My Own Spiritual Journey

My first psychedelic experience (in my mid-twenties) was quite shocking for me, not only because of the vistas it opened up but because of the realization of how poor my previous grasp of reality was. I had what I thought were great artistic ambitions and overnight they were revealed to be mediocre at best. My self-confidence was shattered. With my newfound enlargement of vista I began to see other artists making statements of a profundity I could not hope to emulate.

So began my spiritual journey, for I understood that the root of my artistic inadequacy was an inability to incorporate the cosmic presence into my work.

Within my own culture there was no guidance to how one might do this. The available spiritual instruction was on how to follow a socially accepted religion or non-religion (such as atheism). The only plausible hints came from explorers of the esoteric religious sects such as Zen Buddhism and Sufi Islam, as well as the spiritual speculations of the Theosophists, Rudolph Steiner, Gurdjieff and a plethora of Eastern and new-age gurus. Credible psychedelic writers were emerging such as Allan Watts and Ram Dass, while the work of Carl Jung and his ideas of a collective unconscious drew my attention.

One thing was common to all of these: Fully engaging with a cosmic presence held a promise of not only enlarging my artistic sensibilities but relief from the suffering of the human condition, and many offered techniques for achieving this end. My current inability to achieve this was due to my ineptitude as a spiritual novice, and it was my own mental baggage that was preventing my 'enlightenment'.

For the following 30 years I followed the advice of gurus, worked, raised a family, meditated, abandoned gurus, became vegan, gave up veganism, and earnestly did my best to discard my mental baggage. But working at a full-time job imposed restrictions on my spiritual efforts and retirement gave me the opportunity to pursue my spiritual hygiene more assertively.

It is now some 24 years since retiring and 50 years since my first psychedelic engagement, and I have arrived at the conclusion that the advice I was given by all my teachers and gurus, viz. that it was my own mental baggage (which includes my social conditioning) that was the greatest impediment to my enlightenment, was wrong. Or rather, not wrong, just massively incomplete.

I, and all my teachers, had been working from the assumption that the cosmic presence comprised a monistic unity and that absolutely everything, whether material or spiritual, was sourced in this one unified spiritual being (which the psychedelic experience of universal connectedness appeared to confirm). Such unity implied that every contradiction could ultimately be reconciled were we only sufficiently enlightened to comprehend it. It meant that every time I could not reconcile a contradiction it was my own fault.

Arriving at the point of conceiving Physical Spirituality, I realized that might not be the case. There is not a singular, monistic spirituality but a dualistic or even pluralistic one. In Physical Spirituality I demonstrated that even the psychedelic experience of universal connectedness can be understood in the context of a multiplistic ontology rather than a monistic spirituality. And I suggested that one such pluralistic spirit which I termed "our Planetary Deity" is a much greater impediment to our full participation in reality than our own mental baggage; indeed that our mental baggage is acquired as a response to the overwhelming architective pressures we all suffer.

There are many events in my life (and in those of others) that I have come to understand in this way - that our Planetary Deity intentionally organizes what events it can to frustrate our cosmic ambitions - and understanding things in this manner has relieved me of a shitload of guilt - and of much resentment against others.

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My understanding of "spiritual trust" evolved in a similar manner.

As a teenager following a traditional religion, spiritual trust involved a simple faith that everything was the will of God, and as long as I did His bidding (as dictated by the dogma of my religion) He would look after me and mine, as He did for many in the Bible tales. Any personal mishap was due to my own negligence, voluntary or involuntary, of the divine ordinances, and my spiritual efforts were largely directed at keeping abreast of and in line with these.

My subsequent take up of atheism obliterated any sense of trust in a spiritual beneficiary.

My acceptance of a cosmic presence post psychedelics took the form of the monistic spiritual unity that was the most widely accepted concept among my gurus and teachers, which also meant that any personal mishap was due to my own misjudgement based on accumulated misconceptions, and that by abandoning my own judgements I could allow the connected universe to express its divine love more fully.

I worked judiciously at building my trust in the cosmic presence, suspending my own judgements and actions whenever I could, and the results were spectacular. I walked on fire. I averted the attack of a dog that had been set on me. I walked through a storm of angry bees unhurt. But there were other occasions where this 'technique' appeared to not only fail but make matters worse, and much effort was directed to understanding these situations and perhaps remedying them, but with no result. An accumulation of such events contributed to my eventually realizing that the teaching of a monistic spiritual unity was inadequate, and that a willy-nilly abandoning of my own judgements did not always let the cosmic love shine through.

It was only with the advent of my understanding architectivity and connectivity that I could make the distinction between a spiritual trust of allowing the connectively connected universe to express itself more fully and a spiritual distrust of an architective adversary. So I have become more circumspect about abandoning my judgements. I still do it, with similarly spectacular results, but only when the context is overwhelmingly connective. In architective circumstances I am now exceedingly wary.