Secular Faith

This musing started on a drive down south listening to a Weird Studies episode, by a podcast we at Altered Mates admire and seek to emulate in our own fashion. The hosts reflected on their why for the podcast, their core philosophy and approach - and it sparked a deep reflection for me.

This began as a brief philosophical commentary, but wound up being a 10-year integration process as I looked back on an aspect of my psychedelic healing process that has endured since I first drank Ayahuasca, on May 11, 2015 - almost exactly one decade ago.

You can listen to my brief ‘Thank You Plant Medicine’ episode on Altered Mates where I tell the story of that journey, but for now I’d like to spend a moment reflecting on the meaning of life… or at least, the meaning of my life. Perhaps you might find some resonance… I’d Love to hear in the comments.

I know a long-form reflection like this is not going to garner as much attention as a chic reel with my hair tied in a man-bun, tattoos beared on my chiseled chest (the one I don’t have), sharing my ‘authenticity’… But I ask you to bear with me, as I try to get something across to you. An idea. A way of seeing the world - an optimistic view. Not the naive optimism of an unencumbered life, but rather, a hard-won optimism born out of challenge and refined with rigour.

Bear with me…

First we must start with an earlier point in my life, where optimism was just a nice idea and I considered myself more of a ‘realist’… You know the type.

As a young man, a young boy, I found myself rejecting the world in a number of ways. I was a skateboarder with an attitude. I shop-lifted with my little rebel mates, I snuck out at night to drink Fruity Lexia with buddies at the local park, climbed the roof of my school after hours. We would take a candle to wax the wood floorboards of our school so that we can could skate over it and slide across it just for a bit of fun. We also did some proper dumb stuff, a whole bunch of low key rebellious / anti-social behaviours that I won’t get into. It didn’t take much to influence me and for me to get pulled into naughty things with the wrong crowd. Fortunately, I was also surrounded by really positive role models and family in way that helped me to never go deep into that kind of behaviour.

I knew how to be a ‘good’ and polite boy, and I look back now and see that I was doing a great job of hiding the bubbling contempt that I held towards society at large. At the same time, I have always had a yearning for something deeper, something which felt missing. A religio-mysitcal itch for meaning. Whilst I loved the teachings of Christ, I felt betrayed by religion for the many lies, discrimination and all-too-often hateful or self-righteous rhetoric I experienced from it.

A major influence for me in this time was my middle brother and his close group of friends, all ~5 years older than me. They were in their final year of high school when I first entered high school - a group I idolised - and they were a pretty anti-social bunch in their younger years… So much has changed since then. They were rude to their teachers, they drank and took drugs, listened to heavy metal and adorned an ‘I don’t give a fuck’ kind of attitude. For a whole bunch of reasons, that was alluring to me when I was in my high school years.

I’m painting a social caricature here, to give you a sense, or an impression of something at the core. One of the things that came with the influence of this social group, amidst everything else, was a current of righteous cynicism. ‘I see the world as it is, and its fucked.' Or at least, that’s what came with it for me. And I have come to realise that this attitude justified so many things I have done that were uncaring or wrong, which I have come to later greatly regret.

So, what is cynicism?

I’ll invoke a favourite musician, a musician (as you’ll see) who is connected to this story. Cynicism, according to a letter Nick Caves once wrote to a fan, “is not a neutral position - and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.”

After years of therapy, healing, psychedelic work, and simply going through life - I can reflect on my cynicism as holding a profound protective value to me. The world can’t hurt me if I ‘fuck the world’ first (...classic avoidant attachment). Unfortunately, as I’ve come to see, whilst it offers a superficial protection - it is essentially, fundamentally, a put-down of the world, and there are consequences for that kind of attitude.

Now, this attitude is also bound up in social movements and intellectual fashions. I have noticed over the years a strong current of cynicism amongst the supporters and advocates of science, and I think of authors such as Richard Dawkins and his ‘God Delusion’, and your argumentative ‘atheists’, who espouse ‘Science’ as a worldview (instead of a humble process of discovery). And at my time of cynicism, I was drawn into the debates of that world, I was drawn into ‘being right’, and into bringing down the ‘fools’ who believed in pseudoscientific thought and religious mystical ‘nonsense’…

How self-righteous. And ironically, it was a superficial protection over a vulnerable spirit who (deep down) yearned for something deeper, something spiritual.

I remember a talk by Alan Watts where he was speaking about this very theme in Western philosophical dialogue. He described some of the core mythologies that underwrite different eras in human thought. We began with the so-called ‘ceramic’ myth from the bible - which gave us a sense of the world as being made fundamentally of ‘stuff’, where god formed man out of clay, and then breathed life into it. Later on, the mythology of the world as a mechanism took front seat, and still holds many of us unwittingly to its assumptions. I am referring to the Newtonian mechanic view of the world as essentially random particles bumping into each other - that the entire universe is like a really complicated billiard ball table - particles bumping into each other with such incredible complexity that things like life happen, but Only by sheer chance, perhaps even a 1-in-a-universe chance.

Here Alan points out that this mechanistic view is often held in a way that puts down the world, and uses the evolution of human consciousness to illustrate this. When we consider the evolution of the earth, and of the species which inhabit it, we can see that our brains and bodies are a complex expression of the raw materials of the earth - evolved over millennia. Now - you can frame that in two fundamentally different ways:

1. Human consciousness is basically complicated rocks (Newtonian reduction)

2. Rocks are a basic form of consciousness (Alternative elevation)

It seems many authors are writing about the idea that consciousness forms part of the essential substratum of the universe - so maybe Alan was onto something - but what I am trying to point out is the attitudinal shift between these two perspectives. You can see that they are in a way saying the same thing, but one is reducing consciousness to ‘mere matter’, whilst the other is ‘elevating’ rocks to the level of consciousness.

What I am suggesting to you is that the adorning of cynicism in early life as a protection, also led me down certain philosophical tracks - reductive ones. My philosophical position was characterised by my emotional relationship to the world - and therefore constrained by it, too.

Returning back to my earlier life, I was pretty unaware of the impact that my attitude was having on my life, nor aware of its origins. I wrought havoc in a number of places… But amidst the flow of my life something major impacted me - a death.

Like Nick Caves, “Much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt. It was a position both seductive and indulgent. The truth is, I was young and had no idea what was coming down the line.”

Just like Nick, “It took a devastation to teach me the preciousness of life and the essential goodness of people. It took a devastation to reveal the precariousness of the world, of its very soul, to understand that it was crying out for help.”

I’ll never forget the moment that a close friend of my brother's called me one day. The words remain surreal - “Scott is dead, he hung himself”… This can’t be real... I thought. The rug had been taken out from underneath me.

What proceeded was a collective experience of deep grief, which I felt together with the people around this young man. This experience impacted me more than I could ever have expected. Scott was a friend of my brother’s first and foremost, and yet his passing and the intensity of this collective grief affected me profoundly. I think somehow his actions were personal to me. I resonated at some level with what he did, or his desire to end things - to escape, perhaps, from whatever the fuck this life is.

After Scott's passing, his loved ones created a CD of music that he loved, and which was also (I believe) an emotional expression of their loss. They called it the ‘Scottest 100’ as a play on the Triple J ‘Hottest 100’. I mentioned earlier that Nick Caves was connected to this story, and the connection is here - with the song ‘Into My Arms’ that made it into that collection. I still listen to that playlist to this day.

Watching a circle of people grieve the loss of a young man to suicide broke my heart, in a way I didn’t know was possible until that moment... And I believe that was the true beginning of my healing process.

This experience Forced upon me a need to reconcile my cynicism. If the world was as I thought, dumb and fucked up, then this tragedy was meaningless and life was truly, deeply, corrupt.

But the love the poured out from this group of friends in the aftermath - it cracked my heart open to something else. To the hope of redemption. That this tragedy was leading to such love and connection. This tragedy changed this community... I saw the deep humanity, love, and vulnerability of a group of people who I had previously idolised for their cool ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude.

This experience got underneath me, and transformed me. I learnt the preciousness of life, and I began to see my reason d’aitre. I felt the world ‘crying out for help’, not just with this experience, but in So many other places and ways. However, this experience served as a primary catalyst for this developing awareness.

I began to see that the Western world was sick with disconnection and alienation. Western society, as I saw it, had lost its way,. It had lost connection with some essential truths about human needs - a topic for another day - something I find is most aptly described by the work of Darcia Narvaez. And so, after a Bachelor of Science, Buddhist explorations, and some classic university fun being totally immersed in campus culture - after a bit of young fun - I turned my eyes on a career in Social Work.

Social Work saw people through a system lens, just like the buddhist principle of mutual interdependence, individuals as persons-in-environment, an ecological perspective that I saw as striking at the heart of the societal issues we now face. Social work helped me to academically and intellectually understand that we need to re-arrange culture if we want humans to thrive. We have sacrificed the human ‘Evolved Nest’ for progress and to reach the sky, and beyond.

At the same time, I believe that I turned to a career in Social Work because of a darkness, a wounding I carried in my heart - the wounding that was forced to the light of awareness by the fatal actions of my brother's beloved friend. I still held an unmet need for healing.

Exactly 10 years ago, at this earlier point in my life, when I was in the midst of studying Social Work - I suspect it was this need for healing that was the rate limiting step of my growth and development. This un-healed heart, my emotional centre, was unclear because of pain and contempt that resided there. I was in need of healing and transformation.

To be absolutely clear - this is a revelation that has become clear to over the entire course of the ten years since my first Ayahuasca experience. I didn’t know I was carrying a burden of this nature. I went to Ayahuasca because I was curious and seeking… something… little did I know as I know now - that, unconsciously, I yearned to be free from this darkness.

Side note, I ended up writing an award-winning dissertation titled “How Ayahuasca Offers Psychosocial Wellbeing” in 2016 - Dedicated to Scott:*

”I dedicate this dissertation to Scott Backshall, whose life and early passing sparked in me a deep desire. This desire took me on a journey to find something that can re-ignite a sense of magic, wonder, joy and love in this world for all those who might have lost it.”

I found an embodied, real, felt sense appreciation for a different cultural paradigm through my experiences of healing with Ayahuasca. This spurred my growing sense that something was deeply awry in Western culture.

In my first experience with Ayahuasca, I excised this darkness. I detangled the dark tendrils of attachment that wove unhealthy patterns within my system. I was able to feel profound awe, gratitude, and humility for this short life. I was able to feel what I had only understood intellectually before - but which was always over-shadowed by painful feelings in my body from earlier experiences that had closed my heart.

I remember a part of me died that night. This part of me was a victim of an unfair world. What remained of me was a champion of a better world. The violence and darkness within me was purged and witnessed for what it was… weakness (I say this with compassion).

At this time (2015) I was in the sacred valley, South America, and participating in a whole variety of healing practices. I began to heal the wounded masculine within me by making first contact with the feminine that lived within me as well. I remember a profound moment from around that time, working with a Curandera whilst with Huachuma medicine, and she guided me inwards, where I discovered a red-hot, raw pain in my chest - something which I had always carried - like a red-hot chunk of iron metal dead in the centre of my chest. For so long I’ve carried this, and assumed it was normal. I’ve tried to breath through it, calm it, all sorts of things. What I had never done, but which this woman helped me to do, was discover an innate feminine nurturing capacity within me, and to ask that nurturing energy to tend to this burning place within me. For the first time in my life, I felt what it was like to be free from this burning hot feeling in my chest.

Over the following ten years I have been on an ongoing process of healing with psychedelic medicines, Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, workshops, men's groups, breathwork, becoming a psychotherapist, family systems therapy, IFS healing, working through my wounding around women - and how to be in a deeply committed relationship. And after these many years I feel I have freed myself from that darkness in my system. Importantly, for this reflection, this means I am no longer bound to a kind of intellectual-reductive-sadomasachism which previously constrained the philosophical realms I was open to.

And this is where this connects with Altered Mates. For so long… I have rejected intellectualism as a whole because, for so long, it had been bound up in cynicism and a subtle aggression born out of early trauma. But now, I can return to it afresh.

This connects in with a recent episode I was listening to of Tara Brach and Dan Siegel. The idea that trauma, or adversity, forces us to close our hearts - like I did - and forces us into this more reduced world - a reduced world where the focus is on survival, and mistrust is what keeps you safe. But then, once you heal from that - and if you have safety - then there is a choice. We can cultivate the opposite of that reduced world. We can open to a bigger vision of the world.

We can instead cultivate the mystical mind, the open mind, the heart. Like opening the Yes function. A kind of principle that is the more optimistic or non reductive worldview. And its an exquisite risk to take. To open your heart to the world itself. Something I am really curious about is how open, how far that can go. Can taking that thought or feeling experiment to its farthest reaches lead us to a kind of flowering of consciousness, a full opening of the heart?

But how do we do this when closure has kept us safe for so long? How do we do this when society tells us to stay small and quiet? When others who desperately cling to the very cynicism I am trying to break free from HOLD me to that place? When they laugh, ridicule, sneer, smirk, or outright attack. What then? How do we open ourselves in this life?

As Nick Caves goes on to say in his latter to a fan, Valerio:

“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so."

I am placing hopefulness and the mysticism of an open heart in the same category here. I believe they are both hard-earned, they both make demands upon us, and require the energy of a warrior. In my perspective, embodying love in your life is no passive act, no monk in a monastery. It requires outright war in this society - war against all of the institutions of modernity that slowly chip away at our mystical selves…

For me, I had to first purge the cynic in me before I could open to the mystic in me.

I’ve had many experiences of release that seemed to orient around my own intellectual cynicism, and righteousness. In fact, the majority of my earlier psychedelic experiences were difficult, painful, harrowing even - and I can look back now and see that it was because my cynical mind was wrestling so hard with these medicines that were trying to open me up.

In that first Ayahuasca experience where my intention was: ‘teach me the ways of the human heart, mind, and spirit by showing me my own’ - I began to heal. I began to see a bigger vision of the world.

And so many experiences with Ayahuasca have been so difficult… As my mind rallies against this medicine, against letting go, of surrendering to something larger… My experiences of beauty and god have always been far and few between as I reckoned with darkness - as I purged pain, as I purged cynicism - as I was forced to my knees, with no choice but to release my convictions, my reductions, and my darkness into a bucket before me.

I’ve had many experiences now, many openings, many mystical moments - in one such experience I realised that my deepest aspiration was to become a teacher of the heart. To be able to teach others how to open as I had been slowly, painstakingly, learning how to do myself. And I’m still very much on that journey - I still wrestle sometimes with the medicine, as you’ll see if you listen to a recent bonus episode where I talk about a very difficult experience. But the pendulum has swung. Now, I can open more easily, I fight less, I can breathe into and through the medicine more deeply - I feel a sense of trust and ability to let go, it all comes with less fight.

There are many mystical moments I could share with you… this one came not during a psychedelic experience, but in the days following, during a sober morning ride as the sun rose. I’ll give you a little detail of the ceremony as well as the bike ride so you can piece together this experience with me.

Definition: "Unci Maka" is a Lakota phrase meaning "Grandmother Earth" or "Mother Earth". It is often used in Native American spiritual practices and ceremonies to honour our connection with the Earth as a living being and source of life - something I learnt about after this experience.

Context: I am at at an ayahuasca ceremony… and,

One of the facilitators began her song, ‘Unci maka’, and I was struck! Visual fractals emanated from her voice, piercing the air between us and coalescing around my heart. The beauty in that moment left me in a state of awe... and overwhelm.

I felt the beauty of the world, the heartbreak of existence itself - that all must one day die - and the fragility, and incredible magnificence of life because of that fact.

Beauty led quickly to grief.

A stuckness grasped my throat, a lump of intense, bubbling, gasping emotions.

The emotions broke up through, I sobbed, I cried, I wept for life. Gratitude and grief all-together at once.

I didn’t just see the fractal imagery through my eyes - I Felt it coursing through my body, a powerful electric force running through me… TOO MUCH, it was too much…

Even my weeping and rocking was not enough to dispel the intensity of this moment.

Soon I realised the only way to release this energy was to purge. To throw up.

The electricity mounted and surged, oh god it was so much, god help me please, I heaved, and I released … something… everything.

This is medicine for me. I forget the fleeting nature of life, the raw fragility of it, I close down in order to survive the daily grind. I retreat into the safety of intellectualism - something I learn from a young age - how to disconnect, dissociate a little even, to pull away from the world. This is all part of the cynicism I described earlier.

I was riding my bike into work on a cool, early morning. Riding along the river, a blue sky highlighted by pink and orange clouds reflecting the sun’s slow rise in the East. The very song that had struck my heart in my recent Ayahuasca experience starts to play through my headphones.

The grief, beauty, awe, humility. The felt experience of the preciousness and beauty of life strikes again. I am sobbing on my bike ride now... Thisis is a new experience and I’m self-conscious as I pass other cyclists... Putting on a neutral face as I pass them, before letting the process continue on afterwards.

This is where I encountered faith, not as a concept, but as a mystical knowledge, or gnosis, of some kind. I’ll do my best to reconstruct the experience here, but being mystical as it was it will always remain quite ineffable. As we did in one of the Altered Mates early podcast episodes (which I highly recommend), I will try to ‘F the Ineffable’.

As these feelings course through my body on this beautiful morning cycle, my mind begins to draw close to certain ideas / images / feelings - a flow state of mental inquiry emerges as I stomp it out on the bike.

I can’t say that this was conscious… But as I reflect on it I think I was `feeling into', a core faculty of the mind and essential part of magic according to Ramsey Dukes - something which we discuss in a recent Altered Mates episode on Magic (again, highly recommend). I was 'feeling into' these two different worldviews that I often find myself smack dab between.

An oversimplification for sure - but a binary experience of the cynical worldview which seeks to reduce everything to mechanical, linear explanations. For example, someone might say, “oh you had a mystical experience of god whilst on mushrooms? That is merely chemicals in your brain creating a different experience to normal waking consciousness.”

In contrast, a more optimistic, open-minded, or mystical worldview might say, ‘yes, and’... And hold the possibility that there are deeper layers to this universe - some of which we will never, and can never understand. They might say, “Perhaps there is an intelligence in the fabric of the universe that consciousness interacts with, and mushrooms create a neurological state which allows for a deeper connection, or communion with that intelligence? Perhaps the mushrooms themselves are intelligent and have developed a capacity to create a powerful entourage of synergistic alkaloids that hits the brain in just the right way to create an experience of connection or communion between human consciousness and mushroom consciousness?”

Whether or not this perspective is true, its this ‘could it be’, this wondering, this openness to the vast possibilities of life, this mystical mind - that I felt myself connecting to.

And I had this moment where I connected this faith or hope with a beautiful universe - allowing myself to feel that the world I am living in is magical - already - as it is - not a cognitive reappraisal of the world as having more than what is already - but an emotional reappraisal of my already-formed perception... One now-filled with awe, beauty, and hope. My heart wide open to THIS world, as it is now. Not some other world I have invented in my mind to create safety or whatever I am trying to do.

I realised that this faith… Or this hope… Or this love - for the universe - was in a way, a kind of hope... And I could be wrong.

And this ‘I could be wrong’, but choosing it anyway... Cracked my heart open even wider than before.

It was like an unrequited love for the universe…

Vulnerable and courageous, I greeted the universe with wonder, reverence, and devotion - knowing there may not be the reciprocation I yearn for. The universe, god, may not care, but I was choosing to relate to it as if it did anyway.

This is my spiritual practice.

Faith.

I’m calling this an encounter with faith because the moment I realised it could all be wrong and not true - the magic of the world, the spirit of it, mother earth, god, it could all be BS - and chose to hold it anyway in my heart - that choice to hold it Anyway - for some reason - cracked my heart wide open ever wider - I felt a divine presence come over me.

I’ve purged the cynic, and found the mystic - now what?

Well, in short, I want to live a life in constant dialogue with the un-named mystery of life. I’m not chasing a ‘mystical experience’ per se, but instead I am seeking to live in relationship with the mystical / divine that I have experienced and which I have this faith in.

I have found my own winding path into this kind of relationship with the world and myself. I have known the pain and isolation that other, darker relationships can cultivate - as well as the bitter-sweet joy-grief of the gnosis that comes with a wider vision carved out by mystical encounters. I would love to help others along their own form of this path, too. To be in service to the awakening of others, like the path of a Bodhisattva.

To be clear, I’m not saying that I am an awakened Bodhisattva, utterly free from the grips of Maya (illusion). Instead, I am saying that I have found healing, and connection to Mystery, and it would bring me great joy and meaning to help others along that path.

I identify with the mission and life-meaning of a Bodhisattva. Here I'd like to send my gratitude to the many medicine musicians who I view in the same light - expressing the raw aliveness of the mystery through song - and especially to the beautiful singer who inspired this reflection, who sang 'Unci Maka' that night.

Next up, I’ll be writing about a fictional character I believe is a Bodhisattva, Sassy the Sasquatch from ‘The Big Lez’ show. For now,

“wadyatalkinabouut”

~Sassy