Religion is Psychedelic

Education is one of the major weapons of mind control available to dominator culture. Seen in this light, the British National Curriculum is a most effective tool, enabling those in power to determine quite precisely what our young citizens should be taught; what they should and should not know and believe to be true. One book unlikely to find its way onto any course of Religious Studies is 'Supernatural' by Graham Hancock: it might give the kids all sorts of inconvenient ideas.

What is ignored by scientists and academics as a topic for study can be as revealing as what they endlessly research. Two such ignored mysteries readily come to mind. One is the seemingly unfathomed question of the origins of religion and the spiritual. Another - which, we shall see, dovetails neatly into the riddle of our sense of the religious - concerns human anatomy in general, and the human brain in particular. With regard to the latter theme, it would seem that the human being of 100,00 years ago was anatomically identical to our 21st century specimen. This fact extends to the brain, in terms both of its size and its complexity. In other words, everything we are mentally capable of today, our ancestors of that time should have been likewise. For most of the intervening time, however, nothing much seems to have happened - an enormous time gap exists between the appearance of the modern human skeleton and behaviour that is deemed fully human by we moderns.

Suddenly, and without prior warning, we get the great cave paintings of Peche Merle, Cosquer, Fumane, and the rest, between 20,000 and 35,000 years ago. No gradual evolutionary path leads to these astonishing eruptions of artistic vision and accomplishment, at least as far as current evidence shows. They appear as if out of nowhere, and with a degree of artistic skill that amazed Picasso, among others. They are also the first signs we have of anything beyond a most rudimentary imagination, which again seems to manifest fully formed, as does a sense of cognisance of supernatural forces and spiritual dimensions. A closer look at these paintings shows their content to be bizarre. Alongside half-naturalistic animals, the paintings teem with therianthropes (half-human, half-animal beings), people transforming into animals, wounded men, and extensive patterns of dots, lines, and arcs. What on earth is going on?

As the earliest expressions of complex artistic imagination, let alone a sense of the broadly religious, you would think that these paintings are uniquely significant in helping us understand what it is to be human. Yet their meaning has remained elusive. Earlier theories, such as hunting magic, have been thoroughly discredited, and most scientists have moved on to less enigmatic subjects - and ones that are more likely to attract research funding....

Enter Graham Hancock and his 700-page tome. His investigations lead him from these magnificent cave paintings of prehistory onto the almost modern rock art of the San people in South Africa. He is subsequently drawn in the direction of European fairy lore, the psychedelic shamanism of Africa and South America, modern encounters with UFOs and abductions by aliens, and the experiences of volunteers in Dr. Rick Strassman's groundbreaking research with the powerful psychedelic DMT.

His remarkable conclusion is that all these peoples and situations, disparate in time and space, are nevertheless expressions of the same core phenomena. They keep on cropping up, regardless of culture: weird alien beings, therianthropes, transformations and shape-shiftings, wounds and surgical procedures, patterns of dots, lines, and other entoptic phenomena. It appears that these are all universals to the human condition, somehow hard-wired into our very being. And that they can be accessed through entering into what are called (rather unsatisfactorily) 'trance states' or 'altered states of consciousness' (a.s.c.'s). The means for exploring such states are various, and have been used by shamans and others since time immemorial: meditation and yoga techniques, psychedelic (entheogenic) plants and substances, sensory deprivation, fasting, trance-dancing, flotation, and sleep deprivation are some that immediately come to mind.

If this scenario is not already bad news for pontiffs, archbishops, imams, and other leaders of organised hierarchical religions - that religion most likely has its origins in a.s.c.'s accessed by hallucinating shamans in caves 35,000 years ago - then things are about to get far more uncomfortable. The obvious next question any half-intelligent humanoid is bound to ask is: how did our Paleolithic ancestors get to experience these a.s.c.'s anyway, all of a sudden after thousands of years of apparent cultural stagnation? While difficult to prove conclusively, the most likely contender as a means for significant numbers of a population to access such states would be a psychedelic plant of some kind - for our European ancestors, this could well have been the liberty cap mushroom, psilocybe semilanceata. The possibility of a fungal contribution to the evolution of human consciousness was made more speculatively by Terence McKenna in 'Food of the Gods'; Graham Hancock's treatment of the subject is more thorough and convincing, however. It seems that, in any given human population, around 2% of people have a natural ability to enter altered states. For the rest of us plebs, we need help in one form or another, and our Paleolithic ancestors may well have discovered that the swiftest, simplest, and most reliable means was through ingesting the sacred mushroom.

Unburdened of the prejudiced moralistic clutter and inhibition that blight our modern monotheistic-based cultures, most extent shamanic peoples appear to use pretty much whatever thay can get their hands on in order to enter altered states, including plants that are potentially far more hazardous than any psychedelic psilocybin-containing mushroom. Whatever, it is worth considering for its far-reaching implications: the major catalyst for our human sense of imagination and spirit may well be growing in a field or grass verge near you right now!

For anyone interested in the human endeavour beyond the pathetic confines of the western dominator pig trough (apologies to our porcine buddies), 'Supernatural' is pretty much a must-read. If Mr. Hancock's 700 pages seem a bit daunting, believe me, they are not. But you could always listen to his excellent lecture at October Gallery in episodes 27 and 28 of Shamanic Freedom Radio (see my 'sites on the web' list for the connection).

(photo by G. Mueller, from Erowid)

Musings From the Fringe

During the week following the solstice, while most of Britain was basking in sunshine, and with even Glastonbury escaping its traditional soaking, Martha and I were enjoying the grey clouds, intermitttent drizzle, and fresh cooling breezes of the far-flung islands of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Take a look at a map. These islands are on the very fringe of the Eurasian landmass with all that implies. And on the edge of our familiar universe is what they sometimes feel like.

Lewis: a vast sea of peat topped with scrubby heather constantly racked by the zephyrs of the North Atlantic. Callanish: to those with ears to listen, Neolithic wisdom still speaks from the stones, whose essence no photo is able to capture. Luskentyre, Seilebost, West Berneray: enormous swathes of sand, stretching into the middle distance, dazzling the eyes when the sun deigns to shine.

Out here, on the perimeter of the monolith we call western civilisation, it is easier to conceive of life and world beyond the confines of that suffocating dominator complex. The lull of the dark ocean, constantly breaking on crystalline shores or against contorted rocks, its slow and steady rhythm punctured only by the occasional cry of a sea bird. The Stones, each displaying unique and fantastic patterns in the ancient Lewisian gneiss from which they have been wrested, and whence they have been quietly radiating their message for millenia. The slow yet measures cycle of life of flowers and birds on the machair, the sandy, windblasted marine hinterland. After a while, these begin to nibble away at your soul, imposing a slower and more spacious rhythm. Alongside this process, life deepens and opens up, and individual consciousness strains to expand to the further horizons of the Hebridean skies. An invitation to the perimeters, to give up the narrowness of self-obsession, and to embrace instead the greatness and fullness of existence.

It's when you get on the bus that you remember where you are: Radio One is playing as the theme tune for our journey past remote farmhouses and lochans embedded in the ocean of rock that is South Harris. Here in the Outer Hebrides, where for a moment life beyond the grasp of global non-culture can be savoured, still the mainstream must make itself known somehow. On Monday, on our way back to the mainland via the ferry to Ullapool, I notice an old lady reading a magazine. The previous day she was most likely perusing the Bible in a Free Presbetyrian church in Stornoway, fearfully fuelling her sense of guilt and chiding herself for her sins. Today she is reading about the private (or not-so private) lives of Cristina Aguilera, Jordan, and Britney Spears. I struggle to grasp the relevance of these 'celebrities' for the grey-haired lady from Lewis, but there it is for all to see. Alternative culture internet sites teem with articles about global conspiracy, the New World Order, forthcoming one-world government and a single global economy. No need to look to the future: it's with us right now, in cultural terms at least. The globalisation of culture, along with media as its prime means of dissemination, is a necessary element in the dream of world domination. Culture creates the mindset. For culture, read brainwashing. Stornoway, Stepney, or Singapore, it's all the same. Cristina Aguilera's the one. Or, for the boys, football.

So in the Outer Hebrides, the sense of remoteness from the mainstream, though fragile, is palpable, an increasingly rare experience in the modern west. Brussels, Westminster, Holyrood, all seem gloriously irrelevant. Yet they are not. For these sinister centres of power, it is vital to extend their grubby tentacles into every nook and cranny of the Empire. The dining room of the Bed and Breakfast on Harris overlooks a dark sea loch set deeply into the grey rocky hillscape all around. The lady running the establishment tells me how she is unable to put up benighted travellers on the sofa or the floor, because it would be breaking the rules, and she fears word getting back to the Inspectors, who would remove her four-star rating. This is the legacy of the New Labour nightmare of soulless bureaucracy, happily imitated by Scottish Parliament. Highland hospitality blown to pieces. Rather die of hypothermia on the doorstep than sleep on the sofa, risking the wrath of Big Brother's henchmen, the Inspectors. One World, or One Europe at least, even out on the fringes, where the Atlantic relentlessly batters the coastline, and the main sounds are the cries of gulls and oystercatchers. Faceless, soulless, creeping death.

Passing through the splendidly wild and rocky landscapes of North Harris, I cast my eye in the direction of a hill called Muaitheabhal. Soon it will sport a cluster of metal-and-plastic wind turbines. Love and connectedness coexist in the core of my soul alongside a seething anger, which is sometimes tinged with a sense of despair. Another thirty-turbine project is proposed near Stornoway. There seems no end to this onslaught on the spirits of the landscape by dominators in suits. The talk nowadays is of 'consultation with local communities', though precisely what this entails remains to be seen. Plus what the BBC, in its own biased euphemistic language, refers to as 'money contributed by wind scheme operators.' Translated into realspeak, this amounts to bribes offered to hard-up villagers for messing up their lives. The Coalition is now talking of institutionalising this bribery through lower council tax bills for communities that agree to the invasion of their locality by wind turbines. This is actually no different to the sort of thing that makes our modern middle-classes recline in horror if it happens elsewhere, or as part of history. Giving Coca-Cola to indigenous Amazonians in exchange for their land, or their souls in the form of religious conversion. It was one of Carl Jung's great insights that we are nowhere so blind as in the centre of our own egos, a principle that holds collectively as much as individually. It's easy to condemn when it's 'out there', 'other'; far less so when it's happening in our midst.

Small communities may accept these shameless bribes from the pimps in suits, and I can understand why. Probably too late, they'll realise their mistake, and what they have lost by selling off their soul. In addition, tourists will stop coming, the local economy will suffer, while the dominators in suits in their centrally-heated offices hundreds of miles away will rub their grubby mitts at another mission successful.

To finish on a more optimistic note, a few words of beauty from the artist Alice Starmore. I know little about her, except that she was born and grew up among the peat and heather of Lewis, and she has exhibited her work at An Lanntair, the rather smart Arts Centre in Stornoway. The exhibition is dedicated to Mamba, an acronym to describe Lewis. To some it is 'Miles and Miles of Bugger All', but to Alice it is 'Miles and Miles of Beauty Astounding.' 'North Lewis is the largest undisturbed blanket bog in Europe' she writes. 'Its importance as a rare and special habitat is equivalent to that of the Serengeti or the rainforest of Brazil.' 'For many islanders the moor is a part of their soul....... The catalyst for creating the Mamba exhibition was the realisation that there are people, some in positions of considerable power, who have no regard for the moorland and think of it as a bleak and empty place which has no value other than space to be exploited. The exhibition shows that it is neither bleak nor empty....... Mamba is about precious landscape and the life within it. Step into that landscape and look, for there are wonders to behold.....' Thanks, Alice.