Genesis of Eden
This is my hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy from a personal point of view. It is a view of the apocalyptic unveiling seen through my life history and the greater crisis of diversity. It may be a yin experience for those expecting the rapture of cosmic rupture, but you can't always get what you want, sometimes just what you need. A verdant climacteric is sufficient unto the day.
Under the skin of the Existential Dilemma
We live from birth to death conscious sentient beings. All our
experiences of reality, indeed the only means by which we are
aware of existence or the universe at all, is through our subjective
experience. Alongside this awesome mystery, the physical world
view although, common sense and everyday common ground, is more
remote and indirect, a story conscious beings tell about the reality
we share, not the veridicial actual reality of subjective experience.
I will try to give you a running account of the universe as it
manifests itself to me. Some aspects of this may seem unusual,
almost too alive, but everything is bound to fall into place in
the end.
Although we are intimately familiar with the idea that the physical world exists as a common material framework, in which we bleed of cut and pass out if knocked on the head, this framework is accessed only through our conscious experience. Without subjective experience we would not know there was an objective physical world or even that we existed at all. When we move to the finer details of the scientific description, such as molecules and photons, we have to deal with entities which can no longer be experienced directly through the senses, but can only be understood indirectly through experimental phenomena such as absorption spectra, and complex theoretical descriptions which come close to becoming articles of belief in the manner of religious faith. Nevertheless we still ultimately validate this description consciously and subjectively by checking our experimental apparatus and by personally validating it through our reading and exchange of ideas.
Science differs from religion in two important ways. Firstly it is sceptical, so it tests its theories, secondly its description is immensely self-consistent in all its intricacies. As mythological descriptions go, it is fabulously imaginative, utterly ornate and remains quite mysterious in its foundations in wave-particle duality. However science has one Achilles heel. Because it deals only with objective reality, it has no means to come to terms with the subjective experience which is the foundation of our existence.
This is the so-called 'hard problem' in consciousness research - the fact that subjective experience is simply too qualitatively different from the objective attributes of the physical world description, and in particular one's brain state, to be able to be described in physical terms. No model of brain function, or objective brain state, however exotic, can be equated with the subjective experience of knowing. Many scientific and philosophical descriptions of reality ignore subjective consciousness, identify it with brain function, or assign it to a passive epiphenomenal role, reflecting but not acting upon, our brain dynamics. This picture is made comfortable and consistent for the mechanistically-minded by assuming that the subjective impression of free-will is an illusion and that we are de facto automata. However, denying the 'principle of intent' implicit in free-will fells in one swoop our entire social edifice of accountability for our actions under the law.
Notice there is a deep contradiction here, which may be the key to the whole enigma - the conscious observer can describe the world but the world cannot describe the conscious observer. Somehow subjective consciousness is fundamental to objective reality. This is something that is hard for us to realize, now that we have discovered through science how fragile and ephemeral life is on the scale of the violent energies of the universe as a whole. Just the temporary quirk of an unstable molecular process on an out of the way planet dwarfed to insignificance and seared to extinction by the action on even the smallest star. This perspective however is quite misleading. There is a basic respect in which the human brain has a cosmological significance and that is in terms of interactive quantum complexity.
In a sense the human brain is the most elaborate and synergistic quantum interaction in the known universe. An interaction resulting ultimately from the cosmological symmetry-breaking into the four wave-particle forces (electromagnetism, gravity and two nuclear forces) as the primordial comic inflationary phase collapsed in a shower of hot particles. It is the pinnacle of supra-molecular aggregation to form a single interacting dynamical system. The brain's quantum-chaotic properties may be central to its capacity to evoke subjective consciousness. Now it is in this sense that the brain may be manifesting a deep cosmological principle out of which the subjective state emerges as a dual aspect to objective reality. This is not a separated Cartesian dualism, but a deep, intimate complementarity, similar to wave-particle duality.
What would it mean to our understanding of the universe, if our subjective impression of free-will - that we can actually make a conscious decision which effects the physical world - is actually correct? If we can consciously influence the course of the physical universe, even by so menial an act as flexing a muscle, where can we draw the line with such 'psychokinesis'? Would the universe still merely be the concatenation of mechanical determinism and blind randomness - the nihilistic abyss of randomness and heat-death that Bertrand Russell lamented? Or is it perhaps less random, more chaotic and more alive than the mechanistic scenario would have us believe? Does reality somehow manifest in a unique way to each of us, yet interconnected in a greater web in our collective interaction, so as to give our lives active meaning and a real capacity to participate creatively and formatively in the watersheds of history? Let's see what this might mean ...
Incarnational Initiations
Each of us has experiences stretching back to early childhood,
some of us also may claim to have pre-natal experiences or even
knowledge of past lives, but we will postpone these more exotic
possibilities for later enticement. I don't remember being born,
but I can recall going to be weighed and checked as an infant
and everyone being so big and hairy, they were grotesque giants.
I can also recall things which came from out of the continuum. I pricked my finger, the blood spurted. I was told with great gravity by my small playmates that this was an example of 'sin'. If you have done something wrong, you may have ill-fortune and prick yourself to the quick, as in the 13th fairy's curse, and as I discovered much later in the ancient Indian law of karma. My parents denied that sin was any such thing, but the awareness of cosmic feedback was sewn in my mind.
Destiny can appear to shape one's life in unforeseen ways, sometimes in dreams. One was a dream in which I was stuck with poison barbs in my hands. My flesh melting like orange jelly. I was dying in the searing sun, lying arms spread-eagled in a cruciform. I'm no flagellant. It was not a religious dream of Christ, it was me myself there wasting away - "My heart melts like wax". I was deep in the last throes of death. Morning was an uncanny reprieve - a second life.
A very disquieting intense nightmare foretold the death of nature, long before I realized anything about biodiversity. It was the uncanny intensity of the dream, the lion looking at me with utterly disapproving, sad eyes that know I am one of the genocide species. The dry grass. The hawk crying above in echo of this awful truth. They both know. We all know. I slunk away to join a queue of my fellow humans in bondage underground on a dark polluted factory floor.
Some causal influences later become pivotal to the very meaning of existence. My father and older brother were both doctors, 'therapeutae' if you will. I felt being able to cure illness, especially the 'physician healing himself', was something no one could afford to be without. However my father was also a scientist who wanted to understand the ultimate workings of the universe and particularly loved mathematics. He spent a few evenings showing me the mysteries of calculus so he could understand them himself. The quiet joy with which explained these passages made shivers run up my spine. I felt so good I could hardly bring myself to listen to what he was saying. What started out as his two pages of handwritten notes became an accidental life career.
I left school early for university a year early and consequently omitted to take biology and missing out once and for all on the prospect of a medical degree I became funnelled instead into the physical sciences, and finally by reductio ad absurdum, mathematics. Ever since, I have been trying to stitch together the frayed edges of this biological abyss using mathematics as a linguistic 'keyboard' to fathom the symphony of nature. To cope with the new environment of university in the capital I discarded my unusual childhood name Kester for my better known birth name of Chris - an alien name because of its Christian connotations. The name stuck irreversibly.
Just as I graduated, I met an exceptionally wise and graceful American girl, the ephemeral 'beat generation love' who speaks like silence, and fell irresistibly in love. The first meeting happened against all odds, because the phone number had been changed and I caught her pater there by chance on a Sunday. The first week, many strange things happened. We became lost in the hills above the capital. We were nearly swept away by a 20 foot tidal wave while standing on a long breakwater. For a second we were hundreds of yards out in the ocean standing waist deep in an oceanic torrent. Five weeks later we were married.
My partner came from an unusual quaker family who had left the US to avoid the perils of nuclear confrontation.The marriage document was a beautiful quaker one signed by everyone present. It still lies rolled up on the ship's cabinet, and we remain legally married and a very close-knit extended family, despite long ago moving on to other partners. The first three years were an idyll of two hearts entwined on European hiking tours, long canal voyages, the awe and mystery of fertility - a charming baby daughter while studying mathematics in England.
We lived on a narrow boat named Taniwha the mythical Maori leviathan and plied the locks, tunnels, aqueducts and dock-side pubs of England's ancient canal system. On one of the quiet days on the canal boat, I experienced my first pre-cognitive dream, after reading J W Dunne's "An Experiment with Time". It was doubly powerful because it was a repeated nightmare that I was being stung and I spoke about it early in the morning, a good hour before it came true as I was painfully stung wide awake. This experience set a fundamental challenge to the precept of mechanism. If I can dream about this beforehand some aspect of reality is already partially formed. The die may not be cast but it is at least partially so in a quantum sense. It's no use taking the line that we patch together such correspondences by ignoring the many negative cases and that the whole phenomenon is chance probabilities. The nature of randomness remains occult in quantum terms anyway. Such experiences have happened too often in my life since and Dunne himself used a double-blind.
Almost immediately I reached the level of graduate maths I began to get a passion for biology, particularly the burgeoning field of molecular biology. It was as if the subject area I had failed to take in missing my chance to be a therapeutic was working in me to compensate.
On our return to 'god's own' country Aotearoa we joined with a circle of acquaintances and purchased together a stunning peninsula overlooked by the mountain which gave our country its original name 'land-of-the-long-white-cloud'. Ever since, we have spent the tumbling years living there on and off, backs straining to keep the access road open and to provide adequate food, arguing spiritedly and sometimes devastatingly over the future of the land and watching many of our children grow up in a community rooted in the wilderness and a personal relationship with the land, as gather-hunter societies have done since time immemorial.
There are many powerful experiences have happened on this land. Every person is touched by its gnarled wind-swept beauty. Somehow we have all been possessed by this spirit even in our sometimes troubled relations. When we threw the I Ching over the meeting house we built together it said "preponderance of the great, the ridge pole sags to the breaking point", so we returned to the burned forest, and collected one twisted Totara to form the centre pole. A creeper had shaped it into a buttock-like spiral and a chance branch between the upper fork cut off to become a veritable penis. The I Ching very auspiciously came out "wooing" and so our centre pole is genuinely our fertility pole - the wooing post.
Some people will find it preposterous to throw a 'chance' reading to seek an oracle of some future event, but this is a tradition which spans all culture and raises deep questions about the nature of randomness and ultimately the connections underlying quantum reality. In undecided matters the ancient Jews also had an oracle to declare divine judgement called the urim and thummim. The philosophy behind the Ching is that chance, nature and consciousness are three basic manifestations of the cosmic creative principle underlying the Tao or Way of complementation between Yin and Yang the female and male principles. Just as evolution is transformed by mutational change, so consciousness may be transformed by chaotic instabilities, both sourcing in the apparent 'randomness' of quantum uncertainty. Likewise a coin toss. So all these three could be manifestations of quantum non-locality. We will chase this shadow further.
To live with the land both as a social community with no boundaries, and with the ongoing process of nature is a deepening life-long journey. Many of my most puzzling shamanistic experiences have taken place here.
Athirat and Anath
My marriage had come with another less formal but heavily portentous
contract assented to in private under the pervasive influence
of my father-in-law, which ran uncannily true to the rites of
Ishtar: "I will marry you so long as I have the right to
have lovers as I choose". Being head-over-heels in love,
I was in no state to refuse.
I now came to experience a situation which has many peculiar analogies to Adam in Eve and Lillith, to El in Anath and Athirat, to Abraham in Sarah and Hagar, and even to Jesus in Mary and Martha. It was a common custom among Old Testament Jews to take a Jewish wife and have also a Gentile concubine, both options covered, so to speak. It's a cliche that every man wants to spread his wild oats and that the sixties and seventies were times when our hair hung down, but this was a happening which took me by surprise from alien territory. It was contrary to my conservative upbringing and to my natural shyness as an introverted outsider and maternal only-child.
The Ishtar contract came to maturity. My partner fell in love with my closest friend and co-founder of our wilderness community. I was inexperienced and became dependent and unstable, alternately anxious and devoted and argumentative and threatening. I was a virgin unto by wife, while she had enjoyed many strange affairs. Eventually things broke down in fear and a desperate unintentional death threat. I was banished by the in-laws, just as I coincidentally struck up my first extra-marital relationship. That would have probably been the end of the marriage if the patriarch had not consorted with the princess - aha the Ishtar connection realized!. Which is better, a paranoid partner or a perverted patriarch? In this cut the partner came up trumps. I scraped back into tentative acceptance, a sanctuary from a darker fate. After a short separation, the three of us set up as a menage-a-trois to spend a year together under the same roof.
I became more confident sexually and we began a rather crazy existence as an extended family of two women, one man and two small children. All the adult parties held court to other relationships while keeping home together, often partying quietly in the evenings with our loves of the day. We had sexual trysts with many of our friends. For a short period my wife and I came together again as a nuclear couple. She plaintively said she wanted just to be Mrs. King again, but her two heady affairs over the summer and my compensating discovery of a new partner on my part drove us back into a second longer-lasting menage and another child with my new namesake.
This transitional state, Kazantzakis's crucifixion dream of Jesus, Mary and Martha, continued for four or five years. Never once did the two women argue, although I had my impetuous spats with both of them. There was an unremitting air of civility and frank cooperation between the two mothers. This situation is quite different from a man having a clandestine affair, where it is a case of separate worlds where the twain (hopefully) never meet. The open dynamics are beyond the male's control unless he is a despot. It all comes down to the queenly or filial grace of the 'first wife' whether polygyny is bliss or forty miles of bad road, whatever she may actually feel about the situation. It is essential for women in a polygynous 'marriage' to be willing to embrace living together, otherwise the situation will lead to resentment or deceit. The hopes and sexual designs of the male are secondary.
Our house became well-known for its libertarian tradition. We all slept together in a triple bed, often along with our small children. We had another more discrete room for private love-making. We also had a meditation room with a huge twelve-foot bed for occasional love-trysts with our friends, or for evenings of psychic adventure. There was never sex for sex's sake, no hard core sex, nor any with strangers, just the 'love is all you need' ethic, making 'love not war' even though anarchy may rule in the end.
Somewhere in this too-ing and fro-ing the partners spent some time in the wilderness while I remained at work. In a flash I had my first and most uncanny lucid dream while trying to look at my hands as I dreamed. My experience was split in three parallel strands: One was rushing upwards with an ever-accelerating velocity - flying become the unbearable lightness of being. The second was an intense lucid dream, lost on a brilliant promenade with the sea spray hitting my shirt. I marvelled at being able to sense every single droplet, but I was anguished, lost in the other, with no way back to earth. A woman approached and I rushed to her and grabbing her by the shoulders, stared deep into her dilated, dark eyes asking "Where is the way back?" She just shook her head and smiled the Giaconda's smile. The third strand was an insane sensation bumping gently on the ceiling watching my body in the bed below, realizing in contrast that everything was just fine down there. I became possessed by the vision. I will never find my way back from this reality. It has shattered the narrow aqueduct of day and night.
It's not so easy keeping relations with two
'free' partners either of whom at any time may fall in love with
their current fancy and find it much more endearing to set up
a new private nest, possibly taking some of 'our' offspring along
with them. It's one thing to be Abraham with a clear wife Sarai
and her servant concubine Hagar, or a polygamous patriarch of
the male reproductive imperative who can erect flaming barricades
to surround ten thousand nubile virgins. It is something different
again to be the mortal spouse of two 'sister goddesses', trying
endlessly to please, appease, protest, or crow at the break of
day like the little red rooster. Things remained light-hearted
as long as it was party-party, but when romance became serious,
the old insecurity, mistrust and tensions would emerge.
In the end the whole situation came apart in one sweeping gesture of poetic irony. I had an unrequited passion to wander through the East and to discover its mysteries of enlightenment which had never been sated by hiking tours in Europe or brief air stops in Isfahan, Katmandu and Phom Penh. I finally got my first sabbatical leave, and having set up facilities for the partners in our chaotic threesome on the land, I set off alone for South East Asia and India, kissing the partners and kids goodbye at the dusty local bus-stop. Both partners promptly found other companions and I was left doubly alone, travelling from hotel to hotel through the bowels of Asia.
Truth and Consequences
The evolutionary game-theoretic facts of life are that, while
everyone expects the ideal of faithfulness, adultery is endemic
to human society. The 'silent electorate' are busy having clandestine
affairs, or going from one partner to another in a serial journey
of convenience. Dishonesty comes from not being able to tell a
partner about a sexual relationship, because it will cause an
irresolvable personal crisis. I much prefer the ideal of honesty
and cooperation.
In mammals and colonising birds, the principle barrier to the natural male reproductive tendency to polygyny appears to be reproductive resource competition between females. This results in overt monogamy, with frequent clandestine adultery on the part of both sexes. In birds and humans which are both overtly monogamous, a full twenty percent of offspring are not the children of the ostensible father, because of covert female infidelity to optimize both genes and family support, cooperating with clandestine male sowing of wild seed. This is the source of the fear and sexual violence against female indfidelity of the patriarchs.
Polygynous partnership is a cliche of the chauvinistic power structure of patriarchal societies, such as those of Islam, however the labrys cuts both ways - the tables are turned if the family ethic is a democracy in which females are in the majority. This sometimes happens too in a patriarchal society because of the mutual support the women provide one another. In the polyandry of Tibet a woman marries all the brothers of the husband, who have to wait their occasional turn for a conjugal visit. Brothers probably have enough common vested interest to make this work, particularly in the tough climate of Tibet, but most people, male and female alike, prefer a partner all to themselves 'to have and to hold' and resent sharing them in a variety of ways. Sexual jealousy is a very natural defence, but it can be overcome if people decide by free choice they can achieve more by cooperating honestly.
After travelling through the East and West, I drifted into a third 'Mary and Martha trope' which lasted for a full fifteen years on and off. At first we all lived together in the country, but there was never the same degree of acceptance of the women for one another that had blessed the previous relationships. We accomodated to a situation where one partner lived in the city and one in the country and I would commute between, working in the city and raising children in the folksy country environment.
I have always been committed to my children. Children are the living manifestation of gender and sexuality. They are the immortal ongoing process of life, which has brought each of us in an unbroken web all the way from when life first began 3800 million years ago. Sexual death is the deepest act of genetic altruism - to communicate only half our genetic identity in symbiosis with the loved one. Cloning by comparison is mechanistic hubris. Homosexual love, however personally fulfilling, is a vine without stamens and anthers.
In reproduction, sex gains its biological
fulfillment. In the endless variation of sex, the immortal web
of life continues. Tantra does not just worship the sexual act
but the immortal path. As individuals, we have some three score
years and ten, but as evolutionary beings, as the germ line, we
are as old as life itself. We should cherish our offspring and
care for them with sacred devotion and educate them dispassionately
with living wisdom as well as analytic knowledge. Not to clutter
the world with humans is essential, but it is equally important
to ensure those which live on know peace and love, and enjoy as
abundant good health as our medical arts can provide. I have always
loved my children with commitment and devotion and treated them
as equals and as cherished friends even when the going is tough.
They in turn become true beings.
The world of ideas, discovery and vision is also a great immortalizing endowment. We are culturally creative in amazing transformative ways which transcend genetic procreation. This very communication contains an immortal vision of life, as infectious as a living organism, but respect for our biological nature is the first step to respecting nature as a whole.
The city-country split was a strangely divided life. I used to feel I was only my real self when I passed through the anonymous country town that lay half-way from one life to the other in the middle of the night. Gradually our entwined relationships moved from reluctant toleration to resentment, because however much I tried to care for both partners, they were reluctant co-travellers. The situation became territorial and painful.
The progenitive situation became a telling watershed. I arrived from the country one Sunday night to be told by my city partner she was accidentally pregnant, after confidently pursuing the rhythm method to a two-day nemesis in a gynecological awareness initiative. When I suggested we should all talk together about the future, she initiated a precipitate termination with her women friends early next morning to avoid any hint of extended-family entanglement. When my country partner, from our previous partnership, with whom I already had a child, then became intentionally pregnant and came to have a second birth in our communal city house, the die became cast. We were 'not supposed' to make love for territorial reasons, even though we we were having a child together. The birth nearly became compromised by the divided loyalties, causing righteous outrage. We split up shortly after. I stayed true to the partner with whom I had fathered children.
After a few years, the former 'city' partner and I again began a more casual relationship which smouldered on for several more years. I'm very constant for a chaos child. The flame of old affection dies hard. Its not that I was being unfaithful by continuing to partner with a companion I had already been living with for some ten years in an open relationship, but she had rejected the situation and I had committed myself to the existing family. Given the choice of continual tension and a clandestine peace, I chose peace. For several years this continued quietly, as clandestine sexual 'love' affairs often do. But it compromised the 'casual' relationship to protect the ongoing 'family' relationship. This is the paradox of covert adultery throughout human and avian society.
A Moth to the Flame of Enlightenment
For a noble savage to find one's roots, it is essential to wander
from culture to culture, to leave behind the heritage of your
childhood, and to merge with the essence of humanity. One needs
to be able to be as much at home with the Shipibo, the Lisu, and
the Tibetans, to be able to live in Jakarta, Lima or New York.
Such a yearning is especially strong in one who hails from a sequestered
antipodean colonial outpost. You feel an urge and at the same
time an incompleteness.
From the Buddhist temples of South East Asia I travelled to Nepal and then to India where I wandered as a sadhu, learned to accept leprous beggars naturally as my friends, followed the sacred Ganga, the divine plant of Shiva, from its sources in the Himalayan foothills to ancient cities such as Varanasi. India was full of lessons and psychic experiences. When I had my fortune told, it was said that I was destined to be a very great man, but somehow I had gone right off the beam. Hold your breath!
The free-wheeling condition, when you travel alone is very mysterious and pregnant. By erasing your personal history and throwing yourself on the winds of fate, all manner of surprising things happen. A given day you wake up you simply have no idea where you will be at the end of it. You need to keep an eye over your shoulder. Live like a jaguar. It's a major learning experience how to get the knack of the accidental, to plan for nothing and find the unexpectable. There is also a major component of risk. You may find yourself locked in a strange house, or mugged, but you may also discover treasures of existence.
In Varanasi, I was besieged with rickshaw drivers. I took a very hard and careful look at them all, and struck up a close personal friendship with one of them because of his urgent sincerity. He led me into a labyrinthine community down on the Ghats where families had lived for centuries. People of great character and heart. Varanasi temporarily took over my life. I lived in a traditional Indian house and smoked opium ghoulies each evening on the roof with the proprietor as a courtesy, a wrestler in fine condition. We all slept on the roof. I would go for dinner with the local boat-builder. Sometimes on the hot nights I would lock my cell with a padlock, carry nothing but the key around my neck and go and sleep with the boatmen in the cool on the Ganges. It gave a spectacular experience of the pilgrims arriving at dawn to bathe, the chants echoing on through a night lit up here and there by sacred and funeral flames. Bathing in the Ganges is a must. The steps are very slippery. Later the sitar I bought was to take me right across the Middle East.
India was a place I could never really feel lonely. Companions were everywhere. In the streets, in the fields. Flitting in and out were a heart-string of haunting travelling affairs, accidental meetings of two minds, as people on an endless journey through a mesmerizing desert wilderness, who have been through heaven, earth and the abyss, meet at a water hole, and together in one solitary night, their whole life experience, through the trackless wastes of time, passes between, in the sultry glance of an eye, in the passion of a lingering embrace. To fall in love many times over is very precious. Each person is a unique gateway to the deepest mystery - a brief mutual sanctuary from loneliness in Katmandu, a feisty Tantric love affair through Kashmir and Ladarkh, a delicate tryst with an adolescent Junkie passing through the dreaded Iran-Afghanistan border - a summary firing-squad cheated by the banner of love. By the time I reached the western hemisphere I had become something exotic, woven with the scent of far-distant horizons. It didn't matter whether I was in New Mexico, New York or even Guatemala. Love was around every corner.
I spent a good deal of the time in the East seeking the meditative samadhi. I visited Sai Baba because of his kitcsh reputation for cheap miracles, although I found the posters which rumour had it Indian sweet meats would ooze out of grotesque and the rumours of ash-dropping devices disquieting. The women did shriek when he sprinkled ashes on them in my presence and he did give a striking sermon on the Gita in which man without god was destitute, dead, with no hope and no future! Devastating stuff.
I got as much of my spiritual discovery from street people as from gurus. India is full of temples and pilgrimage places. There are spiritual people every step of the way from little babas sharing a chillum in the remote paths to the great Himalayan pilgrimage spots to the sadhus weaving the winding alleys of Varanasi with their tridents. Everyone who devotes themselves to the divine is a divine presence. I am Yogindra Baba. I was given the name by a hotel proprietor in Puri, the pilgrimage town of the Jaggernath or Juggernaut, under whose wheels people traditionally threw themselves. He said that every sadhu needed a name and it was his duty to pronounce mine. It combines the ancient yogic Kali aspect of the Indus Valley civilizations with the Aryan factor of Indra.
Richard Alpert - Baba Ram Dass - in "Be Here Now" related an influential story of taking lysergide to one Maharaj-ji who completely blissed him out and swallowed acid like it was chick peas with apparently no effect. He noted certain psychic happenings such as Maharaji telling him to visit Lama Govinda when he was already contemplating it. For Ram Dass this was evidence of the much deeper penetration of insight of the Indian sage than the fractious day tripper. At Varanasi, Chai Baba the tea-shop sadhu carried a picture of Maharaj-ji, along with many others. When I mentioned Ram Dass's assessment of Mahara, he was equivocal. "Nothing exceptional".
The argument that the psychic trance of power plants is inferior to meditative samadhi is misguided. Many American Indian shamans and shamanesses display awesome psychic capacities and particularly in the midst of 'intoxication'. A group of Amazonian Jivaro shamans may declare your relative has died, or that a contending war party from an adjoing country is on the way. These will turn out to be correct. A Mexican Huichol may dream you are lost in the desert and send helpers to find you. A Mazatec shamaness may have a vision on the 'little things' that you are about to arrive, and three weeks later you do.
Ram Dass was a novice with no such tradition.
Maharaj-ji was an accomplished baba in the Eastern tradition.
The principal methods in shamanism involve the use of power plants,
contrary to Mercia Eliade's naive prejudice. Drumming and sensory
and physical deprivation are of secondary significance by comparison.
Ganja has likewise had a central role in the Indian meditative
tradition. Bom Shankar.
Really we have two alternative approaches, one from order, training the mind through mantra, visualization and breathing, and the other based more on chaos, chanting or staring your way through the vortices of a power plant, drumming or deprivation induced trance state. These two can also be complementary. The meditative condition is a natural means to yoke the visionary state and by so doing to enter it more deeply and completely. Traditional power plant shamans generally chant their way through such experiences, their song becoming a personification of their spirit journey. I prefer silent prajnayama - yogic breathing designed to induce a deeply-'transcendent' meditation - silent like zazen.
This is not to suggest that all or any people should be taking the power sacraments, or expect to gain instant enlightenment this way, but simply to respect that the opportunity is there if they at some time wish to take it as a natural expression of the biosphere, evoking the totality of mind. It is a natural heritage which can change our consciousness, perhaps teach us to live in closer harmony with nature, and provide a democratic endowment for visionary experience. Perhaps only a very small number of people will ever choose this mystery path, or experience it more than a few times during their lifetime. Many people only take a full initiatory dose of iboga once. But the fact that nature has provided these opportunities ensures the grass-roots of vision is available for all who choose to seek it.
We are thus dealing with a symbiotic fertility principle and a visionary democratic principle. These are auspicious and worthy. The divine sacrament has always been central to Christianity, but only as a metaphorical experience of union with the flesh and blood of Christ in a most macabre celebration of blood sacrifice which the Aztecs themselves understood to be in cultural attunement with their own bloodthirsty tradition. The genuine tradition of the living sacraments is union, not sacrifice.
Neither is this to suggest you will experience instant nirvana from a 'trip' as even Maria Sabina called it, although you may experience anything from doom-filled anxiety to blissful wonder. Shamans will of course tell you that you should undertake a rigorous training, in some ways as severe as that of any meditative training, but at least there is a fundamental principle of visionary democracy. Just like dreaming, we can all access the visionary state by partaking of the sacrament. We do not have a situation where the mysteries of existence are held by an elite priesthood which no one can access without the divine grace of the avatar, or the Logos. Indeed a traditional shaman may be initiated into their role by an illness or other incident which just comes upon them spontaneously. This very important principle - visionary democracy - is essential for the ongoing future of the world as we enter an epoch in which humanity has become the guardian of evolutionary creation and the future of life on earth. It is a democracy that Jesus personally acknowledged, despite his unilateral deification, in saying from Psalm 82 "Ye are gods".
The principle of visionary democracy says that the subjective experience of the least of us is as valid as the greatest - that each and every one of us naturally supports the visionary essence of creation. Some of us may possess wisdom in great measure, but we should convince the others of our ideas democratically and in a way which is subject to peer criticism and not by attempting to stand as a guru or priesthood to make divine edicts, especially ones such as the Anathema maranatha or the fatwah which spell death to the unbeliever or the dissenter. This ground-breaking principle has been violated throughout history by just about every established religion, in infallible papal edicts, shariat and its dire enforcement, the idolatrous idea that the word is sacred, setting the Bible, Qur'an, Gita and even the Dharmapada above and over other books of visionary poetry, as edicts and commands from (a male) God.
There is another caution about the spiritual approach of following a religious authority which becomes particularly steamy in India. The ideal of submitting to a guru, as if they were a divine manifestation, may help release the follower from their egotism, but it breeds corruption and contempt. Buddhism is full of good methods to help crush your wanton ego, including guru devotion. But this is fundamentally non-democratic. It invites abuse of power. Tibet was racked with monastic infighting at the very time China invaded.
Raj Nish is a good example. Coming form an academic background in Indian religious philosophy, he was ideally placed to touch the pulse-beat of Western infatuation. His style of rhetoric was eclectic, spanning Taoism, Sufism and Buddhism in its orbit. It emphasized Tantric sex and a 'New Age" vision of spirituality. But it is all too easy to become a spiritual entrepreneur. Is this enlightenment or just adroit marketing? The proof tends to come much later when we discover Rolls Royces, helicopter gunships and attempted mass-poisonings.
The real fallacy here is that enlightenment is something you only find in the most supreme realized beings on earth - that there is some secret inner cabal who know the inner workings of the universe - this is rubbish. Enlightenment is a shedding of superstructure to return to our natural roots. All people dream naturally and in the same way we can all reach naturally to enlightenment, because it is a deep expression of the nature of the existential condition. It is something democratic we all share, not something only 'God' can show us through the one way trip "Jesus is Lord" or that Raj Nish or the Reverend Moon can show us by waving a torch at a mass gathering, or concentrating his mind on us in secret from afar. One reason to stand by nature shamanism is that it is the ground roots which we all share.
In the East there is a wholesome emphasis on empowerment through self-realization, but this is compromised by a hero-worshipping devotion to the guru. In the West, democracy is denied by having a religious hierarchy and edicts which are claimed to be infallible declarations of God. Everyone is supposed to submit to God's will and to be fallible mortals with no discriminating wisdom. Inquisition is used to destroy religious opposition. Vast movements are built in Christianity and Islam on a simple fundamentalist doctrine of affirming commitment to God and joining an evangelical body which uses inter-personal support and repression of the other to grow at explosive rates. None of this has anything whatever to do with the divine. It is about indoctrination and reducing the verdant complexity of the real world to an unshakeable simplistic conviction. The Fall arising from the knowledge of good and evil.
Absolutely the worst case of inflated spiritual de-humanization is Jesus. You have this very unusual controversial genius who transforms the cultural zeitgeist by becoming the Bridegroom of Isaiah 61 in quite a blasphemous way, which later looks half way between the religious practices of Israel and it's Hellenistic nemesis Nabataea in Arabia. He gains hysterical popularity as a faith healer and notoriety as a charismatic possessed by Ba'al Zebul, the Lord of Flies. The people from his own home town of Nazareth disown him. His family say he is beside himself. Finally when he is brought to account in the flesh, the miracles evaporate and he is crucified as a common criminal. Bewailed by a devoted following of females.
Then a cult emerges claiming to have seen him rise on the third day like all the dying and reborn Gods of the ancient Near East. Suddenly it takes a new twist of fire in the name of Paul, a typical born-again Christian with a very dubious background, who never set eyes on Jesus, and within a short space of time we have a religion claiming Christ, the anointed, was the only man-god in the whole of history - He whom God sent as his only begotten son, who shall end the entire universe, the lamb become Armageddon, judging the quick and the dead for all time. Whose death we continue to celebrate by drinking his blood and eating his flesh as was done to Dionysus and Dumuzzi before him.
We can no longer appreciate him as a shaman or a prophet with a very creative paradigm shift or enjoy his penetrating insights as a human who could be emulated in our own gnostic realization, for now, since the burial of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, everything he said or is claimed to have said comes straight from the mouth of God. Almost immediately Paul pronounced the Anathema and we have the death curse if you don't believe it too. Ever since, despite the myth of the second-coming, Jesus, just like Mary, has been in bondage, an institution of the church, calculated to prevent any other prophet, even the returning Christ, creating another paradigm shift to bring this archaic caravan of dreams into the living world of evolution. That's why it is my sacred duty to free these bonds of religious tyranny, to put back the human element of spontaneous creative vision and to bring back the spirit of democracy to the prophetic tradition.
Two Tibetan lamas entered my life in a surprising and telling way. I walked in front of Karmapa as he was arriving at Bodhnath to give a ceremony. I thought nothing about it. When I went trekking, the people of the Tibetan refugee village on the way to Anapurna implored me to wait to see his puja. When I returned to Katmandu a German approached me and told me lightning struck when he raised his thunderbolt. I felt mortified. What was I doing travelling on a spiritual quest to miss this experience? It wasn't until I arrived in New York months later that I had another chance. But chance had it I was studying lucid dreaming at Maimonedes on the same day and I couldn't get back to Manhattan on time. I thought it was useless. I decided on the off chance to run the block to find out. As I arrived there was a climactic blast of Tibetan trumpets. I ran for the door, seeing someone still entering, but just as I came, it slammed violently shut. Later I saw the same ceremony, and had an audience with Karmapa. He blessed a mala of Tibetan bone beads I had. He did it with alarming energy, smashing it together and laughing naughtily as he did it. A couple of years later the mala was explosively torn apart when I was assaulted at a function, sending the beads flying into the windows in all directions. The next time I returned to the US, a mysterious letter arrived saying Karmapa was at Woodstock NY. I made it up to see him with a Buddhist tennis pro. We both bowed to him. He laughed and grabbed each of us by our bearded goatees and gave our heads a yank like cattle. I was told he was not well, despite his apparent vigour. A short time afterwards he died. Now he has an appointed reincarnation.
Yeshe Dorje was
another kettle of fish. He was living in a kerosine tin shack
with his wife and seven children. I went to visit him with Maya,
my Californian travelling partner through Kashmir and Ladarkh.
She fancied he was into all sorts of sexual empowerments, as he
had a wife and seven children unlike the monastic orders. He was
consulted by builders who wanted a break in the monsoons to put
on a roof, pushed clouds away from Dalai Lama's path, and was
regarded as a shaman healer who could draw out spirits of possession
from epileptics and deranged people. He was very serious about
his ancient Ningmapa form of Buddhism and warned against the ideas
put forward in the Tibetan library at Dharmsala. Like Karmapa,
he appeared at odd times when I was travelling. At Santa Fe he
appeared again and gave a seven hour exorcism ceremony, rich with
immolated messages, and flour imprints of our hands, long and
complex chants and drumming in the middle of which he fell sound
asleep without warning as a consequence of his meditative vigils
in the late hours. When I asked for a video he gave me a mischevious
salute of revolutionary defiance. When he held up the dorje thunderbolt
a torrential desert downpour burst forth, but when he held the
final immolation the weather broke into a rainbow. This weather
is common in the desert at nightfall, and even adorns the New
Mexico coat of arms, but still.
I find the concept of reincarnation difficult to accept at face value, particularly the idea that bad men are reborn as flys or spiders. It's also in conflict with the natural order. A species which lives by killing doesn't get worse karma than a herbivore. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't happen. But then who am I to argue with the millennium either? Aren't I a walking example? Am I a reincarnation of Jesus? Would you want to be someone else's shadow? Don't you have any creative life of your own? No it's infinitely more difficult than that.
Part of me is an ancient spirit from the beginning of creation. Another part is the biological, emotional individual Chris. Nagual and tonal if you like. The eternal part incarnates into the mortal coil to perform its creative unfolding in the universe. Life then becomes an extraordinary synchronicity - the very fabric of being is a mandala - a space-time fractal of free-will.
Sometime away back in the seventies on a sacramental velada I had this awful vision. Surely I was the Christ of cosmic evolution sent back by the creatrix to liberate the verdant Earth from wanton destruction, but somehow an ancient sacrifice of evolution was imminently foreshadowed to fulfil the atonement. The vision unfolded like a fugue. Somehow it involved my firstborn daughter Arwen Evenstar and her fertility. Twenty years later she gave birth in our home. The child was small, the birth was easy, but the first cries were strangely chirpy. The little boy was so floppy. A day later they told us that he had Down, syndrome, an extra copy of chromosome 21. We were all devastated. My head was spinning. What was that vision I had twenty years ago? So its all come to pass! So the universe did send me back! Taena is growing up a spark. But it is all very strange. He is floppy and has needed careful physio. He is a sacred king in the ancient mold. Dedicated to God. Down males are generally infertile. He learned to walk groggily, like the lamed sacred consort of Mari of the buckled post, who staggered along in buskins, the high-heeled boots of Dionysian passion drama.
All those things Buddha had to find out by being sequestered inside his palace and to come on life and death hard, starkly witnessing transience and suffering were Buddha's egg-shell of karma. Long before Buddha had his maha-samadhi the universe was shaping his karma in poetic irony right out of the prophetic tradition. This is the nature of quantum transaction.When he finally comes to terms with the middle way, after denying himself to starvation this karmic backdrop which made the very fabric of meaning of Buddha's life matured. Even without insisting on God, there is an eternal part of us that lies beyond the cycle of birth and death beyond time itself.
A lot of seekers spend a great deal of their lives trying to come to a state of spiritual knowledge to heal their mortal transience. They seek to discover a greater truth beyond which will compete the picture and given them peace. However there is another way of looking which turns this situation inside out. We are also the eternal gypsy spirit of the universe that visits incarnations , not fragile but eternal, donning incarnation, as beads on a string, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, or as a bride decketh herself with her jewels. It is older than the big bang and for it, the 'heat death' is just phase of the totality. So I guess you could say that part of me is the reincarnation, even of Christ. But maybe you too can share this thread. Maybe the whole fabric is a weave of the one conscious spirit into its myriad forms just as the Tantric creation myth says. Maybe we are each a bundle of reeds, which become loosened in vision and finally unravelled as we pass away back to the oceanic self-aware totality. From this disembodied perspective, as if looking back at ourselves, incarnation is like becoming bound tightly, so you cannot see yourself as a whole. The death state is the unravelling, but also the reintegration.
Whatever the situation, the incarnational perspective heals the mortal quest. Instead of being a mortal looking for enlightenment, you become an immortal spirit embodied to help realize the unfolding conscious reality. Although the incarnation will pass, by living your life out to its conclusion, you are the very spirit of deity or the void abyss totality, the Tao, manifest in physical form. This is the sanctuary, the solace, the meaning of existence, the umbilical cord and the 'mysterious grand design of nature'.
So am I a Buddhist? Well I've taken Buddhist vows, just like I'm a confirmed Anglican too, but how can the noble savage be anything other than an abysmal primitive. Buddhism, particularly the Tibetan form has a very complex regime of meditations, prostrations and retreats and a very particular description of reality. Tibetan Buddhism is founded also on the more ancient Bön shamanism. But why does a true understanding of reality have to come from such a complex regime of order? Why isn't it just a natural ground-swell like dreaming, shared by all of us? Well lucid-dreaming is certainly a difficult technique to learn and I only manage it occasionally. Also the mind is a bit like a monkey and needs some training to be able to concentrate and calm itself enough to experience samadhi. But many of the techniques and realizations of Buddhism actually source from older practices in shamanism and the yoga of the ancient Indus valley cultures.
My innate preference is for the formless path. One in which you attain realization in the midst of the natural dis-order, possibly by pushing yourself to near-death or ego-death experiences, from meditating on graveyards, to Tantric sex, to power plants.
Many of my life discoveries have happened only when my back was to the wall. This is the nature of the formless path. To go travelling I had to forsake not just one partner but two in double irony. When I made it to Ladarkh, I stood in the ruined lamasery that stands over the town in direct echo of the Potala at Lhasa and vowed to stop short at nothing. I walked to an outlying village. My sandals broke. I was embraced by a Ladarkhi woman in sheer curiosity and immediately bitten on the left foot by a dog.
This began a series of episodes where I had to make it down to the casualty department of each general hospital in India I came to to get another horrendous shot of rabies toxin in the abdomen. It was considered too dangerous to be given by a general practitioner. There was a one percent mortality rate from allergic brain swelling. Each innoculation was murder. Swollen glands and intense allergy. The needles were never properly sterilized and all the diseased of India were queueing there, eaten away by horrific sores, blindness and dysentery. I would walk down to the front of the line and demand my shot.
Each city I came to presented a new and gripping Tantric dilemma. At Srinagar a male nurse like a wrestler dropped the syringe and squirted out the residue from the floor beside a boy who was vomiting into a bucket with a green choleric face. When I said to sterilize the syringe he said "I see you are an educated man". But the serum had been used many times before in this way. Eventually in Delhi there was a bright young nurse playing Russian roulette with fifty needles. The queue stretched forever. Instead of injecting the serum under the skin of my abdomen, she deftly plunged it right into my internal organs. Within a day or so, I succumbed to hepatitis and had to stagger weakly for the cool of the hills. The train was simply overflowing. People hanging out every door. I crawled into a first class carriage and lay in near faint on the floor. When the guards tried to throw me out, I moaned "Sick sick" like a leper until they left me in uncertainty as what they might catch by moving me. Hare Kali. Hare Kali-ma. Om nama Shivai-ay. Om nama Shivai.
Everywhere I went in India, I lugged a sitar with me, like the torso of a loved one. It wasn't the best of sitars. I bought it from my music teacher. The bowl fell off almost immediately. When I complained, he said "I wouldn't deceive you uncle!" and picked it up and played such a haunting raga that I burst into tears. He said "It's God, it's God" and handed it back to me. I never played it well but I put this supreme effort into trying to guard and protect it in the raging heat that precedes the monsoons. I had to argue vehemently with bus drivers who wanted me to put it on the roof with the chickens and cling to it in my seat. When I arrived in Afghanistan I had all my money and passport stolen. The jewellery I was carrying from Thailand proved fake. I had only $3 to get me to Europe. Incomprehensibly a man came up to me and pleaded to buy my sitar. The money got me on to a bus to Istanbul. I had to play every trick to feed myself in Iran, staging photo diversions to escape from restaurants, but the sitar I had nurtured so faithfully proved to be my karmic saving grace.
Indira Ghandi instituted the Indian emergency when the legitimacy of her rule was challenged by the courts, over-ruling democracy. This provided for ninety days in jail without trial. Eventually she was shot by a Sikh after she had played a clandestine role in setting up the militant priest who inflamed the Sikh crisis which led to the storming of the Golden Temple at Amritsar. Thousands were slaughtered in the aftermath. Let's not be naive about the idea that all women are beneficent. The Golden Temple was for me a sea of peace, but this was shattered when I was stopped by a drunken customs official who was hunting down a drug-dealer who had entered illegally from Pakistan. When I had entered India from Nepal the border guard demanded "backsheesh!" I told him where to put it and he then had unknown to me stamped my passport maliciously.
This man was trying to arrest me during the emergency. No writ of habeas corpus. Indian jails are no place in the heat of the summer, or any other time. I knew Indian people are often embarrassed when a European person displays distraught emotion, so I did something which would never work in a Western country. I got down in the gutter at his feet and began to wail piteously to passers by that this man was trying to abduct me. Very quickly a large crowd gathered pushing against one another and arguing volubly about whether he was abducting me or arresting me, and who was he? And who was I? I began to try to crawl out, but he had me by the shirt. I put up one last desperate fuss and he became embroiled in an argument with a railway official. He relaxed his grip and I crawled away. The Amritsar chillies were the hottest on earth. My guts turned to water. Could they be the cause of all the violence? The next day I set out for Pakistan. The countries were technically at war over Kashmir. There was a no man's land. You had to walk across a field and through some trees to another post. I walked out alone and just as I was about to step out of India, there he was the last thing I wanted to see, sitting there in uniform. I stepped up to him very cautiously and said "You were drunk!" He said "You see! I have waited here for you just so that I would know." He let me pass by. I was free.
There are a lot of good things about Buddhism. It stresses peace and non-violence, that the perfection within is innate and can be experienced through meditative equanimity. It is a do-it-yourself path of attainment, empowerment and enlightenment, rather than sin and fixed mortal fallibility. However it is manifestly patriarchal, despite the protestations of its followers about the many feminine buddhist deities in this 'Godless' religion. Yab-yum tells the basic story - a super-powerful enlightened male with a hundred arms holding a rather limp consort with only about ten to his torso. Tantric sex, by contrast, has Kali squatting ascendant over the lifeless corpse of Shiva. Only put together do they begin to give a complete picture.
God, Science and the Immortal Sex
Am I an atheist like Buddha? Well that is complicated. I can't
accept moral causality is intrinsic to evolution nor that the
ignorant reincarnate as insects, so it is necessary to look deeper
for the connecting principle. The key seems to be consciousness
and perhaps the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics.
But that is no reason to posit some additional principle we have
no direct evidence for at all as the omnipotent creator. Why not
simply a self-consistent description of the universe? Gautama
Buddha and Stephen Hawking both have very astute reasons for not
including God in their cosmology.
The question really is what IS God? To Judeo-Christians, God is an omnipotent creator principle which, however transcendentalized to an abstract unrepresentable entity, as is al-Llah in Islam, still carries the dimensions of personality and emotion, and when pushed to it, the male figure of the 'ancient of days' - father sperm. The existence of the big bang is evidence for an origin in time but not necessarily a creator God. A theory of everything based on symmetries and symmerty-breaking might be more apt. Christian thinkers tend to define God in an initial creation of a universe which is then forever after running down like a clock-work toy. The second law of thermodynamics does mandate increasing entropy. However life is negentropic. It's complexity unfolds with time. Quantum uncertainty is ongoing. Evolution unfolds new diversity. Free-will is an expression of the creative act. Assigning only one creative act to the past does not solve the problem cosmologically nor evolutionarily. Some modern Christian thinkers try to preserve the order by giving God a meta-cosmological status outside time. Now it is true that Augustine and Einstein would probably agree that space-time is created in cosmogenesis, but this doesn't mean there is this classical entity 'God' sitting outside the universe, creating it from another time dimension either. Having got hold of God, such thinkers strive endlessly to find a key place to fit him in. Really it is the hard problem revisited. Using God to explain consciousness. That may involve a process outside time - the transactional interpretation.
A different way of looking at this whole situation is that the totality of the Tao is intrinsically self-complementary as wave-particle, female-male body-mind etc. Within this complementarity, space-time and the dimensions of experience emerge. If we take the point of view that the brain is evolving towards a kind of cosmic correspondence, by generalizing its functions towards the quantum limit, it is conceivable that the dimensions of mind somehow reflect a deep cosmic reality. However in such a reality, as in both the Tantric and Taoistic description, the totality is a complementation between female and male aspects, not merely a male God become so transcendental that He can pretend he is beyond form and void. If anything, He is imposing form and She is void and chaos - tohu wabohu. Lurking behind the apparent formless transcendence of al-Llah and the abstract God of Christian theology is a definably male personality who emphasizes transcendence over immanence, the heavenly cosmos over the verdant earth, the eternal over the transformative and dominion over nature and woman alike.
So although the ancient Goddess may seem a primitive blood-curdling, infant-killing, promiscuity-inviting anachronism, she is carrying essential features of reality into the modern world, without which our description of the totality could become tragically flawed. Both Taoism and Tantra stress this deep gender complementation. Taoism also notes the way that can be told is not the countless Way, echoing the Buddha state and the indescribability of al-Llah, but with due reverence for the feminine Way of the Valley as well. Even Buddha, in reaching to the unchanging still point, rejected the turning world of life and death which Queen Maya, the mother of appearance and diversity, represents. The concealed feminine aspect can also present in a host of very disquieting post-modern ways as dynamical chaos, quantum-uncertainty, synchronicity, emergence, as we shall see. The feminine aspect is not confined only to women and can be an aspect of the experience of both sexes.
God alone is incomplete - a distorted image in a chauvinistic mirror - a shaker on the table cloth of divine order, surrounded by pregnant chaos. The divine causality of Buddha is also incomplete because illusion is substance - mind without body is merely the bardo. The Tao, Tantra, the eny-weeny God/dess is unspeakable, an undecidable proposition, a paradox of reality, which our conscious free-will is here to reveal the nature of, even as we communicate this instant.
If we are talking seriously about a 'journey into Egypt' as the cultural shamanic quest, the modern journey is vast and not just a matter of spiritual or cultural wandering. It is also an adventure across the universe from the big bang to the biosphere. It extends from quantum physics to brain dynamics. What is the creative thread that runs from the simplest molecules to the most complex structures associated with memory and experience? It is pointless have a visionary idea of reality if its physical basis is naive and erroneous.
Traditional religions are archaic descriptions of reality which have to contort science to fit in their perspectives. This causes all manner of inconsistencies. Christian descriptions fall wraith to the long shadow of Augustine and cast genetic defects and even kin altruism in the light of original sin. The rule of divine order is imposed on a fluid universe full of chaos and wave-particle complementarity. Creation tends to be forced into the first moments producing a world which is running down like God's clockwork toy - a Newtonian spectre graced only by the degradation of entropy. Some Biblical fundamentalists, who do not understand the nature and purpose of visionary mytho-poetry, attempt to deny biological evolution and insist the universe was created only six thousand years ago in a literalist interpretation of Genesis. But the view of dominion over nature portrayed in the 'older' Eden account of Genesis is a serious danger to biodiversity and our sustainability.
Buddhism faces similar difficulties. Complete moral karma would have to violate the diversity of the natural world and shackle it to a moral law which would hamper diversity lead to the over-multiplication of herbivores, or even if taken to its natural conclusion - only plants - no animals at all.
Even Islam which is the youngest, a mere adolescent by comparison with Buddhism, was still invented 1400 years ago and since 1500 has held to an unflinching view that all components of the law are complete, although the creative process, especially in Sufism is ongoing.
In Afghanistan I was called a Sufi on sight. This was somewhat of an honour, since I do have an affection for the mystical aspects of Sufism and its visionary tradition to use all means available to get to the unspeakable core of experience. Although the outer garment of Sufism is Islam, founding Sufis were made martyrs to their cause by conventional Islam, so the inner garment contains a wilder more blasphemous tradition at source. However there are Islamists who stand in the name of Sufi for who the inner garment is a convenience. While Sufism is reputed to have an inner 'Tantric' feminism uncharacteristic of Islam as a whole, the Sufi sage Taslima Nasrin feared in her childhood, shows the evil of sexual dominion and the fatwah.
I'm afraid I find the gender expression of Islam offensive and destructive to trust and freedom between woman and man wherever it is emphasized. Every woman who is not shrouded becomes fair game for pestering and harassment. It is only poetic irony that some Islamic women prefer the veil because of the seclusion it brings. Women suffer stoning and the sunna, and are frequently denied education and equality of opportunity. The men suffer too, because, when women are sequestered, it isolates men from their good influence and the joy of their presence. Single men can only know womankind through their mother and close relatives. Out in public is a distorted male world full of sexually-excitable men leading ever more fervent speeches about the fundaments of Islam. In this environment it is easy to see how women come to be regarded as so enticing as to exert an uncontrollable influence over mankind which has to be repressed (for the women's own protection) by cloaking them in drapes and keeping them in the family compound. When I was in Afghanistan, some women wore western dress, but now all must wear the Burqah and cannot even venture forth without a male family member present. If this is not genocide, it is certainly a life-sentence for the female sex.
There is no way the more liberal defenders of Islam can claim this is not a fundamental aspect of the religion. I applaud statements from Islamic leaders rejecting terrorist violence and claiming Islam is a religion of Sakina. However it is clear the Algerian rebels are Islamic fundamentalists. They rape and torture women and even disembowel the pregnant. They use them as sex slaves and then slit their throats for good measure. They do this in the 'holy' month of Ramadan because it is jihad - religious war. The Taleban take similarly repressive actions against women, again because it is part of the fabric of Islam to repress, sequester and control the female. While Iran is currently enjoying a moderating influence, the advent of Shi'ite fundamentalism has heralded similar abuses in which women receive the lash for not observing the veil and many people have been put to death in the name of religion, including innocent members of the Bahai faith. In Pakistan women are stoned and set on fire, not even for adultery, just marrying against parental will.
The root source of this problem is fundamental. It goes back to the overthrow of the feminine principle in the 'satanic verses' and the smashing of the 360 idols in the Ka'aba. Strict adherence to the linguistic image of the divine word is as much a form of idolatry as is worshipping a graphic image. Muhammad was a great prophet, but he was also a human prophet, just as he correctly declared Jesus (Isa - Esau of Edom as the Jews called him) was before him. Anything more is male hubris. In this sense, the current satanic verses in the Qur'an disclaiming al-Uzza, al-Lat and Manat were shaitan-inspired, and will remain evil until rescinded in asking forgiveness from the feminine. A similar apology is owing from Christian patriarchal fundamentalists, and from the Catholic church for offering Mary but excluding women from the priesthood and from Jewish tradition for the rape of the sanctuaries and for setting the violent tradition of stoning for adultery.
Newspapers and TV depend on both words and pictures to convey a representation of the truth. However beautiful the Arabesques and mosaics of Islam, to prescribe the death sentence for representing the image of God, while holding the word, particularly medieval laws of Shariat, which were not uttered by the prophet but by institutional clerics, as divinely inspired is corrupt to the core. To use the death penalty to inspire conformity to any dogma is totalitarian. Muhammad did not enter Mecca through jihad but through the Sakina of Hudaybiyah. No prophet's words should be taken literally as the Bible and Qur'an has been, because the essence of prophecy is visionary poetry. The poetic licence which expresses mystical union is liberating, not prescriptive. As Lao Tsu said 1200 years before Muhammad met his patroness in Khadja, "The way that can be told is not the countless way."
Eucharistic Communion
I am now going to talk about one of the most taboo areas of Western
society. Discrete but honest. Why is it that every power plant
discovered by humanity has become the subject of religious veneration
in each and every society it has been used from pre-historic times
to the twentiath century, and yet all are classed as dangerous
drugs in our culture, where use of such prohibited substances
is punishable by long imprisonment or sometimes even death? Yet
why is it that all three of the most potent true hallucinogens,
peyote, teonanactl and ayahuasca are each in our century used
in the name of Christ as sacramental celebrations? Why is the
Eucharist itself the flesh and blood of Christ, just as teonanactl
is the 'flesh of the Gods'?
Towards the end of my undergraduate studies I was transfixed by a newspaper report about a new substance called lysergide which could mimic the states of insanity attributed to schizophrenics. I had read Huxley's Doors of Perception, some of R D Laing's books and saw the schizophrenic vision as a possible way to enlightenment, or at least to liberate from the shackles of normality. From Brave New World I picked up a deep affection for the plight of the noble savage, and vowed never to become civilized, to retain all my rough edges and with them the primal mystery of nature with which I was born into this world, whatever the demands of civility, social expectation or indoctrination.
I first met hallucinogenics during our student sojurn in England. The experiences were quite shattering. The second experience was a double-whammy. I knew that I had died and was left with reverberating phosphenes for weeks afterwards, just as the news came out that it was supposed to shatter your chromosomes. I felt like a radiation victim. Much later it proved to be bad science with political undertones.
Many people never realize the immense scope of their subjective realities, nor how thin the veil of illusion of the real world is. We all know we dream vividly without the external world being there in the dream. Although nightmares can be bizarre, for many people everyday reality is closely identified with the physical world and its status symbols. They scarcely realize their entire experience of reality is nothing but a subjective model constructed by the mind to keep track, which could literally disintegrate into a kaleidoscope of teeth and claws, a shower of interlocking Eiffel towers, or a mad alienated reality where nothing makes emotional sense and it is impossible to figure out who you are or what the hell is going on as the immense well of subjective reality unravels. It can be literally maddening to discover that all your sense of companionship, the meaning of life, everything you have strived to achieve has simply come apart in front of you and that you are completely alone. This is truly Dionysian madness, but it doesn't mean things are all bad. It is the first point of a discovery process about just how magical our subjective consciousness is and how alive the universe may be.
It wasn't until years later that I again plucked up the courage. I was so anxious about it that I broke the window I was gazing out of with my forehead in a fit of indecision. At that point I gave in. The smashing glass was a signal for an endless romance with nature. Immediately I realized that all my ideas of life, god, and creation were figments of our cultural construct, imposed to keep us century after century in the rule of divine order - the long shadow of Augustine - a vision as mechanistic as Newton's universe. The reality underlying our sensory experience is so different that none of the categories god, soul, spirit, or any of the components of our traditional description are anything more than a subterfuge. The truth is totally wild and exotic, and beyond the table-cloth of order, just as Casteneda insisted in his shamanistic 'allegories'. This became a repeated ticket to the edge of samadhi, echoing with kundalini bursts, incomprehensible visions and curling white lights that made every hair in your skin stand on end
Several of our friends had bad reactions. One woman had a prolonged episode of amnesia and had to be hospitalized. She could only recognise the community dog. She recovered and had her first child on a 'trip'. Another girl had a major psychotic break after picking up a tiny piece of newspaper on the beach with the letter "U" on it. This cosmic gesture of recognition proved too much for her to handle. A week later she was putting staples in the soup and a month later setting fire to her bedroom. She recovered completely. Another friend flipped out, smashed the guitar he was playing so awfully, and the bed he was sitting on bouncing higher and higher in demented confusion. He tried to jump off the balustrade and bit and flailed everyone in sight who was trying to restrain him, before passing into deep unconsciousness for several hours. He remembered nothing about the incident next day except for a major rebirth experience. This is a commonly reported feature. Lysergide remains an artificial substance which has unstable characteristics. It may be visually very powerful, but my deepest experiences have all come from natural sacraments, which also appear to be much more trustworthy allies.
A major part of the purpose of my 'journey into Egypt' was to visit the natural habitats of each of the power plants. It may seem strange to many religious people to travel to the Golden Triangle to investigate opium or even its semi-synthetic analogue heroin, as a path of spiritual discovery, but that is a prejudiced view. Papaver somniferum is an ancient medicinal plant and one of the earliest plants cultivated by humankind. Slit poppies crown the heads of ancient Greek and Cretan Goddesses in cameos and on statues. My father swore by the Brompton reprieve, a mixture containing opium and cocaine, as the lifeline to the doorway for terminal patients, because it gave both release from suffering and renewed vitality. Another doctor Abraham Verghese (New Yorker Sept 22 97) calls morphine "a truly holy drug" in the similar context of terminal pneumonia.
Modern culture in its gross misunderstanding has tabooed these ancient sacraments, which are universally attested to in the archaelogical record. By reducing them to the status of street drugs, they lose their sacred function, their ritual sanctuary of 'responsible use' is destroyed and they become another mechanistic nightmare of disintegration in the modern alienated world, driven by criminal profits and accompanied by violence. For every child born on crack, there is a peasant in the Andes quietly chewing coca leaves as a medicinal stimulant. Coca has been recently discovered to stimulate the immune system.
On to part 2?