natural condition, but when it comes to consciousness, our patriarchal mind-sky heritage makes us feel that our mental identity is to be carved out, not in interactive merging, but in a lone isolation, on the one hand a supremacy of contemplation and mental control, and on the other a submission to a higher power - the will of god.

Yet perhaps both these hierarchical ideas are misconceived. Perhaps the purpose of the conscious mind is not to leave the natural world for a ‘higher plane’, but to learn to better integrate with conscious nature in a wholeness that both gives us the sense of completion and fulfillment we seek, and in so doing sustains living diversity in a more integrated compassionate and caring relationship. Indeed this is the only practical route to the immortal paradise all our myths and religions gravitate towards, and the reality the immortal sexual passage of the generations attests to. Therefore we need to consider the possible role psychotropic plants, fungi and animals may have in making the consciousness of the biosphere complete, whole and ‘holy’. In a sense their story is a liberation myth of the modern world.

The relationship between so-called ‘power plants’ and human consciousness is a startling example of the sexual paradox principle in action - the idea that the crowning forms of integrative conscious experience are not gained by one species in isolation but in interaction between complementary living principles, without which, the heights of the spiritual experience might be difficult or impossible to achieve, attained only by a mystic or psychotic few, or so become so distorted by second-hand accounts, that they are perceived only ‘through a glass darkly’, rather than knowing and being known face to face.

Complementing the deep meditation of the Eastern traditions of Buddhism and the Upanishads is a Western tradition of sacramental shamanism every bit as ancient in which virtually every psychedelic species has become revered as a sacred ‘power plant’ for curing and access to the divine and hidden realms of nature. The origins of these discoveries in myth frequently go back to discoveries by women gatherers, which are later stolen by the men.

Mircea Eliade made a major conceptual error when, in his seminal work “Shamanism” he relegated sacramental forms of shamanism to an inferior status. In fact the strongest, deepest and by far the most insightful traditions of shamanism come through the power plants. Centrally important here is a world view in which nature and all the species therein are sacred and the ‘good life’ is lived in an intimate caring relationship with nature, rather than the dominion over nature claimed by humanity, projected through a high god.

The ‘war on drugs’, like the ‘war on terror’, is a contradiction. It is an aberration in human history, which runs counter to the experience of virtually every culture that has used these sacraments. It leads t the illicit use of chemicals in addictive concentrations, trafficked by criminal organizations, rather than the natural consumption of living organisms. It is based on a Christian fear of paganism, of witches’ brews and of any form of material access to the divine - that anything outside the carnivorous Christian sacrament of soma and sangre, is diabolical.

Cypriot juglets from Egypt from around 1350 BC appear to be designed on inverted poppy pods, Papaver somniferum, inset of Minoan seal Crete 1500 BC, head of Goddess with slit poppies Crete 1350 BC.

Many modern medicines are plant sourced. Our evolutionary endowment in psychoactive plants has been particularly rich, with some of the most potent psychedelic substances known coming directly from natural sources. Although some of these, such as the solonaceous plants used in mediaeval witchcraft are toxic, others despite being somewhat bitter medicines are medicinal or of no seriously debilitating effect. The ‘medicine men and women’ who partake of these live healthy lives into their nineties extolling the power and virtue of these sacraments.

Christianity as a sacramental religion sits both pregnant and unrequited waiting for natural evolution from a lifeless cannibalistic Eucharist to the ‘living sacraments’. In this transformation lies its greening, its healing, and its awakening from blind faith to the transformative experience of knowing.

Maria Sabina and the Agape of Pentecost

In 1935 the anthropologist Jean Bassett Johnson witnessed an all night mushroom ceremony at Huautla de Jiménez. This report was to lie idle until the night of June 29th 1955 when the mycophiles Gordon and Valentina Wasson, upon a clue from the anthropologist Weitlander, with the help and encouragement of Robert Graves ‘were invited to partake of the agape of the sacred mushrooms’ in the hills of Oaxaca, among isolated peasant peoples who used the plant to divine the future and seek a cure of illness, after a long search. After a season of difficulty securing the trust of the Mazatecs, Wasson had commented:

‘Perhaps you will learn the names of a number of renowned curanderos, and your emissaries will even promise to deliver them to you, but then you wait and wait and they never come. You will brush past them in the market place, and they will know you but you will not know them. The judge in the town hall may be the very man you are seeking and you may pass the time of day with him yet never know that he is your curandero’.

Mayan mushroom stones 1000 - 300 B.C.

In fact the man who finally led him to the eucharist was indeed the judge Cayetano. Wasson was deeply struck by the spiritual power of the sacred mushroom, which he referred to as ‘the divine mushroom of immortality’: ‘Ecstasy! The mind harks back to the origin of that word. For the Greek ekstasis, meant flight of the soul from the body. Can a better word be found to describe the bemushroomed state? ... Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles, until you feel you will never recover your equilibrium’.

The sacred mushroom teonanactl is ‘known to the ancient Meso-Americans as the Flesh of God, echoing the soma and sangre of the Christian Eucharist. Wasson also noted that Greeks call mushrooms broma theon ‘the food of the gods’ and specifically likened the experience to the epoptea of Eleusis ‘For me there is no doubt that the secret of Eleusis lies in hallucinogens’.

‘On both nights Wasson stood up for a long time in Cayetano's room at the foot of the stairway, holding on to the rail transfixed in ecstasy by the visions that he was seeing in the darkness with his open eyes. For the first time that word ‘ecstasy’ took on a subjective meaning for him. ... There came one moment when it seemed as though the visions themselves were about to be transcended, and dark gates reaching upward beyond sight were about to part, and we were to find ourselves in the presence of the Ultimate. We seemed to be flying at the dark gates as a swallow at a dazzling lighthouse, and the gates were to part and admit us.’.

Wasson's father Edmund was a maverick Episcopal priest, who had written a book called “Religion and Drink” and never tired of telling Gordon that Christ's teaching began with the water into wine at Cana and ended with the wine of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. Gordon was to interpret his experience in the light of its significance as the agape of the Early Christians. This eucharist and the falling sacred words evoked to Wasson the day of Pentecost in which the disciples and the women at the burial were “filled with new wine”. In his subsequent article in Life he wrote:

“On the night of June 29-30 1955 in a Mexican Indian village so remote from the world that most of the people spoke no Spanish, [we] ... shared with a family of Indian friends’ a celebration of ‘holy communion’ where ‘divine’ mushrooms were first adored and then consumed. The Indians mingled Christian and per-Christian elements in their religious practices in a way disconcerting for Christians but natural for them. ... We had come from afar to attend a mushroom rite but had expected nothing so staggering as the virtuosity of the performing curanderas and the astonishing effects of the mushrooms. ... We were received and the night's events unrolled in an atmosphere of simple friendliness that reminded us of the agape of early Christian times”

“One can imagine the many trembling confabulations of the friars as they would whisper together how to meet this Satanic enemy. The teonanactl struck at the heart of the Christian religion. I need hardly remind my readers of the parallel, the designation of the Elements in our eucharist ‘Take, eat this is my Body’... and again ‘Grant us therefore my gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son ... and to drink His blood’. But the truth was even worse. The orthodox Christian must accept on faith the miracle of the conversion of the bread and wine into God's flesh and blood: that is what is meant by the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. By contrast the sacred mushroom of the Aztecs carries its own conviction: every communicant will testify to the miracle that he has experienced” .

The transmission of the sacrament by Maria Sabina.

The curandero who opened the secret of the mushroom to Wasson was Maria Sabina. Shortly before his arrival she had a vision that strangers would come to seek the little one who springs forth. She had shared her vision with Cayetano García the local sindico or justice, and it was he who agreed that the knowledge should be shared and brought Wasson to her.

The mushrooms were consumed before a small altar. The curandera kept one corner free so that the Holy Ghost could descend in the form of the sacred words that came to her, the words of her little book: “I see the word fall, coming down from above as though they were little luminous object falling from heaven. The word falls on the Holy Table, on my body, with my hand I catch them word for word.”

“Says.. woman who thunders am I, woman who sounds am I.
Spiderwoman am I, says hummingbird woman am I says
Eagle woman am I, says important eagle woman am I.
Whirling woman of the whirlwind am I, says
woman of a sacred, enchanted place am I, says
Woman of the shooting stars am I.” ...
I'm a birth woman, says I'm a victorious woman, says
I'm a law woman, says I'm a thought woman, says
I'm a life woman, says ...
“I am a spirit woman, says I am a crying woman, says
I am Jesus Christ, says ... I'm the heart of the virgin Mary.”
(Mushroom Ceremony - Smithsonian Institute)

Her long life to age 91 was beset by many tragedies, including a macabre vision she had shortly afterward on the ‘little things’, which foretold the murder of her son, possibly in vengeance for opening the knowledge of the mushroom. Her house and little shop were also burned. Neverthless the mushroom was a family tradition: “The father of my-grandfather Pedro Feliciano, my grandfather Juan Feliciano, my father Santo Feliciano - were all shamans - they ate the teonanacatl, and had great visions of the world where everything is known... the mushroom was in my family as a parent, protector, a friend”.

Maria Sabina had sampled sacred mushrooms in abundance as a child. A few days after watching a wise man cure her uncle she notes: “Maria Anna and I were taking care of our chickens in the woods so that they wouldn't become the victims of hawks or foxes. We were seated under a tree when suddenly I saw near me within reach of my hand several mushrooms. ‘If I eat you, you and you’ I said ‘I know that you will make me sing beautifully’. I remembered my grandparents spoke of these mushrooms with great respect. After eating the mushrooms we felt dizzy as if we were drunk and I began to cry, but this dizziness passed and we became content. Later we felt good. It was a new hope in our life. In the days that followed, when we felt hungry we ate the mushrooms. And not only did we feel our stomachs full, but content in spirit as well. I felt that they spoke to me. After eating them I heard voices. Voices that came from another world. It was like the voice of a father who gives advice. Tears rolled down our cheeks abundantly as if we were crying for the poverty in which we lived.' She had a vision of her dead father coming to her. I felt as if everything that surrounded me was god”.

“Maria Anna and I continued to eat the mushrooms. We ate lots many times, I don't remember how many. Sometimes grandfather and at other times my mother came to the woods and would gather us up from the ground on which we were sprawled or kneeling. ‘What have you done?’ they asked. They picked us up bodily and carried us home. In their arms we continued laughing singing or crying. They never scolded us nor hit us for eating mushrooms. Because they knew it isn't good to scold a person who has eaten the little things, because it causes contrary emotions and it is possible that one might feel one was going crazy” .

Maria Sabina describes access to the timeless eternal visionary realm: “There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me”.

“The more you go inside the world of teonanacatl, the more things are seen. And you also see our past and our future, which are there together as a single thing already achieved, already happened . . . I saw stolen horses and buried cities, the existence of which was unknown, and they are going to be brought to light. Millions of things I saw and knew. I knew and saw God: an immense clock that ticks, the spheres that go slowly around, and inside the stars, the earth, the entire universe, the day and the night, the cry and the smile, the happiness and the pain. He who knows to the end the secret of teonanacatl - can even see that infinite clockwork” .

Eunice Pike noted to Wasson in 1953 “One of the proofs that it is ‘Jesus Christ himself’ who talks to them is that anyone who eats the mushroom sees visions. Everyone we have asked suggests that they are seeing into heaven itself. ... Not all Mazatecs believe that the mushroom messages are from Jesus Christ ... Most monolinguals however will either declare that it is Jesus Christ who speaks to them, or they will ask a little doubting ‘What do you say, it is true that it is the blood of Jesus’?”.

The Man in the Buckskin Suit

Jesus came to the white man as flesh and blood, but to the Native American as peyote. John Wilson, who many claim as the ‘founder’ of the peyote religion in the United States claimed that he was continually translated in spirit to the ‘sky realm’ by peyote and it was there that he learned the events of Christ's life and the relative position of several of the spirit forces such as sun, moon and fire.

Ceramic snuffing pipe with a deer holding a peyote in its mouth
Monte Alban 500 BC.

He reported that he had seen Christ's grave, now empty and that peyote had instructed him about the ‘Peyote Road’ which led from Christ's grave to the moon (this had been the Road in the sky which Christ had traveled in his ascent. Many peyotists affirm Christian elements as an important part of their religion:

“God told the Delawares to do good even before
He sent Christ to the whites who killed him ...
God made Peyote It is His power. It is the power of Jesus.
Jesus came afterwards on this earth, after peyote.”

“You white people needed a man to show you the way, but we Indians have always been friends with the plants and understood them ... “The white man goes into a church and talks about Jesus , but the Indian goes into a teepee and talks to Jesus.”

However, it is Christ in his second-self who came to give the peyote ritual to the Menomini: “This old man was a chief of a whole tribe, and he have his son to be a chief. He said, “I'm going to go, and you take my place. Take care of this [tribe].” And the boy, he went out hunting; He was lost for about four days. He began to get dry and hungry, tired out; so he gave up. ... So he went, lay himself down on his back; he stretched out his arms like this [extending his arms horizontally], and lay like that. Pretty soon he felt something kind of damp [in] each hand. So he took them, and after he took them, then he passed away. Just as soon as he - I suppose his soul - came to, he see somebody coming on clouds. There's a cloud; something coming. That's a man coming this way, with a buckskin suit on; he got long hair. He come right straight for him; it's Jesus himself. So he told this boy, “Well, one time you was crying, and your prayers were answered that time. So I come here. I'm not supposed to come; I said I wasn't going to come before two thousand years,” he said. “But I come for you, to come tell you why that's you [are] lost. But we're going to bring you something, so you can take care of your people. ... So they went up a hill there. There's a tipi there, all ready. So Christ, before he went in it, offered a prayer. ...Take this medicine along, over there. Whoever takes this medicine, he will do it in my name.” So that's how it represents almost the first beginning.”

UDV meeting with ayahuasca brewing. The Celebrants sit for several hours in the church meeting hall in contemplation, music and some speeches. A celebrant drinking ayahuasca.

The indigenous use of Amazonian ayahuasca, has been reformed into a modern religious movement, Union of the Vegetal, to “remember past lives and to understand the true meaning of reincarnation as well as to become familiar with the origin and the real destiny of nature and of man”. The Union Vegetale or UDV is a nominally Christian movement devoted to experiencing inner harmony through partaking of ayahuasca tea. A fortnightly meeting is held by the movement, which includes members of both sexes from all walks of life. Its membership is not restricted to one fringe group. Similar movements, surround the use of iboga in equatorial Africa in the bwiti and mbiri cults in which men and women make a vision quest to visit the ancestors.
What is at stake here goes far beyond Christian horizons. It is the discovery that the mystical visionary state is unlocked, not by conscious control, but the incipient chaos that comes from the interaction of the ‘other’ with our will to order. It extends from the psychotropic plants and fungi to the actual molecules which are their active principles, and their variants.

In 2006 a ground-breaking scientific experiment, after 40 years of research taboo, using “straight” volunteers demonstrated that the psilocybin in magic mushrooms can occasion mystical experiences having genuine spiritual and religious significance, of continuing benefit to their lives months later, which stood out as one of the five most significant experiences of their lifetime, standing alongside birth, death and marriage.

Persephone giving Demeter the Epoptea sacrament.
Eleusis -‘liberty cap’ mushroom

Healing the Nations

However, this association between an active sacrament and mystical gnosis has been lurking in the Christian condition since its beginning. Allegro has speculated that the mystery at the Christian origin is founded on an agaric mushroom cult. Commenting on the Elusian epoptea, Clement of Alexandria likens Christ, to the Hierophant of the sacred mysteries: “Are they not sesame cakes, cakes with many marvels, . and a serpent, the mystic sign of Dionysos Bassareus? Are they not also pomegranates, fig branches ... ivy leaves, round cakes and poppies? In addition there are the unutterable symbols of Ge-Themis, majoram, a lamp, a sword and a woman's comb? [kteis - genital organ symbol]... Oh truly sacred mysteries! Oh pure light! In the blaze of torches, I have an epoptic vision of heaven and of God. I become holy by initiation. The Lord is the Hierophant who reveals the mysteries and commends them to the Father's care, where he is guarded for ages to come” .

John Spong notes that the sacred meal is not just a ritual instituted by Jesus but is also the central motif in the manifestation of the resurrected Christ in which “their eyes were opened”, just as were those of Adam and Eve when they ate the forbidden fruit: “And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.” (Luke 24:30)

Partaking of the sacrament Holland 1999

Likewise in John 21:4 it is the dining which reveals the Christ: “Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, ‘Who art thou?’ knowing that it was the Lord.” In Acts again, eating and drinking the sacred substance with the redeemer is the central key: “Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.” Spong comments: “in the act of eating and drinking in the name of the Lord, here and now, we are sharing a foretaste of that kingdom. Perhaps in such a setting our eyes might well ‘be opened’ to behold the one.”

The power plants and fungi are my natural allies with which I have communed extensively over decades of my life. While I have also taken Tibetan meditations and wandered as a Sadhu in India, the allies are the source of my illumination as to the inner resonances of the sentient universe, even though years may sometimes pass between the times I make a velada of the sacraments.

Tellus Goodmorning the peyote roadman was 93 when I last took peyote with him.
Sr. Trinico my ayahuasca shaman Yarinacocha. 19 years after we first met.

I’m not suggesting that a ‘mushroom religion’ can replace monoclonal evangelical Christianity, but that such allies do form the seeds of a reflowering transformation of the tradition in the paradigm of the Tree of Life. The living sacraments form a natural basis for an inner path of mystical realization, in which those who choose can witness for themselves the inner dimensions of the vision quest, and form a consensual movement of compassionate wisdom, which could provide a healing effect on world futures and our long-term survival as a species.

Perhaps Eve was right all along to seek the fruit that would ‘make one wise’ - hidden from the foundation of the world to the unveiling:

“And he shewed me a pure river
of water of life, clear as crystal,
proceeding out of the throne of God
and of the Lamb.
In the midst of the street of it,
and on either side of the river,
was there the tree of life,
which bare twelve manner of fruits,
and yielded her fruit every month:
and the leaves of the tree
were for the healing of the nations.

The epoptea was always an inner sanctum. Such mysteries are best carefully ‘shepherded’, as the ayahuasca shamans do, to prevent excesses or delusions from leading to fearful, false, or violent outcomes. Integrated with the sacramental tradition in a reflowering, the ‘power plants’ could become a source of illumination for a genuine wisdom movement, whose ‘elders’ are a voice of conscience and good counsel for the planet, fulfilling the regenerative process as a living tradition.

Tags:
peyote, messiah, magic mushroom, ayahuasca, sacrament