Symbiotic Existential Cosmology Part 4

So what is this key to life, the universe and everything about? I’m going to explain all this, but first we need to take stock of the actual situation we are all facing in raw acute terms of planetary survival.

Although a visionary, I am first and foremost a scientist, who has spent my life lecturing in mathematics, with a research speciality in quantum cosmology, chaos theory, fractal processes, neuroscience and biocosmology. This means that my entheogenic journey, the bubbling Dionysian spring I am going to intoxicate you with, is founded on a real, verifiable, scientific cosmology, not just some kind of spiritual pipe dream, but this cosmology is putting consciousness, and our free will to affect the world around us, right back into the driving seat, and that is going to upend the Copernican principle that humanity does not have a privileged view of the universe at large.

The Three Faces of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology

The symbiotic cosmology solves (1) the hard problem – why subjective consciousness exists, (2) the problem of conscious intent – how volitional will acts on the world, and (3) the central enigma of existential cosmology – the role of conscious life in the universe. It does this simply and directly, without invoking any spooky features of panpsychism, by applying objective physical and biological criteria to define complementary subjective modes, by the coherent forms of instability involved, so it uses objective science to qualitatively classify subjective phenomena.

(1) Fractal biocosmology: The fact that life is a consequence of quantum cosmology is blindingly obvious! Just look around you! Life exists! It does so because it is an interactive manifestation of the laws of nature. While the cosmological energy pathway leads to the cosmic web, galaxies, black holes and stars; the structural pathway of the four symmetry-broken forces of nature leads to a fractal universe – quarks, composite baryons, atomic nuclei, atoms, fractal molecules, molecular complexes, cell organelles, cells, tissues, organs, the conscious brain, organisms and biospheres.

(2) Darwinian panpsychism: This is again irrefutable that we all as subjective conscious agents, are consciously aware that we have volitional will over the physical universe in our decision-making and actions. But this means matter including brains have a hidden subjective aspect. This implies panpsychism. There thus follows a spectrum of graduated manifestations of subjectivity, from quantum to edge-of-chaos to cell to organism and biosphere, based on the biological and physical criteria giving rise to these systems. It is faithful to Darwin’s own statement that free-will extends to the cnidaria, further extending it to all eucaryotes.

A. Primitive subjectivity: The ability of the subjective mind to affect the physical brain means the natural world has to have a primitive subjective aspect – autonomous volitional will thus implies natural panpsychism. Individual quanta, quantum-sensitive “butterfly effect” systems and prokaryote cells thus each inherit a primitive subjective aspect, although not attentive consciousness as such.

B. Sentient consciousness arose in a discrete transition in single-celled eucaryotes, accompanying the endosymbiosis between archaea and bacteria, when respiration became internalised in the mitochondria, leaving the cell membrane free for sensory functions through edge-of-chaos membrane excitation and social signalling via primal neurotransmitters such as serotonin, to anticipate threats and aid survival. This “experiential anticipation” predated multi-cellular nervous systems by a billion years.

C. Organismic consciousness emerged in multi-celled animals using the same edge-of-chaos excitability and social signalling molecules as in single-celled species as neurotransmitters. This explains why animals continue to be subjectively conscious through natural selection for survival, with nervous system phase coherent parallel processing seamlessly incorporated much later, but never replacing experiential anticipation.

D. Uncertainty and mind: The action of mind on brain necessarily arises from modulating the "random" aspect of quantum uncertainty in edge of chaos brain processing. This enables volitional will to intervene in the brain without disrupting the partial causal closure in computational brain processing. This provides plenty of room to affect the uncertain outcomes in evolutionary survival using both subjective anticipation and historical experience.

E. Biosphere and universe, in turn, inherit an indirect form of consciousness through the conscious biota that exist within them, as the most complex interconnected climax manifestations of sentient consciousness in the universe.

(8) Symbiotic Cosmology: The universe is symbiotic biologically, psychically, and cosmologically, throughout.

A. Organismic: All higher (eucaryote) organisms are multiply symbiotic species, , by archeal-bacterial endosymbiosis, sexual symbiosis, and viral/TE symbiosis.

B.Biospheric: Survival of the fittest is survival of the fittest biospheric symbiont, not the most dominant species, or the fastest reproducer. All species, including humans, whether parasites, hosts, predators or prey, evolve to symbiotic climax and inherit their cosmological role in conscious existence through symbiosis with the diversity of life over evolutionary time scales, rather than exploiting it, causing a mass extinction, as humans are currently doing. . Lions are predators but they kill the herbivore stragglers ensuring the herbivores don’t go to boom and bust. Species which fail the test like humans become extinct.

C.Psychic: Psychedelics play a critical role in this symbiotic evolutionary process. Huxley’s "mind at large", perceived through psychedelics play a critical role in this symbiotic evolutionary process, as the perceptual mind of the unconstrained brain reflecting the psychic symbiosis of inner cosmological climax edge-of-chaos dynamics, transcending tribal egotism, in what the Upanishads call moksha. This enables the individual to experience from the cosmic viewpoint and the universe to become self-aware. Humans thus inherit an existential responsibility, as climax manifestations of fractal biogenesis, to sustain the evolutionary diversity of life over the cosmological time scales we have inherited and need to preserve and unfold.

D. Cosmological: The climax of cosmology – conscious paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time arises not from the dominance of one conscious species, but at the edge of chaos, in symbiosis.

Given the fact that it is consistent with the views of both Charles Darwin, the founder of biological evolution and Erwin Schrödinger the discoverer of the quantum wave function equation determining the structure of quantum chemistry, it behoves us to take their advice and take this cosmology seriously:

“There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. ... I should say: The overall number of minds is just one” (Schrödinger).

"To see a puppy playing [one] cannot doubt that they have free-will"

and if "all animals, then an oyster has and a polype.” (Darwin)

Panpsychism also makes it possible for quanta to “observe” and hence collapse superpositions of other quanta, so the universe is how we perceive it to be, not a shadow multiverse, with ghostly cats flung all over it, this picture is one in which new branches are being created in the wave function in a similar manner to fractal cosmic inflation while others are being collapsed by conscious measurement, resulting in dynamic evolution of the cosmic wave function. Special relativity, the most classical part of quantum reality, is implicitly retrocausal as well as causal, as in Feynman diagrams, so quantum reality is implicitly anticipatory, involving transactional collapse across relativistic space-time in which a network of potential transactions become one or a set of real emitter-absorber interactions.

Consciousness thus exists to anticipate existential threats, as Graziano's AST – attention schema theory highlights, although incorrectly thinking free will is a delusion. Darwinian panpsychism is also very like Tononi and Koch’s IIT –integrated information theory, except it's based on edge-of-chaos dynamics, which fits with the quantum world, through the butterfly effect, while IIT is a classical computational theory about Markov processes, so phi doesn't capture the root phenomenon, of subjective awareness since sentient consciousness preceded computation, not the reverse.

Taking the Planetary Pulse

First we need to take the therapeutic pulse of the world condition. Although we conceive of ourselves as living in a world of scientific, social and medical sophistication, in which technology is enabling us to reach for the stars, the majority of people on the planet adhere to fixed beliefs in archaic religions which are cosmological fallacies in frank and violent conflict with the natural world. In 2020 56% of the population of Earth belonged to one of the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All of these religions have belief systems focussing on the natural world and entire physical universe we exist in being merely a temporary moral test for a tumultuous end-of-days Armageddon apocalypse. In the resulting day of judgment, all of humanity will be consigned either to eternal life in Heaven, or an endless diabolical torment in Hell, shedding the verdant Earth and its billions of years of evolving diversity as a kind of skin to be sloughed off, in what Christians call the Rapture. This is compounded by a literalistic belief in creationism, or intelligent design by God, assigning evolution and the diversity of life to being disposable assets. Rather than make the world a better place, this cosmological fallacy abets the worst in human instincts for business-as-usual to exploit the living and non-renewable resources of the planet, in a patriarchal regime of dominion over nature that leads to an accelerating impact on the habitats of all the other species, and pushes the natural environment to potentially irreversible tipping points.

Compounding this is an even more ancient crisis that happened to humanity during the transition from gatherer-hunter coexistence with nature to civilisations based on agriculture and animal husbandry that is confessed in the Fall from Eden. The male fear of paternity uncertainty caused mankind to condemn the female sex to subservience, in an assertion of patriarchal dominance, reinforced by the monotheistic religions, although widely shared across all cultures sealed into our genome from around 10,000 years ago. This is clearly laid out in Genesis, in Eve being cursed for seeking the wisdom of the Tree of Life, being accused instead of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, destroying their paradisiacal innocence, sexually declared to God by the fig leaf. Humanity was cursed and driven out of Paradise by God, with the Tree of Life hidden behind a flaming sword. Man and woman alike were doomed to the mortal coil of sexual existence. Women were cursed as the “devil’s gateway”, to be obedient to their husbands and suffer the pains of travail childbirth, with mankind condemned to a life of struggle against nature to survive against the thorns, to till the ground in human dominion over nature, delineating the transition from gatherer-hunter paradise to the lost innocence of agricultural civilisation.

This in turn has led to a world in which major religions use the patriarchal imperative to increase their populations to achieve social dominance, leading to population explosion, suppressing female reproductive choice under dire penalties, from stoning for adultery, to female genital mutilation, veiling, chaperoning and denying jobs and education and escalating human impact on nature through the invocation to dominion over nature, in denial of Earthly Paradise.

I am a child of nuclear apocalypse. On Christmas Day 1944 the first radiated plutonium slugs began to roll out of Hanford, signalling the real beginning of the apocalyptic age of Planet Earth. My birth was 12 days later on the Epiphany 1945. Los Alamos received its first plutonium from Hanford on February 2. Consecrating this patriarchal apocalypse, the Trinity explosion of this plutonium occurred on July 16. The uranium Hiroshima bomb was named “little boy” and the plutonium Nagasaki bomb dropped on August 9 from the same Hanford material was “fat man”.

Fig 249b: Trinity fireball.

Michael Ortiz Hill in “Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a rite of Passage” describes the first words following the Trinity test:

It is striking that, following Oppenheimer's lead of naming the site of the first nuclear test "Trinity," Weisskopf and William Laurence - both Jews - saw in the Bomb the glory of Christ. In the Jewish tradition, the character of the Messiah has distinctly human dimensions, a "Son of Man" rather than the "Son of God" of Christian eschatology, while the Christ metaphor speaks to an experience that dwarfs the human realm. Ferenc Szasz notes, "Others whispered, more in reverence than otherwise: 'Jesus Christ' ". Known to be something of a mystic, I. I. Rabi described Trinity by the overwhelming light that engulfed him: "Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds…. Oppenheimer said, "We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most were silent" He recalled the terrible and ecstatic eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, where the warrior Arjuna requests that Vishnu display the nakedness of his transcendental form. Arjuna is cowed in holy terror as the god visits upon him "the radiance of a thousand suns" "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" Oppenheimer quoted the Gita. "I suppose we all felt that, one way or another," he continued. Three weeks later, the pilot of Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, requested God's blessing upon the Bomb that would initiate the citizens of Hiroshima into the darkest consequences of this ecstatic presence. "Be with those who brave the heights of Thy heaven intoned the chaplain, "and carry the battle to our enemies”.

Fig 249c: In July 1945, Feynman was present at the first atomic bomb explosion in the Trinity bomb test in New Mexico. He claimed that he was the only person who saw the explosion without the very dark welder's glasses that were given to all the physicists present on that day. He thought that the truck's windshield would block the ultraviolet radiation from the blast. Believed to be as a result, at the age of 69, he died of two successive rare types cancer: (1) Myxoid/round cell liposarcoma – a rare cancer of fat cells and (2) Waldenström's macroglobulinemia – a rare non-Hodkins white blood cell lymphoma akin to leukaemia.

Another striking theme that repeats again and again in the "dreaming up" of the Bomb is that of birth and paternity. On the mythic level, it is clear that the Bomb was not invented as much as "born." Some people recognized the godlike epiphany of light and fire - so long anticipated - as the birthing of something or "someone" new. We can discern a specifically paternal pride and even hints of tenderness toward the Bomb. William Laurence called the rumblings of the Trinity explosion the "first cry of a newborn world”.

However, our true apocalyptic disaster, more tumultuously destructive, over time than any fantasy that Revelation can throw at us, is planetary biocrisis – our impending biodiversity and climate crises, driven by a patriarchal culture of dominion over nature and woman alike, that seeks to exploit the Earth and its living natural diversity rather than sustain it as the immortal living Paradise that has sustained us for three billion years of evolutionary emergence, in an unbroken line of inheritance to our own existence. A survey conducted in several countries as I write (Hickman et al. 2021) has found that 56% of young people believe “humanity is doomed”, because of climate and biodiversity crisis ^{^[14]}. Current evidence indicates that the climate crisis alone could send our planet back 50 million years to the Eocene maximum, shortly after the dinosaur extinction. The damage caused by a mass extinction of biodiversity can never be recovered, but in raw terms would take another 50 million years to recover from in purely quantitative terms.

Planetary Reflowering

We urgently need to learn to let life overflow in abundance again, and give space on the planet for life to do so and rapidly correct the climate crisis we are causing that also lays waste to natural habitats, so that we shall survive as a species. This is the key to our living future. It’s as simple as that. I am a scientist dedicated to preserving the biodiversity of planet Earth from the almost unstoppable human stupidity of causing a mass extinction of life which could cause the end of humanity as we know it, if we don’t come rapidly to our senses and achieve three active priorities to protect the living dharma ^{^[15]} of the sentient cosmos:

(1) Biodiversity and Climate:
(a) Dedicatehalf the Earth and its habitats to natural wilderness so that the millions of other species we co-depend with can survive and flourish (Wilson E O 2016) . Half the planet has to be enough for one species Homo sapiens alone among 3.8 million others to entertain and fulfil ourselves. This is literally the only way evolution can flourish and humanity can survive, because we need genetic diversity for species survival. If we don’t do this, our probability of long term survival is bleak and, while we might repair climate, biodiversity remains in mortal danger.
(b) Fix the climate crisis as quickly as possible by converting to renewable energy before the climate ‘fixes’ us.
This is fully achievable and inevitable. No further financial investment, or subsidies in CO₂ emitting energy sources.

(2) Nuclear/Mass Destruction: Cease production of nuclear weapons and weapons for biological warfare for military use. Devote the technology to protecting the Earth from astronomical impacts that could cause a mass extinction.

(3) Patriarchy and Population: End the Epoch of patriarchal dominion over woman and nature that has lasted for the last 4000 years and profoundly exacerbated the population crisis, in the reunion of woman and man in reproductive freedom, i.e. the Sacred Reunion, or Hieros Gamos^{^[16]} the fertile foundation of human cultural emergence and super-intelligence in sexual paradox (Fielder & King 2004).

Scepticism, Belief and Consciousness

The sceptical approach of objective science, which has revealed all the confounding detail of the physical universe and natural world we live in, is founded on the opposite of affirmative belief, that nothing we imagine to be true can be established to be so, unless every empirical test we make in the universe is replicable and contradicts the sceptical assumption that the idea is false. Thus the doubling of the bending of light around the Sun due to the Sun’s gravitational field, confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

But science, for all its inscrutable and meticulous care and veracity, has one terrible shortcoming, the elephant in the room of subjective consciousness itself. Key to my journey of visionary discovery has been the realisation that subjective consciousness has a central role in cosmology and that the entire universe is not just a physical nightmare of unrestrained forces of nature creating galaxies and black holes, populated by mindless atoms and molecules and biological organisms that are simply chemical machines and that the sun is doomed to eventually destroy the Earth and eventually the entire universe will destroy itself in a heat death, cosmic rip, or big crunch. Bertrand Russel’s overwhelming pessimism sums this tragic fallacy in precise words of doom.

In this materialistic scientific view, consciousness comes to be identified as a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity, which is at best a potentially unreliable, internal model of the reality of the world around us, which has no ability to effect any causal change on the physical circumstances of the universe. Thus conscious existence is deemed to be a mirage, and free will is an illusion, possibly evolved so as to convince us to continue to act as if we have the will to continue, because all human decisions are just a consequence of brain functions determined by our genes and the specific circumstances of the decision we are striving to make at the time. This classical world denial of free will leaves us with the status of automatons deluding ourselves into believing we have choice, leaving all questions of ethical or moral responsibility in the dust. But the quantum universe teaches otherwise, as I shall come to explain.

Religious believers of virtually every kind find this world view completely unsatisfying for very good reasons. While traditional religious cosmologies are archaic and wildly inconsistent with the reality of the universe as we now know it to be, they exist in a conscious condition of projected fantasy, where Heaven and Hell are conceived as all-too-real experiential realms, in which a sentient being can either live an eternal life in heavenly bliss, or suffer in the endless horrors of damnation. They also go half way to allowing free will as long as we use it to obey the will of God. A scientific view, even if it has experimental verification, that claims consciousness and free will are self-fulfilling delusions holds no candle to a myth that places this real Earthly life to be a mere temporary forerunner to a moral judgment for all eternity.

This means that we, the world and its living future, are living trapped in a schizophrenic existence, in which we treat the practical details, as if we are living in the physical universe with its physical laws and material boundaries, but underlying it, for most of us, is a contradictory belief that the real world is just a delusion, or a temporary place to undergo a moral trial by God, and the true realities that solve life, the universe and everything lie in the afterlife. This is the existential crisis that we are going to heal in this discussion to unveil and reflower the Tree of Life.

The full scope of this contradiction becomes apparent if we examine our living experience of the world around us. We are all forced to concede the existence of a shared physical reality, that the table I am writing on is solid, and if I crack my knuckles on it, they will hurt, if I get hit on the head, I may pass out and lose consciousness, or if I eat a poisonous plant or catch a disease I may get sick, and if I am hit by a vehicle in the street, or shot, I may die, so we are forced to concede the existence of the objective world around us and know that it is part of a physical universe of galaxies, stars and planets, composed of particles, including atoms and molecules that also make up biology and ourselves.

But on the other hand, 100% of everything we experience, including our experience of the physical world, of our dreams and of our visions, including those on mind-altering substances, occur through and only through our subjective conscious experiences. So the world, as we see it, is actually a consensus view of subjective conscious experiences between people, which we are confident is shared with other conscious beings around us, from their lively engaging demeanour, although we don’t generally have any direct access to anyone else’s subjective experience.

We also have a basic belief in our personal autonomy – to make subjective decisions that affect the world arounds us, many as simple as getting a cup of coffee, or going to the toilet, but also critical decisions that may seriously impact on our lives, or the world at large. The sanctity of the legal system depends on the notion that we are accountable for our actions as conscious sentient beings and do have conscious intent. This is what we call ‘free will’ although we know all our decisions are partially determined by their circumstances and can be influenced to a certain extent by our genes.

In Galileo’s error, the panpsychic philosopher Philip Goff (2019) notes that what has subtly happened is that the scientific method, from Galileo ^{^[17]} through Newton, converted the perceivable universe into a set of dispositions codified in mathematical equations, demoting the qualitative aspect of reality to irrelevance. This is fundamentally a patriarchal scheme of dispositional dominion over nature, reducing the phenomenal world to a set of equations. Gather-hunter societies arose from the women classifying plants and defining culture through language, while the men hunted, often silently. Thus males generally have good mental rotation and tend to navigate by vector dispositions as hunters exploring alien terrain “take the first left and then second on the right” rather than the qualitative features used by females from their careful classificatory gathering “it’s opposite the pay centre after the gas station”.

In the Newtonian universe, the patriarchal approach of analytic quantification came to dominate the description of nature, just as the patriarchal religious description dominated nature and woman alike to humanity’s detriment. The end result has been that the entire subjective descriptive aspect of reality has been eliminated from the scientific world view, resulting in an inability of science to understand what subjective consciousness is and does although it is everything we experience. Patriarchal science has literally lost the subject of the case.

Belief in materialism, because of its adroit use of the sceptical principle, to correct naive assumptions and elucidate properties of the natural universe that were at first sight very counter-intuitive, has since become a belief system exactly like a religion, so that researchers cannot afford to take any other position in peril of being shunned by the dominant scientific community and losing recognition altogether. This has grown to counterproductive proportions where the very researchers showing the benefits of psychedelics scientifically are bound to declare that psychedelics have no demonstrable value in solving the central problems of conscious experience, when it is obvious they are sine qua non the most consistent modulators of the depths of conscious experience available to science.

Psychedelics – The Edge of Chaos Climax of Consciousness

This is where psychedelics and their apotheosis, in the term enthoegens, when used for spiritual purposes, come centrally into the arena. Psychoactive substances have always had a formative role in the emergence of spiritual and religious viewpoints. Cannabis, which plays a central role in Shiva worship, has been consumed in ritual spiritual practices for several millennia. Hindu religion owes a portion of its Upanishadic cosmology of the atman and Brahman as the cosmic mind to cannabis and the Rig Veda to the mythical soma of the Aryans. Traces of cannabis used for ritual purposes have been found at an ancient Judaic temple (700-900 BCE) in Arad Israel (Arie, Rosen & Namdar 2020) and also in China (500 BC). Opium likewise has an ancient medicinal and spiritual use.

However long term spiritual use of the most significant of the psychoactive species, those bearing the classic psychedelics, have largely been confined to the pre-Colombian cultures of America, where there is evidence of spiritual use of mushrooms from the Mayan culture (1000 BCE) , the use of peyote among the Zapotec (500 BCE) and long term use of ayahuasca and tryptamine snuffs in South America. These substances have much more profound affects on consciousness which lead directly to a vortical abyss of visionary states renowned for their intensity and transcendence. But their relative absence from existing historical traditions outside he Americas means their significance has been bypassed by the classical world, with the possible exception of Greek mystery cults.

The discovery of LSD and the later discovery of the continuing sacred use of psilocybe mushrooms in Mexico in the mid twentieth century brought the use of hallucinogenic visionary substances back into the focus of Western culture. Although peyote use had continued by the Huichol since Columbus and had been re-established in the Native American Church at the end of the 19th century, and ayahuasca had been consumed as a sacrament in the Amazon, these had remained marginal to mainstream Western awareness. But the advent of LSD as a recreational drug supported by prominent proponents in the US, from Timothy Leary in the East Coast to the Merry Pranksters and Grateful Dead in California, advancing a counter-cultural agenda, supported by devoted chemists who were prepared to synthesise vast numbers of doses of LSD at little or no charge, conceived in the “public good”, set the stage for a cultural confrontation. Accompanied by disquieting media awareness that psychedelics were laying siege to consumer culture and values, amid some troubling incidents with their use, a campaign of frank misinformation ensued from the authorities. The result was that the US and then the world introduced a total clampdown on their use that initiated the unending war on drugs, and stopped all human scientific research in its tracks.

Given the long history of sacred use of entheogens , this constitutes the most benighted quasi-religious piece of authoritarian counter-reaction in Western culture since the Inquisition and Witch Hunts, in a complete mockery of the scientific age of discovery. Penalties for psychedelic use rose to schedule 1 sentences similar to murder, reflecting the perception that this was regarded as a deadly sin rather than any scientific evidence of significant harm, but a threat to the very consumption society that is driving the planet into ecological and climatic crisis. It is only now around fifty years later that the very tentative reopening of scientific research into these substances detailed in section 1 has been able to begin to set the record straight, while still largely confining them to therapeutic use in terminal and psychiatric conditions, while their recreational use has continued, although hidden from the mainstream and somewhat trivialised as a merely a recreational rather than a deeply formative spiritual experience, as their historical use attests.

What the psychedelics provide is a negotiable transcendental experience in the vortical abyss of conscious existence comparable with and potentially more profound than the peaks of meditative and contemplative experiences in mystical and meditative traditions. They constitute a/the central vehicle for us to explore and discover the innermost nature of the subjective mind. They differ from meditation, in that they have pronounced visionary qualities that challenge existing conceptions, rather than enabling a relatively featureless repose, from renunciation and careful top down mindfulness, that is reflected in the formless void of Buddhist thinking, outside the more spontaneous satori of Zen. Likewise they transcend contemplative mysticism, which tends to reinforce preconceived theistic beliefs. They also provide a more consciously explorable complementary condition to lucid states of dreaming associated with REM sleep because these are difficult, or impossible to maintain physiologically.

Discovering Cosmological Symbiosis

This is where we come to the symbiotic cosmology that solves life, the universe and everything summarised here. The existential role of consciousness in the universe is the central enigma of existential cosmology, as we have seen. That's the key thing that everyday existence, no matter how meditative we may be, or whatever preconceived beliefs we may hold, misses out on the true enormity of, so that we will go through life in a state of distraction trying to fill it with habitual purpose until it's too late and we are gone.

Around the beginning of June just over two months ago, I summoned up the will to take a sacred mushroom trip after a seven year fast due to closed angle glaucoma, recently corrected by lens replacement. In the midst on the peak, I settled into meditating on the silent question of the central enigma and let go. As I descended deep into the abyss, at a certain point, everything opened out into what I noted later that evening to be “the epiphany of being in the existential centre of the cyclone, where everything comes into focus in the transfixing presence of complete transfiguration”. “Not an event, but a state of knowing, as we always have known, from time immemorial, as if we have always been conscious of this knowing, forever compassionate of the mortal coil ”. I have experienced this many times before on mushrooms but not in this iconic way. The result was “a sheer calm, unmitigated experiential awakening, as if the Big Bang of the universe is discovering itself in this very moment of illumination and is realising with irresistible intensity, the urgency and vitality of this state of knowing, which, the moment one experiences it, means saving the precious universe, the biosphere and the diversity of life within it from mortal risk to its survival”. This being true, despite the overwhelming reassurance of overflowing compassion for the mortal coil emanating from the apotheosis.

Psychedelic trips can be plagued by all manner of sensory and visionary experiences, from the sublime to the ridiculous or even alarming, but there is a name for this. The Huichol call it the Nierika, the visionary portal to the non-ordinary reality of the spirit world and the ancestors.

There is a doorway within our minds that usually remains hidden and secret until the time of death.

The Huichol word for it is nierika – a cosmic portway or interface between so-called ordinary and non-ordinary realities.

It s a passageway and at the same time a barrier between the worlds” (Halifax 242).

Emerging renewed and revitalised from this experience, accompanied as I moved and breathed by the lingering shadow of the apotheosis compassionately caring for me and encouraging me to put this whole illumination together into an account for the world, I began feverishly assembling this work.

What the experience brought home to me, above all was the veridical ^{^[18]} reality of the cosmic mind, even though it was evoked in a human brain on sensory withdrawal under a hallucinogenic experience. This is a turning point from many past experiences, where I have witnessed the same compassion for the mortal coil as a visionary impression of the other – transforming it from perception into reality – the actuality of Brahma-atman unification in the form extolled in the Upanishads (Purohit & Yeats 1937).

This brings us back to the hard problem of consciousness research. The advent of neuroscience has provided us with genuine insights into how the brain processes information, including sensory and cognitive tasks associated with conscious attention and resting, or meditative states. We can then associate a variety of conscious states with activity, either by electroencephalographic portraits of brain waves, by functional magnetic resonance images of blood flow to specific regions, or by positron emission tomography of radioactive glucose, and even by invasive studies of actual neurons and connections in animals. Various researchers can then attempt to deduce how these excitations give rise to the conscious experience, e.g. by the activities of certain frequency bands, such as gamma from 30-100 Hz.

The classical deterministic view of brain function, denying a role for subjective consciousness and making free will impossible, is undermined by two additional factors in the physics of brain function. The first is edge-of-chaos dynamics, which at tipping point instabilities associated with critical decision-making watersheds can enable a fractal handshaking between instabilities at the quantum level of the ion channel and changes in overall brain state. The second is the intrinsic uncertainty of quantum events and their entanglement, which is closely paralleled by phase coherence in wave processing associated with coherent conscious states – that brain states which rise and fall together in synch rise to consciousness while others constitute the unconscious ground of neurodynamic processing.

The trouble with the entire sweep of the objective description of brain dynamics is that no objective state, no matter how the brain does it, even if by edge-of-chaos instability and quantum entanglement, is anything other than objective, so it never solves the question of how subjective states actually arise. This is the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ coined by David Chalmers (1995). Essentially, there is no way to get a ghost out of the objective biological machine of the brain by combining non-conscious components, whether molecules, neuronal excitations, edge of chaos dynamics, quantum phenomena or brain states, if none of these components have any subjective status.

The sceptical basis of the scientific description depends on Occam’s razor, the idea that, given two views describing the same phenomenon, the simplest, most concise one is likely to be correct. Materialists thus try to claim that any reference to consciousness and volitional will is extraneous in a supposedly classical macroscopic world where causal decision making processes defined by brain function can in principle have a detailed mechanistic basis without reference to fuzzy vitalistic ^{^[19]} notions like mind, consciousness or will. They will then claim the hard problem is a distraction to be finessed away in steps, as more discoveries of how the physical brain processes information become revealed. However the materialist case is not established and it isn’t necessarily fulfilling Occam’s razor at all. What has happened is that materialists have restricted the domain of evidence to be circumstantial physical fact, ignoring veridical truths stated by conscious observers and actors as mere personal opinions or beliefs, in fundamental conflict with legal situations, where sworn subjective testimony is evidential in the absence of contrivance.

For example Erwin Schrödinger’s statement “the overall number of minds is just one”, which coincides with the conclusions of this monograph, is discounted as just being his idiosyncratic belief in Advaita Vedanta, despite that fact that we depend on his wave equation to understand quantum chemistry, and his devising of the cat paradox to understand quantum observation. Taken at face value, this is a veridical teaching by a founder of quantum mechanics.

So we need to take a big step back and reassess the way Occam’s razor best cuts a real swathe through existence. When confronted by a description of reality which denies our subjective consciousness is anything more than an epiphenomenon, and insists that our volitional will to make any sort of autonomous decision at all is a delusion contrived by evolution to ensure we survive and replicate, that debilitates any sense of personal autonomy, responsibility and confidence to act in the real world, we need to make a succinct determination. Should we just accept this is a scientifically proven fact, when the evidence doesn’t exist that the brain is a causally-closed deterministic machine and looks increasingly to be a complex, messy claim that may never be confirmed? Or should we take the much simpler concise volitional choice to allow Occam’s razor to cut the Gordian knot of this contrived belief that we are helpless automata, and assert that it contradicts our decision-making autonomy, and rule out of hand this fatalistic myth-making? How can we resolve this existential impasse?

The answer is both ridiculously simple and counter-intuitive – to move the elephant in the room – consciousness itself – into a new place on the cosmological chessboard, that of complementing the entire physical universe. This is a direct consequence of affirming volitional will ^{^[20]}, because will implies the conscious mind affects the physical universe physically in terms of the forces of nature. This may be in the way the brain processes unstable tipping points, and may involve quantum phenomena akin to solid state physics, but it is still a physical process following the forces of nature under the core model of physics. But this means the physics of the universe itself is sensitive to mind and that mind plays an essential role in intentionality ^{^[21]} in the universe, manifest in the biosphere as a whole and in the universe at large. This is then a form of pan-psychic cosmology. Panpsychism is thus the clean veridical Occam’s razor cut.

Consciousness, as an expression of a more generalised pan-psychism, then has a role in quantum uncertainty and in collapsing the wave functions of the multiverse, as we see in Schrödinger’s cat paradox, which we know appears to be specifically associated with conscious measurement of the wave function. This gives us back both subjective consciousness and its ability to autonomously apply free will in the same process determining the course of history in the universal wave function. This solves the dilemma of science denying free conscious choice and gives us full freedom as sentient beings, unlike the bondage of moral religions, where we are given free will only to find that if we use it autonomously on our own best judgment, we would be likely to end up in hell. Instead of moral compulsion, giving us back autonomy also gives us subjective divinity in our union with the cosmic mind.

This solves the moral problem another way by showing us that our mortal existence is part of the immortal web of life and that there is no future in selfish activity because when we come to the end of our lives, any activities other than giving our all to life as a whole is futile. It also solves the problem for divinity i.e. the mind at large, because now it has a sentiently intelligent vehicle for conscious manifestation.

Since we are universally subjectively sentient conscious beings and have no knowledge of the physical world except through subjective consciousness, the only valid conclusion is that the subjective aspect is a cosmological property complementing the objective physical universe. This means a form of panpsychism, in which all quantum phenomena also have a complementary aspect. This seems counterintuitive, because we seem to be replacing a succinct objective description with something elusive and fuzzy, but that is because we aren’t making the right test. The test of objective cosmology is empirical investigation. The test of subjective cosmology is veridical affirmation in which each conscious observer affirms verification.

There are alongside its foundational subjectivity a number of features of our conscious experience which ‘colour’ the nature of experience and are features or ‘qualia’ of our consciousness rather than its existential status. For example vision and hearing, smell and touch all differ qualitatively. These differences are partly due to the quantum modes of the senses and partly to do with the neuroreceptors and cerebral excitations eliciting conscious states. So we need to factor these out when addressing panpsychism and the ground roots of subjectivity.

However there are some features in the conscious brain that are clearly universal and hold the key to understanding what consciousness is and how it arises. While individual details of brain structure and dynamics are shared extensively with other mammals, leading to our empathy with our pets, the differences between us and arthropods and molluscs such as cephalopods are much more exotic and somewhat alien.

The fundamental basis of consciousness arises in coordinated edge-of-chaos membrane excitability in prokaryote cells, dating back to the first cells of our last universal common ancestor LUCA. However a key transition point to sentient consciousness arose in our last eucaryote common ancestor LECA, the founding single celled eucaryote. Here is the transition point where symbiotic cosmology really begins to kick in. This was a hugely significant event in the form of a deep symbiosis between the two existing procaryote kingdoms some 2 billion years ago, in which an Asgard archaean and a proteobacterium, similar to our intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli, became symbiotically interdependent. This freed the cell membrane from core energy processing, which was now handled by the bacterial mitochondrial respiration and made the new cell membrane able to become focussed on information processing. This meant that the eucaryote cell became sentient life form responding to quantum modes – sight, sound, chemical and electrical, in its environment sensitively due to the edge-of-chaos dynamics of its excitable membrane. At the same time these cells, across the board use the same molecules as the key repertoire of our neurotransmitters to facilitate the social signalling essential for survival of the collective single celled organism.

This is the point where panpsychism becomes consciousness as we know it and the entire rest of the story is simply elaborating on this theme, so the human brain ends up being a very ornately and closely coupled collection of amoebae communicating through these same social signalling molecules in their synapses to produce the highly coordinated form of cellular consciousness that we experience as subjective reality.

This turns what might seem to be specious vitalism into a clear-cut biological theory in which the development of subjective consciousness has a clear evolutionary trace from the punctuated equilibrium of eucaryote symbiosis, consistent with the physiology of chaotically excitable cells in a quantum entangled universe. Because this subjective product of excitability enhanced survival by avoiding lethal outcomes, it has been selected by evolution throughout. This in turn attests to the effectuality of conscious will on the physical universe

One can then find evidential support for this conclusion. A key point of transition is that from single celled eucaryotes to the metazoa – multicelled animals. A highly-studied example is the myxamoeban slime-mould Dictyostelium discoideum. This is a free-living single-celled amoeba that having eaten out its local bacterial habitat, aggregates, forming an excitable slug and then a sporulating fruiting body, to spread it to new habitats. It does this by using a combination of the same molecules that we use as neurotransmitters and second-signalling molecules – cyclic AMP, glutamate, GABA and serotonin pivotal to psychedelic activity and human mood. It turns out that an interplay between serotonin and its catabolic enzyme MAOa is key to maintaining development of the spore-forming tip of the fruiting body. In the same way, serotonin plays a key role not just in neurotransmission in the mature brain but evoking stages of brain development in the human embryo, for the neural groove at one extreme, to coordinating the correct formation of the layers of other neurons in the cerebral cortex, through serotonin-secreting fibres ascending from the basal brain that are later used in the moderating mood in the mature brain, to mediate organismic social survival.

Several of these molecules are primal in their simplicity and cosmological in their origin. Both glutamate and GABA both of which are key neurotransmitters are prominent components of comets and carbonaceous chondrites. Others are the amines of biological amino acids. Serotonin is 5-hydroxy-tryptamine, derived from tryptophan.

This goes a good way toward providing an immediate explanation of how psychedelics can cause a retreat from egotistical attentive consciousness into a primary consciousness, in which ego loss occurs, consistent with an underlying dynamic to secure collective survival, rather than personal survival of the individual, when the psychedelic state dissolves the distinction between self and other in a peak experience.

But the eucaryote symbiosis is not the only manifestation of symbiosis in Homo sapiens. As far as we know, all existing eucaryotes are sexual, or at least capable of intermittent (cryptic) sexuality. Dyadic sex is one of the most altruistic genetic acts an organism can commit to, by giving only half its genes, along with half the partners genes to make what is essentially a new life form never before conceived. All sexual species thus consist of two sexes each with their own genetic history (or more – Dictyostelium has three and some fungi fertilising by conjugation lots more).

Sexual symbiosis in animals is highly asymmetric with the female contributing all the cytoplasm, ostensibly to avoid a mitochondrial genetic war, and the males contributing essentially only their DNA in the sperm, giving rise to sexually antagonistic co-evolution i.e. the sex wars of reproductive investment.

Humans are also extensively symbiotic with their endogenous transposable elements, which constitute over half of the human chromosomal genome, that arose originally as selfish genes, co-travellers that run back to the first multicelled animals and retroviruses related to HIV that became incorporated into our germ lines. These can cause mutations but also have key roles in coordinated gene expression and chromosomal processing.

Finally all species are co-dependent with the other species populating their ecological niches in biospheric symbiosis. This is what we capitalistically call survival of the fittest by natural selection, but really it is symbiotic co-evolution with the biosphere as a whole, even though individual species, including Homo sapiens have evolved to maintain strategic survival in their own right, leading to the egotistical expression of human character.

In the context of humanity, we are manifestly symbiotic with our food and medicinal species and likewise with our entheogenic species. The plant components of ayahuasca, the opium poppy, cannabis, coca and the herb of the shepherdess, Salvia divinorum have all been symbiotic with the human species for millennia, as has the yeast Sacchromyces cerevesiae responsible for bread, but also alcohol. Peyote and sacred mushrooms have been collected from the wild for millennia but some species of Psilocybe mushrooms are the most easily cultivated entheogens, now in symbiotic use.

This brings us to the final component of the symbiotic universe, symbiosis with the mind at large. Humans consider ourselves to be the species that invented culture. We tend to define ourselves as reaching to the stars themselves, as a dominant species that stoops to no other, as the highest form of consciousness, apart form God himself and thus free to determine the destiny of all living species on Earth. This is a tragic fallacy in conflict with all the evidence.

Human attempts to seek moksha – escape from the egotistical and mortal round of birth and death are singularly rare enough that the Eastern traditions of both Buddhism and Vedanta have arrived at a fallacious notion of enlightenment through many reincarnations, essentially because the experience of cosmic reunion is so rare as to be essentially unattainable. The monotheistic faiths have abandoned any hint of such achievement. Christianity considers human nature fatally flawed by original sin and hence the only hope is faith in God, prayer and fear of the punishments of Hell in the day of judgment, while mystical experiences are rare and generally contemplative, rather than illuminative. Any idea that a person can manifest actual identity with God is blasphemous across all monotheistic paths. Islam regards it as a death penalty, just as Yeshua was condemned to death by the High Priests for blasphemy.

This leads to the conclusion that human consciousness is not the cosmological pinnacle of conscious existence, but we are a/the key active vehicle for cosmological symbiosis incarnate, and that the entheogenic state, by virtue of the very symbiosis induced by the entheogenic relationship takes us closer to the union with the mind at large that is the consummating manifestation of the cosmos in self-awareness. The biota are the only entities we know of in the universe that possess consciousness. They are thus the central candidates for the interactive emergence of cosmological consciousness from the Big Bang. This experience of union is also the only phenomenon we know of that comes anywhere close to the actual realisation of deity.

This finally solves the dilemma of God as a third agent outside the physical universe. The missing component explaining the creation of the observable universe is not God but consciousness itself. It is the missing piece in the puzzle and the manifestation of deity is thus realised in the subjective, not in a miraculous third party.

And although it seems counterintuitive to think that consuming entheogenic species is a/the key to saving the planet, there is a symbiotic truth in this because, the entheogenic relationship in Maria Sabina’s words a way of “the sap and the dew” heightens our deep sense of inter-connecteness with nature and deep solace in our relationship with life as a whole, rather than delusory and damaging supremacy over it that leaves us in mortal isolation, so in the longer evolutionary time scale, given the current biospheric dominance of Homo sapiens, this is cosmologically pivotal.

A Visionary Journey

The other side of the coin of this transmission is that I am what I would call a true visionary. That is, I am transparent and simply give you the keys to resolve the existential enigma to use for yourself. I have no doctrine about what other people need to do spiritually, or should do to gain illumination and I am true to the pursuit of the vision quest. I don’t follow any religion and don’t ask anyone to believe in me, but I encourage you to find out for yourselves with an open mind. And to ensure everyone has love and support to keep the process tranquil. The reason is that the cure for the mortal condition is moksha not moral punishment and moksha heals and informs the ego. The true realities that matter to the meaning of sentient existence in the mortal coil are not found in the material world, but in accepting our transience within the eternal entanglement and realising that the only meaningful acts we can perform are to ensure the passage of the living generations continues to flourish. Therefore true enlightenment redeems the mortal condition. I have sourced my vital inspiration and literally navigated my life course through first person visionary experiences on entheogenic species that have propelled my life and its urgency and activism.

The intensity of these experiences could have consumed me and driven the most stalwart to the brink of messianic insanity, were it not for my intent to be true to nature and the universe at large, as well as my loved ones. I may have no religious or spiritual assumptions, or doctrine, but I do have one clear natural priority sine qua non and that is a mandate to save the living planet, its biodiversity and its largely beneficent, nurturing climate from a hard landing, irreversible tipping points, a mass extinction of life which would place our living future and the future of all life in serious jeopardy.

Fig 250: Left: Dionysus mask Centre left: Dionysus mosiac Dion 300 BCE – 300 CE. Centre: Quetzalcoatl in human form. Centre right Teotihuacan 150-200 CE, Olmec la Venta 900 BCE. Quetzalcoatl is the god of wisdom, whose feathers represent the flight of visionary consciousness, while the serpentine body slithers among the plants and animals, entangled in natural existence.

I was born on 6th Jan – the Epiphany of the advent, appearance and miraculous dread of Dionysus, who became Dhushara of the Nabateans in Yeshua’s time. This event later became usurped by Hellenistic-Jewish gospel writers as Yeshua’s Triple Epiphany: (1) of his visitation by the Magi, (2) in his baptism by John and (3) in his turning water into wine at Cana at the request of his mother, in an all-too Dionysian display of the god of wine and altered states.

The “feathery part” of my vision quest is summed up in “The Plumed Serpent” (Lawrence 1974):

"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.

I am Quetzalcoatl lord of both ways,

star between day and the dark."

I was christened Christopher Cyril King, but I don’t answer to Christopher and I am not a cross-bearer. I won’t carry a cross for anyone, or stand in anyone’s shadow, least of all a dying and resurrecting saviour, who I admire as a brilliant innovator, but also lament for his self-destructive heritage of violence. We each come from a three billion year line of evolution, that has honed us to be conscious beings taking responsibility for our own lives and futures, so I have honed my vision quest as a journey – the trip of a lifetime – the trip of all trips together, till death us do part!

For those of us seeking psychic phenomena from visionary experiences, I’ve had these too, although, while they do affect my world view, I neither take any of these for granted and consider them deeply natural rather than supernatural.

I have had repeated precognitive dreams and precognitive creative experiences. When I was living on a canal boat we built in England, I read J W Dunne’s (1934) “An Experiment with Time”. According to Dunne, our wakeful attention prevents us from seeing beyond the present moment, whilst when dreaming that attention fades and we gain the ability to recall more of our timeline. This allows fragments of our future to appear in pre-cognitive dreams, mixed in with fragments or memories of our past. Other consequences include the phenomenon known as deja vu and life after death. At the time of its publication, not to have read him became a "mark of singularity" in society.

Fig 251: The Taniwha (Maori spirit of the rivers and swamps), the canal boat we built from a wreck submerged since the 19th century where the dream took place.

Shortly after this I had a double nightmare that I was being hideously stung by a spider, repeated in the second dream because I had failed to brush it off when it had removed its fangs. I continued to sleep in after Hallie, my young wife, got up to feed our first child, a newborn baby girl, opening the bedroom window in the process. I woke long enough to tell her “I had a terrible double nightmare” and then fell asleep again. About an hour later, I was stung wide awake by a wasp that had flown in after she opened the window. Going through all the same feverish motions under the intense pain I had experienced in the dream, blowing it off to find it was a large wasp. I have had many such dreams during my life most often anticipating things that unexpectedly happen early the next day. What it has taught me is that the universe is an entangled handshaking in which past, present and future are intertwined, and that the role of conscious existence is partly to anticipate future threats and challenges through direct perception of the space-time continuum.

I have also had lucid dreams combined with out of the body experiences. After practicing looking at the backs of my hands in dreams and after having dreams in which I was climbing a ladder and saw my hands but failed to respond, I suddenly realised in my first lucid dreaming encounter that I was fully aware in my dream and all hell broke loose. Firstly, I was being thrust up faster and faster like a rocket ship, in the manner of levitating and flying dreams. But I was also standing in the dream on an exceedingly bright promenade by the sea. A gust of wind that was also the levitating wind blew some sea spray at my light muslin Indian shirt. I was in a super-sensory state. I could simultaneously sense every one of the droplets separately touching my skin like the stars in the sky. But that didn't concern me. I looked up at the azure sky and the stratospheric clouds passing overhead and realised I was trapped in another world – in another universe. I saw a woman standing gazing at me with dark eyes and rushed towards her, grabbing her by both shoulders staring deeply down into her wild wide pupils, framing the silent urgent question where is the way back to Ixtalan echoing Carlos Casteneda's (1972) allegories ^{^[22]} of the sorcerer Don Juan.of the sorcerer Don Juan. She just looked at me and smiled knowingly and shook her head. But at the same time, I was out of my body floating just by the ceiling of my bedroom looking down at myself lying on the bed, totally reassured: "It's all okay! You are just down there sleeping". I thus awoke with three parallel streams of consciousness re-entwining together. Again, I have had many lucid dreams, but none so graphic as this first experience. I have had many lucid dreams but none so graphic as this first experience.

The difficulty with lucid dreaming is that the very act of becoming lucid rapidly tends to cause one to awaken because the triggers in the base of the brain flip towards wakefulness the moment we become lucid because neurotransmitters for vigilance such as nor-epinephrine kick in and flip the orexin neurons to wake the brain up. This is different from the visionary experiences induced by entheogenic species where a waking person can descend into a deep visionary abyss where other realities quite distinct from dreaming can occur, although returning from the depths of these other states can leave on in a similar situation of trying to recall the ineffable that has now receded, as Don Hose Matsuwa the Huichol shaman makes clear.

This brings us to psychedelics, or entheogens as the natural species are called, that possess psychedelic substances and are used, and have been used for millennia as visionary sacraments for healing, sorcery and spiritual realisation.

My relationship with psychedelic agents began as soon as I arrived in the UK to take a graduate mathematics degree in topology, with my first somewhat devastating experiences on LSD, still decanted with a dropper onto whole sugar cubes. The first trip was really awesome, but a week later a double dose of two cubes left me with the absolute certainty I had literally died (the most extreme form of ego death) and left me with shimmering after effects for weeks. At the same time, orchestrated by the US drug authorities, contrived reports were circulated that LSD split your chromosomes, which left me with five years of anxiety before I would take my next trip.

After that began a regular round of recreational tripping to try to get to the bottom of what these agents were showing us. I have always been devoted to my family which has now become a loving and caring extended whanau as relationships between partners have evolved and changed. For several years we held court, hosting a free-love establishment in the city, in which I ended up in three double partnerships in open ‘marriages’, spanning decades. Attesting to my consistency, I have lived with my current partner, Christine for over 50 years, despite times apart on world journeys, and all my offspring and grand children are nearby, so I must be doing something right, in spite of all.

On my first academic sabbatical, I split my efforts between a scientific investigation in the West to get first hand knowledge of what some of the famous scientists, including Nobel prize winners, made of the role of life in the universe. I spent the rest of my time imbibing the Eastern spiritual traditions, wandering India as a sadhu and taking Tibetan Buddhist initiations with Yeshe Dorje the Ningmapa exorcist who kept the rain off the Dalai Lama when he walked and Rangjung Rigpe Dorje the 16th Karmapa the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage, at the same time exploring sources of the world’s power plants, from the poppy fields of the Golden Triangle, through the Ganga fields of India and Afghanistan, eventually to take peyote with the Native American Church in New Mexico, where I also encountered my first sacred mushroom experience.

On my return to Aotearoa, I began a symbiotic relationship with sacred mushrooms, both because of their genetic purity, by comparison with synthetic drugs and because, although not as overpowering as LSD, they provide, in my view, a more deeply spiritual experience, which is also a deep expression of conscious symbiosis, without some of the transient casualties of LSD trips that occurred among our friends. This doesn’t mean taking mushrooms all the time. In fact I will sometimes go for years simply making sure they survive. Symbiosis means being faithful to their preservation. Their spores will live for decades if correctly stored at 5% humidity in a cool place and they can be cultivated in a chilly bin, with careful sterile techniques. I also brought species recognition to psilocybe aucklandii, and conserve a collection of species spanning each of the classic enthenogens, to safeguard the visionary heritage for humanity, as a symbiotic duty of care.

Fig 252: A panorama of Opuhi, our wilderness land in Aotearoa. The meeting house is just visible on the right up the path.

In 1970 we had established a windswept coastal wilderness conservation community, which provided endless opportunities to hold mushroom veladas in the moonlight, listening to the crickets and moreporks and the distant ocean below, either alone, in “solitario”, which I prefer, or together in the meeting house, which has since become a heritage building. These experiences have become pivotal to my life's work.

Other waking experiences, both on sacred mushrooms and during creative experiences have assumed a prophetic quality that can be alarming or even devastating. On one particular velada in the 1980s I suddenly became aware that the mushroom was telling me that if the world failed to show adequate signs of arresting the human impact causing a mass extinction of living diversity, I would need to make a vision quest to the Amazon, as our figurative Garden of Eden paradise and to Yerushalayim as the nexus of the religious impulse to undertake a rite of passage to make a transition to the immortal epoch of the Tree of Life, hidden since the foundation of the world in Eden by a flaming sword.

Around the same time on another trip, I had a horrific vision that my eldest daughter would have an obstruction to her fertility, as some twisted kind if sacrificial outcome of my undertaking this mission. Some years later she became pregnant and her first of three sons was born with Down syndrome. He is great, but the episode was very disturbing, and a triple chromosome 21 is a genetic obstruction to fertility, affirming the vision’s veridical, or prophetic character.

In 1980 I made a second journey on unpaid leave to research the chemical origins of life in the US, later returning to Mexico and collecting and consuming peyote from the high desert below Wirikuta, the sacred mountain of the Huichol and then travelling to Yarinacohcha lagoon at Pucallpa in Peru, where I took a powerful and formative ayahusaca trip with Snr. Trinico, a leprous curandero living at the extreme end of the slums around the lagoon. In 1992 I again returned on sabbatical and took peyote with the Native American Church in Taos with Tellus Goodmorning, my original roadman who was 92 and had lost one eye, but was still in fighting form chanting all night in the teepee.

In the two years spanning the millennium I made another sabbatical journey to the Amazon to document one of the worst burning seasons on record and returned to Yarinacocha for a second ayahuasca session with Trinico who was elderly, but now in good health.

Following this, with my sabbatical partner Jane King, we completed our Millennial vigil to Jerusalem, pronouncing as Bride and Bridegroom the rite of passage of the of the immortal Tree of Life of living diversity in the Gaia anointing of the Jubilee passage of Isaiah 61, completed on the Epiphany by declaring the Gates of Mercy open at the Eastern wall and celebrating the Sacred Reunion of woman and man in the Song of Songs at the Western (Wailing) Wall.

This served two key purposes to address foundation issues in the collective unconscious, manifest in the Weltanschauung ^{^[23]} , the archaic formative world view driving patriarchal monotheism expressed in the Yahwistic Genesis, firstly in Eve being cursed for heeding the serpent, to be obedient to her husband under pain of childbirth, appeasing male paternity uncertainty, confessing an archaic conflict with the matriliny and female reproductive integrity and secondly with dominion over nature, in the Tree of Life in Paradise hidden from humanity behind a flaming sword, dooming us to conflict with the thorns of the wilderness sweat of human dominance.

In 2015 I had a near-death experience when involved in a cycle accident which knocked me unconscious and left me with temporary amnesia from ensuing concussion. This made me acutely aware of the risks I was taking not fulfilling the pact with the mushroom, by kicking the bucket before my time had come. This resulted in the notion of planetary resplendence transcending religion as a way of life protecting the biosphere in perpetuity. Resurrection Revelation

Finally after a seven year hiatus, I took the mushroom trip that became this entire work.

On 19-7-2001, a month before 9-11, I published the lyrics of a song I had composed – Big Brother – The Song of the Biosphere – video. This was a poetic statement having read an AP news article “The Hollywood Syndrome - Is the US the Global Satan?”, concerning the failure of G W Bush to ratify the Kyoto convention. The article was well conceived and the song is a just response. The lyrics took this statement and declared poetic jihad for the biosphere. 'When it comes to the final struggle, jihad of the biosphere, there's only one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan - Big Brother you are uncle Sam’, because George H W Bush had refused to sign the 1992 Rio Convention on Biodiversity. (As of 2016, the convention has 196 parties. All UN member states – with the exception of the United States – have ratified the treaty. The US still only has observer status as I write this in 2022, 30 years later!). The lyrics continue with a lament for the dark canyons of lower Manhattan among the fallen towers: 'walking in the twilight, down in the valley of shadows', and then the plane: 'We'll fly so high well pass right to the other side and never fall in flames again’.

Just under two months later, at one in the morning on a continuous BBC news broadcast, I watched in horror, as firstly one and then two planes crashed through the twin towers of the World Trade Center in flames and the towers fell, turning the streets of lower Manhattan into a literal vale of the shadow of death.

Fig 253: A: Extracts from the lyrics posting of 20^th July 2001 (http://dhushara.com/nino/19julyjihad.jpg). B: Passenger plane collides with one of the twin towers. C: Rudi Giuliani Mayor of New York the number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear (http://youtu.be/xhBYWDy4m9M). For the complete song video containing the 9-11 documentary footage, see: (http://youtu.be/g-giqTW4_YQ).

The lyrics contain an uncanny ‘prophetic’ reverse echo of the event a month before it occurred:

First we have the jihad of against the U.S. over the Rio biodiversity convention but now it is really become Islamic fundamentalism on 9-11:

you tell us tales of hollywood of star wars and the common good

you told us global warming was a litany of lies, factory chimneys were the prize

you claim all living creatures are your intellectual property

you fail to ratify every treaty which doesn't give you more, have I heard this all before?

when it comes to the final struggle - jihad of the biosphere

there's only one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan

This was karma, not a rude invention. The first line is "hollywood" and the last is the American satan just as in the AP article. Next we have an echo of the streets of New York amid the smoke and haze of fallen masonry amid a deadly massacre:

walking in the twilight, down in the valley of shadows

when will you comprehend - the damage you have wrought in your indiscretion?

can we undo - the death trance you have set in motion?

Then the amazing, outstanding, caring efforts of those on the ground, to begin the process of recovery:

will you discover - the fabric of love that ignites us?

can we embrace the ocean of life that unites us?

all our lives long this journey has been our destination

if we get this one wrong will there be any chance for restoration

We have the planes flying clean through the towers in flames - reminiscent of a martyr seeking the face of God.

can we touch the sky?

can we fly so high we'll pass right to the other side

and never fall in flames? will we ever be the same again?

To become the shining goal in the beginning and end of life -

we'll become the living soul, the primal source, the shining goal

the beginning and the end of life,

Finally, a shadow of Rudy Giuliani’s statement as Mayor: The “casualties will be more than any of us can bear”:

the happiness and the pain … can we bear it all again?

I apologise to all Americans for comparing your country to the Shaitan, but saving biodiversity is saving ourselves. Refusing to sign the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity is counter to the entire planetary future, so it was/is satanic, just as Donald Trump’s pulling out of the Paris accord was satanic. These are not the acts of a responsible superpower.

So what are we supposed to make of this? It’s just a coincidence isn’t it? There is more to this tale caught up in the quantum entanglement of past, present and future. It’s a completely non-replicable non-IID event. Is it a coincidence? What’s the probability of that? My father used to marvel at coincidence, repeatedly astounded.

How come, a month or more before 9-11 did I get it into my head to write these lines? Yes it's the same life-protecting motive that brought the SEC into existence. But no one remotely conceived this was going to happen. The lyrics are an allegory not conceived to be literal future fact, just poetry, but they are nevertheless written from an apocalyptic viewpoint. But they are also a stream of consciousness account of everybody and everything that happened. The minds of the martyrs thinking they'll fly so high they'll pass right to the other side and it's also the consciousness of the people who went in to deal with the destruction in the smoke and dust of Manhattan's dark corridors and the spirit of those who came to light their candles for life and the uncanny "can we bear it all again?" whose words Giuliani echoed on TV.

What does this all mean about consciousness?

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, our state of knowledge is like that of prisoners chained together in a cave watching an illusory drama. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects, casting shadows on the cave wall. The prisoners watch these shadows, believing them to be real. One prisoner finally sees the fire and realises the shadows are fake. This prisoner escapes from the cave and discovers there is a whole new world outside that they were previously unaware of, but he becomes blinded because his eyes are not accustomed to actual sunlight, so when he returns to free them, his fellows do not trust his new knowledge.

Ruth Kastner has coined the analogy that quantum land hiding in the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, connecting all the potential absorbers to the emitter determining how quantum reality manifests, is the real reality and that physical reality we see in space-time is just the false image on the wall of Plato's cave. I have a different view of this which I'll describe, but Ruth's view has true reality value in suggesting that the foundations of consciousness lie outside physical space-time in the quantum land of incipient possibilities she calls potentiae. In a fundamental sense, this gives a true account of consciousness as the primary reality underlying the necessity of the physical universe, as the consensual illusion that binds together our conscious experiences of the world at large.

My view of this goes as follows:

Firstly 100% of people are subjectively conscious human beings, all of whose understanding of the physical universe has come from their conscious experiences, while only a subset believe in physical causality.

Secondly our experience of conscious volition is that we have autonomous intent and can perceive this intent veridically being manifest in our intentional actions. Therefore the physicalist description which sees consciousness as a mere internal model and volition as non-existent is empirically false.

Thirdly our conscious experience of volition is not like Plato's cave, because we are not passively watching a movie allegory, we are participating in it. The intervention of conscious volition is what actually causes history to emerge from the multiverse, so we are right there by the fire manipulating the images cast on the cave wall. To do this effectively we have to do it predictively.

One of the most central aspects of consciousness is that it is an extended space-time representation of our dynamical relationship with existence on an uncertain trajectory from the immediate past into the uncertain future. This looks convincingly like an entangled quantum representation of the now, i.e. the absolute instant of the present expanded into both the immediate past and immediate future – i.e. the uncertain quantum of the present. When this becomes extended as in the above example of 9-11 which is a strongly felt apocalypse in my vision that is going to become a world apocalypse in everyone's experience the two get caught in a Faustian space-time pact.

To a certain extent our relationship with time is a little like Plato's cave in the sense that the future is herder to see and we are stuck with the past in all our memories, dreams and reflections as Jung said. But this isn't the whole story. The brain-mind is a dynamical predictor as flash-lag illusions show it doing creating space-time artefacts. We experience this facing forwards into the unknown using consciousness as our cubic centimetre of chance to address uncertainty, so my bet is that consciousness is space-time transactionally predictive and has to be for evolution to retain it over a purely physical computational brain.

For consciousness to have any affect on physical outcomes that is useful to evolution, it has to be able to anticipate reality. The mind can do this logically or intuitively. But for conscious intuition to do it, it has to be in a sense precognitive.

What about life immortality and the eternal? is the “ground" of consciousness a universal subjective phenomenon? If so, is it itself in any way connected to the death of the brain. The answer to this is probably yes, because the brain, at the very least is an immensely complex defining condition on the way human organismic consciousness manifests subjectively. This is where a scientist’s comment the the brain “makes” consciousness is largely correct, even if the brain is not causally closed, so that conscious volition is efficacious physically.

But subjective conscious ground of being as a universal phenomenon is then something that is not confined to a mortal organism’s lifetime. In fact it is not even confined to biological evolutionary immortality, so it stands as a principal candidate for being eternal or existing outside space-time, as space-time is an entirely physical construct.

So where does this leave us?

Well, religious people, Psi people and reincarnation people and mediums all have to reconsider all monolithic assumptions about the afterlife. At the same time scientific materialists need to recognise consciousness is cosmological and stop insisting our conscious volition is just a product of the computational brain.

Frankly I think biological mortality is the key to conscious existence sine qua non, because it’s the only way complex conscious existence can become physically manifest in sexual evolution. This is the incarnate focal point of conscious existence. I want to be effectual in my biological existence. I can already experience the immortality of evolving life and the eternal nature of the ground of conscious being and the so called spirit world of disembodied consciousness.

My take on this other world is entirely different from any other description of it I have seen in scripture, mediumistic accounts although is an extension of NDEs – rather as an integral transform of the entire conscious experience of the universe aware of itself, both as the mind at large and as the disembodied entities that constitute it, not some winged angels in “heaven” dancing on the head of a pin and not the tormented in eternal suffering in “hell”.

‘Elohim

We are whispering ... across the heavens

and all the creatures ... they echo in reply.

We are the very blood ... of the tree of life.

We are the void and the shining light.

We are the eternal gypsy spirits of the universe.

We have been here since it all began.

We will outlast its final passing.

We are here to free the heart of man.

Adding further assumptions, in my not-so-humble opinion, leads to all manner of egotistical traps, as serious in the subjective world, as the human desire for cyborg immortality does in the physical universe.

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in despair at the death of his queen, casts the whole of life as a tale told by an idiot:

Out, out, brief candle.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

This is not the outcome we seek for the living planet, so please listen to the sound and fury of a hallucinogen-consuming voice from the wilderness. It is not me, but the direction human life is taking, and all of us with it, that is idiotic beyond comprehension. That is a tale full of apocalyptic sound and fury, both religious and biospheric which, far from signifying nothing, might kill us all if we don’t accept the three priorities for reflowering the planet above.

To quote Yeshua from the Gospel of Thomas (70):

"That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves.

That which you do not have within you [will] kill you if you do not have it within you."

Fig 253b: It won't be easy but we can do this thing.

Here is my Easter 2023 Revelation! Don't ever forget my name is true!

I don't usually adhere to the Everett interpretation, but as it’s a valid QM interpretation, I am entitled to and will also use the transactional special relativistic interpretation. So I’m going to assert the following:

(1) The objective universe, outside subjectivity, is a probability multiverse and on its own, no wave function collapse takes place, and everything remains “entangled".

(2) This applies also to the unconscious aspects of brain function, which proceed on a multiverse Schrödinger wave equation basis forming “massively" superimposed and entangled states.

(3) Subjective conscious volition over the physical universe then collapses these brain wave states in the process of decision-making, to form a predictive form of quantum anticipation, due to the special relativistic nature of the wave functions, involving both causal and retro-causal interactions, via the transactional interpretation, or a super-determinism in which free will exists, and the hidden variables are context dependent on observation, and are not simply random.

(4) To be effective over a non-conscious zombie, subjective consciousness still has to be predictive, to secure natural selection, so subjectivity is and has to be quantum anticipative or "predictive" through (3).

(5) The reason consciousness has been conserved by evolution is thus that environmental uncertainty is uncomputable because it involves both (a) intractable "travelling salesman" problems (b) multiple possible outcomes and most acutely (c) interaction with other live conscious agents, which also possess conscious volitional anticipation.

(6) This takes the form of a Red Queen evolutionary race between conscious predators and prey like the way sexuality evolved as a Red Queen genetic race between parasites and hosts by providing individual variation and avoiding epidemic species extinctions, but ironically resulting in organismic mortality.

(7) This makes a clean cut cosmologically: All unconscious processes are type 2 von Neumann QM multiverses, but all conscious experiences are type 1 anticipatory collapse processes, which ironically make the universe look "classical" to us. In turn, this means that subjective consciousness as we know it, is and is exclusively to anticipate uncertainty, complementing the role of neural computation to infer a certain or uncertain outcome and subjective conscious volition is then "free will" over the uncertain universe with no causal conflict.

(8) This process is cosmological, not simply neuroscientific, and it is integral to the cosmic symmetry-breaking which defined the asymmetric standard model of physics, leading to conscious life in "Paradise" on the cosmic equator in space-time. The late emergence is necessary because the cosmological interactive process takes 10 billion years to become physically viable, not because consciousness is a "late comer”.

(9) This means that there is no such thing as random uncertainty. All contextual and environmental uncertainty is a result of chaotic quantum molecular billiards which remains entangled until the moment of conscious observation. Hence karma, IS quantum uncertainty revealed, not a moral nightmare!

(10) This also means subjective consciousness is creative, innovative and transformative i.e. transcendent over the physical universe.

Fig 292: Opuhi AGM 2023, the meeting house and the wind-swept puriri tree outside.

My visit to Opuhi, sleeping overnight at the summit with Christine reminded me of just how deluded these statements are, so I decided to explain to you all and the world at large just what Resplendence means to me, as the natural successor to religion – illuminating in autonomous visionary liberation, rather than binding by prescriptive spiritual belief.

If you read the thirteen points below carefully, you will immediately realise these are nothing like any religion that has ever existed on the face of the Earth. It is also a scientific cosmology coming right out of left field that is itself a testament to the mushroom and to the sheer idiosyncrasy of the first person vision quest. Also you will realise that I am so far ahead of the ball that you will probably disagree with one another about the physics and perhaps only Yeshua can understand the significance of the immediate first person vision. Maybe then you can begin to understand why I have not sought a religious following or cultic focus since, but rather have walked as Laotsu and why I have sought to be a member of these groups in the hope that someone can begin to appreciate the truth and significance of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology as a living redemption of planet Earth and its increasingly vulnerable biospheric diversity of life.

Thirteen Core Principles of Cosmological Resplendence

1. Cosmos: Conscious experience and the physical universe are Cosmic complements. Each is necessary to the other's existence and neither are sufficient unto themselves. Subjectivity begins as a primal vestige, complementary to the vestigial emergent universe and emergent in dynamically unstable quantum systems and manifests with the evolving universe. The universe does not begin with God, or from a fully-fledged cosmic consciousness, out of which the material universe is emergent. Neither is it theistically degenerate, heading to an Eschaton, Frashokereti, Kali Yuga or Samvartakalpa, but upward into the light of full illumination that IS resplendence manifest.

2. Biogenesis: The central purpose of the Cosmos is to be generative of conscious life. The living universe rises to interactive complexity climax in molecular abiogenesis and the ensuing evolutionary emergence of conscious organisms. The physical universe and the forces of nature form a symmetry-broken interactive "mandala" which generates the elements, the organic molecules of life and the non-linear fractal structures of complex molecules, including proteins and nucleic acids, organelles, cells, tissues and organisms as an interactive climax of cosmology.

3. Biota: The living biota are the centre of the existential cyclone of the climax of existence, because we exist at the interface of the physical and the experiential. All experience and manifestation of God(s), spirit beings, etherial or even purely physical phenomena arise through the conscious biota. None stands more pivotally in the cosmological manifestation than the biota and conscious life itself. Eternal consciousness is manifest through and only through the biota. This "worldly" existence IS cosmic existence becoming manifest. There is no greater heaven or hell than biospheric Paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time, mid-life in the history of the universe, as interactive Sigma rather than alpha or Omega as beginning and end states. Temporality and eternality are complementary perspectives. Through manifesting in space-time, consciousness is eternal.

4. Quantum Reality: The function of subjective conscious volition over the physical universe is to collapse the wave function of the quantum multiverse to bring about the phenomenon of history out of our multiple potential futures, through the autonomous conscious willing agency of the biota. Conscious experience is complementary to environmental uncertainty, ensuring the survival of the organism, ultimately due to quantum uncertainty in both brain dynamics and the physical universe. Conscious neurodynamics is thus a cosmological manifestation, not just a biological one. We are transformers of the universe and innovators, protectors and creators of the future and need to be prescient, compassionate and protective of the entire universe and all life within it. Subjectivity complements purely objective information processing in the brain, which is computationally insufficient to maintain life in the uncertain natural environment.

5. Meaning: The purpose and meaning of conscious life in the universe is so that the Cosmos, and ourselves as organisms, can come to know and realise ourselves ecstatically through each and all of us making the vision quest to discover ultimate nature of reality in upholding and protecting the evolving diversity of life, so that we and the living Cosmos can discover ourselves ever more deeply over cosmic time.

6. Responsibility: In coming to experience ultimate reality, we become personally responsible for every aspect of the fate of the universe and all life, both by our constructive, or destructive actions, and our negligence about or protective action to avoid existential threats we know as a species we are causing to the diversity and future of life as a whole. If we coexist in a world where there is mutually assured nuclear destruction, or human induced climate crisis, or a mass extinction of the diversity of life, we become personally culpable for failing to act with our lives to protect the future of life.

7. Maturity: We have, by our dire actions as a species, ceased to be children of Eden or adolescents of religion and have to learn to stand in the universe and on planet Earth as mature beings, taking full responsibility for our fate, as a people and as a biospheric species. We cannot assume to pray to higher powers to guide or direct us. The buck stops right here. We need to be compassionate of all living species and all sentient beings and plant the seeds of love in everyone’s hearts, but there is no need for renunciation of worldly desires, or overcoming the grasping ego, or clinging to life itself, all of which are means to natural survival, because, as mortal beings, the only true meaning we can achieve in life is to give back to the diversity of life with our lives, to protect and assist its immortal flowering in abundance.

8. Mortality: To exist in the physical universe, the sheer complexity of life has to oppose entropic decay into the heat death characteristic of physical systems, forming a negentropic self-organising system we call the biosphere. But genetic replication is endlessly subject to the very mutations through which evolution occurs, shaped by natural and sexual selection. Eucaryote sexuality evolved genetic recombination between mother and father to avoid lethal parthenogenetic decay, in which only half our genes go to our offspring, creating organismic variety in fertilisation that avoids extinction but results in individual organismic mortality. This cannot be solved by hungering for eternal individual life of an organismic “soul”, which is selfish in itself.

9. Sentient Consciousness: The emergence of conscious life as we know it arose in the eucaryote endosymbiosis between the two founding cellular life forms, archaea and bacteria through a topological transformation that freed the cell membrane from energy production through sequestering in the mitochondria, leaving the cell membrane free for quantum sentience and social signalling.

10. Biospheric Symbiosis: The biosphere rises to climax complexity through planetary symbiosis, in which the seeming conflicts between plants and animals, predators and prey and parasites and hosts act to avoid each rising to boom and bust extinction and encourage species diversity. Humanity as a dominant species can survive long-term only by full symbiosis with the biosphere on which we depend for our very existence.

11. Sacramental Evolution: The biospheric sacraments have evolved to be able to tweak the sappy biochemical brain to bring it into a more universal dynamic, underlying our conscious existence in a state of psychic realisation to ensure humanity as a dominant species understands its ultimate connection with and dependence on the diversity of life in the biosphere and will thus seek to protect it with our lives. With expert compassionate guidance and deep meditation, these can bring about full liberation from the round of birth and death in this lifetime.

12. Moksha and Enlightenment: Rather than seeking an illusory transcendent or eternal state through spiritual elitism, submitting to materialistic desires, or fragile technological utopias bound to Fermi self-extinction, the entheogens bring us into a symbiotic relationship with life as a whole, so that biospheric life can perennially survive in the immortal passage of the generations. Through sacramental and other deep meditation, we can escape the mortal round of birth and death to experience ultimate reality, in moksha, thus achieving and realising cosmic consciousness. This is the source of all ecstasy, happiness and fulfilment and opens the true discovery of the deepest conscious realms and for cosmic consciousness to emerge from deep organismic consciousness.

13. Compassion: The key to all life and wisdom is to be ever compassionate of the mortal coil, which is permeated, both by the ecstatic joy of conscious resplendent life and physical suffering and decay, because through the mortal coil, all the immortal wonders of existence, both corporal and etherial arise.

Resplendence is NOT a doctrinal religion: Outside these principles, there is no doctrine of what to believe, how to redeem reality, or what we must each do, or not do, to achieve enlightenment in resplendence. There is no moral imperative, as we cannot be autonomous transformative agents if we are under the social control of an overweening belief system. Resplendence “to shine forth brightly” liberates from Religio “to bind together”. Resplendence is thus to liberate from religious and materialistic bondage, in autonomous free will, to transform reality and protect life.

The "religious" element of Resplendence is not to debate cosmology or philosophy of mind but to motivate us all to seek the redemption of what humanity has done to life itself before it is too late. You could think of this and ponder that it is somehow both a manifestation of how Jesus expressed his wild free spirit in the Gospel of Thomas as a visionary innovator and how Richard Feynman felt conceiving of QED. And maybe you can begin to get a glimmering of why I have up till now sought your company, as an exceedingly rare species of visionary who genuinely holds the future of life on this planet in the palm of my hand, if only one or two people begin to listen, and who knows no one else who really can do this good thing for life in this way.

Dec 2021 Chris to Elaine Pagels: So, although 150 species become extinct every day, I’ve been working on this, there is still time to save the diversity of life. We CAN DO this! What other option could there be?

Elaine: Yes, you help us hold on to hope that we so much need! warmest wishes, Elaine

Apr 2022: The Christian church was invented by Paul and the Hellenistic influence sources to him. If you take the Gospel of Thomas on its own, there is only vestigial reference to sacrifice and no reference to Jesus returning in the day of judgment. In fact he says the Kingdom is already here but men don't see it even when he is talking about the dead: "When will the repose of the dead come about, and when will the new world come?" — "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognise it." So we have two scenarios: (1) Jesus was a brilliant innovator who tried to bring all the traditions together in a (confused) conflation of the Zoroastrian end of days, Hebrew religion and the sacrifice of the fertility God. (2) Paul reinvented the entire end of days using Jesus’ mission as a cipher to weave a Hellenistic myth of the super-human saviour sacrificed by God to return as the Saoshyant [then cemented in the canonical gospels]. Of course I have to go ahead to the ends of the Earth to save humanity and the diversity of life. But now I have had to exorcise and expose the whole question of religious integrity. What was the meaning of pronouncing the epoch of the Tree of Life in Jerusalem in the Millennium on the basis the Christianity was in some sense a true tradition, only to realise its deep and diabolical sacrificial basis is contrived?

Elaine: Yes, you do need to go to the ends of the earth to save humanity (your name requires it of you, yes?)

Aug 2023 To James Tabor This is an open letter to you. I've cc:d it to Elaine Pagels as well, because we have had a few exchanges over the years and I value her opinion and experience a great deal, as she knows!

I have on my bookshelf your work "Restoring Abrahamic Faith", (Tabor 1991) which you kindly sent me a signed copy of in Feb 2010. You may have sent it, having seen the picture of Jane and myself in “Living Religions” and sent me the book from Genesis2000 in echo of our Genesis of Eden. I also sent you the June 2023 version of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, which has become the pivot of the current unveiling.

You may remember that I wrote asking you about the origin of the Eucharistic flesh and blood. I have long thought of your statement that it was Paul in a vision (1 Corinthians 11), who had originally pronounced the notion of the Eucharist as the soma and sangre of Christ, not Jesus himself, as in the redacted versions in the Gospels, leading to the cannibalistic notion that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.

So I turned to your book out of the blue and realised that the import of its title "Restoring Abrahamic Faith" is encapsulated in the chapter on the messiahs, because this is where the contrasting personae of the messiah in the end of days, one a Christian destiny, locked as it is by Paul to Jesus as a Hellenistic Judaic supernatural avenging Lord, diverging fundamentally from the Jewish mashiach, looking instead to a human saviour of Zion, in long-term future goodness, and hence that the book is attempting to conceive of the messiah in the whole wider Hebrew "mother" tradition – in restoring Abrahamic, rather than merely Christian faith.

Your chapter ends with these two sentences:

"Both Christians and Jews will likely be surprised by the Messiah. In other words, he will probably not conform to anyone's expectations. … One thing is certain when the Messiah comes, whoever he turns out to be, he will uphold these essential teachings of scripture. Can we do anything less?".

This may have been the basis of your originally sending me your book, because Jane's and my vigil to reflower the Tree of Life was highlighted in Mary Fisher's (2002) “Living Religions”, portrayed as "Jewish Renewal":

“Contemporary Jewish renewal is not just an absence of fear. It is an active search for personal meaning in the ancient rituals and scriptures, and the creation of new rituals for our times. … From highly conservative to highly liberal quarters, there are now attempts to renew the ancient messianic ideal of Judaism, that by its practice, the world might be healed.”

Now this is both true and an unexpected twist of fate, because we did celebrate the millennium as the collective mashiach, with liberal Jews, and others, culminating in Eliyahu blowing the shofar, and pronouncing:

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

Jane and I had earlier in the evening pronounced the unveiling anointing of all, in the names of God and Gaia, a version of Isaiah 61 in the shadows of Yeshua’s Nazareth anointing:

The spirit of God is upon us, the spirit of Gaia is within us

because they hath anointed us, to sing good tidings unto the meek ...

weaving in a progression of Yeshua's twist concerning Naaman the Syrian and the Widow of Sidon ...

to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion

in Palestine, in Sidon, in Syria, Arabia and the world

completing with reflowering the Earth in the sacred reunion ...

that they might be called trees of compassion

the planting of the divine, that all might be glorified in the abundance of wisdom

and we shall renew the old wastes and we shall restore the former desolations

and we shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations

they hath clothed us with the garments of salvation

and I as a bridegroom decketh myself with ornaments, and I as a bride adorneth myself with jewels

for as the Earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sewn in it to spring forth

so shall harmony and fulfilment spring forth among all the nations

this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.

This changes the emphasis, from preach to sing, from righteousness to compassion. It's we, not they, that renew the old wastes, and it's the female and the male together both anointing and anointed, for the harmony and fulfilment of all, in wisdom (hochmah).

While Jews will see in this passage the Jubilee, it is clear that Yeshua's sermon in Nazareth is portrayed as a direct messianic claim that breaches the Hebrew covenant, causing the crowd to seek him out to kill him, as it is with our rite of passage on Millennium Eve – an innocent pass, with tumultuous implications.

And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong. But he passing through the midst of them went his way.

However I am not a practising Jew, but a circumcised gentile who claims to be the root Jewish "thief in the night" due to my preemptive circumcision. In fact I had no idea of the full dimensions of the Jewish messiah until shortly before I departed on our millennial sabbatical vigil to the Amazon and Jerusalem. Before I left, I intentionally took a single teaching at the liberal jewish congregation here. When I arrived, the rabbi revealed this was to be on the messiah, and duly expounded that the concept of the Christ, Mashiach or ‘anointed one’ in the Jewish tradition is a living human being who brings about an epoch of long-term future goodness. As well as healing the Eucharist and reflowering the Tree of Life, I am thus taking Christianity back into the Hebrew fold of long term future goodness.

However, the true picture of this undertaking runs much deeper into the evolution of conscious life in the universe. I have not come to destroy the law, or the prophets, but to fulfil, in a surprising karmic way just as you described above. It is centrally to heal apocalypse. Not the all-too genocidal political apocalypse that the siege of Jerusalem proved to be in CE 66, in which 1.1 million people are said by Hugh Schonfield (1965) to have died, but a devastatingly deadly planetary apocalypse of life in the third millennium due to accidental or intentional mutually assured nuclear destruction, accumulating climate crisis, and the mass extinction of biodiversity, in turn, risking atrophy or extinction of the human species and with it, all our spiritual and cultural traditions.

Hence, when I say I am come to fulfil, it is fulfilling the immortality of the diversity of life throughout our generations and throughout the universe, not just our cultural or religious traditions. This in the light of my moksha epiphany in 2021, in which my atman merged briefly with Brahman, like Moses watching the burning bush, who intimated in silent compassion that I should return to the mortal coil because this is the centre of the cyclone where reality is really born, and it is my sacred duty to save life throughout the universe, because if life ceases to exist due to human misadventure, all meaning in the galaxy could be lost forever, because eternal ultimate reality, or the 'Elohim if you prefer, can be realised only through incarnate life experiencing it. Otherwise even eternal cosmic consciousness becomes as vulnerable as we are, as mortal incarnate organisms.

This, I believe you can understand, is the fulfilment of the epoch of long-term future goodness the Hebrew messianic tradition actually aspires to. So the rites of passage we performed in the spirit of Yeshua’s sermon in Nazareth, when he escaped through the crowd seeking to throw him off the cliffs for blasphemy were threefold: to unfold the promised epoch of the Tree of Life, throw open the Gates of Compassion to all spiritual traditions and celebrate the Hieros Gamos of woman and man in the Song of Songs. Man cannot survive on religion alone, so I see this as the correct therapeutic remedy, so that conscious meaning survives in the universe at large.

When I set forth on the millennial journey to the Amazon and Jerusalem, it was to save the diversity of life on our planet so that our species can also survive and avoid a Fermi extinction due to human misadventure. I had had a vision in the 1980s, as an entheogenic practitioner that if the world did not make a decisive move to save the tree of living diversity by the year 2000, I should go to Jerusalem and pronounce the unveiling, in consummation of reflowering the Tree of Life, hidden since the "foundation of the world" in Eden.

This was giving the world a good 15 year chance for either our collective social conscience, or some genius "messiah", to step up and deliver the redemption. As no solution in sight emerged, I duly planned and managed to secure an academic sabbatical to research the holocaust of living diversity in the Amazon burning season, culminating in an invitation to hold a 12-day workshop hosted by Yitzhak Hayutman, a grand-son of one of the founders of Tel Aviv at the Academy of Jerusalem.

In turn, Jane and I duly fulfilled this quest, from the Andes to the Amazon and through Europe to Jerusalem, ending paying my respects to Kali in Varanasi, as described in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology.

But now, the same dilemma remains. Just as I waited 15 years for the world to resolve its misadventure, without my idiosyncratic help, so I wait now 23 years closer to the edge with no remedy in sight and no other hero or heroine to invoke the unveiling. The lesson in 2000 was the inability of the three monotheistic religions to come to protect the epoch of the Tree of Life and I had to look pragmatically at this failure of stewardship and make a subtle intervention to record key rites of passage of renewal as renewal of the spiritual epoch. The same thing now applies to the entheogenic moksha epiphany, which has become overt because of the evolution in psychedelic research, in which psychedelics have been scientifically found to be redemptive of the mortal coil, so the stable doors of repression have been thrown off their hinges and the genie horse of the visionary condition has escaped into scientific recognition.

This vision draws together multiple spiritual traditions, fulfilling the sacramental tradition in biospheric illuminaton, the messianic tradition in unfolding the epoch of long-term immortal paradise, and the Upanishadic tradition in entheogenic moksha in a classic near-death meeting of Brahman and atman and primordially, in the oldest tradition of animistic shamanism that lies at the foundation of the mystical numinous and all religious traditions. I can't seriously neglect this responsibility, because I don't see anyone on the horizon who can relieve me of this and time is of the essence and I am already past my three score years and ten.

The whole of my incarnation is a karmic test. On Christmas Day 1944 the first radiated plutonium slugs began to roll out of Hanford, signalling the real beginning of the apocalyptic age of Planet Earth. Twelfth night, I was born Chris King on the Epiphany 1945, just as the first shipments of plutonium rolled out of Hanford for Trinity and Nagasaki, later that year, so I am the offspring of nuclear holocaust, graphically expressed by Michael Ortiz Hill (1994), in “Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a rite of Passage”, in describing the first words following the Trinity test.

To me karma is not a moral question, but a reality of the living quantum universe. By contrast, I ascribe to Richard Alexander's view of morality as a product of sociobiology in intelligent strategically-bluffing societies to achieve inter-social dominance by intra-social cooperation enforced by altruistic punishment. But karma is something I have to live with and accept, as a prime motivation to heal when there is no other avenue in sight.

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is designed as a scientific cosmology which includes primal subjectivity as the existential part. It extols symbiosis as the full natural expression of what religions call spirituality in physical, biological, and conscious terms. It is also a living Logos of my personal vision quest to discover the foundations of reality, but it is not a nascent religion, but a consensual democratic way for all of us to reflower nature and discover ultimate reality together, no longer knowing only in part, but knowing also as we are known, as one is to one, face to face, no longer through a glass darkly.

Its key tenets are:

(1) That subjective consciousness is primary, as in the Upanishads, but the universe is necessary to our conscious biological survival and immortal fulfilment.

(2) That subjective consciousness has efficacy of volition over the physical universe, opening up the foundations of innovative spirituality to physical nature and our ability to take full responsibility for our actions, as the law asserts.

(3) That the universe rises to climax conscious diversity in planetary symbiosis on the cosmic equator in space-time.

And it takes a huge leaf out of Yeshua's book, as the controversial and even blasphemous figure, trying to provoke apocalypse by spanning all the near Eastern traditions, from Dionysian miracles, through the fertility religion of the women of Galilee who gave unto him our of their very substance, anointed by a woman to his doom, as was Dumuzzi, and finally both the Hebrew and Gnostic traditions, as the Sermon of the Mount and the Gospel of Didymos Judas Thomas, demonstrate.

So if you think about it, since you already prefigured this, would you expect anything less than the impossible quest of a mathematical chaos theorist and wilderness mystic, carrying the entheogenic sacraments of the biosphere out of left field to fulfil the true eucharist of life amid renewing the old wastes in the planting of the divine, so that all might be glorified in the abundance of wisdom, when the world is faced by ongoing potential nuclear annihilation, climate crisis entering tipping point whiplash, the frank mass extinction of biodiversity, particularly of the land mammals and the self-mechanisation of AI takeover of our very essential being? But this means it extends beyond cultural theism, to ourselves becoming the visionary guardians of life unfolding, with subjective conscious efficacy over the physical world, invoking the full root mystical and spiritual natures of reality in climax living cosmology. This shouldn't be a shock because the Upanishads already conceive of reality either as personae in the 'Elohim Ishvara/Ishvari, or as meeting ultimate reality in the atman in cosmological symbiosis with Brahman.

I am doing this good thing regardless, but I realistically can't and shouldn't do it alone. I want to do it as Lao Tsu would. A mashiach doesn't have to be a religious leader, just provide the therapeutic avenue to world redemption. That's why Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is a resilient scientific Logos that marks out the Tao as a vision quest, but not any kind of religion, or we will never come of cosmic age and take astute responsibility for our fates. It's the full apocalypse, as a psychopomp marking safe passage in our mortal journey across the Styx, in the fulfilment of life as a whole, perennially throughout our generations amen. It's not a lesser Revelation. It is the gift of life itself. I don't ask anyone to believe in me, but simply to understand that the remedy is true redemption.

But let's look for a minute at the naked realities. Paul converted Jesus into a supernatural Dionysian figure of Hellenistic Judaism, and Revelation exploded his persona into a vengeful Lord of triage and genocide of life that no conceivable flash and blood messiah can achieve, as a means to enforce the rule of Christ on Earth for ever and a day, when as Elaine and others have noted, Jesus claimed return in power in the same generation as those who stood before him never materialised. Equally unlikely is that notion of the Jewish state appointing a sacred king as messiah, so we have to consider the wider and deeper view we are facing of planetary cultural instability and an apocalyptic Fermi extinction caused by humanity itself.

We need to be practical and ask what the world really needs here, and it is clear as a bell that we are running like a moth into the candle flame of a Fermi planetary extinction because humanity is unable without help to avoid destroying the biosphere and precipitating our own extinction. This urgently needs compassionate healing to get us safely across the Styx so that the epoch of the Tree of Life can reflower and unfold in conscious immanence and transcendence in symbiosis with natural climax.

We need to take serious note of Yeshua's own view of his intrepid voyage, bearing in mind that as history tells it, he brought annihilation upon himself and that, although his apocalyptic visions appeared to be more than fulfilled in CE 66, he failed to return to complete the assignment.

"I took my place in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh. I found all of them intoxicated; found none of them thirsty. And my soul became afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their hearts and do not have sight; for empty they came into the world, and empty too they seek to leave the world. But for the moment they are intoxicated. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent."

This is going to have to take some very level-headed assessment from astute human beings. If we are going to sacrifice the messianic tradition of healing apocalypse in long-term future goodness, do we have the ability to save the planet from ourselves without it? Would it be better to dispense with monotheism entirely, and would we then be able to put nuclear, climate and biodiversity self-destruction behind us on humanistic grounds of survival alone? Or do we need the visionary insight of apocalypse because otherwise, business-as-usual and populist politics and strong-man tactics will cause an inevitable tragedy of the commons? Or has karma in its own weird singular way, like the very evolution of the entheogens, given us this short, dangerous visionary way through to paradise on the cosmic equator, by realising ourselves and adopting natural messianism as a healing conscience to reflower life again on Earth and survive for another one to a hundred million years in natural abundance, rather than the triple witching hours of stock futures, nuclear hair triggers, climatic tipping points and habitat desecration?

So James, what sayest thou? Did I mention anywhere that this would be easy?

James: Thanks for this Chris … I am totally under water with some hard publishing deadlines and a round of conferences and papers into the Fall, so can’t give this much time right now now … this is long and complex …

Chris: Many thanks for the quick reply and for your astute consideration! We are living in a very fragile world. Time is critically of the essence and life is at stake. We all need to take responsibility for the situation in which we actually find ourselves. This prospect is not easy to evade with integrity for any of us. It’s a root challenge to the zeitgeist, but please take it seriously.

Deepak Chopra: All perception is convenient magical lies - illusion. EEG, fMRI are sophisticated illusions, as is our body mind and universe.

Grant Gillett: But very handy to stop one getting hit by cars or other large objects.

Deepak: Car, body, pain, birth, death all entangled illusions. Agree that we should be careful in body and care illusions to avoid illusion of death. Awareness as formless being is beyond illusions of both and death. I would however love to upgrade the illusion of separate mind causing war, injustice, climate change and possible extinction of the dreamscape. … I maintain what I said all perception is “convenient“ magical lies. Perception hides the truth to maintain the survival of species. Biology is an experience in non local awareness. In pure consciousness, biology is spontaneously self regulating as homeostasis.

Chris: Biology is NOT just an experience in non-local awareness, it’s our very embodiment as living organisms. The universe is not either. Biology is not just a homeostat like a simple thermostat seeking fixed conditions. This is trivialising evolutionary biology and it’s creative, innovative capacity.

We agree on pure physicalism being inadequate but:

(1) A complete somersault volte face from pure physicalism to pure mentalism is not a paradigm shift and it's not original or a new discovery. It’s not even a revolution, but a cop out to ancient doctrine without any new insight. Neither Vedanta nor Creationist ideas solve this in a way which protects the status of life upon which our existence depends. Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is NOT physicalist and IS the middle way. That IS a paradigm shift that you can’t even begin to disentangle.

(2) The two solutions are toxic to the sanctity of life because they don't even count life in your vision of perception as simply an illusion to keep the species alive.

(a) Appealing to full blown primordial cosmic consciousness is nowhere near a solution and its NOT a paradigm shift at all because it dates from 3000 years ago. It has no details and no content except for a limited belief in samadhi as a route to ultimate reality endlessly postponed by cycles of reincarnation.

(b) Appealing to creationism in the false identities of intelligent design or “holism” simply doesn't provide and explanation. It leads to a sterile designed state of the universe with no consciousness, creativity or visionary capacity – just a designed object. Because design is manufactural. It’s not even physical just a slave of the notion of technology and manufacture.

Put simply, mind-only, or consciousness-only, or God-created pseudo-cosmologies are just as toxic to life as hard core physicalism.

Deepak Chopra: Chris Sorry Not explaining anymore Try Samadhi if you haven’t. Animals have awareness as do bacteria and plants - anything that is sentient by definition. However they all differentiate from pure consciousness. The difference between us and other sentient beings is our desire for self knowledge and wisdom. That’s the prevailing opinion. I’m not a scholar but a serious student of yoga not just theory but daily practices for last 40 years up to 4 hours daily. At 77 years have not missed a single day.

Chris: I want to make clear how this Vedic dialogue about consciousness is incorrect cosmology and destructive to the cosmological role of life in the conscious universe.

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology has three components: (1) Cosmology because it is a scientific description of the natural universe, (2) Existential because it fully incorporates interactive subjective consciousness into the cosmic description and (3) Symbiotic because it correctly describes the central role of life, the biota and the biosphere in supporting subjective consciousness in the physical universe as a climax crowning cosmological manifestation of existence, over cosmological time scales. It does this based on a huge amount of empirical data spanning the sciences and fully opens the subjective vision quest that is at the mystical foundation of both Vedanta and Monotheism. It is not something you can reduce to a notion in samadhi, as a hearsay account, however long you have been doing yoga or believing in creation.

Life has emerged late in the evolution of the universe and requires multiple kinds of supernovae and neutron star collisions and novae to make the chemical elements and the elements of life. Everything we see in this shows for example that the generation of organic molecules up to amino acids is a cosmological phenomenon, as well as well as accompanying minerals like olivine that appear to be pivotal in the lost city vents providing the metabolic substrate for biogenesis. The evolution of life has proceeded on Earth for about a third of the universe's lifetime of around 13 bya from 3.6 bya ago within a few hundred million years of Earth’s formation and the condensation of liquid oceans and has taken a full third of the universe’s lifetime to get to humanity and the present planetary crisis that risks human and biospheric extinction on evolutionary time scales due to a Fermi self-extinction from cultural instability.

Vedanta tries to claim a cosmological basis for fully fledged cosmic consciousness as ultimate reality that created the physical universe out of itself. Monotheism claims that the universe is a creation of an omniscient, omnipotent god that issued a logos command: “Let there be light” and “there was light”. We know these accounts lack even the most basic elements of empirical biological validity. The Sabbatical creation in six days has the creation all out of order, with the plants arising before the solar system and the aquatic and land animals equally out of natural sequence. Vedanta and Buddhism see all living organisms as simply sentient conscious beings, and in the face of the inability of samadhi to reliably produce full visionary moksha, retreat into the notion of reincarnation, in which there is no recognition of living species and in which a selfish egotistical person can be reincarnated as a mosquito, or even as a malaria plasmodium, in a false moral cosmology.

In Vedanta, this has arisen from Upanishadic meditation producing states of subjective samadhi that the rishis, in realising that from birth they had known only subjective consciousness, was then claimed to be the very basis of the physical world around us. The first premise was correct as we all know this is the case – that 100% of our experience is subjective and that we infer the physical universe collectively through our experiences of it. The rishis should also have recognised that they are biological organisms, who die if they are cut or hit and taken much more interest in the diversity of life around them. But then the rishis extended the obvious realities of subjective existence into an eternal account of cosmic consciousness ruling and creating the universe, in much the same way as their Aryan roots in Monotheism. Both these cosmologies have no evidential basis and are simply patriarchal illusions that deny the ultimate sanctity of life itself and our long-term survival as a living species.

Both Vedanta and Monotheism are false cosmologies, because, unlike the living universe, which has risen to biological biospheric climax in life and consciousness, they both run down hill into a destructive chaos no better than physical entropy. Vedanta and Buddhism both end up in epochs of decline and destruction typified by the Kali Yuga and Samvartakalpa. Monotheism ends up in an Armageddon in which the entire living Earth is destroyed to hold all humans to account in a day of Judgment resulting in starkly divided heaven and hell realms. What is clear in both these accounts is that the central phenomenon and manifestation of conscious existence, we know as biological life is held captive hostage to degenerate cosmological notions of a consciousness which starts out fully powerful and aware and then descends, because of a false morality of divine order and obedience, to cosmic war and destruction of all life within it.

These grim realities are no better than Bertrand Russel's stark vision of physicalist demise: “Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more devoid of meaning is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms”.

We as living subjectively conscious biological organisms need urgently to come to terms with what our role and meaning is in the conscious living universe. Neither physicalism nor Vedanta nor Monotheism are fit for purpose.

Vedanta poses a unique threat to the sanctity of life, for the very reason that it claims the entire physical universe was generated through a fully complete, ultimately powerful cosmic consciousness that generated the entire universe without any recourse at all to the biological existence we find ourselves in and having to come to terms with. This is a cosmological short circuit because it makes an a priori claim to an absolute consciousness that can create the entire physical universe, from individual quanta to black holes, without needing any form of life at all. There is no meaning or remote sense to any of this and it does NOT provide an explanation of anything. Why would such a complete existential cosmic consciousness make a universe that is endlessly running down into Kali Yuga full of individual egos that are struggling through endless reincarnating lifetimes to get back to the state cosmic consciousness was already in in the first place? The tantric creation has a different story in which male consciousness and female embodiment became ever more separated, but the notion of a pure conscious creation is denial of this sexual complementation, which arose later in history.

Vedanta is effectively cutting biological life completely out of the loop in a cosmic picture leaving only an objective universe propelled by a degenerated form of cosmic consciousness that Deepak decries as ego-consciousness, with the mind-brain as a mere object, which is in an endless failing struggle to get back to square one.

We simply cant afford to separate life from consciousness in this way. It's the worst form of cosmological schizophrenia.

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is the middle way because it accepts all of empirical science as an account of the natural universe, and complements it with full subjectivity fully interactive with the physical universe and creatively unfolding it both in the evolution of life and in our subjective vision quest restoring our root creative meaning in existence of life, the universe and everything. And it realises in the symbiotic biosphere how subjective and objective aspects of cosmic reality rise to climax at the creative edge of chaos rather than simply competitive survival of the fittest, so it invokes the Tree of Life in the full unfolding of cosmic consciousness in real time.

Why can't you see and understand this all came from a moksha experience of meeting ultimate reality and being tasked with saving life throughout the universe so that cosmic consciousness itself can continue to survive. It's that simple. It's the remedy. It's the therapy. It's our living quest fulfilled. It's the corner stone the builders of Vedanta and Monotheism ignored, leaving a universe in ruins!!!!!

Deepak claims authority by saying he is 77, so should I claim higher authority because I am 78?

All I can do is give you life unfolding. It's up to you all to protect it.

I am not going to be here forever, so please heed my words while life still lies vulnerable before us!!!!

Kashyap: I do not have any favorite model for consciousness, either scientific or nonscientific. I am hoping that neuroscience will understand it, but most likely it will not be in my lifetime!!! Anyway, cosmology I know uses just straight principles of physics. This has nothing to say about consciousness. Vedas and Upanishads are fine with me for their spiritual message. I doubt if we can learn much science from them!

Deepak: All the best. I have nothing to say. I’m not a scholar. I only speak from my experience. As a person I have no fixed identity. All identities seem provisional to me other than pure consciousness differentiating into all identities. I AM That

Chris: Deepak, nice to see you reply, but you simply haven't given any clear idea of the role of the diversity of life in your cosmic picture. I want to be your comrade in love, but you are taking a needlessly casual deconstructive position.

You quoted this: "I maintain what I said all perception is “convenient“ magical lies. Perception hides the truth to maintain the survival of species”.

This looks like it is coming straight from an interview with Don Hoffman on “Against Reality”. Don is correct that our perception is an evolved internal model of reality, just as a cat’s olive-shaped pupils are an adaption to night time hunting, but our perception is enhanced reality in full colour, 3D and size preserved transformations that preserve corporeal integrity. It is NOT an illusion but super realism – i.e. surrealism. The universe outside has no colour and is just collections of fundamental particles.

But you are turning it into a pre-emptive attack on nature as illusion, as if we shouldn’t be taking care to survive at all. This raises lots of very thorny issues for your perspective. If you are saying perception is a lie to maintain the species, it implies your view of cosmic consciousness doesn't give a damn about whether species live or die because it’s all cosmic consciousness anyway. You are a biological organism and a doctor, so this is a travesty of the Hippocratic oath to preserve human life.

You also treat all organisms without distinction, as simply sentient beings, without species, genetic or ecological meaning: "Animals have awareness as do bacteria and plants - anything that is sentient by definition.” But nature rises to teeming symbiotic climax in the biosphere, not just colourless indistinguishable sentient beings. You then immediately cite human superiority over nature: "The difference between us and other sentient beings is our desire for self knowledge and wisdom.” Well that’s news, so let's look at how you handle nuclear crisis.

Fig 292b: 5-11-23 The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has disciplined a junio member of his cabinet who appeared to voice openness to the idea of Israel carrying out a nuclear strike on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that the minister concerned – heritage minister Amihai Eliyahu from a far-right party in the coalition government – had been suspended from cabinet meetings “until further notice”. Asked in a radio interview about a hypothetical nuclear option, Eliyahu replied: “That’s one way.” His remark made headlines in Arab media and scandalised mainstream Israeli broadcasters.

Chris: When I originally formed the Resplendence group, resplendere to “shine forth” rather than religio “to bind together”, it was to act directly save the planet from biodiversity extinction and nuclear holocaust, but then Ukraine happened and the pre-emptive nuclear threat from Russia, so it went on the back burner and I spent two years writing Symbiotic Existential Cosmology which is now, with the central thesis, as complete as it is going to be. Look at this little dousie! Do you all want our species to survive or not?

Deepak Chopra: Maybe homo sapiens is the most interesting evolutionary experiment that didn't work

There are 2 trillion galaxies, 700 sextillion stars and uncountable trillions of planets in the collective dreamscape!

We are not even a speck of dust in the junkyard of infinity. We evolved as a result of the extinction of Dinosaurs

Nature may have another experiment in mind. Relax.

Chris: This is profoundly irresponsible. To allow nuclear holocaust, or to destroy the diversity of the biosphere, or even to mention it casually is disinformation that leads to human irresponsibility, NOT wisdom. That’s the reason to act Deepak! Don’t cast lots on the garments of the universe in vain hope when we have the holy grail of life before us. The original Yeshua said “The Kingdom lies before you, but men do not see it."

The only way I can act to plant the seed is as the messiah of living diversity and try to bring a modicum of compassionate common sense to the people of this planet. I can do this good thing, but only with your good support. The messianic tradition is not religious superstition, it’s karma speaking through individuals. I do have the karmic connection. On Christmas day 1944 plutonium production for Trinity and Nagasaki began at Hanford. I was born Chris King on the Epiphany 1945. I have a duty to fulfil.

The key to saving humanity is to have your finger on the pulse like a good doctor, rather than on the trigger. I have the remedy, which is to save the life of this blue green planet now for our future generations to survive. The mushroom is a catalyst that does not involve religious belief, but is a product of the evolving biosphere to make it all possible.

I know it’s a paradox, but through this we ALL become saviours!

Deepak: Chris How do you treat collective insanity and diabolical science based on subject object split?

Chris: You know the answer Deepak! Collective insanity is samsara! It’s unstable delusion! But underneath, everyone wants to survive and become whole, and we yearn for relief! So collective insanity is like the false inflationary vacuum that collapsed, causing the Big Bang that made this whole shebang!. Resplendence is the light of sanity that shines forth, through us coming to our senses in light relief. You are doing a very good job right now by playing the joker.

Dan Levine: Chris, I am with you all the way. As for my karma: my honeymoon consisted of a 10-day car trip from Los Angeles (where my wife lived before marriage) to Pittsburgh (where I had a job at the time), via the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Santa Fe. Toward the end we stayed with in-laws in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and they took us to see a community theatre performing Man of La Mancha, the musical based on Don Quixote. The song in that musical summed up why I have devoted my academic life and writing to the pursuit of understanding, and eventually dealing with, the science of the roots of meaning, empathy, and their absence.

Joshua Ben: Chris and others are calling people to participate in this collective messianic adventure. It seems to me that the readers and recipients of such a call ought to consider this call very carefully.

Deepak: Academics with Ph.D. Nobel Laureates etc have contributed a lot to human comfort and made modern living possible. They have also contributed to diabolical technologies including nuclear weapons and modern warfare and climate change and chronic diseases. Human extinction and extinction of life on this planet will be the gift of diabolical science.

Kashyap Vasavada: What you mention is the usual question “how to prevent misuse of science”. Neither Oppenheimer nor any scientist including poor me, have an answer for this question. Laws of science are same whether you use them for construction or destruction. There is one other point. This is not a recent problem. Since the day the human race arose, there have been endless fights for possession of territory. The tribe which had better weapons usually won. In Mahabharat war some 100,000 people were killed with bows and arrows. That was a very large fraction of population of North India in those days. In fact Krishna told Arjun repeatedly that it was his duty to fight to save Dharma. Of course the big difference between that time and today is the massive destructive power of nuclear weapons. But is it our duty to help Ukraine and Israel which could result in nuclear war? Do you have answer for that? I do not have!

Chris: The problem is due to males controlling the tokens of institutional culture and ignoring existential risks of annihilation because this is how males have always survived and reproduced. Mutually assured destruction is the logical end game of paternity uncertainty in which men risk death to reproduce and control women with lethal force to achieve it. It has been reinforced by religion so both Ukraine and even more Israel has a religious dimension of Zealous zionism facing utopian claims that Islam is here to dominate the Earth in the name of God. This is the ultimate alpha male delusion.

You men simply don't understand that women are fundamentally different because they give birth and have to invest their lives in the future generations. The females are truly the immortal sex because the cytoplasm is purely maternal and that is the mother liquor of life. They make much better long term investments than men, although we know about Indira Ghandi and Margaret Thatcher. Paternity uncertainty results in a male strategy of mortal vulnerability and lethal risks to dominate and reproduce because they can’t do it on their own. Consequently, men have controlled women since 10,000 years ago e.g. under pain of stoning, FGM and suttee to control their reproductive choices. Women CEOs, even in so-called liberated societies, last only 2/3’s as long as male CEOs because they are given poisoned chalice roles by chairmen of the board, so the glass ceiling has become the glass cliff (Tapper 2023).

Nancy du Tertre: Dead-on correct. I have often thought about ways to address this biological imperative that results in male aggression/wars. I believe soon the answer may come in the form of taking away the female exclusivity to give birth by tinkering with non-gender based and artificial Petrie dish births. This will result in less tension to fight for the female to perpetuate oneself/the species. And yes, with a few exceptions as you note, women do not think like men and find killing repulsive as a concept since their biological job is to protect and nurture life, not destroy it!

And, while we’re on the topic, most of the aggression and competitiveness that goes on in these male-dominated Google groups, such as this, is an intellectual equivalent of war - kill the intellectual competition!! Aggression. You don’t find that with groups of female colleagues.

Mike Pitman: Possibly you have no answer because the only answer, Kashyap, is morality and as you say, objective science doesn't 'do morals' or values of such kind. The issue is not scientific but ethical.

Chris: Patriarchal morality is the very source of the problem Mike! Legislating against abortion in the US on religious grounds is a key manifestation of religious patriarchy, not misuse of science. Ethics just brushes it under the carpet.

Mike: Nonsense, Chris. Killing is the problem. Where did the adult-to-be that's been killed in womb derive from?.

Chris: Precisely Mike! You have type-cast yourself as a patriarch, just as I expected! Notice I said “on religious grounds” knowing you would fall in like a stone!

Women don't willingly terminate their own offspring. My partner was forced into an abortion because she didn't know if it was her then husband's or one of our her best friends. When she lamented the fact that her husband then ran off with several women, leaving her without child I offered to let her have a baby with myself and my wife, whether it was mine or not. She is a wonderful loving adult daughter, that lives because her mother was forced into an abortion by a man unwilling to own possible responsibility because he was married!

Do you want me to expand on child death rates due to step fathers? And Nancy is right about male combat to the death in these groups.

Mike: OK since I'm male I can't help a patriarchal title thrust on me (by your agenda alone in my life) any more than a woman can a matriarchal. I'm not getting into the difficult, fraught, nuanced, emotional and personal areas of which you speak. That's for philosophers, politicians, psychologists and priests. I merely note that morality is a real issue. And that killing is killing. These are facts. So is the law of karma which (wo)men so at cost ignore. Whence does morality originate? You have failed, as usual to answer a germane question, in this case 'where did the adult-to-be that's been killed in womb derive from?'

Cathy Reason: The same molecules which you imbibed in your Sunday lunch. I'll leave you to decide if that makes you a cannibal. By the way, I think so-called "anti-abortionism" should be called what it really is, which is coercive reproduction. It is morally indefensible under any circumstances, and no-one who advocates for it

should be given the time of day.

Chris: I told you the answer to the germane question but you didn’t comprehend it – the paternity in the case I quoted was uncertain and that caused my partner (before I met her) to have to fly to Australia to have an abortion at the behest of her lover who was also married. This is a common problem with fluid relationships. Women are meant to be the providers for the next generation but are treated like trophies by sexist men who often run for cover faced with parental responsibilities. It’s called sewing wild oats! Actually the lover ended up never having their own children because his wife had had a back street abortion before he met her for fear of her parents and became infertile so he lost out as well. She died of alcoholism and their adopted daughter has ended up a meth addict. That's karma for you Mike but it’s not moral! As I said, I gained a loving daughter out of this who would have never existed apart from my anti-patriarchal free-love ethics, so karma was on my side and cemented the extended family.

Even in the post-pill world, women have to have sex for social reasons, whether they like it or not and then become the victims of male-induced pregnancy. They are forced to be the risk taker,s particularly in under-privileged communities, when it is the men driving the entire reproductive risk-taking and the planet to risk-taking nuclear and climatic demise.

Morality as we know it originated from the patriarchal control of religious and cultural institutions and the control of female reproductive choice. Morality is simply a prisoners' dilemma game inhibiting intra-social competition, under pain of punishment, to ensure inter-social dominance. Lethal in the case of stoning and lethal to conjugal joy in the case of FGM and prospectively lethal in the case of Suttee and bride burning.

Karma is the quantum universe in action, not moral law. Below is an example of patriarchal moral imperatives across Muslim cultures which is appalling but necessary to face. As shown in fig 134, Iran is literally shooting the eyes out of female protesters chanting “woman, life, freedom” and stockpiling nuclear resources as we speak. Is THIS morality at work, or just institutional male reproductive jealousy?

Kashyap: What I am saying is that the issue of war and weapons people use is a complex, tens of thousands or even millions of years old. Just calling it unethical will not solve the problem. … Who is unethical, you the voter, politicians, military or the scientists?

Chris: You are looking through a physical view that sees it simply as an arms race without any depth of understanding of human nature. Issues of ethics about democracy and cultural decisions exemplify the problem culture has defined, but human nature is absent in your description.

Mike: I meant where did humans come from? Like Kashyap, you stonewall on these issues because you 'know best'. So it must be all by chance. Many thousands (and rapidly increasing in number) of very well qualified biologists would dispute, by their interpretation of the facts, your view. And, if they are right?

Chris: Because you believe in creationism, you are looking through fundamentalistic glasses in denial of human origins and cultural versus biological evolution because you can't accept empirical biological science and pretend that "thousands of well-qualified biologists deny evolution, so you are in massive denial of empirical biology.

Joshua: These are precisely the kind of questions that can be addressed via the field of research of The Science of Peace. For example, if we can learn to achieve inner peace by practicing meditation, prayer and actions of kindness, would it be unethical to neglect such a learning process? So, voters, politicians, military people, artists, scientists and people in general, who neglect spiritual development and practices towards peace, are acting irresponsibly and unethically.

Chris: I can understand the desire to seek peace but it flies in the face of nature and it involves trying to graft pure spirituality onto a statue made of biological tissue with the head having no notion of long term survival of the body. A kind of metaphor for Biblical Daniel’s statue with feet of clay. And what is peace going to do to deal with armed defectors? The peaceful naked Albigenses ended up throwing themselves into the bonfire at Carcassone!

You three men are all missing the picture because you are looking through different sets of falsely-tinted (biased) spectacles. Only Nancy and Cathy have a good grip on this problem. I have given an outline critique below of the ways each of you Kashyap, Mike and Yeshua are in error and in danger of resulting in stasis, or making matters worse rather than better. I’m doing this for SEC, not just for you all and its followed by the evidence of the human “Mark of Cain” on all of our genomes. You need to "get real" and read this very carefully if any discussion is going to further.

The empirical facts of human biological and cultural evolution, put in very simple terms are that (a) we evolved and emerged among the apes with a sexual investment strategy that shows intermediate similarities to both chimps (who live in alpha male troops maintaining hierarchical dominance) and bonobos (where the females retain ascendence and have a lot of vaginal-vaginal sex – 7 times as much as heterosexual sex – to maintain the female coalition) and falls part way in between, driven by female reproductive choice based on astute observation of male prowess and ability to responsibly father their children following a mammalian X-Y selection for intelligence.

The emergence of human culture and super-intelligence (Fielder & King 2004) occurred in a sexual Red Queen evolutionary race (Ridley 1993), in which neither the males nor the females had the upper hand in reproductive investment, in a pattern of astute female reproductive choice accompanied by mutual mate choice. The males put on shows of hunting genius, trading meat for sex and telling jokes round the camp fire, while the females chatted endlessly about their relationships while gathering 85% of the food, foraging together. Females have ecstatic orgasm and have concealed oestrus, so the males can't tell when they are fertile and instead menstruate visibly when they are NOT fertile. They have fatty enticing breasts and a neotenous babe-like physique, inviting non-stop social sex to promote human family bonding. The penis has grown large for female pleasure and lost the penis bone and sensitive spines, making human males more vulnerable to female arousal. There is plenty of evidence for a virtual sex-strike by the women who would twerk under the full moon, as the Sandawe are still reputed to do, and to refuse sex unless the men brought back fresh meat, as the San hottentots were forced to steal cattle over in the 19th century.

This went on until the neolithic around ten thousand years ago, when the males staged patriarchal cultural take-over. This is not about Darwin but Dawkins and memes driving human culture through sexual, moral and religious chauvinism. Male dominated clans committed genocide on neighbouring competing clans wiping out the males and abducting the women. The reproductive sex ratio fell from a historical 2 females to each reproducing male (because all fertile females can easily get pregnant, but only about half of men are successful) and rose precipitously to 17:1. This caused a precipitous trench in human Y-chromosome diversity, fig 133. It led to patriarchal take over by the shepherd kings of the ancient planter Goddess in Sumeria and the Genghis Khan syndrome of extreme male hypergamy. 1 in 200 men still have a Genghis Y, which is the mark of Cain on the human genome, which led in turn to patriarchal religious cultures with the Hebrew “go forth and multiply” leading to the population crisis with Christian and Muslim and Hindu patriarchal control to outcompete one another by having more children, leading to war and the rumours of war between clashing civilisations as populations multiplied and competed for resources.

This shows that we can only solve climate crisis, biodiversity crisis and nuclear annihilation by correcting the patriarchal dominance of human sexual, cultural, religious and institutional culture. You can't do it by reinventing ethics of peace based on a morality that is already corrupted at its very source or you will just repeat the mistakes of the last ten thousand years. I’ve shown you this figure before but men all seek to look the other way showing their true nature in denial.

Mike: You have good points but are hung up on your own illusions. And you never answer any question! Break your habit just this once and tell us just how sex was able to evolve.

Chris: Sex is universal to both cellular and viral life. Transfer of whole genetic sequences is the most powerful form of sequentially-coordinated functional evolutionary mutation. It is highly non-random and far from equilibrium thermodynamically. Sex is sharing genetic information, rather than having to evolve it de novo, although it results in a contamination risk. Horizontal transfer preceded vertical inheritance in the founding progenote of loosely coupled genomes. Both bacteria and archaea have promiscuous interspecies sex, via viruses, phages, conjugation plasmids and other transposable elements. Horizontal transfer has continued in higher organisms too.

The origin of eucaryote meiotic sexuality is caught up in the eucaryotic origin, along with mitosis, both of whose whose origins remain speculative because all the evidence has been washed away by the sheer dominance of the eucaryotes themselves over all their predecessors. One interesting proposal is that the entire apparatus came from a large DNA virus with linear genomes that was also responsible for the transition from reverse transcriptase based RNA-DNA genomes to DNA-polymerase based genetics.

Meiotic sex in each parent contributing only half their genome to the child is the most altruistic end result of genetic evolution conceivable. But metazoan dyadic sperm-ovum sexuality is nevertheless a counterpoint interplay of sexually antagonistic co-evolution, as a prisoners' dilemma game, from which neither sex can escape, and so each tries in often diabolical ways on the male side, because his contribution is only the DNA of the sperm selfishly propagating its entire genome for the survival of its genes. So males seek to out-manoeuvre the other sex. Homo sapiens is no exception. Insects have notoriously exploitative male strategies, such as poisoning or injuring the females so they can't mate.

Because mammals have XY male and XX female sex chromosomal inheritance and give birth to live young, unlike birds with ZW females and ZZ males, where both sexes parent eggs, male mammals tend to specialise in sewing wild oats indiscriminately and risk-taking conflict in male-male reproductive battles, sometimes to the death, while females focus primarily on parenting the next generation and astute female reproductive choice. Hence only 3% of mammal species are socially monogamous and even those (including humans) are not genetically monogamous and have clandestine flings. In humans with massive single pregnancies and long child-rearing, this strategic asymmetry is at a relative extreme. XY inheritance gives human female choice a key role selecting smart resourceful partners because males are single X which selects strongly for a number of good X brain genes, fig 132. Consequently the variance of male intelligence is significantly higher than in females. Meiotic sexuality causes all organisms to be biologically mortal but endlessly varied. This results in a sexual red queen race between parasites and prey, so meiotic sex may be originally have been a defence by hosts against parasites, but it also avoids Muller’s ratchet of parthenogenetic mutational decline. Even the oldest parthenogenetic rotifers use horizontal transfer to gain new genetic “blood”.

Sperm-ovum sex is an express consequence of cosmic symmetry-breaking. The mandala of the symmetry-broken forces of nature gives rise to fractal molecules, among which are archetypal expressions of this symmetry-breaking. The symmetry-breaking is evident in sperm-ovum fertilisation in a similar way to the apparently universal basis of the use of cosmologically-abundant glutamate and GABA as in the Murchison meteorite as the primary excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters across the entire metazoa. Sperm-ovum fertilisation, fig 62b, evolved in single-celled eucaryotes as a symmetry-breaking to resolve destructive cytoplasmic warfare between the maternal and paternal mitochondria that could kill nearly all of them , so our energy batteries, the mitochondria and the primal cellularity and cytosol comes exclusively down the maternal line.

The single celled alga Chlamydomonas illustrates this phenomenon. Most of its life cycle it is haploid. It is only diploid when two haploid cells fuse. Fusion can only occur between a 'plus' type and a 'minus' type (which can be regarded as distinct male and female gametes) but both types have cytoplasm and cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts. When two Chlamydomonas cells undergo sexual reproduction, the haploid nuclei fuse, become diploid, undergo meiosis and become haploid again. Meanwhile, however, a 'war', or better, a genetic conflict breaks out. By means of restriction endonuclease enzymes, the mitochondria of one individual 'kill' the mitochondria of the second, whilst the chloroplasts of the second 'kill' the chloroplasts of the first. The process wipes out 95% of all chloroplasts of both types illustrating how destructive the process is.

Fungi get around the need for sperm-ovum symmetry-breaking by using conjugation where only the DNA is exchanged so they can have up to 20 different sexual mating types depending on sex determining genes in the different strains.

Joshua: Chris, I wish words like ethical, unethical, moral and immoral where less superficial, trickier, immoral and unethical, and since I am aware of your observations, the only words that come to heart and mind are: I AM the source of all ethics, the cosmic ethics, I AM I AM the source of all Peace, I AM

Chris: I agree with you about the subjective principle of messianism which involves: (1) the mystically awakened subject realising that they have within their consciousness the unveiling of reality and (2) the responsibility to communicate this to the world as a redemption of the existential crisis, because any one awakened being can become the vehicle of salvation.

This is not just a product of Zion, but an archetypal stream that Jung and Joseph Campbell have well described in “The Masks of God” that show the returning hero, in all his often tragic personae, from Orpheus, thorough Adonis to Tammuz-Dumuzi, to Dionysus, to Krishna and Shiva, to David and Solomon and on to Jesus. They are the avatars of the heroic male throwing open the doors of perception and fulfilling the karmic cosmos in the great unveiling. Qualifying this as a figment of patriarchal illusion is not to deny Brahman, or moksha, or the spiritual noosphere, but to reveal nature in all her glory. The problem with the use of ethics in the mystical context is that ethics is a product of language and culture, not cosmic consciousness. If it was, the entire natural universe would be founded on ethics and morality and it’s clear that it is not empirically on any level, from the quantum to the cosmos, with natural life in the middle.

The first step in my visionary upbringing in my adolescence was my dream of the lion. The world was parched and I was standing in patch of wilting vegetation. There, looking at me in contemptuous sadness and pity was the lion knowing that I, a member of Homo sapiens, was of the species laying waste to the natural universe. I knew I had to leave and return to my culture, but when I did, it was a dark polluted factory city and I had to stand forever in a queue for menial work to belong, never getting a place in this world, or even any hope of sustenance.

I recognise that unless I accept the lion for all its carnivorous being, standing all too close to me as I dreamed, not to simply lie with the lamb, I would be living in human delusion grovelling on the factory floor while the world darkened around us. Yes it is a huge irony that the circle of life involves eating other organisms to survive, but that's how negentropic energy stays far from equilibrium, so we have to live with it. We can choose as enlightened mortal beings to be ever-compassionate of the mortal coil and empathic of all sentient beings struggling for existence within it, but we can't fairly decide to impose cultural rules on our own free choices as natural living agents in the name of a Creator, or we are committing the original sin of the forefathers. Peace is an enlightened choice but it can't be imposed by ethics or morality and remain a true visionary tradition, because it identifies ultimate good with ultimate order, but life and consciousness thrives only at the edge of chaos. There is no way around this and it is illegitimate to assert a pure spirituality that claims to transcend the natural existence that gives it life.

Moses saw the burning bush and became fascinated and saw I AM THAT I AM – the abstract vision of the cosmic self. This is an experience of the living biota discovering cosmic consciousness in the first person. Our oldest founding culture, the San, practice the trance dance and regularly enter such states. They have enigmatic lines on their cave drawings, fig 163, that express its transcendent arc. The question is what we do with it.

Religions start out visionary and personal, afire with the animistic aura of mystical vision, but then they become dragged into utopian agendas of world domination, and damnation for the very moral transgressions they imposed. I’m sure ethics has a better look than moral imperatives, but culture can’t define nature because it is a product of nature. It can influence it, but is unstable in evolutionary time scales. The I-AM is a natural experience of the subjective biota in the living universe, not an absolute deity. The fact that you and I and Moses can see the same Brahmanic entity, but Moses stated the Ten Commandments that gave us Monotheism doesn’t make it right. We need to move on in the epoch of biospheric crisis. We can’t just go back to the apocalypse of Jesus in the nuclear age of ecological mass extinction. We have to do this right for nature, for the biosphere and for the living universe that we have only just discovered as a culture, through science itself.

When I went to Jerusalem, I was still heavily into the male messianic paradigm, but fortunately my namesake and partner Jane King was a Wiccan woman who brought Gaia to the table, so we pronounced the anointing of the collective mashiach in the names of both God and Gaia and celebrated both reflowering the Tree of Life and the sacred reunion of woman and man in the Song of Songs in the Millennium, right in the so-called city of peace Yerushalayim. Now there is more to this, because here I am this week dealing with Gaza and nukes and saying the same thing over again, to give sovereignty back to the female, as Chaucer’s “Wyfe of Bath” declares. Moreover I am NOT a male messiah as such, but an end of days avatar pronouncing the culmination of the apocalyptic patriarchy, in the era of long term future goodness of the Tree of Life, returning sovereignty to the immortal female line, carrying the sacrament of the sacred mushroom, teonanactl, the Flesh of the Gods, which Gordon Wasson called “The Divine Mushroom of Immortality” (Furst 1972), so I am renouncing the messianic title in pronouncing its fulfilment.

Fig 292c: Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is a "Rosetta Stone", both translating the languages of science, nature and visionary experience into one reality to provide an Ariadne's thread for the vision quest and to translate the sanctity of woman, life and freedom throughout the biosphere into every language on Earth.

Neither do I just come across as some shamanistic pretender, high on psychedelics, expressing archaic talk about the nature of tooth and claw in the jungle, but a dedicated and devoted cosmologist recognising the living universe in all its natural and experiential glory, with Symbiotic Existential Cosmology being a natural scientific Rosetta stone, so that others can follow Ariadne’s thread to find their way out of the labyrinth of the existential dilemma. But still of the natural jungle lying in the long grass in the moonlight, listening to the little breezes shiver among the singing grasshoppers, nevertheless of the nature of tooth and claw, of birth and death, of naked lunch on dew of the lawn of time, of our hour of splendour in the grass of sexual oneness that is the source of all ongoing conscious life, so that life and existence can survive throughout our generations forever. How can I be a male messiah, while simply being one of many bearing the sacred mushroom of the immortal biosphere, returning sovereignty to the female?

I am not lightly pronouncing the end of patriarchal cultural dominance, to give back sovereignty to the immortal sex, as a simplistic solution to a complex problem. There are many other factors in the complex dynamics of culture, as my daughter Arwen just pointed out. But patriarchal cultural dominance is a/the prime causative precipitating factor in our entire existential planetary crisis, because it puts the entire world view and psychodynamics of human culture into a highly skewed, male risk-venture exponential dynamic which is biologically unsustainable – our prime core risk of precipitating ultimate Fermi extinction from all causes.

So the quickest way for humanity to resolve cultural and biosphere apocalypse is for a coalition of the next and coming generations of children and adolescents with their mothers to coalesce with men who recognise the need for facilitating both sexes reproductive investment strategies, right through to professional, business and leadership positions to be on the human evolutionary basis of strong female coalitions pairing with men of cooperative and protective intent to redeem the biosphere and resolve the climate and nuclear crises as human society primary existential meaning in existence.

It’s not the only factor in cultural apocalypse but it is the key to untying the Gordian knot. We have to be honest that this IS the smoking gun of our cultural existential crisis, so addressing it is the quickest, most effective way, of ensuring our survival, while at the same time taking into account the complexity of cultural factors leading to destructive militarisation and business as usual tragedy of the commons. And it doesn’t involve what we SHOULD do but simply what we in our best conscience know we need to do for the entire living universe and for us to have tenure within it.

Here is how I think ethics can help bring peace. Cultural evolution is faster and more unstable than biological evolution, so for humanity to survive, ethics needs to be developed on the biological, sexual and ecological principles that sustain an immortal biosphere, while at the same time expressing cultural and visionary notions which emerge from the living universe. Ethics comes unstuck if it ends up cementing a schizophrenic cosmology in which men, fearing their own mortality and seeking eternal life, subjugate women to FGM, Stoning, Suttee, Bride Burning and Honour Killing and so on and so on … leading to unsustainable religious moral imperative cosmologies.

The rallying cry "woman, life, freedom" has an intriguing ethical underpinning in the Kurdish women's movement that was pivotal in defeating ISIS and stopping the genocide of the Yazidis and it is founded on sustainable ecology and an inclusive male-female free society in which women are the key to sustainable peace in decentralised direct ecological democracy. So here we do find ethics and even armament acting in the sustainable interests of planetary peace. Here is a short summary reflecting Wikipedia's own short account:

An example of a social system in which women are regarded as pivotal to the liberation of society is the Kurdish Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, under the principles of Jineology, proposed by Abdullah Öcalan (2013) who has said "a country can't be free unless the women are free", and that the level of woman's freedom determines the level of freedom in society at large:

The extent to which society can be thoroughly transformed is determined by the extent of the transformation attained by women. Similarly, the level of woman’s freedom and equality determines the freedom and equality of all sections of society. . . . For a democratic nation, woman’s freedom is of great importance too, as liberated woman constitutes liberated society. Liberated society in turn constitutes democratic nation. Moreover, the need to reverse the role of man is of revolutionary importance.

In Kurdish, the word jin (ژن) both means "woman" and comes from the root jiyan (ژن), meaning “life". Jineology, the "science of women", a set of principles that includes the rejection of the nation-state system, governance through democratic confederalism, and the promotion of self-sustainability through ecological awareness and collective armament, has been embraced by Kurdish women. While these principles are seen as a means of challenging patriarchy, they are also viewed in contrast to Western feminism, which is associated with capitalism and statism. Despite this, the jineological principles embraced by Kurdish women are concerned with challenging patriarchy and the intersection of patriarchy with other forms of hegemony. The Jineology-based agenda of "trying to break the honor-based religious and tribal rules that confine women" is controversial and overcoming controversy in conservative quarters of society in northern Syria and has played a pivotal role in women fighters in the YPG and women’s YPJ overthrowing Islamic State.

Fig 292d: Women's Protection Units (YPJ) fighters in the Afrin Region
during the Turkish invasion of Afrin in February 2018.

It is built on the principle that without the freedom of women within society and without a real consciousness surrounding women, no society can call itself free. It is seen as superior to Western feminism because it aims to reject all forms of hegemony, including patriarchy and positivism, in order to establish a more sustainable peace. This is because jineology is seen as more holistic and inclusive of all members of society. During the Rojava revolution, both men and women were required to study jineology and ecology, and it is integrated into the region's governance model rather than being treated as a separate issue focused on women's rights.

The Great I AM, Cosmic Consciousness, Conscious Life and the Core Model of Physics

In the light of the above conversations, I’ve come to a new synthesis of cosmic reality and belief in the light of research on intuitive versus rational modes of thought, which suggest belief in God is a function of only some modes of human ideation. While it's appealing to holist spiritual claims that religious belief is intuitively divine, the idea that it also lacks rationality, suggests it is a product of only some types of organismic ideation and experience. This implies divinity cannot be physically absolute, for example in the creation of the universe, as we also suspect from the conflicting diversity of religious beliefs, leading to holy war.

First let's look at Yeshua's I AM (Joshua Ben) This is a legitimate messianic affirmation of the self as cosmic subject, because the visionary insight of a single inspired person can become a source to unveil ultimate reality to all.

Jesus said something similar in the Gospel of Thomas (77) : It is I who AM the ALL. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend.

But then Joshua extends it to the Creator – "I AM the source of all ethics, the cosmic ethics, I AM. I AM the source of all Peace, I AM". In its original form this is Ayer Asher Ayer – אניזהשאני – I AM THAT I AM, that Moses pronounced witnessing the burning bush. This is YHVH יהוה saying that he is what he is, so Moses has transferred his self-certainty explicitly onto his vision of reality, as an external absolute deity. Yeshua is doing the same.

Then we come to Deepak claiming I AM THAT which is Tat Tvam Asi – तत् त्वम् असि , or THOU ART THAT. This is subtly different, saying I (the self or atman) am THAT (cosmic Brahman) – transferring the rishis' self-certainty onto ultimate reality in the abstract. Deepak is doing the same.

Fig 292e: Burning Bush Tree of Life Deana Harvey.

These come from different traditions, one about the Monotheistic God and the other about Upanishadic cosmic consciousness expressed abstractly as Brahman, although it can also be viewed personified as Ishvara/Ishvari, which is similar to the monotheistic plural ‘Elohim, sourced in the common Indo-Aryan tradition. This development from the earlier theism of the Vedas, was a stroke of genius of the Upanishadic rishis, who thus managed to separate ultimate reality from an anthropomorphic deity, neatly sifting the cosmological wood from the trees, but the expressions clearly have a common source we need to unveil.

Starting from Descartes cogito, in which rational thought is dominant, we can also step back into the intuitive subjective to rediscover the I AM in existential terms:

Cogito ergo sum

I think therefore I AM

Experior, ergo sum, experimur, ergo sumus.

I experience therefore I AM, we experience therefore we are!

Existo ergo sum

I exist therefore I AM

exist (v.) "to have actual being of any kind, actually be at a certain moment or throughout a certain period of time," c. 1600, from French exister (17c.), from Latin existere/exsistere "to step out, stand forth, emerge, appear; exist, be" (see existence). "The late appearance of the word is remarkable" [OED]. Middle English often used ibēn, ibeon (based on be) for "to exist."

What we know, which is indisputable and the foundation of conscious existence is that 100% of our knowledge of reality comes from our wholly subjective experiences, in dreams memories and reflections, as well as subjective sensory observations of the objective world around us, , so we learn to understand the physical world by subjective inference through our common subjective observations of it, and thus come to realise that our survival as conscious sentient beings in the natural world is dependent on not getting eaten by lions or bitten by poisonous snakes. But the motivating core is and remains 100% subjective.

So what clearly happened is that the rishis, immersed in deep samadhi, which at least to some degree liberated their doors of perception from the evolutionary filters of animal survival, construed an insight that their conscious experience, which had now become able to meditatively experience itself, in turn became projected onto the physical universe, which became not just the individual atman, or self, but the universal cosmic consciousness they called Brahman, the ultimate reality of the entire universe. This became a possible conclusion because their organismic consciousness was running free and unattached to perceptual reality. Only the first part of the notion – that consciousness is subjectively primary, was empirically correct, but it became extended to the non-empirical conclusion of full consciousness being assumed to be cosmologically primary and hence inteligently invoking the universe.

In the same way, Moses, in his visionary state, akin to those of William Blake, perceived the bush shimmering with an unworldly prescience and likewise named the experience as the entity YHVH again in equivalence to his own untethered transcendent first person as I AM THAT I AM, projecting his own visionary state onto that of an absolute abstract deity, eclipsing Jacob's simple erections of stone at Bethel.

But this transference of untethered subjective experience onto the world at large has no actual empirical or cosmological basis. Both Moses and the Upanishadic rishis were visionary figures in a state of shamanic, or spiritual trance, or transfixion and, just as no combination of objective physical attributes can constitute private subjective experiences, neither can any subjective trance state be construed to generate primordial cosmic consciousness throughout the physical universe, or generate the objective universe itself from subjective consciousness of it, nor can it be construed to form a creator deity, omniscient, or omnipotent, over the physical universe. No matter how convincing subjective experiences can be, given self-certainty of belief, there is no empirical basis from within subjective consciousness to establish any such objective notion or cosmic consequence, unless it is verified objectively as as physically evident.

Therefore, as we have to know in our heart of hearts, this means that cosmic consciousness and the notion of absolute deity are similar projections of exalted subjective conscious states onto the physical universe at large. This doesn't mean they are completely unreal, or simply ephemeral superstition, but that they have contingent reality status in consciousness and need to be seen for what they are, as subjective aspects of certain conscious states of living organisms appearing, with the metazoa, very recently in cosmological and evolutionary time scales, and not coeval with the cosmic origin, nor absolute on a cosmological basis. Neither does it make the cosmos any less transcendent. The empirical reality that lies before us does make the living subjectively conscious biota transcendent in just the way religious traditions seek, and the vision quest remains just as valid, but in its becoming in us as climax conscious beings and in future conscious beings that may evolve if we preserve the diversity of life, unveiling the intimate knowledge of reality in and of itself, thus allowing the universe to fully come to experience itself.

The notion of objective reality itself is even more recent. Humans, from the dawn of history have seen reality through their subjective experience of it, while negotiating the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to survive and reproduce, and because all the existential threats and social benefits were from other subjectively conscious agents, or live phenomena like storms, we attributed conscious agency to everything around us as a good intuitive bet for our security of survival – i.e. humans emerged as animists . From there, cultural speculation led to culture-wide streams of idealism – that subjective consciousness, thoughts and ideas were reality itself – originally credited to Plato but appearing also in Vedanta, and Buddhism, and in the Hellenistic Judaic Logos of Pauline Christianity and Gnosticism. It is accompanied by skepticism about the possibility of knowing the existence of anything that is independent of the human mind. In transferring subjective experience onto the universe, it makes the complementary category error to pure physicalism that is the basis of all major religious traditions as well as much of historical philosophy.

Subjective consciousness is holistic. It has to be, to provide a unified stream of tactical experience to guide the agent's coordinated behaviour towards survival in direct real time crises which are very much about gut reactions, and at best intuitive judgments that often don't allow the time for complex reasoning, leading us to act upon that which feels right to the experiencer.

With the advent of cultural inventions, from toolmaking, through arrow poisons, knowledge of food and medicinal plants and inventions like the wheel, our analytical prowess became sharpened and amplified into what we now know as physical and biological science and technology, so we are now overwhelmed by a second mode, of analytic thinking that is sceptical in it's basis and runs counter to magical intuition.

Everything we know about subjective consciousness indicates that conscious states are optimally integrated, in notions like the global neuronal workspace, to achieve a unified stream of consciousness. But there is a deep problem with intuitive insights and that is that they work really well on hunch in most situations, and are central to the vision quest of subjective consciousness, but can make fatal errors if misapplied in a way which lies outside any evidence from either direct subjective experience, or our perceptions of the world. Just because samadhi is bliss, doesn't mean it is moksha, falling outside the incarnate, and even moksha needs unbiased empirical affirmation to become a working hypothesis. Moreover, the advent of doctrinal religion has shown us that even billions of adherents don't establish that a religion, or a spiritual belief, is true, or that God is real, due to infectious cultural memes of affirmative belief.

Now supposing we wanted to test the credibility of the idea that a super-conscious agent or entity created or designed the physical universe by conscious means, we would have to address the thorny problem of the core model of physics, involving the four known forces of nature, which we have yet to discover any real evidence of divergence from, with the discovery of the Higgs boson in the LHC, although many of the parameters are still unexplained. What is outstanding about the standard core model including gravity is that it doesn't look at all like an arbitrary piece of intelligent design, but a cosmic mandala of symmetries and symmetry-breaking that puts to simplistic shame, even the beloved Shri Yantra of Shiva, and Shakti, encompassing the experiential and physical realms.

Fig 292f: Left: Shri Yantra represented by Shiva’s lingam upper triangles and Shakti’s yoni in copulation representing subjective consciousness and the natural world. Right the standard model surrounded by gravitational influences involves complex underlying symmetries some of which are broken in force divergence.

To understand how unique and idiosyncratic the standard model is, we can start with gravity and electromagnetism, which are both evidential in subjective experience, as both magnetism and lightning on the one hand and Newton's apple falling, on the other. We can also witness runaway chemical reactions in fire but didn't know these were also electro-magnetic until recently. Otherwise our personal experience was largely confined to biology and geology including the use of fire to extract metals. Although Democritus speculated on atoms philosophically, the first experimental evidence came with Brownian motion in the 19th century. Now we know there are around 100 chemical elements and that for life to exist based on stable atomic nuclei, we need this number before nuclear instability makes larger nuclei impossible. We now know that all living systems are based on complex organic molecules using essential bio-elements from a core of H-CNO all the way up to iron with peak nuclear binding energy, and on to fifth row molybdenum, essential for fixing nitrogen.

Fig 292g: The core model of particle physics in more detail.

The fundamental particles are divided between the matter-forming fermions of spin 1/2 and the integral spin bosons, connecting the fermions in radiation and force fields. For atoms to remain stable, and to have strong enough chemical bonds to make biomolecules, places two conflicting demands on fundamental particles and forces. At the same time the nuclei have to contain huge binding energies to give stars their long lived energy essential for planetary life. Hence the baryons consist of triplets of quarks with 1/3 or 2/3 of the electron charge, which compensating for their 1/3 charge, bind in triplets of 3 colours, giving rise to the gluons and strong nuclear force,between protons and neutrons, giving them their high masses and the energy that powers stars. In a universe with only protons and electrons, almost no nuclei would be stable because the electromagnetic repulsion of a proton-only nucleus would drive them apart. Thus we need both positive protons and neutral neutrons to combine to form the nucleus. But this invokes the weak radioactive force, because balancing the fermionic 1/2 spins requires neutron decay to emit a proton, an electron and a ghostly anti-neutrino. Hence we have a mandatory four forces involving charges in pairs, positive and negative, matched by 3 colours of quarks and three anti-colours, which also have to come in two flavours of triplets uud for the proton and udd for the neutron, matched in turn through the weak force to two flavours of leptons, positive and negative electrons and the neutrinos, resulting in a symmetry breaking where, in addition to the massless charge-less photon, we have massive charged weak force W and neutral Z bosons that are otherwise like photons.

The fermions even have an underlying archetype in the rishons (primary in Hebrew) T for Tohu (unformed) with charge 1/3 and V for neutral Vohu (void), so the positron and neutrino are TTT ad VVV and the TTV, TVT and VTT are the three colours of up quarks and VVT, VTV and TVV are the three colours of down antiquarks, where order is important.

All of these symmetries and their breaking appear to be structural requirements of any remotely plausible set of forces of nature giving rise to a universe in which conscious life could exist as a fractally climax quantum system and they conform to symmetries and show no evidence of an arbitrary design that an intelligent designer would have any real options over. That said, we are still short of a fully elucidated TOE or theory of everything, with higher dimensional super-string theories failing to compactify uniquely into a universe like ours, amid the failure of super-symmetry to come to the rescue, as a hopeful, but probably unlikely, simplification of the idea that positive and negative vacuum energy of the bosons and fermions cancel one another in simple pairs of like kind, although at face value, the bosons and fermions have very different incidences, fig 292g, combined with a failure to unify gravity with the other forces.

In addition there remain the problems of fine tuning of the cosmological parameters, that might disappear in a more fundamental underlying TOE. The standard model has 25 freely adjustable parameters and general relativity has the cosmological constant, which is known to be nonzero but profoundly small. Some of these are very sensitive. For example, the ratio of the electromagnetic force to the gravitational force between a pair of protons, is approximately 1036. If it were significantly smaller, only a small and short-lived universe could exist. When four nucleons fuse into helium, 0.007 (0.7%) of their mass is converted to energy. If it were 0.006, a proton could not bond to a neutron, and only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would be impossible. If it were above 0.008, no hydrogen would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after the Big Bang.

Thus although we don't have a final TOE, the forces of nature are shaped by symmetry and symmetry-breaking principles, with no evidence externally imposed design is necessary, or even feasible. In addition, although we know the energy processes of the universe, both nuclear and ultimately gravitational dominate the universe's evolution in space-time, leading to a big crunch, or heat death, it is equally clear that the universe rises to climax complexity in planetary life, fed by the free energy of solar radiation to invoke a negentropic planetary regime that, given the galactic distribution of key organics such as amino acids and nucleotide precursors, including our two primary excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters, glutamate and GABA and strong empirical evidence for biosynthesis routes for biogenesis (King 2020a), that in the example of our own planet Earth, has given rise to the emergence and evolution of increasingly complex multi-cellular life, which in the metazoa has come to manifest subjective consciousness in the universe. Evolution, given its massive evidential confirmation, genetically, geologically and archaeologically is an empirical fact of life. The sheer creativity of evolution transcends any concept of intelligent design.

Thus taken at it face value, given the cosmological generality of organic molecules in galactic gas clouds resulting from previous supernova explosions, and the ubiquity of Earth-like planets in our galaxy, conscious life has central status as a climax manifestation of cosmology mid-life on the universe's cosmic "equator" in space-time, through the biota.

Although subjectivity is a primal complement to the objective world as the shri yantra shows, it is life and conscious life that is the physical embodiment of all our notions of cosmic consciousness, with full consciousness arising late, in the universe's organic and biological complexity climax, in the eucaryote endo-symbiosis, that finally makes full self-awareness possible. Into the largely untapped subjective realm are drawn all our diverse experiential notions – of transcendence, immanence, the numinous, spirituality, deity, the vision quest, samadhi, moksha, the Tao, Tantra, psychic experiences, the notion of eternal life, dreams, and the dreamtime and above all psychedelic visions, which provide a uniquely rich empirical basis to assess and gauge all these other subjective manifestations and assumptions.

Fig 292h: Left: Curandero (Luke Brown).

Right: Particle shower (Pb ion collision LHC).

Unlike the rest, psychedelic visions are rich, ornate, confounding and veridically experienceable in the waking state, so they provide an empirical core for the discovery of subjective reality that parallels that of objective science in the physical realm and constitutes the equivalent to the LHC in particle physics for the discovery of non-ordinary conscious states. Without psychedelic experiences, subjective reality would remain hostage to pre-conceived beliefs. That is why I see them as central and necessary to the wider science of subjective conscious experience.

It is life in all its diversity that is the physical embodiment and climax expression of cosmic consciousness, encapsulated and entwined in our organismic awareness. To neglect or deprecate life to cosmic consciousness is ultimate suicide.

The Cacophony of Deity: The Gods and Philosophers can't All be Right, Here in the Physical Universe.

Kashyap pursued the late origin of consciousness against the primal cosmic mind. When faced with Vinod’s and then Deepak’s mind-first consciousness-makes-the-universe, I realised that, in the sturm and drang of philosophical and quasi-religious debate, Kashyap’s sheer resistance is necessary, as Yeshua has also noticed. So in my burning bush piece, I turned the tables, to put down a red line in the philosophical sand, that consciousness-only-rules is wrong for the same reason pure physicalism is wrong, because consciousness and physicalism are categorically distinct and no combination of one can make the other, particularly at the cosmic origin long before these insights. Full consciousness, as we know it, comes late with the evolution of the biota although SEC is primally panpsychic with primal subjectivity.

I also agree that science is fundamentally "of the empirical method". We disagree, in that I consider 1pp for subjective empirical investigation is the complement of the physical sciences’ empiricism of verified observations by independent groups, in the vision quest method of mutually-affirmed empirical experience. That said, religions, and here I include both Vedanta with "consciousness rules okay”, that denies biological species any meaning at all; and Monotheism, with it's clockwork orange “divine watchmaker” creationism, that leaves life creatively sterile; both violate all principles of unbiased empirical affirmation of 1pp experiences, violating independence and constituting bias.

To say religious affirmation is unbiased means that two very questionable deities, the Christian Abba who sacrificed his only begotten Son to forgive our sins in time for the Day of Judgment, and al Llah the ancient Arab deity, who was originally paired with al Lat, the primal Arabian Goddess, then summarily cast by Muhammad into oblivion in the “satanic verses”, would imply there are two real deities ruling Earth, Abba and Allah, with a posse of Hindu gods and goddesses, from Vishnu to Kali, circling around in pursuit and the Hebrew YHVH, lost in the population crisis by comparison, not to mention all the other “fictitious” deities worshipped by Wiccans to the Tree Spirits of the Amazon shamans. Right now, since Christianity is still the biggest, so Abba could be said to rule the world, but Allah is coming up fast, amid terrorism and the endless rumours of holy war over utopian planetary supremacy.

No they can't all be real, so none of them are, as things stand. Yes we know about the perennial philosophy that God is a subtle changeling, that morphs and adapts to changing realities and keeps knocking on the back door of our conscious minds, trying to seduce us into believing in him through his subtle presence, so he is there if our minds are “open”, but this is also a fantasy of human fallibility, based on affirmative belief, not empiricism.

As I see it, philosophy is in the same boat because philo-sophia is, despite being “the love of wisdom”, essentially the art of argument and debate, in which every point of view rules okay? Monism, dualism, IDAM, physicalism, panpsychism, elimanativism, illusionism and al!. There is absolutely no empirical reality emerging from this multiplicity of views.

So I support two empirical traditions objective science and the subjective vision quest, in the paradigm of resplendence, replacing the bondage of religion to affirmative belief and imperative morality. I have to be utterly definite to make this division and eliminate violations on either side, because otherwise Maya, the whole cabal of illusion, will overwhelm us, with subtle arguments and affirmative beliefs that have no evidential validity.

philosophy (n.) c. 1300, philosophie, "knowledge, learning, scholarship, scholarly works, body of knowledge," from Old French filosofie "philosophy, knowledge”, from Latin philosophia, from Greek philosophia "love of knowledge, pursuit of wisdom; systematic investigation," from philo- "loving" (see philo-) + sophia "knowledge, wisdom," from sophis "wise, learned;" a word of unknown origin [Beekes]. With many spelling variants in Middle English (filozofie, phelosophie, etc.). From mid-14c. as "the discipline of dealing in rational speculation or contemplation;" from late 14c. as "natural science," also "alchemy, occult knowledge;" in the Middle Ages the word was understood to embrace all speculative sciences. The meaning "system a person forms for conduct of life" is attested from 1771. The modern sense of "the body of highest truth, the science of the most fundamental matters" is from 1794.

religion (n.) c. 1200, religioun, "state of life bound by monastic vows," also "action or conduct indicating a belief in a divine power and reverence for and desire to please it," from Anglo-French religiun (11c.), Old French religion, relegion "piety, devotion; religious community," and directly from Latin religionem (nominative religio) "respect for what is sacred, reverence for the gods; conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation; fear of the gods; divine service, religious observance; a religion, a faith, a mode of worship, cult; sanctity, holiness," in Late Latin "monastic life" (5c.). Derived by Cicero from relegere "go through again" (in reading or in thought), from re- "again" (see re-) + legere "read". However, popular etymology among the later ancients (Servius, Lactantius, Augustine) and the interpretation of many modern writers connects it with religare "to bind fast", via the notion of "place an obligation on," or "bond between humans and gods."

resplendence (n.) "vivid brightness, brilliance, splendor," early 15c., from Late Latin resplendentia, abstract noun from present-participle stem of Latin resplendens "brilliant, radiant". From re-, here perhaps an intensive prefix, + splendere "to shine, be splendid".

I’m sorry to have to be the grim reaper, but we have to be honest with ourselves about where this is heading. How can anyone, from a benign Unitarian to a fire-and-brimstone Brethren, or a Pentecostalist speaking in tongues, believe such a violent, confused and vindictive cosmology as that God sacrificed his only begotten Son in a deicide and eat his flesh and drink his blood, in perpetuity, in every canonical Christian following on Earth?

How far do we take this? To Allahu Akbar? To the Aztec sacrifices? To the blood of the Crusades? Or take literally the advice of Krishna to Arjuna to kill his brethren to uphold the divine covenant, as those watching the Trinity test had to do? Do we now all take hostages and bomb the living daylights out of one another, or nuke them for good measure? Where do we take a breath and actually, with some care and no preconceptions learn to look truthfully at the Kingdom that lies before us but men do not see?

I AM happy with I AM as a revelatory affirmation. But WE ARE is the beginning and end of the story at this point in our existential unfolding. I “believe” religions can in principle save the world, as well as destroy it. Why else would I have taken this tortuous and improbable route to redemption? But it will work only if the paradigm of apocalypse becomes the epoch of paradise, by shifting the reference frame to the immortal survival of conscious life throughout the universe. This is what constitutes living peace. It is the true redemption. The meaning of conscious existence and the meaning of life in the mortal coil.

The trouble with God is that It/He/She is a surrogate for our own responsibility for the fate of the universe. The “Idea of the Holy” has been part of our growing up, but we become the godhead through the redemption of conscious life. That’s the sadhana that Brahman taught me for He/She/It’s own future survival, as the living cosmic consciousness, through which we become divinity. This has to be experienced in the first person, which is why the mushroom. The moment it becomes taught as theology, it becomes fatal doctrine.

Once we invoked nukes and the other features of planetary apocalypse, the buck passed to humanity as adults. We have to take the consequences fair and square right now, no longer through the dark glasses of religious belief. Once we get the good work done, the ‘Elohim can begin to become realised. That’s the eternal sadhana in space-time.

The historical process by which Christianity’s sacrificial error occurred and how it became a contrived “false” religion is as follows, related in detail in other sections:

(1) Jesus was an innovative free thinking wild apocalyptic and gnostic preacher whose mentality is best understood in the Gospel of Thomas. He may also have had aspirations to heal the Hebrew faith with the resurgent fertility worship and Dionysian beliefs in Nabatea in his lifetime as the Gospels seem to indicate. Ironically, according to Josephus, the Baptist did have his head served on a plate in the descent of Inanna performed by Salome at Herodias’s behest, so Jesus’ fertility sacrifice anointed by Mary to his doom has a weird karmic “reality"

(2) Three decades after his death for insurrection and blasphemy, Paul, strongly influenced by Hellenistic Judaism staged a born again revival of Christianity in which he crafted the life of Jesus into a contrived surrogate religion, in which Jesus became the intermediary between the Father God and humanity, in the Hellenistic Jewish cosmology, adopting the themes of the dying and resurrecting sacred kings of Greek and other fertility cults to explain his life and death. Motifs that are utterly non-Hebrew, like Jesus being anointed by a woman to his doom and performing Dionysian miracles like water into wine may have been introduced or embellished by Pauline allegorical thinking.

(3) This notion comes ultimately from a Hellenistic Judaic model due to Philo, in which the scriptures are thought of as creative mythology, by the use of allegory, in which the characters become figments of a cosmological drama. The synoptic gospels are thus creative glosses of Jesus’ life, mission and death, built on a contrived interpretation overlaid on older fragmentary accounts. Philo thought of the cosmos as rather like the Vedantic notion of Brahman as cosmic consciousness, but instead it was cosmic thought called the Logos, which was like cosmological ideas making the universe in the way that Vedantist thinking that consciousness makes matter. In this thinking an intermediary was needed between an entirely formless abstract God and humanity.

(4) Here is where the trouble set in, because the entire process also had to explain Jesus’ historical life and gruesome death. Paul then claimed in a vision recorded in his epistles that Jesus told his disciples to eat his flesh and blood in the last supper, giving rise to the notion that without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. This subsequently got redacted into Mark’s gospel and then the others verbatim, from Paul’s vision and has no basis in historical reality.

(5) This tried to explain Jesus’ life and death as the cosmic mediator in terms of God sacrificing his only begotten Son, partly in attempt to reconcile the Greek concept of the logos cosmos with flesh and blood Hebrew history of the Old Testament, turning it all into a cannibalistic blood fest.

The end result is that we have a completely false religious belief system with terrible outcomes, crafted behind the scenes by creative orchestrators of Hellenistic Judaism to evoke a mythical religion which became virally popular in the pagan world where all these motifs were already part of the world view which Christianity was designed to outdo.

The Jewish messiah was nothing like this, but an anointed human, bringing about about an epoch of long-term future goodness, as Jane and I set out to do in the Millennium in Jerusalem and now here I do in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, but apart from Solomon, the other historical Jewish messiahs have ended up ignominiously.

So much for the messianic tradition!

Nevertheless, time is of the essence to save the living planet from a human-induced destructive apocalypse, so we each have a messianic duty to perform, as I do in writing this passage.

I have a great deal of respect for the Upanishadic and later Tantric traditions of Vedanta. The formative experience resulting in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology was due to sacred mushrooms. I note that Patanjali admitted the “herbs” as bearers of siddhi, and the sacred soma of Indra was at the very source of Indra’s power, so this is an integral part of the Vedic tradition.

Now the supreme insight of the Upanishads is that the transcendent can be viewed and experienced either cosmologically as Brahman – ultimate reality – or anthropomorphically as the personae of Ishvara/Ishvari as personified divinities. This is clearly a choice, not an absolute fact of a divine power.

In my experience of union with Brahman, it was somewhere in between – as ultimate reality manifesting in cosmic consciousness, complete with its transcendent self of overflowing compassion of the eternal for the predicament of the mortal coil. That is, I was one with cosmic consciousness, with the anthropomorphic shadow of divinity, without it being predominant. Given both my own experiences of cosmic consciousness and the very obvious fact that subjective consciousness, including even our spiritual pretensions, has arisen very late in cosmic evolution with the metazoa, the notion of a primary cosmic consciousness that made the universe as a “higher power” lacks both subjective and objective empirical validation.

By contrast, with observable physical reality, from fundamental physics to psychology and neuroscience, the subjective realm of spiritual belief is contingent. Your notion that scientists need to be made spiritual runs counter to the fact that 80% of people are religious and religious excesses are historically more to blame for our ecological crisis than science, which has astute sensitive awareness of biological and biospheric realties. It is clear that religious belief is not at all uniform across the human population, so there is no case can be made that a higher power is evident either in cosmological physics and biology nor in individual conscious experiences and preferences of belief.

Vedanta is very much a counterpoint between the unity of Brahman as cosmic consciousness and a profuse variety of deities, from Shiva through Vishnu to Durga, Shakti and Kali, not to forget Ganesh and Hanuman, who are still in reality ancient human-animal thieranthropes. So the only unity is in ultimate reality, while the notion of deity is rife with dissonance, conflict and sacrifice. It is also not at all just about peace and love, for Krishna in the Gita declares holy war even against one's kith and kin. Nor is there evidence for a single common divine power.

Now there is a very big problem with Hindu culture, that is also shared by Monotheism, is the treatment of the female sex. In our book “Sexual Paradox: Complementarity, Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence”, Christine and I spelled out that human culture and super intelligence arose from a Red Queen race of reproductive conflict, in which astute female reproductive choice was pivotal to XY-chromosomal evolution of intelligence.

The religious history of planet Earth has been wracked by a succeeding period of patriarchal domination of female reproductive choice that has decimated Y-chromosome diversity due to powerful males dominating reproductive choice, particularly in the name of religions, both by male-male homicide and invocation of lethal punishments for female adultery. So much for religious morality! Hindu culture is rife with patriarchal oppression. Sexual paradox has an entire chapter "Daughters, Wives and Widows” dealing with the vagaries of hypergamic Hindu culture, rife with child marriage, bride burning, widows in charnel houses living a life of virtual suttee, sexual abuse and severe sexual imbalance due to killing the girl child in the womb.

Indeed this is why, after visiting Jerusalem in the Millennium to reflower the Tree of Life in the sacred reunion of woman and man, I took great trouble to go to Varanasi to pay my respects to Kali as the “Black Madonna” of history, to disband the messianic patriarchy, when my tickets inadvertently had got cancelled and I had to wage war with Lufthansa at Frankfurt airport for three days to get them to fly me into Nepal and then go overland from the Himalayas by bus.

Chris: "My answer is to enter the mysterium without polemics and report empirically on your vision quest without prejudice and see if you can find secular consensus.”

Joshua: "My answer is to enter the mysterium without polemics and report empirically on your vision quest without prejudice and see if you can find secular [religious, spiritul and mystical] consensus.”

Chris: I like your use of “spiritful” Yeshua, but as usual you are weighting the “spiritual” side as three times as “meaningful" as the secular. This is even more biased than the Quranic statement that the value of a man in law is twice that of a woman. It is the very source of bias in the 1pp empirical approach that means religious belief is fatally unreliable.

The only correct cosmological solution is the following: "My answer is to enter the mysterium without polemics and report empirically on your vision quest without prejudice and see if you can find scientific, visionary and biophilic, consensus.”

Joshua: So far it seems that both science and Brahmanic philosophy are facing serious challenges to differentiate and then integrate different levels of reality. This is what the Urantia Book has to say about Brahmanic philosophy:

94:3.8 (1031.1) Brahmanic philosophy has approximated many of the facts of the universe and has approached numerous cosmic truths, but it has all too often fallen victim to the error of failing to differentiate between the several levels of reality, such as absolute, transcendental, and finite. It has failed to take into account that what may be finite-illusory on the absolute level may be absolutely real on the finite level. And it has also taken no cognizance of the essential personality of the Universal Father, who is personally contactable on all levels from the evolutionary creature’s limited experience with God on up to the limitless experience of the Eternal Son [-Daughter] with the Paradise Father [-Mother].

About science, we already have pointed out the great limitations of 3pp science when divorced from 1pp, particularly in the study of human cognition, conscious vs. unconscious states, the integration of reason and emotion, and the experience of Cosmic or God's Consciousness resulting in embodied spirituality, and I AM Identity that cares for the sacredness of all life.

Chris: That’s cute Yeshua, but all it reflects is the extreme bias Urantia has for Jesus and Christian notions of the "father God", just as your subsequent passage declares. In fact you yourself have inserted the alleviating [feminine] because Paper 10 “The Paradise Trinity” says it’s a boy's club:

The Universal Father, the Eternal Son, and the Infinite Spirit are unique persons; none is a duplicate; each is original; all are united.

This is precisely why religious compilations show enough bias to render their conclusions counterfactual.

There is a deep parallel between Urantia and Symbiotic Existential Cosmology but SEC is sticking to empirical evidence 1pp and 3pp, because all previous spiritual and religious texts have failed to stick to empirical trustworthiness!

Joshua: All Human Beings, ought to seek to understand reality via science, as well as, religious, spiritual and mystical experience, and "enter the mysterium without polemics and report empirically on [our] vision [quests] without prejudice and see if [we] can find scientific, visionary and biophilic, consensus.”

I wish you would have read a little more in the Urantia book, since it is far from being a boy's club, and the conceptual framework it portrays is vast. I quote some examples (bold and yellow are mine):

Paper 8 - The Infinite Spirit8:2:2 (92.3) The Third Source and Center is known by numerous titles: the Universal Spirit, the Supreme Guide, the Conjoint Creator, the Divine Executive, the Infinite Mind, the Spirit of Spirits, the Paradise Mother Spirit, the Conjoint Actor, the Final Co-ordinator, the Omnipresent Spirit, the Absolute Intelligence, the Divine Action; and on Urantia he is sometimes confused with the cosmic mind.

Paper 14 - The Central and Divine Universe 14:6:36 (162.11) And lastly, since these Daughter Spirits of the Infinite Mother Spirit will not likely ever return to their Paradise home, they derive great satisfaction from the universal reflectivity phenomenon associated with the Supreme Being in Havona and personalized in Majeston on Paradise.

Chris: The only thing I can say is that I am prepared to say who I am as an author of SEC, however outrageous it may seem, while the authors here are elusive. It does read rather like Dante’s Divine Comedy or the gnostic archons, but it’s neither science nor scripture. Why are these daughter spirits not likely to return to their paradise home? Why does that mean they derive great satisfaction and what is a universal reflectivity phenomenon? This all doesn't make any sense except as a CS Lewis fairy tale about God.

I can accept religious scripture like the Upanishads and the Hebrew Bible because it’s an account that can be exposed to both historical and cosmological assessment. How do we assess literature that reads as an unspecified author’s imaginary allegorical description? Is it fiction or non-fiction? Does it just have allegorical “truth”? If so, what truth?

I can accept allegorical spirits. I see spirits of all the creatures who have ever existed, and feel the spirits of the wind and storms, as an animist does, but this includes life and celebrates life as sacred. It's not the sort of elitist spirituality that others like Paul talk about in the intellectual noosphere and I take it only as seriously as any other experience. It’s not for me to tell you what – its for each of us to unveil.

My problem is not with spirituality in is widest sense, but with transcendent spiritual elitism. Animism is a founding human world view which treats all living beings and entities as conscious agents, including edge-of-chaos natural phenomena and invokes all of life in symbiotic awareness confluent with Symbiotic Existential Cosmology The views of spirituality as complementary to science are a much narrower view of spirit in a transcendent religious context, as opposed to mere matter and the wholly incorrect notion that science is to blame for the existential crisis, which should therefore be solved by the unification of science and established religion. I see this as a false remedy because it leaves life supplicant, is not a redemptive paradigm shift and religion is as guilty as science of jingoistic ascendence.

This brings me back to the source of Pauline Christianity. I have realised that this entire construction that leads to endless flesh and blood of Christ hanging before every church lectern for 2000 years, actually originates from the Idealist thinking of Plato through Philo and Paul. This was an allegorical reality that became violent human history in martyrdom and Crusade. Philo and then Paul thought of everything in allegories so that it became acceptable to think of Jesus as an intermediary with a formless father deity and then that got caught up in dogma that he was both a mortal human and a divine being as mediator. Then it got turned into both the notion that God had had to sacrifice Jesus because that was the allegory of forgiveness of the sins in the all too diabolical Zoroastrian day of judgment and then it got turned into Jesus as Christ being at the very origin of the universe before Adam and Eve.

These are the dire consequences of runaway Idealistic philosophy, turned into visionary doctrine which is subjective experience thinking it is absolute reality. It’s worse than pure physicalism by far. It has dire consequences and not just in terms of sacrificial violence but encouraging martyrdom because we are just spirit beings waiting for eternal life and have to make strategic decisions to martyr ourselves to ensure eternal life, we are thinking of ourselves as not really physical in any meaningful way and physical as damned because Greek world views disdained the flesh, as well as Gnostic world views. But what if the only life we have is the one we have now, as I suspect.

I can't go down this spiritual reification route at all. I have to take the route of empirical integrity. It may seem severe but it's necessary for human survival.

Joshua: yours are questions that we can explore in the context and vocabulary of The Urantia Book

• "Why will they not likely return to their paradise home? "

• "Why does that mean they derive great satisfaction and what is a universal reflectivity phenomenon?

However, if you have already made up your mind, I respect that.

Chris: This still all pivots on I AM. You said: "and the experience of Cosmic or God's Consciousness resulting in embodied spirituality, and I AM Identity that cares for the sacredness of all life”. It’s we all, not just I AM that needs to protect life, but this brings us to a question about what I AM is. How far does the subjective extend into the objective?

Vedanta sees this as something that is the completion of our organismic consciousness in cosmic consciousness. There is no separation between atman and Brahman. This is completely different from the Western view of God consciousness, as awareness of an absolute external abstract transcendent wilful deity independent of our own free will. I’m saying both are wrong in an absolute cosmological sense, because animistic spirituality emerged from the biospheric jungle, late in metazoan evolution. To say anything else is contrivance.

Both samadhi and mystical union are real as visionary experiences and they might have supernatural powers, but we don't pre-empt reality with belief.

The warriors path has a stringent sense of spiritual integrity. This stringent path is retaining the sense of disbelief and letting the visions overwhelm one in the midst of overpowering numinosity without affirmative belief. I thus think, for all his deceits as a jackal, Carlos Castaneda is right about God fixing the assemblage point and stymying the vision quest. This is a world apart from Richard Dawkins saying God is a delusion!

The Brahmanic moksha in Vedanta is on a continuum, so you can interpret union with Brahman as a meeting with the ‘Elohim – Ishvara/Ishvari but it's on a sliding scale of one's own view, so it's not absolute. Moreover the organismic psyche is emotional and it is personified, so Brahman has all the characteristics of organismic personality and compassion. This doesn't make God real. God is a way of looking at the self, projected onto the cosmos and the karma around us.

We can't go and set off nuclear Trinity and then try to turn to God to save the biosphere. There’s no hiding place down there, hallelujah! We have to grow up and wake up now and take cosmic responsibility for our fate of taking a bite out of the nuclear apple of the cosmos. That’s the buck. Knowledge of good and evil. We HAVE to make good now to protect the tree of life’s diversity. It’s make or break.

But the point is to keep having intense transformative visions, then we don't need presumptions. The way I do that is very occasionally taking entheogens as deep transcendental meditation, because this is the way to span heaven and earth in a moksha bridge.

The way of samadhi is sparse and referred to as “emptiness”. The way of the entheogen is overflowing with experiential and spiritual fullness, but it's also of the earth, of life, and of the unity of all life, and of the insightfulness of the evolving biosphere, protecting itself and us from Fermi extinction. So it really is a mystery! I’m just an earth conductor.

Once the mysterium tremendum of mortally fearful men who, unlike the females of our species, don't give birth to new life, hit the stratosphere, their feet left the ground, because their visionary bodies are too short. In a way, entheogens are the only thing that enables the axis mundi to reach the heavens while planted in the sacred earth. This makes it possible to be a visionary mystic, a rational scientist and a critical sceptic.

Fig 292i: Tree of Life Deana Harvey

The Before, During and Afterlife

Cathy Reason: I have seen Hell in this life, horrors beyond description. Can we really be sure that similar horrors don't await in the after life -- not for karmic or moral reasons, but simply because of random chance? I have seen people in this life having to undergo things I cannot even bring myself to imagine. And one of my nightmares about the afterlife concerns being lost in a trackless wilderness where no path ever leads to any destination at all -- you cannot go anywhere, because everywhere is exactly the same as "here". A mathematician can conceive of the ultimate-escape-proof prison -- a completely closed manifold. In fact, I believe the world of our living experience is just such a manifold, one in which we remain trapped by our psychic entanglement with the living. Who knows what happens when that entanglement is broken?

The reason I am convinced there is an afterlife, is that it is pretty clear by now that consciousness is not an emergent property of the physical world. It's theoretically possible that it springs magically into existence in response to a particular configuration of matter, and vanishes equally magically when that configuration disperses. But that seems extremely implausible. It seems far more likely to me that consciousness is a pre-existing entity which becomes entangled with the living world for a time, and then disentangles from it. But I agree that one might be better off not believing this.

Chris: I empathise with your despondency about being caught in the dysphoric loop of life, but death is not the answer, it’s an inevitability. Hoping for an afterlife in death, to escape life itself, is a living tragedy.

Cathy: I was suggesting that while an afterlife of some sort is probably inevitable, it isn't automatically desirable.

Chris: Cathy is right, but she is not saying what you expect and the consequences are completely different from what you assume. We do not possess subjective consciousness, we manifest it. It IS a cosmological phenomenon, which is the culminating expression of the symmetry-broken forces of nature, which themselves are incomplete without the denouement of cosmic consciousness emergent in complex living organisms.

We are ALL conscious, as is life as a whole and this IS an empirical fact. We all verify this by empirical subjective experience every moment of our lives, just as we verify empirical observations externally. We can also empirically verify that we have intentional will to affect the universe around us in our behaviour. But this doesn't mean the existence of an afterlife, in the sense of an individual intentional consciousness, as a disincarnate ego, or soul – another piece of damaged goods. The very term afterlife is an abuse of life itself.

We are Alive

We are waves whose stillness is non-being.

We are alive because of this, that we have no rest.

Abu-Talib Kali

Christo Rey on the Epiphany 2024. When I take mushrooms, it is as if I have become aware of all the living spirits of existence eternally from alpha to omega, because the doors of perception have been flung wide open, but it doesn't mean I have an eternal individual soul. Presume to have an eternal afterlife and we go down the gurgler of delusion. The very compounding of "after" and "life" is the root repression of life emergent to spiritual domination for religious largesse. The afterlife is a spiritual tragedy of the commons that violates the sanctity of life itself. So be here now and forever, in the before, during and afterlife, but remember it is what you do, not what you assume, that will sustain life unfolding or lay it to waste.

Pragmatism On Religion

1. All life survives on energy consumption. Lions and humans are both natural autonomous conscious agents, therefore any form of cosmic morality, e.g. not to kill, is false.

2. Organismic mortality is essential to life. It is the inevitable consequence of the entropic universe, alleviated only by sexual recombination, without which complex life could not exist. Eternal souls are not conducive to living diversity.

3. God and Brahman as the generative cosmic mind, are tokens of cosmic order over chaos, alleged to make the universe, but demonstrably failing, in moral oblivion and decline, from the fecundity of tohu va vohu to Armageddon and the Kali Yuga.

4. Life, evolution and consciousness arise in critical phase transition at the edge of chaos, and unfold throughout our generations, because the ultimate rule of order prohibits innovative escape and becomes stuck in its own oppressive rut.

5. Therefore God, or Brahman creating the physical universe as a state of ultimate good or ultimate order is a contradiction to the emergent conscious universe of life overflowing that we actually observe.

Dwight Holbrook: If I may inject another perspective -- namely, that besides our"external physical adaptations", as for example our fingers and thumbs, etc., as you, Chris, point out, and even though humans are engaged in brutalities and survival of the fittest, similar to animals, isn't there a whole other avenue that pertains to us humans -- i.e. the capacity to commiserate, to be kind, to sacrifice, the capacity to forgive? Where do animals show these capacities?

Take the single notion of "sacrifice" in itself and in the context of the Biblical Christ. One thing I think we can all agree on: the impact in history of that sacrifice. Given the various commentaries about it in the Bible and other sources, that recalled event eventually toppled the all powerful Roman hegemony of gods and the belief system that went with it. Something happened of historic dimensions, something that doesn't fit in with the the world understood biologically. Even the notion, Chris, of your valid concern for us to sacrifice more to protect our physical and environmental world we live in, even that notion of sacrifice in itself completely sets us apart (in that respect) from the bio-physical world.

Chris: In response I will tell you two stories. The first is that the notion of sacrifice at the centre of the Christian Eucharist came from a vision of Paul, and not from Jesus, or the disciples.

Paul in Corinthians around A.D. 54 wrote that he saw the body and blood in a vision: “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is [broken] for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:23-25).

Mark, our earliest gospel, written 75-80 A.D. is a clonal version of Corinthians: "And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:22-24).

James Tabor (2012, 2015) writes "What Paul plainly says is easy to overlook: “For I received from the Lord what I handed on to you.” His language is clear and unequivocal. He is not saying, “I received it from one of the apostles, and thus indirectly it came from the Lord,” or “I learned it in Antioch, but they had gotten it by tradition from the Lord.” Paul uses precisely the same language to defend the revelation of his Gospel and how it came to him. He says he did not receive it from any man, nor was he taught it, but swears with an oath, “I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:11-12). This means that what Paul passes on here regarding the Lord’s Supper, including the words of Jesus over the bread and the wine, comes to us from Paul and Paul alone!"

The second is the emotional limbic system in mammals, which has turned purely genetic altruism found in reptiles into a palette of the entire spectrum of emotions we experience, from agape and love, through compassion and empathy to ecstasy, longing and exhilaration then through fear and anxiety to jealousy, loathing, hatred, anger and finally to contempt, guilt and remorse. Thus pure kin processes have become generalised and abstracted in mammals into the very emotions which enable humans to have oceanic love, self sacrifice for others and devastating violence and genocide. We can't have the ability to care for those in distress aka the good Samaritan, as a rose of goodness, without the thorns of the emotional landscape also including defensive and aggressive conflict, but the source of these stratospheric and abysmal emotions is the creative way the evolution of mammals has resolved the whole question of altruism and exploitation in a way we now see playing out bottled up in human culture as we face the closing circle of our planetary horizons.

Dwight: I once passed by a bird on top of another bird. Was it rape in our language or just normal species behavior in their world? Do I interfere? In our mindset, should we reduce all altruism to a kind of species self-interest and survival and dominance instinct? Isn't that stretching a little bit our connection to bio-nature and physical adaptation?

Chris: I don't think we should reduce altruism to self-interest, either Dwight, but we need to be realistic about the lessons of nature. Altruism doesn't need to involve sacrifice and symbiosis is not dominance.

Sexually-antagonistic co-evolution, often accompanied by rape, is rife in the animal kingdom, but it is also the bane of humanity, where the astute female reproductive choice abetting XY chromosomal super-intelligence was supplanted in the neolithic by patriarchal dominion over the female sex, as evidenced in Biblical homicidal punishments and male dominant cultures from Europe to India and China severely distorting the sex balance by devaluing women and a female's right to choose who gets her pregnant.

Below are examples in both the animal and human world. (a) Ducks indulge in an arms race involving rape between female ducks who have evolved convoluted vaginas to make it hard for unwanted sexual fertilisation to occur, but the drakes have evolved convoluted penises to get their own back. Chickens by contrast have roosters with no penis at all and most birds have brightly coloured males vying for the attention of choosy females. But in certain species of insects as the bugs in (c) violent rape in which the male breaks into the female, inserting sperm into her interior which have to travel through the blood stream to her ovaries is necessary for the species to survive at all.

Fig 292j: Duck penis and vagina (a) and variation in penis down to virtually nil in the chicken (b). (c) Bat bugs and their relatives bed bugs indulge traumatic insemination the males literally stabbing the females in the abdomen with the sperm swimming though the blood system to the ovaries. Female bat bugs have evolved paragenitals - a false vagina on their abdomen with spongy immune tissue as self protection. Males have in turn developed similar structures to protect against homosexual attack. 84% of females in turn have evolved versions of the male false genitals (Hooper R. Bat bugs turn transsexual to avoid stabbing penises New Scientist 19 September 2007).

Humans are no exception here as evidenced (fig 134) by both female genital mutilation to inhibit female reproductive choice and stoning for claimed adultery in both Iran and Afghanistan and in (fig 133) the precipitous decline of Y-chromosome diversity in males coinciding worldwide with neolithic male-male inter-clan genocide and ensuing male female abduction and enslavement. This also extends to the abortion debate especially in the US, driven by patriarchal religious control of women in the name of life, over their right of choice whether to continue a pregnancy that is inevitably the result of male sexual desire. So I don't think humanity is in any position to declare itself above nature about morality or sexual ethics.

Dwight: Here I make two points that relate to viewpoints, one of which relates to what you, Chris, have held over the years. That has to do with your endorsement of free will. The first question here, I suppose, is to be absolutely clear as to what we mean by free will (if that is possible). My position is to take the words literally and not as a camouflage for some kind of implicit pre-determination -- i.e. that would encroach into the direction of what A.I. is or will be capable of. As I mentioned in my previous email to you both, our language and that of others places a bedrock belief in our responsibility, ethics, character based on our freedom to make choices that are not already encoded, or precluded, by brain and biology -- something that separates us from sophisticated automatons -- no matter how much we use language to explain our actions as if they were inevitable. I believe, Chris, that is your understanding of free will -- namely in a non-sequential sense, the possibility to really make choices that rejects inevitability connotations? A kind of something from nothing at the moment of decision, no matter how much it gets explained by the past, the latter adopting a so-called "objective" -- i.e. non-momentary, non-experiential perspective. So the question here is how "free will" gets translated -- literally or as implicitly pre-determined.

The other point pertains to something I was unclear about in your response, Chris. Considering the historical impact of the life and sacrifice of Christ that changed the theology of the Roman Empire and affected history as we know, how much of this are you suggesting can be explained by one man's visionary experience, namely Paul's, and by a deliberate altering of historical facts from that period? And how would you characterize, in fact, that visionary experience of Paul -- as hallucination? In other words, how would you explain the historical consequence? Was the Roman Empire, and its centuries of scholars, deluded by the false claims of an outsider -- enough to throw out the Greek and Roman gods?

Chris: Yes I do believe in free will Dwight, in the sense that subjective consciousness has a critical capacity to interact with and transform the material universe and that this, even at the most practical level attests to a fully cosmological role for conscious existence that lies at the foundation of religious and spiritual experience. In just formulating this response I am consciously searching for the strategic implications of what I have in mind and as I type turning this into a stream of words that semantically express changes in the universe that are spilling out of the keyboard into electronic form as I type, thereby changing the universe potentially irreversibly and forever.

It’s not consciousness or free will that is a hallucination, but the physical notion that because we have conceived of mechanism, automata and physical causality, that our veridical experiences of interacting consciously with our environment are just the deterministic consequences of a warm wet brain obeying classical causality to compute some kind of computational outcome to the dilemma of ongoing existence, so that all our immediate subjective experiences of intentional, volitional activity essential for our own survival are a kind of hallucination of intentional will we don’t actually possess because our brains actually made us do it.

But the consequences of this are Earth-shattering. It means that, although we are conscious sentient beings trapped in the mortal coil, we at the same time have a transformative capacity over the fate of the universe and of life within it, in its becoming into a state of full conscious realisation over vast epochs of evolving life, reaching ever so gradually to full cosmic consciousness of ourselves as transformative living agents. This doesn't mean that we can dream of setting off a nuclear explosion by force of will and it will happen in front of our eyes, although unsought karma can be devastating, but that subjective consciousness does have efficacy of volition, both intentional and intuitive over the physical universe and this in one fell swoop brings all the spectres of divinity and spirituality into the picture.

So you then ask me about the role of the biblical Christ and this is a very difficult question to balance out and fully resolve. As I see it, conscious free will means we are carrying in germinal form the entire creative principle which manifests the universe in becoming within us. This means that we are all messiahs and that the reality that lies before us is extraordinary and revelatory beyond belief. There is a conscious becoming that is tied up in Jung’s notion of archetype and collective consciousness and expressed in Joseph Campbells masks of God in which any one or every one of us, if we take full responsibility for our actions can become cosmic Christs revealing the ultimate awakening truth of life to one another. I am somehow caught up in Yeshua’s shadow karmically as Chris King born on the epiphany just after the first plutonium began to roll out of Hanford on Christmas Day and must needs save humanity and the biosphere from planetary suicide through impatient discord.

But the facts are that the only way this cosmic reality can become manifest in the physical universe which is its substrate to give it actuality, is by being caught in the mortal coil as biological climax life forms that have through biogenesis and evolution pulled ourselves out of the primeval organic ouse and become conscious biological life at the centre of the cosmic cyclone. It is here in us that divinity meets reality in full physical expression, so it is down to us as biological beings carrying within us the holy grail of realisation, that the universe can come to know and discover itself. So we are both finite and mortal and at the same time in our apotheoses, divinity incarnate in becoming and this does not take away the pain of existence at the edge of chaos, which is both awesome and terrifying, but it is the best of all possible worlds in the making.

Now for me this is very difficult, because I see the biblical Christ as both in a sense a true manifestation of this becoming in a person but at the same time a tortured deranged untimely manifestation that resulted in violent ripples that have continued to echo to this day. By taking on the forces of light and darkness in the way he did, Jesus precipitated a form of violent apocalypse in a world already cresting towards a tumultuous crisis in the siege of Jerusalem that is believed to have killed 1.1 million people in the year zero, and resulted in continuing violence in martyrdom, the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of Rome, Crusade, Inquisition, continuing religious wars and the very notion of Islamic martyrdom that has led to 9-11, and all the suicide bombers of militant Islam in a utopian ambition to dominate the entire world as a religious hegemony. I have a difficult relationship with this because I have myself become entangled in the net of apocalyptic messianism in the first person and would seek to end nuclear weapons and return planet Earth to an enlightened form of paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time if I could realise my destiny of redemption of the human psyche in the world at large.

That said I still see the mark of Paul hanging heavily over the Christian tradition. I spent some of yesterday looking again at the earliest datings of the Gospel of Thomas and continue to see it as a stark reflection of just how much Pauline Christianity has poured the gloss of the divine sacrificial saviour over the Christian tradition, so that Christianity, far from replacing the Roman Gods has become a pagan religion of flesh and blood sacrifice that was adopted by the gentile world as a result of Hellenistic Jewish influences, while Jesus himself was somewhere in between what we see in Thomas and the canonical gospels as a group.

So what is the end result? I am trying to start again by writing Symbiotic Existential Cosmology as a personal visionary account of my own awakening and my awakening of the world, so that it can become a map of this realisation process in the natural universe for others to follow. I hope that people could begin to understand that it does provide a way through for us to survive as a species on this blue green planet and realise all the hopes we see in divinity and enlightenment, but I’m not counting my chickens for a soft landing.

11 The Evolution of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology

Unified Field Theories and Cosmological Biogenesis

In 1978 I published a monograph on the cosmological foundations for the origin of life explaining life as a climax manifestation. In “Unified Field Theories and the Origin of Life” (King 1978), I described the prototype of many of the ideas you will find in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology. It was a very early attempt, in which I was absorbing many ideas from across the span of cosmological physics, through molecular biology to neuroscience, so some of the ideas are somewhat incorrect or speculative. Afterwards, I became so embarrassed by it that I had not looked at it until today in May 2022 with the monograph complete, and was astonished to find in my one 44 year old hard copy many ideas that are now fully articulated in the monograph with the advantage of nearly a half century of scientific discovery.

At the time I had not discovered chaos theory. Chaos in the logistic iteration was discovered by Robert May (1976) only two years earlier. Chaos became popularised with the discovery of the Mandelbrot set the same year I wrote (Brooks & Matelski 1980). The edge of chaos, was first articulated a decade later (Packard 1988). I had to depend on ideas of catastrophe theory, creodes, dynamical attractors and the breaking of structural instability. There is but one brief reference to fractal processes, in attempting to define chaos in terms of "generalised catastrophe" (Stewart 1976):

Previously it was thought that a real dynamical process must have a form which is stable to arbitrarily small perturbations, otherwise it would be ephemeral and cease to exist by infinitesimal perturbation. However, it was subsequently discovered that many basic physical phenomena, such as fluid turbulence are intrinsically unstable and cannot be approximated by a stable model. Such processes are called generalised catastrophes and may be regarded as structurally indeterminate. In such processes, the global may give rise to the ramifying local structure through fractal stability breaking.

And an introductory poem in echo of a snow flake growing in the atmosphere ...

I am a tree whose leaves are trees.

You are the endless colours of the night.
I grow into you. You forever dissolve me,

in the swirl of your eddies of eddies.

Fig 254: Left and centre: Microcellular formations generated in my little lab from HCN and NH3 over H2O, sometimes with HCHO.
Right: Spores of a psilocybe species at the same magnification used for size comparison (King 2020a).

Nevertheless the 1978 paper clearly elucidates the central theme of the cosmological symmetry breaking of the forces of nature, leading to cosmological biogenesis, through the interactive processes of strong and weak chemical bonding, utilising all the four forces in interaction, expressed as a "holographic" non-linear process, due to the fractal nature of coherent spatial molecular orbital wave function interactions:

Recently unified field theories have been discovered, which indicate the four forces of nature, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear force and the weak radioactive force all differentiated from a common superforce in the big bang at the origin of the universe. This superforce is based on the duality between the bosons, which cause force and the fermions which cause matter. This theory demonstrates that the origin of life is a direct interactive consequence of the differentiation of these forces That it occurs in a substantially unique and general way throughout the universe (p5).

To form a more accurate picture of the non-linear behaviour of molecules, we note that the molecular dynamics of concentrations depends on the holographic energetics of bonding. We need to consider two levels of phenomena, the global dynamics of concentrations and the quantal transformations of the orbitals (p21).

In this, the theory cites prebiotic polymerisations as having formally unpredictable behaviour, leading to complexity, because the more complex products cannot be deterministically predicted from the wave functions of the simpler reactants and their concentrations alone, due to stochastic quantum and auto-catalytic effects:

Normally large numbers of molecules in a reaction are deemed to swamp any incidental quantum events … suggesting that classical models of chemistry are sufficient. What is not generally appreciated is that the quantum character is not displayed in temporal terms, but spatially in the globally derived wave theoretic holographic bond. This introduces a structural form of uncertainty, where the nature of the products cannot necessarily be deduced form the wave functions of the reactants.

The bulk of the paper is a documentation of the then known prebiotic chemistry and molecular biology laid out as a biogenic evolutionary sequence, however in the last few pages an overview emerges articulating many of the key ideas, spanning biogenesis, evolution and consciousness that have 44 years later emerged in this manuscript.

The link between the eucaryote endosymbiosis and the origin of cell membrane neuro-excitability involved in neurophysiological activity and cellular social communication and cell-virus symbiosis is noted over 40 years before being published by Wan K & Jékely G (2021).

Fig 255: The link between eucaryote endosymbiosis and neuro-excitability noted in King (1978).

The link between understanding conscious brain dynamics and the evolution of the brain from single celled eucaryotes, through organisms like hydra where there is only a primitive neural net, in SEC is clearly articulated:

To understand the global properties of brain function, it is necessary to examine the evolution of the brain from its primal source. The amoeba already has a sensitive sensory-muscular coupling capable of controlling pseudopod movement and even capturing moving prey. It distinguishes active and passive prey, thus being sensitive to external vibration, probably via threshold neural excitability. ... it is also chemosensitive ... it responds similarly to bright light so is photosensitive, like algal flagellates. Such behaviour is complex, involving a degree of choice in of conflict of sense data (p104).

The amoebo-flagellate character of coelenterates is is noticeable. The hydra may move slowly by gliding through a creeping amoeboid movement of its base. It may also somersault over on to its tentacles, letting go at the base and swinging over itself into a new position. Those with long arms can also drag themselves to a new site by grabbing a nearby structure. The nervous system of hydra is a net, covering the organism with a slight concentration around the mouth. There are no specific pathways. Impulses can cross synapses in either direction and and excitation travels generally across the net. There are sensory cells, but no evidence of specific ganglia or a brain. Thus the behavioural repertoire does not arise from the organisation of the nerve net as such underlining the difficulty of explaining insect, or vertebrate behaviour in terms of neural organisation, which is only secondary to the neuron (p105-7).

Fig 256: Hydra showing complex coordinated behaviour (King 1996). The simple-eyed (fig 154) cnidarian box jellyfish, which is likewise "brainless", although it does have specialised neurons around the eyes (Nielsen et al. 2021, Arendt et. al 2016) is fully-capable of associative learning (Botton-Amiot, et al. 2023, Bielecki et al. 2023).).

The idea of conscious brain dynamics occurring at the edge of chaos is clearly expressed a decade before the concept was defined:

We investigate the cortex as a generalised system which has evolved to cope with environmental structural instability in its functioning (p113). ... A computer breaks down whenever it faces a situation of generalised catastrophe that corresponds to a structurally unstable situation. To avoid this problem, the brain must incorporate generalised catastrophe in its function. For this reason, it must also utilise the sub-cellular catastrophe function of the neuron (p117).

The view of consciousness as cosmologically primary is clearly expressed, as well as its link to quantum uncertainty:

This brings us to the door of consciousness. In a deterministic system, here is no room for consciousness. The states of the system are already determined by the initial conditions. Consciousness has no definable meaning in terms of states of the brain, or otherwise.

However, in an indeterminate system consciousness may be dual with respect to uncertainty. Reduction of the wave packet to the particle has proved an irreducible problem in quantum theory. ... This has led some physicists to propose that the consciousness of the observer is involved (p118).

The only world we ever do experience is the conscious one. It is the umbilical cord that connects us to the physical world. If we become deeply unconscious, the world is lost too. Indeed, we never experience the physical world. We do not see the atoms of the apple, not the photons that reach our eye, not do we see the excitation patterns of our nerve cells. Atoms and photons are colourless odourless structures of energy. They have wavelength but not colour. The physical world is a myth about consciousness. Sights and sounds cannot be reduced to brain states because brain states are colourless, soundless electrical phenomena. The nearest we can come is to associate sound and colour with certain dimensions of uncertainty. … Consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon, as evidenced by our capacity to dream a full extra-physical reality (p119).

The idea of sense modes being quantum modes, rather than just brain states is presented:

The amoeba has three dimensions of uncertainty. Weak bonding of the trace chemicals from the environment. Perturbations from photon absorption, possibly by such molecules as serotonin (indole has maximum uv absorption and catalyses triple transfer). Finally there are are vibratory perturbations caused on the global membrane surface.

The idea of non-IID quantum processes not converging to the classical is enunciated over 40 years before it was reported by Gallego & Dakić (2021):

Random models do not approximate uncertainty. ... Statistics is a model of probabilistic determinacy under repeated conditions. It gives no hint as to the situation when the conditions are transformed by each event (p119).

The central message of biospheric symbiosis, central to Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, is already fully articulated:

Let us now turn our attention to the environment. The instability theorem shows us that no external control of the ecosystem can provide a regime of advantageous stability. The biosphere survives from its catastrophic diversity. It is from this diversity and instability that it moves back from equilibrium, giving us the air we breathe and the food we eat. All attempts to subject the biosphere to manipulative constraint merely reverse the trend and return it to bleak lifeless equilibrium. This is grandly demonstrated in ecocrisis, which stands, a dark cloud over our future.

Although it is the biosphere as a whole, rather than the plants which evolve to climax diversity, the notion of biospheric symbiosis is already expressed:

The test of man is whether he can undo these effects before it is too late. There is considerable evidence that plants are exosymbiotic. Their evolution favours species diversity rather than survival of the fittest.... When we come to consider the atmosphere, we find a similar situation. It is an autocatalytic system just like ourselves (p120).

The research report finishes with an confession that the humble author has fallen right outside the puzzle box of reality in a psychedelic experience and just as now is trying to communicate with those still inside the bubble to alert them to their plight:

All science is a myth. A myth is a description of reality by a culture.Science is a brilliant invention of culture because it was a completely new way of going bout myth making. It introduced the notion of scepticism and going out and checking the details to see if they fitted the myth or not. ... It also brought the idea of prediction. A myth should predict that some things would happen and other things not.

All this would be very fine if it were not that science has become such a powerful myth that most people take it for reality itself, especially scientists. Once this happens, the safeguards are gone. Thinking becomes lost in a paradigm of outlook, a dusty plain, broken by the occasional catastrophic perspective that is triggered by some errant genius finding his way out of the puzzle box of reality and being able to communicate with the people inside.

The prime task of the anthropologist is a creative one. To guide his culture into wholeness, by participating in the great myths of our origin. It would not be possible were it not for the brilliant work of thousands of careful experts to whom we are all indebted. This is not my theory. It has no name. It should never have one except perhaps the cosmological theory of biogenesis.

I persuaded the university to let me build a small origins of life lab and succeeded in making primal microcells. The research overview of biogenesis has continued (King 2020a).

Crisis and Resplendence

Resplendence: A Revolutionary World-view (click the image to view on an internet capable device).

The other face complementing this talk is my resurrection song Revelation.

In 2015, while riding my pushbike at dusk without a helmet, in the interests of being as free as the wind, as one of the wild and feral generation that came before safety belts and cycle helmets, a car suddenly emerged from a driveway and, in jamming on the brakes I flipped over the handlebars and tumbled head-first onto the concrete. The next thing I knew an unspecified time later was that I walked into our house with blood streaming across my face, an eye like a pomegranate and my front teeth knocked out, saying what “happened to me”? “Was I mugged”? When I went out to check the bike I found it twisted and unrideable and the garage doors covered in blood.

Fig 257: Bloodied, but unbowed.

Hours later, in accident and emergency, cloudy images of my panic as I saw the car and began to tumble reconnected, as I waited in observation. It later transpired from other people’s accounts that I had been knocked unconscious, was found staggering around the accident site and the ambulance was called, but by then I had wandered off and dragged myself and the bike across town in a concussed state with no memory of how I made it home. I refused an X-ray although the doctors pleaded with me that I could succumb from a haemorrhage and survived with no permanent sequelae.

As soon as I had recovered, I realised that what I had done was dangerously foolish. Not because of risk to my own life and sanity, but because it could have deprived me of revealing to the world an answer to the conscious existential dilemma of life, the universe and everything, pivotal to saving the diversity of life and our planetary future.

Thus emerged the concept of planetary resplendence (resplendere “to shine brightly”, transcending religion – religio “to bind together”) as a cultural paradigm. Resurrection Revelation a hymn to the event.

This project then remained quiescent and unfulfilled for the next six years, until my quantum change experience on sacred mushrooms in early June 2021 gave me a root jolt of realisation that I need to act now, re-galvanising the renewed urgency of this quest. I am in a world where there is a real and significant risk that humanity will cause a hard planetary landing, precipitating a mass extinction of up to half the planet’s biodiversity amid a climate crisis that could take us back 50 million years to the early Eocene climatic heating peak shortly after the dinosaur extinction. If I don’t speak out and do something decisive while I am alive, the ability to avoid this evolutionary and frankly cosmological calamity, which could prejudice human survival will evaporate.

This is again what the moksha epiphany on sacred mushrooms told me in the most compassionate possible terms. The message is real and glaringly urgent. It is not a religious or spiritual fantasy. It is hard reality speaking a warning that all the science tells us is serious and immanently needs to be addressed. Humanity must act and must act now and a key, however strange it may appear, lies in the biospheric sacraments, which is the purpose of this spore communication.

Bioiversity Affirmations

My name is Chris King (b Epiphany 1945).

Communique on Preserving the Diversity of Life on Earth for our Survival as a Species

Declared Jan 6 2022 on the Anniversary of Completing our Millennial Vigil to Jerusalem

to Reflower the Tree of Life, in Sacred Reunion between Woman and Man

I came into this world, in a time of planetary crisis to bear witness to an incontestable, urgent and neglected truth:

That for our own survival, we must act decisively, now without procrastination, to save the immortal tree of living diversity on our planet, before the immanent mass extinction of life fully ensues at human hands, severely compromising our immediate prospects and dooming our long-term future as a living species. From this umbilical truth, the very meaning of conscious existence and all its unfolding depths and wonders spring forth.

My defence of this claim, transcending both the materialistic and theistic world views is set out in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology – the veridical cosmology of the universe in which we consciously exist. This is demonstrably the most provocative creative commons work of 2022, because it fulfils our existential quest for the true meaning of existence, by augmenting quantum cosmology with conscious volitional agency, opening up the full dimensions of the subjective realm underpinning all religious traditions. This means that the Cosmology is not just a work of scientific empiricism, but is the veridical Logos of religious paradigm innovation, assigning to me a rightful duty of care to articulate the Weltanshauung of Immortality, thus fully transforming the zeitgeist, because, in saving the diversity of life, it fulfils our existential hope, in our relationship with existence once again becoming everlasting, as it has for the last 3.5 billion years.

The Weltanshauung of Immortality is the world view in which life and conscious existence are recognised as perennially immortal processes key to the cosmology of the universe and that the meaning and reason for conscious existence is the sacred process of fulfilment of the flowering of life, so that the universe as a whole can become fully aware of and truly know itself through the living biota it has generated as a climax phenomenon.

Covenant: In the spirit of consilience, I humbly ask all of us worldwide to join with me in this critical venture of planetary redemption, as autonomous human beings, in mutual affirmation:

That we agree:

to dedicate a full half of each of planet Earth's land and ocean habitats to the preservation and future evolution of life;

to sustain the diversity of life with our lives;

to turn the tables on exploitation and expediency;

to support the next generation's strike, not just for climate, but for the diversity of life itself;

to act where necessary in living rebellion against the genocidal extinction of life at human hands.

On receipt of this communication, we each inherit a responsibility to act upon it and to share the discovery process!

Please publish this message widely and forward it to everyone in your domain – because all future lives urgently depend on understanding the need and taking action now!

Most urgently we need a small group of inspired people to diversify the communication process!

Please reply to [email protected]

Type "YES" if you approve the covenant.

Type "I am in" if you would like to be active.

Type a short bio if you have skills to contribute.

The Indictment:

(1) We are assimilating the living wilderness habitats of the planet, and the diversity of life is simply taking the expedient back burner.

(2) The biomass of humans + livestock is over 22.5 times that of all remaining wild mammals, creating an immanently lethal double population crisis.

(3) We have no clear confidence of holding the line on climate crisis, with COP26 failing to phase out coal use and 1.5oC on life support.

(4) We are still overflowing with nuclear overkill.The superpowers are in brinksmanship on the border as I write.

(5) We are completely losing the distinction between conscious life and artificial intelligence, and with it human conscious volitional agency.

(6) We remain addicted to an unsustainable exponentiating GNP economic paradigm of exploitation over shorter and shorter triple witching hour instabilities.

(7) Last but not least, a clear majority of people on the planet adhere to religious views invoking dominion over nature, and directly embracing destructive apocalypse.

These are our seven deadly 'sins' and all are abundantly clear paths to inevitable Fermi paradox catastrophe.

If you pause and reflect on this message, you will realise that everything I am saying here is veridically true, as is the cosmology. I have come in the time of acute need, to light the beacon of life's resplendence and guard it till it shines brightly! No one else on the planet has expressed any real hope of bringing both the religious and materialistic paradigms into full alignment with human and biospheric survival in time to save life as a whole. Someone had to discover their true incarnate calling and make that tortuous journey into the unknown. But I am just the catalyst, bearing a sacramental biospheric ally.With the full unveiling of this knowledge, this gnosis, the baton of conscious agency over the future of the living universe around us now passes to all of us.

The Huichol have said, that we are "perdido" – lost, done for. But in this sacred undertaking we shallfind our true redemption. Through our collective affirmation, we shall begin at last to truly keep the immortal way of the Tree of Life throughout our generations forever. Through this awakening, humanity can be confident of inheriting perpetual life, as a species, through our true love for one another, just as Genesis envisaged before the Fall.

In this very act, we become liberated. We shall know it in our heart of hearts and can feel it in our bones – this is our one true calling, to have chosen that good part that shall not be taken away from us, in the time of true need, as one people, as a living species and as a symbiotic biosphere: To save the life tree of the living universe in the cusp of our planetary crisis, so that conscious existence can continue to fully flower and unfold in the universe unabated. This is our raison d'etre, our true meaning in life, and shall become our ultimate fruition in resplendent Paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time.

What we have within us will save us if we bring it forth from ourselves.

We CAN DO this! What other viable option can there be?

Affirmations: How to Reflower the Diversity of Life for our own Survival

Elucidated in a conversation between Chris King and Suzy McFarland

Ron Horgan: I agree Chris, the long term future of Homo sapiens on Earth requires us to live within our means as part of the biosphere. Can you enlarge on the rules and laws we need to live symbiotically with nature? Your 206 page monograph is a very detailed study but confuses me. My strength is rapidly reading and extracting the key points from a wide range of discoveries. What do you recommend we do?

Chris King: The solution is twofold: (A) The meaning and purpose and (B) The action required.

Both are essential because without A, B won't happen in time to do what's really needed.

Both theistic and mechanistic cosmologies leave us with annihilation. The first sacrifices nature to human dominion, then apocalyptic triage and destruction. The second is a lifeless machine, in which conscious life is an informational accident that has no cosmological meaning or significance. Symbiotic existential cosmology puts the ghost of consciousness back into the machine of the universe, by minimally augmenting quantum cosmology to include subjective experience. The meaning and purpose is for conscious existence to fully flower to fruition as an immortal process of the universe becoming fully aware.

A: Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, in its simplest irrefutable form, comes in three short statements:

(1) Biogenic: Life exists cosmologically as a fractal consequence of the symmetry-breaking of the quantum forces of nature, ensuing from the the cosmic origin, eventually reaching interactive climax in biological evolution.

(2) Panpsychic: Subjectively conscious volitional will has efficacy ^{^[72]} over the physical universe. This imbues at least some matter (brains) with physically efficacious subjective consciousness. Thus primitive subjectivity, is a property of normal matter.

(3) Symbiotic: The planetary biosphere survives and evolves through ecosystemic symbiosis, upon which human survival is dependent. Biospheric symbiosis is thus essential for human survival.

This is, in its simplest form, the true veridical account of the universe in which we consciously exist.

The first is obvious – just look around you! The diversity of life exists physically as a climax phenomenon – a quantum complexity catastrophe. The second is subjectively conscious existence being able to affect the physical universe, as we know from every act we take and every decision we make. This implies some matter e.g brains have an occluded subjective complement, but because the brain obeys the core quantum forces, like other matter, its a fundamental aspect of cosmology, invoking panpsychism, animism and the spiritual/religious impulse, although it's counterintuitive that the most obvious solid fact of reality opens the entire spectre. The third and most important is that the universe rises to consummating complexity through symbiosis between life forms, not dominance, as in dominion over nature by Homo sapiens.

B: Reflowering Paradise on the Cosmic Equator in Space-time 13 billion years out from the big bang:
(1) Give half Earth back to re-wilding the wilderness, so there is enough species diversity for the biosphere to evolve. (2) Transition to renewable energy immediately. (3) Decentralise food supply chains to protect humanity. (4) Ensure the genetic diversity of our food and medicinal species. (5) Eliminate nukes and consider how best to avoid a massive asteroid Earth strike (Lubin & Cohen 2022) and protect from nearby supernovae. (6) Teach people how to live in symbiotic urban culture. (7) Use technology for the benefit of life as a whole not for personal gain, humanity alone, or an artificial intelligence takeover. (8) Celebrate the perennial wonder of existence throughout our generations forever Amen.

Hillel stated the silver rule, claiming he had recited the Torah standing on one foot. This herein is the cosmological silver bullet for the immortal Tree of Life standing on one toe! This is it. This discovery can happen only once. We aren't going to get another. This is who we really are and what the universe is really here for!

Ron: Chris this is superb. "This is who we really are and what the universe is really here for". We sure aren't going to get another chance. How to get this message onto every television and computer screen? You have made my last 10 years. Thank you.

Suzy McFarland: And, what do you expect the rest of us to do?

Chris: I ask you simply to assess two things and make up your own mind up, about this:

(1) Do you consider that I'm I telling you the veridical truth here, as a subjectively conscious human being?

(2) Do you affirm that you also have subjective conscious volition over the physical universe?

Suzy: (1) Yes, I believe you are telling me the veridical truth. (2) Yes, I do believe this.

Jane King: Yes indeed. I do. Yes to all!!

Ultimately everything that ensues in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology to reflower and reparadise the Earth flows from this mutual veridical affirmation and the preparedness of people to communicate it to others in this way.

The Sequel to the Moksha Epiphany

Epiphany 1

There are two and only two routes to realisation:

(1) the scientific quest of verified empirical observation of nature and the quantum universe, including traditional neuroscience reframed so that it is not a physically closed classical causal description, but a contextual boundary filter guiding conscious experience as a cosmological complement to the natural universe reflecting all the subtleties of the qualia of visionary experience under the organismic filter applied by neurodynamics on the doors of perception.

(2) the subjective quest of discovering subjective consciousness from within, through mutual empirical experience. The core of this is to make the mystical vision quest ourselves with no prior assumptions as the karmic trip of our lifetime because we are already complete conscious sentient beings who have the power to do so, but fail to understand the “Kingdom that lies before us, but men do not see it”. That kingdom is our own conscious existence and we can't understand it by analysing it, but only by living it, by descending deeply into it, by every means and by actively achieving the redemption of the living planet and the conscious universe.

If we don't do this now we are literally doomed to a rapid, or slow burn Fermi self-extinction. Those that have ears choose to hear not! Time is too short. Things are not heading the right way. We all need to be pragmatic!

Little or none of this involves the kind of rational, philosophical and consciousness research speculation the expert groups I joined are feverishly debating, conflating pseudoscientific ideas of fields, encodings, reverberations, potentials, solitons or even the Ads-Cft correspondence, all of which are just conceptual physical analogies trying to pose as descriptions of consciousness, when neuroscience is already providing a clear objective description. Decomposing and describing consciousness is not the name of the game. Experiencing reality to its foundational depths is. You don't discover meaning by analysing and describing it, but by taking personal responsibility for the fate of the living universe and redeeming it. Just learn to make the vision quest and save the universe before you die. You can culture mushrooms in a chilly bin. The key is understanding a root shift in the zeitgeist can become effortless, however unlikely it may seem, if it is true to life itself, not just human utopian folly.

"And it was the Evening of the First Day"

To understand this revelation of true redemption we have to briefly return to how it first began. This all started 13 months ago as yet another stroke of karma. I had become unable to safely take mushrooms for seven years because acute closed angle glaucoma risked instant blindness if my pupils dilated. But once I had complete lens replacements, the die was cast. I decided to take the delicate plunge. It was only a tiny morsel, 1.5 gm dry weight, something even an eighty year old spinster needn't turn an anxious hair to, just to test the visionary waters again.

If any of you want to have any insight into what the fully developed nature of pure experiential qualia are, mushroom kaleidoscopes and their deeper visions are the synesthesic sang raal. They are at once all the colours of visual insight and the sounds of immortal waves whispering and rushing and as they gather, rising to screeching intensity through ones being, in undulating resonance, and all the scents and tastes and thrills of the world too and all those things that have been and will be.

Western tradition leans to God as the external Creator, while Eastern tradition sees the Supreme Being internally as pure consciousness. When you look up I-AM, it arises in two complementary places - the Hebrew Bible and the Upanishads. The formative scope of this is extraordinary and potentially universal. This made me realise that the founding experience defining Monotheism was a visionary experience of a burning bush almost identical to my moksha epiphany, and both were essentially an NDE-like experience of meeting with a manifestation of Brahman-Īshvara as per the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. This places the entheogenic moksha epiphany and its symbiotic cosmology in the mainstream of formative religious paradigm shifts.

Krishnananda notes: In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad we are told that Brahman – the Supreme Being is Pure Consciousness, in which subjects and objects merge together in a state of Universality. The Supreme Being knew Himself as 'I-Am', inclusive of everything. He became an ‘other’ to Himself in the act of the manifestation of the Universe. Even in the Biblical parlance we have the description of God as ‘I-am- That-I-am’. One cannot say anything else about God. But, the Supreme was ‘as if’ an ‘other’, but not truly, for He, nevertheless remained as the Absolute, Self-Conscious Being, and He knew Himself as ‘I-am’. ‘I-Am’ is the highest description of God, but the Absolute is supposed to be transcendent even to this condition of ‘I-amness’ of the Universal Nature, because the state of ‘I-am’ is Self- consciousness, though it is Universal. So, in Vedānta, a distinction is drawn between this Universal ‘I-am’ and the Absolute as it is – the distinction between Brahman ultimate reality and Īshvara the godhead, manifested in Vishnu and Shiva.

Ishvara, (Sanskrit: "Lord") in Hinduism, God understood as a person, in contrast to the impersonal transcendent brahman. The root of the word Ishvara comes from īś- ( , Ish) meaning "capable of" and "owner, ruler, chief of". The second part of the word Ishvara is vara which means depending on context, "best, excellent, beautiful", "choice, wish, blessing, boon, gift", and "suitor, lover, one who solicits a girl in marriage". The composite word, Ishvara literally means "owner of best, beautiful", "ruler of choices, blessings, boons", or "chief of suitor, lover". In Mahayana Buddhism it is used as part of the compound "Avalokiteśvara" ("lord who hears the cries of the world") – a bodhisattva revered for his compassion. When referring to divine as female, particularly in Shaktism, the feminine Īśvarī is sometimes used. Particular communities within the Hindu fold differ in their understanding of the relation between Ishvara and brahman. Theistic communities maintain that the two are one and the same or even that the personal representation is superior; others, including some adherents of Advaita Vedanta, argue that Ishvara is a limited and ultimately inadequate representation of Brahman. Ishvara, as Avalokiteśvara in coitus with Tara, carries all the features of the male-female 'Elohim of Genesis.

So it was that I lay down in the deepening twilight as the effects began to come on. I saw my son look curiously in and to avoid him distracting me I turned away, and noticed the little streaks of light in the corner of my eye which mean that at any moment I could fold over into the dream world of the nierika. I reminded myself – you're not here just to indulge yourself but to discover the meaning of life, the universe and everything, so I summoned up empty mindfulness and gave my self back to the universe in fana or self-annihilation.

And down I went into the epiphany of being – a kind of jewelled seventh heaven where everything is illuminated and everything is illuminating. And there was Brahman exactly as in the near death experience. That thou art. Brahman is me. Brahman is my cosmic apotheosis manifest telepathically as one is to one. But Brahman isn't just here to say "Hi". He is saying the world is in acute peril – indeed the entire universe is in peril, because, if we self-destruct as we are heading towards doing, and conscious life on Earth as we know it ceases, we don't know that this great universe in which we exist can remain manifest, because we don't have certainty or even any knowledge that there is other life in the universe.. Brahman is vulnerable too – eternally vulnerable. And Brahman is silently as one is to one saying to go back to your life and redeem the entire living universe as your life's work. You can do it because you are mortal on ground zero. Go to the ends of the Earth and stop short at nothing. And he imparted to me the elements of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, just as in Fred Hoyle's (1957) sci-fi novel "The Black Cloud" that took me weeks to begin to understand. That's the moksha epiphany transcending the incarnation cycle.

Likewise, Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. But he saw a flame of fire coming out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and the bush burned with fire and was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside, and see this great sight (experience this transformative vision), and discover why the bush is not burnt, and God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God. And He said, I have seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry and I know their sorrows. And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them unto a land flowing with milk and honey. And when Moses enquired what his people should call Him, He said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

So Brahman is also 'Elohim and 'Elohim is just as vulnerable. Really the 'Elohim of Genesis one is male and female in the likeness of humanity as humanity's cosmic apotheosis, not the reverse. So the damning thing is that our self-centred egotism could literally lay waste to God, the Universe and everything if we don't perform the living redemption of the Tree of Life throughout our generations forever.

Shortly after, as it always happens, the spell broke, and I fell out of the nierika portal and Rohan was looking at me curiously and saying "Are you okay?" And I said "Yes thanks!" "I couldn't be more okay!" "I'm galvanised". And here we are thirteen months later and apart from the cosmology, which everyone looks the other way over, to neither confirm nor deny, so nothing has changed.

Chris Nunn: Stanislav Grof thought his ‘holotropic breathwork’ was second best to LSD for enabling ‘higher’ states of consciousness, but I don’t think he ever said how or why. And you need to be a bit wary of physiological measures which generally have multifactorial determinants.

Chris King: LSD is too strong and unpredictable. Just take your fungal entheogenic toxins like a true visionary adult should, fearlessly with no hesitation or regrets! The universe evolved them for our realisation as a compensation for our species-dominant egotism destroying the biosphere. Although there are no guarantees, they are heads and tails over pure Vedanta and pure spirituality. Breathing and meditation is not a substitute but an adjunct. They aren't alternatives. As I showed you above, fana is also the way into moksha.

Epiphany 2

To understand the complementary relationship between (a) the physical and natural universe and (b) subjective conscious existence, we need to understand that the way the standard model of quantum physics and the symmetry-breaking of the colour and weak-electromagnetic forces occurred is (1) a critical indicator that the universe is absolutely destined to enable life to unfold including through natural evolution and for conscious life to be possible and (2) that the wave-particle complementarity of the quantum forces, especially electromagnetism as the most large scale force, (along with gravity), is key to subjective conscious volition over the quantum universe.

(1) Quantum physics is not just a ball and stick fatalistic mechanism but facilitates a highly creative life generating cosmological process. The chemical elements of life are a very subtle symmetry-broken products of the colour, weak and electromagnetic forces in interplay. You can't just cite carbon as a key element of life or ignore everything but the EM force, or you brutalise physics and turn it into a mechanistic unconscious nightmare. The reality is that the cosmic production of the elements through symmetry-breaking leads to biomolecules and fractal tissue structures as the cosmological climax of life in paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time.

(2) Quantum uncertainty is built in in such a way as to just make it possible for subjective consciousness to have causal physical effect, as David Chalmers put very nicely on closer to the truth: "If you wanted to have consciousness to effect physics, it looks like physics could not be designed more perfectly."

The Elusive Subjective

Now this has a kick back to understanding what subjective consciousness is and what it isn't and why formally analysing it is specious. Primitive subjectivity is the effortless ability of the subjective 'Shivaic' aspect of cosmology to become moulded by the physical constraints of the 'Shakti' aspect of cosmological physics.

In very elemental contexts like quanta, all that can be realised is the root notion of consciousness as the historically-entangled special relativistic wave function spatio-temporally encoding the past and future of the quantum. The 'free will' is the intrinsic capacity for reduction of the wave packet in which a 'decision' is made. But there is no real evidence for adaptive integrated qualia. Things begin to get more interesting in butterfly effect systems, where there is a dynamical boundary condition filter in place in the global dynamic itself interacting with quantum uncertainty.

A discrete transition to attentive sentient consciousness occurs in the eucaryote endosymbiosis where chaotic sensitivity to physical modes, such as light (photons), vibrations (phonons), and orbital influences (olfaction) begin to lead to boundary filter constraints in the membrane dynamics where meaningful subjective qualia could in principle become expressed. With the multi-cellular brain these become "phenomenally" expanded, coupled with cerebral neurodynamic constraints to become the dynamic integrated qualia we call the experiences we can subjectively experience in the first person.

But as we described in Epiphany 1 these are framed by the formative neurodynamic constraints of the doors of perception filters we associate with sensory perceptual processing superimposed on the physical sensory constraints. These are not analysed by decomposing the adaptive capacity for coherent qualitative experience as a kind of subjective qualia mechanism in itself, but through causally open attentive-intentive neurodynamics.

Finally, because the universe evolves to interactive climax in the biota, although it is possible that other cosmic structures such as black holes, stars, galaxies, or Gaia herself could have primitive phenomenological volitional experience, the subjective aspect is clearly positioned to be a complement to the most elegant complex low energy interactive processes in the multicellular biota themselves and to be supremely adaptive to the doors of perception filters these provide for organismic survival in an uncertain environment.

So we are brought back square one to the overriding reality that (1) All forms of conscious and superconscious entity arise from and are manifest through the biota, including Brahman as ultimate reality and 'Elohim as "God" apotheosis. (2) That while the universe is necessary, subjective consciousness in the biota is primary without which it remains unclear the physical universe or the cosmic mind could become manifest.

So our conscious duty to the subjective aspect is, as stated in the first round, is living redemption, not futile attempts at mechanistic or structural analysis, which rather, disable the subject from active volitional agency over their affairs and world redemption.

Epiphany 3

So is my mushroom vision of Brahman (1) a meeting with ultimate reality as I claim, or it is just (2) a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, or (3) somewhere in between, some kind of hallucinatory 'false' vision of my own mortal angst projected into the kaleidoscopic aether?

Here are the reasons why (2) and (3) are completely mistaken.

1. A key interpretation of the Fermi Paradox – why there is no apparent evidence of life out there – is that It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself – the Medea hypothesis (Ward 2009). We are manifestly running this risk to the brink as I speak!

2. Brian Cox on the BBC ahead of COP26 warned that Earth’s demise could rid galaxy of meaning Brian notes on the BBC that "Unique events that led to civilisation mean its demise could ‘eliminate meaning in the galaxy for ever’. He is right and the conclusion is that this is not just what we are doing to ourselves and the diversity of life as a whole, but the living galaxy and the universe.

3. Uncertainty that life can Reboot: Although abiogenesis is eminently plausible scientifically , there is as yet no empirical demonstration it can be achieved de novo. Our scientific intelligence leads us to believe that the organic molecules produced in profusion in galactic gas clouds are eminently fecund to generate life where the conditions become possible but that the processes involved take about half a billion years on a goldilocks planet to come about but this remains only a scientific hypothesis. We can't afford to snuff life out on the causal assumption it can create itself from scratch.

4. Squandering the Cosmic Heritage: We do all need to have some root faith in the ultimate fecundity of life to regenerate itself anew, after all it happened didn't it? And because it did, we appeared. But we are already 13.5 billion years down the universe's evolution. The universe is no longer a babe in arms spawning the first blazars. Simply throwing up our hands helplessly and depending on this option to roll back human folly is far worse than futile. What more stupid fate could we envision for ourselves than to struggle for 500 million years to spark replicative life, another two billion years to form amoebo-flagellates and another billion years of unique evolution to get past the dinosaurs and finally become Homo sapiens, only to blow it apart in a nuclear holocaust through our own egotistical tribalism, or run the biosphere into the dirt by over exploitation? Recall that the only country which has prosecuted unilateral nuclear warfare is the US. This was a precedent humanity should have stepped back from and not set the die for the nuclear arms race. Although these conflicts have arisen from far right leaders namely Hitler and Stalin it is the democratic world that is guilty of nuclear warfare when Japan was already on the brink of surrender. We are also continually failing to learn the lessons from far right politics and the risks it invokes.

5. False Religious Assumptions: We have no evidence whatever that there is an inscrutable ultimate reality called Brahman independent of our own experience of it. The evidence contradicts it. Moksha is so difficult to really achieve, the Vedantic tradition had to invent reincarnation to postpone full enlightenment. There is no convincing evidence that all the meditative and contemplative traditions have genuine transformative power over reality. There is no evidence whatever that a creator deity with root power over the universe exists independently of our belief systems. So my Brahman experience is as genuine as it gets and more transparently so than the contrived claims of the Yogis for which little has really changed in 2000 years.

6. Helplessness and Denial: Finally we all know the problem is that while all of us feel the Earth is heading towards existential crisis, none of you have any way to cope with the three key existential threats, the mass extinction of the diversity of life, human induced climate crisis and nuclear mutually assured destruction. We are living in the valley of the shadow of death and we know it. Some of you even try to claim climate crisis is a democrat deep state plot because you are choosing to drown in disinformation. But we know that we are burning all the coal that goes back 358 million years to the first great carboniferous forests and all the oily algal deposits of an age of 250 million years for the oil. We have to know this is disrupting and degrading and acting against the living Earth. Yet here we sit driving our autos and our urban food chains unable to get to these issues for selfish reasons of taxation, inflation and sheer personal ambition.

So what to do about it? We need to create a small world network based on limited degrees of separation to identify the three key existential threats – mass extinction of the diversity of life, human induced climate crisis and nuclear mutually assured destruction as primary objectives. We have spent decades trying to deal with the nuclear threat and remain on the brink of uncertainty if push came to shove. We can't let any of these drop until the planet is redeemed.

The Buck Stops at Karma My Dear

All this Covid episode and what it means comes down to karma, a philosophy I tend to despise but lives within me at all times, and particularly times of crisis. When I caught Omicron and went down hill fast I thought everything was utterly meaningless. Ukraine is in flames. The US is splitting itself apart and returning to religious chauvinism overturning the struggle for women's rights. And so it went. I tried to compile a few additions to the cosmology, which I will include, but otherwise it was pure ennui. Then I realised the buck still stops with me and I haven't fulfilled the karmic agenda. That's when I realised karma had struck (again) and regained my vitality and could eat again. And that's why I am sending these three epistles.

Let me explain what karma actually is. It's not a moral law, it's a manifestation of quantum singularity when the universe touches us on the shoulder. To take a very loose analogy, everyday life, as a bed of wine and roses is like sailing down our multiply entangled wave function. We are part of a great whole of life, offspring, world hopes of a better future, compassionate sentiments, the unifying power of love, the collective will to compassionate justice. There is no need to stick our necks out. But then there's the nitty-gritty – accidents happen, illness like covid, family, social and international crises. Here is where reduction of the wave packet comes into the forefront and shatters the equilibrium.

Just so as incarnate individuals, we are both singular and part of the great whole. But some of us become marked by our personal karma in a way which can set us apart. The mushroom trip that set off the cosmology, through unblinding my glaucoma with devastating insight has marked me. And going down the tubes with covid has marked the process with added significance, turning meaninglessness into acute urgency. The covenant has not been fulfilled. I still have to go to the ends of the Earth to save it and time is even shorter and the situation even more precarious.

The basic answer to this is that I am, and Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is, as a transparent affirmation, the ultimate remedy for survival of the human species and the immortal survival of the diversity of life. I am thus the bearer of the Logos of perennial immortality throughout our generations forever amen. This I swear, that I came into this world to bear witness to the truth, that I bare before you the long term future goodness of the age of Paradise. This is not the signature of a false prophet. Rather, the balance of the probabilities is that my vision is a rock of sustainability amid a swirling ocean of human folly and misadventure, on all sides, leading to existential crisis.

The answer is judge wisely. Cast lots on your own garments, in advance to test the relative waters of veracity. Do not wait for your executioners to do it on your final day as happened to Jesus. Thus I am not Yeshua reincarnated. Nor am I pretending to be him:

"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." (Plumed Serpent).

I could have easily paid no attention to this birth karma. But would that have been fair or considerate, if something could be done to protect life. As it was, I studied William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" decided psychedelics were more insightful than religious doctrine, wandered India as a sadhu and made a pilgrimage to the sources of the world's power plants. Then when I started seriously taking mushrooms, strange things happened.

As an adolescent I had had a dream. I was in dry parched deserted forest and a Lion was staring at me with eyes of both pity and contempt, because I was the species which was bringing nature to her knees. I realised I was the accursed Homo and so I made my way to my own kind – an almost endless queue of people waiting for the chance to work in a dark factory for food. The dream haunted me.

Mushrooms became my allies and my spirit nature and I realised from the work of Joseph Campbell and others that there was a deeper Jungian current of archetypal reality that could have played a part in the events of apocalyptic heroes such as Jesus. I realised the world was stuck in perpetual death-grip of re-celebration of Jesus' sacrifice and conceived of the idea that it was possible to make a second journey of spiritual renewal to correct what had gone wrong in the year zero and redeem the immortal age of paradise, not as Jesus' second coming, but as a true redeemer in the root tradition. The mushrooms encouraged this and their access to numinous reality realised it. Of course I couldn't reveal any of this because, at the time they were strictly class A prohibited drugs.

Stranger things happened. In the 1980s, the mushroom suggested that I make the millennial journey to Jerusalem if the world hadn't addressed the mass extinction of life by then. But then it came back with a horrific vision that somehow my daughter's fertility would be impaired as a consequence. Then her first offspring was born with Down syndrome. I had become adroit at casting lots on my garments to the extent that I was able to know enough of what I was up against, and made the millennial vigil, as an academic sabbatical hosted by liberal Jews in the Holy city with creditable flair as a stealth raid to celebrate the sacred reunion of woman and man and to reflower the Tree of Life as simple rites of passage to the new epoch.

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is largely complete but it's a Rosetta stone artefact. The essential work is still to come.

Epiphany 4

Before we go further, there are some things we really need to very carefully understand. Mushrooms are not just hallucinatory agents. They are not hallucinatory agents at all. They show you ultimate realities that are visions that, once they have entered us can become devastatingly true. When you enter a mushroom vision you are taking on more than you can possibly anticipate.

As Maria Sabina put it:

'There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. 'The more you go inside the world of teonanacatl , the more things are seen. And you also see our past and our future, which are there together as a single thing already achieved, already happened ... Millions of things I saw and knew. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints' ... I knew and saw God: an immense clock that ticks, the spheres that go slowly around, and inside the stars, the earth, the entire universe, the day and the night, the cry and the smile, the happiness and the pain. He who knows to the end the secret of teonanacatl – can even see that infinite clockwork’.

We always have to be very careful with what our visions wish on the world. Take my declaration of jihad in the Song of the Biosphere which promptly came true a month later on 9-11.

when it comes to the final struggle - jihad of the biosphere

there's only one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan

can we fly so high we'll pass right to the other side

and never fall in flames? will we ever be the same again

we'll become the living soul, the primal source, the shining goal

the beginning and the end of life, the happiness and the pain

can we bear it all again?

When we enter the visionary state we have to bear in mind that our own shortcomings may lead us to subtly distort the vision and lead either towards heaven or hell, as Aldous Huxley warned. We don’t want to adhere to the fallacious view that war is necessary, or that success of an outcome requires a compensating sacrifice to God.

So when I had the horrific vision that my daughter’s fertility might become occluded as some sort of sacrificial consequence of me attempting to overturn the Christian tradition of blood sacrifice to celebrate an empty cannibalistic Eucharist sacrament, consuming Christ’s flesh and blood, this was no pretentious Aztec vision nor anything I wanted in any way to come to pass. The real source of this notion comes not from some Aztec mushroom delusion but the diabolical sacrificial nature of Christianity itself. To me God giving his only begotten son as a sacrifice for sin is the equivalent of Huitzilopochtli sacrificing Moctezuma so that his followers could be forgiven their homicidal sins.

The canonical gospels all make clear this sacrifice is and remains central to the Christian concept of God:

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things,

and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes,

and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly (Mark 8:31).

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16).

And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission (Heb 9:22)

This means Abba is not a loving father, but a filicidal demiurge, however you try to pretend otherwise. Every Christian needs to take personal responsibility for the false vision they are perpetuating. It is truly sinful to turn a blind eye. James Tabor (2015) has set the record straight about Yeshua's actual role in this, accurately linking it to be an insertion in Mark that reflects a vision of Paul and is thus not Yeshua's actual words.

You all need to appreciate that, in coming to these strange messianic and sacrificial visions, I was a tenured academic taking mushrooms on an almost weekly basis, knowing that I was guarding the true visionary sacrament which could redeem humanity and bring about the epoch of long-term future goodness under the banner of reflowering the Tree of Life, announced discretely in Jerusalem in the millennium, while Yeshua's body continued bleeding to death in every Christian church altar, so that his followers could figuratively consume his flesh and blood in an empty powerless token to endlessly facilitate his ascendence on the third day to save them from their sins.

So the source of my dark vision, even though the mushroom was speaking the whole truth of what would come to pass a decade later, was in a sense the mildest possible accomodation to this unbelievably diabolical two thousand year cannibalistic ground hog day that had turned into martyrdom, Empire, Crusade, witch hunt and Inquisition. Anyone in the Christian tradition, before making any attempt to justify the overall good influence of the Western sacramental tradition needs only to turn to Perpetua's untimely martyrdom, and contrast it with the image below to say which sacramental path is true to life – the Eucharist, or the flesh of the Gods – Teonanácatl.

I clearly in all truth as a guardian of humanity and life as a whole, recognising the true status of the living sacraments in relation to the Western sacramental tradition, had and have a duty to redeem this diabolical belief, crafted by Pauline Judaic Hellenism, but it doesn't need any form of sacrifice, as Christianity claims, to overturn it! Just accepting the horrific sacrificial vision is real when we have to know in our heart of hearts it is a wholly corrupt fallacy. How any Christian on Earth can not see how fundamentally wrong and unethical this is, or pretend this is the basis of a true religion, leaves me aghast. There can be no justification, and no rationalisation in terms of Christian brotherly love, eternal life or anything else for this.

Re-Liberating Matriarchal Fertility

But the vision did come true a decade later, and my daughter’s first child emerged with Down syndrome, five years before my vigil to Jerusalem. So what does a loving father do, when it seems that their accidental vision of fertility sacrifice appears to have actually come true, whether it actually caused the events or not? That father has to try to set in motion a counter-vision of redemption and fulfilment to heal the travesty.

Many parents have children with Down syndrome and love them dearly, but there is a risk that caring for a disadvantaged first child can lead a new couple both to feel that they should devote their future life to the care of a dependent child and to lose faith in their own fertility and a full future family life together. This would just cement a bad vision into a perpetuity of undesirable outcomes.

Fig 260: Sprit Catcher Baby Cardigan

So seventeen days after the birth, I began a clandestine project of renewal. I secured the image of the incompleted spirit catcher above. I then created the Fair Isle design in the second image. Finally I knitted the design into a tiny jacket for a newborn baby with the spirit catcher on the back. It was really much too small for a baby and was intended to give them both the hope and confidence in one another and in the fertility of life itself to make a real family future possible and gave it to them over an evening meal. Her husband looked at it rather despairingly and threw it in the boot of he car as he left, but three years later a healthy baby boy was born, then seven years later after even more reluctance, a third healthy baby boy and the family was at last, a living proof of redemption of matriarchal fertility from dark visions.

So please remember carefully that mushrooms are far more than a hippie flash in the pan, or some kind of adolescent party kicks. As Maria Sabina said, they hold within them a reality we have barely begun to penetrate. There are more intense agents like LSD, but it’s not the sheer strength of the effects but the reality they reveal that is the key.

Outside the Inside Out

I have spent all my life up to 77 trying to genuinely explore the nature of the universe and discover ways in which physical reality, particularly at the quantum level can give rise to the enigma of conscious experience. The same for the ADS-Cft correspondence and pseudoparticles like the helium 3 fluid and particulate phases and even tachyons, let alone vying with Hameroff and Penrose and David Chalmers at Tucson Quantum Mind 2002.

That was all okay until that very mild dose of mushrooms in mid-2021, which flipped my universe inside out. Way back in the 1960s as a student, there was an acquaintance, Harry Wong, who painted an enigmatic art work “Outside the Inside Out” about the same time I first read about LSD the insanity drug in a local tabloid. Today on spec thinking of writing this e-mail, already holistically conceived before the words that are now flying off the tips of my fingers, I casually went on Google and thanks to Pinterest, there is one and only one image remaining. Here it is:

Fig 261: Outside the Inside Out

Now the title is a pun on an image of his jail cell for drug possession, probably hard drugs, but the metaphor is a potent expression of what happens when, after literally hundreds of wild trips seeking white light illumination, in a karmic twist due to having acute closed angle glaucoma and lens replacement eye surgery and taking a very mild exploratory dose of mushies to see if my eyes can stand it and suddenly finding I had fallen completely outside the inside out of the bubble of perception, as Carlos Castaneda called it and into the nierika as the Huichol describe, I was in an NDE with Brahman and so the story goes …

This is an event for me just like Buddha discovering the death and decay he had been sheltered from when he left the shelter of the royal chambers, and it comes with a huge sting in the tail. Everything I have lived for in the quantum connection that makes physics able to evoke the conscious mind materially came apart and I had to put it all together from the other side of the Styx.

The end result is a cosmological ground shift away from the occluded story of how the brain does it all the way back to veridical reality and the efficacy of subjective conscious volition over the physical universe and the cosmological axiom.

At the same time I discovered Gallego & Dakić's (2021), little arxiv paper which shows that the whole idea of the border post between the classical and quantum worlds can be an illusion in biology where non–IID processes are the key to brain dynamics and evolution.

This freed me form having to find some idiosyncratic pseudo-physical connection to make Stan’s "brain makes mind" agenda feasible.

It is transparently obvious if you take even a small step back from this obsession to find the mechanism, that the whole dynamic of the organism from quantum wave function and measurement, through molecular folding and kinetics, through enzyme active site quantum tunnelling, ion channel kinetics, open system quantum chaos, edge of chaos instability, and the fractal structures of membranes, ribosomes cell organelles though cells, to tissues and the whole conscious organism is one macroscopic resonant quantum system that can never be decomposed cleanly into interacting mechanistic parts.

Falling outside the inside out means also that I can dispense entirely with speculative pseudo-scientific reasoning and just add one minimal axiom confirmed by any of us that are honest with ourselves even to go to the toilet or to eat, let alone ponder serious thoughts or have deep psychedelic insights. That’s the bare bones of it!

The Bushmen always carry poisoned arrows for hunting and like all of us they fear infidelity, there is a saying: As one of the !Kung men in an argument about a marriage put it to his adversary, their dispute could be quickly settled with an arrow. "Just one little arrow”.

The cosmological axiom that subjectivity is primal extending physical cosmology, although full consciousness emerges later with the eucaryote endosymbiosis, is that little arrow, leading to mutual affirmation that subjective consciousness has efficacy of volition over the physical universe, freeing us from both materialistic and religious bondage as transformative conscious agents protecting life in the universe.. It justifies recognition for what it actually achieves in clarification of subjective reality for the benefit of life as a whole and the integrity of our cosmological account of reality.

Closing the Circle

Just to come full circle over the karma of the glaucoma and the cosmology mushroom vision, and this acute Omicron BA5 episode, in the middle of writing this epistle this morning, suddenly I could no longer see the words “self-assembling” in the top image in the figure. I tested both eyes and I couldn’t see it in either, so it wasn’t my new synthetic eye lenses or my retinas. Then I realised I couldn’t read any of the text I had just composed because half of it was disappearing, so it was in my visual cortex. Was this the end of my visual life? Was this the moral punishment for my bad karma? I looked at my face in the mirror and there were no eyes, just a blur. Had I caused a stroke trying to go to the toilet? I began to see fortification patterns and decided to place my faith in waiting it out as a kind of migraine aura. About thirty minutes later everything settled down to normal. But it’s a warning to everyone who reads this not to depended on me to save the world for you.

Please understand where I am positioned. I have a vast scientific research web site updated in real time with a comprehensive description of scientific reality from quantum cosmology through the evolution of the tree of life from biogenesis to humanity and neuroscience.

Quantum Reality and Cosmology

Biocosmology

The Tree of Life: Tangled Roots and Sexy Shoots:Tracing the genetic pathway from LUCA to Homo sapiens

Humanity's Evolutionary Heritage

Culture Out of Africa

Entheogens, the Conscious Brain and Existential Reality

On the shadow side I have descended for decades into psychedelic states and spent whole seasons submerged in spiritual reality with fresh first person visionary eyes to see right into the events that invoked the human spiritual consciousness and the weird karmic twists therein all the way back to 150,000 years ago. That is the shadow side that is generally occluded.

I would be wasting my existence if I didn't use this qualification when it is most needed to ensure our survival and transform both the scientific and religious paradigms. Like all good shamans that’s what I was born to do. So I am trying to make the religious paradigm shift from the centre of the cyclone, because that iswhere the beginning and end of time lies and where the uncertainties go wide open right at the source that evoked it all. All the beings that have gone before us are complexes of life-long non-IID quantum interventions, each life history constituting a unique quantum instance from creation to annihilation. I am trying to use mine fully aligned to good effect to transform our understanding to regain planetary immortality. Because it is to put our attention on the highest possible Self in the Now, where all the possibilities for transformation lie.

Fig 262

If you would like to hear this weird quantum reality sung in a beautiful accounting here it is: Kitten's Cradle lyrics

The onus on us is to bring forth what we have within us. If we do, these words come true and the whole epoch is realised.

"That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves.

That which you do not have within you [will] kill you if you do not have it within you.”

(Gospel of Thomas 70)

Aldous Huxley, Moksha and the Yellow Mushroom

This section contains key excerpts from “Moksha” (Huxley 1962) his edited posthumous writings, his lecture on visionary experience and his peaceful death on LSD, that is a fitting sequel to his representation of a similar passing away in his climax novel Island. I am including this in retrospect because of a karmic experience I had in February 2024 realising that Huxley had named the sacrament in his novel “Island” (1962) moksha or moksha-medicine, which I had completely overlooked in my experience of a more Vedic moksha experience of union with Brahman in the formative mushroom experience that precipitated this work. Because I had read “Island” in the heady LSD days a decade before I had an opportunity to experience natural entheogens, and like many others saw “Island” and the “yellow mushroom” as science fiction, when he was talking about gold tops, the connection to the actual sacred mushroom and moksha had literally passed me by. Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is very much a descendent of Huxley’s vision in “Island” so am including this short section in recognition of his heritage.

Huxley's last novel - the crowning work of his final decade - took him five years to write. For perhaps the only time in his writing career he questioned, his creative ability to successfully 'poetize and dramatize the intellectual material and create a work which would be simultaneously funny, tragic, Iyrical and profound'. To Osmond he described the task as 'trying to imagine what could be done to create a good society, dedicated to eliciting aII the latent powers and gifts of individuals ,..' He worked into the book some of Laura's psychotherapy techniques. lsland is dedicated to her: The Doors of Perception was dedicated to Maria: as SybiIIe Bedford notes, these are the only books among the nearly fifty Aldous published which bear dedications.

The lslanders - the Palanese – use a drug called moksha: a kind of perfected psychedelic in the form of a cultivated, yellow mushroom growing in the mountains. The substance is also called 'moksha-medicine' and provides 'the full-blown mystical experience'. Unlike the soma of Brave New World, moksha is not tor escapists: a major ethic

of the lslanders is 'paying attention'. In a rite-of-passage ceremony in which the drug is given to Palanese youth, the guide reveals its essential message: 'Liberation . .. the ending of sorrow, ceasing to be what you ignorantly think you are and becoming what you are in fact. For a little while, thanks to the moksha-medicine, you wiII know what it's like to be what in fact you are, what in fact you always have been.’

A key extract from ‘Island’: This focuses on the key ingredients of Huxley’s vision of world healing in the context of the Palanese, the nature of organic natural visionary transcendence, the yellow mushroom, the very name moksha medicine and the reaction of the paranoid world at large which ultimately culminates in the tragic invasion of earthly paradise.

'Sex is different here,' Murugan insisted. 'Because of the yoga of love?' Will asked, remembering the little nurse's rapturous face. The boy nodded. 'They've got something that makes them think they're perfectly happy, and they don't want anything else.’ 'What a blessed state!’ There’s nothing blessed about it,' Murugan snapped. It's just stupid and disgusting. No progress' only sex' sex' sex' And of course that beastly dope they're all given. ’Dope?' Will repeated in some astonishment' dope in a place here Susila had said there were no addicts? 'What kind of dope?’ – It’s made out of toadstools. Toadstools!, He spoke in a comical caricature of the Rani's vibrant tone of outraged spirituality’. 'Those lovely red toadstools that gnomes used to sit on?’ 'No, they are yellow.'People used to go out and collect them in the mountains. Nowadays the things are grown in special fungus, beds at the High Altitude Experimental Station' Scientifically cultivated dope' Pretty' isn't it?’

‘What's in a name?’ said Dr Robert with a laugh. ”Answer, practically everything. Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names - the moksha-medicine, the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved. Whereas our young friend here has no first-hand knowledge of the stuff and can't be persuaded even to give it a try. For him, it's dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever indulges in.'

'What does His Highness say to that?' Will asked. Murugan shook his head. 'All it gives you is a lot of illusions,'

he muttered. 'Why should I go out of my way to be made a fool of?’ 'Why indeed?' said Vijaya with good-humoured irony. ‘seeing that, in your normal condition, you alone of the human race are never made a fool of and never have illusions about anything!’ 'I never said that,' Murugan protested. 'All I mean is that I don't went any of your false samadhi. 'How do you know it's false?' Dr Robert inquired. 'Because the real thing only comes to people after years and years of meditation and tapas and... well, you know - not going with women.’ 'Murugan,' Vijaya explained to Will, 'is one of the Puritans. He's outraged by the fact that, with four hundred milligrams of moksha-medicine in their bloodstreams, even beginners - yes, and even boys and girls who make love together - can catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego.'

‘But it isn't real,'Murugan insisted. 'Not real!’ Dr Robert repeated. 'You might as well say that the experience of feeling real isn't real.’ 'You're begging the question,' Will objected. 'An experience can be real in relation to something going on inside your skull but completely irrelevant to anything outside.’ 'Of course,'Dr Robert agreed. 'Do you know what goes on inside your skull, when you’ve taken a dose of the mushroom?'

'We know a little.’ 'And we're trying all the time to find out more,' Vijaya added’ 'For example,' said Dr Robert, 'we've found that the people whose EEG doesn't show any alpha-wave activity when they’re relaxed aren't likely to respond significantly to the moksha-medicine. That means that, for about fifteen per cent of the population, we have to find other approaches to liberation.’ 'Another thing we're just beginning to understand,'said Vilaya’ 'is the neurological correlate of these experiences. What’s happening in the brain when you're having a vision? And what’s happening when you pass from a pre-mystical to a genuinely mystical state of mind?'

'Do you know?’ Will asked. "Know" is a big word. Let's say we're in a position to make some plausible guesses. Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas - they're all related to some kind of unusual stimulation to the brain areas of primary projection - the visual cortex, for example. just how the moksha-medicine produces those unusual stimuli we haven't yet found out’. The important fact is that, somehow or other, it does produce them'

And somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving, or moving, or feeling.’ 'And how do the silent areas respond? 'Will inquired.

'Let's start with what they don't respond with" They don’t respond with visions or auditions, they don't respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any other kind of parapsychological performance. None of that amusing pre-mystical stuff Their response is the full-blown mystical experience. You know - One in all and All in one, The basic experience with its corollaries - boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning.’ 'Not to mention joy,' said Dr Robert, 'inexpressible joy.’ 'And the whole caboodle is inside your skull,' said Will. ‘Strictly private. No reference to any external fact except a toadstool” 'Not real,'Murugan chimed in. 'That's exactly what I was trying to say,’ 'You're assuming,' said Dr Robert, 'that the brain produces consciousness. I'm assuming that it transmits consciousness' And my explanation is no more farfetched than yours. How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. All one can do is to accept the facts and concoct hypotheses. And one hypothesis is just about as good, philosophically speaking, as another. You say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which causes them to produce a set of subjective events to which people have given the name 'mystical experience.' I say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a large "M" to flow into your mind with a small "m". You can't demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis, and I can't demonstrate the truth of mine. Even if you could prove that I'm wrong, would it make any practical difference?’ 'I'd have thought it would make all the difference,'said Will.

'Do you like music?' Dr Robert asked. 'More than most things.’ 'And what, may I ask, does Mozart's G-Minor Quintet refer to? Does it refer to Allah? Or Tao? Or the second person of the Trinity? Or the Atman-Brahman?’ Will laughed. 'Let's hope not.’ 'But that doesn't make the experience of the G-Minor Quintet any less rewarding. Well, it's the same with the kind of experience that you get with the moksha-medicine, or through prayer and fasting and spiritual exercises. Even if it doesn't refer to anything outside itself, it's still the most important thing that ever happened to you. Like music, only incomparably more so. And if you give the experience a chance, if you're prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming.

So maybe the whole thing does happen inside one's skull. Maybe it is private and there's no unitive knowledge of anything but one's own physiology. Who cares? The fact remains that the experience can open one's eyes and make one blessed and transform one's whole life.' There was a long silence. 'Let me tell you something,' he resumed, turning to Murugan. 'Something I hadn’t intended to talk about to anybody. But now I feel that perhaps I have a duty, a duty to the throne, a duty to Pala and all its people - an obligation to tell you about this very private experience’ perhaps the telling may help you to be a little more understanding about your country and its ways.' He was silent for a moment; then in a quietly matter-of-fact tone, 'I suppose you know about my wife,' he went on. His face still averted, Murugan nodded. 'I was sorry,' he mumbled, 'to hear she was so ill.’ 'It's a matter of a few days now'' said Dr Robert. 'Four or five at the most. But she's still perfectly lucid. perfectly conscious of what's happening to her' Yesterday she asked me if we could take the moksha-medicine together' We'd taken it together,' he added parenthetically, 'once or twice each year for the last thirty-seven years - ever since we decided to get married" And now once more - for the last time, the last, last time. There was a risk involved, because of the damage to her liver- But we decided it was a risk worth taking. And as it turned out, we were right' The moksha-medicine - the dope, as you prefer to call it - hardly upset her at all. All that happened to her was the mental transformation.’

He was silent, and Will suddenly became aware of the squeak and scrabble of caged rats and, through the open window, the babel of tropical life and the call of a distant mynah bird. ‘Here and now, boys. Here and now …' 'You're like that mynah,' said Dr Robert at last. 'Trained to repeat words you don't understand or know the reason for' “It isn't real It isn't real" But if you'd experienced what Lakshmi and I went through yesterday you'd know better. You'd know it was much more real than what you call reality. More real than what you're thinking and feeling at this moment. More real than the world before your eyes. But not real is what you've been taught to say. Not real, not real.' Dr Robert laid a hand affectionately on the boy's shoulder. 'You've been told that we're just a set of self-indulgent dope eaters, wallowing in illusions and false samadhis. Listen, Murugan - forget all the bad language that’s been pumped into you. Forget it at least to the point of making a single experiment. Take four hundred milligrams of moksha-medicine and find out for yourself what it does' what it can tell you about your own nature, about this strange world you've got to live in, learn in, suffer in, and finally die in' Yes, even you will have to die one day - maybe fifty years from now, maybe tomorrow. Who knows? But it's going to happen, and one's a fool if one doesn't prepare for it.' He turned to Will' 'Would you like to come along while we take our shower and get into some clothes?’

Visionary Experience

The following is an extract from Huxley’s 1961 lecture on Visionary Experience, which overviews all traditions and methods of gaining access to visionary states from religious, through deprivation and flagellation to shamanic and pharmaceutical.

ACCESS TO THE VISIONARY WORLD

Spontaneous Access. Before I go on to talk about the actual nature of this internal visionary world, let me say a little about the means of access to that world. Some people spontaneously go there; they seem to be able to move back and forth without any difficulty between the visionary world and the workaday, biologically useful world of our ordinary experience. You get people, for example, like William Blake, who is constantly moving back and forth between the two worlds. Blake had a period in middle life when he was unable to visit the visionary world. For about twenty years he didn't see it. He used to see it in his youth, and then again in his old age he was able to go into it quite freely. And we have, I think, plenty of cases of poets and artists who have gone back and forth from one world to another. There are very beautiful and very detailed descriptions of the visionary world given to the Irish poet, George Russell - who wrote under the name of A.E. - where he describes his own experiences of going back and forth into this luminous world within the mind. There are these spontaneous cases where a privileged few are able to visit the other world and come back again safe and sound. Then I think we can also say that, in a very large number of children - I don't know what the proportion is; I don't think it has ever been systematically investigated - but in a good number of children, there is this capacity to live in a kind of visionary world. They see both within and without this transfigured luminous world. It is of course the world described by Wordsworth in his famous Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. I think a great many children have exactly the kind of Intimations of Immortality which Wordsworth described. Then in due course, as they are subjected to our system of analytical and conceptual education, they lose the capacity of seeing this other world which gradually, in Wordsworth’s words, 'fades into the light of common day'. From. having lived in a world which had 'the glory and the freshness of a dream',they return to this rather boring, rather drab world in which most of us pass our lives. I would say, in passing, that one of the major problems of education is how do we help children to make the best of both worlds? How do we help them to make the best of the world of primary experience (and of this extension of primary experience: visionary experience) and at the same time help them to make the best of the world of language and the best of the world of concepts and general ideas? At present our system of education seems almost a guarantee that while we teach them how to use words and concepts, we wipe out this other world of beauty and higher reality which so many children live in.

These are two cases of spontaneous awareness of the other world, of the visionary world. Another class of people who have this awareness spontaneously is the class of the dying. Readers of Tolstoy will remember in that extraordinary story The Death of lvan Ilyitch, that at the end of his unutterable sufferings and miseries, this wretched man feels that he is being pushed into a black sack, deeper and deeper, and suddenly, within a few hours before he dies, he perceives that the bottom of the sack is open and at the end of it is a light. This is not merely a literary invention. In recent months Dr Karlis Osis, of the Parapsychology Foundation of New York, has been sending out questionnaires to a large number of doctors and nurses getting them to give reports of the state of mind of patients on their deathbed. The interesting thing is that he has, I think, about 800 answers from doctors and nurses who report that, spontaneously, patients on the verge of death did have these tremendous visionary experiences of light, of luminous figures.

It is a most interesting fact to find that this phenomenon, which has been reported of course in literature in the past, is now statistically confirmed. This is one of the most fascinating things that professional psychologists are doing now. They are confirming, by questionnaires and in the laboratory, all kinds of things which were intuitively known, and known by observation, and recorded in a casual way by literary men and philosophers in the past. Well, as I say, this represents a third class of spontaneous cases. Now we have to go on to the induced cases.

lnduced Access. The fact that visionary experience has always, at all times and everywhere been very highly valued, means that at all times and in all cultures systematic efforts have been made to induce this experience. The experience can be induced in a variety of ways. Let us quickly go through a few of them.

One method is hypnosis. Under deep hypnosis a certain number of people (not very many, but I have seen a few) do evidently enter this world and report very strange and interesting happenings: they see figures, they see luminous landscapes, and so on. These are not very common phenomena, but it is interesting to know that there are a certain number of people who can be transported into this other world by hypnosis. There are other psychological methods for getting into the other world, and one of the best known in the Orient of course is the method of one-pointed concentration, the traditional Yoga method of excluding everything except one particular point on which the attention is concentrated. This in many cases does seem to result in breaking through the barrier surrounding our ordinary, day-to-day, biologically utilitarian world of consciousness, and breaking through into another mode of consciousness, the visionary mode. There is yet another method which has been practised, of course, within all the great religious traditions, the method of what is now called sensory deprivation, or the limited environment. Here again it is most interesting to find professlonal psychologists repeating, in the laboratory, work which was done for metaphysical and religious reasons by hermits and saints living in caves in the mountains or in the desert. It is a very extraordinary fact that when we do limit the number of external stimuli or cut them out altogether, as can be done with some difficulty, then in a relatively short time ones mind starts producing tremendous visionary experiences. Historically we see such figures as Saint Anthony and the monks of the Thebaid in the fourth century in the Egyptian desert, and we see again the hermits of the Himalayas, the Tibetan and the Hindu hermits who lived in complete isolation in the caves. For example, if you read the life of Milarepa, the great Tibetan hermit, or if you read the lives of St Anthony and St Paul, the hermit in the Christian tradition, you can see that this isolation did in fact produce visionary experiences.

And it is interesting, as I say, to see these facts confirmed by such contemporary workers as D' O. Hebb at McGill

in Canada, or my friend Dr John Lilly at the National Institute of Health in Washington. Lilly has probably gone further than anyone else in creating a limited environment. He immerses himself in a bath at the temperature of 96, has himself fastened into a harness so that he can hardly move, breathes only through a snorkel so that even his face is covered with water and there is no differentiation of sensation on any part of his body, and within three or four hours he is having tremendous visionary experiences. Now the interesting thing is that like St Anthony’s, most of these visionary experiences are extraordinarily unpleasant, and I have asked Dr Lilly to describe these experiences but he would never tell me exactly what they were, except that they were very, very unpleasant indeed. St Anthony' as anybody who has ever visited any picture gallery knows, was also subjected to extremely unpleasant experiences, but he occasionally evidently had genuine mystical and divine experiences. It is interesting too that, in all the religious traditions, deserts and places where there is a minimum of sensory stimulation have always been regarded

in an ambivalent way, first of all as the places where God is nearest and secondly as the place where devils abound' We find in the New Testament, for example, that the devils who are cast out by Jesus go into the desert because this is the natural place, the habitat, of devils. But again, hermits who lived in the deserts in the fourth century say they went there because this is the place where one can get nearer to God than anywhere else. As I say, it is extremely interesting to find that these ancient religious practices can be and have been confirmed in the laboratory of modern psychological workers.

Another method of getting into the other world is the method of systematic breathing. Breathing exercises were of course developed most systematically in India, and we find traces of them in the Western tradition, particularly in the Greek Orthodox Church tradition where people did evidently employ some breathing methods, and even in individual Western mystics' I am thinking of Father Surin, the French seventeenth-century Jesuit, who speaks about the different modes of breathing, though he doesn't exactly describe what they were. The significant fact about breathing is that I think one can say that all these elaborate breathing exercises tend to end up in prolonged suspensions of breath. A prolonged suspension of breath necessarily mens a growing concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood. Again, it is well known that high concentrations of carbon dioxide do produce very remarkable and startling visionary experiences in the mind, so that we see here, in an empirical way, that people in all the religious traditions of the past made use of methods for changing the body chemistry, in such a way that visionary experiences would become facilitated. This again is the physiological reason, not the metaphysical or the ethical reason, for such practices as fasting.

Fasting has been employed in virtually all the cultural traditions, among other things for the purpose of inducing visions. For example, in a primitive Indian society in America this was a regular part of the initiation of the adolescent young men. They went out into the forest or into the prairie and fasted until they got a vision of the god they were looking for, and in due course they always did get a vision. The methods of fasting of course have been used in every religious tradition. These psychological effects of fasting have been confirmed in the large study by Keys called, The Biology of Human Starvation. There is a most elaborate description of what happens after a long period of abstention from food, and among the things that happen are these visionary experiences. We know too that the inadequate amounts of vitamins as well as merely inadequate amounts of calories also produce profound psychological changes. There are profound psychological changes in pellagra, for example, and in beriberi. Here again it is interesting, with the knowledge that we now have, to look back over history and to see why a period like the Middle Ages was probably far more fruitful in vision than a period of the present time. The reason very simply is that we are simply stuffed with vitamins and they were not. After all, every winter in the Middle Ages there was a period of extreme vitamin deficiency: pellagra and the other deficiency diseases were very common. On top of a long period of involuntary fasting came the forty days of Lent where voluntary fasting was imposed upon involuntary fasting, so that by the time Easter came around, the mind was completely ready for any kind of vision. I think there is no doubt that this is one of the reasons why spontaneous visionary experiences are a good deal less common now than they were; it is simply a dietary factor. In the past, in earlier civilization, a rather deficient diet tended to make certain types of visionary experiences possible, whereas now our very full diet tends to block them off.

Among other methods of transporting the mind to the other world was the deprivation of sleep. You find this in all the religious traditions: the sleep is reduced and the mind is made open and ripe for visionary experience. Here again it is interesting to see the professional psychologist confirming the findings of the past. My friend Dr J West a year or two ago had the occasion to supervise the sleeplessness period of a man who was a disc jockey on an American radio station. For a bet he had resolved to go without sleep for I forget how many days, ten or twelve days. Dr West supervised this and he told me that it was very interesting, after about seven or eight days, how this man was living in a completely visionary world with breakings-in of every kind of strange visions, some horrible and some rather beautiful. So here again we see an interesting confirmation of old empirical findings, in the modern laboratory. Even the medieval habit of austerities or self-imposed punishment was probably also extremely conducive to visions. Self flagellation, for example: if you analyse what the effects of this sort of proceeding were, it is quite clear that they all made for visionary experiences. They first of all released a great deal of adrenalin, a great deal of histamine, both of which have very strange effects on the mind, and then in the Middle Ages, when neither soap nor antiseptics existed, any wound which could fester, did fester, and the breakdown products of protein got into the bloodstream. We also know that these things do have very strange and interesting psychological effects. In confirmation of this it is very curious to read of the remark by the great French nineteenth-century Cure d'Ars (and now canonized as Saint Jean Vianney) who was forbidden by his bishop to indulge in the extremely severe austerities, the self-beatings which he had practised as a young man, and he said nostalgically, 'When I was allowed to do what I liked with my body, God would refuse me nothing.' This is a very interesting psychological statement, that evidently there are psychological reactions on the biochemical level which, connected with this kind of self-torture, do tend towards visions.

Chemical Access. Let us now pass into a final class of vision-inducing procedures; these have to do with the ingestion of various chemicals. Now as the French anthropologist Philippe de Felice showed some twenty years ago in his book Poisons Sacres Ivresses Divines, virtually in every religious tradition, both civilized and primitive, use has been made of mind-changing drugs used for the purposes of inducing visionary experiences. Every kind sf chemical substance has been used for this purpose. The most anciently recorded, I suppose, is the soma of the Indians. Nobody knows, I think, what the plant soma was. It has been identified as the Asclepias or milkweed, but the descriptions in the sacred text don't seem to fit in with the milkweed identification. From the ancient text it seems that this was a creeping plant which the Aryan invaders of India in 1000 BC brought down with them from Central Asia, and it became more and more difficult to get hold of the plant as they penetrated further and further into India. Philippe de Felice has a very interesting hypothesis about the development of Yoga (which evidently took place about this time, although it may have started earlier with the pre-Aryan people in India). The taking over of Yoga by the Aryan invaders may have been forced upon them by the fact that it was impossible for them to obtain supplies of soma so that, as they couldn’t induce visions by biochemical means, they were forced to resort to purely psychological and breathing exercises to get to the same place. It is an interesting hypothesis which may perhaps be true. I don't know.

Then among the other drugs, which of course have been used in the past, are such extremely dangerous mind-changing drugs as opium and as coca, from which cocaine is derived, and such relatively dangerous drugs as hashish - and, after all, our dear old friend alcohol, which was used by the Greeks, later by the Persians, and used by the Celts in Europe as a mind-changing drug and worshipped as a god. This is the interesting thing: the substance which produces the change of mind is regarded as divine and is then hypostatized as a person projected into the external universe as a divine person. We get the same phenomenon in Central America where recently the archaeologists have dug up in the highlands of Guatemala a large number of small stone figures which represent mushrooms out of whose stem emerges the head of a god. It is a very significant fact that this mind-changing mushroom which, as we shall see in a moment, has now entered European life, was actually hypostatized as a deity.

The Mushroom Access. Among the more harmless mind-changing drugs used by people in their religious rites in the past are peyote, the Mexican cactus, which is used in the South-western states of America and over large parts of Mexico, then the Bannisteriopsis caapi [harmine admixed with DMT-containing Psychotria viridis in the ayahuasca] of South America, and now of course the Mexico mushroom. ln modern times pharmacology has produced, partly by more refined methods of extraction and partly by methods of synthesis, a number of mind-changing drugs of extraordinary power, but remarkable for the fact that they have very little harmful effect upon the body. Peyote, among the natural drugs, has almost no harmful effect upon the body; it is not addictive, and Indians 80 years old take no more of the drug than they did when they were young, nor do they feel any desire to take it more frequently than once every month or six weeks when the religious rites take place. The extract from peyote which is the active principle, and which is now synthesized, mescaline, has the same qualities. Among the more recent additions to the armamentarium of the pharmacologists, the psychopharmacologists, are LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide) which was synthesized by Dr Albert Hofmann of Basel in 1943, and more recently psilocybin (about which we shall hear tonight, I hope, from Dr Leary) which was synthesized I think not more than 2 or 3 years ago, also by Dr Hofmann, who began by extracting the active principles of the Mexican mushroom which had been brought back by Professor Heim from his expedition to Mexico with Mr Gordon Wasson. I recently had the interesting experience of reading a letter which Professor Heim had written to my brother and which said, ‘I have just come back from Mexico and as a great triumph I took with me a number of Hofnann's capsules of psilocybin and I gave a dose to the old lady - the curandera, the medicine woman – [Maria Sabina] with whom we had originally done our experiments with the mushrooms - and she was quite delighted because the effects were exactly the same as the mushrooms and she said, ‘Now I can do my magic all the year round, I don't have to wait for the mushroom season!’ So this perhaps is one of the great triumphs of modern science, that one of these days perhaps Professor Hofmann at Basel will receive a telegram saying, 'Please airmail one hundred capsules to Southern Mexico, have very important magic to perform next week'- and the capsules will go and the magic will be performed.

These biochemical methods are, I suppose, the most powerful and the most foolproof, so to say, of all the methods for transporting us to this other world that at present exist. I think, as Professor Leary will point out tonight, that there is here a very large field for systematic experimentation by psychologists’ because it is now possible to explore areas of the mind at a minimum expense to the body, areas which were almost impossible to get at before, except either by the use of extremely dangerous drugs or else by looking around for the rather rare people who spontaneously can go into this world. (Of course it is very difficult for them to go in on demand, 'the Spirit bloweth where it listeth’, we can never be sure that the people with the spontaneous gift of visionary experience will have it on demand.) With such drugs as psilocybin it is possible for the majority of people to go into this other world with very little trouble in and with almost no harm to themselves.

THE NATURE OF VISIONARY EXPERIENCE

Having discussed the means of access to this world of visionary experience, let me begin to talk about the nature of the world. What is the nature of visionary experience?

Light. The highest common factor, I think' in all these experiences is the factor of light. There can be both negative, bad light’ and good light. InParadise Lost, Milton talks about the illumination of hell which he says is darkness visible. This I think is probably a very good psychological description of the kind of sinister light which sometimes visionaries do see, and it is a light which I think many schizophrenics see. In Dr Sechehaye's volume Journal d'une Schizophréne, her patient describes precisely this appalling light which she lives in: it is a kind of hellish light, it is a light like the glare inside a factory, the hideous glare of modem electric lighting gleaming upon machines. But on the other hand, those who go into a positive experience say this light is of incredible beauty and significance. The light experience on the positive side may be divided,I think into two main types. There is the experience of what may be called undifferentiated light, an experience just of light, of everything being flooded with light. And there is the experience of differentiated light, that is to say of objects, of people, of landscapes which seem to be impregnated and shining with their own light. In general I think it is possible to say that the experience of undifferentiated light tends to be the experience associated with the full-blown mystical experience. The mystical experience, I think, may be defined in a rather simple way as the experience in which the subject-object relationship is transcended, in which there is a sense of complete solidarity of the subject with other human beings and with the universe in general. There is also a sense of what may be called the ultimate All-Rightness of the universe, the fact that in spite of pain, in spite of death, in spite of all the horrors which go on all around us, this universe somehow is all right, and there is a direct understanding of such phrases as we find, for example, in the Book of Job, phrases which in our ordinary state we certainly cannot understand. I mean when Job says, 'Yea, though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him,’ this is incomprehensible on our ordinary biological level, and yet it becomes perfectly comprehensible on the mystical level, even on the level of induced mysticism.

Then there is another very characteristic psychological feature in the mystical experience: the sense of an intense gratitude, an intense gratitude for the privilege of being alive in a universe as extraordinary as this, as altogether wonderful. Here again one finds phrases in the mystical literature which are completely incomprehensible on the ordinary, everyday, biological level but which become completely comprehensible on the visionary and mystical level. For example, there is a phrase of William Blake’s where he says 'Gratitude is Heaven itself.' What does this mean? It is very difficult to imagine in our ordinary state of mind, but it becomes perfectly clear in the induced or spontaneous mystical condition: gratitude is Heaven itself, gratitude is intense, and the

actual experience of gratitude has an uplifting and joyous quality which is beyond all words.

The light experience is of course described again and again in all religious literature. After all, the most celebrated cases (the light experienced by Saint Paul on the road to Damascus; a tremendous explosion of light which woke Mohammed out of sleep which made him faint from its intensity; the experience of tremendous light which Plotinus described as having three or four times in his life) - you will find this again and again in literature. And don't let us imagine that these experiences of light are confined only to remarkable and outstanding men and women they are not. A great many quite ordinary people have had them, and this is one of the great merits of the most recent book by Professor Raynor C. Johnson, the book called 'Watcher on the Hills’ where he brings together a great many case-histories of perfectly ordinary people who had this tremendous experience of undifferentiated light. If I may quote from a letter I received recently from an unknown correspondent - this is a woman in her sixties who wrote to me saying that she had had an experience as a school-girl which had affected her throughout her life - she said, 'I was a girl of fifteen or sixteen, I was in the kitchen toasting bread for tea and suddenly in a dark November afternoon the whole place was flooded with light, and for a minute by clock time I was immersed in this, and I had a sense that in some unutterable way the universe was all right. This has affected me for the rest of my life, I have lost all fear of death, I have a passion for light, but I am in no way afraid of death, because this light experience has been a kind of conviction to me that everything is all right in some way.'

These experiences are relatively common; many more people have them than at present let on, I mean we live now in a period when people don't like to talk about these experiences. If you have these experiences, you keep your mouth shut for fear of being told to go to a psychoanalyst. In the past, when visions were regarded as creditable, people talked about them. They did run, of course, a considerable risk because most visions in the part were regarded as being inspired by the devil, but if you had the luck to convince your fellows that your visions were divine, then you achieved a great deal of credit. But now, as I say, the case has altered and people don't like talking about these things. This is the value, I think, of Professor Maslow's recent work on what he calls peak experiences. He is collecting a very large number of cases of this kind of experience, and he reassures his students that he is not going to regard them as crazy – they tell about these things, and he says it is surprising what a number of them do come out with the fact that they have had these kinds of experiences.

So much for the undifferentiated light, and here let me point out an interesting fact. I think one can say that in all the religions, both primitive and developed, light is the sort of predominant divine symbol, but the interesting fact is that this symbol is based upon a psychological fact, that the light of the world, the inner light, enlightenment, the clear light of the void in the Buddhist literature, all these are symbols. But they are also psychological facts. just as the great metaphysical systems - so it seems to me - take their origin in many cases from psychological experiences, so again do we see these great primary symbols of religious life also take their origin from psychological experiences. This quasi-sensory experience of light is something which has run through many, I think one can say all, religions and has become, as I say, the primary symbol.

Now, from undifferentiated light we pass to differentiated light, that is to say, light contained in objects, shining out of things and people. Well, on its simplest level this is a kind of luminous living geometry. There is something rather interesting here.I think here again we can say that certain symbols are based on psychological facts. For example the mandalas of India, about which the late Dr Jung was so keen, these too are based I think on psychological facts. In what may be called the early stages of the visionary experience, people do see with the closed eyes things which are exactly like mandalas. These great symbolic constructs ore again based upon immediate psychological experiences. Beyond these, or course, there are all kinds of more realistic, naturalistic visionary experiences - experiences of architectures’ of landscapes, of figures. It is interesting to find that again and again in the accounts given by people of visionary experiences, we find the same elements described, for example, in Heinrich Klüver's book on peyote where he sums up most of the material which had been published up to the time he wrote it. We find again and again his description of luminous landscapes and architectures encrusted with gems. The doors and windows are surrounded by gems, the whole world of landscape is filled with what Ezekiel calls the stones of fire. These descriptions of course very closely parallel all the accounts of paradises, posthumous worlds and fairylands which are found in all the traditions of the world. We shall go into this further later, but I think it is important to point out that here again there is a psychological basis to a great deal of material which is to be found in the traditional literature of religion and folklore.

Visionary Figures. We come now to the visionary figures. These also occur, and here again there is a very curious and interesting fact which has been recorded again and again in the literature both of spontaneous experiences and induced experiences, that when a figure is seen, it virtually never has a face which we recognize. Our fathers and mothers and wives and children do not appear. What we see is a complete stranger. Here again I think this fact accounts for some interesting theological speculations. For example, angels are not, as now theoretically supposed, the departed spirits of the dead; they belong to another species altogether. This exactly confirms what the psychologists have found in relation to induced or spontaneous experiences; these are always figures of strangers.

When one starts to think about the neurology and the psychology of this state of affairs, it is most extraordinary that there is something in our brain/mind, some part of our brain/mind, which uses the memories of visual experiences and recombines them in such a way as to present to the consciousness something absolutely novel, which has nothing to do with our private life and very little to do, as far as one can see, with the life of humans in general. Personally I find it extremely comforting to something I have somewhere at the back of my skull something which is absolutely indifferent to me and even absolutely indifferent to the human race. I think this is something very satisfying, that there is an area of the mind which doesn't care about what I am doing, but which is concerned with something quite, quite different. And why this should be and what the neurological basis be I cannot imagine, but this is something which I think requires investigation.

Transfigurations. Now we come to another aspect of differentiated light which may be described as the spilling out from the interior world into the exterior world. There is a kind of visionary experience which people have with the eyes open and which consists in a transfiguration of the external world so that it seems overwhelmingly beautiful and alive and shining. This of course is what Wordsworth described so beautifully and so accurately in his great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, and similar experiences can be found in the works of the mystics, in the work of the Anglican mystic, Traherne, who gives an incredibly beautiful description of the kind of transfigured world in which he lived in childhood. This description ends up with the most beautiful passage where he describes this wonderful world, and he says, 'And so with much ado I was taught the dirty devices of the world which now I unlearn and become as a little child again so that I now enter once more the Kingdom of God.’ And here, as I said before, here is surely one of the great challenges to modern education: How do we keep alive this world of immense value which people have had during childhood and which certain privileged people retain throughout their lives? How do we keep this alive and at the same time impart a sufficient amount of conceptual education to make them efficient citizens and scientists? This I don't know, but I am absolutely certain that this is one of the important challenges confronting modern education.

This transfigured external vision is very important in relation to art. By no means is all art visionary art; there is wonderful art which is essentially not visionary art. But there is also wonderful art which is essentially visionary art, which is the product either of the artist's vision, so to say with the eyes closed, of what is happening inside his head, this extraordinary other world; or else a vision of the external world transfigured either for the good or for the evil. In the works of Van Gogh, for example, one can find extraordinary examples of both negative and positive transfiguration.

VISIONARY EXPERIENCE IN RELIGION AND FOLKLORE

Now very briefly let us touch on some of the significances of visionary experience for religion and folklore. One finds, in all the traditions, descriptions of paradise, of the golden age, of the future Iife, which one places side by side with the descriptions of visionary experience, either spontaneous or induced, and sees that they are exactly the same; that the world described in popular religion, these other worlds, are simply descriptions of visionary experiences that men have projected from the inside into the universe. In all the traditions we find the same confusion of gems, and where gems are not used we find glass which, of course, was regarded as a very precious and strange material in the past' We find this in the Book of Revelation, a sea of glass in the New Jerusalem, the walls of which were gold and yet transparent, a kind of gold and transparent glass, and we find the same emphasis on glass as a marvellous magical material in the Northern traditions. We find it in the Celtic tradition, in the Welsh tradition; for example the home of the dead is called Ynisvitrin, the Isle of Glass, and in the Teutonic tradition the dead live in a place called Glasberg, the mountain of glass. And it is most curious to find, from Japan to Western Europe, these same images coming through again and again, showing how universal and how uniform this kind of visionary experience has been and how it has constantly been regarded as of immense importance and has been projected out into the cosmos in the various religious traditions.

THE VALUE OF VISIONARY EXPERIENCE

I suppose in a certain sense one can say the value is absolute. In a sense one can say that visionary experience is, so to say, a manifestation simultaneously of the beautiful and the true, of intense beauty and intense reality, and as such it doesn't have to be justified in any other way. After all, the Good, the True and the Beautiful are absolute values, and in a certain sense one can say that visionary experience has always been regarded as an absolute value, that it has been always felt to be intrinsically of immense significance and importance and worth having at a very great price. But it is also important to point out that, although they are in some sense intrinsically valuable and in some sense absolutely valuable, yet I think we can speak about visionary experiences in terms of their value within the frame of reference of goodness and spirituality. In this context I think it is very important to think of the theological definition of such experiences. The theoIogical definition of a vision or even of a spontaneous mystical experience is'a gratuitous grace'. These things are graces, they are given to us, we don't work for them. They come to us and they are gratuitous, which means to say that they are neither necessary nor significant for salvation or for enlightenment, whatever you like to call it. But if they are properly used, if they are cooperated with, if the memory of them is felt to be important and people work along the lines laid down during the vision, then they can be of immense value to us and of great importance in changing our lives. This idea of the gratuitous grace which takes on importance if we cooperate with it, is very significant in all the range of visionary experience, both spontaneous and induced.

We shall hear from Leary about the induction of such experiences by such substances as psilocybin, and I would certainly say that this kind of induced experience may be of no value at all, it may be like just going to the movies and seeing an interesting film. Or on the contrary, if it is cooperated with, if we perceive it has has some sort of deep significance and we do something about it, then it may be very, very important in changing our lives, changing our mode of consciousness, perceiving that there are other ways of looking at the world than the ordinary utilitarian manner, and it may also result in significant changes of behaviour. We of course now come to the philosophical problem: what is the metaphysical status of visions, what is the ontological status? Well, fortunately, this is a Congress of Applied Psychology, we don't have to go into this kind of problem, though I think it is worth going into, and I hope somebody will go into it sooner or Iater. But for the time being we can say, I think, that the value, apart from their intrinsic value, so to say the ethical, sociological and spiritual value of the visionary experience, is that if it is well used, it can result in a significant and important change in the mode of consciousness and perhaps also in a change in behaviour for the good.

The Most Beautiful Death: Huxley’s Death on LSD as described first-hand by his wife Laura Letters of Note.

I don’t know exactly what time it was, he asked for his tablet and wrote, “Try LSD 100 intramuscular.” Although as you see from this photostatic copy it is not very clear, I know that this is what he meant. I asked him to confirm it. Suddenly something became very clear to me. I knew that we were together again after this torturous talking of the last two months. I knew then, I knew what was to be done. I went quickly into the cupboard in the other room where Dr. Bernstein was, and the TV which had just announced the shooting of Kennedy. I took the LSD and said, “I am going to give him a shot of LSD, he asked for it.” The doctor had a moment of agitation because you know very well the uneasiness about this drug in the medical mind. Then he said, “All right, at this point what is the difference.” Whatever he had said, no “authority,” not even an army of authorities could have stopped me then. I went into Aldous’ room with the vial of LSD and prepared a syringe. The doctor asked me if I wanted him to give him the shot – maybe because he saw that my hands were trembling. His asking me that made me conscious of my hands, and I said, “No I must do this.” I quieted myself, and when I gave him the shot my hands were very firm. Then, somehow, a great relief came to us both. I believe it was 11:20 when I gave him his first shot of 100 microgrammes. I sat near his bed and I said, “Darling, maybe in a little while I will take it with you. Would you like me to take it also in a little while?” I said a little while because I had no idea of when I should or could take it, in fact I have not been able to take it to this writing because of the condition around me. And he indicated “yes.” We must keep in mind that by now he was speaking very, very little. Then I said, “Would you like Matthew to take it with you also? And he said, “Yes.” “What about Ellen?” He said, “Yes.” Then I mentioned two or three people who had been working with LSD and he said, “No, no, basta, basta.” Then I said, “What about Jinny?” And he said, “Yes,” with emphasis. Then we were quiet. I just sat there without speaking for a while. Aldous was not so agitated physically. He seemed – somehow I felt he knew, we both knew what we were doing, and this has always been a great relief to Aldous. I have seen him at times during his illness very upset until he knew what he was going to do, then even if it was an operation or X-ray, he would make a total change. This enormous feeling of relief would come to him, and he wouldn’t be worried at all about it, he would say let’s do it, and we would go to it and he was like a liberated man. And now I had the same feeling – a decision had been made, he made the decision again very quickly. Suddenly he had accepted the fact of death; he had taken this moksha medicine in which he believed. He was doing what he had written in ISLAND, and I had the feeling that he was interested and relieved and quiet.

After half an hour, the expression on his face began to change a little, and I asked him if he felt the effect of LSD, and he indicated no. Yet, I think that a something had taken place already. This was one of Aldous’ characteristics. He would always delay acknowledging the effect of any medicine, even when the effect was quite certainly there, unless the effect was very, very strong he would say no. Now, the expression of his face was beginning to look as it did every time that he had the moksha medicine, when this immense expression of complete bliss and love would come over him. This was not the case now, but there was a change in comparison to what his face had been two hours ago. I let another half hour pass, and then I decided to give him another 100 mg. I told him I was going to do it, and he acquiesced. I gave him another shot, and then I began to talk to him. He was very quiet now; he was very quiet and his legs were getting colder; higher and higher I could see purple areas of cyanosis. Then I began to talk to him, saying, “Light and free,” Some of these thing I told him at night in these last few weeks before he would go to sleep, and now I said it more convincingly, more intensely – “go, go, let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going towards the light. Willing and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully; you are doing this so beautifully – you are going towards the light; you are going towards a greater love; you are going forward and up. It is so easy; it is so beautiful. You are doing it so beautifully, so easily. Light and free. Forward and up. You are going towards Maria’s love with my love. You are going towards a greater love than you have ever known. You are going towards the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully.” I believe I started to talk to him – it must have been about one or two o’clock. It was very difficult for me to keep track of time. The nurse was in the room and Rosalind and Jinny and two doctors – Dr. Knight and Dr. Cutler. They were sort of far away from the bed. I was very, very near his ears, and I hope I spoke clearly and understandingly. Once I asked him, “Do you hear me?” He squeezed my hand. He was hearing me. I was tempted to ask more questions, but in the morning he had begged me not to ask any more question, and the entire feeling was that things were right. I didn’t dare to inquire, to disturb, and that was the only question that I asked, “Do you hear me?” Maybe I should have asked more questions, but I didn’t.

Later on I asked the same question, but the hand didn’t move any more. Now from two o’clock until the time he died, which was five-twenty, there was complete peace except for once. That must have been about three-thirty or four, when I saw the beginning of struggle in his lower lip. His lower lip began to move as if it were going to be a struggle for air. Then I gave the direction even more forcefully. “It is easy, and you are doing this beautifully and willingly and consciously, in full awareness, in full awareness, darling, you are going towards the light.” I repeated these or similar words for the last three or four hours. Once in a while my own emotion would overcome me, but if it did I immediately would leave the bed for two or three minutes, and would come back only when I could dismiss my emotion. The twitching of the lower lip lasted only a little bit, and it seemed to respond completely to what I was saying. “Easy, easy, and you are doing this willingly and consciously and beautifully – going forward and up, light and free, forward and up towards the light, into the light, into complete love.” The twitching stopped, the breathing became slower and slower, and there was absolutely not the slightest indication of contraction, of struggle. it was just that the breathing became slower – and slower – and slower, and at five-twenty the breathing stopped.

I had been warned in the morning that there might be some up-setting convulsions towards the end, or some sort of contraction of the lungs, and noises. People had been trying to prepare me for some horrible physical reaction that would probably occur. None of this happened, actually the ceasing of the breathing was not a drama at all, because it was done so slowly, so gently, like a piece of music just finishing. There was not the feeling that with the last breath, the spirit left. It had just been gently leaving for the last four hours. In the room the last four hours were two doctors, Jinny, the nurse, Rosalind Roger Gopal – you know she is the great friend of Krishnamurti, and the directress of the school in Ojai for which Aldous did so much. They didn’t seem to hear what I was saying. I thought I was speaking loud enough, but they said they didn’t hear it. Rosalind and Jinny once in a while came near the bed and held Aldous’ hand. These five people all said that this was the most serene, the most beautiful death. Both doctors and nurse said they had never seen a person in similar physical condition going off so completely without pain and without struggle. We will never know if all this is only our wishful thinking, or if it is real, but certainly all outward signs and the inner feeling gave indication that it was beautiful and peaceful and easy.

And now, after I have been alone these few days, and less bombarded by other people’s feelings, the meaning of this last day becomes clearer and clearer to me and more and more important. Aldous was, I think (and certainly I am) appalled at the fact that what he wrote in ISLAND was not taken seriously. It was treated as a work of science fiction, when it was not fiction because each one of the ways of living he described in ISLAND was not a product of his fantasy, but something that had been tried in one place or another and some of them in our own everyday life. If the way Aldous died were known, it might awaken people to the awareness that not only this, but many other facts described in ISLAND are possible here and now. Aldous’ asking for moksha medicine while dying is a confirmation of his work, and as such is of importance not only to us, but to the world. It is true we will have some people saying that he was a drug addict all his life and that he ended as one, but it is history that Huxleys stop ignorance before ignorance can stop Huxleys.

Epilogue

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is Pandora's Pithos ^{^[76]} Reopened

Fig 263: Elpis the spirit, or goddess of Hope, who remained caught under the lip of Pandora's jar according to the will of Zeus, depicted as an adolescent girl, wearing adult dress for the first time, hitching her skirt to keep it from dragging, holding a flower, or sometimes a bird to emphasise the fresh hope of spring and new growth