Thor Among the Giants Part X: The Synthesis

We are looking at the spiritual history of the western world, and it goes like this: Intact Period →Rupture → Dislocation Period → Synthesis. Right now we are in the Dislocation Period, and our hope is that we can set up conditions where we move into a Synthesis of old and new – which is where psychedelics could help.  It is a story of how we moved from being a Medieval religion-based society to a technology-based secular one, and where we might – or might not – go next.  

The Intact Period was the time before the scientific revolution, when science and faith were fused into one (as it turns out, erroneous) belief system where we thought for instance that God is literally somewhere above the stars we see in the night sky, while the planets revolve below his feet. “Intact” does not suggest that the world was a friendlier or more honest place than it is now, but it was a place where people were more likely to believe that because there was a god up there life made sense, and that there was going to be a next chapter to their story after this one was over. They would not have agonized anywhere near as much over issues of meaning and purpose, and an innate feeling of “God is in his heaven, all’s right with the world,” will surely get you out of bed in the morning better than watching Bergman movies. 

The Rupture was the scientific revolution that undermined all the foundations of the Medieval belief system. It turned out that crystalline celestial spheres being pushed being along by angels was just a fantasy, it could all be explained by gravity; and if God really did live in an empyrean above the spheres, why hadn’t his realm been spotted by the newly invented telescope? The doctors of the church had it all wrong, the once-revered ancients had it all wrong, and it certainly didn’t help that at this time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thousands of godfearing Christians were slaughtering each other and burning one another alive over fine points of doctrine. Many a humble peasant or townsperson, having heard everybody accuse everyone else of being the Antichrist, would have been forgiven for saying a pox on all your houses, and quietly wondering if any of this God stuff was true at all. Scientific ingenuity and human tomfoolery made us start to question the unquestionable.  

After the Rupture comes the Dislocation, which is from the scientific revolution (1543 to 1667, says Wikipedia) until now. I’m calling it a Dislocation with the full understanding that none of us regrets that it happened. In terms of technology, medicine and public health, plus new-fangled concepts like human rights and democracy, this was a building-up, not a breaking down. But the secular worldview this science gave us is entirely materialistic, and in the package deal of materialism the afterlife idea is simply a sop to make credulous people less scared of dying, while morality is little more than a social convention designed to stop us murdering the next-door neighbours. The inescapable core of materialism is that the Big Bang doesn’t really care if we exist or not, that sooner or later we will have to face the terror and despair of dying, and that our spiritual journeys are no more than the self-soothing flourishes of our active imaginations.    

It was inevitable. Sooner or later, the beautifully organized worldview of the Middle Ages was going to get busted. Our worldviews, especially when we are short on good information, tend towards an emotional unity and a sense of harmony that turns out to be internal, not external, discovery. We make up creation tales of gods, good and bad, who usually take an interest in human affairs, and we project our inner dramas onto the world around us, it’s just a thing that we do. But in the end the factuality of the fable will be exploded, and the religion that was once so vibrant becomes a rear-guard action of outworn ways of being. I’m looking at you, Evangelism. For those of us who can’t go along with the creaky old-time religions, the faith we might be able to generate in “something bigger than us” feels like a neglected Tinkerbell, feeding off crumbs of self-generated belief in a half-starved life. C.G. Jung put it a bit more eloquently in his The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: 

Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway over the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today and why we speak of an unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols…Our unconscious hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But “the heart glows,” and a secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. 

The whole DSM, the therapist’s bible as it is interestingly known, could be reduced to that one diagnosis – a secret unrest gnawing at the root of our being. But Jung is shining his flashlight into the darkness ahead of us in a way that leads towards a Synthesis of the healing spirituality of the Intact Period with the useful science of the Dislocation. For Freud, the unconscious was just a basement where we put all the nasty, smelly, and unacceptable parts of ourselves and then slammed the door; but for Jung, if you were brave enough to go down there and burrow beyond your own personal crappiness you would find yourself in an ancient, sometimes enchanted, sometimes terrifying, world. A world of dreams, nightmares, reveries and mystical visions that people have been interacting with and scratching their heads over for a long time. The secret unrest comes when we are divorced from imagination, from this world of scary enchantment. We become, as Herbert Marcuse put it, “one dimensional,” partly to avoid the responsibility of going down into the spooky basement and partly because we don’t know any better. We may live longer and more comfortably these days, but it stinks to not be a complete person.  

The unifying principle, I believe, and the one that can lead us to the Synthesis, is the mystical experience. After a mystical experience a person does not need their inherited religious belief structures, they just have to remember what happened to them. You have had an experience of the divine that is as real as any other real you care to mention, like the real world of test tubes, traffic lights, and bureaucracies. Or maybe it could even be more real. With a lasting visceral contact with the divine we can struggle to retrieve ourselves from the materialist dark, and some day have the best of both worlds. The only trouble is that in the normal run of things, very few of us have spontaneous mystical experiences, and they are such rare and ill-noticed events that there is little chance they would ever transform a deeply secular society like ours.    

Cue the entrance of the chemically induced mystical experience. Suddenly the realm of the hermits, saints and desert fathers becomes just a hit away for all of us. Many people I work with have said that before psychedelics they were atheists, but now they are not so sure, they believe in something, even if it’s hard to put their finger on what that is. So far though, for whatever reason, maybe because we’re just a bunch of scaredy cats, Western culture has steered clear of letting psychedelics in its mainstream. They may have been used by the Greeks at Eleusis, but that was a long time ago; it’s quite likely that the witches used psychoactive plants in their rustic ceremonies, but you know what happened to them. After that, it was pretty much tumbleweed until psychedelics burst on the scene in the sixties, but even then, it was a cool, hippy rebel kind of thing to do, not a normal person thing. Only now are psychedelics creeping into respectability, via the mental health industry and the cottage industry of ayahuasca circles. As the mystical experience is on the brink of being undertaken by millions of secular people, that marriage of spirit and science may be ready at last to take off, and it should be an interesting ride.  

The Synthesis then, is the next step where spirit can resurrect itself so that science will talk nice to it again, and maybe they will even start dating. The new god of the Synthesis is the one of people’s trips; its belief system is full of ideas like: all is one, we can accept ourselves for what we are, everything is energy, love is the greatest power, and the divine loves us unconditionally. Unlike the old god, this one is not dogmatic, bossy or interfering, it is not obsessed with sin, it has no in-crowd or out-crowd, and it is not interested in hierarchy. Sometimes this new god is light or energy, sometimes a presence, and anyway, as the Tao De Ching points out, the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.  

When Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the Omega Point, I believe he had this new, divine-energy type of god in mind, rather than the old rulebook one; he saw this divine expansion in a visionary way, as sparkling lights seeping over the planet as a new atmosphere, not of air, but of consciousness. This new atmosphere, this noosphere (from nous, the Greek for mind) will be a network of linked minds, our minds, eventually forming into the emergent property of a new global mind. What he didn’t do was outline how that was going to work its way into the world of test tubes, traffic lights and bureaucracies. Maybe he was already in enough hot water with the church authorities to push his luck no further, or maybe it was too early to look for the nuts and bolts of exactly how his ideas would be operationalized. Now, as we start turning on our air conditioners in early May, it is time. There are two paths ahead of us: one of self-annihilation through the global madness of pollution, habitat destruction and climate change, and the other one that brings us over the threshold of human evolving and into the noosphere. Let’s look for who is helping us along the second road.  

A good place to begin is Kate Raworth, an English economist who became disenchanted with the conventional economic models because they see continuous growth as a requirement for our survival, rather like a shark that always needs to swim forwards. She believes that standard economics, with its focus on endless growth and ever-burgeoning GDPs, has thrown us under the ecological bus, and is throwing more of us under more buses all the time. Raworth proposes instead the idea of Doughnut Economics, where the hole in the centre of the doughnut represents the zone where an economy is not yet meeting the basic needs of the people, while the space beyond the outer edge of the doughnut represents an economy that is burning up resources and overshooting the planet’s capacity. Right now, no country in the world is living in the doughnut, while economies that are blessed with the names “developed” and “advanced” are the ones overshooting. The closest country to being in the doughnut turns out to be Costa Rica, good old Costa Rica, too bad you are so tiny.  

Without actually using the word “capitalism,” Raworth tells us that our current way of doing business is “degenerative and divisive,” and in her Youtube talk,  “How radical ideas can turn into transformative practice,” she says that the “take, make, use, lose” economy “is what takes us over planetary boundaries, and that is what runs down the living world.” To the “advanced” countries of the world she says, “You are just destroying the life support systems of the planet for yourselves and everybody else.” Fortunately, there is a solution, and it comes from “transformation within and between every nation,” and “no country can get into the doughnut alone, this is a mutually dependent project.”  

Raworth does not call for revolution, but for everyone to follow their own true interests, i.e. not frying ourselves inside a cesspool of toxic sludge. She remarks that the transformation we need cannot happen while the richest 1% of the world’s people own 50% of its resources, but she isn’t clear on how the one percent can be persuaded to give it all away – but then, I’m not if sure anybody is. Since it is not going to come from violence (we tried Communism, but all we got was this lousy Che Guevara tee-shirt) then it must come from a combination of two things: through desperation and sheer panic as we face down the ecological endgame, and through Teilhard’s “forces of love” beginning to penetrate all of humanity in significantly new ways.  

In Raworth’s thinking, the vehicle of world transformation is business. Transformed businesses, she says, will not only be out to make money, they will have the needs of the planet in their core mission, they will design products that are not only sustainable but actually regenerative, they will give employees a meaningful share in power, they will encourage competitors to take on the good practices they have discovered, they will reinvest in communities, and they make sure their mission does not get undercut by greedy financial backers. “Don’t just design your product,” Raworth says, “design your company to protect yourself from excessively powerful finance. Design yourself so you can stay true to your purpose, even as you scale.” And in case we get discouraged, Raworth reminds us that, “Economies and companies are entirely a human construct. We invented them, and we can reinvent them.”  

And so we have a broad picture, an outline at least, of what the businesses of the noosphere might look like: connected to their community and ready to put the quick buck aside if it furthers the interests of the species. This goes against the Adam Smith dictate that by following their own selfish interests, businesses necessarily serve the commons. That worked best when the businesses in question were local little stores, and it more arguably worked through the industrial revolution, but now it is simply not true anymore; in a way Raworth is describing the Buddhist idea of right livelihood, of keeping true to ourselves while making money, or you could say, designing a world where we can make the jump into the noosphere. It’s being in the doughnut or bust, it’s understanding the power of love or bust! 

Mystical experiences never were private concerns, and mystics have always been yelling out the message of love at the rest of us. Though we don’t have a Terence McKenna any more to lead the party, large scale chemically induced mystical experiences do have a chance of bringing love and vision into the mainstream of life. They might help businesses stop greenwashing and start greening, and They might help politicians start taking care of the polis and not themselves. In the Middle Ages we built extraordinary cathedrals that literally brought light and love to all who entered them. Indigenous cultures see the earth, and the way we interact with the earth, as sacred. With a new impetus of direct experiences of divine love, we can set a collective intention to enter the noosphere and save the world. In the words of Jesus, as reported to me by someone after their MDMA encounter, “At every moment the choice is always between love and not love, and the answer is to always act in the service of love.” He always had a way with words, that guy. And can psychedelics help us collectively be in the service of love? Yes they can!