The Method of Psychohistory - Sixth Delivery

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THE METHOD OF PSYCHOHISTORY

SIXTH DELIVERY EL SUEﾃ前 FLORIDO COSMOLOGICAL COMMENTARY THE ENTHEOGENIC THEOLOGY OF HUAUTLA

El Fruto Prohibido The Goddess within The God within The Flower of Illumination The Jewel of Discrimination When the gods had no names The Prehistory of Religion A History of Entheogenic Experience An inquiry into the experience of Illumination To recover our historical and Prehistorical Memory The Process of Hominization and the Sacred Entheogens Entheogenic Phenomena in the Pleistocene The dawn of religious experience The future of Religion The convergence of Religion and Science

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It is only through loving that we shall understand the world.

Without love reality will appear to be purely geometrical, mathematical or logical. Love is the mental clarity that gives nexus, light and coherence to human thought.

Note Book 2, page 85

I N T R O DU C T I O N

The following text was written in the late 1990’s. I revised it during the Summer of 2014. It is composed of separate parallel entities, universes that are interacting with each other, crossing paths, sometimes colliding, or travelling together through the realms of Dark Matter while orbiting a Star, as is the case of Psychohistory and Theology; or of Neo-Platonism meeting The Entheogenic Theology of Huautla while in transit through the Universe of Mahayana Buddhism: coalescing, seeking a final form to address the problem of existence in a turbulent planet in its voyage through Time and Space… always together, at the very center of Illumination.

The universe shall not end until every soul has achieved illumination - this is the meaning of the word compassion. And here we are adopting all of world culture as much of it as we can, the small as well as the great. The religions ideas of the Vaupées of the Colombian Amazon as well as those of the great religious and philosophical traditions of East and West.

All religious ideas are equally true and equally false if we consider that we are living inside a dream.

Beyond the dream lies the reality; only a great vision can lead us out from reason for there is truth from the moment that we will see it, that we awake, that there is born within us the desire for knowledge, and that we learn to perceive elements of truth around us.

Many ancestral Souls have perceived great sectors of The Truth. The philosopher Plato, founding father of the Western World, The Patriarch Ashvaghosha, who set dawn in writing during the first century A.D. the essential teachings of Mahayana Buddhism, wrote these astonishing words: ‘Although all things from eternity are neither mind nor matter neither infinite wisdom nor infinite knowledge, neither existing or non-existing, but are after all inexpressible, we nevertheless use words, yet should know that the Buddha’s skillful use of words to lead men aright lay in this- to get men to cease conjecturing and to return to Absolute Reality, for the best human thought of all things is only temporary and is not Truth Absolute.

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From The Awakening of Faith More recently visionaries like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein witnessed, I am sure, spellbound, in wise discernment and discrimination, behind the transitoriness of morphology, the shadow of truth, laying somewhere beyond a fantastic cloud of cosmic dust, awakening a concert of unitary entelechies across a spectra of life and elemental matter. From Galileo to Hubble, an orbiting telescope, a window has been opened on time and space. Who set all these things in motion? – negative gravity at time 0 would answer that sage, Stephen Hakins…’Nothing really exists…’ would say another. Nobody set them in motion: ‘it is all inside your head… in your imagination…’

Be that as it may, we are nonetheless confronted with the problem of our own existence which is a point of departure as good as any, difficult to ignore. In René Descartes own words:

‘Ainsi, en considerant que celui qui veut douter de tout ne peut toute fois douter qu’il ne soit pendant qu’il doute, et que ce qui raisonne ainsi, en ne pouvant douter de soi meme et doutant neanmoins de tout le reste, n’est pas ce que nous disons etre notre corps, mais ce que nous appelons notre ame ou notre panseé, J’ai pris l’etre ou l’existence de cette penseé pour le premier principe, duquel J’ai deduit trés clairement les suivants, a savoir quíl y a un Dieu qui est auteur de tout ce qui est au monde, et qui, etant la source de toute verité n’a point creé notre entendement de telle nature qu’il se puisse tromper au jugement qu’il fait des choses don’t il a une perception fort Claire et fort distincte.’

René Descartes, Introductory letter to the Principes de la Philosophie, Ouvres et Lettres, Bibliotheque de la Pleyade pp. 562-563.

And so considering that he who wishes to doubt all cannot in the same instance doubt that he is, while he is doubting. And he who reasons in such a fashion, not being able to doubt himself and doubting nonetheless everything else; not what we call our body but what we know to be our soul or our reason. I have taken that thing itself, or the existence of reason, as the first principle from which I have deduced very clearly the following: that there is a God who is the author of everything that there is in this world, and who being the source of all truth, did not create our reason in such a way that He could be wrong in the judgment of things of which He has a very clear and strong perception. (Translated by the author)

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Very remarkable words indeed; surely when every soul in the world knows the truth the World will come to an end having fulfilled its raison d'être. We can equally say that the Universe shall not come to an end until every soul has achieved Illumination. This is the meaning of the word compassion.

And this is the wish of God as I understood it in the fields beyond Huautla.

Illumination is to stand in the light of God and to know previous things unknown like Descartes did in his moment of Epiphany in that sleepless night that he mentions in the Preface to his Principes, the moment when he clearly saw the full scope of his philosophy and realized that from then on he had nothing else to do in life but to describe it, to develop it. It is God who permits this phenomenon of experience, but it is we who must do the work and the understanding… to be the active agents within the experience for as long as it is required; be it our whole life - an entire life of perseverance and devotion in the search for Ultimate Reality.

The whole purpose of the phenomena of life is to attain Divine Consciousness- consciousness of Consciousness, The Source, the source from which life sprang, to perform this cosmic circle when everything shall end at the beginning, in the implosion of all Black Holes at zero gravity. Alpha and Omega of which Teilhard de Chardin wrote, where the collective experience of humanity is left behind- the historical process is left behind and we enter the hyperpersonal era of individual fusion with the meaning of the Universe in a shared universal ecstatic experience where we shall loose our personal ego-identity and become one with what is eternal. This is the realization of world history.

And this continuum started in the remotest spheres of Prehistory, where we most return in search of the emergence of The Religious Phenomena.

A vision of Love for no matter how much I will try to disguise my subject the truth will come out in the end. Although I will employ the language of Science and Philosophy I am less a theologian or a metaphysician, I will be a conveyor and I will give you my vision, a glimpse of “Le Milieu Divine”.

Who more seeing and compromised in seeing than man himself? For I propose to take a vast quantum of Time - all of time to arrive at this idea. Out of the vastest spaces emerge the greatest visions – so the astronomer knows. The further we reach out into space the greater does our vision become, as we touch the edge of the Universe we touch indeed the very age of the Universe, the last borders of comprehension and understanding to the point where negative gravity first expanded.

A Vision of Love because the movement of Love is the movement of the Universe itself; its isotropic resonance, its maximum entropy, the convergence of convergent significants that operate the process of mass addivity and phylogenesis – God’s projects and ideas…As we rediscover His projects and explain them to ourselves in ever greater acceleration; as we move towards one end alone and that end a clearer vision of the Universe, of the All Encompassing. This is the purpose of life and it is also the purpose of death. What we put into this process, what we learn, is what we are.

Perhaps if we were to say that God is ultimate significance we could forego the use of the word “God”. We might define Le Milieu Divine as the space or environment of ultimate significance, 4

ultimate reality. And towards this space of understanding all things eventually gravitate and find their true intemporal meaning. We could then answer such questions as why did early men discover fire, or why did the early Egyptians build pyramids or why do men and women make love – or why should Hydrogen fusion lead to Helium.

For if hydrogen fusion did not lead to helium there would be no pyramids in Egypt, men and women would not make love and primitive men would never have accomplished fire. The fission and fusion of energy and matter within a solar pile, the movement of energy throughout time and space is what gives isotropic balance to the Universe. The progressive addivity and direction of this movement is a prefigured entelechy and where ever it is resolved into higher forms complex systems arise that might lead to consciousness. This is a creative process, an exercise in God knowledge in which one day we shall become conscious participants, be initiated perhaps.

We must first begin with the metaphysical world because that is where the origin of our spatial temporal universe is to be found. Quantum Physics and the Physics of relativity have suggested that nothing really exists for if matter can be converted into energy and energy can be converted into matter we then have the impermanence of all forms as the fundamental circumstance of the Universe. What remains, in essence, is a building process out of which tentative forms emerge.

Within the continuum of energy matter exchange we might conceive the Universe as a laboratory – the projection of a creative, experimenting agency.

But what is outside the Continuum? What or where are the boundaries of this continuum? It is worthwhile to point out here that when we refer to the Universe we are not describing here a closed system but an ensemble of systems leaving open the question of its internal dynamics and of its origin. Whether it be a steady state or a pulsating universe the present writer is not an astrophysicist he only claims to be a poet, nonetheless, on the given and studied evidence we incline towards the theory of a pulsating universe, though of a much greater time span than the fifteen billion years commonly accepted for reasons that we shall elucidate further on.

If we agree that the formal interrelationships of matter and energy follow certain patterns of progressive addivity we most posit that something outside the continuum is acting upon its movement, its momentum, affecting, the behavior of its energy matter exchange just as every single system of the universe is under the electromagnetic or gravitational influence of another. Also the universe as it is does not seem to be autonomous or self-regulating in the sense that it can reverse or stop at will the course of its processes, rather it seems to be describing a movement of explosion and implosion which cannot be stopped. Although within the timespan of explosion and implosion as all galactic matter rushes to collide into the Black Hole at the center of each Galaxy pulling on to itself all the matter in the galaxy, an apparently infinite number of events take place with isometric uniformity.

If the Earth is 4.5 billion years old which is somewhat less than a third of the age of the Universe, when and where did the Earth begin? What if it was not part of the interstellar cloud that gave rise to the Sun, what if it is much older than the Sun, a collapsed white dwarf that was caught in the gravitational field of a young Sun? What is the time span in stellar and planetary formation, 5

especially if planets eventually collapse into fragments and become interstellar dust like our own Moon is likely to do? And these cosmic phenomena seem to take place regularly considering all the cosmic dust clouds inside galaxies that heat up and give origin to the stars? We do not know for how long these phenomena have been in progress repeating long cycles of stellar evolution, certainly far longer than the 14.5 billion years the Universe is supposed to have existed under its present version.

On internal evidence alone we could deduce that the Universe is being acted upon just as any system would if it were under the influence of outside forces like the gravitational field of a galaxy approaching another galaxy and deflecting its trajectory. So it is probably The Universe being actuated on by an outside force that has determined its cycle of duration or is crossing paths with another parallel Universe. All seriated, evolutionary systems that constitute processes of complexification and addivity retain previous forms that were in their own evolutionary moments prototypes of things to come. We should look in our own universe for such forms that signal the end of a process or that contain an original form.

A Black Hole or a collapse is one such form; a human being is another, possibly the last life form on this planet before there is a mass extinction of life. It has been posited that a supermassive black hole exists at the center of our galaxy mercilessly pulling in all the stars, sucking all the matter of the galaxy on to itself in a ferocious vortex that not only gives gravitational shape to our galaxy but also signifies its end. So the theory goes --- eventually all galaxies will disappear into huge black holes until the universe shall consist solely of black holes exerting a tremendous gravitational pull on each other until they all converge at a fantastic accelerating rate on each other and coalesce into a single ball of absolute negative gravity that shall eventually reduce itself, collapse, into the size of an orange ready to explode again and commence the whole cosmic process one more time.

A human being is another such elemental form, a human being at The Omega Point posited by Teihard de Chardin. A human being fully conscious of cosmic phenomena operating over Time-Space like an extraterrestrial or any other fully conscious inhabitant of the Cosmos, is the closest thing to a cosmic end product as there can possibly be. There are probably many galactic and extragalactic species living at very high levels of consciousness; they all represent the end product of the Universe, its thematic originality and the meaning of its processes: the generating of consciousness of Consciousness --- Illumination. And therein is to be found the portal that leads to the other dimension; that is over and beyond our present universe; the very metaphysical Plain that is actuating on our universe; that constitutes that other system that operates on this one and that determines its morphology.

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

If we consider The Universe to be a process that does not exist permanently but takes ephemeral, transitory forms and that this transient forms follow a certain progression in stellar evolution, planetary formation, in the evolution of life, then we must realize and accept that these transient forms that on first sight appear capricious or mechanical are in fact prefigured entelechies. More simply stated we can say that cosmic events like a star or a galaxy are ways in which the EnergyMatter exchange generates other possibilities of existence such as planets and the possibility of the phenomena of life.

The Phenomena of life requires certain sets of cosmic conditions for it to appear. It is the product of the evolution of matter, of its complexification and addivity in a process called Orthogenesis, it occurs at a point in time when a collapsed red dwarf, a star of relative density, is captured by a young bright star at half-life, like our Sun, and becomes a planet – like Jupiter. In the course of its condensation a solid crust develops; Hydrogen and Oxygen molecules condense into water and seas are formed on the surface of the planet. The temperature is at first quite high and the planet is sterile. Eventually certain mega molecules coalesce, at the edge of underwater volcanoes, and heat loving organisms called thermophiles appear that give way to arqueobacteria. Later, proteins are formed and these eventually constitute the first cells, the first unicellular organisms.

But how many universes have there existed? How many Big Bangs from solar pile to rhinoceros – to man, how many experiments have there been within the over all isotropic resonance of the universe? Who makes these experiments, if experiments they be? At the limits of theoretical and experimental Science a wall has been erected to contain curiosity‌ we must tear down this wall; in a sense dissolve the limits imposed, using the criteria of reason so that creative, innovative thought

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may continue its inevitable course without inhibition or censorship; worst of all – self-censorship.

We must tread new ground, jump out into space…

These questions lead us outside the continuum of the universe of Time-Space, Energy-Matter into the realm of Metaphysics. We here take leave of Einstein and Darwin and meet for the first time spirits like Siddhartha Gautama and others who will lead us to a different universe, a parallel universe which thanks to a psychological continuum operating as a bridge between these two worlds represents the continuity of human thought, no less rational for having crossed this threshold and entering another dimension of which the entrance door and point of departure is within ourselves…

The Buddha of Compassion.

It is we who are the Metaphysical Plane, our very existence in the Universe points to it. We, from Prehistory, have elevated ourselves onto the Metaphysical Plain…Strange flowers in the Night of The Cosmos… I propose that we explore these Mysteries while still alive here in This Cosmos…The conclusions that we shall derive from the elucidation of these mysteries shall give new meaning to Science until, with this new content, the very stuff and quality of our lives will come to acquire a new light and open up new vistas, new horizons such as Captain Cook beheld in Antarctica and New Zealand, that could alter the future direction of life in this Planet.

The concatenation of cosmic events leads inexorably to life and life leads inexorably to man and to the birth of Consciousness, the point where the phenomena of the Universe unfolding becomes conscious of Itself. If we accept that the formal interrelationships between different patterns of the energy-matter transformation are in fact prefigured events from the moment that an inside observer situated at a vantage point in the universe is recognizing them as such… because of the complexification, selection and individuation of all processes contingent in the evolution of matter and life, and that if we trust in our reason we shall see that these phenomena lead to consciousness as it unfolds in the process of hominization and are in fact prefigured; then we must accept the 8

existence of a metaphysical plane that is none other than the deepening of existing spheres of reality into parallel dimensions we had as yet until that moment not been aware of as they become new knowledge. So that there is no leap into unreason required of anyone but merely an expanding of perception into a sphere hitherto unknown, a milieu or environment from which certain teleological connections emanate, take place or evolve into our own realm of time-space.

Our finality in Nature is pure knowledge and creation, Illumination, the contemplation of The Divinity, of Le Milieu Divine, immensely fortified by His Grace and the Gift of Vision – The Radiant Jewel of Discrimination which is discernment when confronted by diversity in recognizing the elemental Unity of Noumena as different forms or manifestations of The Spirit. We are Its many petals, Portals and unseen points of departure; a Nexus between the teleological and the world of creation where things happen, are made and done.

Once understood this we can transform the world beyond recognition, beyond mere history, beyond our greatest dreams.

Future World action will not be coherent and unitary until we all arrive at this junction…the glimpse of creative spirituality is here. Humanity is on the threshold of eternity, of participating collectively in Divine Experience. This is the meaning of Ecological, Political and Economic integration – it cannot be performed without its equivalent Spiritual Integration. The theological, Psychohistorical and Anthropological differences between religions, nationalities, cultures and ideologies must be grasped and simplified for public understanding so that they can disappear and the universality of human experience emerge.

People should continue to appreciate their cultural, ethnic, historical and anthropological inheritance but should not confuse this with the idea of identity or nationality because the spirit within us belongs to the universe not just to this planet. The idea of the nation State is today a confusing reduction of spiritual dimension that gives a false sense of security, a security that is broken in war and in peace is oppressed with repression and the hynopaedic manipulation of the propaganda of control of the self-perpetuating bureaucracy of the state, what Herbert Marcuse has called the democratic unfreedom of advanced industrial societies. Most human individuals aspire to universality and self-realization – not fragmentation and isolation.

As far as identity is concerned, we have no identity outside the phenomena of Love and God Knowledge. All other thoughts that distract our spirits from these realities are fragmentary, transient and illusory; Love and God-Knowledge are the Ultimate Realities.

This should be translated into coherence, into political and economic life, so that life can continue to be sustainable until the last days of humanity when it at last fulfills its purpose, which is, our conscious, collective incorporation into the process of creation: the maintenance of this planet in its last face as a place of transference where souls come and are born to gain God-Knowledge.

All this could be done in circumstances of great beauty and harmony; the world need not continue to be a place of strain and toil, or of sadness, anger and horror. There is no need for this, humanity 9

possesses the necessary knowledge to create a paradise here on Earth like Hieronymus Bosch envisioned. We must first resist the temptation of power, of control over our fellow men, and then dissolve the fear of dependence and poverty. Our human bodies are happier when in harmony with a moderate rhythm of life that is the consequence of self-control, true Knowledge and spiritual reason than when they are subjected to the tyranny of desires, of the Id, of a capricious Ego. Let us then have One Thousand years of Paradise here on this Earth.

For humanity a metaphysical view of History - indeed of Cosmic History- is now inevitable. Our contemporary concepts of time dissolve in the presence of the unifying power of the Vision of the luminous convergence of significants as we find access into The Divine Plane. Too many wonderful associations converge, at far too great a speed, for our mind to grasp the logic of internal timeconsciousness. Our brain, our biological base in this existential plane we call life, is not used to such intensity of light, it rebels and hides, sensorial and material, not programmed to work at such heights, when it is taken by assault by an All Powerful Force. We are no longer talking of the organ of perception and memory, of knowledge in the usual sense acquired in three dimensional space but of something that has taken over our hold of reality and exploded our usual channels of perception inundating us with an extraneous light, all embracing that remits us to our lost origin, clarifying and touching all, not seeing the individual but the many, the uniqueness of The One in the many, and this becomes a continuing theme everywhere we look and stays with us permanently, steals our soul from us, and we surrender gladly.

We could follow one oh Herman Minkowsky’s World lines and stand at a World Point ( as within the axis of a pyramid, The Omphalos), and there take leave of three dimensional reality and with Albert Einstein come to the conclusion that the objective world of physics is essentially a four-dimensional structure, its resolution into three-dimensional space and the arrow of one dimensional time not being the same for all observers. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four- dimensional existence instead of as hitherto the evolution of a three-dimensional plane.

In visionary moments a passage is opened between our three-dimensional world of spatial-temporal perception and the fourth-dimensional world of intemporal simultaneity. It is as if we were dead, left our body, for a few moments, outside our organic three-dimensional base and had penetrated to the within of things through a vortex in an explosion of light in a moment of epiphany. And once freed from this organic base ( in an orgasm of Love ), which is relatively speaking slow moving, we were presented with a simultaneity of multiple significants organically inaccessible while in this life.

This coincides well with the indications of the after death experience described in The Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of The Dead and with the experience I had in Huautla as I described it in my book Teonanacatl.

Each organic whole is a capsule in time equidistant to the nearest system and throughout the different levels of existence an equilibrium of forces is maintained. A zebra running in the veldt is equidistant and equivalent to its nearest companion as a metaphysical expression of life. Certain events, certain experiences, seem to point out towards an ‘outside’, a beyond our threedimensional continuum. Time is the fourth-dimension. The lines of growth in a slice of a tree trunk 10

are an expression of time. A living sixty-five year old human being is an expression of time. The Frescoes at The Vatican´s Sistine Chapel are an expression of Michel Angelo’s sense of internal time consciousness - they also mark a certain time in the cultural history of humanity and they are also a reflexion of renaissance man’s view of the Universe; and the Universe as we now know thanks to astronomical knowledge is also an expression of time. The greatest quantum of time within which we choose to consider the ontological problem of being will be the most appropriate, like the evolution of life in this planet. The greatest quantum of time there is is the Universe itself. Beyond that point the concept of time dissolves into the realm of intemporal infinity or is contained potentially in extreme negative gravity as it was before The Big Bang.

So that the Sistine Chapel’s Frescoes seen from the perspective of a product of time acquire a different dimension from that of an art book or from the Vatican building itself; they are a product of time, of the movement of time, of the flow of time; they are an Idea in the Platonic sense, the Nous of Plotinus, and as such they stand outside time.

Perhaps the frescoes are the carriers of something significant, the transformed product of the mental energy of Michel Angelo who is no longer with us – except through his art; some pigment and plaster, its cumulative effect on culture in the last five centuries. Or maybe it is part of the process of self-creation and self-destruction in which all of humanity past, present and future engages as part of a living, organic process that is continuous and co-equivalent with God that flows into another parallel dimension which is outside time. Something that is both the product of Bioenergy and Psycho-history, both a temporal and an intemporal compound in the night of the Cosmos. Well, let’s project it in time and see if we can encounter it later on in the course of this narrative.

Time is one of the conventions by which we reckon phenomena; and duration would be the time span in which a thing persists or lasts. Could we say that a thing itself is time…Time duration…a continuous event until it breaks up like a chair is broken up and thrown in to a fire and is no more undone of any formal relationship between its parts, ontologically so to speak, the original concept invented by man…Could we say that the Universe is the ultimate metaphor for time and duration, from The Big Bang to its ultimate implosion or ultimate dispersion depending on which theory we should accept The Big Bang or The Steady State?

The Earth Herself is also a metaphor for time. George Withrow has written that “The gradual slowing of the Earth’s rotation results in a lengthening of the day from less than twenty-one hours in the Cambrian Era to twenty-four hours today” (The Nature of Time, Penguin ). But what if the Earth was originally a small red dwarf star and not a spin-off of matter from the Sun as it formed as is commonly thought? It would make the Earth considerably older than it is supposed to be. It would in fact transform her into an entirely different phenomenon and give us a different perception of planetary system formation and stellar evolution.

In the last century and a half the history of man has jumped from 4004 years to nearly seven million.

But what of the History of Consciousness, of the Within of Things, the DNA molecule, the Neutrino and so forth…If we accept that the Universe is a prefigured event then Consciousness goes far back 11

beyond our largest metaphor for time, which is the Universe Itself. But what can there positively be outside the Universe – our very concept of being seems to be circumscribed to the borders of the Universe… But what if the Universe did not really exist but were merely a temporary or illusory phenomenon, apparently depending on the transformation of energy into matter and matter into energy and energy dispersing in ultimate entropy?

Be the Universe a Steady State or a Pulsating Universe its internal laws as stated in the Unified Field Theory and its expanding movement as evidenced by galactic red shift, in stellar evolution and planetary system formation, as in the orthogenesis of the evolution of life, where the individual unit becomes part of a chain transmitting its addivity until the interaction of a plural system becomes a totum like The Universe itself; where a plurality of galaxies interact with each other through gravitational force as they do with their individual galactic centers dominated by black holes. The Universe seems to be a conscious or prefigured event, of which we, humanity, are a passage from one dimension in to another through the continuity of Consciousness or through The Psychic Continuum.

Indeed, we are at the point of the transference of consciousness; at the moment of entering The Bardo Plain, from one dimension into another, because of the continuity of psychic experience as it is given at the moment of expiration. The optimum would be not to lose consciousness, or to enter into a swoon, but to remain calm in this supreme moment of transition. At this moment we should put our trust in the reality of the phenomena of Illumination and of the visions in The Bardo Plain.

What we must do is to further extend this point of convergence in the exploration of the related phenomena of Illumination and death and for this great equanimity and love are paramount.

Knowledge is love. Knowledge is the ever increasing movement of significants, convergent entelechies. But for this to happen a certain type of life is needed to be led; of self-restraint and compassion, of meditation and knowledge and then all these things will become self-evident and will need no explanation.

It is true that the evolution of life and the history of humanity are momentary events within the overall history of the Cosmos and they are meaningful and significant. I do not believe like Mahayana Buddhism seems to suggest, perhaps to induce us in other more transcendent directions, that these are illusory configurations of Maya whose sole purpose is to distract consciousness from concentration and meditation to liberate us from alternating episodes of pain and pleasure. I believe the Universe is worthy of contemplation. It is full of beauty and meaning. If we could achieve a dispassionate form of contemplation we would observe that even if the lower forms of life “do bight off great chunks of each other”, they make a wonderful setting when you watch them from afar, like in an aerial view of the Amazon at its confluence with the Rio Negro near Manaus; you do not have to see the Anacondas or the Piranhas although you know they are there. This beautiful Orb silently cruising in space is mysterious enough to last us for a lifetime of observation and wonder!

In the within of things there is a code that gives direction to the evolution of matter and energy, its progressive themes want to elevate us into consciousness. Without this movement of reason the rush of the evolution of life towards vision would be an antinomy, the negation of its own process.

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It would contradict the awareness of beauty, the perception of harmony in the formal interrelationships of the natural world – and this is one of the main attitudes of Consciousness – the creation and contemplation of beautiful things.

The world of nature is there for us to derive inspiration and joy, not to cause a shunning of the organic nature of our bodies, the negation of our sexuality, of our sensuality which is the pleasure of love. We must learn to understand the sometimes difficult involution of our mental processes through daily meditation and self-control – therein lies the immense validity of the systems of Yoga.

Depression and anxiety can be prevented and palliated through the cultivation of meditation and contemplation. I am not proposing the adoration of Nature – yet the contemplation of nature, of the harmonious symmetry between its systems is a philosophical and spiritual exercise of great import that may lead to Illumination. So is Love one of the fundamental attitudes of consciousness.

It is the act of creation that may derive into parenthood and the contemplation of life, the continuity of our own life. In the spiritual realm it is the equivalent of electro-magnetism and gravitation all in one. It is the radiant quality of knowledge, its convergent movement towards significance and the power of association – Vision Itself.

At the moment of death there occurs an acceleration of bioelectric neuronal activity provoked by the flow of the enzymes of neurotransmission into neuronal synapsis; this effect generates a great vision, a psychological synthesis of our concluding life that unites our consciousness with the content of our unconscious presenting us with a series of visions that amount to a mnemonic recovery of the meaning of our recent life that can lead to Illumination as we enter the Bardo Plain and the Psychic Continuum that will be the substance of our Bardic experience.

Our bioelectric field force with all its content of significants recorded on its Mnemonic Spirals is released from its organic corporeal base and starts a journey beyond time-space at a vertiginous acceleration such as I experienced in Huautla after the eating of The Sacred Mushrooms as I described it in the passage on The Second Day as I stood at the edge of the airfield overlooking the high Sierras of The Mixtec Knot. (Teonanacatl: online, www.peregrinoenelcamino.blogspot ). The soul then starts its journey into The Bardo Plain, the intermediate state between death and rebirth, as described in The Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of The Dead, attributed to Padma Sambhava, a compilation of the great lore of Tibetan Lamaistic Knowledge of the ninth to the thirteenth centuries of our era.

Carl Gustav Jung describes in his Autobiography, “Memories, Dreams and Reflexions”, his coma state and out of body experience during an operation in a hospital. After two weeks of lying in a state of coma he recovered consciousness. He was sixty-five years of age. Jung relates his coma state visions, how he saw the circumference of Earth silhouetted against Space as he was leaving the planet towards what he perceived to be The Temple of Aesculapius where he knew a gathering was awaiting him. At the very moment of his approach he was recalled by his doctor and brought back to life. These were Bardic images of Jung’s psychic continuum; The Bardo Thodol warns us about their subjective nature while facing us towards The Clear light of Ultimate Reality. Jung, who considered The Bardo Thodol the most important book he had read in his life said he kept a copy of 13

it by his bed side; wrote a thirty page commentary for the edition of The Tibetan Book of The Dead edited by W.W. Evans-Wentz, published by The Oxford University Press in 1927. I own a copy of this book, the 1960 edition, autographed by the late Lama Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen, whom I met in Mexico City in the late 1990’s, he had been a teacher to His Holiness, The Dalai Lama ( there exists a Spanish language translation of this book by Editorial Kier of Buenos Aires. )

Facsimile copy of the book mentioned above.

At the moment of death there occurs a powerful bio-chemical transference of brain energy described in a form of Tantric Yoga known as Pho-Wa, The Path of Transference, The Yoga of Consciousness Transference (Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines), this is the fuel that catapults the field force in its journey into the Bardo ( I suggest that this moment could be studied through special photography and spectrography that could be developed from present day knowledge). As the animic field force departs the third dimension fantastic visions within a vortex of greatly accelerating light are observed. These visions seem to relate to the history of The Universe as contained in each of the field force’s mnemonic spirals, these may include visions of The Cosmos and of other extraterrestrial civilizations together with their cultural iconography and architecture.

The Author when he experimented with d-lysergic acid diethylamide in London in 1970 had visions of innumerable inscriptions in fantastic alphabets that did not correspond to any known on earth, he also saw wonderful buildings of exceedingly beautiful architecture unknown to the history of art of this world.

Are these archetypes or are they memories stored in a different Mnemonic Bank from that which our brain possesses here on Earth, and to which we have access when we are outside our present 14

space-time continuum? Stanley Kubrick in his visionary film, 2001, A Space Odyssey, based on the novel of the same name by Arthur C. Clark, supplied us with an accurate, vivid and imaginative reconstruction of the moment of death visions in the last sequences of the film when the astronaut has reached The Planet Jupiter approaching it through a vortex of light that inexplicably lands him into what to all purposes is a subjective Bardic vision of a comfortable hotel room, as the astronaut might have imagined an out-of-life situation that eventually led him to rebirth. And so where the great geometric figures that the astronaut saw floating in space, physical manifestation of primordial archetypes.

It is reasonable to suppose that these visions vary in form but not in content in so far as they represent a composite image of the evolution of The Cosmos. But what are the physics that govern the field-force? Is The Soul, in its journey into the fourth-dimensional time-space world of The Bardo Plain, a succession of cosmic events in simultaneity? Does the Soul contain a trace, a fragment of materiality, a mass of neutrinos travelling in a helix of light? Or does it imply an entirely different phenomena that has parted with all aspects of the physical Universe?

Carl Jung in his coma induced dreams describes his Soul as going somewhere outside the planet as if he had been searching for his own archetype in a bardic temple of Aesculapius…The Bardo Thodol is more specific, it describes certain aspects of the after death experience that might be termed the organicity or materiality of the Spirit in a remarkably scientific way…There is no interface or boundary between the plain of life and the Bardo plain, they are the same, there is a continuity of THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTINUUM into the Bardo Plain, we are The Clear Light of Pure Reality, we have always been…When we awake…. ”Thine own intellect, which is now voidness of nothingness, but as being The Intellect Itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling and blissful, is the very consciousness, the All-good Buddha.

Thine own consciousness, not formed into anything, in reality void, and the intellect, shining and blissful, these two, are inseparable. The union of them is the Dharma-Kaya state of Perfect Enlightment.

Thine own consciousness, shining void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable Light – Buddha Amitabha.

Knowing this is sufficient. Recognizing the voidness of thine own intellect to be Buddhahood, and looking upon it as being thine own consciousness, is to keep thyself in the state of the divine mind of the Buddha.”

From THE BARDO THODOL, Chikai Bardo I

A psychological stream of consciousness that is continuous before, throughout and after the experience of death. The Soul is capable of experiencing, or is it remembering…sensations as when the spirit, taken unaware by death in an accident, is first struck by the idea that it is already dead; 15

that it has in fact passed into the world of Bardo experience, because it is actually able to walk right through walls and people do not seem to be able to see him or to hear him.

Or a spirit who has never meditated and lived its life in near total ignorance suddenly finds itself in the Bardo plain and is taken by surprise and overwhelmed by fear might: “fancy himself being swallowed by monsters, or dwelling in small, cold, dark crevices in the side of precipices”, ( Chikai Bardo, or Bardo of Karmic Illusions )… What is a disembodied memory composed of, beyond neurons and tiny electric impulses… Some Buddhist visionaries talk of luminous, silver like, pulsating coils or spirals composed of brilliant particles… But if we wish to understand rationally the nature of the metaphysical world we must begin to explore the possibility that it is the metaphysical world that is real and that our world, or universe ( is ), the illusory one - The exact opposite conception to what we have been accustomed by culture… and therein lies the difficulty of understanding the immateriality of the metaphysical world – that is, how it would look if we could see inside matter and witness at close quarters events like nuclear fission and fusion, collisions as in a particle accelerator, things dissolving and recreating themselves out of apparent nothingness – out of energy field forces or solar piles, coalescing interstellar dust…

The material universe would then seem to us a succession of spasmodic, sporadic configurations of light. We in order to exist must live at a slower rate of succession, that is why our perception of natural and cosmic phenomenology will always be limited by the amount of time-duration we will be able to perceive notwithstanding our largest telescopes and radio antennas. Human perception takes place within certain specific spatial-temporal parameters that have to do with organic existence, our own life spans; extended if you like, as it was observed by a succession of Maya astronomers who calculated stellar parallax from generation to generation and passed on their findings (Whitrow, op. cit.)… thus we cannot see under normal conditions the relative a temporal quality and simultaneity of the natural world – that is; its non-existence, the Noumena of what is.

We can contemplate its existence and infer its non-existence from the transient nature of its forms, but we cannot “see” while we are alive, its intemporaneity and its immateriality – its metaphysical existence…We would have to cross the shadow line and enter the realm of Illumination… to perceive it.

After death, in the Bardo plain, the rate of phenomenological succession accelerates incommensurably we thus begin an exclusively mental existence and participate of a corpus of memories that far outdistances and increases the body of memories of our one past and immediate life; so that we begin ‘living’ and ‘experiencing’ phenomena that are closer to the Great Body of Radiance of Divine or Ultimate Reality – the metaphysical dimension which forms part of a wider memory bank whose experiences are derived from having created several Universes containing a near infinity of individual memories.

We could be present at the birth of a star or at the death of a galaxy…or within the pulsating efforts of a simple bacteria; we would be then sharing from a common source of mnemonic experience, from many life-time experiences, images very close to God’s ideas, pure entelechies…following in fact, and participating in God’s acts of creation as integral parts of the Fountainhead (The Simurg of 16

Farid ud-Din Attar in “The Conference of the Birds”). What we mean by this is that from a spiritual point of view, from a metaphysical point of view, through the power of our consciousness, and through the phenomena of Illumination, we have formed part of Ultimate Reality from the very beginning of Time.

We contain within ourselves a record of the evolution of the Cosmos in our physicochemical composition and a record of the evolution of life in our DNA molecules. In the journey projected by every embryo in the womb, the story of the evolution of life is played out. In its early stages a zygote resembles a fish, then a reptile, until it finally develops a human form after going through a series of coded messages from our DNA; entelechies derived from the orthogenesis of life that can project to our Soul, like on a picture screen, images and visions of the Universe as it unfolds; the origin of life and consciousness evolved from Pleistocene times while eating Entheogenic Plants. As these visions take hold of our consciousness we are immensely overwhelmed by them, by the power of the sudden vision and the revelation. Every desirous and sentient soul no matter the level of its spiritual development has access to it if it so pleases God. It is sufficient that the individual spirit is brought to this point by the quality of its actions to reach the crucial threshold and arouse the curiosity of God. The spirit could be an animal like a dog or a cat or a horse – the dog that Goya painted at La Quintaa del Sordo…or a very simple person whom the world might regard as silly or marginal. This is of no consequence to God; The Divinity is not interested in religion per se but in the quality of individual souls.

Goya’s dog from “La Quinta del Sordo”.

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It is of paramount importance that we leave behind all the susceptibilities of the ego; that we transcend our ideas of personal identity – those given by the culture of the sector of the planet into which we were born; we should enjoy it socially while we can, in this world, but we should learn to detach ourselves from it because we shall eventually leave it behind for it shall not be of any use to us in the spiritual plain beyond an exercise in self-knowledge and reflexion. No access to Illumination is possible while we are immersed in the travails of the ego. The individual soul must feel a certain compassion for itself and for its future before it can start on the road to spiritual development.

When we come to it, compassion for oneself is compassion for all, and once we have reached this figure we are on the road, a pilgrim on his way. We first take hold of our own selves and become responsible for our own spiritual development: from there on we are in God’s hands. And it is through His-Her Compassion that we shall learn to know, to see, to love. The knowledge of this process has been within us from all time; no one can teach us this for the experience of The Divine has been our Entheogenic heritage, our reality, our cosmic origin, our destination, our End. We arrive at the Unknown from the shadow that It projects on the known. This is how we derive knowledge of The Over All Reality seeking those portals that are crucial in our transit across The Shadow Line; where one dimension opens into another leading in to the One; and in this we coincide with Plotinus: “The shadow of the One produces the essence, so that being is no other than the shadow of the One, if it can be said that the word, ‘being’, derives from the word one… and language driven by this vision, and this spectacle, also conserves its image, pronouncing the words: ‘being, essence and home’…”

Plotinus, Fifth Ennead, fifth tractate, pp. 125-126. Jose Antonio Miguez, Aguilar, Buenos Aires, 1973.

Quotation translated from the Spanish by the author.

It is in the within of things, in the orthogenesis of the evolution of life that we find a revealing synthesis in the evolution of the notochord, of the vertebrate phylum leading into the human brain - this event of itself is a great synthesis of addivity operated over a vast quantum of time in the Hominization of man, its encounter with Entheogenic plants is nothing less than a pure entelechy and the consequence was momentous.

It is very difficult to determine the progress of human intelligence. The parameters involved stretch over millions of years, especially if we want to consider Primatology and the evolution of Anthropoids. Where do we find the beginning? We might find it useful to employ certain concepts evolved by Theihard de Chardin like Noogenesis to mean the gradual evolution of the human mind and of mental properties, and Noosphere to denote the layer or sphere created by the presence of men in the general Biosphere of the planet that acts as the promoting agency of Hominization, which we might associate to Plotinus’ concept of Nous.

The problem of beginnings is very difficult, especially in Biology, since it implies a continuum where changes are selective and are at first isolated and occur over a very long period of time. So with man who is strictly speaking still becoming as the term ‘hominization’ implies. The problem of intelligence 18

is incomprehensible if we attribute intelligence solely to man. The Phenomena of Life denotes intelligence because it solves specific problems of survival and adaptation as are presented and were presented to the milliards of species that have inhabited the planet. Man is very much a part of the phenomena of life. There exists the possibility that the phenomena of intelligent life might outlive Mankind. There is an aquatic variant of the Genus Anthropoidea living in the sea today, The Sirens and their bloop; although their existence continues to be disputed by arrogant anthropocentric mankind complacent in the feeling that they are unique; who feel threatened by the possibility of advanced nonhuman intelligence; like the very probable existence of our other near cousins, The Bigfoot, or of extraterrestrial intelligent life…No species is guaranteed indefinite survival, extinction is in the cards, most likely by tiny viruses like Ebola and AIDS. We could still develop inherent failures of adaptation – these are probable verticils of Evolution.

But the Soul is another matter, to the Australian Aborigines, the Dream-Time of the Unconscious; to the ancient Mesoamericans, the Nahual or Tonali, our double in the spirit world that we share with the primordial forms, the archetypes of the animal world and plants. For the Bon people of ancient Tibet it was La, the very principle of consciousness, the organizing principle of life, our hold on ourselves, also an intimate perception of reality, our sense of identity, our spiritual and mental sanity – our La.

ESCHATOLOGY AND COSMOLOGY: HOW DOES KARMA CONDITION REBIRTH

The transitoriness of phenomena does not exempt us from the effort to understand reality, even if we are faced with metaphysical reality. We must consider the theoretic probability that the Universe is the thought of an Entity, Nous: it has very much the sequential and thematic structure of thought.

It is in the within of things that the Divinity or Soul manifests Its intelligence, that He has left His print and given us a clue to decoding His logique, His Logos. Soul is a formal format for being; it is a blueprint, a negative of an act that becomes experiential in the real world, like a rhinoceros is real in the living world. So are plate tectonics and volcanism, stellar evolution and the evolution of life, entelechies of Soul. In the appearance of life and in the phenomena of consciousness we can perceive a well ordered and significant progression that reflects a Being who is meditating upon Form, Who distributes His Essence in each individual soul, Who enjoys diversity. This is the Divine Language and we are Her subjects.

These models dissolve too – planets decay, eventually become cosmic debris and turn into dust. The dust is heated by radiation, impelled by gravitational and electromagnetic forces to coalesce into stellar fireballs which then implode and new stars are born. This is the factory process were the media is created for the experiment of life to grow.

I should like to present a proposition that has far reaching implications: The Sacred Mushrooms of Huautla can produce cosmological visions. What mnemonic centers does the alkaloid Psilocybin 19

awake, connect, through dynamic neuronal synapsis, to produce visions of the spectrographic acceleration of light together with stellar configurations? Does Psilocybin produce an acceleration of neuronal synapsis similar to that which takes place at the moment of death? How is it that every human being is presented with a fragment of the history of the Universe at the moment of death?

What is it that we are intended to remember?

That we are part of the overall process itself? That we are part of God? The Bardo Thodol states very clearly that the crucial moment in the psychological imagery of the after death state comes not long after expiration when we are confronted with a powerful vision of light, The Clear Light of Enlightment, The State of Buddhahood, wherein, if we wish, we can remain indefinitely, relinquishing any further desire for individual experience. At that moment, according to Buddhist thought, while experiencing the first visions of Illumination in The Chikai Bardo, we shall see The Clear Light of Pure Reality and, it is said, we can elect to remain in such a state if our Karma is right (see quotation from The Chikai Bardo in previous page).

At the beginning of The Fourth Tractate to The Fourth Ennead Plotinus makes a wonderful revelation: he is relating how he sometimes dreams that he is ‘trapped inside his body, that he wanders off in his dream and sees his prostrated body lying on his bed ; then he goes on to say that: ‘The divine Plato´ said and wrote many beautiful things about the soul, ‘that it is trapped inside a body as if it were inside a cave or a tomb’…and then he recalls that in the Mysteries ( The Eleusinian Mysteries ), a great word is spoken at a key moment, to say that: ‘the soul is trapped inside a body as if it were in a jail’.

Only an initiate in The Sacred Mysteries of The Rites of Eleusis could have known what was spoken therein and they were sworn to secrecy…Of Plotinus we know that he was an Initiate as Porphyry wrote in his biography of his teacher; but of Plato whom Plotinus mentions in this key paragraph of The Enneid, we were not so sure; notwithstanding Plato’s devotion to the Goddess Demeter, tutelary deity of the Mysteries at Eleusis, to whom Plato was devoted as he mentions in the introductory preamble to his Critias.

Busts of Plato, Goddess Demeter and Plotinus.

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We should remember that The Sacred Kukeon imbibed at Eleusis contained Claviceps Purpurea, a powerful ambrosia similar to the Mazatec Psilocybe Mexicana, which is taken in Huautla, so that in antiquity Plotinus took it for granted that ‘The divine Plato’ as he calls him, was an initiate of the Mysteries too.

What is relevant to our commentary is that this passage Plotinus deal with the ‘incarnation of the soul’. It is Karma, the metaphysical consequence of our action while incarnate in this world that will determine the quality and subsequent content of our psychic continuum in our particular experience in The Bardo Plain. While in the Bardo we will surely reflect on the meaning of our past life as we seek to understand it. We will probably remember instances of other lives to supplement our bardic reflexions and as we clarify our immediate past life, what we have learnt will determine the nature of our next re-incarnation.

Or it could be that Soul having discovered that it has formed part of The Fountain Head from all time attains Consciousness of Itself and of its union and participation in The Logos. The soul becomes coparticipant in the Universal Act of Creation, free of carnal attachments and cares…the soul is free at last to contemplate and help in the acts of creation and thus finally emerges into ‘Le Milieu Divine’.

Plotinus: ‘Do not say that God has created Soul in an inferior place, because the soul does not lack what its nature demands and possesses from all time and forever a power that cannot be contrary to its nature, This power belongs to it continuously and has never had a beginning.’

‘Another example would be that of the totality of a fire, from which a large flame emerges followed by smaller fires. Naturally the essence of fire is constituted by the totality of fire, or better yet, that reality from whence fire originates.’

This is similar to the Buddhist metaphor of the All Embracing Fire that lights the individual candles of incarnate souls to Illuminate their transit across the night of The Cosmos, The Shadow Line, the passage of one world into another.

Again, Plotinus: ‘As for individual souls they make use of their intellectual inclination to return to their place of origin, notwithstanding a certain power they might possess over inferior beings. It happens here as with the luminous ray, that on its emerging side is suspended to the Sun, but that not for that refuses to give its light to inferior beings.’

This reminds us of Akhenaten and his God Aton who lovingly spread its rays, laid its hands as the artist saw it in the representations of Aton at Amarna, on all living creatures without distinction.

Yet Plotinus warns us that the individual soul in its desire to experiment in the world of the senses might wander far and become ‘attached…’ and it is from this that it is said that the soul: ‘loses its wings and becomes attached to the strings of the body and is deviated from its original purpose 21

inspited by that Universal Soul that enlightens contemplative beings; because a soul once fallen, remains attached to the strings of the body and acts only inspired by the senses and is thus rendered incapable, at least in the beginning, to be guided by intelligence…’

Why should this be impossible, that the very finite human brain harbor visions of Eternity?

Astrophysicists have recently asserted that the Universe originated in a microscopic ball of pure compressed matter in a state of negative gravity which exploded and that at 10 - 35 seconds after the Big Bang the inflationary epoch of The Universe began, the ongoing explosion that continues to this day. At 10 - 32 seconds the Universe had already reached the size of an orange surging forward in a state of negative gravity. The extreme relativity of Time-Space, a microscopic universe in ultimate compression at the point of its origin, is the history of the Universe compressed inside the brain ready to unroll as in a movie screen , in front of its eyes, to manifest itself as a great Vision of The Divinity at the moment of death; to provide an echo, a sign post. Is this not metaphysical? Is not God poetical?

All this accords well with Einstein’s ideas, Buddha’s ideas, Plato’s theory of Forms that the Universe does not exist. The Universe is an Idea – an Idea of God, and what goes on inside the Universe are God’s thoughts, God’s projections; His inventions and creations, His experiments. Let loose after The Big Bang, The Universe will eventually generate consciousness, of Itself, of Consciousness.

It is a belief of Buddhism that consciousness is all and that the highest form of consciousness or supra-consciousness is The Clear Light of Ultimate Reality or Budhhahood, what the Western World understands as God but without its anthropomorphic content and its historical and cultural context.

Entheogenic reality, the idea or concept of the God-within, of Illumination as experienced through The Sacred Entheogens and through Yogic and spiritual discipline is equivalent with Buddhahood, with the Clear light of Ultimate Enlightment and is the same Illumination as that described by Plotinus, Eckhart, St. John of The Cross, The Khabbala, Sufism, Kabir and Ramakrishna among others.

It is also believed that our limited human consciousness is derived from the Supra-Consciousness, that we are in a sense a part of The Divinity and that we ought to raise ourselves towards The Divinity. This can also be said of the Universe as a whole, of its creative movement, of the direction of its convergent themes: galactic, stellar, planetary, biological. There is an isometric correspondence everywhere in the Universe, a purposeful movement that aims towards Le Milieu Divine.

We retrace God’s steps in the road to Illumination but we must first recover the sense and meaning of all our actions through daily meditation, understand the succession of events that have gone to make our lives that which will enable us to find our place in the world from a spiritual point of view.

We can then open our consciousness to receive the message of Love and the Vision of Unity that is immanent in the world around us. The door through which we can accomplish this is inside of us; in ever greater concentration and lucid action, in impeccability of action, to walk those roads indicated

by Love, harmonious with the world.

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Because at the moment of death we shall be entering a new dimension of experience and for a space of time our consciousness will be pulsating at the God-frequency. Life and death are a single continuum, a continuous process of learning; there is a spiritual and a psychological continuity from our experience of life to our experience of death and on to our after-death experience, an unbroken consciousness along the path of the Psychic Continuum and the possibility of reflexion and learning throughout. It was intended that we live in lucidity; to live well is to die well, it is all part of the same metaphysical process that we share with terrestrial and extraterrestrial forms of life. The movement of life is towards knowledge, self-knowledge and the exchange of knowledge – this leads to consciousness and consciousness leads to an awareness of equivalence and unity. This is the purpose of History – to bring mankind into the sphere of The Spirit.

The Spirit has metacosmic memory. It remembers previous cosmic experiences when it experiments with the life forms; arboreal, bipedal, carnivore, toolmaker, planter, house maker – Australopithecine, Homo Habilis, Sapiens… a movement towards consciousness and the consciousness of Consciousness – a succession of crucial metaphysical events taken as a configuration within a broad quantum of time.

We must accept the supra-temporality of the Soul which means that our consciousness has always existed, that we have always been with the Divinity from the beginning, that we form part of the Spirit. We awake into the Life of The Divine while we are experiencing the phenomena of Illumination, we recover our Divine Memory, we see and remember metacosmic experience.

It is true that from a psychological and neurophysiological point of view consciousness is defined as the complete and comprehensive activity of the brain, the interaction of all the various centers of the cerebral cortex through neuronal synapsis; this has been proved to occur even when the cerebral cortex has been cut in half as was the case of a woman who suffered an extreme form of epilepsy. Nonetheless what we are affirming here is the continuity of consciousness after expiration as is postulated by the universal theory of the transformation and conservation of energy.

An illuminated humanity would be conscious of its History, would suddenly remember all of History and its recurrent cycles, its intricate Psychohistorical interconnections, as was posited by Terence Mckenna in his Novelty Theory. In a flash of insight such a person would recover the art of building a series of superimposed pyramidal Mastabas with pre-fabricated concrete blocks of equal dimension as Imhotep did or the art of building prefabricated Space Stations as NASA does. This is what Terence saw, that a five thousand year cycle was at an end and that we must be able to recognize this fact to move on, to open a fresh chapter in History…A historical era has ended , we have to invent something new to avoid repeating the same historical mistakes. New communities instead of states; self government and self management instead of ‘electoral’ politics and ‘democratic oligarchies’, no corporate or state religions, no extractive industry only light technology, no consumerism, a light diet should be encouraged throughout.

The Bardo Thodol not only speaks to the individual dying man but to Humanity as a whole. Just as each one of us most learn to live, each one of us could profit from the art of dying. So has Humanity as an entity the possibility of learning about itself through its experience through The United Nations 23

which acts as a sort of mirror and a repository of Faith. Humanity is a physical as well as a spiritual entity and can learn collectively about Psychohistory through the plenary sessions of the United Nations General Assembly if it so wishes to reflect about what is going on in The World: for instance, about ISIS and its desire to restore The Caliphate or about the concentration camp nature of IsraelPalestine and the frontier between Mexico and The United States.

How long can Humanity survive will depend on how lucid it can become, in the recovery of its past and in the interpretation of its present. What is The Phenomena of Mankind in a metaphysical sense? It is a place in the Cosmos specialized in the expansion of consciousness where souls come and are incarnated, initiated…with the purpose of advancing their spiritual development – except that humanity is not fully aware of this fact, not cognizant, not lucid.

If this is so, then we must become cognizant of the fact that we are a generating center of Consciousness in The Cosmos in order of doing it with greater success.

The neurophysiology of Illumination in a mechanical sense implies the sudden activation of all areas of the cerebral cortex, even those that are not experiential, that do not answer to the addivity of our learning processes but represent our common inheritance as human beings – genetic knowledge stored in our collective font, our collective unconscious. These represent the collective spiritual experience of the phenomena of life, very much as it is reviewed in the life of a zygote and an embryo going through all the different phases of the evolution of life as a necessary preamble for the renovation of life. This is an entelechy, a divine idea preserved for all time in our genetic code so that all beings should have access to Memory. Complete and comprehensive Memory is Illumination. It is also a preamble for rebirth.

While in The Bardo Plain the individual soul travelling along the Psychic Continuum encounters different states: first is The Bardo of The Moment of Death, The Chikhai Bardo, The Primary Clear Light seen at the moment of death followed by the second stage of The Chikhai Bardo or The Secondary Clear Light seen immediately after death. The Third stage of The Bardo is called the Chonyid Bardo when The Karmic Apparitions and Visions begin that may be very extended and may include visions of vast congregations of souls seeking Knowledge in the Presence of Luminous Beings, leading to what is known as The Sidpa Bardo, this is also known as ‘The Good Head Part’ or ‘The Profound Essence of Liberation By Hearing’. The last station along The Bardo Plain is ‘The Clear Setting Face-To-Face’ or ‘The Intermediate State When Seeking Rebirth’.

These then are the fundamental stages that the great majority of souls traverse along the Path to Rebirth. Along the way each individual soul is presented with several opportunities at Illumination when the Clear light is manifested to them. Not all souls, according to The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, or The Bardo Thodol as is generally called, experience the same reaction to The Clear Light of Reality, which is the infallible Mind of the Dharma-Kaya which is the setting face to face with the balance of our particular karmic journey. The souls who longingly approach this Light and wish to remain therein may do so if their karmic embodiment has been cleared by Dharma in all past lives, 24

when all the relevant weight and content of their past actions has been clarified; if this is not the case further experiences of rebirth might be called for and the individual soul then commences its descent towards the time and place of its rebirth along the path of The Sidpa Bardo.

During the experience of Illumination a soul contemplates the transit of life throughout the vicissitudes of evolution, is filled with compassion because it sees itself reflected in the long travail of life towards it present stage of incompleteness. So is his own life a subject for contemplation and meditation on those events that have given shape and meaning to our existence as well as those that have darken it with grief and confusion; that need clarifying and understanding so that we might proceed along the path. During our time along the Bardo Plain all this will be greatly magnified and thrown into relief so that we might have an opportunity to alleviate the pain. But what greater opportunity if we can procure this relief while in this life and thus be one step nearer to The Clear Light while in The Bardo!

When the Fifth Patriarch of the Zen Order, Hung- Jen, designated his successor, Hui-neng, a lay disciple, his disciples were shocked and said: ‘But master, this man knows nothing about Buddhism’, ‘Indeed’, answered Hung-jen, ‘Hui-neng knows nothing about Buddhism, but he knows The Way’…

(The Path).

This is a true definition of Illumination. Illumination is entirely independent of established religious canon. The phenomenon of Illumination is accessible to all by the grace of God when the individual soul is ready, has clarified its karma and is full of compassion. The Divinity is not interested in religion per se. God is interested in the content of each heart as symbolized in The Judgment of Osiris by the balance of the weight of a heart against the weight of a feather. Established religions might be useful as points reference, points of departure in spiritual growth in our journey towards The Divine, but one day we shall have to leave them behind when we have assimilated their central spiritual message. It is at this point that we become responsible for our own spiritual development.

Beyond that point a passive continuance in the observance of external religious forms becomes an obstacle to spiritual development. The grace and intervention of a religious teacher alone will not serve us if we are not willing to perform our own spiritual work in the search for self-knowledge and the neutralization of karma; this task only we can perform through our actions as no one can do this work for us; for this, Entheogenic experience with the Sacred Plants is paramount. This author believes in an autonomous path in The Road to Liberation: too close an involvement with monastic life or with cultist circles can distract the individual with the psychodrama of group dynamics. It is quite helpful to study Yoga with a qualified teacher but to attach oneself to a spiritual preceptor can generate habits of dependence and comfort that inhibit the pain of confronting one’s own personal karma through right action and the practice of self-analysis in meditation.

Of course we must be inquisitive and inquiring and study the many religious traditions for we shall find there much inspiration and truth; specially in mystical poetry. But we should not circumscribe ourselves in time and space to the specific culture of a given sector of The Planet, because if the individual is not strong enough religions can act as reductive inhibitors of human thought and of spiritual growth. The Planet Earth with all its noble cultures is but a figment of The Universe and 25

sooner or later we shall leave this world behind. It is through the experience of Illumination that we approach The Divine Sphere where the universality of all finds eternal meaning in unity and equivalence.

The concept of ‘the son of the god’ was completely foreign to the Hebrew religious tradition as of the eighth century B.C. when the goddess Acera, consort of the god Yawhe, was banished from state cult by the patriarchs of Palestine. The original idea was probably ‘the son of the goddess’ and it is possible that it originated in the Pleistocene in places like Gobekli Tepe and Catal Huyuk in chthonic and Entheogenic rite, ‘The son of the god’ was an hypostatic figure designed to symbolize The Sacred Mushroom, claviceps purpurea, as it was later to be in Sumerian religion, and in The Homeric Hym to The Goddess Demeter where her daughter Kore-Persephone is abducted by the god Hades into the underworld while picking mushrooms in the forest; she conceives a son with Hades while in the underworld, the son is Dionysus. At other times her son is the youth, Iaccus, symbol of the young Mistoi at Eleusis (John Alegro, The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross; R. Gordon Wasson, The Road to Eleusis).

Some ten thousand years ago the figure of The Great Earth Goddess was well developed at Catal Huyuk where a terracotta likeness of the Goddess was found at level II by James Mellart 30 miles south east of the Turkish city of Konya in 1958. The cult of The Goddess was by that time well established and had become richer in content and iconography; The Goddess must have had an hypostatic son consubstantial with her in Entheogenic rite. The Son was the Sacred Plant or substance that induced the Divine Entheogenic Visions. This was the central part of her cult at Eridu, in Sumer and finally at Eleusis itself.

No religion that came into being from Pleistocene or Mesolithic times onward is understandable if studied in isolation. All ancient religions of the Middle East, from the time of Gobekli Tepe to our own have interacted with each other and are in fact variants of the same Entheogenic Matrix. In absolute terms the fundamental religious phenomena is the phenomena of Illumination whether induced by Entheogenic agents or as the result of deep and sustained religious practice or as a combination of both, as was the case with the ancient Aryan shamans who wrote the Rig-Veda or the ancient Arhats who gave origin to Yoga, to Hinduism and Buddhism or the wandering Didascali and other mysteric initiates who gave birth to Syrian Christianity at Antioch; events made possible by the Special Grace of God, as Saint John of The Cross pointed out in his Noche Oscura, Ascenso al Monte Carmelo.

Whenever the phenomena of Illumination has made its appearance throughout History it has been associated with a great and charismatic religious teacher, these men, in their own life time have not usually considered themselves to be ‘the sons of God’, as Richard Conze and professor Susuki have pointed out. Their followers and disciples, in time, after their masters had passed away, and ceased to give their spiritual example, proceeded to identify them with Entheogenic Experience Itself, as was the case with Saul of Tarsus after his experience on the road to Damascus.

This has not always been the case: probably most of the Egyptian people, induced by the priestly class attached to the god Amon, refused to recognize their Pharao Akhenaten for the great religious 26

teacher that he was; certainly a religion cannot be imposed from above, the Egyptian people of the XVIII Dynasty were very much attached to the cult of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis. It was left to Akhenaten’s disciple, Moses, to carry the seed of monotheism to the Haviru or Hebrew people, marginal semites, egyptianized tribes, who lent their labour to the Pharaoh in the area of Pi-Ramses, in the eastern part of the Nile Delta near the Sinai Peninsula.

In the Eastern religious tradition Buddha and Mahavira were recognized and accepted as religious teachers by their contemporaries of Sixth Century India. It was at a later date that Buddha was deified on the initiative of his disciple, Sariputra, as professor Susuki has pointed out ( Zen Buddhism, Doubleday). On the other hand, the Greek philosopher Plato, although many consider him to be the intellectual progenitor of The Western World, has not been recognized as a great religious teacher.

Christianity would be difficult to understand without the influence of Plato. The intellectual merits of Plato are unquestionable yet the depth and source of his religious inspiration have been underestimated perhaps because Christianity feared to recognize its own origin in Greek Mysteric religion and preferred to emphasize it Jewishness.

It was Plato’s great religious vision and feeling that gave lucid unity and coherence to his philosophy not to mention the beauty and transparency of his literary style. We must remember the devotion Plato felt for The Goddess Demeter from whose festival Socrates and his friends were returning at the start of the dialogue Timaeus; which leads me to believe that Plato was an Initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries. A fact confirmed by Plotinus, who was an initiate of The Mysteries himself .We do not know the name of The Goddess at Eridu in ancient Sumeria, where the appearance not long after 7000 B.C,, of the first Mesopotamian buildings that can be unequivocally identified as temples or shrines, marks the beginning of a long religious tradition, (today superseded by the discovery, in the 1990’s, of the Sanctuary of Gobekli Tepe, a site 13, 000 years old).

His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Ramakrishna

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There is a meta-historical reason for the emergence of urban civilization in the Ecumene, the early desire of mankind to come together at special powerful points in nature designated as Entheogenic Centers where The Rites took place – like at Eleusis. This led the impetus to Hominization, to spiritual phenomena in culture, reflexion and applied intelligence, which is the beginning of Culture and Civilization. By the time of Homer and Hesiod the Greek gods and goddesses had names, but the religious History of The World was already very old.

The Son of The God, the Entheogenic and visionary representation for which The Sacred Plant stood as a functional cultic hierophany, an all-purpose religious symbol, has inspired many in spiritual life.

Yet others have used it as a paramount symbol of racial supremacy, exploitation and conquest. As was the case in the sanguinary conquest of Guatemala, part of the ancient Mayab, where the image of Jesus Christ was used as the presiding symbol by Pedro de Alvarado. The vision and the supreme emotion which gave rise to the human concept of The Divine, and that for many, is fundamental in the recognition of The Divine, is of very ancient origin. It was probably there at Gobekli Tepe and before…in Pleistocene times when the Sacred Plants were first eaten ritually as in The Caves of Altamira, possibly, and with more certainty at Shanidar in Syria where Homo Neardenthalensis was using The Sacred Plant more than 60, 000 years ago (Soleki in Furst, Entheogens and Culture ).

The Plant, the vision and the divinity were fused together into the same religious concept that Saul of Tarsus latter took and used in his Christology, in the helenistic Judeo-Christian concept of Christ.

The philology of the religious names given to The Divine is very rich and has been studied extensively, (see Alegro op. cit). In India The Plant Itself was The God Soma of The Rig-Veda. In Mesopotamia it was Anu, Tiamat, Enlil, Marduk; in Egypt: Ra, Amon-Re, Aton, Osiris, the concept of Maat. For Akhenaten to live in Maat meant to live impeccably every day…just as it does for The Yaqui or the Tarahumara of Carlos Catañeda’s Don Juan.

In Greece, presiding over The Sacred Mysteries at Eleusis stood The Goddess Demeter and her daughter, Kore-Persephone, The God Pluto, the Youth Iaacus and The God Dionysus. These last two Gods were co-opted by Saul of Tarsus who fused them with his idea of Christ and the Mysteric concept of the Soter or Redeemer, similar to the Buddhist Bodhisattva, to inspire the religious imagination of the Corinthians and the Athenians. In this he was aided by the Alexandrian Jew, Apollus, a Neo-Platonist sympathetic to Christianity (Britannica).

For the Jews, Christ, the original Joshua Ben Joseph, had he lived in Palestine, could have been confused with the Essene Master of Light but never with The Son of God, who was a Greek Mysteric hierophant foreign to the Jewish religious imagination. Mykes, Narkissos in Greek; ndi xi tho in Mazatec, ‘the little one who surges forth’, was a figure in Greek Mysteric religious rite as well as in Mazatec religion. An image in artistic iconography as seen in the frescoes of Tepantitla at Teotihuacan associated to chthonic passage and the use of The Sacred Entheogen, The Sacred Mushroom that was ritually eaten in Communion, at Eleusis, in the Sacred Chalice: The Kukeon, which introduced the Mistoi to transcendental visions on the nature of The Divine.

The story of The Life of Jesus is a metaphor for The Phenomena of Illumination and The Sermon of The Mount is clearly of Entheogenic origin, pertaining to The God-With-In That dwells inside every 28

living, sentient entity. It is comparable to The Dhammapad, attributed to Buddha Himself, To the hymns of Akhenaten and to the Isa Upanishad. It was the inspiration of Saint Francis of Assisi, of Saint John of The Cross. The central phenomena in the History of religion is The Phenomena of Illumination and this is a universal experience inherent to man, belonging to many cultures: The Vaupe of The Colombian Amazon (Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff), The Pygmies of The Congo (The Plants of the Gods, Richard Evans Schultes), The Yakuts and Chukchi of Siberia, The Mazatecs of Oaxaca province, Mexico, The Huichol of Nayarit, Mexico, the tribes of North America congregated in The Native American Church; many of the Andean Peoples, as well as the Aborigines of Australia and the natives of Polynesia.

These are ancestral peoples to whom the mixed blessings of Christianity and Islam have not always been a good influence. Maria Sabina, ancestral Mother of her home town, Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, Mexico, could sing for several hours while, in Entheogenic trance, Hymns to the God Tlaloc after 500 years of Spanish and Criollo dominance; as Gordon Wasson witnessed in 1955. The Editorial House of Bompiani-Feltrinelli published in Milan a transcript of these Hymns in a parallel text edition of several languages that astounded the community of European savants who realized the special meaning for humanity that such an act of survival implied – prehispanic religion was alive and well living in the hills of Oaxaca… We include here an image of the God Xochipilli who was the tutelary deity of Entheogenic Rites, The Temisoch, El Sueño Florido and of Maria Sabina.

The World’s political and proselytizing religions have often acted as supremacist forces eroding the cultures of native peoples in a very negative way through the force of arms and commerce, promoting genocide, as has happened in many parts of the world. The concept of cultural supremacy and the practice of colonialism have been amply discredited. When we lift from a particular religion the strata of its cultural and historical formation what is left, what is best, what is essential is The Phenomena of Illumination. We will see the primary elements that it shares with other religions because religions interact with each other as they did along the caravan trade routes of the Ancient World or in the libraries of Cordoba and Alexandria.

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We must free ourselves from deception and illusion, any personal desire for power; recognizing that the phenomena of life has merely been transmitted to us and that the power that operates through us has only been given to us for a short while, a life time , to awake, to learn and to love. ‘We must pay for the flesh’, as the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton once bluntly put it, by doing something noble with our lives.

What I am is you, we are equivalent. We share what is Eternal. So that it is fitting that at the moment of death we should have a glimpse of The Eternal, a vision of The Clear Light that all sentient beings experience; that will reveal to us What Is, what we have wanted to know all along. It is a moment of recognition at the point of culmination, of being and nonbeing, of our primordial origin. We will have seen that nothing endured or took place that should not have been; everything that should have happened did happen and everything that should have existed came to pass. All is well then.

San Angel

September, 2014

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