Acclimating to Not Knowing

There are many levels at which you know and you don’t know, as well as levels at which you think you know, and think you don’t know. There is no way to systematise or explain these levels, simply because they will be vastly different for each being. I don’t ask anyone to take this on faith. I am far more interested in encouraging your exploration in this direction. What I would like to suggest are some tools with which you can begin to call into question some of the things you think you might know.

Sometimes you have to move in a direction that appears backwards in order to go make what we could call ‘progress’. In true self-inquiry we are always extending a foot out into the darkness, and although the results aren’t always guaranteed, the intention does always count.

In conventional terms, I couldn’t put anything on a piece of paper as ‘truth’. I am really no better positioned than you are. I am however aware of many things I thought I knew, and I am increasingly skeptical of the value these things carry. I have witnessed so many of them dissolve or break away like chunks of sea ice. Sometimes these fragments are never to be seen again, sometimes they occasionally drift back within sight, but never again taking up the same amount of space on the horizon. These are things I relied upon at some point as inviolable facts, what I assumed to be truth itself. What I witness when this kind of inner event happens, whether through inquiry or accident, is that there is an exceptionally fine line between a sense of liberation and horror. The prospect of freedom simultaneously exhilarates and terrifies us.

On the one hand, the sense of teetering over the abyss, looking down into the black unknown is horrifying – but only to one part of the self. That is the part that thinks it knows, that thinks it should understand, that thinks it ought to have some grasp over the management of its inner topography. It turns out that part of us is very minor upon investigation. That part of me, despite being so tiny, has historically been like a finger held up in front of my eyes only an arm’s length away, but has seemed big enough to blot out entire galaxies in the night sky. The tiniest parts of us inside can block out the greater portion of reality, if adequate care and attention is not taken.

To the greater part of me, so witnessed, there is a sense of freedom and liberation as these pieces of knowledge once claimed as firm ground have broken away. It reveals what was always really there, which is not the black abyss we thought would swallow us. There is a space there, alive and whole, that only seems to increase in plenitude with each inner discovery. This is the space in which I know that I don’t know, and it is alive.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite referred to this state of not-knowing as ‘agnosia’, which is distinct from mere ignorance. In fact, my knowing that I don’t know is the primary condition to be in maximal congruence to this greater reality. It is neither silence nor non-silence, neither darkness nor light, neither everywhere nor nowhere. It is a living state of pure potential. There is nothing behind it; everything is out in front of it.

At our level of being, the coordinates at which it may be located are ‘here’ and ‘now’. For the purposes of having something to refer to it as within human language, it could be called ‘the unmanifest’ or ‘the unborn’. It doesn’t really matter what we choose to call it. We could always call it ‘consciousness’, but I would rather use a term that you are likely to have less immediate familiarity with so that it doesn’t dock in at the port of your intellect carrying with it too much by way of unnecessary cargo.

For reasons suggested earlier, thinking you know anything about this isn’t overly helpful. This includes everything you have ever read about it before, whether religious, scientific, philosophical or spiritual. At the same time, thinking you don’t know anything about it also isn’t especially useful, because you certainly will have had some experience with it, since it is the foundation of your entire inner life. What I find is more useful is de-emphasising your insistence on what you think you do or do not know.

This is what the Zen practitioner Shunryu Suzuki refers to as ‘beginner’s mind’. It then doesn’t really fall within a category of what we ordinarily think of as something we know or don’t know, understand or don’t understand. It is more to do with what we are, with what our direct, unaltered experience is when we aren’t consumed by the common human endeavour of cramming it full of new content, maps, systems, or other frames of reference.

You may have noticed that many people are often extremely bothered by not having anything to talk about. Thinking that you don’t know, but assuming you need to know, creates violent ripples of dissonance in the human mind. Often these people will attempt to remedy this with talking incessantly, or via outsourced mental noise such as reading, radio or television. This is because silence is highly detrimental to this limited sense of self which lives off reams of acquired mental content. It is almost like it can sense an undercurrent of awareness that it has been taken from a space of freedom into a tiny, separate skull cramped full of beliefs and prejudices. Silence is corrosive to this illusion, and it can make people nervous to the point of being physically ill with fear when they don’t have something to occupy their attention.

Lack of self-understanding is the modern disease. It was Blaisé Pascal who correctly observed that the root of modern man’s ills is his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself. This highlights the symptoms of modern man’s materialist syndrome as a being that has either willfully or ignorantly acquired no familiarity with their own soul.

Before I understood that the abyss beneath our claims to knowing wasn’t annihilation, I was extremely terrified of anything that threatened what I had claimed in belief or knowledge. It felt like impending doom to me that the things I thought I knew might be threatened, questioned or even subjected to slight modification. If I came across something that disturbed this sense of knowing, or forced me to modify the way I think, I would spend dutiful hours repairing thoughts, making new connections, reframing, re-routing.

The nature of this activity wasn’t noticed at the time. I just thought I was a bit depressed, or ‘thinking things over’, although what I was really doing was making sure the new disturbances would not affect the total structure of my established worldview – I was in damage control.

If someone had told me at an early age that none of this was necessary, and had I heeded this advice, this would have been like being led to a goldmine. Of course, you cannot be told this, because no-one would ever listen unless they were truly ready to hear – in which case, they would be led there eventually anyway.

True knowledge, which is a term I would hesitate to throw around, does not fall within our usual system of values, because everything we have collectively developed by way of what we have call ‘wisdom’ is something employed instrumentally to in order to get something else beyond it – spiritual wisdom is not like this. It is not what we think we know. It cannot be learned from someone else, it cannot be mooched, it cannot be bought or sold, and it cannot be gifted, inherited or stolen. It is exclusively earned through a combination of experience and direct application of your inner attention. You have to be looking, listening – you have to be interested in how this experience right here deepens and unfolds. Not for some new acquisition, status, or a new set of mental toys, but because you are inherently interested in what is here, and what you are.

A worldview, being a constellation of mental positions about the way we believe things are, isn’t true knowledge in this sense. It is acquired over time, and maybe it is closer to an accurate picture of the way things are relative to others. A worldview represents a high investment of one’s life energy – at least, insofar as a psychological entity is concerned, in its time-bound personhood. The necessary feature of any and every worldview is that it is limited – it portrays an image of reality at the vital cost of its limitlessness.

To the selfless-self discovered beneath the turmoil, this is all neither here nor there. The unborn doesn’t exist in psychological time like our worldview does, it exists here and now. That is what qualifies it as alive rather than being some kind of coral-like accretion running backward throughout personal and human history. No worldview is required to engage in Being, although the false self has zero tolerance for the unborn. You might be surprised at what can and will be discarded without harm to you. I certainly was, and I still am quite routinely. The universe never seems to run out of surprises.

What do you think you know? That might be a good place to start. Chances are, if you think you really know something that isn’t subject to criticism or doubt, then I’m willing to bet that you probably haven’t inquired very far into it. If you think of your beliefs and conclusions as each having a piece of string attached to them, try following the string all the way from one end to the other.

People are generally reluctant to do this, or at the very least unpractised. This is partly because questioning the things you took for granted as true is of such high novelty that there isn’t widely available information about it. Most people will discover that there are strings they are more comfortable to follow than others. There are many strings we absolutely do not want to follow, because part of us recoils in horror at the thought of what we may or may not find at the end.

Fear can actually be your friend in this exercise, because you will learn by your apprehension which conclusions you have set aside as inviolable and sacred. The difference between these beliefs and others you aren’t afraid to investigate is that these are cherished beliefs, probably touching on core beliefs that structurally support your worldview. Can you afford to lose your worldview in the pursuit of truth? Your view of who is right and who is wrong? Who are the blameless, and who are the damned?

Maybe these are all just temporary roles within the play of consciousness, or, maybe this universe has some kind of insubvertible structure. Take a look though, see whether there are strings worth investigating while others can be left trailing into the darkness. The discovery you will be making here is not directly about truth, but your inner relationship to truth. Am I willing to question everything, or do I have a set of rules set aside that make me feel safe, that I choose to never pursue in inquiry, because I already know the answer?

We might begin with some really simple, but big questions, such as: how do you know who or what you think you are? What makes you think that you are who your memories tell you that you are, and is there a difference? If you lost everything you had ever learned or remembered, who would you be? Who would you seem to be, to yourself or to other people? Is there any difference? What do you think you know that cannot be undermined by any reason, any doubt? If there is anything that you have taken on authority, whether philosophical or religious, and how do you know that you have not been knowingly misled by some kind of demon? What can you be sure of? Will you have some answer in the future? Did you once have some answer in the past, which you have now lost?

The goal here isn’t for you to settle upon some profound new answer to worship and hold onto, but to crack open some of your pre-existing assumptions.

Our culture doesn’t generally do a great job of preparing us for this scale of inquiry. Culture is for the most part a topographical map permitting exploration in very limited regions, providing the illusion of limited freedom and reduced options within the prescribed system. There are of course plenty of roadblocks and no-go zones. Some of these directions are so taboo that other people will attempt to repudiate your claims by agreeing in knowing falsehood that you can’t have gone to the places you claim, simply because it is easier for them to believe a lie that preserves the structural integrity of the consensus than it is to embark upon overhauling their own inner realm.

A classic example of this is the person who leaves a religious organisation claiming that they have seen unwholesome things that led them to leave it behind. The cultural response encouraged and supported within the remainder of that group will be some version of “yes, but the devil would try to convince you of that. We, however, are standing firm, because the devil will not succeed in tricking us”.

This effect is everywhere. It isn’t really religious, it is human. It happens in the church, the school cafeteria – it may even happen in killer whale pods, for all we know. We revile the dissenter because they threaten to inform us of something concerning our choices and position that we would really rather not see the light of day. It exposes our foolishness. If our choices that were made in the sleep of ignorance were to become subject to any form of scrutiny, the only possible outcome insofar as ego was concerned would be damage and destruction. If you placed yourself in a position of allowing this damage, you would be forced to repair or even entirely discard what you had invested in for many years.

Of course, some people have no control over this collapse and are forced to act when it comes upon them. When we turn a blind eye, we are allowing cognitive dissonance to win at the expense of truth. Truth has to be at stake, not because anything we believe could be inherently true, but because anything that is formed as belief in darkness is going to be subject to falsehood – even if it just so happened to turn out to be true. You can be wrong by mistake, but you can’t ever be right by mistake – see whether this is true in your own experience.

Again, wisdom or self-knowledge can only come as result of your deliberative inner attention and receptivity. It isn’t mysterious or elusive, but it does ask you to put all that you hold dear to the highest scrutiny.

Truth is not going to arrive as the addition of something new, it is going to consist at a minimum of disempowering the falsehoods that predominate the collective mind. We have found ourselves as humans in a position of needing to urgently assess the collective structures we have agreed to. Unless we allow those structures to fall under the light of examination within ourselves, what hope do we have as a species? What value can we really claim to put on honesty and integrity?

What might you lose if you were to loosen your death-grip on your worldview? What kind of world do we want to leave to our children? And if it doesn’t begin directly with ourselves, in our own inmost world, then where else could it possibly start?

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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The Basics Of The Alchemy Of Character Development

Westerners are used to thinking in material terms, and we take the same approach to writing fiction. We tend to think our of characters as primarily material beings, who are challenged by emotions that are themselves evolutionary adaptations to survival challenges. As such, the life of a fictional character is mostly about the neurotransmitters that flow through their brain.

The fundamental viewpoint promoted by this book, instead, is that of viewing one’s characters as primarily frequencies – namely, the frequency of their consciousness. The higher a character’s frequency of consciousness, the lighter their soul, and vice-versa.

In this book, it will be explained, a character’s frequency of consciousness is the most important thing about them. It is the driving force that impels them to take action. It is the fundamental explanatory force that makes sense of the character’s station of birth, his basic motivations, intentions and aspirations.

Herein it is assumed that the reader understands the truth of the phrase ‘turn lead into gold’: namely that this phrase does not refer to physical lead and physical gold, but rather to the transmution of the soul, from spiritual lead to spiritual gold. The true alchemist is not interested in mere material wealth, but in much subtler forms of wealth. This includes the treasures of the world beyond as well as the more sublime emotions here on Earth.

To make a truly interesting story, the main character’s frequency of consciousness has to change. This tends to make for a gratifying reader experience, as long as the reader can identify with that main character. By the end of a good story, the reader ought to have an appreciation for the development that protagonist has undergone to make them what they now are.

In the most typical character arc, a low frequency of consciousness is transmuted into a higher one. This is the typical heroic character arc beloved of stories going all the way back to The Epic Of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh begins his story as a low-frequency hedonist, and ends it as a high-frequency man of his people.

Countless tales follow this same pattern. The protagonist begins the story as a more-or-less normal person, and, through various trials and tribulations, they become something special – stronger, smarter, wiser, better than before. It’s what Joseph Campbell called the Hero’s Journey and it’s been known about since the oral traditions that predated literature.

This character arc is very common, however, so skillful authors like to throw some twists into the story. Sometimes the protagonist has to lose to make the story interesting. As such, the development of a character’s frequency throughout the course of a story doesn’t usually follow a linear upwards progression.

The basics of the alchemy of character development, as described in this book, are the basics of telling an interesting story. It’s all about alchemy – and hence this book is all about alchemy too. The logic is that the Hero’s Journey is primarily an alchemical journey, and that the joy the reader gets from a story primarily comes from the alchemy of character development, and the ups and downs of that development over the course of that story.

There are three main parts to this book.

The first explains the Mithraic Ladder, and its seven steps. The Mithraic Ladder is the axis along which alchemical development occurs. The bottommost step is lead, and the alchemist ascends through tin, iron, copper, silver and mercury to reach the top step, which is gold.

The second explains how a character can move up from one step to the one above. This is keeping in accordance with the principle that people like to read about main characters who overcome challenges and transform themselves while doing so.

The third explains how a character can move down from one step to the one below. This is in keeping with the principle that stories of linear progression are not very interesting, and so readers prefer stories in which the protagonist suffers setbacks, withdrawing temporarily so that they can rise again (or even descend further, in the case of tragedies).

The totality of this book is about how a writer can understand the Hero’s Journey from an alchemical perspective.

This is an excerpt from Vince McLeod’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

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The Drop Of The Penny

by Simon P. Murphy

There is a trajectory within you like a hunger. That hunger is the drive to reconnect with what is true. It is not about belief, simple or complex, and is not about being holy or righteous. It is about one thing only – seeing clearly, and revealing that which is true and whole. Another way of putting this is that it is the drive to come to the full conclusion of your existential seeking.

Why would someone be averse to seeing clearly? Because usually, there is a whole raft of illusion at stake. If you chose to see clearly, through inner eyes unfettered by illusion, you might discover that what you have invested years into will someday end, despite your best efforts to the contrary. You might see that the knowledge will disappear, or the money, the health, the relationships, the career, the house, the identities, the religious or philosophical commitments. Why else would something feel fragile or impermanent, unless it carried within it the promise of its ending? Why would it not feel like inherently immutable truth?

That is something we often choose not to look at, because it tends to render the scope of the illusion far less satisfactory than it already is. If we found ourselves examining the contents of our inner lives, which consist in the relationship we have with our illusions and what we think they afford us, we might find all of our illusions quite rapidly deteriorating or becoming displaced. And who would want that?

Interestingly, the part of us that is real actually wants that. Not to get rid of what is around us – but to critically examine our relationship to everything we hold to be real, permanent and meaningful in order to make space for what is actually real to shine through our inner world. That is basically the entire spiritual project in a nutshell – the discovery, sudden or gradual, that there is not one true thought.

What is real that shines through has a curious origin – we are responsible for none of it. We can choose to be instrumental to its coming forth. This is where the sense of existential dissatisfaction and dislocation in life issues from – not from being alone, not from not belonging, or not knowing or believing the right things, but from having not been willing to see how things are clearly. This asks that we meet all the things that we have been responsible for. All of our choices, all of our beliefs, our cultural creations that we have been party to, all that was formed out of darkness in the strange refusal to look at who and what we truly are in our essence.

Most everyone would prefer to be told who and what they are in their essence, because that is simply the way that humans have become accustomed to living a conditioned life. We are used to being told who and what we are by our various cultural institutions, and then moving ahead with our lives. Those sources have presumed to give us everything we thought we needed by giving us what we are ultimately not – our names, roles, etc. The Truth of who you are, however, isn’t like that at all – not in the slightest. You absolutely cannot be told who you are, nor can you be given who you are. You also cannot have a belief so sophisticated or clearly refined that would provide the detail of who you are in a neat envelope.

There is a way of knowing for certain that you have not met the vital recognition of who and what you are in truth. It will be this: the question of who you are will continue to have some appeal to you. In other words, you want to know who you are, because you are under the impression that you don’t already know. The reason for this is simple: absolutely nothing else in your life has been able to tell you what you are with any degree of satisfaction. When you know who you are in truth, the question has fallen away completely- you have no question to ask about who you are – period. That is how you will know. No one alive has partial knowledge as to who they are; they either know who they are at this level, or they don’t.

The next question is: now that you know that you don’t know, that you have not yet met the recognition of who and what you truly are, what do you want to do with that?

Chances are, it will be one of the following – either you don’t want to look at it just yet, in which case you probably will not have read this far, or, you are so hungry to know the truth of who you are, that you are willing to push ahead in your integrity, even if it might mean losing everything that you know. Because after all, if you don’t know who you are, how much of your inner or outer world can you be certain is illusion? How much can you really say for certain will remain or fall away as a result of your discovery of your true identity?

If you are like most people, including myself, you will have gone a lifetime of feeling a sense of grave unease about not being sure of who you are, to a greater or lesser degree. You will have attempted to establish it through many courses of action which haven’t quite settled the matter. All of these ways have been tried before by people of all times and places, and without effect. This is because there is only one certain way of settling the whole question once and for all, and that is by coming to a true meeting with who and what you are.

Discovery of who you are is a milestone of what we might call spiritual evolution. It doesn’t begin there, and it certainly doesn’t end there – but it is the vital step forward. I like to frame this discovery to the drop of the penny. The penny drops, a realisation is forged, and a connection that wasn’t made before in this life suddenly clicks into place, and you can never, ever see the world or your place in it quite the same way as you did before. This experience will leave you altered, even if you do your best to forget it ever happened. There is also no guarantee whatsoever that your life will turn out great or awful as a result of this discovery- but you do have to decide how much you want to know, because the fact is, it could cost you everything.

It cost you your personal future, it could certainly cost relationships, and it could cost everything you thought you knew was real. The question is: just how much are you willing to know who you are? What is the deepest calling guiding you? For myself, there were certain moments in my childhood that led me on paths of discovery that gave me a hunger to know who I was that in some ways seemed almost an inevitable collision course. But that only relates to me. What about you? Can the hunger within you, the divine yearning, be set aside for another few years? Or maybe for the rest of your life? Or are you willing to come to the truth of the matter now, in this moment? Is the yearning for self-knowledge diminishing of its own accord, or is it making itself known in more pressing ways?

I truly don’t have anything of value to say to anyone who isn’t genuinely interested in the truth of who we are. There is simply no capacity to help. For my part, there is no sales pitch, there is no ‘ought’ or ‘should’, no prescription for what you should be interested in, nor how you should be managing your life. There is nothing to teach those who aren’t curious. However, if what you actually feel within yourself is being geared toward waking up into you-don’t-know-what, then what I can tell you is this: in no way can you force this process or make it happen, but you can invite a meeting with your true self. In other words, you can facilitate a space within yourself, your inner being, to become available to that which is living and true, that which has always been ready and available if we were simply to take the time to look and listen with an attitude of open attention.

What will happen, with time, is a true meeting with yourself. How that will look, I cannot tell you. In my own experience, I can tell you that there is an encounter with Being possible that is dependent on no time, no thought, no belief, no self. When you meet this for the very first time, after even a second you will no longer question the nature of who and what you truly are. The penny will have dropped, and all of the abstract and philosophical questions about your being you once found so ineluctable, so pressing, so heavy and urgent, simply cease, like engines which have been exhausted of fuel. All of the momentum of your endlessly tiring self seeking and self definition simply ends, and you probably never realised just how desperate and tiring it all was, until the relief of it ending – at which point, there is usually years worth of psychological mess to clean up.

You are suddenly in completely new territory. You come to ask yourself new questions, such as “what happens to my energy and attention that has gone into this absurd, erroneous pursuit?”

You may be surprised to find just how much of that energy was allocated into the seeking of your true identity via fictionalised structures. How many of your life choices have consisted in some version of “I will invest in this because this will tell me who I am, as well as show others who I think I am or how I want others to perceive me”. What if the very bssis for those kinds of investment of energy, the sense of derived identity, were very suddenly gone, like the floor taken out from underneath you? You have to understand that to thoroughly reveal your identity is a life-altering event, some might even say a catastrophic spiritual and psychological event. Once the horse has bolted, there is absolutely no putting it back, for better or for worse. However, if you look closely enough within yourself, you will know exactly how much this discovery really means to you. You will know what price you would be willing to pay.

To discover who you are can leave you with a lifetime of cleaning up the inner and outer detritus. The great news is that the energy from every illusion you ever invested in, every inner scam, is returned to you and becomes fuel for the glowing fire of your awareness. Nothing real can be lost, only illusion can fall away – and eventually it will anyway, with physical death. All it takes for you to discover the truth of your being now is your willingness to take that first step into the unknown. You aren’t even coming into something new. The strange thing about this experience is that it is a re-membering. You are pooling together once more the parts of you that somehow became divided. You are certainly not adding something new; you are removing something that has served as an obstacle to that which was always already here and available. It is not complicated, it is simple. Complexity and simplicity are like directions in self-inquiry. If you follow complexity further, you are moving further away from the truth. If you are following the direction of simplicity, you are always moving closer toward truth, being the recognition of that which is already here in unity and wholeness.

There are many who have gone before you, as there are many who are making the same journey now. The encouragement I would give is this: the only thing you will ever have to lose is that which you aren’t going to keep anyway.

Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.

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The Mithraic Ladder Of Drugs

Mithraic Ladders can be found everywhere in both natural and artificial worlds, because they are forms of the Great Masculine Axis. The drug world is no exception. This is to say that the various drugs in common use correspond to various levels of the Mithraic Ladder. This essay explains.

At the bottom of the Mithraic Ladder is lead. Lead is the dark element representing our basic fears for survival. It also represents Saturn, otherwise known as The Grim Reaper. Decay, deterioration, destruction and decrepitude are all energies of the level of lead. A person at this level will be merely surviving and nothing else.

The drug of lead is heroin. This is the drug often used by the survivors of the worst abuses and crimes. If a person has given up on life, heroin is often what they turn to. Appropriate to the level of Saturn, heroin (and the drugs like it) kills people the most easily. Heroin users are of the lowest frequency of any drug users.

The next step up the Mithraic Ladder is tin. Tin represents Jupiter, the jovial god of greatness and irresponsible good times. The characteristic emotion is joy – joy being what arises when the fear of the lead stage dissipates. People at the level of tin are looking to have a good time ahead of any other consideration. There is a high time preference.

Alcohol is the drug equivalent of the level of tin. On alcohol it’s possible to have a fantastic time in a very irresponsible manner. Much like Zeus, there are millions of drunkards out there who have children they conceived in a drunken frenzy, and then didn’t look after. If a story was written about Zeus today, he’d kill someone drunk driving.

The third step of the Mithraic Ladder is iron. This is analogous to Mars, the god of war. The emotion emblematic of this step is rage. Once you start having a good time, you quickly learn that there are people who want you to suffer and be enslaved instead. Thus, a person has to learn rage in order to live free.

The characteristic drug of this third stage is methamphetamine. Not only does meth use make people prone to violently attack others (even more so than alcohol), it’s also beloved of actual warfighters, most famously the German Army in France in 1940. Meth is an outstanding war drug because if your enemy needs to sleep and you don’t, then you win.

The fourth step of the Ladder is copper, analogous to Aphrodite, Venus and Freya, the goddesses of love. Copper is the stage one reaches after all the fighting. After all, men mostly fight to win women. So once a man has a woman his attention naturally shifts, from fighting to lovemaking.

The fourth level is represented in the drug world by MDMA, the love drug. MDMA is famous for increasing the release of oxytocin, the neurotransmitter that makes people bond with each other. If Aphrodite would cast a spell to infatuate someone today, she’d probably involve MDMA.

The fifth step of the Mithraic Ladder is silver. The brilliance of silver is analogous to the knowledge that is beloved of people at this level. Silver is more precious than copper, because this is the stage at which someone moves away from simple pleasures, and starts to become attracted to the truth. At this level a person starts to think of suprapersonal concerns.

Silver is analogous to tobacco, the drug of industry. This is not to say that tobacco is a particularly great drug – it’s not more fun than taking MDMA. But it’s possible to achieve awesome things with the diligence associated with tobacco use. Many of the engineers behind the great engineering projects of the 19th and 20th Centuries would have been habitual tobacco smokers.

The sixth step of the Mithraic Ladder is mercury. If silver is brilliance, mercury is genius. The quicksilver nature of mercury reminds of the quicksilver nature of the extremely intellectually gifted. A person at this level cannot easily be judged by the masses, who, being unable to distinguish genius from madness, cannot make sense of this level.

The characteristic drug of this sixth stage is cannabis. This is the drug used by most of the creative people today; the writers and musicians, artists and filmakers. People use cannabis for a variety of reasons, not all associated with the relatively high frequency of mercury. But those who do use it for creativity readily find a bottomless well of inspiration in the herb.

The top level of the Mithraic Ladder is gold. This represents a person who has transcended mere egoic concerns, and who has fully integrated their will with the Will of God. A person at the top of the Mithraic Ladder is beyond genius: they are a divine spark. They want for nothing, having returned to the natural state of bliss that is the province of pure consciousness.

The drugs representing the top stage of the Mithraic Ladder are psychedelics. These are the substances that can induce a person to see beyond the material illusions and to rediscover their own soul. Psychedelics also have the quality of being all but impossible to become addicted to. It’s common for people who take a strong dose of a psychedelic to not want to use them again for a while, in stark contrast to heroin and tobacco.

The Mithraic Ladder can be found everywhere in reality. In the world of drugs, it manifests as a spectrum with opiates and depressants at the bottom, and spiritual sacraments at the top.

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