The Secret to Happiness
What's your mission?
I have an ongoing, at-times-heated dispute with a friend (one of my many highly accomplished friends who moved to the small island of Ibiza around pandemic times and now does a lot of ceremonies and kite surfing), who finds my writing too negative, which I suppose is a synonym for depressing. He believes I am not “self aware of how negative my writing is.” In reality, I don’t feel negative at all. I feel quite happy and at peace these days, even if I cover some dark subjects. I hope that comes through in the work. Please let me know in the comments.
Here is the thing: Philosophically, I am a monistic idealist. I believe that the world we experience is the “play of consciousness.” Consciousness enjoys itself, experiments with itself, experiences itself by creating an endless profusion of beings, worlds, universes, dimensions, as well as individuated containers of consciousness like us, who get to explore as separate observers in the transitory Samsara a.k.a. Nirvana. Every and any thing we can think, feel, and experience is an energetic pulse — a little wave or cloud rolling around, a pattern of forces shimmering across the infinite ocean/sky of pure spacious awareness.
I feel incredibly grateful, appreciative, and awe-struck to be part of this unfolding spectacle. I live in constant wonder. As an idealist, I believe “I Am That”: The infinite, eternal consciousness that created this universe as well as all universes and beings and possibilities. I know, in the end, I will never let myself down.
When it comes to near-term outcomes, I will keep trying to do my best. But I have also, on a deeper level, surrendered. I realize it is out of my hands. (“Not my will, but Thy will, be done.”). I find strength — resilience, tenacity — in this.
In order to grow, there are many terrible mistakes, misadventures, and harsh lessons our souls need to experience as part of this adventure of consciousness, which, I believe, continues across many lifetimes1. Ultimately, I sense, everything is perfectly orchestrated, harmonically balanced, and destined to return, eventually, to the pristine, spaceless and timeless source from which it came.
Time is simply duration or interval: The requisite opportunity for consciousness or God to know itself through us, as us. To experience everything possible before refolding itself back into itself.
Where will life — the succession of lives — lead us, eventually?
I love Henri Bergson’s idea that the “universe is a machine to create Gods,” while I also agree with Tibetan Buddhism and Dzogchen that everything ultimately dissolves back into the primordial condition of non-dual bliss — experience without an experiencer, something we recover in meditation or for a split second during orgasm, the climax of the act of physical love which is a reminder of divine union: The ultimate truth of what is.
For me, personally, the most formative element in developing my perspective has been the phenomenological DMT experience — both nn-DMT and 5-meo-DMT — correlated with a great deal of research and study in esoteric traditions. I’ve addressed this before, and don’t want to dive too deep into increasingly familiar psychedelic waters here. I will say that I believe 5-meo-DMT directly confirms the Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana or the Void. nn-DMT seems to reveal the existence of subtler dimensions of beings or forms of hyperdimensional consciousness beyond our limits, a bit like Ezekial’s vision of the “four creatures,” of wheels-within-wheels, from the Bible:
The four creatures looked like a blazing fire, or like fiery torches. Tongues of fire shot back and forth between the creatures, and out of the fire, bolts of lightning. The creatures flashed back and forth like strikes of lightning. … As I watched the four creatures, I saw something that looked like a wheel on the ground beside each of the four-faced creatures. This is what the wheels looked like: They were identical wheels, sparkling like diamonds in the sun. It looked like they were wheels within wheels, like a gyroscope…
It seems Ezekial had as much trouble describing this experience as I do!
My thesis is that we are here to learn, to create, to have fun, and, as divinities-in-training, to learn how to take ever-greater responsibility for the precious miracle of life and being. This last element — learning to take greater responsibility for everything that is — eventually requires a self-overcoming of immediate desire, including the desire for pleasure, personal success, power, satiation, as well as the ego’s desire to be proven right. This requires inner work, but also sincere mental effort.
I believe, as contemporary people in an intricately interdependent and deeply troubled world, we can’t just meditate, dance, or chant our way to “enlightenment” or attain it via any psychedelic shortcut. We need to integrate philosophy, and particularly, systems thinking. This is, perhaps, a new element in the quest for realization. We have to learn systems thinking and then act on it. I don’t find it surprising that realization requires an intellectual effort: The same is the case with Buddhism, which is less a religion than an experiential philosophy based on dialectical reasoning, an inheritance from 2,500 years ago.
Earlier cultures — like Buddhist or indigenous societies — were not destroying, polluting, and poisoning the totality of their planetary environment as we are. It wasn’t possible for them to wreck the Earth, as industrial civilization is doing now. Therefore, individual sadhus, mystics, or monks could pursue personal realization or “salvation” in monasteries or on mountaintops without any guilt. Of course, some people still do that today. But I feel more is required from us.
We have benefited from this system: We were born into it. We must, if we can, correct it. All of those people in the Global South who are enslaved by our corporations and increasingly threatened with famine are also expressions of the underlying field of unified consciousness. This means they are, ultimately, dissociated aspects of myself and yourself. It feels deeply wrong to allow for such needless suffering because of an unjust system that massively over-rewards certain kinds of labor activities (like moving virtual numbers around on stock trading platforms) over others (like growing food or taking care of the sick or elderly). I consider it spiritual bypassing to not address this.
I realize I feel a bit shy about stating it, but this is what I believe personally, and feel in my heart: The only true path of initiation for us, as contemporary Anglo-Europeans, requires directly engaging with the demonic forces that our culture has unleashed via the last centuries of imperialism, colonialism, accelerated technological and industrial development, consumer Capitalism, and now cognitive Capitalism or “technofeudalism”. This is actually the warrior path, the dangerous path, the righteous path, and the fun path.
I find this exciting and have tried (and failed) to convey this excitement to people like my friend in Ibiza. Mythologically, the hero gains his heroic status not by meditating on a mountaintop or undergoing a thousand ayahuasca ceremonies, but by going to meet the dragon, demon, or giant that is devouring the people. In every legend, this requires courage, cunning, pluck, and good spirits, which somehow, in the end, compensate for what would otherwise seem an impossible assignment.
Here is our first Instagram livestream discussing the new course:
Today, the dragon/demon confronting us is a gigantic human-made egregore, or several of them entwined together. We confront the fossil fuel / military-industrial / technocratic control system with its myriad octopus arms, Botfarms, assassins, robotic drones, bought-and-sold politician-clowns, and so on, at a time when global temperatures have spiked beyond the worst projections of terrified climate scientists.
The situation seems impossible – and perhaps it is. But why should that put us off?
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