I
That which Alan Watts called the Fully Automatic Model of the Universe has prevailed. As such, the common narrative is that the Universe came into being for no reason. It has no creator, and is fundamentally just blind energy, operating without purpose. This is the general ontological attitude of the world’s ruling classes, and of its scientific, academic, military, cultural and media elite.
Following as part of this model is the assumption that consciousness evolved, much like eyes evolved because vision was advantageous, and legs evolved because locomotion was advantageous. Therefore, there is nothing special about consciousness or any great mystery to it. It’s just another biological phenomenon, like digestion or excretion.
Despite the lowly position assigned to consciousness, it remains desperately hard to define, measure or explain. The question ‘What scientific instrument detects or measures consciousness?’ gets blank looks. A thermometer measures heat, an altimeter measures altitude. But there are no psychometers. More dedicated materialists will say “an fMRI scanner” and can even expound at length the brain structures believed to be associated with consciousness. But potential associations are as close as they can get to a meaningful explanation.
Physicist and Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg once said “The first sip from the glass of the natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but, at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.” Many who have studied a natural science deeply will appreciate this comment. Studying the natural sciences works as a kind of Diotima’s Ladder, in which one initially becomes fascinated by particular aspects of reality, only to appreciate ever-more general aspects as one’s knowledge and experience deepens. But what is the final rung of that ladder? What is the most general possible element of reality?
Certainly not atoms, or even subatomic particles. As Heisenberg said: “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”
The idea that atoms or elementary particles are not actually real is one that few would take seriously. Many normal people would suspect such an assertion is a sign of mental illness, a detachment from reality. Hard to detect, sure. But not real?
Erwin Schroedinger, who also won a Nobel Prize in Physics, had no time for the theory that consciousness is secondary to the material world. He wrote “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”
Max Planck, yet another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, also supported this belief. He said “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
What does it mean that all of these great physicists believed consciousness was primary to matter? The common wisdom seems to be that these men, great though they may have been in other ways, were deluded in this regard. Maybe they drank too deeply from the glass of Nature, and went a bit mad. Maybe some lingering religious superstitions corrupted their judgment.
An alternative explanation is that these men were correct, and the reason we don’t understand them is that we’ve regressed from their level. Eternal progress is not a fact: the population of Rome collapsed 95% in the two centuries after Theodosius. It may be that the insights of the early modern physicists represent an intellectual peak, from which we have fallen into a stage of comparative ignorance.
Most people with an interest in consciousness know about the “double slit experiment”. They know that one interpretation of this experiment is that the physical world doesn’t actually exist unless it’s observed by consciousness, an interpretation that accords fully with the assertions of Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Planck that consciousness is primary to matter.
Most of these people don’t know that the other sciences likewise suggest that consciousness is primary.
The materialist edifice is built on several assumptions. One of them – as mentioned above – is that consciousness evolved. Evolution, of course, is the process by which living organisms adapt over time to meet challenges of survival and reproduction. The common assumption is that consciousness evolved, somehow, to provide a survival or reproductive advantage. But anyone who has researched the evolution of consciousness has found there is very little agreement on when consciousness arose in the evolutionary record. This is because materialists don’t agree on which brain structures give rise to consciousness.
The fact that there is widespread disagreement on when consciousness arose in the evolutionary record is related to the fact that no-one can detect or measure consciousness with a scientific instrument. If detection of consciousness with a scientific instrument were possible, there would presumably exist some evolutionary boundary after which consciousness could be detected, and before which it could not be. Then we could say that the brain structures that evolved around this time were key to the mystery.
If consciousness could be detected, for example, in the brains of humans but not those of other apes, then we could surmise that consciousness evolved in the last 5-7 million years, after the last common ancestor of both today’s humans and other apes. If apes were conscious but Old World monkeys not, then it would have evolved in the last 25-30 million years. If Old World monkeys were conscious but New World monkeys not, then the last 40-50 million years. And so on down the phylogenetic tree.
Consciousness cannot be detected by scientific instruments, however, but is rather sensed by intuition.
There appears to be a spectrum, ranging from solipsism to panpsychicism, such that a person’s position on the spectrum reflects how much of the physical world they intuit to be conscious. The solipsist only reckons themselves to be conscious. A slightly less narcissistic form of ethnosupremacist only considers his race or ethnic group conscious. Many people only consider humans conscious, and this was a common belief in the West during the Middle Ages, and is a common belief in the Third World today. Most First World citizens consider mammals and usually reptiles to be conscious, maybe amphibians, maybe fish, maybe insects. Certain spiritual types consider trees, mountains, rivers etc. conscious. And the panpsychicist, as their name suggests, considers basically everything to be conscious.
Almost everyone’s position on this spectrum appears arbitrary to the outside. Perhaps there is a connection between a person’s level of narcissism and their position on the spectrum, such that the more narcissistic one is, the less consciousness one recognises outside of oneself. But very few people have any logic or reason backing up their position. It’s just feels, and usually conditioned ones.
Most tellingly, no-one can offer any reason beyond loose conjecture as to why evolution would give rise to consciousness. The reasons typically given for the evolution of consciousness are almost as varied as evolution itself.
Back when it was mostly believed that only humans were conscious, it was also mostly believed that consciousness evolved because of some quality specific to humans, such as tool use or language. For many people, it seemed intuitively true that the complex thought associated with tool use or language was also associated with consciousness somehow.
Recent decades have shown that not only were the hominoid precursors to homo sapiens tool users (most famously homo habilis), but so are similar extant creatures, such as chimpanzees, and even more distant creatures, such as elephants, dolphins and corvids. That cats and dogs can communicate through body language is well-known, but forms of language have been found in much simpler forms of life: a paper in Plant Signaling And Behavior found “electric signals were reliably transmitted from one plant to another via fungal pathways.” None of the reasons given for the evolution of consciousness withstand examination.
The glib assumption appears to be: the more complicated the sensory processing apparatus, the more consciousness. Certainly the contents of consciousness are different. No-one doubts that what it is like to be a bat is different from what it is like to be a human being. But that doesn’t mean that the consciousness perceiving life as a bat is any different to the consciousness perceiving life as a human. Indeed, Schroedinger said “consciousness is a singularity phasing through all minds.” Apart from its contents, nothing differentiates one fragment of consciousness from the next.
In practice, consciousness is much like pregnancy, in the sense that one can’t really be partway there. In the same way that a female is either pregnant or not, a creature is either experiencing subjectively or it isn’t.
In any case, the difficulties go much deeper than this. The laws of evolutionary biology rule out the possibility that consciousness could have evolved.
Niko Tinbergen’s four major problems are intractable when it comes to consciousness. What is the survival value of consciousness? There appears to be none at all. The fact that it’s possible to conceive of a philosophical zombie rules out any apparent need for a subjective observer of the emotions, thoughts, feelings and sensations of a biological animal. Some might even argue, given the apparent link between consciousness and depression as expressed in works such as Notes From The Underground, that consciousness has a negative survival value.
Another of Tinbergen’s problems leads us to ask how consciousness might have evolved. As alluded to above, it’s not just that materialist explanations don’t add up here – the laws of evolution rule out that consciousness can have evolved.
Richard Dawkins’s research states that all evolution works (proximally, at least) on phenotypic expressions: “replicators do not expose themselves naked to the world; they work via their phenotypic effects”. There is no “higher plan” that leads evolution towards a higher goal – it only ever works on selection for or against phenotypic expressions. But what is the phenotypic expression of subjective observation, such that more of it could have been selected for over time? On one level, it seems obvious that there can be no such thing.
Materialists naturally dispute this. Consciousness might not be directly observable, but its phenotypic expression can be inferred, they argue. It “could be” that consciousness allows for more complex social organisation. It could be that it allows for greater introspection, enabling self-correcting behaviour. It could be that it allows prediction of the future.
Here one is reminded of the special pleading of the Christian trying to explain how a perfectly good God is compatible with all the evil in the world. When children die in agony of bone cancer, the apologist suggests, it “could be” God’s plan to teach the rest of us gratitude. But the materialist can only speculate in the face of the laws of biology. They cannot point to any phenotypic expression of consciousness that evolution may have selected for.
In fact, a person might not even need a brain to be conscious. A 2007 paper in The Lancet described the case of a French civil servant who was missing 90% of his brain because of hydrocephalus. Despite this, the man scored 84 in a verbal IQ test and was able to hold down a full-time job. If the brain generates consciousness, it’s not easy to explain how it can still do this to the same extent when 90% of it is removed.
If consciousness cannot have evolved, then what? The conclusion is very simple. As Schroedinger said, consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness came first and it dreamed up the world, and the story of evolution is a substory within this great dream.
This explanation is supported by the Principle of Parsimony. Materialists are routinely astonished by the unlikelihood of life arising in what is called the Goldilocks Zone. If Earth were slightly further from the Sun, water would freeze and Earth couldn’t support life. If it were slightly closer to the Sun, water would boil and Earth couldn’t support life. Life on Earth only becomes possible if the Earth is the exact distance from the Sun that it is.
This blessed fluke has also occurred with many other variables. If the Hubble constant were slightly larger, the Universe would expand too quickly for galaxies, stars or planets to form. If it were slightly smaller, the Universe would collapse in on itself soon after it began. If the gravitational constant were slightly stronger, stars would exhaust themselves much faster, leaving insufficient time for life to evolve. If it were slightly weaker, stars and planets wouldn’t have enough cohesion to form in the first place. If the strong nuclear force were a few percent stronger, protons would bind too tightly for hydrogen formation to be possible, which would mean no stars or water. If it were a few percent weaker, stars would not form the heavy metals that life depends on. If the neutron were more than about 0.1% heavier than the proton, heavy elements wouldn’t form, making life impossible. If it were less than about 0.1% heavier, protons would decay into neutrons and the Universe would have no atoms. And so on. If almost any fundamental measurement of the physical universe would be slightly different, life would be impossible.
Adding all these flukes together, the chances of life existing at all seem like decillions to one against. That life exists at all, given the relentless hostility of the physical universe, is so unlikely that one is dumbstruck by the improbability.
Understanding that consciousness is the prima materia resolves all of these apparent paradoxes.
II
The Book of Chuang Tzu recounts the time Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly. “Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solidly and unmistakably Chuang Tzu. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.”
How could he not know which of the two he was? The common, modern Western interpretation is that Chuang Tzu eventually remembered, after the fog of sleep cleared, that he was Chuang Tzu and not the butterfly, and then just got on with his life. But how would he really know?
Let’s assume, as a thought experiment, that materialism is true.
A materialist walks down a street in his home city. The light reflecting off the buildings, cars, streets and other people enters the materialist’s eye through his cornea, passes through the pupil, and is focused by the lens onto the retina. When this light hits the photoreceptors in the materialist’s retina, it triggers a chemical reaction. The process of phototransduction converts the light energy into neural signals. These signals are then transmitted by the optic nerve to the brain, eventually to the visual cortex. In this visual cortex the brain generates its actual image of the physical world. Various areas of the visual cortex process different aspects of vision, like colour, shape and depth. The subjective sensation of vision arises in the materialist’s brain from how his brain interprets these signals. Thus, he sees.
Through this ability of vision, the materialist is able to perceive the material world in which he is walking around. This way he can achieve goals and avoid dangers in that world.
Now imagine the materialist enters his home, gets into bed, falls asleep and dreams. Let’s say that, in the dream, the materialist is walking the streets of a strange foreign city, and that, in the dream, the materialist doesn’t realise he’s dreaming. At the time of walking those streets, he thinks he is in the “real world”: he can see a physical world all around him and it appears coherent and logical. He might even engage in goal-directed behaviour, like walking on the footpath to avoid traffic, exactly how a person in the “real world” would do.
Now, assuming materialism is true and that brains generate consciousness: does the brain in the body in the dream world or the brain in the body on Earth generate the consciousness of this materialist observer while he is dreaming?
It’s one thing to argue that the visual cortex produces an image of the world in the brain, and that this brain image is available to subjective experience, and that this is why we see Planet Earth while we move around on it. But then dreams force us to ask: is it the visual cortex in the body on the dream world that is producing the image of the dream world, or is it the visual cortex in the body on Earth?
Most materialists would answer “obviously the brain on Earth, because the brain in the dream world doesn’t really exist.” Very well. But doesn’t that prove that a person can be conscious of a world that their brain isn’t in? If a brain on Earth thinks it’s in the dream world, then a brain in the dream world could just as well think it was on Earth, as Chuang Tzu appreciated. Or, a third brain, in a deeper world more real than both Earth and the dream world, might dream up both Earth and the dream world.
It must be accepted as remarkably odd that it’s possible to have an entirely coherent visual experience of a world in which one has no visual cortex, optic nerve, retinas, pupils, corneas or eyes. That proves that it’s not necessary for any outside world to exist in order for us to have a fully believable experience of one existing.
Once one accepts that it’s possible to think one is someone else in a dream, and believe it without question, one must accept that one could be dreaming oneself right now. As Ramana Maharshi taught, the consciousness when asleep is the same as that when awake. It’s merely the contents of consciousness that differ. Thus this Earthly experience is fundamentally the same as the dream experience. It only differs superficially.
Here the materialist objects again. In a dream it’s possible to fling yourself fearlessly off a cliff or in front of a truck if you realise it’s a dream and you want to wake up. In “real life” you can’t do this – people have massive inhibitions against killing themselves, and anyone who does it is invariably in a state of extreme despair, if not out of their minds entirely. Therefore, the Earth world is The Real World and Serious Business in ways that the dream worlds are not.
It’s not true that no-one has died fearlessly in the Earth world. Socrates famously did it. In Apology, Crito and Phaedo, Plato has Socrates explain at length why he was not afraid of death. In Apology, Socrates explains that he has no way to know that death is bad; death could be a nirvanic absence of suffering for all eternity, or it could be reincarnation in a higher realm where he could enjoy the company of great men from the past. In Phaedo, Socrates outlines his belief that the soul is immortal and exists prior to the body. Thus, he has no reason to fear death as the materialist does. Absent this fear, he can drink the hemlock and die with an equanimity that still astonishes two dozen centuries later.
Even if one assumes that the story of Socrates was exaggerated, the story of Thich Quang Duc is not.
Most people recognise Quang Duc as the burning monk from the front cover of the eponymous Rage Against The Machine album released in 1992. He was a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who self-immolated in 1963 to protest the oppression of Buddhists by the then Catholic leaders of Vietnam. Photos of the deed became well-known around the world, astonishing millions: how did Quang Duc have the self-control to sit there, impassive, while burning alive?
When most people are burned, even a little bit – like touching a warm cigarette lighter – they tend to involuntarily react. The child who touches a hot stove recoils before they even realise what’s happening. An adult who burns themselves might yelp in pain. It’s a common assumption that every person has a threshold of physical pain, beyond which they will break down into involuntary reactions. Burning to death surely exceeds that threshold. So how could Thich Quang Duc possibly do what he did?
Quang Duc was 66 years old at time of self-immolation. He was initiated as a monk as a teenager, so he may have been meditating seriously for half a century by the time he died. This alone, and not any superhuman will or supernatural intervention, may be enough to explain how he did it.
Meditators will tell you to begin by watching the rise and fall of your breath. Patanjali taught that, through such singular focus, a person could cause the fluctuations of their mind to cease. Once the sensory cravings and thoughts are settled, what remains? The meditator, if they are dedicated and honest, will eventually find that only consciousness itself remains. Then it becomes apparent that the physical world comes into consciousness, rather than consciousness coming into the physical world.
Nisargadatta Maharaj taught “You are not your body, but you are the consciousness in the body.” It follows that all of the sensations of the body, including the sensation of its permanence, are just fluctuations of mind that rise and fall like any other. Even the worst of pains, in this way, can be considered merely an object of awareness. So with sufficient practice, even the worst of pains can be apprehended by consciousness without emotion.
If Thich Quang Duc convinced himself that he was not his body, but rather the consciousness observing the sensations of his body, he could have dispassionately observed the sensory impressions associated with burning to death without feeling a need to react to them. If he had been deluded or insane (as some have argued), and he was really his body, the pain of the fire would surely have brought him back to reality.
What if Thich Quang Duc died as fearlessly as people can sometimes do in their dreams, and was able to do so because he knew this Earthly experience to be fundamentally no different to a dream, in that there is consciousness and there are the contents of consciousness, and that the latter always changes while the former never does?
American spiritual teacher Robert Adams once said “The body that appears real to you is a delusion. It appears real just as a dream appears real until you wake up.” When a dreamer wakes up and has breakfast, they don’t mourn the body in the dream world they left behind, they just get on with life. If Quang Duc had already let go of his body before it died, he could have let it burn with similar indifference. He could then have simply reincarnated into the next body and got on with things.
The Ashtavakra Gita asks “Realising the Universe is illusion, having lost all curiosity, how can one of steady mind fear death?” It appears that truly advanced experts of the mind, such as Chuang Tzu, Socrates and Thich Quang Duc, recognised the material world as secondary to consciousness. They recognised that the suffering associated with having a material body might be unpleasant on some level, but it isn’t actually real, and therefore doesn’t need to have an overwhelming emotional impact. This insight granted those experts extraordinary powers to overcome suffering.
The potential mental health effects of such knowledge are tremendous. If a person can remain indifferent to being burned alive, they can certainly remain indifferent to relatively less painful experiences of anxiety and depression. Canadian mystic Manly P. Hall once said “It is the inner world of man’s personal life which no outside situation can injure or destroy.” What if, through truly understanding consciousness, it was possible to learn to dwell in an experiential space absent of misery – a space that the body, being destined to hunger and thirst and tire and sicken and die, can never attain?
The term ‘psychiatry’ is supposed to mean ‘healing of the soul’. But modern psychiatry almost universally rejects belief in souls. Patients come to psychiatrists not as souls undergoing painful and challenging incarnations, but as bodies whose brains are undergoing chemical imbalances. The role of the psychiatrist in practice is to fix the brain, not the soul. This helps explain why modern psychiatry is infamous for not actually helping people.
The narrative underpinning mainstream psychiatry today is that materialism is true, the brain evolved with the rest of the body and consciousness evolved with it, and therefore, upon the death of the patient’s physical body, their consciousness will be erased. Life is inherently meaningless due to this, and, even if the patient can find some meaning, it doesn’t matter in the face of their inevitable annihilation. Respite from suffering can be found in the short term from the sedative effects of pharmaceuticals (or from other distractions), but in the long term there is only oblivion. Psychiatrists don’t say this to their patients, of course – they say pleasant-sounding things about how we need to find meaning through connection etc. But they can’t deny that their fundamental world view has the patient suffering without meaning and essentially waiting to die.
Is it any wonder that those who seek the assistance of psychiatry for existential anxiety or depression, or for trauma-related conditions that cause despair, often find it unhelpful?
British spiritual teacher Rupert Spira once said “The discovery that peace, happiness, and love are ever-present within our own being, and completely available at every moment of experience, under all conditions, is the most important discovery that anyone can make.” If psychiatric patients could be taught to abide in the Self, and to find that peace, happiness and love through spiritual instead of pharmaceutical means, this could potentially transform the practice of healing souls.
III
The idea that consciousness survives the death of the physical body is far from new, even in Western culture. Plato wrote about it extensively.
In Timaeus, Plato forwards the theory that this world is an imperfect version of the perfect world that exists in the World of Forms. This imperfect version is crafted by a deity known as the Demiurge, who also created all of the souls that populate this world. Timaeus contains a detailed description of Plato’s conception of reincarnation, known also as metempsychosis. It also describes a kind of karma, in that those who live lives in accordance with reason are granted auspicious rebirths, whereas those who surrender to lower impulses are forced to be reborn as insects, wolves or donkeys. A similar conception of metempsychosis is expounded in Republic with the Myth of Er.
The highest realm, as described in Phaedrus, consists only of souls, without earthly bodies. These souls get to live in the company of the gods, who they follow in a procession through the heavens. Owing to forgetfulness and weakness, some souls fall behind the procession, lose sight of the truth and descend to Earth, incarnating in mortal bodies. Should they live sufficiently virtuous lives while in mortal bodies, those souls can return to the heavens, but if not, they will continue to reincarnate in terrestrial realms.
Modern readers often have trouble understanding how Plato was so utterly convinced of life after death. Why does Socrates, in so many different dialogues, speak of the immortality of the soul as if it were an established fact?
The Eleusinian Mysteries offer us some clues. These were renown in ancient Greece for making people lose their fear of death. Plato doesn’t reference the Eleusinian Mysteries directly, but makes allusions to mystical initiation in several dialogues. Initiates into the Eleusinian Mysteries were sworn to keep the teachings secret, and Plato, as an Athenian of high birth, would have respected this pledge.
Of them, Pindar wrote “Blessed is he who has seen these things before he goes beneath the earth; for he understands the end of mortal life and the god-given beginning of a new life.” Cicero wrote that initiates into the Mysteries are able “not only to live happily, but to die with better hope.”
What could make a person understand that life continued after the end of this one? A substance that conferred a belief in reincarnation would be sufficient.
It is known from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter that the Eleusinian Mysteries involved the consumption of a drink known as kykeon. Ordinarily, kykeon is a barley, water and mint beverage consumed for refreshment. In the case of the Eleusinian Mysteries, however, kykeon may have contained powerful psychedelics.
Ritual use of psychoactive beverages is well established in many world cultures. Ancient Vedic culture used soma as a ritual drink to summon divine inspiration. R Gordon Wasson believed that this soma may have contained amanita muscaria mushrooms, known world-wide for their powerful psychological effects. Native American cultures drink ayahuasca, a DMT-based concoction that is also well-known for inducing spiritual visions. European cultures made a variety of meads that were laced with henbane, mandrake and datura. In Greece itself, Dionysian cults were known to drink wine spiked with various psychoactives. So if the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries was psychedelic, this would fit a pattern common across human cultures.
Terence McKenna pointed out that, assuming the kykeon contained a psychedelic, it would have to contain one with an extremely benign safety profile, because thousands of people took part in the Eleusinian Mysteries every year, yet the kykeon had no reputation for poisoning or harming people. Those who have suggested an ergot rye fungus were mistaken, McKenna concluded, because this would have poisoned too many people, and would have garnered the Mysteries a reputation for being dangerous. As the Mysteries had no such reputation, an ergot rye fungus could be ruled out.
That a person can lose their fear of death from psychedelics is not well known, but it is well established. Psychedelic subcultures, such as certain channels on X, frequently reference the phenomenon. The entheogen awareness website Erowid lists hundreds of spiritual experiences that have challenged the thanatophobia of the experiencer. One such is matter-of-factly titled ‘Life After Death’. One DMT user wrote of their experience that “some days later I took a plane and when it was taking off, I thought for a moment that if the plane accidentally crashes I wouldn’t be very worried, I can pass away quite realized and satisfied”. This echoes closely the remarks of Pindar and Cicero.
Psychedelics can also make a person believe in God. Another mushroom trip caused a person to realise “We are all GOD” and say of themselves “I don’t know if I believed in God before this moment, but from now I was [sic.] without any hesitation.” Yet another story involving mushrooms concluded “All in all I was the Universe, I was God, I was The God’s [sic.].” A substance that can transform a person from a materialist into a believer in the afterlife, or from an atheist into a (non-denominational) believer in God, is an exceptionally powerful one.
The title of one Erowid DMT trip report is ‘Corporeality is Bunk’. This reminds of the words of the Avadhuta Gita: “Verily nothing exists except the Self.” For so many people, psychedelics and spirituality lead to the same place: the insight that they are more than their body. Psychedelics grant certain users insights into the nature of the soul, such as that the soul is eternal and survives the death of the physical body. This is the basis for their enduring popularity across times and places.
The etymology of ‘psychedelic’ is from British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in a letter to Aldous Huxley, the term coined to mean ‘soul-revealing’. For most people, the soul is hidden behind mountains of thoughts, emotions, sensations and feelings that are mistaken for the real ‘them’. Psychedelics can reveal that the consciousness observing all of these thoughts, emotions, sensations and feelings is actually the real person, the “I” behind subjectivity itself.
As Ramana Maharshi liked to note, the fundamental problem is that people identify with the body. Because the body is fated to die, people who identify with it adopt a particular short-term way of thinking that inclines them towards fear, unhappiness and selfishness. This is very common unless a person is shocked out of it, such as through a spiritual experience.
Socrates, like Plato, probably partook in the Eleusinian Mysteries. It was common for anyone with ambition to do so in ancient Athens, and thousands took part every year. It may have been that Socrates lost his fear of death thanks to a psychedelic experience at Eleusis, and therefore that the astonishing spiritual achievements recorded in Apology, Crito and Phaedo are based on replicable psychedelic insights into the nature of consciousness.
A person can also lose their fear of death from Near Death Experiences, aka NDEs. This is counterintuitive for many people. Common wisdom would suggest that death and things related to death are scary and traumatic, and so being involuntarily exposed to them ought to create fear and trauma. Descriptions of NDEs, however, demonstrate that the opposite is true. People undergoing an NDE regularly report a complete absence of fear, and regularly look back on the experience, once recovered, with joy rather than trauma.
The science of NDEs is generally considered pseudoscience by most people, the same way that Heisenberg, Planck and Schroedinger are considered a bit soft in the head by many committed atheists. But it’s hard to see any obvious softness in the reasoning of Dr. Jeffrey Long, perhaps the world’s foremost researcher into the NDE phenomenon. Dr. Long is a radiation oncologist who has compiled a database of several thousand reports of NDE experiences. Some of the experiences described might seem fantastical. But there are marked patterns in the data. Those experiencing an NDE are often transformed in a manner similar to that of the participants at the mysteries of Eleusis.
Some of the NDEs could be dismissed as religious delusion, such as the ones which seem to confirm pre-existing religious biases. But in some of the video recollections of NDEs, the people describing them seem as bemused as the viewers. The video of Vincent Tolman’s experience has Tolman meeting a godlike figure who outright rejects that he is Jesus Christ, the exact opposite of what one would expect if Tolman was exaggerating for religious reasons.
An uncharitable cynic might say this was all delusion. But as Chuang Tzu might have argued, if the experiencers thought their experiences were real at the time, then how are we to know any different? In any case, NDEs frequently cause people to believe thereafter in God, the afterlife, and the fundamental alrightness of existence. They confer much the same psychological boons that Pindar and Cicero attributed to the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The ability of NDEs to grant equanimity in the face of death could be because, like meditation and psychedelics, NDEs make people realise they are consciousness, and not their bodies.
Many of those who have experienced an NDE have experienced viewing their own body from the outside. This prompts a question the materialist cannot answer: if consciousness takes place in the brain, then where is the consciousness looking down on the body being generated? If it’s possible to view one’s body from the outside, that’s proof the body and the consciousness are two separate things.
One DMT trip report recounts “I lost complete contact with the waking reality as I knew it… I returned to a place that seemed very familiar”. Another one states “This place, these things stand outside of space and time, yet they feel familiar. In my core, I know this place. I know this place…and it knows me”. One NDE experiencer reported “It was more real than anything I have ever experienced in my life” and “it was like coming back to my true home” (19). In Vincent Tolman’s video, Tolman recounts “For the first time in my life, I felt like I had finally found my home.”
How is it that the realms accessed by some DMT or NDE experiences feel more real than this one, according to so many? Why would they feel already familiar to someone who has (presumably) never been there? Mainstream neuroscientists will tell us that this is because of a disruption to the brain’s default mode network. But it stretches credulity to argue that the DMT experience and the NDE experience both produce such similar and otherwise unique changes to the brain’s default mode network.
Non-mainstream neuroscientists like Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman have different narratives.
Kastrup, with a Ph.D. in ontology and a Ph.D. in computer engineering, is not typical of those who reject materialism. In The Idea of the World, Kastrup states: “All reality is in consciousness; there is no world outside mind.” This is the basis of his worldview, known as analytic idealism. This has us as fragments of universal consciousness living to know ourselves through experience.
Donald Hoffman echoes Schroedinger and Planck: “Consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality.” Hoffman, a professor of cognitive psychology with a Ph.D. in computational psychology, is no woo merchant either. His theory is known as conscious realism, and differs from Kastrup’s theories in several ways. In the most important way, however, it is the same: it rejects the primacy of matter.
Kastrup and Hoffman are the current iterations of over a century of rigorous, hard-headed scientists who believe that consciousness is primary to matter. It’s time for mainstream culture to concede that these thinkers are on epistemological ground as stable as that of the materialists.
Is it possible that the realms accessed by DMT trips and by NDEs feel more real than this Earth because they are more real? Could this Earth be a downwards emanation from a more ideal Earth somewhere in a higher dimension, a place one returns to after one’s Earthly body dies, which is accessible through DMT, NDEs and meditation, and whose denizens Socrates describes in Apology as “happier there than we are here”? Plato’s ontology as described in Phaedrus might seem fanciful to 21st Century Westerners. But it accords with the reported data from psychedelic and near-death experiences.
IV
It’s time to question the culturally sanctioned belief around the primacy of the material world.
It could be that, in the same way that the beings in Phaedrus lost sight of the Forms, and thereby were caused to reincarnate into lower worlds, the human race has lost sight of the spiritual realities of existence, and thereby has been caused to manifest a corresponding dark age in this world. As the beings in Phaedrus must suffer incarnation in material forms, so must we suffer lives in ignorant societies. Bereft of spiritual truth and guidance, we blunder through wars and violence, drug addictions, sex addictions, dopamine addictions, always suffering, always yearning for relief but never getting it.
A philosophical revolution that returned consciousness to the centre of our reality could save us from all of these things.
One common historical perspective considers that the nihilism Nietzsche foresaw – that arising from the death of the god of Abraham – was never overcome (it can also be argued that this nihilism actually arose from the death of the European religions). After the publication of Thus Spake Zarathustra, the world lurched into World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the War on Terror, the Global Financial Crisis and now we’re in a post-Covid malaise where housing unaffordability and climate change are wreaking havoc with the mental health of younger generations. Meaning in life was never found, just an infinite yawning abyss of materialism, stretching out to the heat death of the Universe.
Materialism, in truth, is not a reaction to spirituality but a reaction to spiritual falsehoods; the former exists in proportion to the latter. Much like a broad-spectrum antibiotic, which clears the board, allowing the natural biome to re-establish itself, materialism kills spiritual sense, and in doing so clears the way for natural and true spiritual sense to return. The age of materialism has dispelled many spiritual delusions: it now seems impossible that a person could be burned at the stake for promoting heliocentrism, as Giordano Bruno was only four centuries ago. Now people’s natural spiritual sense is seeking answers in hitherto forbidden places.
Thus, even in this malaise of the modern world, there are signs of spiritual renewal. People have never had more interest in occultism than today – and perhaps occultism has never been less occult. The advent of the Internet means that any dedicated student of the occult has easy access to more material than they could ever read and more videos than they could ever watch. This has led to a proliferation of new forums in which such topics are discussed, and with that new perspectives have arisen.
A few years ago, I spoke to an esotericist who had been involved with various secret societies, and who had taken part in a ritual where his body was slathered in a psychedelic balm before he was sealed into a sarcophagus for two days. This man told me straight out that “consciousness is God.” If consciousness is God, then understanding consciousness is the same as understanding God, i.e. the very basis of our reality. It’s the most important endeavour that we could ever engage in.
Consciousness is the only thing I know for certain to be true. That I am conscious of consciousness is proof that consciousness exists. All else in perception is merely the contents of consciousness, something that comes and goes. That all else could all be illusion as far as I know. If consciousness is God, the only thing I know to be true is God. Is it not true, then, that the riddle of consciousness and the riddle of God are the same thing? And that, if the existence of consciousness can be affirmed, then the existence of God also?
Could it be that the entire concept of a Hard Problem of Consciousness can only be conceived of if one has first made the erroneous assumption that the physical world is primary to consciousness? If one considers consciousness primary to the physical world, the problems with explaining it disappear. The idea that the brain generates consciousness might turn out to be the geocentrism of our age, a mass delusion which put darkness before the light, and which distracted humanity from the truth.
Ultimately, there’s no actual proof that the death of the physical body impacts consciousness. It’s taken for granted in materialist circles, and in mainstream society, but there’s no actual proof of it. Each of us knows themselves to be conscious. None of us have good reason to think that the deaths of our physical bodies ought to impact that consciousness beyond changing its contents. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that consciousness can be presumed to survive the death of the physical body. If the materialist wants to assert otherwise, the burden of proof is on them.
This reasoning turns the usual reasoning – that we are our bodies, and those bodies generate consciousness, therefore upon the death of those bodies consciousness ends – on its head. But, as this essay has demonstrated, there are no justifiable reasons to think that our brains generate consciousness. The belief that the brain generates consciousness is a lingering, dogmatic superstition that took root in the materialist vacuum left by the death of the god of Abraham.
Top scientists, from Schroedinger to Hoffman, have believed for a hundred years now that consciousness is primary to matter. This idea hasn’t broken through into mainstream acceptance yet, possibly because materialist atheism and religious superstition still have too much inertia. The prediction of this essay is that it will. A saying attributed to Buddha goes “Three things cannot be long hidden: the Sun, the Moon, and the truth.” What if materialist atheism and religious superstition were themselves little more than banks of clouds obscuring the Sun that was the truth of the primacy of consciousness? In such a case, the complete victory of idealism is inevitable.
Cyril Scott, in An Outline Of Modern Occultism, noted that intelligent and honest people were seldom satisfied with either scientific materialist atheism or mainstream religion. The former is too soulless and the latter too dogmatic. Thanks to the Internet, those people now have options. So it may be that it’s time now for both atheism and false religion to just fall away.
Could humanity ever get to a stage where all our suffering became as ephemeral as the clouds, which sometimes obscure the Sun for a moment, but which always get blown away? If this is ever to be possible, then restoring consciousness to its rightful position at the centre of life must be the key to achieving it.
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