The Tao of the Tree of Life

Paradise Found David Miller www.mauiarts.com

Tao of the Tree of Life

Cosmological Science, Psychedelic Christianity and Sexy Greenpeace Buddhism

The Problem:

Every person on the planet shares a desire to see the world continue and flourish, so that there will be a habitable world for our offspring, for the future generations of humanity and for the diversity of life to continue. We also want to see a world without war and one in which justice prevails for the rich and poor alike. Even highly religious people, except for those pursuing martyrdom, often for violent ends, and a few fundamentalist rapture seekers, want to see a world in which their children and other people can survive.

The trouble is that, while we want to have a sustainable world, achieving it seems to always be beyond the horizons of economic and political realities. Economic realities keep up the pressure on for short-term thinking and political realities are contaminated by vested interests in the business world who deny the damage done to the climate and biosphere by human impact for their own self-interests, despite the obvious mounting scientific evidence that human impact is causing increasing, and possibly irreversible, detrimental change to our future.

Worse still, the world's religions, despite some very good words from a few religious leaders, including the current Pope, are more devoted to ascendency and internecine apocalyptic warfare combined with utopian visions than actual care of the planet. The two major religions Islam and Christianity both promote unrestrained population growth and have ingrained agendas to control female reproduction. One only needs to make a rough assessment of how little financing of environmental projects comes from the major religions to see the actual thrust of their activity.

The large numbers of people who would like to contribute personally to protecting the planet and its future, face an uphill battle  because, in the absence of a society-wide ethic to actually cherish and replenish the Earth, effort remains confined to protest groups such as Greenpeace and sporadic government action such as creating nature reserves. Thus investment in saving the planet is like throwing money over your shoulder in a cold shower, because one can put time and effort and money into it until one becomes destitute and depleted, while the problem still grows larger, leading to a tragedy of the commons from the failure of people to act together with a coherent common sense of purpose ,while others exploit it for gain.

The Solution:

Is there a way out of this dilemma? Yes there is! Lets simply extract the two key ideas that convey the two most world-transforming insights from major world religions:

The first is the key insight of the monotheistic tradition with subdue amended to cherish: To cherish and replenish the living planet and its diversity throughout the generations of life.

The second is the mahayana of the Buddhist and Vedantic traditions: To facilitate the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Covenant:

1. I vouchsafe to cherish and replenish the living planet and its diversity throughout the generations of life.
2. I vouchsafe to facilitate the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

These two are sufficient to bring about a common sense of purpose, both to protect and sustain the planet, and to enable all people to reach a deeper state of understanding of the universe in which they live. They are thus good cosmological science and consistent with the scientific pursuit of knowledge unhindered by beliefs and assumptions. Affirmative belief is not essential to religious meaning. In Judaism, the virtue of keeping the covenantal traditions and in Buddhism observing the dharma, or way, - i.e. actions - are what is critical to bring the blessed condition into being.

The Sanctity of Nature:

The covenant to cherish and replenish the Earth is a commitment to preserve and restore the bountiful diversity of nature planet-wide. It is the key that unites the latent energy of people across the whole face of the globe to have the confidence and energy to realize we can together, without pain or privation, actually achieve the perpetual sustenance of the Planet in the immortal passage of the generations of life. This brings with it an immeasurable sense of relief from the anxiety that we are living in an insecure world of conflict and degeneration, where the very meaning in existence is occluded, and our futures, and the future of the whole world remain in an unacceptable degree of doubt.

By drawing people together with the clear and simple purpose of sustaining the immortality of life, the covenant to cherish and replenish can potentially unite the energy of the entire planet's population around the central activity for which the human species has inherited the Earth to perform. We thus become the guardians of the perpetual diversity of life and find our place in nature not to subdue and have dominion over it, but to act as verdant guardians of a perpetual paradise in the universe at large.

Enlightenment:

By facilitating the enlightenment of all sentient beings, we are also accepting the scientific pursuit of knowledge of the natural universe and the spirit of skeptical inquiry, where we test our assumptions against the oracle of nature, rather than imposing our preconceived beliefs. Enlightenment can have no meaning if it is simply a spiritual conviction or vision in the absence of affirmation from the nature of the world around us. We need both the knowledge and the wisdom to fulfill the engagement.

Thus the quest for enlightenment is both the scientific quest to understand the universe and the sentient vision quest to understand the very foundations of conscious experience of all kinds: waking, dreaming, mystical and visionary. The emergence of conscious sentient beings is a natural cosmological process forming the most complex complete interactive manifestation of the fundamental forces of nature emerging from the cosmic origin. It is thus a cosmological sigma point and the quest for conscious enlightenment is also cosmological.

Sacred Sexuality:

At the same time, accepting the sacredness of sex as the foundation of the passage of the generations of life, from which we all come transforms religions of renunciation such as most of Buddhism, the implicit sexual guilt of Christianity from Eve's 'transgression', and the explicit sexual oppression of Islam, through lethal penalties for adultery, enforced veiling and sequestering and seclusion of women into traditions celebrating in the mutual ecstasy and joy of sexual union and the full abundance of the flow of life, rather than the negation and control of it. Sacred sex has long been central to the Vedantic tradition and is one of the highest rites of illumination in Tibetan Buddhism as well.

Sex is a central part of social bonding key to deep human relationships and the stability of family life and is not just for reproduction, but sacred sex transcends social sex as the deepest celebration of the fertility principle between woman and man.  The sacredness of sex also implies mutual respect between men and women and the right of women to reproductive choice, not to be controlled by men or patriarchal religious dictates, because they the bearers of the principal responsibility for parental commitment in pregnancy, a sometimes perilous delivery, lactation and long-term child care. The passage of the living generations comes through sex, so it must needs command the uttermost sacred respect as the holy grail of life itself.

Sacramental Mysticism:

Complementing the meditative and contemplative traditions, the use of the visionary power plants and fungi as sacraments, which are already incorporated into religious traditions in the Americas, including an ongoing Christian movements, which identify them as holy sacraments, provide a democratic avenue to the mystical experiences that are the foundation of religious illumination - forming the psychedelic face of a new Christianity, thus healing the Eucharist which is otherwise a decadent empty sacramental religion celebrating in its central rite the consumption of human flesh and blood in remembrance of a homicidal sacrificial death two millennia ago.

Psychedelics are not dangerous drugs  and have been shown in recent experiments using mature people who are not drug takers that they can provide genuine spiritual experiences which have lasting benefits months and years later. The core of religious experience is mystical experience, so a genuine sacrament to replace the empty sacrament of the Eucharist is a pivotal step in making Christianity a real sacramental religion with the integrity to protect the Earth and one in which every person can share in the spiritual vision, rather than having to stoop to the conformity of unquestioning doctrines and a dominant hierarchy of the priesthood for instruction.

Universality:

At its most universal, the way, or Tao of the Tree of Life would involve just these two points as a simple all-embracing covenant, leaving everyone free to express this in an endless variety of creative ways in both acts of restoration and celebration of life.

This evokes a path of true compassion and a human movement of empowerment, which can celebrate its existence in diverse rites of passage, from birth, partnership and death, to the fertility of the seasons, and the agape of creative musical and artistic performance. Just as people across the planet love to party and experience life to the full, the path provides the zest of life with the added sense of meaning and fulfillment and joy of living which actually bringing our energy and activity to its natural fruition brings forth in overflowing abundance.

One can think of the Tao of the Tree of Life as an integration of cosmological science, psychedelic Christianity and sexy Greenpeace Buddhism, taking the best out of each, but really it is the foundation of all spirituality. It is the common thread of sentient survival and the science of nature and cosmology because it is rooted in the realities of the natural universe discovered by the scientific pursuit of knowledge.

This Tree of Life is not just the Biblical notion of a tree in Eden hidden since the foundation of the world but is the tree of evolution of the diversity of life as it has emerged and flourished on the planet over geological time scales.

In a metaphysical way, this brings the two trees in Eden of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life together into one. Knowledge only gains the capacity and temptation for evil when it becomes divorced from our primary goal in life, which is to sustain the passage of life itself. Once this integration with our life meaning and purpose occurs evil fades away as simply a form of ignorance of the whole picture.

This is a covenant, which religious and non-religious people alike can accept and fulfill together, because its foundation lies in the very truth of the nature of existence. It can thus have a wider basis for collective action than traditional religions, which are fragmented into competing factions each vying with one another as the one 'true' way. By becoming a common affirmation of a wider section of society it would actually become possible for collective action to restore the living planet to become globally effective as well as applying ethical influence to government and business decision-making.

Conversations between two Avatars of Reality

Krishna: I know, or rather I have known this for quite sometime now, that I am the same personality who was known as Krishna in the ancient times (right now Kalki). You've written about these kinds of stuff, so I thought maybe someone to talk to. I don't really fit in this kind of world, and I now find myself on earth, end times probably. My partner, is also somewhere here on earth, and I am looking for her. We're both inherently not doing well, I can tell from my heart. I don't know where or how to look, but I only have a feeling where she is. And don't take me to be a happy cheerful person, I am more like a lone walker, right now.

Cristo: Your e-mail raises a lot of root questions.   In what sense are we avatars of mythical entities who personify in some sense the existential quest of all beings. Not least - what is the relationship between consciousness and the arrow of time? Do we have soul mate? Do we have a destiny in the universe?

For a considerable period of my life I have considered myself as an avatar too - that there is an archetypal level to reality where consciousness lives out themes expressed in the lives of mythical heros like Shiva and Krishna and Kali and so on. At other times I wonder if this is consistent with nature and evolution as we know it. I don't have the final answer on this except to say that the heroic quest is an archetype of our incarnation and to try to make the best use of it without falling into literalism. It's a metaphorical truth.

I also know from my own personal experience that at times of 'coincidence' there seems to be an anticipatory aspect to existential consciousness - e.g. in precognitive dreaming, which has an innate sense of the immanent future, whose reality shatters our illusions of causality. And that this is maybe what consciousness is for. Now the trouble with all this is that it is all hidden in the quantum entanglement. It has a status that we can neither confirm nor deny. Indeed if we could confirm it, it would very likely violate the probability laws at the foundation of quantum reality and the entanglement from which it comes.

This means that the best option we have is to live in the universe with a kind of predilection for a subterranean opening, living for it as a kind of investment those in the stock market know requires 'stomach' - i.e. not being disheartened when it all goes to custard for an epoch. This is what the notorious shaman impostor Carlos Casteneda called "having to believe" as opposed to the affirmative forced belief religions push on their followers. We can go through the world having no belief at all but maybe that's wasting an innate talent which is that consciousness is here to anticipate a future we can sense subliminally and unless we invest in it with 'stomach' we won't have the advantages it brings to survivors in a living universe.

Now as to whether there is a destined soul mate is another question to do with the evolutionary psychology of falling in love. Sexual beings are mortal and incomplete. It is this very incompleteness which drives the desire for a complement - for another to curl up with in fulfillment and it is this kind of fulfillment the combination of the sexual act and the emotions of falling in love bring about. This is a superbly good bonus that evolution has thrown in the path of the human species because it sums up our existential predicament in a real consolation prize.

The ultimate trouble from my point of view is that I have experienced a bunch of soul mates, some of whom I have loved for years and had children with and others of which were a one night stand or an all too brief affair. My romantic notion of love is meeting a stranger from a strange land who has journeyed as tortuous paths through life as I have and in the co-mingling we each bring together to one another the experience of many lifetimes in knowing as we stare into one another's eyes the ultimate meaning of existence.  My original wife with whom I still keep up affectionate contact was an ultimate soul mate but she was destined to be a great love of many men. My current partner and namesake, despite just starting out as a fling on the side, has proved to be the most resilient person in my life and an almost eternally fecund lover. Having had a lot of relationships, I can see that relationship building is as important as the notion of soul mate.

Krishna: You will find answers to a lot of your questions relating to consciousness, if you seek out Vishnu, i.e., you have to know how to sacrifice (a method in consciousness). (Other religions too mention sacrifice, but how to practice it is not known right now). It is also known as Yajna. I didn't read books, etc., I have in my nature, and I know how to do these things. I am now just learning to put words to these stuff.

I know who I am, but being reborn as a human, means I also have too look & find and put stuff into my mind, according to the times and the age. Feeling is what matters, the words attributed to the feelings change with ages and times. What was devotion before, is now called as love. What was duty before is now called as doing what you like, or be yourself. So words are actually irrelevant, "feelings" are relevant. Logic/mind helps in discerning these feelings out. The mind is for this life only, but your soul or "heart" continues. You can feel your destiny via your heart, you can known stuff about yourself, via your heart. That is accurate information of the self, feel yourself. Whats you like, what feels good, and you genuinely feel ok with, therein lies the truth about yourself.

Ok now, just throwing some light in a unordered fashion, don't take it very rigidly, instead try to "feel" it. Vishnu or Krishna conceptually, is a personal attribute of the Universe, is the setter of faith, whatever one, and is also the giver of satisfaction, when sacrifices have been made. He is coupled with Lakshmi (or genuine love for those who are good). Faith & Love, together continues existence and takes it higher and higher. Basic premise. The divine coupling.* What is the relationship between consciousness and the arrow of time?

Faith is time. As long as faith continues, time does. What the mind tries to grasp time, the mind is just doing something, there's no ultimate grasping such concepts using the mind.* Do we have soul mate?

Yes for beings, not disconnected from goodness, there is. You can feel them within your heart, where I feel, you will become genuinely your Self. Go for what your heart genuinely desires and likes.* Do we have a destiny in the universe?

You know it. You can feel it in your heart. Do you want to take credit for your own destiny, or do you want to give credit to a higher power? Basically, see it like this, The Supreme Absolute, is surrendered to her beings, like a mother to her child, whatever the child desires, her mother sets her faith in that direction, and encourages in that direction.* In what sense are we avatars of mythical entities who personify in some sense the existential quest of all beings.

Yea, so you would have to perform sacrifices to grasp the essence of intuition, faith, and goodness, and satisfaction. I find it hard to explain these in words, but you will get a sense of events, feelings, intuition and happenings with the progress of time. You will see the entire picture as one happening, together. Think of reality in terms of consisting only of beings. There is no quest, you're god, doing whatever you want, enjoying whatever you want.

I for myself, know that I don't fit here on earth. I feel so less love here, that I feel it as a dull realm. So I've always imagined stuff, which now I know, relates to my previous connections, with whom I feel disconnected right now. My desire is to go back, my work is to feel good.

The old structures are decaying in some way, but they are not gone. Most beings that descend here are self-sacrificing, they raise the intensity of this realm. But now sacrifices are getting stopped, so the intensity is dying. I don't know what I'll be doing, but I'm feel that most of civilization will be wiped out, by the will of Time, if she so desires.

Sex conceptually is a sacrifice. One being sacrifices her body to the other being for genuine love, the other being (the lover) enjoys being loved and glorifies the sacrifice, body. Nowadays, say porn sites, have man exploiting woman's body, woman exploiting man's body, etc. Sacrifice is being destroyed, not glorified. Beings sacrifice willingly for love, and other good beings feel love for it automatically, they don't desire to sacrifice. Todays world is the same as an Aztec king sacrificing 80000 humans for his own benefit. There isn't a civilization, or something that is good.

Cristo: When I am in Varanasi I am Krishna and Shiva in one, paying my respects to Kali as the root manifestation of all women, from Radha to Parvarti, Kal  the changing yuga out of which time emerges. When in Israel I am the Christ. In the Amazon I am the shaman psychopharmacologist. At home, I am the leaves spinning in the afternoon gales blowing past my window. I am the atman. I am the abyss. I am the void. What do I mean by this? So do I take you literally or metaphorically?

I know Vishnu is the sustainer who dreams the universe from his navel, but faith is a double edged sword which can suck us into the underworld. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex, faith is the nemesis of truth. It is the point where everything turns diabolical. The Gita is no exception. Faith to battle is one thing when it is holding no quarter with illusion but when it turns practical it becomes jihad and the internecine Kaurava genocide of the Gita. You have to have faith or you can't understand God. But this is like saying one has to believe or else for religion or God to be real. That's a vicious circle. Its a hocus pocus scam, to believe in faith in itself. We need to take a peek at reality and make the acid test of the experiencer. Not take it on faith.

Heart is the centre and love is supreme. But faith is a translation from the real to the illusory. Heart and love are evolutionary manifestations of who we are as organisms, along with fear, anger, jealousy, envy, compassion, disgust and so on all of which make the complex emotional landscape of relationship in life. None of these are more sacred, or more profane, because all are part of the prisoners' dilemma of existence. If there is a higher calling it surely must come from the fact that emotions in all their complexity evolved biologically on earth and with it existential consciousness which may both anticipate what is about to become and through intentional will alter the entire history of the universe. Therein lies the mystery we are both trying to understand.

The question is - where do these archetypes lead us? Are they a liberation or our prison? What is the universe actually doing to incarnate each of us in the way it has? Does this imply there is a deity lurking behind the cosmic curtain pulling the coat strings of the cosmological theory of everything so that it all has to be? And what has to be? How much is preordained and how much is left up to us or to the vagaries of fate?

I think we are all the thousand eyed manifestation of Vishnu and Lakshmi coming to witness ourselves in the incarnate as we live the mortal coil. But there is a deeper secret. What are we actually doing in and to the universe in the flesh? What do we do here and leave behind us? Offspring and enlightenment? Or more genocide of life? What role does our incarnation play in the deepening manifestation of reflective consciousness and of biological splendour?

The archetypes and the avatars speak of an ancient conformity to an idea, to a cosmology that predates everything we have discovered about nature, which has turned our view of the universe upside down and inside out. Maybe in the quantum entanglement is a wholly new kind of reality we are only scratching the surface of. Maybe we need to enter it with no preconditions, no assumptions, least of all the assumptions of the avatar and the assumptions of a God. So I take my lessons from the abyss, from the insects. From no assumptions at all. I wear the clothes of the avatar because that is the existential predicament, but the inscrutable journey is hurtling by us as day turns into night!

Krishna: Yea, don't go by the words, or religions. The Universe is beyond it, and God is beyond any conception. Modern religions are crap, they worship someone important other than themselves. The thing is to worship your self. Right now its the Dark ages, so humans act as if the Mother is to be feared. The name Vishnu is just a pointer. The real thing is experienced. There are no books, no Wikipedia to help in that. Vishnu is the ultimate destination for those who know how to sacrifice. To give more hints:

* Imagine a warrior walking alone through enemy territory without fear, completely focused on whatever he is doing. He is then worshipping Vishnu.

* Imagine an explorer, who loves the unknown, and dares every mountain, and desert that he comes by, he love for exploration never stops. He is then worshipping Vishnu.

* imagine a scientist, tucking away in a dark room for days, his line of thought attacking a single problem from every angle. He is then worshipping Vishnu.

The focus is not on God, the focus is on what you like to do, and enjoying it. Thereby you also love yourself.

Writing is a symptom of the dark ages. When the hearts are too weak to remember. Writing gives rise to multitude of thoughts and relative importance. Questions with God come w.r.t. to control, and w.r.t. to giving or taking credit. This is rooted in fear. Whenever questioning these topics, discard fear effortlessly, even if it doesn't look like fear.

Instead of that, see it this way, just like a mother desires to birth her child, the universe gives birth to beings. Just desire. Imagine yourself as the Universal mother, to understand the position. The beings are free, but the Mother guides if asked for. Again imagine that if you were the puppeteer of the Universe, where all the beings are puppets, would that give your heart any satisfaction? That would be boring. God separates into multitude of beings just to experience love, and play.
The connection is always love. If God were all alone, if you were all alone, just being God, what would be? Imagine pure goodness and imagine pure love and you will go in that direction.

And beings enjoy reality, they enjoy their God-hood, because they themselves are God. They do whatever they want. But then they become weak and unable to enjoy further, that's where religion comes in. When beings become too weak in their hearts, they start questioning. They feel suffering. The thing is realizing your true extreme self, that is your true self. Your self, that keeps you satisfied, fulfills all your desires and leads you to having bliss in the Universe itself, while being the Universe itself at play.

For me personally, I really don't like to "think" these that much, as opposed to experiencing reality live. Thinking doesn't lead anywhere close to God. True enquiry within yourself is a different thing. I am more inclined to approach from the pov of feelings and intuitions, something that is not concrete, something that you're not trying to hold on to.  Your feelings/intuitions are a direct connection to yourself, not thinking or words. How much truth you will grasp depends on how honest you are with yourself. :)

* Imagine a warrior walking alone through enemy territory without fear, completely focused on whatever he is doing. He is then worshipping Vishnu.
Cristo:  This is what I call the invincible abundance of life that makes it all worthwhile even if the Earth blows to pieces and we all eventually become extinct, but its also what makes an IS suicide bomber blow fifty young innocent people to pieces in Turkey, so we have to be careful.

* Instead of that, see it this way, just like a mother desires to birth her child, the universe gives birth to beings. Just desire.
Cristo:  Yes I get the sentiment and it is very easy to empathize with, especially you saying to follow your desires and your heart which I completely agree with because we humans are actually good at heart - original virtue if we let it live, despite all the negative emotions as well.

But now here we get into the emotional analogy of transcendence. What IS desire? How does desire make life and consciousness? Isn't desire an emotional feature of biological conscious life?  A lot of my criticism of gods and religion is that it is all one big analogy for all-too-human emotions and jealousy in particular. Yahweh is jealous of the unfaithful wife Israel. "For I am a jealous God". Muslims claim al-Llah is "merciful and compassionate" but all his actions are violent and homicidal retribution for any form of infidel(ity). Rama condemns Sati to suttee even though she was always his faithful wife. So what is the Ramayana teaching us about respecting women any more than the Gita does about securing the peace? Even the Veda is full of Indra's worldly pretensions. That leaves the Upanishads as our only hope. This is where Buddha got it right and then got it wrong claiming the only reality is escaping the wheel of birth and death which is the very life process itself. What a nihilistic conclusion! A suicidal escape from life itself into the void that is no void. That's not an answer - its just a surrender.

So the question becomes another one. Is the universe in the archetype of human emotions? Or to put it another way - are human emotions in the archetype of the Elohim who created the world? But there are very good reasons for coming to the conclusion that human emotions are mammalian emotions that evolved in mammals so they could socialize in ways which transcend strict genetic altruism and thus form cooperative groups. Emotions thus gain cosmic status by transcending the confines of earlier organisms. That is itself very cool and opens another question. Is evolution opening out an epoch of enlightenment like a lotus blossom opening?

What is the source of this phenomenon? Is it just math or is it Vishnu-Lakshmi? But what is a human analogy getting into the centre of the cyclone for? Why is God an organism or a couple of organisms desiring stuff? What about their ecosystem? What about their laws of nature that made them desire? Where does it all start? It seems we have just pushed the problem onto Vishnu-Lakshmis doorstep for them to solve.

Our experience tells us of two complementary natures - conscious and physical - mind and body complementary like wave and particle, female and male, yin and yang, Shakti and Shiva if you like, or even Vishnu and Lakshmi if you 'desire'. There is no evidence for a cosmic threesome in this equation. God, or the creator, or the Mother is superfluous to the abundance of the creative process. Even Vishnu dreaming the universe - a great myth of awesome explanatory power - fails to solve the complementary dilemma.

And we know dreams have different qualities from waking life so to say the universe is a dream of God is to confuse the two. I just dreamed a snake had killed our cat. I dreamed  was in France and had lost my car. We can fly in dreams but we can't look at our watch and tell the time correctly. The differences are palpable.

Vishnu dreaming the universe doesn't explain to us the complementarity of consciousness and the physical world - it just finesses it into the dream of the God all powerful making the whole thing - galaxies, dark matter, black holes and all. But the universe has more properties than our dreams alone and our dreams are built on their biological foundation. The Judeo-Christian god is even more dysfunctional because he creates the universe like a clockwork toy, when we know you can't create a brain by imposing conditions from outside like we can a mechanism like a computer - embryogenesis is a generative interactive inside-out process, as is evolution, so is the universe as well.

You are right about the other point of view i.e. seeing it from 'her' the Mother's cosmic perspective. I see individual consciousness as a constrained form of cosmic consciousness like the bundle of life - a tied up form in incarnate bondage, which if we untie it a little in visions, merges with the cosmic self, better able to see itself. But this is yet another analogy.

We know dreaming and visionary experiences because we have biological brains that evolved sentient consciousness. From every practical scientific point of view it is rooted in the physical and emerges in the conscious only when we have chaotically sensitive quantum brains to generate the entanglement.

We can't just say it's all a creative dream of God or the Mother because where are their neurons or the equivalent to support their dreams? In a black cloud? On planet nine? In the center of stars or the galactic core? Outside the inside out standing in a continuum beyond all towns and countries? Then it all becomes a cypher. An answer begging to exist because the question is so huge and incomprehensible.

Now to sex and pornography. If you look at the temples of Khajuraho - the Jaggernath I think in particular - you will see both high sexual rites - Maithuna - and on the lower strata, every form of 'perversion', from bestiality to sodomy. It's all in the transgressive merry go round that sex is. Fertility and pollution are other sides of the same coin. I'm a great believer in worshiping the woman respectfully, and in reproductive sex - that is the greatest fuck is to get the soul mate pregnant with new life - our life. Vastly better than voyeuristic lust, sucking off, rear entry, or anything with another species, or one's own kith and kin. Its the pure path of sexual true love speaking. Its the glory and the life fulfillment. The Song of Songs is a great poem to sexual fertility even though it is unrequited. But still sex is naughty and transgressive. You can't decry pornography when your own religious tradition has Kali stomping on Shankar, and all those freezes admitting everything goes with consenting adults.

Krishna: Another interesting thing I want to point out is, judgements. Many questions are intrinsically judgmental. Judgements are rooted in fear, and they lead to more judgements and holding fear in your hearts. Freedom from judgement means not trying to build a dam to direct where the river flows. It is whatever it is right now, due to the multitude of desires of multitudes of beings for thousands of years. It's just nature. Death, being a fact of life, violence is a point of query for those who are bound by fear. On the other hand, if people were just fearless, they would immediately put a stop to whatever is happening in front of them. Because right now evil is effortlessly violent and making all the rules, while those who are good are weak, nice, polite and bound by rules and internal conflicts of what is right and wrong. If you upgrade yourself to God-hood, imagine upgrading yourself to a vampire, w.r.t. modern day humans. It isn't condescending, but rather being good as well as strong, and free.

It's overwhelming for me in this time and age, and to me, my identity is irrelevant. I like to think of myself as normal, because people are nowadays infatuated with becoming important. I also hope you understand, I don't follow any religious traditions, I just know. The world is full of doubts, and not everyone is intellectual, they are more driven by their desires when asking questions, and I am not the fulfiller of desires. It's not a customer satisfaction survey.

Cristo:  I realized I was the Christ one stormy night on the land on the visionary sacraments and lived it out twenty years later by going to Jerusalem and performing rites of passage to throw open the Gates of Compassion, reflower the Tree of Life and celebrate the Sacred Reunion, so I know all about this kind of feeling too. And it's real in a sense, and the key to what incarnate consciousness is about, but the avatar has a responsibility to bring about an epoch of long-term future goodness in the real world. We all do but the bigger the realization the more inscrutable the responsibility.

Krishna: You're approaching correctly, but your views are still intellectually rigid.

Cristo:  Not rigid but inquisitive. We are conversing so I am playing devil's advocate with you about the importance of understanding nature as complementing the visionary. My source experience doesn't come from intellect but from contemplation. I became involved in the visionary sacraments because they are a path to illumination that has no mantras or doctrines. Moreover they are a natural biospheric complement and completion of the existential consciousness of the human mind. Without the sacraments I would never have known the inner secrets. For me it is always a deep meditation to enter the contemplative trance simply by listening to the sounds and patterns as they come together into a conscious void into which I melt and disappear into the visions. If I try to apply intellect or even try too hard to keep a line of observation it will keep me from descending into the reverie that harbour experiences impossible in the waking world and altogether different from the equally extraordinary experiences of dreaming. Intellect is just a summing up of the innate experience.

Krishna: Imagine a tree growing, imagine flowers appearing and then flowers becoming fruits. It natural. As a part of the natural process you will see the world grow old and then change. I am part of this natural process and so is everyone. There's no planning things for me, by the mind. Don't approach truth or knowledge related to God, via your mind. You cannot write it down. Give up your desires and fears, and you'll find truth. Giving up your desires and or fears is sacrificing. With that, everyone can interpret a written religion their own way according to what they desire (subconsciously

Cristo:  Yes letting go into the universe is a key part of this.

Krishna: Everything will happen as normal, is happening as normal, has always been, everybody is doing it. I have no plans of building a religion, I want to be alone, and carry on with my life as normal. But decisions have been made, and you will see change appearing in the hearts of people as time progresses.

Cristo:  That's what I meant about the avatar, or messiah, having a responsibility to actually bring about a real improvement in the world. That's one difficult agenda to follow through with in real terms.

Krishna: I am not decrying pornography, I'm saying people don't know how to have sex. Do you love fucking, or would you want to become a woman yourself? How much do you love a woman? Fucking is not love. And the world is centered today around sex, sex is irrelevant. Love is relevant.
Cristo:  Sex is essential. It's the foundation. We all get here through sex or we wouldn't exist as conscious beings. Sexual recombination gives us all the diversity of beings on the planet. Without this, complex conscious life would never have emerged. It is what makes the lover our true complement as Shakti is to Shankar. Sex is a mystery of the very foundations of physics - as wave is to particle, so egg is to sperm. Love is the apotheosis of sex - the god and goddess within sex. We can love our parents and kin and we can love our children but the love for the lover is limitless overflowing love for an alien being.

And we can love nature, humanity and the entire universe selflessly. But the love of the lover is the holy grail of love incarnate. Sex and love are entwined and they are brought together into dynamical meaning through lust - the desire to merge with, to fertilize and be fertilized, by the complement, so that life will flourish and the passage of the generations will be fulfilled. Love and lust light up highly overlapping areas of the brain showing they are aspects of a unified process for the benefit of life.

This is one of our highest callings because it is the generator of life. Never secondary. We also have a calling as mortal sentient beings to leave the universe a better place than we arrived or otherwise our whole incarnation is wasted. Intrinsic to this is the third calling, the discovery process we each engage to become avatars of the transcendent within us.

Krishna: Give up your own desires and you'll find truth. There's no clarifying it via words.

Cristo:  Maybe it is better to harness our desires as Arjuna would harness his chariot and gird his arrows. Desires are there to lead to fulfillment. Foolish desires are a hindrance. Noble desires are our path of integrity.

Krishna: I have no plans of building a religion, I want to be alone, and carry on with my life as normal. But decisions have been made, and you will see change appearing in the hearts of people as time progresses.

Cristo:  Now here you are raising another deep question - this time about the quantum entanglement. This one is - can consciousness - in particular the enlightened consciousness of a living being alter the flow of 'karma' in the universe and in the world around us possibly for the good of an awakening world - flowering as you put it? You mentioned this of the Mother. Or is this just another illusion of Queen Maya?

Krishna: As a part of the natural process you will see the world grow old and then change. I am part of this natural process and so is everyone.Cristo:  This is one of those potentially undecidable questions. What is the source of coincidence, or of the vagaries of fate? What is it that causes a disaster to strike one place and a windfall to fall on another? Why did I get sick? Yes it was an infectious disease, but why did it strike me just when it did and why not you? In terms of physics this seems to come down to quantum uncertainty because the source of all randomness in the universe ultimately comes down to this, possibly amplified by chaotic instability.

Now when people try to examine this more closely they discover quantum entanglement. In its simplest form an atom emits two photons which have to have complementary polarization because the spin of the two orbits in the atom's transition were both zero, so the two photons have to have complimentary spin. When we sample one it turns out the other instantaneously has the complementary spin whatever orientation we pick. But the information of each on its own is random. This shows us that hidden behind the randomness can be 'spooky' connections in the entanglement that span both space and time.

But when we repeat any kind of quantum process, the distributions of the particles always settle down to the probability generated by the wave functions. We never find the laws of quantum probability violated long term. Just within the uncertainty window. This means we have no way of knowing if there are subtle mental influences on 'karma' but we do know that such influences can't become established causally or they would violate the probabilities.

Now intriguingly the brain may be using quantum entanglement to generate consciousness because the way brain wave processing is done looks very similar to quantum wave interference and making a decision looks like collapsing the wave function. Moreover, quantum hand-shaking seems to span space-time in a way which links past and future. The Wheeler delayed choice experiment shows us that changing the arrangement after a wave-particle has traversed the universe can alter the path it must have taken.

The deepest question about consciousness is whether it can anticipate the future and whether it can change the physical outcome through an act of free will. We all depend on the notion of personal conscious autonomy to do the simplest of tasks. To suggest we are just automata of our brain function is in fundamental conflict not just with our sense of personal autonomy but with accountability and the law.

So I'm just asking you to ponder what kind of universe you think we are living in. Do you think that simply by existing in a state of knowing that one can change the flow of 'karma' and the emerging history of the universe?

Krishna: This question is related to control, and doing something important. Assume everything is normal, nothing more important than the other.

Cristo:  It's not about control but accountability. With control you set the terms. With accountability the world around you does and you have a responsibility to address it. Unless we make a reality check on this we may be just adopting transcendence without it being real.

Krishna: This again, attaches importance to specific events, situations. Do not attach importance to specific events, or situations.

Cristo:  But every event is idiosyncratic. Any event can be devastating. Why does one happen to you and another to me? Are we just going to say it's all random? Then we need to understand the entanglement. Every shamanistic path asks this question. Why did it happen to me? Sometimes they conclude it's witchcraft and go to kill the perpetrator. This is a homicidal error. Sometimes they say its karma e.g. of past lives. This is a corruption of biology. Living organisms are not moral manifestations of human waywardness.

This is a very real issue of survival for everyone. Modern science ignores it and says opportunities, disease and accidents exist - get real. But the universe does one particular thing each time like the one quantum uncertainty and we don't know why or how. Does it have anything to do with consciousness, or are we just victims of fate?

Krishna: Everything is normal, that will be seeing clearly.

Cristo:  There is a Sufi saying: We are waves whose stillness is non-being. We are alive because of this, that we have no rest. Abu-Talib Kali Life is not normality. It is emergence at the edge of chaos. Everything about life is negentropic, leading to idiosyncratic diversity, including the whole biosphere capturing solar energy and ramifying to produce the diversity of all living beings over time through evolution, which is itself adventitious as well as selective. This is the very flowering of which you speak.

Krishna: Science has the implicit desire to predict and control. The knower whats to control what it already knows and has already expressed by virtue of his own potency.

Cristo:  The pursuit of knowledge is not the desire for control. Religions and commercial cultures control, science discovers. The knowledge that comes from learning about nature can be used to control, but the learning is fundamental discovery which challenges and overthrows our preconceived notions. Neither is prediction control. Prediction is not controlling the process, just following it into the future accurately as it evolves. Many processes such as chaos and quantum uncertainty remain unpredictable. Many of the most fundamental discoveries of science, especially in cosmology, are completely beyond our control, but fundamental discovery remans the key to the scientific quest.

Krishna: Ok, fine, but it's also stupid, a sign of ignorance. Giving up thinking while keeping your eyes open, that is real science.Cristo:  Yes it is really important to experience intuitively and directly and appreciate the conscious moment in being here now. This is something humans have engaged since the dawn of time and is the key to shamanism across the planet. Our oldest culture, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have pursued this in the trance dance for millennia, probably the last 150,000 years. It's part of the human condition that can be masked by modern life's mechanistic and materialistic demands and delusions.

Krishna: Knowing means grasping the events, sequences, happenings, around you, and noticing that you're the one doing it. When I say, "to know", I mean it in a much broader. Float on what you know, feel your life, do not "think and relate", just try to grasp it by your intuition.  Feel it, only notice how the universe happening! Feelings and intuitions are something apart from thinking. Do not join the dots. They will join by themselves.Cristo:  Yes that's a very good insight. That's why I say I am the wind blowing by the window.

Krishna: But you will not be able to do this, if your mind is distracted and is directed by your desires.

Cristo:  I agree that a lot of people are lost in their worldly obsessions and can't appreciate the inner meaning of existence, but intuition is a natural human faculty which we use all the time if we aren't being completely mechanistic in our outlook.

Krishna: You changing the universe, means you're considering yourself separate from the universe. That is not, hence, the question again has a sense of trying to control.

Cristo:  Our personal experience says that we have conscious volition, we can consciously decide what to do. When we do, it has a demonstrable affect on the world around us - we catch the bus, we go to the movies, as incarnate biological beings, not just conscious observers. How does this happen? What's it all about? What does it tell us about cosmology? This is critically important because some scientists would have us believe that we are just brain function and there is no real conscious volition at all.

Entanglement is beyond our control. There is no way to establish causal interactions in the entanglement. Entanglement is participatory because there are other components caught together in the wave, so the notion of control is fruitless. Local Einsteinian causality fails the test of Bell's theorem in all experiments.

Any explanation of how consciousness can have a meaningful role in an organism revolves around anticipating crises and acting to avoid fatal consequences. To do this consciousness may have to do something quite magical by anticipating circumstances about to happen completely intuitively in a way which goes way beyond causality, prediction and computation per se. Indeed the only way consciousness could have evolved is because it has survival utility over a non conscious but perfectly computational brain network.

Krishna: The main thing you need to change in your point of view is not to consider yourself separate from the universe. The moment you experience separation, as YOU AND THE UNIVERSE, you will have innumerable questions. That's the main thing. If you really trying to figure experience that. Otherwise its just intellectual conversation over a cup of tea, which is OK for science but not for religion, and you would know that too given the many experiences you had. Make your mind stop. And then you start seeing.

Cristo:  These are deep deep issues no one, religious or scientific, yet understands and I'm sure they are pivotal to understanding our own conscious dilemma. And yes all e-mail correspondence is a conversation over a cup of chai!

Hot Articles from my latest live reviews

Hot Articles from my latest live reviews at dhushara.com:

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Space, Time and Consciousness

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Humanity's Evolutionary Heritage

Culture Out of Africa

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Biocrisis

Nature, Violence, Consciousness, Sexuality and World Religion

Nature, Violence, Consciousness, Sexuality and World Religion

This article is an unveiling expose of the lethal fallacies that underlie the religious traditions which between them are followed by a majority of people on this planet, which between them constitute one of the most principal threats to the future survival of humanity.

Deus ex Machina and the Conscious Cosmos

Deus ex Machina and the Conscious Cosmos Chris King Feb 2014

The concept of “god in the machine” evokes all the paradoxes of nature and existence, from religious creationism to mechanistic atheism. We use this evocative notion to escape from the contradictions of current world views and to discover the roots of our transformative consciousness.

Space, Time and Consciousness

Space, Time and Consciousness Chris King Feb 2014

This paper presents a potential mechanism for the conscious brain to anticipate impending opportunities and threats to survival through massively parallel weak quantum measurement (MPWQM) induced by the combined effects of edge of chaos sensitivity and phase coherence sampling of brain states. It concludes that the underpinnings of this process emerged in single-celled eucaryotes.

The Cosmology of Conscious Mental States

 

The Cosmology of Conscious Mental States

We explore the diversity of mental states, and examine to what extent these are both a product of specific known brain processes and yet may access a complementary aspect of existence to the cosmology of the physical universe and its natural biosystems, potentially giving mental states an existential cosmological status. The case is made that the cosmology of mental states reflect a deeper physical principle connecting quantum entanglement with the brain wave processing evolved in higher organisms to solve the computational intractability of open environmental dilemmas, which go beyond Bayesian statistics and causal prediction, into multiple nested Schrödinger cat paradoxes, hinting at a meta-evolutionary paradigm of conscious cosmological integration.

Entheogens, Culture and the Conscious Brain

Entheogens, Culture and the Conscious Brain (27 min video) Chris King 21-9-12
A companion video to the research review Entheogens, the Conscious Brain and Existential Reality with source footage of the cultural traditions as well as the scientific discoveries.

Comments on the video:

Synapse: Thanks!  a welcome addition to the textual document! This is now among the best information available on YouTube (or more generally, in video format), to my knowledge, of the current state-of-the-art. 

Arlene: Excellent Chris! Would love you to do a doc on the politics of consciousness ... To expand upon why they have  been suppressed ... Why they pose a threat to tptb ... Also about the purpose and function of ego dissolution as it relates to planetary healing and sustainability ... Why those who  condemn psychedelics are hell bent on the manifestation of Armageddon ...

George D: Excellent video Chris. Thank you for sharing and I will be circulating it through my mailing list. Aloha

John B: Watched it last night. Excellent. The argument was clear, not to say intriguing. It's good work you do. All the best!
 

Unfolding the Visionary Path of the Tree of Life

Sacramental meditation is the most powerful complete form of religious experience.

PDF Version  

"But I, I am lord of two ways. I am master of up and down. 

I am as a man who is a new man, with new limbs and life, and the light 

of the Morning Star in his eyes. Lo! I am I! The lord of both ways. 

Thou wert lord of the one way. Now it leads thee to the sleep. Farewell ! 

So Jesus went on towards the sleep. And Mary the Mother of Sorrows 

lay down on the bed of the white moon, weary beyond any more tears. 

"And I, I am on the threshold. I am stepping across the border."

D H Lawrence "The Plumed Serpent" 

Into the Centre of the Cyclone Again

A couple of days ago, for the first time in a year and a half, because like most people, I  am habitually fearful of my mind being torn apart by visionary transcendence, I persuaded myself to imbibe a powerful whack of the very best crisp dried sacred mushrooms, as a devotional meditation, lest the passage of the years carry me unrequited at the age of sixty seven ever closer to the edge of dissolution before I have fulfilled my covenant with existence and the tree of living diversity.

As the great wave of reverie broke over me, they gave me an overflowing and integrated vision of how cosmic consciousness comes about in the universe, in one of the cleanest, and yet strongest, spiritual experiences I have had, totally restoring my sense of psychic vitality and meaning, as they have countless times in younger days, as the sheet-sail for my tortuous journey through life.

Real religious sacraments have to be able to be powerful enough agents to be able to transport us into the mysterium tremendum. They also require meditative vigil to enter deeply into the experience. I try to retreat into reflective solitude, without thought processes or internal dialogue, lying watchfully, with eyes sometimes open and sometimes closed and often half-open and half-closed as the Buddha is depicted as doing, tuning consciousness with my breathing into a resonant state of attention sensitive to the ensuing visionary miasma.

I won't go into all the incidental details of the retinal circus, the complex dynamically interlacing 3-D fibers and fractals, their rushing vortices and shrieking currents, of entering many interconnected layers of dreaming and waking reality, or even a vision of being transported to join God in heaven, with Saint Peter ushering me in on a stage decorated a little like a New Orleans carnival.

The key is the overwhelming power, truth, beauty and integrity of the experience, convincing me in its full intuitive detail, yet again, that the living sacraments contain the genuine royal blood, or sang raal, route to religious knowing, beneficial to all life. By the same connection I naturally inherit a personal responsibility to 'turn the tables' on false, fraudulent and violent traditions of religion, for the sake of life and the planetary future.

let's get to the key issue

How the Universe generates Transcendental Consciousness

Now let's get to the key issue - "How does transcendental mystery emerge from the natural universe?"

The cosmos is a complementarity, in which subjective consciousness and the objective universe complement and complete one another just as wave and particle aspects of the quantum do in physics. It is also what the Upanishads and virtually all Eastern teachings say, from Tantra to Tao. Without this cosmic complementarity, our personal experience has no meaning, or real existence, just an internal model of reality made by the brain.

Now the interesting turning inside out bit is this. To fulfill conscious realization requires a complex inversion of physical cosmology, beginning with the mandala of the symmetry-broken forces of nature, leading to a fractal quantum architecture of atoms, molecules, biogenesis and ultimately tissues and organisms through the evolutionary process. Ultimately all the forces and evolutionary processes come together in the emergence of organismic subjective consciousness in the evolution of the brain invoking all the forces in their most complicated and coherent interaction.

Only then can cosmogenesis begin to manifest subjective consciousness through the sappy holographic biochemical brain, which has evolved to make animals able to anticipate future threats to survival in the computationally intractable open environment through processes which most plausibly are happening through space-time entanglement at the quantum level thus manifesting the cosmic complementarity that set this whole thing off. There is no way this can be reduced to a purely electrochemical phenomenon or a bit based computation like a digital computer.

Now, in this process, cosmic consciousness can and does arise only through the individual subjective consciousness of the biota - i.e. the living species especially subjectively conscious animal species. There is no independent third party personality of God pulling the marionette strings, but there is a natural propensity in human consciousness for religious experience, because, although the brain has to close down the doors of perception sufficiently to enable subjective consciousness to protect organismic survival, it can't do it completely, because the brain evolved so the doors of perception were open enough to anticipate reality.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
William Blake "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

Consequently people throughout history have had a gathering sense that there is a transcendental conscious reality burgeoning up within their individual consciousness and try to talk about it in terms of deities, God, supernatural spirits and psychic influences, thus giving rise to the major world religions and in the case of Christianity, to the false deification of Jesus as transcendental demi-God in the Hellenistic tradition of Paul of Tarsus.

The reality is that God exists only in so far as we can enter into deeper more cosmic forms of subjective consciousness ourselves, in which the egotistical bundle of life becomes loosened enough so that our personal consciousness can come to reflect transcendental consciousness beginning to come alive in us. Thus, in coming to know ourselves no longer through a glass darkly, but now face to face, we are the universe coming to know itself consciously, fulfilling the cosmic becoming and completing the turning inside out.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: 

now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known (1 Corinth 13)

Now, because life is immortal, or at least perennial in the intermediate term, transcendental consciousness is not confined to the mortality of any single individual, but can become manifest in each and every conscious being, in so far as we can enter into the grail state. Moreover transcendental consciousness may in principle be eternal as a phenomenon extending in space-time in the same sense that the envelope of space-time is eternal because it extends throughout all time. It may also have a cumulative capacity to become aware of itself through the biota over long epochs. We don't yet know what the implications of this possibility might be.

The source of transcendental consciousness lies in the biota. Only the biota possess the resonant complexity to be the location of "God consciousness" and it is to the living diversity of the biota and the passage of the generations of humanity we need to give our creative devotion and protection. This is not merely a form of animism, seeing God in natural phenomena, but the reverse, natural phenomena giving rise to transcendental consciousness in evolution.

Casting Out False Gods and Pagan Demi-Gods

However we need to be very clear. There is no God in the skies, in the centre of stars, in black holes, or dark wastes of the universe. The source, and the only source, of transcendental consciousness, or any form of consciousness, natural, omniscient or omnipotent lies in the biota, because only the biota have the physical complexity and sensitivity to support subjective consciousness. God cannot come alive or become conscious more than we can come alive and be conscious ourselves, in our transcendental experience, by bringing about a beneficent age of conscious enlightenment together. To fulfill our existential quest and our personal responsibility to our incarnation, we each need to put away childish 'things', and give our love and devotion to replenishing the generations of the Earth's unfolding conscious life process.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: 

but when I became a man, I put away childish things (1 Corinth 13)

Although Jesus was a brilliant visionary genius, and his teachings, especially in sayings such as those in the Gospel of Thomas, are inspired, worshiping Jesus as the crucified Lord and savior, the only begotten Son sacrificed by God to save us from sin, who will return to judge and condemn the sinful world, is a tragic fallacy that has led to martyrdom, Crusade and Inquisition, as well as gross religious fraud. The Christian notion of brotherly, or selfless, love is not an adequate rationalization to justify the root fallacy of turning Jesus into a pagan demi-God dripping blood on every church altar, amid a utopian end of days deleterious to our planet's living future.

Because the central core is a fallacy, prayers are doomed to be ineffectual, except in so far as they are a form of meditation, which helps individuals come closer to the centre of the cyclone of transcendental consciousness. Many people engage prayer as an internal conversation with an imagined supernatural personality. This serves to reinforce a feeling of safety, through belief in an imagined moral deity who watches us unseen, but this is far from actual spiritual realization.

Charismatic Christian visions and speaking in tongues are likewise founded on the same root fallacy - dependence on the untrue notion that salvation comes, and can come, only through the savior, rather than by personal realization, obstructing the capacity for transcendental consciousness. Ever since Athanasius banned the gnostic gospels to establish the Catholic canon, with the exception of a few Christian mystics, many of whom, like Marguerite Porete have been burned at the stake, Christianity has been truncated at the neck.

Many of the key questions concerning transcendence have yet to be tested in the current era. We haven't unraveled the full nature of transcendental consciousness, at this point in time, so discovering to what extent it can 'supernaturally' or 'quantum physically' anticipate the future, or influence future events is an ongoing research process, we are all participating in and can only explore through the transcendental condition.

Traditional religions, rather than fulfilling the unfolding of transcendence, become oppressive and sometimes diabolical social forces of the rule of civic order, empowering domination over other cultures, by asserting moral paradigms which aid internal cooperation to achieve utopian dominion over other cultures and societies. This deceit hijacks the source process transcendence, the priesthood claiming to be the guardians of it, at the same time as repressing it  Prophets from Zechariah to Jesus, not to mention Baha'ullah have all felt the violence of the established order.

This is a totalitarian social process, driven not by prophetic consciousness, or visionary experience, but historically by the established religious order, imposing patterns of belief in a moral deity, a paradigm of religious and social dominion, and repressive social attitudes towards women and female reproductive choice, for male cultural and reproductive ends.

The Entheogenic Destiny of Sacramental Religion

Into this unholy situation enters an exotic disrupting influence to the rule of theological order, in the form of the entheogenic species, particularly those of the alien New World, which every culture who has discovered them has given sacred and revered status to, despite many being violent warrior cultures. These raised a unique challenge to the sanguine Christian sacramental tradition and so were promptly repressed by the Conquistadors as diabolical practices. The use of sacred mushrooms became a hidden and carefully guarded Mazatec secret which only came to light in 1953 due to the explorations of the ethno-mycologist banker Gordon Wasson. "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. … 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."

  Maria Sabina during a sacred mushroom velada.

“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 am a spirit woman, says
I am a crying woman, says
I am Jesus Christ, says ...
I'm the heart of the virgin Mary.”

Eventually Wasson was introduced to Maria Sabina who had had a vision that he would come and to let him partake. The sacred mushroom, whose ‪Nahuatl‬ title was teonanacatl or 'flesh of the gods', was hailed by Wasson as "the divine mushroom of immortality", calling it "Ecstasy!" after Greek ekstasis - flight of the soul from the body. "Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles, until you feel that you will never recover your equilibrium", likening its effects to Pentecost, and noting himself its authentic nature as a natural successor to the Eucharist: "By comparison with the mushroom, the Element in the Christian agape seems pallid. The mushroom holds the key to a mystical union with God, whereas only rare souls can attain similar ecstasy and divine communion by intensive contemplation of the miracle of the Mass."

Reaction to the release of the secret was swift. Maria Sabina's house was burned to the ground and one of her sons was killed. Within a few days, a Mexican botanist had phoned the CIA to confirm Wassons find, and an agent was dispatched as a mole on Wasson's return trip, demonstrating the Western establishment's proactively malign attitude. By 1966 psilocybin had become a schedule I prohibited drug, swept along by social anxiety about LSD use, and scientific research became effectively stalled for decades.

Fortunately, the Earth has been blessed with some very potent and yet beneficent living sacraments. Psilocybin found in sacred mushrooms, for example, has an active dose a thousand times smaller than the mean lethal dose, no confirmed evidence of long term harm, and no verifiable tendency towards addiction. Alcohol by contrast, along with heroin, methamphetamine and paracetamol, has a mean lethal dose only some ten times higher than the active dose.

The sacred mushroom is not a drug, but a living sacrament, like the food species on which we depend for our survival, which contain biodynamic molecules conducive to life. The active agent is trustworthy since it is genetically produced in pure form by suitable species of psilocybe.

  Maria Sabina, who lived to the ripe old age of 91, freely ate sacred mushrooms as a young child with no ill effects:

"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. I saw near me within reach of my hand several mushrooms. 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. …  I felt as if everything that surrounded me was god. 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" (Estrada A. 1981 Maria Sabina, Her Life and Chants 39-40).

Because evolution explores the "phase space" of possibilities, it is virtually inevitable that the biosphere will include species containing agents that will modulate the sappy biochemical brain in just such a way as to open the doors of perception (for example as serotonin 2A receptor agonist neurotransmitter analogues), so that our organismic individual 'ego' consciousness finds itself facing the overwhelming flood tide of a reality that brings all our experiences, from dream, memory and reflection into one kaleidoscopic vision of the totality - be it heaven or hell, depending on how positively or negatively we engage the experience at the time.  Even people in terminal conditions, who might be anxious or have a negative mind set, confirm the beneficial effect of being given access to the psychic resolution such agents can provide in carefully undertaken research studies.

Christianity is a sacramental religion whose holy communion is sine qua non founded on eating the flesh and drinking the blood, the soma and sangre of the sacrificed redeemer. This cannibalistic sacrament is a false sacrament because God sacrificing his only begotten Son is a false belief. The bread and wine is at worst a gruesome enactment of neolithic blood sacrifice and at best is no more effective spiritually than the mildest alcoholic tipple. The true destiny of the Christian tradition, as a sacramental tradition, thus lies paradoxically and prophetically in the living sacraments of the Tree of Life noted in the closing verses of Revelation.

In taking a long term view, one could validly accept that Jesus was merely a forerunner of what I am proactively saying now as 'messiah guardian' of the Tree of Life and that the sacramental nature of Christianity is just a forerunner of the perennial sacramental devotional path protecting the way of the tree of living diversity in the passage of the generations. Jesus was inspired, but before the time of the planetary unveiling we have witnessed in our scientific coming of age and the dire global impacts of humanity across the face of the Earth, so his teachings are brilliant foresights, but distorted by the paranoia of confrontation and violence of the Roman occupation.

Christianity in turn, having been crafted in contradiction to Jesus' teachings by church fathers with their own fraudulent agendas, is struggling to be a sacramental guardian of the end of days, based on endlessly reliving the crucifixion, rather than providing an authentic path to transcendental consciousness. Both Jesus and Christianity are stage rehearsals for the unveiling, confessedly seen through a glass darkly before the advent of the unveiling of planetary consciousness in our pivotal time and age, where we have discovered the nature of the human genome, genetic evolution, molecular biology, the quantum forces of nature, and are knocking on the threshold of our cosmological origins and how the brain generates subjective consciousness.

To turn this around in positive terms, bringing the Western religious tradition into consonance with the Tree of Life is both its natural and prophetic destiny, and its redemption, in one of the oldest, most beautiful, cultural traditions, from the Sabbatical Genesis and the Garden of Eden, to the Song of Songs, becoming the genuine cultural tradition of our coming of age in the universe.

Notice the profound contradiction between the ignorant paranoid reaction of our so-called enlightened democratic Western society, with its nominal protections of civil liberties, which has banned sacred mushrooms and the other natural entheogens, despite their manifest safety, particularly when partaken in a protective environment, confirmed by two to three thousand years of sacred use by human cultures. It is most telling that they have been banned without any real evidence of harm, or danger, for the very reason that they do open the doors of perception and thus threaten the social order of Western Christian and material consumer culture.

It is then little wonder, although a devastating commentary on the spiritual fragility of Western society that we have sought to ban these genuine agents of enlightenment with severe penalties from long imprisonment even to execution, in a futile attempt to repress them. Penalties comparable to Deuteronomy's dire punishments for adultery, parental disobedience, or worshiping strange gods, rather than a scientifically and religiously tested openness to incorporate them into our traditional religious life. Society is prepared to continue to do this despite the fact that in all experiments where conventional non drug-taking people are given the opportunity to experience these agents, they consistently claim to have had genuine religious spiritual experiences which remain of beneficial significance and meaning to their lives years later.

 Union Vegetale ceremony

Of course the road to sacramental religion is not an easy one. Many people would rather some other intrepid traveler would face the challenge of their sensory experience being razzled by kaleidoscopic visions and their rational edifice being unraveled by the onslaught of unfamiliar and unspeakable mysteries. This is aptly why those who seek an ordered comforting world, where everything seems to make sense, even if it is a fraudulent doctrine, will place their faith in the authority of a religion where they must follow a set of prescriptive beliefs and practices and obey the instructions of the clergy.

Nevertheless there are clear pointers and precedents for genuine sacramental religion having a real place in the current world in the religious use of peyote, ayahuasca and sacred mushrooms. The Native American Church has used peyote in this way and the Union Vegetale in the Amazon has an ongoing tradition of sacramental visionary use of ayahuasca, both sometimes in a quasi-Christian context, and the use of sacred mushrooms continues, both among scattered Mexican peoples, and young seekers of entheogenic experience in the developed world, despite, or even because of, the allure and forbidden fruit curiosity, over their dire taboos.

Authentic Apocalypse and the Tree of Life

Throughout history some individuals have always been more able to enter the visionary portal than others, because their genes have predisposed their brain chemistry to be closer to the edge of 'sanity'. Humans vary up to a 100-fold for instance in their monoamine oxidase activity, profoundly affecting their serotonin metabolism. William Blake is a person who was gifted with a natural tendency to visionary experience, a tendency shared by many prophets, sages and shamans throughout history.

 The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun 
William Blake.

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; 
a woman clothed with the sun, 

and the moon under her feet, and upon her head 
a crown of twelve stars:
And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, 
and pained to be delivered.
And there appeared another wonder in heaven; 
and behold a great red dragon, 

having seven heads and ten horns, 
and seven crowns upon his heads (Rev 12).

However many of these visionary and prophetic experiences, sometimes driven by starvation, sensory deprivation, self-abuse, long desert vigils, or even borderline psychosis, far from being more authentic manifestations of higher consciousness, are often stereotyped, limited and paranoid visions of cosmic conflict and violence amid seeing the "light of God" or a vision of the "holy one". Sometimes these are perceived prophetically as a vision of the future with God a figure white hair, riding on chariots of fire, or the vengeful Lord, condemning a third of the stars and trees and a third of all life on the face of the Earth, to extinction in a final war between dark and light.

This is no redemption at all, but leads towards a tragic outcome, in which major world cultures are deleteriously positioned to cause an apocalyptic hard-landing for humanity, substantially through desert-loving scorched-earth religious attitudes, which invoke the rape of the planet as an act of God and are incapable of being any form of antidote to the damage caused by materialistic venture-capital exploitation of the worlds natural, genetic and non-renewable resources and living habitats through a male-dominated short term investment blind to long-term sustainability.

Apocalypse is real because human consciousness has a genetic propensity for religious experience through the doors of perception being leaky enough to let in the light of the unveiling, but we are completely ill-equipped to deal constructively with the situation we find ourselves in, leading to planetary damage and the clash of the cultures.

The organic result creeping up on us is that the visionary species do have the power to give us a remarkably safe journey, so we can actually come to discover how this whole cosmic emergence actually works. Far from being a superficial substitute for hard-earned spiritual devotion, by comparison with 'genuine' experiences of the devoted, they show us our own cosmic nature coming up to meet us, which is at once the universe's cosmic consciousness coming to realize itself too.

There is no god, but religious experience is real and integral to how both conscious existence and the physical universe become a fully evolved sentient cosmology.  Living sacraments are conduits to the transcendental capacities of the doors of perception, so become the natural sacraments for genuine sacramental religion.

At the centre of the cyclone is the acid test - helping to bring about a change in our conscious perspective, in which we can come to understand that the highest priority in our spiritual and life quest is preserving the fertility of the living planet, so that the passage of the generations can continue to prosper, and so that our offspring and their offspring can continue to live in peace and plenty in the planetary biosphere. A biosphere which would be paradise, given the knowledge we have gained by the third millennium, were we not hell bent, through our own folly and lack of foresight, to seriously compromise the fecundity of the planet through ill-conceived human impact on the Earth's living diversity and hence undermine the security of our own future as a species.

Tree of Life - The central enigma of the religious universe

This is the Path of the Tree of Life, which is at once the immortal tree of evolution of the diversity of life, and the fabled spiritual Tree of Life, hidden since the foundation of the world in the Fall from Eden, which returns in the apocalyptic unveiling, to sustain us spiritually with its sacred fruit. So, in the path of the Tree of Life, lies both the natural destiny of religion and the spiritual fulfillment of the natural universe.