The Institute for the Advancement of Psychedelic Christianity

A song from Mary Jo’s musical, Papa Panov’s Special Christmas. Click on the link to download and play.

music by Mary Jo Call, lyrics by Jack Call, vocal by Lynda Romano. Copyright 2019. All rights reserved.

In my previous post, “Alan Watts and Psychedelic Christianity,” I tried to explain why I think he fails to understand that everyone will have life everlasting. Here, I tell a bit of autobiographical background about the role Alan Watts has played in my life.

I came across one of his books on Zen Buddhism in my late teens or early twenties, not long after first experiencing mescaline and LSD. This would have been in 1968 and 1969. He immediately became one of my intellectual heroes, succeeding Aldous Huxley, who had succeeded Albert Camus, because of psychedelics. (There were so many “Als” at the time, including Allen Ginsberg and the composer Alan Hovhaness.) I read every one of his books I could get my hands on, bought an LP record of him instructing the listener in how to meditate, and asked for and received as a Christmas present from Mary Jo, my girlfriend-soon-to-become-my-wife, a subscription to the Alan Watts Journal.

That subscription turned out to be a first slight disillusion with my hero. Months went by, and no copies came. Mary Jo wrote to complain, and some weeks later received a letter of apology from someone handling subscription fulfillment. After a few more weeks, several back issues came at once, and then, at irregular intervals, further issues, until the subscription ran out.

When Mary Jo and I were planning our wedding, I naively wrote to Watts to ask if he would be willing to officiate. About six months after we were married, we received a nice letter from his secretary, informing us that Mr. Watts no longer performed wedding ceremonies.

We did see him once in person, when he gave a talk at the community college I had attended before transferring and graduating from Cal-State Los Angeles. He shuffled onto the stage very slowly, wearing moccasins and loose clothing. This was probably at most some months before he died at the age of 58. At the time we didn’t know he was that close to the end of his life, but looking back now, I can see that there were clues that he was not in the best of health. I remember that after sitting down he said, slowly and with emphasis, “Nev-er hur-ry,” and then chuckled in a drawn out, throaty fashion that sounded distinctly unhealthy. With the callousness of youth, I was impatient at all this instead of being sympathetic as I now realize I should have been. He was still my favorite philosopher, but I guess what I wanted from him that evening was to relive in person the fresh enthusiasm I had felt upon first discovering his books, particularly The Joyous Cosmology. But, of course, just as one can’t ever take one’s first psychedelic trip more than once in this life, one can’t discover Alan Watts’s writing for the first time again either.

By the time of his appearance at the college, I had come across a copy of the Boo Hoo Bible, the Neo-American Church Catechism, by Art Kleps, in a bookstore in Long Beach. I enjoyed Kleps’s humorous but also seriously unapologetic defense of psychedelics as sacraments.

Tucked between two pages in the Boo Hoo Bible was a membership application card, listing the three principles of the church:

1. Everyone has the right to expand his consciousness and stimulate visionary experience by whatever means he considers desirable and proper without interference from anyone.
2. The psychedelic substances, such as LSD, are the True Host of the Church, not drugs. They are sacramental foods, manifestations of the Grace of God, of the infinite imagination of the Self, and therefore belong to everyone.
3. We do not encourage the ingestion of psychedelics by those who are unprepared.
   
   I had filled out my name and address, signed my agreement to the principles, and sent in my $5.

So, I was disappointed during the question and answer session at the Alan Watts talk when, questioned about psychedelics, Watts had urged caution, saying, “It’s a medicine, not a diet,” and “When you get the message, hang up the phone,” rather than talking about how fantastically beautiful and life-changing the experience was. Those comments in themselves were unobjectionable, but without making it clear how powerful the medicine is and how wonderful the message, they were misleading. A better metaphor would be to say, “You searched for gold in many places without finding it. You are to be commended for persevering despite your disappointment. But now that you have found it, you don’t need to go on searching. Instead, now you need to think about what to do with it.” Bonhoeffer says something like this about the question of whether the grace of salvation that Jesus brings can also be found in other religions. He says that it is possible, but if you go searching for it somewhere else after you have already found it here, that shows you don’t really realize what it is you have found.

In the Boo Hoo Bible, Art stated an equivalence between LSD and the Holy Ghost, and then cited Matthew 12:31, where Jesus says, “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto man: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven.” In re-reading Nature, Man, and Woman recently, which led to the previous posting, “Alan Watts and Psychedelic Christianity,” I was shocked to see that Watts committed blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, by comparing psychedelic experiences unfavorably to non-psychedelic mystical experiences:

“Although these states appear to be similar to those realized through more ‘natural’ means [At least he put quotation marks around ‘natural’!], they differ in the sense that being able to swim with a life jacket differs from swimming unaided. From personal, though limited, experimentation with a research group working with lysergic acid, I would judge that the state of consciousness induced is confused with a mystical state because of similarities used in describing the two. The experience is multidimensional, as if everything were inside, or implied, everything else, requiring a description which is paradoxical from the standpoint of ordinary logic. But whereas the drug gives a vision of nature which in infinitely complex, the mystical state is clarifying, and gives a vision which is infinitely simple. The drug seems to give the intelligence a kaleidoscopic quality which ‘patterns’ the perception of relations in accordance with its own peculiar structure.”

By the time of the publication of The Joyous Cosmology four years later (1962), he had repented:

“Despite the widespread and undiscriminating prejudice against drugs as such, and despite the claims of certain religious disciplines to be the sole means to genuine mystical insight, I can find no essential difference between the experiences induced, under favorable conditions, by these chemicals and the state of ‘cosmic consciousness’ recorded by R. M. Bucke, William James, Evelyn Underhill, Raynor Johnson, and other investigators of mysticism.”

What had happened in the time between these two statements (1958-1962)? Timothy Leary had happened. [To be continued]

Naturalism is motivated by the belief that the cause of evil in the sense of unnecessary suffering is belief in an imaginary supernatural realm. Epicurus is the classic exponent of this view. Gnosticism is motivated by the belief that the cause of evil and suffering is our imprisonment in the natural world, which was created by an inferior god.

But the body and the world are not prisons, joy is as real as suffering and redeems it, nature and supernature are both real, and the cause of evil and unnecessary suffering is mistaken philosophy/theology, such as Naturalism and Gnosticism, which are two sides of the same coin: the rejection of the Creator of this world.

Recently, I have been thinking about what is implied by a blanket rejection of anything supernatural. I’m tending to think that a conception of nature as impersonal, unconscious, and value-neutral implies that we are supernatural or influenced by something supernatural, since we take things personally, are conscious, and value some things more than others. On the other hand, to conceive of nature as conscious, with a personality and values is no different from theism, which is commonly thought of as embracing supernaturalism. We can’t honestly get away from believing in something or, rather someone, who is beyond or above impersonal nature. I recalled that Alan Watts wrote a book called Nature, Man and Woman and wanted to refresh my memory of what he said about the topic. I looked through my books, found my old paperback copy with its yellowed pages, and reread it. I also downloaded the Kindle edition of The Joyous Cosmology, a book of which I had fond memories, and reread it also.

The Joyous Cosmology is a beautiful account of a psychedelic trip, although Watts admits that what reads as the description of a single trip is a composite of several different trips. As a description of the aesthetic, psychological, and social “feel” of a psychedelic trip and its course over a day that feels like an eternity, it has no equal that I know of. It also is an excellent representation of how LSD makes possible the most vivid, concrete experiences of abstract philosophical/religious concepts. For these reasons, I think it is by far the better of the two books. It is closer to God, so to speak. And yet I cannot happily and wholeheartedly endorse it the way I would have when I first read it so many years ago. And that is because I think he misses the point when he contrasts philosophical Taoism with Christianity, and that he goes wrong in his preference for monistic Hindu and nihilistic Buddhist philosophic/religious concepts over the Christian concepts of a personal relationship with God and the promise of life everlasting—not life in general, but the life of each and every individual.

The philosophic/religious view he expressed in The Joyous Cosmology is no different from the one he expounds in Nature, Man and Woman or any of his other books, and I have found it easier to make my disagreement clear by quoting from the latter. What follows are quotations of passages from that book along with my comments on them in which I try to explain why I think he never really realized in this life that God loves him and will see to it that he, his very own self, won’t ever go out of existence.

On God and Nature and the Tao and Nature

From Nature, Man and Woman, by Alan Watts

“The form of Christianity differs from the form of nature because in the Church and in its spiritual atmosphere we are in a universe that has been made. Outside the Church we are in a universe that has grown. Thus the God who made the world stands outside it as the carpenter stands outside his artifacts, but the Tao which grows the world is within it. Christian doctrine admits, in theory, that God is immanent, but in practice it is his transcendence, his otherness, which is always stressed. We are permitted to think of him as within things and within the world only on the strict condition that we maintain an infinite qualitative distance between God and the creature which he inhabits. Even on the inside he is outside, as the architect is still really outside the house which he builds, even when he goes in to decorate the interior.” P. 40 in the Vintage Books edition of 1970

[My comments are those not enclosed in quotation marks.]
Jesus says God is like a father, and we are His children. He is not like a master and we are not like His slaves. There is no infinite qualitative distance between a father and his children. Jesus says we are heirs to the kingdom.

The Tao is nature with personal attributes. Watts quotes from the Tao Te Ching:

“To its accomplishments it lays no claim.
It loves and nourishes all things,
but does not lord it over them.”

He goes on to quote a passage from Revelation, which contrasts sharply with the one from the Tao Te Ching. But before looking at that one, let’s look at something Jesus says:

“So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” Mark 10:42, also Matt. 20: 24-28, Luke 22:25-27

Now here is Revelation 19: 12-16, which Watts quotes to show what he sees as the difference between Christianity and Taoism: “His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself. And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called the Word of God. . . . And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the wine press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written: King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.”

This certainly sounds like God lording it over us, and it is undeniably an element in the Christian vision. In fact, it reads quite literally like a description of a visionary experience. The Tao Te Ching is certainly stylistically different from the Bible, but here is a passage, from chapter V, which expresses a ruthless element in the Taoist vision of nature which is not as hot and emotional as the wrath of God, but contrasts just as sharply with the claim that the Tao loves and nourishes all things as does the passage from Revelation with the above quoted passage from Mark about the son of Man:

“Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs.”
A footnote in the Penguin Classics edition explains: “In the T’ien yun chapter in the Chuang tzu it is said that straw dogs were treated with the greatest deference before they were used as an offering, only to be discarded and trampled upon as soon as they had served their purpose.”

These passages call into question Watts’s claim that in Christianity God’s otherness is always stressed, in contrast to the Tao that doesn’t lord it over the creatures. As a psychedelic Christian, I would say that nature is personal because God is immanent in nature. God transcends impersonal nature, and so do we.

On Death and Resurrection

Watts: “But once again, the association of God with being and life to the exclusion of nonbeing and death, and the attempt to triumph over death by the miracle of resurrection, is the failure to see that these pairs are not alternatives but correlatives.” Pp. 46-7

Not only God but everything excludes nonbeing. God doesn’t exclude death. He just excludes death without resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection, as witnessed by his followers, was a miracle, in the sense of an event that defied reasonable expectations, but, as C. S. Lewis has pointed out, in God in the Dock, Jesus’s miracles teach us to see the miraculous nature of things we take for granted. Jesus turned water into wine in an instant, but over a growing season water that is soaked up by the thirsty roots of grapevines is turned into grape juice which in turn becomes wine, and that is just as much a gift of God as the wine that Jesus produced from water in an instant. Jesus heals a lame person instantaneously, but healing that takes place over time is also God’s work. Jesus healed particular sick, lame, blind, deaf and mute individuals, and resurrected from the dead particular people when he was asked to do so by people who believed in him. And he did it in each case instantaneously. Why didn’t he heal everyone in the world who was suffering and resurrect everyone who had died? Because it is no less a miracle and God’s work that in the fullness of time or at the end of this age everyone will be healed, the lame will walk, the blind will see, the deaf hear, the mute speak, and everyone will have life everlasting; just as I am able to walk or to see after I wake up from a dream in which I was paralyzed or blind, and just as I am still alive when I awake from a dream in which I was facing imminent death; and just as it is no less miraculous that I am the particular person I am and you are the particular person you are, and everyone is the particular person he or she is, and we are all alive and conscious and each of us has his or her own cross to bear, in the first place.
Everyone will have life everlasting? Isn’t it only the ones who believe in him? I believe it is everyone, even those who don’t believe they will be saved. But in the meantime believing is its own reward, and not believing is its own reward but a distinctly inferior and unsatisfying one.

Watts: “To be or not to be is not the question, for pure being and pure nonbeing are alike conceptual ghosts. But as soon as the ‘inner identity’ of these correlatives is felt, as well as that which lies between man and nature, the knower and the known, death seems simply to be a return to that unknown inwardness out of which we were born. This is not to say that death, biologically speaking, is reversed birth. It is rather that the truly inward source of one’s life was never born, but has always remained inside, somewhat as the life remains in the tree, though the fruits may come and go. Outwardly, I am one apple among many. Inwardly, I am the tree.”

It is the inwardness that I know, that is, what it is like to experience the world from my own first-person perspective, that I cannot imagine going out of existence. If I am told going out of existence is just a return to an unknown inwardness, that doesn’t help. Watts says that life and death are correlatives, but one’s own life and one’s own death are correlatives only if one has life after death as well as death after life. Otherwise, they exclude each other, and there is a terrible temporal asymmetry between a finite lifespan and an unlimited time, before that and after it, of not being alive. It would be like comparing a finite length and an infinite one as if their relation were simply that the finite one is shorter than the other.

The Buddhist “No self” Doctrine and the Gospels

Watts quotes Buddhist doctrine (p. 102):

“Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one seeking it;
Path there is, but none who travel it.”

But then comments:

“And again, unexpectedly, the dissolution of the egocentric contraction (sankocha) of consciousness by no means reduces the personality to a flabby nonentity.”

But this is inconsistent with the plain meaning of the Buddhist text. He says that “Buddhist doctrine denies the reality of a separate ego.” But the Buddhist text doesn’t say anything about the ego. It says flatly that suffering exists but no one who suffers.

Watts quotes Jesus, “Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,” and comments that “we should understand this ‘save’ as ‘salvage,’ as enclosing and isolating. Conversely, we should understand that the soul or personality lives just to the degree that it does not withdraw, that it does not shrink from the full implications of being one with the body and with the whole realm of natural experience. For although this seems to suggest the absorption of man into the flux of nature, the integrity of the personality is far better preserved by the faith of self-giving than the shattering anxiety of self-preservation.”

So, Watts treats the Buddhist text as hyperbole and doesn’t seem to realize it. (Elsewhere, he takes the Buddhist view literally. See the quote from p. 116, below.) His commentary is more consistent with the Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) view that each of us is a self, a subject of experience, and that what we do and what happens to us make all the difference. When Jesus says, “Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,” I think he means that whoever thinks he can save his soul through his own efforts, whether by amassing worldly wealth and power, hiring the finest doctors, or by earning a reputation of being an upright and moral person in the eyes of the world—as a “self-giving” person rather than a “self-preserving” one, for example—is sorely deluded and is going to die anyway.

Jesus goes on to say, “but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” I take this to mean that if you realize that you cannot save your life by your own power, you are more likely to realize also that just as you don’t have this life in the first place by your own power, you will have life again after you die from this life, by the same power that gave you this life.

Let’s look at another passage from the Gospels, this time from Luke, that contains another of Jesus’ “hard sayings”:

Luke 14:26-35 (Richmond Lattimore’s translation)

“Many multitudes followed him along the way, and he turned and said to them: If someone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and even his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. He who does not take up his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you who desires to build a tower does not first sit down and reckon the cost, to see if he has enough for its completion? For fear that, after he has set down the foundation and cannot finish it, all the people watching him may begin to tease him and say: This man began to build, and he could not finish. Or what king, on his way to encounter another king in battle, will not first sit down and think out whether with his ten thousand he is strong enough to meet the man who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he is not, while the other is still far off, he sends an embassy to ask for peace. So, therefore, any of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple. Salt is good: but if the salt loses its power, with what will it be seasoned? It is fit for neither the land nor the dung hill. They throw it out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Elsewhere, he tells us that a second commandment which is like the greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as your self. In the passage just quoted, he implies that unless you violate that commandment, you cannot be his disciple. Well, do you violate that commandment? If you don’t sometimes hate your neighbor, hate those you love, and hate your own life, you should be satisfied with how things are, and you have no reason to take up your cross and follow Jesus. He isn’t saying you should hate your father, mother, wife or husband, children, and brothers and sisters. He is saying you do, not that you do all the time, but that your love for them and even for your own life is inconstant and imperfect. If you say “Oh, well, I may get angry and frustrated with them at times, and I may get depressed and dissatisfied with my life from time to time, but overall I love my family and I’m happy with my life,” he says, “Fine. Then don’t take up your cross and follow me.” What is at stake is whether you will realize that you cannot follow the greatest commandment on your own, and you will suffer and will die in your own particular way, and that is your cross to bear, but that by following Jesus you will be resurrected and have life everlasting. If you think you can follow the commandments on your own and can somehow escape having to bear your cross and following Jesus, you will fail to realize this and will experience your sufferings and death as meaningless tragedies.

Sleeping without ever waking?

Then Watts returns to taking the Buddhist text literally (p. 116). I have inserted comments [enclosed in brackets and in italics, like this] directly after the sentence to which it refers:

“Depressing or frightening as it may appear at first sight, the thought of sleep without waking—ever—is strangely fruitful, since it works
‘To tease us out of thought, as doth eternity.’
Such a contemplation of death renders the hard core of ‘I-ness’ already insubstantial, the more so as we go into it thoroughly and see that sleep without waking is not be confused with the fantasy of being shut up forever in darkness. [Nothing is more substantial than being just the person one is and no one else. I can imagine everything else as not existing. It could have been a dream, and I could have awakened to find a different reality instead. But it would be I who had the dream and I who woke up.] It is the disappearance even of darkness, reducing the imagination to impotence and thought to silence. At this point we ordinarily busy our brains with other matters, but the fascination of the certainty of death can sometimes hold us wonder-struck until the moment of a curious illumination in which we see that what dies is not consciousness but memory. [How can I be certain of what I can’t imagine? I feel certain I will die from the point of view of others, but not from my own point of view. If he is saying that consciousness will still exist but it won’t be my consciousness, then I think he is being consistent with the Buddhist view, but I don’t understand how to imagine what that would be like. How can I imagine myself away? I can imagine suffering from amnesia, and I can imagine losing consciousness and later regaining it. What I can’t imagine is being permanently unconscious.] Consciousness recurs in every newborn creature, and wherever it recurs, it is ‘I.’ And insofar as it is only this ‘I,’ it struggles again and again in hundreds of millions of beings against the dissolution which would set it free. To see this is to feel the most peculiar solidarity—almost identity—with other creatures, and to begin to understand the meaning of compassion.”

What is “the dissolution which would set it free”? Death? Being unconscious? Being abstract “consciousness”? He just said that whenever consciousness recurs, it is ‘I.’ “And insofar as it is only this ‘I,’ it struggles again and again. . . .” Is it ever not this ‘I’? I can imagine I am experiencing the world from someone else’s point of view, but I can’t really be someone else. Compassion, or loving my neighbor as myself, is the result of seeing that the next person has his or her own first-person perspective on the world just as I do. It doesn’t come from thinking that there is an ‘I’ that isn’t any particular ‘I.’ Everyone dies, so I am going to die. The question is: Am I, this ‘I,’ going to stay dead? Alan Watts says Yes. I say No.

Watts continues:

“For in seeing fully into his own empty momentariness, the Bodhisattva knows a despair beyond suicide, the absolute despair which is the etymological meaning of nirvana. It is complete disillusion from every hope of safety, or rest, or gain, suicide itself being no escape since ‘I’ wakens once more in every being that is born. [But suicide would be an escape if it is not this ‘I’ who will awaken again.] It is the recognition of final defeat for all the artfulness of the ego, which, in this disillusion, expires—finding only emptiness in its most frantic resistance to emptiness, suffering in escape from suffering, and nothing but clinging in its efforts to let go. But here he finds in his own dissolving the same emptiness from which there blazes the whole host of sun, moon, and stars.”

Yet there is no such thing as the ego, so there is no artfulness of the ego. My first-person point of view is not another object among the objects I experience from it. And thus there is no such thing as the “frantic resistance” or the “clinging” of the ego either. I might frantically resist or cling, but I am not “the ego.” Or, I might, and do, at least sometimes, realize that I have life everlasting. I can’t imagine my own non-existence, and I don’t believe anyone else can imagine his or her own non-existence either. I can imagine the sun, moon, and stars blazing away in emptiness only by neglecting the fact that they are doing so in my imagination, which is full of them and many other things besides. Existence that is not experienced is meaningless, and experience is always from a first-person point of view. This is not a defeat. It is victory over the illusion of eternal death, the fear of going to sleep and never ever waking up, of permanent unconsciousness. Our continuing to exist is just as sure as our existing in the first place.

Watts, p. 129: “For as the nonsense of the madman is a babble of words for its own fascination, the nonsense of nature and of the sage is the perception that the ultimate meaninglessness of the world contains the same hidden joy as its transience and emptiness.”

It does not give me joy to imagine that life is meaningless. For something to be meaningless, something else must be meaningful. Otherwise, we don’t know what we’re talking about. And likewise, for something to be meaningful, something else must be meaningless. So, to say that ultimately everything is meaningless is itself meaningless, but so is it to say that ultimately everything is meaningful. In fact, every thing being meaningful and everything being meaningless are equally frightening. Fortunately, there is no good reason to believe either one is true.

Watts, pp. 150-1: “Sanctity or sagehood as an exclusive vocation is, once again, symptomatic of an exclusive mode of consciousness in general and of the spiritual consciousness in particular. Its basic assumption is that God and nature are in competition and that man must choose between them. Its standpoint is radically dualistic, and thus it is strange indeed to find it in traditions which otherwise abjure dualism.”

He goes on to discuss the mistake in Hinduism of confusing the illusions of human conventions with nature and thus treating nature itself as an illusion. He is right that it is a mistake to think that God and nature are in competition. The contrast in the Gospels is not between God and nature. It is between the value of what a human can do for himself or herself, or what humans working cooperatively can do for themselves and what God has already done for him or her or them. We humans did not give ourselves life in the first place, and we are unable in the long run, which is really not very long, to keep from dying or to give ourselves new life after death. But we have life, we die, and we live again. We only need to see what a gift that is, and that it is a gift from God, not from secular humanism, nor from scientific research, nor from financial security, nor from a good reputation, nor from either political revolution or political incrementalism in the quest for social justice. If we have life, and die, and don’t live again, then all those other pursuits are worthless.

When I believed that I won’t live again after dying, I didn’t want to believe and didn’t believe that living once and dying was worthless. I thought that it will always be objectively true, no matter what anyone knows or remembers in the future, that I lived my life just as I did, in every detail, so that death can’t go back and retrospectively wipe out either the joys or sorrows that expressed the value I felt in this life. But now that I am convinced I have good reasons to believe I will live again and continue to feel both joy and sorrow overlying an ultimate pure joy, I think that if I could become permanently unconscious, the objective fact that I had once been alive and conscious with all the particular joys and sorrows of my life, would be just something else of which I would be permanently unconscious and so of no value to me. Furthermore, any value, if any, I had contributed to the lives of others would similarly be just something else for each of them of which he or she would be permanently unconscious after his or her death.

But it is that idea of losing consciousness and never regaining it which is emotionally and intellectually repugnant and produces the fear that one’s life might be meaningless. I repudiate it with all my heart and all my soul and with all my mind. It doesn’t console me that other people or Brahman or the universe itself will continue to be conscious. I want to live life from my own first-person perspective, from which there are countless others each of whom has his or her or its own first-person perspective also. And I believe it makes perfect sense to believe in this kind of personal immortality for each one of us. God has made it so that I am just the particular person I am, and you are the the particular person you are, and likewise for everyone else. We know that we didn’t do it, and it makes no sense to think of this most personal fact as given by an impersonal nature. None of us has ever been permanently unconscious, and none of us has any reason to expect to become permanently unconscious. It makes sense to think that dying is like the transition from dream to waking life or from waking life to dream.

If nature is a person or like a person, then he, she, or it can be a source of ethical guidance. If nature is impersonal, then any ethical guidance can only come from someone or something unnatural or supernatural.

If the characteristics of a person are attributed to nature, as in “Nature wants you to be happy,” then the distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism is erased, and this is no different from theism, which is fine by me. But the naturalism of those who reject supernaturalism does not attribute any person-like features to nature. Nature, conceived this way, is not something that cares whether you are happy or not. It is not merciful or ruthless, nor even indifferent, since to call someone or something “indifferent” implies that he or she or it might have cared but doesn’t. Nature in this sense is not conscious or potentially conscious, and a fortiori has no thoughts, plans, or emotions. If there seems to be any consciousness, design, or purpose in it, that is either something imposed upon it by something or someone outside it, i.e., something or someone unnatural or supernatural, or else only an illusion that can be explained as the result of chance mutations, heritability, and natural selection. But then since any explanation implies a conscious being who discovers it, communicates it, or understands it, the explanation itself must either be an illusion or else something imposed on nature by someone who is outside nature. We ourselves cannot be a part of nature, as understood by those who reject supernaturalism, unless we don’t really understand anything. And, although undoubtedly there is a lot we don’t understand, there is no reason to believe we don’t understand anything. Hence the alternatives concerning ethical guidance stated in the first paragraph.

Here are some more musings from my notebook, on Christianity and philosophy, Free will and God’s foreknowledge, Coming down from the peak psychedelic experience, and Prelife and afterlife.

Christianity and philosophy

Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your strength, and all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. You can’t love God with all your mind while believing that trying to be a good philosopher is incompatible with being a Christian.

Philosophy the handmaiden of theology

Someone I read recently—was it Galen Strawson?—said that philosophy is not the handmaiden of anything, denying the traditional metaphor of philosophy as the handmaiden of theology. Well, I think philosophy is the handmaiden of theology. Having tried to quit that job, she has gone astray in naturalism, physicalism, scientism, producing monstrosities such as Nietzsche’s esteem for the “will to power”, Parfit’s reductionist view of personal identity (Hume’s bundle theory); Dennett’s “explanation” of consciousness; Singer’s arguments for infanticide; the neo-paganism of worship of “the planet” (It might be instructive to ask oneself what makes this planet “the” planet.); and tortured attempts to deny the immorality of abortion. (Since this thought touches on political controversies, I’m afraid some readers will stop reading right here, since, for many, politics has replaced theology. But I hope not.)

Free will not compatible with God’s foreknowledge

It is possible for God to create only things that have no will of their own, so that He could have foreknowledge of everything, and it is possible for Him to create some creatures that do have a will of their own, who can either do His will or not. But it isn’t possible for Him to do the latter and for Him to have foreknowledge of what they will do. If God infallibly knows I’m going to do X, then I can’t choose to do Y instead. And it doesn’t help to say that God knows that I’m going to decide to do X, so that it is still my decision. That is because a decision is a choice between two or more equally possible alternatives, and if God already knows what is going to happen, there are no alternatives.

You may ask, “Who are you to say that there is something that is impossible for God to do?” But it is more about what it is possible for me to believe. If God can know what I will freely choose to do before I have decided, then either I don’t understand what it means to freely choose to do something or I don’t understand what it means for God to know something.

Some will respond, “That’s right. You don’t understand what it means to freely choose to do something. You think it’s possible, but it isn’t.”

But the only arguments for determinism that I know about confuse explanations in terms of a cause and effect relation with explanations in terms of a person’s reasons for doing something. If a person’s reasons for making a certain decision are irrelevant, because the fact that the person thinks of those reasons is determined by causes outside that person’s control, then the determinist’s reasons for deciding determinism is true are irrelevant. If the question of free will vs determinism, or any other topic, is something that can be reasoned about, then being convinced of one answer and being convinced by the opposite one are both compatible with the very same chain of causes leading up to the moment of becoming convinced, and the conviction can only be explained in terms of the different reasons for believing one answer or the other.

Someone else may respond: “That’s right. You don’t understand what it means for God to know something, and you shouldn’t even try. His knowledge is so far beyond our knowledge that we shouldn’t try to understand what it is like.”

But that gives me no reason to believe that it is possible for God to have foreknowledge of what I will freely choose to do, because if I don’t understand something, it is insincere to claim that I believe it.

I believe that we can and do have the ability to make free choices about at least some things, and that this is the way God wants it to be. My reason is that the thesis that we can’t make any free choices implies that we are all wrong in the way we talk, think, and act almost all the time. It would require a very compelling argument to become convinced of that, but if it is true, then becoming convinced would have nothing to do with any argument, good, bad, or indifferent.

Do we come down from a peak psychedelic experience, and if so, why?

Art Kleps wrote that the lesson of a peak psychedelic experience is always the same, that life is a dream, but that it is immediately repressed in a thousand different ways. Did he think it wasn’t repressed in his case? Or, that there are degrees of repression, so that in some cases, as in his, the truth is closer to the surface, though it is still repressed? By the way, it is no more meaningful to say that all is a dream than it is to say that all is real.

As I understand Freud’s theory of repression, repression occurs when the ego, having become conscious of something it fears as a threat to its existence, somehow manages to render itself unconscious of it, at the price of a distorted and unrealistic view of the world at the conscious level. The goal of psychotherapy is to bring this repressed material to consciousness again so that the ego is confronted once more with what it fears as a threat and can come to see that is isn’t a threat after all and can correct the distorted perception of the world at the conscious level that was caused by consigning the threat to the unconscious.

Then, if the revelation of the peak psychedelic experience is always immediately repressed in a thousand different ways, so that afterwards the tripper’s view of reality is distorted, what is the point of having it? The answer could be that even a repressed revelation is better than no revelation, and that the resulting distorted view of reality is less distorted than what came before the trip. Or, the answer could be that all that matters is the peak experience itself, and that all the non-peak times are irrelevant.

But how helpful is the Freudian conception anyway when it comes to understanding how to integrate a peak psychedelic experience into one’s life? Suggestion: Admit that one can’t really stand to remain in ecstasy, but affirm that one remembers it as the standard of excellence—which is like admitting that one is not God. This is how having had the experience helps one to be in the right relationship with God. It helps one to know God and oneself better.

“I don’t need anything but the Bible to know God.”

To those many who say, “I don’t need anything but the Bible to know God”:

The Bible itself tells you that Jesus said that He would send a Comforter. I think that the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, can take many forms. Who are you to say He cannot come to someone in the forms of a peak psychedelic experience? I’m not saying that anyone needs to take a drug in order to know God. I’m saying that it makes sense to me to think of some peak psychedelic experiences I have had as a glimpse of the Kingdom of God, where everything is fundamentally all right.

Prelife and afterlife

In response to my confession that I think it is reasonable for me to believe in an afterlife because I can’t imagine my own non-existence, Roger Cook posted a comment on a Facebook link to myiapc.com as follows: “Since you weren’t conscious before you were born, why is it so hard to imagine that kind of oblivion happens to you again upon your death?”

My answer: It’s not at all hard to imagine that the same kind of “oblivion” that preceded birth will follow death, that is, an “oblivion” that turns into a new life.

The charm of ruin is that processes of decay, “wear and tear,” aging, entropy, failing health, rust, erosion, staining, crumbling dustiness add a touch of sad nobility to the spiraling springs of evernew freshness, the stark shocking brilliance of all that God pours into the world moment by moment. The tinkling of the bells I hear on the patio right now is both old and new.

You do not need to fear getting lost forever in the spiraling springs of infinite divisibility because the infinite series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 . . . adds up to 1. Here’s the proof:

n = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 . . .

2n = 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 . . .

2n – 1 = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 . . .

2n – 1 = n

2n = n + 1

n = 1

The happenings that make you angry, hurt you, or make you sad, though they may flare up and burn intensely for an instant or drag you down dully for days on end, are being absorbed into immense joy and relief, which is all the richer for them. Here’s the proof:

Your unfolding future.

The only help I am asking for at present is that you help me spread the word. If you like what you have read here, please tell all your friends who you think might be interested. Also, I always appreciate friendly encouragement.

What turned me around on belief in life after death was a sentence I read in Who Knows? A Study in Religious Consciousness by Raymond Smullyan. He wrote that he believed in an afterlife because he couldn’t imagine himself not existing. At the time, I didn’t believe in an afterlife, and I was surprised to read that he did. He was an expert on formal logic with a great sense of humor, and at the time I thought that the idea that someone who had died could still somehow also be alive was self-contradictory. But I thought about it and asked myself if I could imagine myself not existing, and I realized I couldn’t.

You might say, “So what? Just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t prove that it’s impossible.” And I don’t dispute that, but my response is that if I can’t imagine it, I can’t believe in it either. I can easily imagine that I have died and, say, people are attending my funeral and seeing my dead body lying there in a casket, and that from their point of view, all the evidence will show that I have become permanently unconscious. But what I can’t imagine is that my point of view simply won’t be there or anywhere else. I can’t imagine being permanently unconscious.

I don’t know if I have ever been absolutely unconscious. I have been anesthetized for surgery and know what it is like to recover consciousness and to be unable to remember anything that went on from the time that I lost it. This isn’t all that different from falling asleep and then waking up later with no memory of any dreams. I’m not sure, though, that I was really absolutely unconscious. It may be that I quickly and irrecoverably—at least for now—forgot dreams that I had. At any rate, it’s clear to me that I have never been permanently unconscious, since I am conscious now.

Objection: Just because something has never happened, it doesn’t follow that it never will.

Response to the objection: That’s true, but it gives us no reason to anticipate any particular occurrence or set of occurrences.

Objection: But everyone eventually dies. Experience shows that. And dead bodies exhibit no signs of consciousness and don’t come back to life, with the possible exceptions of Jesus and the few he miraculously brought back to life and the one Peter brought back. And those exceptions wouldn’t be considered miracles if we had empirical evidence that they were likely to occur anyway. So, barring a miracle, you have ample reason to believe that when you die, you will become permanently unconscious, despite the fact that you have never yet been permanently unconscious. Right?

Response: No, that’s not right. I am not disputing that from the point of view of anyone else who may be around when I die, I will die and stay dead and my dead body will exhibit no signs of consciousness. What I am disputing is that that is how it will be from my point of view.

—Well, you won’t have a point of view.

There is no evidence for that assertion, absent the assumption that there is no meaningful distinction between my own evidence that I am conscious and someone else’s evidence that I am conscious. And there is no justification for that assumption.

—Just because something has never happened, it doesn’t follow that it never will. So, despite the fact that you have never been permanently unconscious (since you are conscious now), it doesn’t follow that you never will be.

This is on equal footing with: Just because something has never happened, it doesn’t follow that it never will. So, the fact that no one has ever come back from the dead to tell us what it is like (assuming that is true) doesn’t imply that no one ever will.

I am not denying the abstract possibility that I might become permanently unconscious, so that my point of view simply ceases to exist, even though I can’t imagine what that would be like. I’m only claiming I have no good reason to expect it, and I don’t really know what that is that I would be expecting. So it seems rather ridiculous to say, “Nevertheless, that’s what I believe will happen.”

—If your dead body here has become unconscious and follows the pattern of previous cases where consciousness never has been recovered, but you nevertheless continue to be conscious and to have a point of view, where will you be? Will you have a body? Will other people be there? Will you be somewhere else in this universe, or in some other world? How can you answer such questions? How will it be you who has died, as witnessed by those you have left behind? Isn’t such a state of affairs also something you can’t imagine?

Consider what happens when you dream. From the point of view of anyone who sees you asleep, you are unaware of the world in which they are awake. But from your point of view, you are in a place that is “here” just in the same way you are”here” when you are awake. “Here” = “where I am.” Roughly at least once in every 24 hours, we fall asleep and lose awareness of the world. But we don’t realize it. We dream and in the dream we are aware of a different world. When we wake up we often forget our dreams, but it doesn’t follow that we didn’t have those dreams; and when we remember them, we notice that there are both striking resemblances and striking differences between the events and scenes of the dreams and the events and scenes of our waking life. None of this is apparent to any third-person observer of us when we are asleep Our only evidence that we dreamed what we dreamed is our own memory of it. It is also evident from the first-person point of view that I am the one who fell asleep and dreamed and then woke up. Every experience is from a first-person point of view.

The dead have awakened from this dream. From our point of view, they are now permanently unconscious human remains. From their point of view, we are like the memories of a dream, while they are awake, walking around, doing things in what to them is “this world,” while what we call “this world” is the memory of a dream or a dream which has been forgotten.

Alternatively, the dead have fallen asleep and are dreaming. They are unaware of the world they have left behind or even that they have left it behind. Events of what we call “this world” may affect in some symbolic ways what happens in the dream world which to them is just “this world,” i.e., “the one I am in.”

All of this is quite easy to imagine and is consistent with a wealth of experience. Being sucked away into nothingness from then on forever, on the other hand— on what experience is that fear based after all?

I treat this topic more extensively, and other interesting ones as well, in Dreams and Resurrection. For a sample and info, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Dreams-Resurrection-Immortal-Psychedelics-Christianity/dp/1782796835/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558462262&sr=1-2

Here is a question someone asked on my Dreams and Resurrection Facebook page: If Jesus was truly who he claimed to be, instead of performing random miracles, why didn’t he just present medical and natural knowledge time has only given us at the expense of suffering?

My response: That is an excellent question. I wish I had a short, snappy answer that would awaken all minds hearing it like a million light bulbs turning on all at once. But I don’t. I’ll try this instead: I believe that if God could make it possible for us to experience only joy with no suffering, he would do it. Since we suffer, then He can’t do that. But I do think that He can make it so that we can experience such a joy that we don’t mind that we also suffer. I have felt it. God could have guaranteed that there would be no suffering by not creating us in the first place. But that’s like saying that suicide is the surefire cure for suffering. And it would be, if death were permanent unconsciousness. But I am not aware of any reasoning, deductive or inductive, that leads to the conclusion that one’s own death is equivalent to losing consciousness and never regaining it. We have strong inductive evidence that death is not permanent unconsciousness in that we die to the world of our dreams when we awake every morning. And I can’t imagine, from my own first-person perspective, being permanently unconscious. I am willing to pay the price of suffering for the experience of joy.

Jesus’ message was that the kingdom of God is near. He healed particular people whom he encountered because he felt love and compassion for them.

That clause “if Jesus was who he claimed to be” is unfortunate, I think. This is something I think C. S. Lewis is wrong about. He makes it sound like Jesus lords it over us. I think Jesus was telling us we are children of God just as much as he is. And he was telling us that we will have, or in some sense already have, the cure for all suffering, which is the joy that makes us not mind that we suffer. It doesn’t follow that we should glorify suffering or not bother to relieve it when we are able. That it does not follow is the lesson of the healing miracles.

If Jesus had revealed the natural and medical knowledge that we have discovered over the intervening centuries and that has allowed us to alleviate suffering, then you could ask why God didn’t do it sooner, from the very beginning. But what He has done from the very beginning is to create the conditions under which naturalistic humanism is worth pursuing. It is worth pursuing only because death is not permanent unconsciousness and because there is a joy such that one doesn’t mind suffering. Naturalistic humanism alone, without those conditions, could never deliver us from fear and anxiety about suffering, death, and meaninglessness.