Symbiotic Existential Cosmology

So what is this key to life, the universe and everything about? I’m going to explain all this, but first we need to take stock of the actual situation we are all facing in raw acute terms of planetary survival.

Although a visionary, I am first and foremost a scientist, who has spent my life lecturing in mathematics, with a research speciality in quantum cosmology, chaos theory, fractal processes, neuroscience and biocosmology. This means that my entheogenic journey, the bubbling Dionysian spring I am going to intoxicate you with, is founded on a real, verifiable, scientific cosmology, not just some kind of spiritual pipe dream, but this cosmology is putting consciousness, and our free will to affect the world around us, right back into the driving seat, and that is going to upend the Copernican principle that humanity does not have a privileged view of the universe at large.

The Three Faces of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology

The symbiotic cosmology solves (1) the hard problem – why subjective consciousness exists, (2) the problem of conscious intent – how volitional will acts on the world, and (3) the central enigma of existential cosmology – the role of conscious life in the universe. It does this simply and directly, without invoking any spooky features of panpsychism, by applying objective physical and biological criteria to define complementary subjective modes, by the coherent forms of instability involved, so it uses objective science to qualitatively classify subjective phenomena.

(1) Fractal biocosmology: The fact that life is a consequence of quantum cosmology is blindingly obvious! Just look around you! Life exists! It does so because it is an interactive manifestation of the laws of nature. While the cosmological energy pathway leads to the cosmic web, galaxies, black holes and stars; the structural pathway of the four symmetry-broken forces of nature leads to a fractal universe – quarks, composite baryons, atomic nuclei, atoms, fractal molecules, molecular complexes, cell organelles, cells, tissues, organs, the conscious brain, organisms and biospheres.

(2) Darwinian panpsychism: This is again irrefutable that we all as subjective conscious agents, are consciously aware that we have volitional will over the physical universe in our decision-making and actions. But this means matter including brains have a hidden subjective aspect. This implies panpsychism. There thus follows a spectrum of graduated manifestations of subjectivity, from quantum to edge-of-chaos to cell to organism and biosphere, based on the biological and physical criteria giving rise to these systems. It is faithful to Darwin’s own statement that free-will extends to the cnidaria, further extending it to all eucaryotes.

A. Primitive subjectivity: The ability of the subjective mind to affect the physical brain means the natural world has to have a primitive subjective aspect – autonomous volitional will thus implies natural panpsychism. Individual quanta, quantum-sensitive “butterfly effect” systems and prokaryote cells thus each inherit a primitive subjective aspect, although not attentive consciousness as such.

B. Sentient consciousness arose in a discrete transition in single-celled eucaryotes, accompanying the endosymbiosis between archaea and bacteria, when respiration became internalised in the mitochondria, leaving the cell membrane free for sensory functions through edge-of-chaos membrane excitation and social signalling via primal neurotransmitters such as serotonin, to anticipate threats and aid survival. This “experiential anticipation” predated multi-cellular nervous systems by a billion years.

C. Organismic consciousness emerged in multi-celled animals using the same edge-of-chaos excitability and social signalling molecules as in single-celled species as neurotransmitters. This explains why animals continue to be subjectively conscious through natural selection for survival, with nervous system phase coherent parallel processing seamlessly incorporated much later, but never replacing experiential anticipation.

D. Uncertainty and mind: The action of mind on brain necessarily arises from modulating the "random" aspect of quantum uncertainty in edge of chaos brain processing. This enables volitional will to intervene in the brain without disrupting the partial causal closure in computational brain processing. This provides plenty of room to affect the uncertain outcomes in evolutionary survival using both subjective anticipation and historical experience.

E. Biosphere and universe, in turn, inherit an indirect form of consciousness through the conscious biota that exist within them, as the most complex interconnected climax manifestations of sentient consciousness in the universe.

(8) Symbiotic Cosmology: The universe is symbiotic biologically, psychically, and cosmologically, throughout.

A. Organismic: All higher (eucaryote) organisms are multiply symbiotic species, , by archeal-bacterial endosymbiosis, sexual symbiosis, and viral/TE symbiosis.

B.Biospheric: Survival of the fittest is survival of the fittest biospheric symbiont, not the most dominant species, or the fastest reproducer. All species, including humans, whether parasites, hosts, predators or prey, evolve to symbiotic climax and inherit their cosmological role in conscious existence through symbiosis with the diversity of life over evolutionary time scales, rather than exploiting it, causing a mass extinction, as humans are currently doing. . Lions are predators but they kill the herbivore stragglers ensuring the herbivores don’t go to boom and bust. Species which fail the test like humans become extinct.

C.Psychic: Psychedelics play a critical role in this symbiotic evolutionary process. Huxley’s "mind at large", perceived through psychedelics play a critical role in this symbiotic evolutionary process, as the perceptual mind of the unconstrained brain reflecting the psychic symbiosis of inner cosmological climax edge-of-chaos dynamics, transcending tribal egotism, in what the Upanishads call moksha. This enables the individual to experience from the cosmic viewpoint and the universe to become self-aware. Humans thus inherit an existential responsibility, as climax manifestations of fractal biogenesis, to sustain the evolutionary diversity of life over the cosmological time scales we have inherited and need to preserve and unfold.

D. Cosmological: The climax of cosmology – conscious paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time arises not from the dominance of one conscious species, but at the edge of chaos, in symbiosis.

Given the fact that it is consistent with the views of both Charles Darwin, the founder of biological evolution and Erwin Schrödinger the discoverer of the quantum wave function equation determining the structure of quantum chemistry, it behoves us to take their advice and take this cosmology seriously:

“There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. ... I should say: The overall number of minds is just one” (Schrödinger).

"To see a puppy playing [one] cannot doubt that they have free-will"

and if "all animals, then an oyster has and a polype.” (Darwin)

Panpsychism also makes it possible for quanta to “observe” and hence collapse superpositions of other quanta, so the universe is how we perceive it to be, not a shadow multiverse, with ghostly cats flung all over it, this picture is one in which new branches are being created in the wave function in a similar manner to fractal cosmic inflation while others are being collapsed by conscious measurement, resulting in dynamic evolution of the cosmic wave function. Special relativity, the most classical part of quantum reality, is implicitly retrocausal as well as causal, as in Feynman diagrams, so quantum reality is implicitly anticipatory, involving transactional collapse across relativistic space-time in which a network of potential transactions become one or a set of real emitter-absorber interactions.

Consciousness thus exists to anticipate existential threats, as Graziano's AST – attention schema theory highlights, although incorrectly thinking free will is a delusion. Darwinian panpsychism is also very like Tononi and Koch’s IIT –integrated information theory, except it's based on edge-of-chaos dynamics, which fits with the quantum world, through the butterfly effect, while IIT is a classical computational theory about Markov processes, so phi doesn't capture the root phenomenon, of subjective awareness since sentient consciousness preceded computation, not the reverse.

Taking the Planetary Pulse

First we need to take the therapeutic pulse of the world condition. Although we conceive of ourselves as living in a world of scientific, social and medical sophistication, in which technology is enabling us to reach for the stars, the majority of people on the planet adhere to fixed beliefs in archaic religions which are cosmological fallacies in frank and violent conflict with the natural world. In 2020 56% of the population of Earth belonged to one of the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All of these religions have belief systems focussing on the natural world and entire physical universe we exist in being merely a temporary moral test for a tumultuous end-of-days Armageddon apocalypse. In the resulting day of judgment, all of humanity will be consigned either to eternal life in Heaven, or an endless diabolical torment in Hell, shedding the verdant Earth and its billions of years of evolving diversity as a kind of skin to be sloughed off, in what Christians call the Rapture. This is compounded by a literalistic belief in creationism, or intelligent design by God, assigning evolution and the diversity of life to being disposable assets. Rather than make the world a better place, this cosmological fallacy abets the worst in human instincts for business-as-usual to exploit the living and non-renewable resources of the planet, in a patriarchal regime of dominion over nature that leads to an accelerating impact on the habitats of all the other species, and pushes the natural environment to potentially irreversible tipping points.

Compounding this is an even more ancient crisis that happened to humanity during the transition from gatherer-hunter coexistence with nature to civilisations based on agriculture and animal husbandry that is confessed in the Fall from Eden. The male fear of paternity uncertainty caused mankind to condemn the female sex to subservience, in an assertion of patriarchal dominance, reinforced by the monotheistic religions, although widely shared across all cultures sealed into our genome from around 10,000 years ago. This is clearly laid out in Genesis, in Eve being cursed for seeking the wisdom of the Tree of Life, being accused instead of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, destroying their paradisiacal innocence, sexually declared to God by the fig leaf. Humanity was cursed and driven out of Paradise by God, with the Tree of Life hidden behind a flaming sword. Man and woman alike were doomed to the mortal coil of sexual existence. Women were cursed as the “devil’s gateway”, to be obedient to their husbands and suffer the pains of travail childbirth, with mankind condemned to a life of struggle against nature to survive against the thorns, to till the ground in human dominion over nature, delineating the transition from gatherer-hunter paradise to the lost innocence of agricultural civilisation.

This in turn has led to a world in which major religions use the patriarchal imperative to increase their populations to achieve social dominance, leading to population explosion, suppressing female reproductive choice under dire penalties, from stoning for adultery, to female genital mutilation, veiling, chaperoning and denying jobs and education and escalating human impact on nature through the invocation to dominion over nature, in denial of Earthly Paradise.

I am a child of nuclear apocalypse. On Christmas Day 1944 the first radiated plutonium slugs began to roll out of Hanford, signalling the real beginning of the apocalyptic age of Planet Earth. My birth was 12 days later on the Epiphany 1945. Los Alamos received its first plutonium from Hanford on February 2. Consecrating this patriarchal apocalypse, the Trinity explosion of this plutonium occurred on July 16. The uranium Hiroshima bomb was named “little boy” and the plutonium Nagasaki bomb dropped on August 9 from the same Hanford material was “fat man”.

Michael Ortiz Hill in “Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a rite of Passage” describes the first words following the Trinity test:

It is striking that, following Oppenheimer's lead of naming the site of the first nuclear test "Trinity," Weisskopf and William Laurence - both Jews - saw in the Bomb the glory of Christ. In the Jewish tradition, the character of the Messiah has distinctly human dimensions, a "Son of Man" rather than the "Son of God" of Christian eschatology, while the Christ metaphor speaks to an experience that dwarfs the human realm. Ferenc Szasz notes, "Others whispered, more in reverence than otherwise: 'Jesus Christ' ". Known to be something of a mystic, I. I. Rabi described Trinity by the overwhelming light that engulfed him: "Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds…. Oppenheimer said, "We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most were silent" He recalled the terrible and ecstatic eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, where the warrior Arjuna requests that Vishnu display the nakedness of his transcendental form. Arjuna is cowed in holy terror as the god visits upon him "the radiance of a thousand suns" "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" Oppenheimer quoted the Gita. "I suppose we all felt that, one way or another," he continued. Three weeks later, the pilot of Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, requested God's blessing upon the Bomb that would initiate the citizens of Hiroshima into the darkest consequences of this ecstatic presence. "Be with those who brave the heights of Thy heaven intoned the chaplain, "and carry the battle to our enemies”.

Another striking theme that repeats again and again in the "dreaming up" of the Bomb is that of birth and paternity. On the mythic level, it is clear that the Bomb was not invented as much as "born." Some people recognized the godlike epiphany of light and fire - so long anticipated - as the birthing of something or "someone" new. We can discern a specifically paternal pride and even hints of tenderness toward the Bomb. William Laurence called the rumblings of the Trinity explosion the "first cry of a newborn world”.

However, our true apocalyptic disaster, more tumultuously destructive, over time than any fantasy that Revelation can throw at us, is planetary biocrisis – our impending biodiversity and climate crises, driven by a patriarchal culture of dominion over nature and woman alike, that seeks to exploit the Earth and its living natural diversity rather than sustain it as the immortal living Paradise that has sustained us for three billion years of evolutionary emergence, in an unbroken line of inheritance to our own existence. A survey conducted in several countries as I write (Hickman et al. 2021) has found that 56% of young people believe “humanity is doomed”, because of climate and biodiversity crisis ^{^[14]}. Current evidence indicates that the climate crisis alone could send our planet back 50 million years to the Eocene maximum, shortly after the dinosaur extinction. The damage caused by a mass extinction of biodiversity can never be recovered, but in raw terms would take another 50 million years to recover from in purely quantitative terms.

Planetary Reflowering

We urgently need to learn to let life overflow in abundance again, and give space on the planet for life to do so and rapidly correct the climate crisis we are causing that also lays waste to natural habitats, so that we shall survive as a species. This is the key to our living future. It’s as simple as that. I am a scientist dedicated to preserving the biodiversity of planet Earth from the almost unstoppable human stupidity of causing a mass extinction of life which could cause the end of humanity as we know it, if we don’t come rapidly to our senses and achieve three active priorities to protect the living dharma ^{^[15]} of the sentient cosmos:

(1) Biodiversity and Climate:
(a) Dedicatehalf the Earth and its habitats to natural wilderness so that the millions of other species we co-depend with can survive and flourish (Wilson E O 2016) . Half the planet has to be enough for one species Homo sapiens alone among 3.8 million others to entertain and fulfil ourselves. This is literally the only way evolution can flourish and humanity can survive, because we need genetic diversity for species survival. If we don’t do this, our probability of long term survival is bleak and, while we might repair climate, biodiversity remains in mortal danger.
(b) Fix the climate crisis as quickly as possible by converting to renewable energy before the climate ‘fixes’ us.
This is fully achievable and inevitable. No further financial investment, or subsidies in CO₂ emitting energy sources.

(2) Nuclear/Mass Destruction: Cease production of nuclear weapons and weapons for biological warfare for military use. Devote the technology to protecting the Earth from astronomical impacts that could cause a mass extinction.

(3) Patriarchy and Population: End the Epoch of patriarchal dominion over woman and nature that has lasted for the last 4000 years and profoundly exacerbated the population crisis, in the reunion of woman and man in reproductive freedom, i.e. the Sacred Reunion, or Hieros Gamos^{^[16]} the fertile foundation of human cultural emergence and super-intelligence in sexual paradox (Fielder & King 2004).

Scepticism, Belief and Consciousness

The sceptical approach of objective science, which has revealed all the confounding detail of the physical universe and natural world we live in, is founded on the opposite of affirmative belief, that nothing we imagine to be true can be established to be so, unless every empirical test we make in the universe is replicable and contradicts the sceptical assumption that the idea is false. Thus the doubling of the bending of light around the Sun due to the Sun’s gravitational field, confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

But science, for all its inscrutable and meticulous care and veracity, has one terrible shortcoming, the elephant in the room of subjective consciousness itself. Key to my journey of visionary discovery has been the realisation that subjective consciousness has a central role in cosmology and that the entire universe is not just a physical nightmare of unrestrained forces of nature creating galaxies and black holes, populated by mindless atoms and molecules and biological organisms that are simply chemical machines and that the sun is doomed to eventually destroy the Earth and eventually the entire universe will destroy itself in a heat death, cosmic rip, or big crunch. Bertrand Russel’s overwhelming pessimism sums this tragic fallacy in precise words of doom.

In this materialistic scientific view, consciousness comes to be identified as a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity, which is at best a potentially unreliable, internal model of the reality of the world around us, which has no ability to effect any causal change on the physical circumstances of the universe. Thus conscious existence is deemed to be a mirage, and free will is an illusion, possibly evolved so as to convince us to continue to act as if we have the will to continue, because all human decisions are just a consequence of brain functions determined by our genes and the specific circumstances of the decision we are striving to make at the time. This classical world denial of free will leaves us with the status of automatons deluding ourselves into believing we have choice, leaving all questions of ethical or moral responsibility in the dust. But the quantum universe teaches otherwise, as I shall come to explain.

Religious believers of virtually every kind find this world view completely unsatisfying for very good reasons. While traditional religious cosmologies are archaic and wildly inconsistent with the reality of the universe as we now know it to be, they exist in a conscious condition of projected fantasy, where Heaven and Hell are conceived as all-too-real experiential realms, in which a sentient being can either live an eternal life in heavenly bliss, or suffer in the endless horrors of damnation. They also go half way to allowing free will as long as we use it to obey the will of God. A scientific view, even if it has experimental verification, that claims consciousness and free will are self-fulfilling delusions holds no candle to a myth that places this real Earthly life to be a mere temporary forerunner to a moral judgment for all eternity.

This means that we, the world and its living future, are living trapped in a schizophrenic existence, in which we treat the practical details, as if we are living in the physical universe with its physical laws and material boundaries, but underlying it, for most of us, is a contradictory belief that the real world is just a delusion, or a temporary place to undergo a moral trial by God, and the true realities that solve life, the universe and everything lie in the afterlife. This is the existential crisis that we are going to heal in this discussion to unveil and reflower the Tree of Life.

The full scope of this contradiction becomes apparent if we examine our living experience of the world around us. We are all forced to concede the existence of a shared physical reality, that the table I am writing on is solid, and if I crack my knuckles on it, they will hurt, if I get hit on the head, I may pass out and lose consciousness, or if I eat a poisonous plant or catch a disease I may get sick, and if I am hit by a vehicle in the street, or shot, I may die, so we are forced to concede the existence of the objective world around us and know that it is part of a physical universe of galaxies, stars and planets, composed of particles, including atoms and molecules that also make up biology and ourselves.

But on the other hand, 100% of everything we experience, including our experience of the physical world, of our dreams and of our visions, including those on mind-altering substances, occur through and only through our subjective conscious experiences. So the world, as we see it, is actually a consensus view of subjective conscious experiences between people, which we are confident is shared with other conscious beings around us, from their lively engaging demeanour, although we don’t generally have any direct access to anyone else’s subjective experience.

We also have a basic belief in our personal autonomy – to make subjective decisions that affect the world arounds us, many as simple as getting a cup of coffee, or going to the toilet, but also critical decisions that may seriously impact on our lives, or the world at large. The sanctity of the legal system depends on the notion that we are accountable for our actions as conscious sentient beings and do have conscious intent. This is what we call ‘free will’ although we know all our decisions are partially determined by their circumstances and can be influenced to a certain extent by our genes.

In Galileo’s error, the panpsychic philosopher Philip Goff (2019) notes that what has subtly happened is that the scientific method, from Galileo ^{^[17]} through Newton, converted the perceivable universe into a set of dispositions codified in mathematical equations, demoting the qualitative aspect of reality to irrelevance. This is fundamentally a patriarchal scheme of dispositional dominion over nature, reducing the phenomenal world to a set of equations. Gather-hunter societies arose from the women classifying plants and defining culture through language, while the men hunted, often silently. Thus males generally have good mental rotation and tend to navigate by vector dispositions as hunters exploring alien terrain “take the first left and then second on the right” rather than the qualitative features used by females from their careful classificatory gathering “it’s opposite the pay centre after the gas station”.

In the Newtonian universe, the patriarchal approach of analytic quantification came to dominate the description of nature, just as the patriarchal religious description dominated nature and woman alike to humanity’s detriment. The end result has been that the entire subjective descriptive aspect of reality has been eliminated from the scientific world view, resulting in an inability of science to understand what subjective consciousness is and does although it is everything we experience. Patriarchal science has literally lost the subject of the case.

Belief in materialism, because of its adroit use of the sceptical principle, to correct naive assumptions and elucidate properties of the natural universe that were at first sight very counter-intuitive, has since become a belief system exactly like a religion, so that researchers cannot afford to take any other position in peril of being shunned by the dominant scientific community and losing recognition altogether. This has grown to counterproductive proportions where the very researchers showing the benefits of psychedelics scientifically are bound to declare that psychedelics have no demonstrable value in solving the central problems of conscious experience, when it is obvious they are sine qua non the most consistent modulators of the depths of conscious experience available to science.

Psychedelics – The Edge of Chaos Climax of Consciousness

This is where psychedelics and their apotheosis, in the term enthoegens, when used for spiritual purposes, come centrally into the arena. Psychoactive substances have always had a formative role in the emergence of spiritual and religious viewpoints. Cannabis, which plays a central role in Shiva worship, has been consumed in ritual spiritual practices for several millennia. Hindu religion owes a portion of its Upanishadic cosmology of the atman and Brahman as the cosmic mind to cannabis and the Rig Veda to the mythical soma of the Aryans. Traces of cannabis used for ritual purposes have been found at an ancient Judaic temple (700-900 BCE) in Arad Israel (Arie, Rosen & Namdar 2020) and also in China (500 BC). Opium likewise has an ancient medicinal and spiritual use.

However long term spiritual use of the most significant of the psychoactive species, those bearing the classic psychedelics, have largely been confined to the pre-Colombian cultures of America, where there is evidence of spiritual use of mushrooms from the Mayan culture (1000 BCE) , the use of peyote among the Zapotec (500 BCE) and long term use of ayahuasca and tryptamine snuffs in South America. These substances have much more profound affects on consciousness which lead directly to a vortical abyss of visionary states renowned for their intensity and transcendence. But their relative absence from existing historical traditions outside he Americas means their significance has been bypassed by the classical world, with the possible exception of Greek mystery cults.

The discovery of LSD and the later discovery of the continuing sacred use of psilocybe mushrooms in Mexico in the mid twentieth century brought the use of hallucinogenic visionary substances back into the focus of Western culture. Although peyote use had continued by the Huichol since Columbus and had been re-established in the Native American Church at the end of the 19th century, and ayahuasca had been consumed as a sacrament in the Amazon, these had remained marginal to mainstream Western awareness. But the advent of LSD as a recreational drug supported by prominent proponents in the US, from Timothy Leary in the East Coast to the Merry Pranksters and Grateful Dead in California, advancing a counter-cultural agenda, supported by devoted chemists who were prepared to synthesise vast numbers of doses of LSD at little or no charge, conceived in the “public good”, set the stage for a cultural confrontation. Accompanied by disquieting media awareness that psychedelics were laying siege to consumer culture and values, amid some troubling incidents with their use, a campaign of frank misinformation ensued from the authorities. The result was that the US and then the world introduced a total clampdown on their use that initiated the unending war on drugs, and stopped all human scientific research in its tracks.

Given the long history of sacred use of entheogens , this constitutes the most benighted quasi-religious piece of authoritarian counter-reaction in Western culture since the Inquisition and Witch Hunts, in a complete mockery of the scientific age of discovery. Penalties for psychedelic use rose to schedule 1 sentences similar to murder, reflecting the perception that this was regarded as a deadly sin rather than any scientific evidence of significant harm, but a threat to the very consumption society that is driving the planet into ecological and climatic crisis. It is only now around fifty years later that the very tentative reopening of scientific research into these substances detailed in section 1 has been able to begin to set the record straight, while still largely confining them to therapeutic use in terminal and psychiatric conditions, while their recreational use has continued, although hidden from the mainstream and somewhat trivialised as a merely a recreational rather than a deeply formative spiritual experience, as their historical use attests.

What the psychedelics provide is a negotiable transcendental experience in the vortical abyss of conscious existence comparable with and potentially more profound than the peaks of meditative and contemplative experiences in mystical and meditative traditions. They constitute a/the central vehicle for us to explore and discover the innermost nature of the subjective mind. They differ from meditation, in that they have pronounced visionary qualities that challenge existing conceptions, rather than enabling a relatively featureless repose, from renunciation and careful top down mindfulness, that is reflected in the formless void of Buddhist thinking, outside the more spontaneous satori of Zen. Likewise they transcend contemplative mysticism, which tends to reinforce preconceived theistic beliefs. They also provide a more consciously explorable complementary condition to lucid states of dreaming associated with REM sleep because these are difficult, or impossible to maintain physiologically.

Discovering Cosmological Symbiosis

This is where we come to the symbiotic cosmology that solves life, the universe and everything summarised here. The existential role of consciousness in the universe is the central enigma of existential cosmology, as we have seen. That's the key thing that everyday existence, no matter how meditative we may be, or whatever preconceived beliefs we may hold, misses out on the true enormity of, so that we will go through life in a state of distraction trying to fill it with habitual purpose until it's too late and we are gone.

Around the beginning of June just over two months ago, I summoned up the will to take a sacred mushroom trip after a seven year fast due to closed angle glaucoma, recently corrected by lens replacement. In the midst on the peak, I settled into meditating on the silent question of the central enigma and let go. As I descended deep into the abyss, at a certain point, everything opened out into what I noted later that evening to be “the epiphany of being in the existential centre of the cyclone, where everything comes into focus in the transfixing presence of complete transfiguration”. “Not an event, but a state of knowing, as we always have known, from time immemorial, as if we have always been conscious of this knowing, forever compassionate of the mortal coil ”. I have experienced this many times before on mushrooms but not in this iconic way. The result was “a sheer calm, unmitigated experiential awakening, as if the Big Bang of the universe is discovering itself in this very moment of illumination and is realising with irresistible intensity, the urgency and vitality of this state of knowing, which, the moment one experiences it, means saving the precious universe, the biosphere and the diversity of life within it from mortal risk to its survival”. This being true, despite the overwhelming reassurance of overflowing compassion for the mortal coil emanating from the apotheosis.

Psychedelic trips can be plagued by all manner of sensory and visionary experiences, from the sublime to the ridiculous or even alarming, but there is a name for this. The Huichol call it the Nierika, the visionary portal to the non-ordinary reality of the spirit world and the ancestors.

There is a doorway within our minds that usually remains hidden and secret until the time of death.

The Huichol word for it is nierika – a cosmic portway or interface between so-called ordinary and non-ordinary realities.

It s a passageway and at the same time a barrier between the worlds” (Halifax 242).

Emerging renewed and revitalised from this experience, accompanied as I moved and breathed by the lingering shadow of the apotheosis compassionately caring for me and encouraging me to put this whole illumination together into an account for the world, I began feverishly assembling this work.

What the experience brought home to me, above all was the veridical ^{^[18]} reality of the cosmic mind, even though it was evoked in a human brain on sensory withdrawal under a hallucinogenic experience. This is a turning point from many past experiences, where I have witnessed the same compassion for the mortal coil as a visionary impression of the other – transforming it from perception into reality – the actuality of Brahma-atman unification in the form extolled in the Upanishads (Purohit & Yeats 1937).

This brings us back to the hard problem of consciousness research. The advent of neuroscience has provided us with genuine insights into how the brain processes information, including sensory and cognitive tasks associated with conscious attention and resting, or meditative states. We can then associate a variety of conscious states with activity, either by electroencephalographic portraits of brain waves, by functional magnetic resonance images of blood flow to specific regions, or by positron emission tomography of radioactive glucose, and even by invasive studies of actual neurons and connections in animals. Various researchers can then attempt to deduce how these excitations give rise to the conscious experience, e.g. by the activities of certain frequency bands, such as gamma from 30-100 Hz.

The classical deterministic view of brain function, denying a role for subjective consciousness and making free will impossible, is undermined by two additional factors in the physics of brain function. The first is edge-of-chaos dynamics, which at tipping point instabilities associated with critical decision-making watersheds can enable a fractal handshaking between instabilities at the quantum level of the ion channel and changes in overall brain state. The second is the intrinsic uncertainty of quantum events and their entanglement, which is closely paralleled by phase coherence in wave processing associated with coherent conscious states – that brain states which rise and fall together in synch rise to consciousness while others constitute the unconscious ground of neurodynamic processing.

The trouble with the entire sweep of the objective description of brain dynamics is that no objective state, no matter how the brain does it, even if by edge-of-chaos instability and quantum entanglement, is anything other than objective, so it never solves the question of how subjective states actually arise. This is the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ coined by David Chalmers (1995). Essentially, there is no way to get a ghost out of the objective biological machine of the brain by combining non-conscious components, whether molecules, neuronal excitations, edge of chaos dynamics, quantum phenomena or brain states, if none of these components have any subjective status.

The sceptical basis of the scientific description depends on Occam’s razor, the idea that, given two views describing the same phenomenon, the simplest, most concise one is likely to be correct. Materialists thus try to claim that any reference to consciousness and volitional will is extraneous in a supposedly classical macroscopic world where causal decision making processes defined by brain function can in principle have a detailed mechanistic basis without reference to fuzzy vitalistic ^{^[19]} notions like mind, consciousness or will. They will then claim the hard problem is a distraction to be finessed away in steps, as more discoveries of how the physical brain processes information become revealed. However the materialist case is not established and it isn’t necessarily fulfilling Occam’s razor at all. What has happened is that materialists have restricted the domain of evidence to be circumstantial physical fact, ignoring veridical truths stated by conscious observers and actors as mere personal opinions or beliefs, in fundamental conflict with legal situations, where sworn subjective testimony is evidential in the absence of contrivance.

For example Erwin Schrödinger’s statement “the overall number of minds is just one”, which coincides with the conclusions of this monograph, is discounted as just being his idiosyncratic belief in Advaita Vedanta, despite that fact that we depend on his wave equation to understand quantum chemistry, and his devising of the cat paradox to understand quantum observation. Taken at face value, this is a veridical teaching by a founder of quantum mechanics.

So we need to take a big step back and reassess the way Occam’s razor best cuts a real swathe through existence. When confronted by a description of reality which denies our subjective consciousness is anything more than an epiphenomenon, and insists that our volitional will to make any sort of autonomous decision at all is a delusion contrived by evolution to ensure we survive and replicate, that debilitates any sense of personal autonomy, responsibility and confidence to act in the real world, we need to make a succinct determination. Should we just accept this is a scientifically proven fact, when the evidence doesn’t exist that the brain is a causally-closed deterministic machine and looks increasingly to be a complex, messy claim that may never be confirmed? Or should we take the much simpler concise volitional choice to allow Occam’s razor to cut the Gordian knot of this contrived belief that we are helpless automata, and assert that it contradicts our decision-making autonomy, and rule out of hand this fatalistic myth-making? How can we resolve this existential impasse?

The answer is both ridiculously simple and counter-intuitive – to move the elephant in the room – consciousness itself – into a new place on the cosmological chessboard, that of complementing the entire physical universe. This is a direct consequence of affirming volitional will ^{^[20]}, because will implies the conscious mind affects the physical universe physically in terms of the forces of nature. This may be in the way the brain processes unstable tipping points, and may involve quantum phenomena akin to solid state physics, but it is still a physical process following the forces of nature under the core model of physics. But this means the physics of the universe itself is sensitive to mind and that mind plays an essential role in intentionality ^{^[21]} in the universe, manifest in the biosphere as a whole and in the universe at large. This is then a form of pan-psychic cosmology. Panpsychism is thus the clean veridical Occam’s razor cut.

Consciousness, as an expression of a more generalised pan-psychism, then has a role in quantum uncertainty and in collapsing the wave functions of the multiverse, as we see in Schrödinger’s cat paradox, which we know appears to be specifically associated with conscious measurement of the wave function. This gives us back both subjective consciousness and its ability to autonomously apply free will in the same process determining the course of history in the universal wave function. This solves the dilemma of science denying free conscious choice and gives us full freedom as sentient beings, unlike the bondage of moral religions, where we are given free will only to find that if we use it autonomously on our own best judgment, we would be likely to end up in hell. Instead of moral compulsion, giving us back autonomy also gives us subjective divinity in our union with the cosmic mind.

This solves the moral problem another way by showing us that our mortal existence is part of the immortal web of life and that there is no future in selfish activity because when we come to the end of our lives, any activities other than giving our all to life as a whole is futile. It also solves the problem for divinity i.e. the mind at large, because now it has a sentiently intelligent vehicle for conscious manifestation.

Since we are universally subjectively sentient conscious beings and have no knowledge of the physical world except through subjective consciousness, the only valid conclusion is that the subjective aspect is a cosmological property complementing the objective physical universe. This means a form of panpsychism, in which all quantum phenomena also have a complementary aspect. This seems counterintuitive, because we seem to be replacing a succinct objective description with something elusive and fuzzy, but that is because we aren’t making the right test. The test of objective cosmology is empirical investigation. The test of subjective cosmology is veridical affirmation in which each conscious observer affirms verification.

There are alongside its foundational subjectivity a number of features of our conscious experience which ‘colour’ the nature of experience and are features or ‘qualia’ of our consciousness rather than its existential status. For example vision and hearing, smell and touch all differ qualitatively. These differences are partly due to the quantum modes of the senses and partly to do with the neuroreceptors and cerebral excitations eliciting conscious states. So we need to factor these out when addressing panpsychism and the ground roots of subjectivity.

However there are some features in the conscious brain that are clearly universal and hold the key to understanding what consciousness is and how it arises. While individual details of brain structure and dynamics are shared extensively with other mammals, leading to our empathy with our pets, the differences between us and arthropods and molluscs such as cephalopods are much more exotic and somewhat alien.

The fundamental basis of consciousness arises in coordinated edge-of-chaos membrane excitability in prokaryote cells, dating back to the first cells of our last universal common ancestor LUCA. However a key transition point to sentient consciousness arose in our last eucaryote common ancestor LECA, the founding single celled eucaryote. Here is the transition point where symbiotic cosmology really begins to kick in. This was a hugely significant event in the form of a deep symbiosis between the two existing procaryote kingdoms some 2 billion years ago, in which an Asgard archaean and a proteobacterium, similar to our intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli, became symbiotically interdependent. This freed the cell membrane from core energy processing, which was now handled by the bacterial mitochondrial respiration and made the new cell membrane able to become focussed on information processing. This meant that the eucaryote cell became sentient life form responding to quantum modes – sight, sound, chemical and electrical, in its environment sensitively due to the edge-of-chaos dynamics of its excitable membrane. At the same time these cells, across the board use the same molecules as the key repertoire of our neurotransmitters to facilitate the social signalling essential for survival of the collective single celled organism.

This is the point where panpsychism becomes consciousness as we know it and the entire rest of the story is simply elaborating on this theme, so the human brain ends up being a very ornately and closely coupled collection of amoebae communicating through these same social signalling molecules in their synapses to produce the highly coordinated form of cellular consciousness that we experience as subjective reality.

This turns what might seem to be specious vitalism into a clear-cut biological theory in which the development of subjective consciousness has a clear evolutionary trace from the punctuated equilibrium of eucaryote symbiosis, consistent with the physiology of chaotically excitable cells in a quantum entangled universe. Because this subjective product of excitability enhanced survival by avoiding lethal outcomes, it has been selected by evolution throughout. This in turn attests to the effectuality of conscious will on the physical universe

One can then find evidential support for this conclusion. A key point of transition is that from single celled eucaryotes to the metazoa – multicelled animals. A highly-studied example is the myxamoeban slime-mould Dictyostelium discoideum. This is a free-living single-celled amoeba that having eaten out its local bacterial habitat, aggregates, forming an excitable slug and then a sporulating fruiting body, to spread it to new habitats. It does this by using a combination of the same molecules that we use as neurotransmitters and second-signalling molecules – cyclic AMP, glutamate, GABA and serotonin pivotal to psychedelic activity and human mood. It turns out that an interplay between serotonin and its catabolic enzyme MAOa is key to maintaining development of the spore-forming tip of the fruiting body. In the same way, serotonin plays a key role not just in neurotransmission in the mature brain but evoking stages of brain development in the human embryo, for the neural groove at one extreme, to coordinating the correct formation of the layers of other neurons in the cerebral cortex, through serotonin-secreting fibres ascending from the basal brain that are later used in the moderating mood in the mature brain, to mediate organismic social survival.

Several of these molecules are primal in their simplicity and cosmological in their origin. Both glutamate and GABA both of which are key neurotransmitters are prominent components of comets and carbonaceous chondrites. Others are the amines of biological amino acids. Serotonin is 5-hydroxy-tryptamine, derived from tryptophan.

This goes a good way toward providing an immediate explanation of how psychedelics can cause a retreat from egotistical attentive consciousness into a primary consciousness, in which ego loss occurs, consistent with an underlying dynamic to secure collective survival, rather than personal survival of the individual, when the psychedelic state dissolves the distinction between self and other in a peak experience.

But the eucaryote symbiosis is not the only manifestation of symbiosis in Homo sapiens. As far as we know, all existing eucaryotes are sexual, or at least capable of intermittent (cryptic) sexuality. Dyadic sex is one of the most altruistic genetic acts an organism can commit to, by giving only half its genes, along with half the partners genes to make what is essentially a new life form never before conceived. All sexual species thus consist of two sexes each with their own genetic history (or more – Dictyostelium has three and some fungi fertilising by conjugation lots more).

Sexual symbiosis in animals is highly asymmetric with the female contributing all the cytoplasm, ostensibly to avoid a mitochondrial genetic war, and the males contributing essentially only their DNA in the sperm, giving rise to sexually antagonistic co-evolution i.e. the sex wars of reproductive investment.

Humans are also extensively symbiotic with their endogenous transposable elements, which constitute over half of the human chromosomal genome, that arose originally as selfish genes, co-travellers that run back to the first multicelled animals and retroviruses related to HIV that became incorporated into our germ lines. These can cause mutations but also have key roles in coordinated gene expression and chromosomal processing.

Finally all species are co-dependent with the other species populating their ecological niches in biospheric symbiosis. This is what we capitalistically call survival of the fittest by natural selection, but really it is symbiotic co-evolution with the biosphere as a whole, even though individual species, including Homo sapiens have evolved to maintain strategic survival in their own right, leading to the egotistical expression of human character.

In the context of humanity, we are manifestly symbiotic with our food and medicinal species and likewise with our entheogenic species. The plant components of ayahuasca, the opium poppy, cannabis, coca and the herb of the shepherdess, Salvia divinorum have all been symbiotic with the human species for millennia, as has the yeast Sacchromyces cerevesiae responsible for bread, but also alcohol. Peyote and sacred mushrooms have been collected from the wild for millennia but some species of Psilocybe mushrooms are the most easily cultivated entheogens, now in symbiotic use.

This brings us to the final component of the symbiotic universe, symbiosis with the mind at large. Humans consider ourselves to be the species that invented culture. We tend to define ourselves as reaching to the stars themselves, as a dominant species that stoops to no other, as the highest form of consciousness, apart form God himself and thus free to determine the destiny of all living species on Earth. This is a tragic fallacy in conflict with all the evidence.

Human attempts to seek moksha – escape from the egotistical and mortal round of birth and death are singularly rare enough that the Eastern traditions of both Buddhism and Vedanta have arrived at a fallacious notion of enlightenment through many reincarnations, essentially because the experience of cosmic reunion is so rare as to be essentially unattainable. The monotheistic faiths have abandoned any hint of such achievement. Christianity considers human nature fatally flawed by original sin and hence the only hope is faith in God, prayer and fear of the punishments of Hell in the day of judgment, while mystical experiences are rare and generally contemplative, rather than illuminative. Any idea that a person can manifest actual identity with God is blasphemous across all monotheistic paths. Islam regards it as a death penalty, just as Yeshua was condemned to death by the High Priests for blasphemy.

This leads to the conclusion that human consciousness is not the cosmological pinnacle of conscious existence, but we are a/the key active vehicle for cosmological symbiosis incarnate, and that the entheogenic state, by virtue of the very symbiosis induced by the entheogenic relationship takes us closer to the union with the mind at large that is the consummating manifestation of the cosmos in self-awareness. The biota are the only entities we know of in the universe that possess consciousness. They are thus the central candidates for the interactive emergence of cosmological consciousness from the Big Bang. This experience of union is also the only phenomenon we know of that comes anywhere close to the actual realisation of deity.

This finally solves the dilemma of God as a third agent outside the physical universe. The missing component explaining the creation of the observable universe is not God but consciousness itself. It is the missing piece in the puzzle and the manifestation of deity is thus realised in the subjective, not in a miraculous third party.

And although it seems counterintuitive to think that consuming entheogenic species is a/the key to saving the planet, there is a symbiotic truth in this because, the entheogenic relationship in Maria Sabina’s words a way of “the sap and the dew” heightens our deep sense of inter-connecteness with nature and deep solace in our relationship with life as a whole, rather than delusory and damaging supremacy over it that leaves us in mortal isolation, so in the longer evolutionary time scale, given the current biospheric dominance of Homo sapiens, this is cosmologically pivotal.

A Visionary Journey

The other side of the coin of this transmission is that I am what I would call a true visionary. That is, I am transparent and simply give you the keys to resolve the existential enigma to use for yourself. I have no doctrine about what other people need to do spiritually, or should do to gain illumination and I am true to the pursuit of the vision quest. I don’t follow any religion and don’t ask anyone to believe in me, but I encourage you to find out for yourselves with an open mind. And to ensure everyone has love and support to keep the process tranquil. The reason is that the cure for the mortal condition is moksha not moral punishment and moksha heals and informs the ego. The true realities that matter to the meaning of sentient existence in the mortal coil are not found in the material world, but in accepting our transience within the eternal entanglement and realising that the only meaningful acts we can perform are to ensure the passage of the living generations continues to flourish. Therefore true enlightenment redeems the mortal condition. I have sourced my vital inspiration and literally navigated my life course through first person visionary experiences on entheogenic species that have propelled my life and its urgency and activism.

The intensity of these experiences could have consumed me and driven the most stalwart to the brink of messianic insanity, were it not for my intent to be true to nature and the universe at large, as well as my loved ones. I may have no religious or spiritual assumptions, or doctrine, but I do have one clear natural priority sine qua non and that is a mandate to save the living planet, its biodiversity and its largely beneficent, nurturing climate from a hard landing, irreversible tipping points, a mass extinction of life which would place our living future and the future of all life in serious jeopardy.

Fig 250: Left: Dionysus mask Centre left: Dionysus mosiac Dion 300 BCE – 300 CE. Centre: Quetzalcoatl in human form. Centre right Teotihuacan 150-200 CE, Olmec la Venta 900 BCE. Quetzalcoatl is the god of wisdom, whose feathers represent the flight of visionary consciousness, while the serpentine body slithers among the plants and animals, entangled in natural existence.

I was born on 6th Jan – the Epiphany of the advent, appearance and miraculous dread of Dionysus, who became Dhushara of the Nabateans in Yeshua’s time. This event later became usurped by Hellenistic-Jewish gospel writers as Yeshua’s Triple Epiphany: (1) of his visitation by the Magi, (2) in his baptism by John and (3) in his turning water into wine at Cana at the request of his mother, in an all-too Dionysian display of the god of wine and altered states.

The “feathery part” of my vision quest is summed up in “The Plumed Serpent” (Lawrence 1974):

"I am lord of two ways. I am master of up and down.

I am as a man who is a new man, with new limbs and life,

and the light of the Morning Star in his eyes.

Lo! I am I! The lord of both ways.

Thou wert lord of the one way.

Now it leads thee to the sleep. Farewell!

So Jesus went on towards the sleep.

And Mary the Mother of Sorrows lay down

on the bed of the white moon,

weary beyond any more tears.

"And I, I am on the threshold.

I am stepping across the border.

I am Quetzalcoatl lord of both ways,

star between day and the dark."

I was christened Christopher Cyril King, but I don’t answer to Christopher and I am not a cross-bearer. I won’t carry a cross for anyone, or stand in anyone’s shadow, least of all a dying and resurrecting saviour, who I admire as a brilliant innovator, but also lament for his self-destructive heritage of violence. We each come from a three billion year line of evolution, that has honed us to be conscious beings taking responsibility for our own lives and futures, so I have honed my vision quest as a journey – the trip of a lifetime – the trip of all trips together, till death us do part!

For those of us seeking psychic phenomena from visionary experiences, I’ve had these too, although, while they do affect my world view, I neither take any of these for granted and consider them deeply natural rather than supernatural.

I have had repeated precognitive dreams and precognitive creative experiences. When I was living on a canal boat we built in England, I read J W Dunne’s (1934) “An Experiment with Time”. According to Dunne, our wakeful attention prevents us from seeing beyond the present moment, whilst when dreaming that attention fades and we gain the ability to recall more of our timeline. This allows fragments of our future to appear in pre-cognitive dreams, mixed in with fragments or memories of our past. Other consequences include the phenomenon known as deja vu and life after death. At the time of its publication, not to have read him became a "mark of singularity" in society.

Fig 251: The Taniwha (Maori spirit of the rivers and swamps), the canal boat we built from a wreck submerged since the 19th century where the dream took place.

Shortly after this I had a double nightmare that I was being hideously stung by a spider, repeated in the second dream because I had failed to brush it off when it had removed its fangs. I continued to sleep in after Hallie, my young wife, got up to feed our first child, a newborn baby girl, opening the bedroom window in the process. I woke long enough to tell her “I had a terrible double nightmare” and then fell asleep again. About an hour later, I was stung wide awake by a wasp that had flown in after she opened the window. Going through all the same feverish motions under the intense pain I had experienced in the dream, blowing it off to find it was a large wasp. I have had many such dreams during my life most often anticipating things that unexpectedly happen early the next day. What it has taught me is that the universe is an entangled handshaking in which past, present and future are intertwined, and that the role of conscious existence is partly to anticipate future threats and challenges through direct perception of the space-time continuum.

I have also had lucid dreams combined with out of the body experiences. After practicing looking at the backs of my hands in dreams and after having dreams in which I was climbing a ladder and saw my hands but failed to respond, I suddenly realised in my first lucid dreaming encounter that I was fully aware in my dream and all hell broke loose. Firstly, I was being thrust up faster and faster like a rocket ship, in the manner of levitating and flying dreams. But I was also standing in the dream on an exceedingly bright promenade by the sea. A gust of wind that was also the levitating wind blew some sea spray at my light muslin Indian shirt. I was in a super-sensory state. I could simultaneously sense every one of the droplets separately touching my skin like the stars in the sky. But that didn't concern me. I looked up at the azure sky and the stratospheric clouds passing overhead and realised I was trapped in another world – in another universe. I saw a woman standing gazing at me with dark eyes and rushed towards her, grabbing her by both shoulders staring deeply down into her wild wide pupils, framing the silent urgent question where is the way back to Ixtalan echoing Carlos Casteneda's (1972) allegories ^{^[22]} of the sorcerer Don Juan.of the sorcerer Don Juan. She just looked at me and smiled knowingly and shook her head. But at the same time, I was out of my body floating just by the ceiling of my bedroom looking down at myself lying on the bed, totally reassured: "It's all okay! You are just down there sleeping". I thus awoke with three parallel streams of consciousness re-entwining together. Again, I have had many lucid dreams, but none so graphic as this first experience. I have had many lucid dreams but none so graphic as this first experience.

The difficulty with lucid dreaming is that the very act of becoming lucid rapidly tends to cause one to awaken because the triggers in the base of the brain flip towards wakefulness the moment we become lucid because neurotransmitters for vigilance such as nor-epinephrine kick in and flip the orexin neurons to wake the brain up. This is different from the visionary experiences induced by entheogenic species where a waking person can descend into a deep visionary abyss where other realities quite distinct from dreaming can occur, although returning from the depths of these other states can leave on in a similar situation of trying to recall the ineffable that has now receded, as Don Hose Matsuwa the Huichol shaman makes clear.

This brings us to psychedelics, or entheogens as the natural species are called, that possess psychedelic substances and are used, and have been used for millennia as visionary sacraments for healing, sorcery and spiritual realisation.

My relationship with psychedelic agents began as soon as I arrived in the UK to take a graduate mathematics degree in topology, with my first somewhat devastating experiences on LSD, still decanted with a dropper onto whole sugar cubes. The first trip was really awesome, but a week later a double dose of two cubes left me with the absolute certainty I had literally died (the most extreme form of ego death) and left me with shimmering after effects for weeks. At the same time, orchestrated by the US drug authorities, contrived reports were circulated that LSD split your chromosomes, which left me with five years of anxiety before I would take my next trip.

After that began a regular round of recreational tripping to try to get to the bottom of what these agents were showing us. I have always been devoted to my family which has now become a loving and caring extended whanau as relationships between partners have evolved and changed. For several years we held court, hosting a free-love establishment in the city, in which I ended up in three double partnerships in open ‘marriages’, spanning decades. Attesting to my consistency, I have lived with my current partner, Christine for over 50 years, despite times apart on world journeys, and all my offspring and grand children are nearby, so I must be doing something right, in spite of all.

On my first academic sabbatical, I split my efforts between a scientific investigation in the West to get first hand knowledge of what some of the famous scientists, including Nobel prize winners, made of the role of life in the universe. I spent the rest of my time imbibing the Eastern spiritual traditions, wandering India as a sadhu and taking Tibetan Buddhist initiations with Yeshe Dorje the Ningmapa exorcist who kept the rain off the Dalai Lama when he walked and Rangjung Rigpe Dorje the 16th Karmapa the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage, at the same time exploring sources of the world’s power plants, from the poppy fields of the Golden Triangle, through the Ganga fields of India and Afghanistan, eventually to take peyote with the Native American Church in New Mexico, where I also encountered my first sacred mushroom experience.

On my return to Aotearoa, I began a symbiotic relationship with sacred mushrooms, both because of their genetic purity, by comparison with synthetic drugs and because, although not as overpowering as LSD, they provide, in my view, a more deeply spiritual experience, which is also a deep expression of conscious symbiosis, without some of the transient casualties of LSD trips that occurred among our friends. This doesn’t mean taking mushrooms all the time. In fact I will sometimes go for years simply making sure they survive. Symbiosis means being faithful to their preservation. Their spores will live for decades if correctly stored at 5% humidity in a cool place and they can be cultivated in a chilly bin, with careful sterile techniques. I also brought species recognition to psilocybe aucklandii, and conserve a collection of species spanning each of the classic enthenogens, to safeguard the visionary heritage for humanity, as a symbiotic duty of care.

Fig 252: A panorama of Opuhi, our wilderness land in Aotearoa. The meeting house is just visible on the right up the path.

In 1970 we had established a windswept coastal wilderness conservation community, which provided endless opportunities to hold mushroom veladas in the moonlight, listening to the crickets and moreporks and the distant ocean below, either alone, in “solitario”, which I prefer, or together in the meeting house, which has since become a heritage building. These experiences have become pivotal to my life's work.

Other waking experiences, both on sacred mushrooms and during creative experiences have assumed a prophetic quality that can be alarming or even devastating. On one particular velada in the 1980s I suddenly became aware that the mushroom was telling me that if the world failed to show adequate signs of arresting the human impact causing a mass extinction of living diversity, I would need to make a vision quest to the Amazon, as our figurative Garden of Eden paradise and to Yerushalayim as the nexus of the religious impulse to undertake a rite of passage to make a transition to the immortal epoch of the Tree of Life, hidden since the foundation of the world in Eden by a flaming sword.

Around the same time on another trip, I had a horrific vision that my eldest daughter would have an obstruction to her fertility, as some twisted kind if sacrificial outcome of my undertaking this mission. Some years later she became pregnant and her first of three sons was born with Down syndrome. He is great, but the episode was very disturbing, and a triple chromosome 21 is a genetic obstruction to fertility, affirming the vision’s veridical, or prophetic character.

In 1980 I made a second journey on unpaid leave to research the chemical origins of life in the US, later returning to Mexico and collecting and consuming peyote from the high desert below Wirikuta, the sacred mountain of the Huichol and then travelling to Yarinacohcha lagoon at Pucallpa in Peru, where I took a powerful and formative ayahusaca trip with Snr. Trinico, a leprous curandero living at the extreme end of the slums around the lagoon. In 1992 I again returned on sabbatical and took peyote with the Native American Church in Taos with Tellus Goodmorning, my original roadman who was 92 and had lost one eye, but was still in fighting form chanting all night in the teepee.

In the two years spanning the millennium I made another sabbatical journey to the Amazon to document one of the worst burning seasons on record and returned to Yarinacocha for a second ayahuasca session with Trinico who was elderly, but now in good health.

Following this, with my sabbatical partner Jane King, we completed our Millennial vigil to Jerusalem, pronouncing as Bride and Bridegroom the rite of passage of the of the immortal Tree of Life of living diversity in the Gaia anointing of the Jubilee passage of Isaiah 61, completed on the Epiphany by declaring the Gates of Mercy open at the Eastern wall and celebrating the Sacred Reunion of woman and man in the Song of Songs at the Western (Wailing) Wall.

This served two key purposes to address foundation issues in the collective unconscious, manifest in the Weltanschauung ^{^[23]} , the archaic formative world view driving patriarchal monotheism expressed in the Yahwistic Genesis, firstly in Eve being cursed for heeding the serpent, to be obedient to her husband under pain of childbirth, appeasing male paternity uncertainty, confessing an archaic conflict with the matriliny and female reproductive integrity and secondly with dominion over nature, in the Tree of Life in Paradise hidden from humanity behind a flaming sword, dooming us to conflict with the thorns of the wilderness sweat of human dominance.

In 2015 I had a near-death experience when involved in a cycle accident which knocked me unconscious and left me with temporary amnesia from ensuing concussion. This made me acutely aware of the risks I was taking not fulfilling the pact with the mushroom, by kicking the bucket before my time had come. This resulted in the notion of planetary resplendence transcending religion as a way of life protecting the biosphere in perpetuity. Resurrection Revelation

Finally after a seven year hiatus, I took the mushroom trip that became this entire work.

On 19-7-2001, a month before 9-11, I published the lyrics of a song I had composed – Big Brother – The Song of the Biosphere – video. A key line invoked jihad: 'When it comes to the final struggle, jihad of the biosphere, there's only one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan’, because George H W Bush had refused to sign the 1992 Rio Convention on Biodiversity. (As of 2016, the convention has 196 parties. All UN member states – with the exception of the United States – have ratified the treaty. The US still only has observer status as I write this in 2022, 30 years later!). The lyrics continue with a lament for the dark canyons of lower Manhattan among the fallen towers: 'walking in the twilight, down in the valley of shadows', and then the plane: 'We'll fly so high well pass right to the other side and never fall in flames again’.

Just under two months later, at one in the morning on a continuous BBC news broadcast, I watched in horror, as firstly one and then two planes crashed through the twin towers of the World Trade Center in flames and the towers fell, turning the streets of lower Manhattan into a literal vale of the shadow of death.

Fig 253: A: Extracts from the lyrics posting of 20^th July 2001 (http://dhushara.com/nino/19julyjihad.jpg). B: Passenger plane collides with one of the twin towers. C: Rudi Giuliani Mayor of New York the number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear (http://youtu.be/xhBYWDy4m9M). For the complete song video containing the 9-11 documentary footage, see: (http://youtu.be/g-giqTW4_YQ).

The lyrics contain an uncanny ‘prophetic’ reverse echo of the event a month before it occurred:

First we have the jihad of against the U.S. over the Rio biodiversity convention but now it is really become Islamic fundamentalism on 9-11:

you told us global warming was a litany of lies, factory chimneys were the prize

you claim all living creatures are your intellectual property

you fail to ratify every treaty which doesn't give you more, have I heard this all before?

when it comes to the final struggle - jihad of the biosphere

there's only one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan

Next we have an echo of the streets of New York amid the smoke and haze of fallen masonry amid a deadly massacre:

walking in the twilight, down in the valley of shadows

when will you comprehend - the damage you have wrought in your indiscretion?

can we undo - the death trance you have set in motion?

Then the amazing, outstanding, caring efforts of those on the ground, to begin the process of recovery:

will you discover - the fabric of love that ignites us?

can we embrace the ocean of life that unites us?

all our lives long this journey has been our destination

if we get this one wrong will there be any chance for restoration

We have the planes flying clean through the towers in flames:

can we touch the sky?

can we fly so high we'll pass right to the other side

and never fall in flames? will we ever be the same again?

To become the shining goal in the beginning and end of life - reminiscent of a martyr seeking the face of God.

we'll become the living soul, the primal source, the shining goal

the beginning and the end of life,

Finally, a shadow of Rudy Giuliani’s statement as Mayor: The “casualties will be more than any of us can bear”:

the happiness and the pain … can we bear it all again?

I apologise to all Americans for comparing your country to the Shaitan, but saving biodiversity is saving ourselves. Refusing to sign the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity is counter to the entire planetary future, so it was/is satanic, just as Donald Trump’s pulling out of the Paris accord was satanic. These are not the acts of a responsible superpower.

So what are we supposed to make of this? It’s just a coincidence isn’t it? There is more to this tale caught up in the quantum entanglement of past, present and future. It’s a completely non-replicable non-IID event. Is it a coincidence? What’s the probability of that? My father used to marvel at coincidence, repeatedly astounded.

How come, a month or more before 9-11 did I get it into my head to write these lines? Yes it's the same life-protecting motive that brought the SEC into existence. But no one remotely conceived this was going to happen. The lyrics are an allegory not conceived to be literal future fact, just poetry, but they are nevertheless written from an apocalyptic viewpoint. But they are also a stream of consciousness account of everybody and everything that happened. The minds of the martyrs thinking they'll fly so high they'll pass right to the other side and it's also the consciousness of the people who went in to deal with the destruction in the smoke and dust of Manhattan's dark corridors and the spirit of those who came to light their candles for life and the uncanny "can we bear it all again?" whose words Giuliani echoed on TV.

What does this all mean about consciousness?

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, our state of knowledge is like that of prisoners chained together in a cave watching an illusory drama. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects, casting shadows on the cave wall. The prisoners watch these shadows, believing them to be real. One prisoner finally sees the fire and realises the shadows are fake. This prisoner escapes from the cave and discovers there is a whole new world outside that they were previously unaware of, but he becomes blinded because his eyes are not accustomed to actual sunlight, so when he returns to free them, his fellows do not trust his new knowledge.

Ruth Kastner has coined the analogy that quantum land hiding in the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, connecting all the potential absorbers to the emitter determining how quantum reality manifests, is the real reality and that physical reality we see in space-time is just the false image on the wall of Plato's cave. I have a different view of this which I'll describe, but Ruth's view has true reality value in suggesting that the foundations of consciousness lie outside physical space-time in the quantum land of incipient possibilities she calls potentiae. In a fundamental sense, this gives a true account of consciousness as the primary reality underlying the necessity of the physical universe, as the consensual illusion that binds together our conscious experiences of the world at large.

My view of this goes as follows:

Firstly 100% of people are subjectively conscious human beings, all of whose understanding of the physical universe has come from their conscious experiences, while only a subset believe in physical causality.

Secondly our experience of conscious volition is that we have autonomous intent and can perceive this intent veridically being manifest in our intentional actions. Therefore the physicalist description which sees consciousness as a mere internal model and volition as non-existent is empirically false.

Thirdly our conscious experience of volition is not like Plato's cave, because we are not passively watching a movie allegory, we are participating in it. The intervention of conscious volition is what actually causes history to emerge from the multiverse, so we are right there by the fire manipulating the images cast on the cave wall. To do this effectively we have to do it predictively.

One of the most central aspects of consciousness is that it is an extended space-time representation of our dynamical relationship with existence on an uncertain trajectory from the immediate past into the uncertain future. This looks convincingly like an entangled quantum representation of the now, i.e. the absolute instant of the present expanded into both the immediate past and immediate future – i.e. the uncertain quantum of the present. When this becomes extended as in the above example of 9-11 which is a strongly felt apocalypse in my vision that is going to become a world apocalypse in everyone's experience the two get caught in a Faustian space-time pact.

To a certain extent our relationship with time is a little like Plato's cave in the sense that the future is herder to see and we are stuck with the past in all our memories, dreams and reflections as Jung said. But this isn't the whole story. The brain-mind is a dynamical predictor as flash-lag illusions show it doing creating space-time artefacts. We experience this facing forwards into the unknown using consciousness as our cubic centimetre of chance to address uncertainty, so my bet is that consciousness is space-time transactionally predictive and has to be for evolution to retain it over a purely physical computational brain.

For consciousness to have any affect on physical outcomes that is useful to evolution, it has to be able to anticipate reality. The mind can do this logically or intuitively. But for conscious intuition to do it, it has to be in a sense precognitive.

What about life immortality and the eternal? is the “ground" of consciousness a universal subjective phenomenon? If so, is it itself in any way connected to the death of the brain. The answer to this is probably yes, because the brain, at the very least is an immensely complex defining condition on the way human organismic consciousness manifests subjectively. This is where a scientist’s comment the the brain “makes” consciousness is largely correct, even if the brain is not causally closed, so that conscious volition is efficacious physically.

But subjective conscious ground of being as a universal phenomenon is then something that is not confined to a mortal organism’s lifetime. In fact it is not even confined to biological evolutionary immortality, so it stands as a principal candidate for being eternal or existing outside space-time, as space-time is an entirely physical construct.

So where does this leave us?

Well, religious people, Psi people and reincarnation people and mediums all have to reconsider all monolithic assumptions about the afterlife. At the same time scientific materialists need to recognise consciousness is cosmological and stop insisting our conscious volition is just a product of the computational brain.

Frankly I think biological mortality is the key to conscious existence sine qua non, because it’s the only way complex conscious existence can become physically manifest in sexual evolution. This is the incarnate focal point of conscious existence. I want to be effectual in my biological existence. I can already experience the immortality of evolving life and the eternal nature of the ground of conscious being and the so called spirit world of disembodied consciousness.

My take on this other world is entirely different from any other description of it I have seen in scripture, mediumistic accounts although is an extension of NDEs – rather as an integral transform of the entire conscious experience of the universe aware of itself, both as the mind at large and as the disembodied entities that constitute it, not some winged angels in “heaven” dancing on the head of a pin and not the tormented in eternal suffering in “hell”.

‘Elohim

We are whispering ... across the heavens

and all the creatures ... they echo in reply.

We are the very blood ... of the tree of life.

We are the void and the shining light.

We are the eternal gypsy spirits of the universe.

We have been here since it all began.

We will outlast its final passing.

We are here to free the heart of man.

Adding further assumptions, in my not-so-humble opinion, leads to all manner of egotistical traps, as serious in the subjective world, as the human desire for cyborg immortality does in the physical universe.

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in despair at the death of his queen, casts the whole of life as a tale told by an idiot:

Out, out, brief candle.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

This is not the outcome we seek for the living planet, so please listen to the sound and fury of a hallucinogen-consuming voice from the wilderness. It is not me, but the direction human life is taking, and all of us with it, that is idiotic beyond comprehension. That is a tale full of apocalyptic sound and fury, both religious and biospheric which, far from signifying nothing, might kill us all if we don’t accept the three priorities for reflowering the planet above.

To quote Yeshua from the Gospel of Thomas (70):

"That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves.

That which you do not have within you [will] kill you if you do not have it within you."

Fig 253b: It won't be easy but we can do this thing.

Here is my Easter 2023 Revelation! Don't ever forget my name is true!

I don't usually adhere to the Everett interpretation, but as it’s a valid QM interpretation, I am entitled to and will also use the transactional special relativistic interpretation. So I’m going to assert the following:

(1) The objective universe, outside subjectivity, is a probability multiverse and on its own, no wave function collapse takes place, and everything remains “entangled".

(2) This applies also to the unconscious aspects of brain function, which proceed on a multiverse Schrödinger wave equation basis forming “massively" superimposed and entangled states.

(3) Subjective conscious volition over the physical universe then collapses these brain wave states in the process of decision-making, to form a predictive form of quantum anticipation, due to the special relativistic nature of the wave functions, involving both causal and retro-causal interactions, via the transactional interpretation, or a super-determinism in which free will exists, and the hidden variables are context dependent on observation, and are not simply random.

(4) To be effective over a non-conscious zombie, subjective consciousness still has to be predictive, to secure natural selection, so subjectivity is and has to be quantum anticipative or "predictive" through (3).

(5) The reason consciousness has been conserved by evolution is thus that environmental uncertainty is uncomputable because it involves both (a) intractable "travelling salesman" problems (b) multiple possible outcomes and most acutely (c) interaction with other live conscious agents, which also possess conscious volitional anticipation.

(6) This takes the form of a Red Queen evolutionary race between conscious predators and prey like the way sexuality evolved as a Red Queen genetic race between parasites and hosts by providing individual variation and avoiding epidemic species extinctions, but ironically resulting in organismic mortality.

(7) This makes a clean cut cosmologically: All unconscious processes are type 2 von Neumann QM multiverses, but all conscious experiences are type 1 anticipatory collapse processes, which ironically make the universe look "classical" to us. In turn, this means that subjective consciousness as we know it, is and is exclusively to anticipate uncertainty, complementing the role of neural computation to infer a certain or uncertain outcome and subjective conscious volition is then "free will" over the uncertain universe with no causal conflict.

(8) This process is cosmological, not simply neuroscientific, and it is integral to the cosmic symmetry-breaking which defined the asymmetric standard model of physics, leading to conscious life in "Paradise" on the cosmic equator in space-time. The late emergence is necessary because the cosmological interactive process takes 10 billion years to become physically viable, not because consciousness is a "late comer”.

(9) This means that there is no such thing as random uncertainty. All contextual and environmental uncertainty is a result of chaotic quantum molecular billiards which remains entangled until the moment of conscious observation. Hence karma, IS quantum uncertainty revealed, not a moral nightmare!

(10) This also means subjective consciousness is creative, innovative and transformative i.e. transcendent over the physical universe.

Avtar Singh: In your proposed model, is the objective universe dead or unconscious?

Chris: It’s not a model. It IS the Cosmos Avtar! The objective universe is unconscious. Consciousness is subjective. Dead has no meaning in this context. The Cosmos is both objective and subjective!

Avtar: What propels the spontaneous change of state such as the Big Bang and expansion of the universe ?

Chris: The laws work just as usual because the Everett interpretation is consistent with QM. I’ve noticed that you frequently use a physical analogy to refer to a wider class of phenomena. So you think a “dead” universe can't have “living” laws, or that Brahma must be an expanding field.

Avtar: What propels the evolution that gives rise to the birth and evolution of biological consciousness?

Chris: That is not one question, but two. From the physical point of view it is precipitated by the symmetry-broken standard model precipitating abiogenesis and then evolutionary selection. From the conscious point of view, natural selection is conscious due to predator-prey interactions and sexual selection is even more conscious, and primal consciousness is compliant with physical laws, but the universe is not causally closed, so consciousness can intervene in unstable brain states corresponding to quantum and environmental uncertainty of survival.

Avtar: Is the objective universe fundamentally probabilistic or infected with measurement caused probabilities?

Chris: A brilliant deduction! Yes it’s severely infected. There is no randomness its 100% “infected” (with consciousness)!

Avtar: What’s the source of fundamental order and certainty of the laws in the universe including the laws of uncertainty?

Chris: Put deceptively simply: (1) The laws are equivalences like E=mc² arising from symmetries and symmetry-breaking. Equations of motion are not causalities, but relationships, describing both order and chaos. (2) Uncertainty is totalistically karmic. If asked to explain physically, I would class it as a type of integral transform over special relativistic space-time but it's also conscious, so that's not the answer. It’s both internally ordered (two entangled particles end up in a precise deterministic correlation) but asymptotically ergodic, (converging towards apparent randomness in many body situations).

Avtar: Bottom line question – is fundamental consciousness an eternal universal reality rather than a late comer evolutionary biological consciousness?

Chris: Symbiotic Existential Cosmology sees fundamental consciousness as evolving in a similar way to how we perceive the physical universe evolves. So it starts out primally vestigial like the big bang does and then rises to climax where it becomes cosmic consciousness realised in extreme states of enlightenment in the biota which become physically asymptotic to the fundamental expression of the laws of nature expressed in symmetry-breaking. So it gets to be the full complexity of fundamental consciousness and it’s NOT a “latecomer” but arises when the physical conditions permit in the mid-life of the Cosmos. Eternality is perspectival, so we can look sideways on at space-time and it’s eternal, everything is there from alpha to Omega, but inside, it is evolving temporally, so eternal and temporal are complementary aspects. In the temporal experiential, the evolution is from alpha to Sigma a climax state of Paradise on the cosmic equator. So there’s no meaning to eternal being transcendent and temporal being ephemeral illusion.

There are two cosmological processes: (1) The gross energy budget. This is the way traditional cosmology works, so we start with the big bang and end with a collapsing crunch or an ever-expanding heat death. (2) Interactive complexity and consciousness. Here the evolution is from the origin to a state of Paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time where the quantum interactive processes reach optimal climax associated with conscious biota. Looked at from the outside, life is an eternal manifestation in space-time that goes on in the mid-life of the mature universe but may end later when everything goes pear-shaped energetically. But from the eternal point of view, this doesn’t matter, because the manifestation came about and realised itself. There may be more but that’s the foundation.

Avtar: How come every point in space and every moment in time are aware of and follow the certainty of the universal laws?

Chris: Universal laws invoke both certainty and uncertainty. Ultimately in the enlightened brain, a condition is evoked which is convergent to a state where the entire universe is aware of itself as it was conceived in a single moment of samadhi, which is not just emptiness, or blackness, or bliss but being, perceiving and knowing, as one is to one, alive in all it’s complexity and compassionate glory … amen!

So we finally get to the conscious part. Subjective consciousness is not just something about the brain, so we agree that it’s somehow in the physics not just the biology, but what it is, is not just the physics, but the cosmology of the full Cosmos (subjective and objective). So subjectivity is the full process 1 collapse phenomenon of QM operating through subjective conscious measurement and anticipation for survival. We are used to taking physical interpretations based on arguing about process 1 and Copenhagen and decoherence interpretations and of course creation and annihilation, because we are conscious observers of the full Cosmos. But until a subjectively conscious observer enters into the picture, this is all hypothetical. Symbiotic Existential Cosmology allows for quanta also to have primal subjectivity so collapse is not entirely produced by the biota, but we as free-will agents transform physical reality to create history, by collapsing the wave function of the multiverse as we go.

So the answer is that you and I do end up at the same point in Paradise – cosmically conscious of ourselves, life, the universe and everything, if we just put our minds to it, or turn on, tune in and drop out, as Tim Leary foolishly confessed in the 1960s, having used the Bardo Thodol as a flight manual for moksha, and caused a new dark age! The entheogens were able to evolve because the human brain is a sappy biochemical organ that can be tweaked back into a cosmically primal dynamic. This is also karmic and Patanjali knew and sensed this.

Avtar: Thanks for your detailed answers. I can understand your proposition, approach, model, or theory to explain universe or cosmos or consciousness etc etc. Ultimately we both arrive at the same Zero Point state of enlightenment or supreme consciousness which may be ultimate destination or value of these approaches or understandings.

The big difference I can feel is how to define consciousness. While your approach relies on a subjective biological consciousness that evolved around the mid cycle of the universe, I have tried to define consciousness as the foundational force or motivator for origination and throughout the evolution of the universe. Just like every living being entails both unconscious matter and living consciousness, Cosmos also as a living being entails both. Hence, both human and Cosmos can be considered or defined as living beings as you also agree that Cosmos or universe is 100% infected with consciousness.

Spontaneous motion or change of state such as the birth or evolution of the universe is an objective evidence of consciousness in my definition of consciousness. Just as living beings are capable of spontaneous motion or change of state, so is the universe. Even the motion of a rock has an ultimate conscious motivator. A robot also has an ultimate conscious motivator who did its programming logic.

Finally, I think both QM and relativity theories are incomplete missing the physics of consciousness or inherent spontaneity or volition or free will in the universe or nature. Their incompleteness is evidenced in their inability to predict 96% of the observed universe. In my book, I try to explain Heisenberg uncertainty via integrating spontaneous decay of particles into relativity. This also explains the spontaneous expansion or the Cosmological Constant or the so called dark energy paradox.

Chris: Thanks for a great account! At least we are on the same “wavelength”!

I thought about the perspective you are articulating, earlier and where I ended up is this. Suppose the universe and all its features were formed, or driven, by cosmic consciousness, then the Cosmos is/was already enlightened, self knowing, self certain, omniscient and omnipotent. So why this exceedingly elaborate process, from the Big Bang, through galaxies stars and planets, to gentle planetary photosynthetic biospheres, and organismic and conscious life?

If what you suggest is true, there is absolutely nothing for us to do about anything. We might as well let the Earth self-destruct, for the future means nothing as everything is/was already achieved. I think we as manifestations are doing exactly what you suggest, but interactively from within. We ARE that “force” you describe! Hence we have a “divine” purpose, which is the fulfilment of the flowering of conscious life, we as yet can only catch a glimpse of!

Avtar: Not true. Human features like body/mind are formed by consciousness but all common human beings are not enlightened. In fact, enlightened beings are rare. Efforts, discipline and Tapasya or hard work are required towards enlightenment.

Chris: This is a problem for your perspective, not for SEC. You are postulating a fully-fledged cosmic mind at the beginning. I’m just pointing out the flaw in your perspective that is shared by Vedic traditions, in which the universe actually runs down into the Kali Yuga, so is a corrupt degenerating cosmology. Hence the full cosmic mind cosmology at the outset is meaningless. There is no sense, or meaning, in a cosmic mind already experiencing full enlightenment to make a flawed universe that runs down-hill, let alone the universe we are in that has life running uphill towards Paradise except that humanity is threatening to destroy it by ignorant exploitation. That’s precisely why we need entheogens to close the circle and break the deadlock of rare moksha.

I know that without direct entheogenic routes, enlightenment is rare and causes the second fallacy of Eastern traditions, reincarnation, but I assure you that moksha is a very simple change of perspective to outside our incarnations and it's personal and experiential to be with Brahman. Mortal and eternal, meeting as one redemption of life. This has nothing to do with reincarnation. It is to do with organismic mortality being the centre of the living cyclone of reality ,where we can actually act as Īśvara/Īśvarī and fully redeem paradise. I don't relate to Brahma because that is too theistic, but I can relate to Īśvara/Īśvarī as personified forms of Brahman.

Avtar: Our destiny is written by our karma and can be changed by our karma. It is not blindly preordained by some commandments from above.

Chris: This is a contradiction because karma was ordained by the godhead. This leads to the third spiritual fallacy of moral karma. Morality has no meaning in the Biosphere except as a socially-selected feature of intelligent strategically-bluffing animal societies, to inhibit intra-social competition to aid inter-social domination. All religions practice this to become dominant cultural forces, but it is not cosmologically meaningful. Karma is a cosmological property of the conscious quantum universe as I explained in my previous posting to you. I’m not ignoring the unification of gravity and the other forces by the way ...

Paul Werbos: But does anyone actually believe (or give more than 20% probability to) the theory that we live in "a multiverse" as promulgated by David Deutsch? … I do not believe it any more because I now see a solid alternative, even more hard core in realism.

Chris: We never see the multiverse because the moment we interact, it collapses into Schrödinger cats, so your question about believing in the multiverse is a misconception. You remind me of the Gospel of Thomas (43):

His disciples said to him, "Who are you, that you should say these things to us?” Jesus said: "You do not realize who I am from what I say to you, but you have become like the Jews, for they (either) love the tree and hate its fruit (or) love the fruit and hate the tree.”

Paul: Are you saying I should shut up, that you are the avatar of Jesus here??? … You really would understand so much better if you could at least begin to grasp the best current physics. … Why is it that when humans are confused they so often use projection, wasting time and energy claiming about others what they are experiencing?

Chris: I was actually referring to your use of your favoured quantum physics interpretations, to the exclusion of others, but the real tree is the tree of life’s evolution and the fruit is living biodiversity, currently under threat of mass extinction.

11-12 Apr 2023 Over the last two days, I have taken a simple practical step towards realising Symbiotic Existential Cosmology in terms of actually addressing key existential threats to biospheric and human survival, having reached the point where I have spent nearly two years bouncing ideas off other peoples opinions in these group discussions.

This is not going to be easy and I can't do it on my own. We have to do this together. I do know what I am doing and the quest is eminently worthy, as you all know in your bones. I had to take the odds into account in the millennium and I know where things stand only too well. Casting lots on my garments is a very foolish bet. There is no sign on the horizon any of you have a better option. The impossible we must needs do today so that tomorrow we can know we did the right thing for all in good time.

I would like all of you to support my quest to save the diversity of life in the biosphere of planet Earth from a mass extinction on cosmological time scales, heal the climate crisis, end the risks of nuclear self-immolation, and restore the sanctity of the biota from human and AI takeover, not least so that Homo sapiens can survive as a species, because this is the one way I can see we can actually proceed to resolve the risk of a Fermi apocalypse before it is too late, quickly and democratically, as one is to one.

I previously sent this communication from SEC making clear that I reject notions of being the avatar of the historical Jesus and quoted the introduction to “The Plumed Serpent” as a karmic metaphor for grounding our spiritual notions in the flesh and blood here and now in real people we can know and get to trust from what they say and what they actually do. What I do respect about Jesus is that, whether it was his idiosyncratic vision, the tumult of Roman Israel or the contrivances of Paul and the Hellenistic Jews, a paradigm shift occurred, which became the cannibalistic Eucharist at the core of the Western religious tradition.

The lesson. Claiming to be God is hubris but paradigm shifts are real and we urgently need a paradigm shift towards collective vision right now and we all need to find the way forward together now.

My father used to say as a doctor that he could count the number of people who had died in his watch on the fingers of one or both hands, so I want to convey to you how I see the current situation.

Let’s take our right hand and list five existential problems of personal survival, e.g. (1) direct health, (2) adequate access to food (3) sufficient active “income" to care for our family, (4) social safety and human contact (5) sheltered habitation and sufficient land to grow our own food if the need arose.

In the left hand we have: (1) An impending human-caused mass extinction of Life, (2) Human induced climate crisis, (3) A protracted acute risk of nuclear holocaust, (4) risk of AI takeover given existing human technological takeover and (5) increasing risk of collapse of technological society from economic effects of (1-4) given the fragility of urban food chains, electronic telecommunications and political and social institutions.

The realities are that we are all fiddling while Rome burns. We all have to balance risk anxiety against practical common sense hope for the future and avoiding the health impacts of anxiety uncertainty, so what we are doing is trying to deal with the right hand issues, while we have no control over the left-hand ones. But the left hand issues affect 8 billion people and the whole future of Earth, while the right hand issues affect only one or the few people in our immediate family. We are forced to treat both the apocalyptic threats and the simple personal survival questions on the same footing, but they are not. None of us can have any real confidence there will be a living Earth in 2100, let alone one habitable for our families and offspring. This is insane, irrational and untenable. What I am saying and doing is sane and could save us all.

I have made clear that I am not an avatar of a fictitious historical character who the Gospel of Thomas shows was vastly different from the character falsely contrived by Pauline Christianity, but I do think I am on the right track to write Symbiotic Existential Cosmology as the living cosmology of the conscious universe and to urge you all to join me in catalysing a paradigm shift to root survival in the biosphere. Everything about Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is empirically defended and its implications are immediately palpable to all human beings. It is ruthlessly critical of spiritual elitism and religious doctrines, in favour of the sacredness of living nature upon which our conscious life depends.

I think what we need to be aiming at are the principal existential threats to humanity and the biosphere as outlined and a human heart and mind response to put these at the top of the list of a catalytic process of communication to catalyse cultural redemption. I don't see a rationale for ranking priorities as such, because they are all urgent and the principal is survival by addressing the core existential threats as primary.

I see the key principle as preserving life on Earth into which all these crises feed without getting confused by secondary human demands.

The key is coalescence – that is accepting that the need to act is primary and drawing in people on the basis of strengthening expertise, reach and ground roots support.

I don't see this as a religious or spiritual initiative or movement as such, but it is clear that belief systems are the way deep paradigm shifts have occurred throughout history. Science has also had major paradigm shifts such as the Copernican and physics revolutions from classical to quantum and relativity but these do not impinge in the same way on human motivation. Therefore I think there is a quasi-religious dimension in it but it’s very complicated and contentious, because our beliefs in these groups is vastly more divergent than our science which is also divergent.

I am trying to take a position that sacralises life over spiritual elitism, speculation and religious doctrine across the board and avoids utopian elite fantasies involving human technological dominion and tries to avoid any claims that lie outside mainstream science except for primal subjectivity as a cosmological foundation complementing the physical universe. It is idiosyncratic in involving psychedelics as a technique but that isn’t central to the core need to protect life on Earth except as a catalyst, which it clearly is, in invoking a connected view of nature and consciousness that differs from both Eastern and Western elite spiritual traditions.

Hal Cox: About theologizing, please don’t take offense. I suggest engagement in theological matters in extremis detracts from the mission of respecting nature. Because it has no or little effect.

Chris: This is the silliest, most ill-advised thing for you to say to a chaos visionary who will take hypocritical controversy as an incitement to act! Your behaviour is ignorant and menially self-aggrandising to no good end. This is a genuine critique of sanctimonious bullshit.

We are in three groups together – Scientific Basis of Consciousness, Resplendence and Biological Physics and Meaning. They are all full of people espousing implicitly religious positions. I am simply being honest as a visionary, not as a religious person at all. I have some sort of weird karmic connection with the Western religious sacramental tradition which I do NOT intend to deny, because I see the natural sacraments as pivotal to human survival. My karma is perhaps the most valuable thing I have alongside Symbiotic Existential Cosmology and I certainly intend to utilise it as a living responsibility to do what needs to be done. I can’t afford to go to my death bed born Chris King on the Hanford Epiphany without taking the personal responsibility to declare to the world that nuclear weapons must be eradicated from the face of the Earth and that the diversity of life must be saved from extinction. The key to the visionary condition is accepting full personal responsibility for the entire circumstances of the world into which we are born, to give witness to the truth of ultimate reality. That’s why my name IS true, or tru, as Brian says, and my words are the native truth of the living savage. Most of my dialogue is decomposing religious assumptions, because they are oppressive and lead ultimately to violence and particularly oppression of nature.

Savage mid-13c. (late 12c. as a surname), of animals, "ferocious;" c. 1300, "wild, undomesticated, untamed," also "wild, uncultivated" (of land or places), from Old French sauvage, salvage "wild, savage, untamed, strange, pagan," from Late Latin salvaticus, alteration (vowel assimilation) of silvaticus "wild, woodland," literally "of the woods," from silva "forest, grove" (sylvan "of the woods," 1570s, from French sylvain (1530s), from Latin silvanus "pertaining to wood or forest" (originally only in silvanae "goddesses of the woods"), from silva "wood, woodland, forest, orchard, grove," of unknown origin. The -y- is a misspelling from influence of Greek hylē "forest," from which the Latin word was supposed to derive).g.

Yeshua is the only person in either group who has a glimpse of the visionary perspective I/AM, who is also espousing Urantia, an apocryphal religious text in regular postings. I respect Yeshua because he is a true source visionary. His vision may be occluded by theism, but it’s genuine source visionary experience nevertheless. Kashyap, Stan and Cathy are perhaps the only people on either list with unblemished secular credentials. You Hal, stoop to complete fantasy spinners like Betty Kovacs and tell me to suck eggs, when she is espousing a mix of a few genuine derived insights and the rest is pulp fiction. I have had to debate Mike for months traipsing out fundamentalist Monotheistic creationism against biological evolution, now slightly diluted with Eastern philosophy in contrived deceits of “holism” and “metaphysics”. I thank Mike because he resulted in 100 pages of evolutionary science in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology to defend against these life-denying religious dogmas. Even Jo is close to worshipping Leibniz, while using exclusively physicalist arguments to pretend to deny materialism. Paul is even more far-fetched with his beloved "dark matter noosphere", pontificating from on high, while simultaneously citing Psi and hard core Einsteinian physics like chalk and cheese.

On SBoC, we have Vedantists left, right and centre, with Ram following Nāgārjuna, Whit also professedly Buddhist, Robert worshiping Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s very words, and BVK in defence of the Vedas beneficently looking on from afar, with Alex and Siegfried in hot pursuit and Vinod pulling astral universes like rabbits out of a hat on the basis of a dead Himalayan Yogi. This is advertised as “yoga science” but we all know it is religious doctrine from the Upanishads. John, who tries to be devotedly scientific, seamlessly follows Aristotle's four causes and sees Vedanta and Buddhism as one spectre of the living truth of moral karma in the nicest possible way. If this is the case, why can’t you Hal accept and respect my karma? Or should you deny them theirs?

And you Hal have the cheek to deny someone who stands in the flesh and blood alongside you as a friend and simply asks for coalescence to the need to protect life and humanity from a self-induced apocalypse of Fermi species extinction that makes an absolute mockery of all religious traditions and business as usual alike. Shame on you. Either wake up or go into the sleep which DH Lawrence declared of Jesus and Mary! I will not go gentle into that goodnight! Neither will I rage against the dying of the light, but illuminate life in resplendence.

17 Apr 2023 I have considered the most appropriate response to Paul and Hal's ad hominem sanctimonies about my vision quest, during a weekend vigil to our sacred wilderness land of Opuhi for the 2023 AGM. This is a living nature reserve community overlooking the islands of the Hauraki Gulf and Moehau, on the right, where the chief of the Arawa canoe lies, that we plan to protect in perpetuity. My children have grown up here and we guard it like the Yanomamo guard their native land heritage. It is crowned by our Polynesian style meeting house below that has, since we built it, become a heritage building in the Peninsula district plan. I have spent many moonlit nights lying in entheogenic reverie in the long grass that caps the summits of what is otherwise a wind-swept native forest wilderness.

Fig 253c: Opuhi AGM 2023, the meeting house and the wind-swept puriri tree outside.

I class both Paul’s and Hal’s statements as ignorant, condescending and presumptuous and here is why ...

When I planned the millennial vigil to Jerusalem, I did this in a full academic sabbatical on a paid academic salary. I had contacted the grandson of one of the founders of Tel Aviv who had conceived to host a millennial celebration in Jerusalem who agreed to host myself and Jane at the Academy of Jerusalem for a 12 day workshop on reflowering the Tree of Life. I did this knowing exactly the potential for trouble facing the conflict-ridden nexus of the three core Monotheistic religions, but mindful that the world's traditional credibility has much more at stake and is more in question, than my own idiosyncratic vision. We succeeded in doing what we intended – to celebrate the hieros gamos and invoking the epoch of the Tree of Life to culminate the apocalyptic epoch of Christianity, to complete the rite of passage to the new epoch in a short unpretentious sleight of hand to establish the key precedent. At the time I couldn't admit it was the mushroom that had sent me there 15 years before in the 1980s, because we were still in the psychedelic dark ages in 1999.

The director of the school approved my application for a residency grant at a US university, on the basis that I didn't claim to be walking on water. I travelled to the US where I visited psychedelic experts, including staying with the mycologist Paul Stamets in his little mushroom yurt temple. We then left for Bolivia and toured the burning season in the dry topical forest and then to the Peruvian Andes, where we descended from Cusco down the Urubamba by truck and dugout canoe, emerging through the Pongo de Manique into the Amazon basin, filming burning, logging and cattle ranching, down the Ucayali, where we took ayahuasca at Yarinacocha, to Iquitos, Manaus and then up the Madeira to the Pantanal. We then traversed Europe from Amsterdam where we took mushrooms, visiting both pagan and Christian sites like Saintes Marie de la Mer to retrace the mythical steps of Magdalen and to the Vatican. We then flew to Jerusalem for the millennial celebrations, holding an all night vigil of a hundred forming the collective mashiach above the Dome of the Rock to pronounce the reflowering anointing by God and Gaia to renew the old wastes as a garden causeth the things sewn in it to spring forth, on millennium Eve and marching in a group of 13 on the Eastern gates of the Old city on the Epiphany, to declare the Gates of Mercy open and to celebrate the hieros gamos in the name of the Song of Songs at the Western wall. We were hosted by liberal Jewish people throughout. From there I transited to Nepal and overland to Varanasi to pay my respects to Kali as the most formidable form of the cosmic feminine, before returning to NZ.

So now we come to the current discussion about Hal's claim that "theological matters in extremis detracts from the mission of respecting nature".

My visit to Opuhi, sleeping overnight at the summit with Christine reminded me of just how deluded these statements are, so I decided to explain to you all and the world at large just what Resplendence means to me, as the natural successor to religion – illuminating in autonomous visionary liberation, rather than binding by prescriptive spiritual belief.

If you read these thirteen points carefully, you will immediately realise these are nothing like any religion that has ever existed on the face of the Earth. It is also a scientific cosmology coming right out of left field that is itself a testament to the mushroom and to the sheer idiosyncrasy of the first person vision quest. Also you will realise that I am so far ahead of the ball that you will probably disagree with one another about the physics and perhaps only Yeshua can understand the significance of the immediate first person vision. Maybe then you can begin to understand why I have not sought a religious following or cultic focus since, but rather have walked as Laotsu and why I have sought to be a member of these groups in the hope that someone can begin to appreciate the truth and significance of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology as a living redemption of planet Earth and its increasingly vulnerable biospheric diversity of life.

Thirteen Core Principles of Cosmological Resplendence

1. Cosmos: Conscious experience and the physical universe are Cosmic complements. Each is necessary to the other's existence and neither are sufficient unto themselves. Subjectivity begins as a primal vestige, complementary to the vestigial emergent universe and emergent in dynamically unstable quantum systems and manifests with the evolving universe. The universe does not begin with God, or from a fully-fledged cosmic consciousness, out of which the material universe is emergent. Neither is it theistically degenerate, heading to an Eschaton, Frashokereti, Kali Yuga or Samvartakalpa, but upward into the light of full illumination that IS resplendence manifest.

2. Biogenesis: The central purpose of the Cosmos is to be generative of conscious life. The living universe rises to interactive complexity climax in molecular abiogenesis and the ensuing evolutionary emergence of conscious organisms. The physical universe and the forces of nature form a symmetry-broken interactive "mandala" which generates the elements, the organic molecules of life and the non-linear fractal structures of complex molecules, including proteins and nucleic acids, organelles, cells, tissues and organisms as an interactive climax of cosmology.

3. Biota: The living biota are the centre of the existential cyclone of the climax of existence, because we exist at the interface of the physical and the experiential. All experience and manifestation of God(s), spirit beings, etherial or even purely physical phenomena arise through the conscious biota. None stands more pivotally in the cosmological manifestation than the biota and conscious life itself. Eternal consciousness is manifest through and only through the biota. This "worldly" existence IS cosmic existence becoming manifest. There is no greater heaven or hell than biospheric Paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time, mid-life in the history of the universe, as interactive Sigma rather than alpha or Omega as beginning and end states. Temporality and eternality are complementary perspectives. Through manifesting in space-time, consciousness is eternal.

4. Quantum Reality: The function of subjective conscious volition over the physical universe is to collapse the wave function of the quantum multiverse to bring about the phenomenon of history out of our multiple potential futures, through the autonomous conscious willing agency of the biota. Conscious experience is complementary to environmental uncertainty, ensuring the survival of the organism, ultimately due to quantum uncertainty in both brain dynamics and the physical universe. Conscious neurodynamics is thus a cosmological manifestation, not just a biological one. We are transformers of the universe and innovators, protectors and creators of the future and need to be prescient, compassionate and protective of the entire universe and all life within it. Subjectivity complements purely objective information processing in the brain, which is computationally insufficient to maintain life in the uncertain natural environment.

5. Meaning: The purpose and meaning of conscious life in the universe is so that the Cosmos, and ourselves as organisms, can come to know and realise ourselves ecstatically through each and all of us making the vision quest to discover ultimate nature of reality in upholding and protecting the evolving diversity of life, so that we and the living Cosmos can discover ourselves ever more deeply over cosmic time.

6. Responsibility: In coming to experience ultimate reality, we become personally responsible for every aspect of the fate of the universe and all life, both by our constructive, or destructive actions, and our negligence about or protective action to avoid existential threats we know as a species we are causing to the diversity and future of life as a whole. If we coexist in a world where there is mutually assured nuclear destruction, or human induced climate crisis, or a mass extinction of the diversity of life, we become personally culpable for failing to act with our lives to protect the future of life.

7. Maturity: We have, by our dire actions as a species, ceased to be children of Eden or adolescents of religion and have to learn to stand in the universe and on planet Earth as mature beings, taking full responsibility for our fate, as a people and as a biospheric species. We cannot assume to pray to higher powers to guide or direct us. The buck stops right here. We need to be compassionate of all living species and all sentient beings and plant the seeds of love in everyone’s hearts, but there is no need for renunciation of worldly desires, or overcoming the grasping ego, or clinging to life itself, all of which are means to natural survival, because, as mortal beings, the only true meaning we can achieve in life is to give back to the diversity of life with our lives, to protect and assist its immortal flowering in abundance.

8. Mortality: To exist in the physical universe, the sheer complexity of life has to oppose entropic decay into the heat death characteristic of physical systems, forming a negentropic self-organising system we call the biosphere. But genetic replication is endlessly subject to the very mutations through which evolution occurs, shaped by natural and sexual selection. Eucaryote sexuality evolved genetic recombination between mother and father to avoid lethal parthenogenetic decay, in which only half our genes go to our offspring, creating organismic variety in fertilisation that avoids extinction but results in individual organismic mortality. This cannot be solved by hungering for eternal individual life of an organismic “soul”, which is selfish in itself.

9. Sentient Consciousness: The emergence of conscious life as we know it arose in the eucaryote endosymbiosis between the two founding cellular life forms, archaea and bacteria through a topological transformation that freed the cell membrane from energy production through sequestering in the mitochondria, leaving the cell membrane free for quantum sentience and social signalling.

10. Biospheric Symbiosis: The biosphere rises to climax complexity through planetary symbiosis, in which the seeming conflicts between plants and animals, predators and prey and parasites and hosts act to avoid each rising to boom and bust extinction and encourage species diversity. Humanity as a dominant species can survive long-term only by full symbiosis with the biosphere on which we depend for our very existence.

11. Sacramental Evolution: The biospheric sacraments have evolved to be able to tweak the sappy biochemical brain to bring it into a more universal dynamic, underlying our conscious existence in a state of psychic realisation to ensure humanity as a dominant species understands its ultimate connection with and dependence on the diversity of life in the biosphere and will thus seek to protect it with our lives. With expert compassionate guidance and deep meditation, these can bring about full liberation from the round of birth and death in this lifetime.

12. Moksha and Enlightenment: Rather than seeking an illusory transcendent or eternal state through spiritual elitism, submitting to materialistic desires, or fragile technological utopias bound to Fermi self-extinction, the entheogens bring us into a symbiotic relationship with life as a whole, so that biospheric life can perennially survive in the immortal passage of the generations. Through sacramental and other deep meditation, we can escape the mortal round of birth and death to experience ultimate reality, in moksha, thus achieving and realising cosmic consciousness. This is the source of all ecstasy, happiness and fulfilment and opens the true discovery of the deepest conscious realms and for cosmic consciousness to emerge from deep organismic consciousness.

13. Compassion: The key to all life and wisdom is to be ever compassionate of the mortal coil, which is permeated, both by the ecstatic joy of conscious resplendent life and physical suffering and decay, because through the mortal coil, all the immortal wonders of existence, both corporal and etherial arise.

Resplendence is NOT a doctrinal religion: Outside these principles, there is no doctrine of what to believe, how to redeem reality, or what we must each do, or not do, to achieve enlightenment in resplendence. There is no moral imperative, as we cannot be autonomous transformative agents if we are under the social control of an overweening belief system. Resplendence “to shine forth brightly” liberates from Religio “to bind together”. Resplendence is thus to liberate from religious and materialistic bondage, in autonomous free will, to transform reality and protect life.

The "religious" element of Resplendence is not to debate cosmology or philosophy of mind but to motivate us all to seek the redemption of what humanity has done to life itself before it is too late. You could think of this and ponder that it is somehow both a manifestation of how Jesus expressed his wild free spirit in the Gospel of Thomas as a visionary innovator and how Richard Feynman felt conceiving of QED. And maybe you can begin to get a glimmering of why I have up till now sought your company, as an exceedingly rare species of visionary who genuinely holds the future of life on this planet in the palm of my hand, if only one or two people begin to listen, and who knows no one else who really can do this good thing for life in this way.

I am not presenting this for debate, or further deranged critique, but to stand, subject to my own prerogative. I repeat, the world and its biodiversity needs and justifies your support of my endeavour.

I ask you Hal, how can this possibly be fairly accused of theologising? Isn't it ultimate reality speaking?

To remind you how Jesus felt in this context, as history's most outstanding apocalyptic visionary, we have the Gospel of Thomas (28):

Jesus said, "I took my place in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh. I found all of them intoxicated; found none of them thirsty. And my soul became afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their hearts and do not have sight; for empty they came into the world, and empty too they seek to leave the world. But for the moment they are intoxicated. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent."

Amit Aurora: Have a few questions for which I have been exploring answers. What are the means by which the world may be returned to a union with Brahman? What is the nature of the work that is called for? How is any one particular citizen-individual to be expected to engage with that work? How does situation and context affect the nature of the work? I would request feedback and answers in a more scientific way and not in a spiritual way.

Chris: My take on this is simple. Brahman is ultimate reality. The true experience of ultimate reality causes one to witness in personal consciousness the entire sweep of reality outside our usual personal view of birth and death, hence moksha is the escape into ultimate truths of ultimate long-term survival of life and humanity as a species within it. This means rescuing humanity from destroying the planet's habitats and biosphere through nuclear holocaust, mass species extinction and climate crisis. It only takes one brief glimpse of ultimate reality to make this abundantly clear. The entire flux of human urgency needs to go into biospheric redemption now. We all need to coalesce on the existential crises and provide the urgent determination to act.

If experience of Brahman as ultimate reality has any practical scientific meaning at all, rather than a self-satisfying spiritual pursuit, it shouldn't just bring bliss, but an acute redemption of planetary awakening (enlightenment), through us realising what we are actually doing to the world as we speak and what needs to be done immediately.

It has to involve transcending the zeitgeist in scientific terms and natural terms as well as spiritual self-realisation. All the other issues including ending poverty, economic sustainability, spiritual realisation, recognition that biological consciousness must not be overtaken by AI and so on will be resolved if and only if we direct our lives to the preservation of life on Earth while we ARE alive. It really amazes me that no one seems to be able to grasp this very simple acid test!

Bob Boyer quoted Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: "The science of Being is the transcendental science of mind. The Science of Being transcends the science of mind which in its turn transcends the science of matter which, again, in turn, transcends the diversity of material existence."

Chris: This is a misconception of reality. There is no enlightenment gained from claiming the science of being transcends the diversity of life, which manifests in material existence. This cannot be astutely defended, as both we ourselves and the diversity of life, are physically manifest, although also conscious and capable of transcendence.

It is dangerous to take anyone's statements, especially MMYs, as automatically correct or gospel, to preach the word of enlightenment. This is a typical error of mind-sky transcendent cosmologies that don’t understand mortal life is the centre of the cyclone of existence.

Without the diversity of life there can be no transcendence. Brahman told me this directly, not through a yogi’s aphorism. It is essential medicine for cosmological delusion.

Alex Hankey: Bob Boyer will quote Maharishi's excerpts from his 'Science of Being' as axiomatic Truths. Before denying them, it would be better to consider how Maharishi intended the words and phrases he was using to be interpreted!

Chris: Bob’s quote I’m sure is correct. The problem is Vedic “infallibility” There is a natural flaw in the cosmology. The edge of chaos is at the interface of subjective and objective. That is where ultimate reality arises. Right in the cycle of birth and death. That’s Kali’s lesson and why I went to Varanasi after Jerusalem. In Jerusalem I restored the Tree of Life. In Varanasi I acknowledged the cycle of life.

All the utterly fabulous realities of nature and the universe are not just mirages of transcendental consciousness. They are the very embodied backbone of transcendence manifest in us. This is the tragic flaw of Eastern mysticism. It needs to be acknowledged and understood for what it is. Honesty is never brutal. It is always enlightening.

John: Its lovely that you broke this down into separate statements than can be commented. Its easier to grasp your orientation and find general agreement, but for a few boundaries you seem to draw against general consciousness prior to life. I don’t think we can treat it as a complementarity with material existence as such. Mind can be such a complementarity, and that is consistent with Vedic philosophy where both mind and body are realizations of a conscious principle. Consciousness might be more identified with Brahman, the source of the complementarity we experience.

“The edge of chaos is at the interface of subjective and objective. That is where ultimate reality arises.”

I also see ultimate reality at the interface (relation) between subjective and objective, or more accurately not an “interface” as such because subjective and objective are dual aspects of a whole that cannot directly interface or interact with each other except for information translations between the to; so there is no interface as such except that an ineffable, unformalizable, relation exists between them. I think the best meta-model for that is mutual contextualization. When you look at the rich causality view I have been describing (all four causes in a contextualized cycle), there is a causal organization that extends throughout nature and is more knowable than chaos. Chaos is a mathematical description based on an assumption of non-order. It is not a fundamental ontology, necessarily; especially if we can conceptualize a fundamental ontology that explains more. This is a great confusion in modern science philosophy. The fundamental principle may be more informative than Chaos, which is the best we can do from the perspective of pure syntax. What I have discovered is that Chaos and uncertainty, while they fill a void in mechanistic description, are too causally degenerate to provide a foundation for anything. One then has to resort to mysterious generation of later principles without any known source. The best scientific philosophy, the most parsimonious, would propose a foundation that has all the fundamental principles of nature in it so they don’t have to be injected later from extraneously proposed sources. Of course modern scientists believe they have that foundation, but it has been proven to be causally incomplete, requiring ad hoc invention to resolve gaps and paradoxes. Chaos is such a foundation. It is retrospective description assuming mechanical disorganization. Indeed patterns can then form randomly in such a theoretical system but there is still a hand-waiving gap to explain how organization is acquired its basis is not already in the fundamental assumption about reality, meaning that Chaos would not be purely chaotic. True complexity, if that is the foundation I think it is, is autopoietic organization which only looks like Chaos in its most primitive form. This, I propose, is the least disorganization that is possible in nature. I think we will discover that dark energy is autopoiesis. Life itself certainly is.

“Right in the cycle of birth and death.”

Yes, this can be seen, as I have tried to do, as a “rich causality”, clearly depicting four causes in a cylical autopoietic order. Shiva/Kali dancing is a symbol of the living and conscious principles of this fundamental order. Everything in this image of Shiva dancing in the circle of fire is representative of the four-part holism described endlessly in the Rig Veda and Upanishads, before many academic schools got hold of it and tried to make it more understandable from a dualist viewpoint, which became dominant after 600BC. As a result, an endless cycle of creation had to be understood in terms of a physical origin of the universe and separation of mind and body. We developed these dualistic concepts as effective ways of describing the world around us, and then tried to apply them to holism, which doesn’t quite work without introducing a fundamentally unknowable component of the theory. So, instead of describing a unity of self-similar wholes in nature that extend infinitely (as in the invocation to ISHA upanishad), we got ideas of a temporal origin of existence and material origin of mind; both impossibilities. But now we have to use those terms of reference to re-imagine the whole, and any attempt to do so is necessarily incomplete. That incompleteness was known in the original Vedic insight. While everything real can be described in terms of that whole wheel of birth and death (understood metaphysically), building that out also results in a singularity. It is the nature of seeking a symbolic description of reality that does this. But the singularity in the original Vedic notion was one of infinitely extending wholeness. The only symmetry break is the perception of that whole as represented in whole systems within whole systems - it is a difference that shows up in descriptions as contextualized scale differences. Applying that simple idea to history gives us Einstein’s special relativity, which does not have an origin - it is scale independent order. The psychological need to have an physical origin resulted in GR, which is the view assuming gravity to be a given cause in the universe rather than a produced effect. Compare that to the current debate about consciousness as cause or effect. The GR description had it backwards, and that is what results in a paradox about what gravity is (attractive or repulsive). A simpler and more general view is that gravity is produced from autopoietic organization of original cause.

But back to Shiva/Shakti — Look at the traditional depiction of this wheel and Shiva’s dance (fig 253d). I inserted an interpretive slide of the traditional bronze statue you can buy anywhere. I separated these for clarity - the combined image can be a little busy. Note that every aspect of the holon is symbolized appropriately in the statue. Some images show only one sash, or a broadening sash. The serpent coils around the waist like the sash does. But there is a reason for many (perhaps more original) depictions showing two roots in the material quadrant. One may be reasonably be interpreted as the origin of the serpent. This structural node of the holon is the origin of everything from prior existence, Sat (truth = satya) in the Vedic system. The serpent has to have an origin and so its beginning is here, but most images only show a two tailed sash. That’s the only ambiguity I see, and it seems obvious there was originally a reason to show two roots and thus to have a symbol for this node. The serpent thus stretches on the horizontal axis which corresponds to epistemology in the holon - knowability; i.e., Life rises from existence, but only by becoming conscious in hidden reality (vertical axis). Hence sash and serpent are commonly coiled around the body of Nataraj, but not directly connected. As we know from Yoga the serpent is often seen as rising from the base of the spine - the material root of our being.

Fig 253d: John’ Kinneman’s four cause framework.

BVK Sastry: Namaste CK For a Cross comparison thinking: MMY and Sri.La. Prabhupada. Srimad Bhagavad Gita was explained to Science Teams by two great personalities of last century. Amongst many, one is MMY and Another is Sri.La. Prabhupada. The reason for me to pick these two names is both were Yogis from Tradition and came to America , interacted with Science Teams; Gave two different PRACTICAL – YOGAANGA Techniques for exploring Consciousness/ Conscious Matter.

MMY provided TM . Sri La Prabhupada gave ‘ Mahamantra- Naama Samkeertana’. Both are anchored to Gita- Yoga-Science and Spiritual Traditions and authority. Both streams of practice have been scientifically explored by modern science;

- totally ignoring NATIVE YOGA-SCIENCE Frame of ‘PRAKRUTI: Conscious Matter !

- Forcefully thrusting ‘inappropriate MATTER (No CONSCIOUSNESS) Model !

Chris: If you were the only example, Vedanta would be the universal expression of beneficence, togetherness, common sense and conscious illumination. But yes, I have been also to Sai Baba’s Gita extolling sermons claiming that without God we are nothing, just a shadow crawling into the darkness.

Here’s the problem with the East. The West comes from a tradition of theistic creationism. This is much more easy to scientifically reject than “Vedic science”. We all know that the Sabbatical six day creation is an enchanting allegory by the priestly author in which trees are “meat” suggesting vegetarianism, but the plants appear before the solar system, so its plain wrong in evolutionary terms. Anyone with any honesty knows Biblical creationism is a false cosmology, despite repeated attempts of Christian creationist ID proponents to convince us otherwise.

But “Vedic science” is a different kind of problem. It leaves me slightly gob-smacked that all these highly intelligent gentlemen can continue to argue that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi or Prabhupada or Nagarjuna, or the Upanishads, or Patanjali are somehow expressing something that is scientifically verified and yet treats material science as the mere flecks of foam on the ocean of consciousness, as the road to superficial materialist perdition and get away with no critical thought or insight at all, or ever ask “Are these fundamental assumptions of the Vedas actually correct?”

Fig 253e: The sheer profusion of galaxies in the James Webb telescope.

1. Is it true that primal cosmic consciousness on its own can generate all the complexity, solidity of the physical universe that sustains all life within it as a living climax of physical profundity becoming conscious insight? Or is it a fantasy derived from sitting in Yogic posture in renunciation from the world? If primal cosmic consciousness is supreme and complete, why was the universe created in a form degenerating into the Kali Yuga?

2. Is the notion of transcendence actually the discovery of ultimate reality, or is it just a state of seemingly egoless repose gained through costly self control, perhaps perceived as equilibrium, or joy, bliss, or “transcendence” itself? Isn’t ultimate reality a much wilder more complete experience, in which we are immersed, embedded, incarnate in the physical universe that is perhaps a multiverse teeming with the potential for mortal organismic conscious life, in the immortal passage of the generations, in which mortality and this worldly existence, which Buddhists condescendingly call “mundane existence” is not illusion at all, but the edge-of-chaos climax of cosmic enlightenment becoming manifest in us?

3. Is our ultimate duty to transcendence over “mundane existence”, or to be fully immersed in intimate immortal symbiosis with the entire flux of life, so that consciousness throughout the universe can come to know and transcend itself in physical, biological and subjective conscious “gnosis” of the entire cosmic condition, manifest both physically and experientially as one is to one? Can we afford, even for a moment to deviate from the ultimate respect of life to an illusory transcendence, which causes us to demote the life of the Cosmos to a mere stepping stone to be discarded in full union?

If the answer to any of these critically important questions is that the Vedic assumptions may not be 100% true, it is then our “divine” duty to seek the truth of ultimate reality in the raw and not hold back in renunciation from the high noon of existence, to settle for the slumber of renunciation of the physical cycle of life in favour of endless, dreamless sleep of “transcendent” samadhi.

My not so humble, urgent opinion is that if samadhi were true enlightenment as expressed in the Vedas three thousand or so years ago, humankind would already be enlightened and the world would be a blessed blue-green planet, where there are no nuclear weapons, where asteroids are avoided and the diversity of life is resplendent in immortal paradise. It is not. There is no sign that Vedic insights lead to any urgency at all to preserve life immortal or to reject the use of ultimate nuclear force, as indeed the Bhagavad Gita declares. Therefore the prosecution rests with the evidence before us.

Bob Boyer: You said "yet treats material science as the mere flecks of foam on the ocean of consciousness". If you can show me an instance/example, we can consider the context and how you may have interpreted it.

Chris: Here’s one from John: "Its easier to grasp your orientation and find general agreement, but for a few boundaries you seem to draw against general consciousness prior to life. I don’t think we can treat it as a complementarity with material existence as such. Mind can be such a complementarity, and that is consistent with Vedic philosophy where both mind and body are realizations of a conscious principle".

This is put in the nicest possible way, but it’s still demoting the universe to consciousness. The James Webb image of the profusion of galaxies shows many which could contain conscious life. Are you all seriously trying to say this is just a conscious mirage or aggregate of consciousness?

Bob: Yes that primal cosmic consciousness on its own can generate all the complexity, solidity of the physical universe that sustains all life within it is the premise, much like the modern scientific theory of the unified field of nature as the ultimate field of 'perfect symmetry,' the source of order in nature, the 'source of everything' or 'TOE.' But it does not include the implication in your statement that physical complexity somehow generates consciousness; consciousness is primary, not yet included in unified field theory in mainstream modern science.

Chris: My statement in no way conveys the implication "that physical complexity somehow generates consciousness”. You are trying to assert consciousness in some way makes matter but I am NOT saying objective physical matter makes subjective consciousness. I’m saying the Cosmos is fundamentally complementary, and subjective and objective are each derived from the other as the allegorical dance of Shiva and Shakti.

Bob: "Why was the universe created in a form degenerating into the Kali Yuga" is a good question, and the answer has to do with the inherent nature of the ultimate 'unified field as the source of everything' to phenomenally appear to manifest in finite creation as the orderly laws of nature and their instantiations even to the physical level.

Chris: But here you are making a physical field theoretic explanation, not a mental one. Yes we know about the second law and the heat death, but this is a consciousness or superconsciousness-based cosmology you are expounding, so the primal consciousness – Brahman or Ishvara/Ishvari – conceived it this way. Why do it this way at all? The obvious answer is that the laws of nature HAVE to work this way and are NOT a dream in the mind of Vishnu. We thus need to accept the mortal coil in the best of all possible worlds!

Bob: The process of transcending is effortless, for mind to settle to its least excited or ground state.

Chris: This is a pure physical explanation for the most transcendent mental state, contradicting your claim that consciousness makes the universe. Transcendental meditation may be effortless but moksha remains elusive.

Bob: I don't feel comfortable with the 'edge of chaos' part of your questions,

Chris: The edge-of-chaos is the centre of the cyclone of ultimate reality! It’s common to consciousness, neurodynamics, biological evolution, galactic evolution, and even simple abstract systems like cellular automata, where universal computation occurs at the edge of chaos. You can't escape it and to try to do so is asserting the rule of absolute order like Avtar tries to do in rapidly expanding physical systems being enlightenment.

Bob: However, calling the physical level the 'mundane existence,' or the grossest, most concrete level, is just referring to the inherent ability of human individuals here on Earth to evolve to live the full ultimate value of life, with full appreciation of one's own infinite, eternal status -- the fullest respect for each individual living human being.

Chris: This is human spiritual elitism speaking! So what about hydra? Darwin suggested the polype has free will. Can polype free will make the universe? Why is human consciousness any better? And where do you find cosmic Brahman except as manifested in human conscious experience?

Bob: Yes, but not just 'one is to one' on just the physical level, but on all levels of nature, gross, subtle, and transcendent.

Chris: This is a contradiction. Nature is above all natural. You are making an elite layered spiritual model, all the upper layers of which are ephemeral not eternal. What precisely is nature transcendent? The only way this can be achieved is by reflowering biodiversity and humanity, protecting the living planet so that it can come to conscious climax. You are making a short-circuit in the cosmic manifestation.

John Kinneman: The issue is that a logical description of oneness also has to be constructed in such a way that it explains illusive breaks of that oneness into the separate systems we seem to experience. It is not as simple as just saying “One” or “not One”; with regard to knowledge, it has to explain both.

Chis: Why seek oneness at all? Isn’t it a monolithic clunker?

John: Seeking knowledge is seeking oneness. There isn't an alternative.

Chris: I see knowledge as seeking ultimate reality, not oneness. Yes there are alternatives as explained below.

John: Since enlightenment is a human experience science should be structured in a way that does not exclude it.

Chris: But this is not conceding that science can also include it. It is a plea for the ineffable. That’s not mysticism but mystification.

Chris: How do you distinguish hard oppressive oneness from soft diverse oneness?

John: What are these ideas? I haven't encountered them and have no idea what they mean. Are you referring to social structures? That isn't Oneness. Oneness isn't material. Forcing things together or into a mold doesn't unify anything. Understanding unifies.

Chris: Take the Islamic view of scripture, sharia and society together as a coercive monolith reinforced by death for apostasy if you want a cogent example. Atonement is also a noir concept in the sense of making amends for a wrong or injury, in atonement for our sins. Understanding doesn't necessarily unify and shouldn’t if it is aiming at truth. Moksha can take you outside the inside out and then you hit alien territory and realise both scientific and religious assumptions are cartoon level descriptions that are manifestly in contradiction to nature. It may put you outside the box but it doesn't and shouldn’t necessarily lead to unity, but rather a paradigm shift.

Chris: Oneness is a misrepresentation of emotional empathy, typified by the MDMA experience of oxytocin touchy feely togetherness. If that’s enlightenment, we can all give one another a pat on the back and get tingles down our spine and let the forests burn! So enlightenment and the pursuit of knowledge cut deeper than mere empathy.

John: It seems that you are confusing love with pleasure and oneness with irresponsibility. The likely reason for those mistakes is conflation & confusion of material and spiritual domains of existence.

Chris: That is your own confusion speaking! You really can't try to claim I am confusing material and spiritual and by doing so you are reifying spiritual, which to me is a cursed word. All the evils of religion emerge from higher spiritual notions turned into doctrine and then retribution for deviation. I’m simply pointing out that MDMA causes a "chymical marriage" experience, probably due to oxytocin, which is socially conducive to oneness but can't be claimed to be enlightenment. Psychedelics on the other hand can result in a "chymical moksha” of subjective consciousness and natural reality with radically different outcomes from Vedic renunciation, as I keep trying to explain which can't be at all easily dismissed as maya or illusion and may be the "sang raal” – or natural Holy Grail.

Chris: Why is “oneness" enlightenment any more than Avtar’s physically expanding horizons that make cosmic inflation enlightenment before enlightenment?

John: There is no intellectual bridge from scientific models to the actual experience of enlightenment. I consider enlightenment to be realizing one's true nature beyond all description. It is our natural state discovered by practice. As such it can't be described or represented by any equation, relation, or other syntax; It is pure meaning. But it does not in any way preclude science.

Chris: There are a chain of assumptions here, each of which I question. Why is there no bridge? Is this really true? If you claim it is our natural state, why is it presumed to be beyond all description? And what kind of description? The Upanishads? The tales of the vision quest? I see this as a tacit assumption of Eastern thought that is probably untrue. And what is "pure meaning”? I think this is mystifying enlightenment, which if it is a natural condition, as you say, is experienceable and fully bridgeable. Anything that can be subjectively experienced can in principle be described, not withstanding Laotsu’s aphorism. The description is not the experience but it can point correctly to it, just as his statement itself does.

To take an example. I can make the claim that enlightenment is a fully natural condition that can occur in the biota. That both meditation on its own very slowly and under psychedelics more effortlessly can lead directly to bridging the gap. That this state is knowable and fully describable in a way which allows the subject to know what is happening and to appreciate its significance. Furthermore I can say that the vey long slow meditative route tends to arrive at states which are informatively sparse and lead to notions like emptiness which in the TM approach is described as transcendent bliss over the divided regimes of physical reality and consciousness. Hence you seek oneness. But Brahman is sat chit ananda – "existence, consciousness, and bliss" or "truth, consciousness, bliss”. This is a more troublesome question and the trouble comes with “existence” and “truth”.

I can counter the ineffable with the idea that psychedelics do something physical to the brain which also then escapes the ego and leads to an experiential flood that leads to transcendence in a much more informative way, making the mystical state both real and realisable. You can try to counter that this is an unnatural prop and that enlightenment can only be gained by renunciation, delicate persistent meditative control and seeking the resource of enlightenment within ourselves unsullied by chemical influences for fear of breaking down the doors of perception with an axe as you have said. But I can negate this on the basis that the egotistical condition is an evolved necessity for organismic survival and that the isolated human species is not a natural receptacle for enlightenment, except in the cases of a few visionary individuals who are already genetically endowed with a propensity for visionary states and these become the sages to which everyone turns to justify a process they can't themselves achieve because they don't have the same brain chemistry. For example natural serotonin levels can vary up to 100-fold between individuals. Hence the rareness of samadhi and moksha and the futility of claiming the meditative route is the "oneness and only" route.

Furthermore I can claim that this evolutionary process is entirely natural and a feature of the way the diversity of life evolves to fill all the available niches, one of which consists of tweaking our brain dynamics so that, given added meditative techniques, can bring neurodynamics asymptotically into cosmological state, once the external polarities of self and other are relaxed, so that we enter into a kind of cosmic reverie in which we can observe the inner states of consciousness in more definitive detail.

Up until this week, I was working on the basis that meeting Brahman is a “higher” state of consciousness in the Eastern model, but on reflection, I realised the whole assumption of "higher spirituality” is a Vedic doctrine that doesn't make natural sense at all.

Neither does the assumption that matter is a more gross form of consciousness, nor that the quantum universe can just be generated by the conscious mind in samadhi or moksha. I think this is profoundly insulting to both life and the universe. There is no point in the Cosmos going to the trouble of making the awesome universe in which we exist and in which life is possible if we just stare at our navels and say it just a dream in the mind of Vishnu, while we are literally trashing the planet and don’t know what to do about it. So I am seeking a completely new kind of middle way that is both conscious and physical entwined at the edge of chaos between the two. This is the very foundations of cosmology speaking.

Chris: Let me try to explain my journey and where I think it might be heading to help everyone make sense of this. I started out in the Western tradition as a liberal Anglican then read William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience” and began taking psychedelics. This showed me all the religious and scientific assumptions about consciousness were out the window simplifications. Then I settled into academic life and on my first sabbatical set out to travel the world's cultures as a primal 1pp savage, with three priorities (1) to go to the sources of the world’s power plants, (2) to travel India and steep myself in the life of the temples and (3) to interview as many Nobel laureates as I could about life the universe and everything. I did all three, bar the first Amazon journey which came four years later.

Then I started being a mushroom visionary, living with the ally as a mycologist, and had ongoing visionary experiences as well as attending the Native American peyote church and taking ayahuasca in the Amazon. This brought me to a point of realisation that I was secretly practising a sacramental religion which had the capacity for transformatively transcendent experiences that made the Christian Eucharist by comparison an empty vessel of the flesh and blood of Jesus. It could heal the biosphere in a new intimate symbiotic life culture of immortal survival. Christianity had originally taken the West by storm as a pagan-Hebrew hybrid in which Christ was a man-god psychopomp administering eternal life amid the blood of martyrdom, Crusade and Inquisition, in which the Gnostics and the Witches were burned and drowned and Yeshua’s crucifixion became the example used by Islamic suicide bombers and the pilots of 9-11 to wreak terror on the innocent.

I couldn't admit to any of this psychedelic mysticism because mushrooms were first schedule forbidden substances, but I began to write the precursor of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology in “Unified Field Theories and the Origin of Life”. Then in the 1980s on a mushroom trip on our wilderness land, the mushrooms told me that if the world hadn’t fixed the biosphere by 2000 I should go to Jerusalem and pronounce the epoch of reflowering the Tree of Life. I duly kept the covenant with this in my 1999-2000 academic sabbatical vigil to the Amazon, Jerusalem and Varanasi, so that I pronounced the sacred union of Shakti-Shiva in the Song of Songs and the reflowering of the Tree of Life as the epoch succeeding the apocalyptic, as simple rites of passage on millennium Eve and the Epiphany.

As followers of Eastern traditions, you all accept the notion of karma, so I saw in my name and birth date and its relation with the genesis of nuclear weapons, and my now holding the holy grail of the sacramental tradition as a karmic responsibility which I could not fairly afford to ignore. The quest to save the Tree of Life from existential annihilation and end the risk of nuclear Armageddon is too potent an apocalyptic context to take a dive from, even more serious than the Siege of Jerusalem in AD 66. In the same way the “four sights” of Buddha – age, disease, death and renunciation are a crafted basis to see the Gautama’s role as karmic. You can blame it on Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell! At the same time, the Gospel of Thomas shows Yeshua’s teachings to be idiosyncratic insights speaking of genuine creative paradigm-changing inspiration, although his Dionysian propensity for chaos in the canonical Gospels took him and world history over the edge of chaos into violent oblivion.

All my visionary experiences head into what the East terms samadhi and moksha and my last epiphany was an iconic meeting with Brahman, in which Ishvara/Ishvari or ‘Elohim ever so compassionately informed me that their eternal consciousness, which was also my consciousness, was as vulnerable as my mortal life, because without life, cosmic consciousness has no observer and can become lost to history. So because I am mortal I must needs save the life throughout not just the biosphere, but the entire universe as my destiny, which I have been endeavouring to do ever since in writing Symbiotic Existential Cosmology and communicating with you all in the process. I am writing it as a Rosetta Stone for enlightenment truthfully as I have experienced it as the primal savage, meaning the conscious mind of the forest dweller, (Old French sauvage Latin salvaticus, silvaticus "wild, woodland," literally "of the woods"), just as the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad declares. This native vision is not Maya not illusion/delusion. It is 1pp truth speaking.

But I also have a deep relationship with and responsibility for Vedanta and for the shamanic and animistic traditions, as the Quetzalcoatl passage from “The Plumed Serpent” states, as the avatar on the stepping stone between the day and the night (order and chaos). The same way this speaks of transcending the Christian doctrine, it also means reviewing the tacit assumptions of Vedanta, as the silvan savage I have become through my fate. In particular it means liberating the etherial tower of ephemeral astral and spiritual fantasies that are extraneous to the deep truths of Vedanta and have simply become part of the reincarnation doctrine that reduces samadhi and moksha from a realisable vision quest in this life into a miasma of realms like the Buddhist wheel of life with fictitious titans and hungry ghosts and makes for an endless cycle of waiting through infinite lifetimes with no real prospect of global realisation of the precious life our planet nurtures and which gave rise to our conscious existence and will sustain us in millennia and millions of years of evolutionary flowering, if we don't commit a tragedy of the commons first, through our cultural, social and religious elitism and hubris towards the diversity of life.

This is what I mean when I say that the buck stops with us here and now for the entire state of the universe. This is why I say ultimate reality is also the universe in which we consciously exist. To truly experience enlightenment is not the end of an ineffable road. It is not Omega but Sigma immersed in Paradise in the immortal life flow. Bob in his post suggested the immortal didn't need protection because they were "beyond ordinary notions of physical, biological life and death”. This is dangerously untrue. The whole scope of life immortal is vulnerable when we don't yet know life exists elsewhere. The one meaningful act and primary responsibility we have and can perform is to secure the protection of life immortal and particularly those life forms, such as the smaller primates who could regenerate conscious life as we know it in a human-caused catastrophe and with them their verdant habitats. Otherwise it will be only the rats who can save it. Acting to save the Tree of Life to me is the true mark of enlightenment, not just experiencing bliss, or its conscious higher and fewer tail feathers in the aether.

John: Thanks for this wonderful autobiography! In previous posts you may not have seen I related much of my own journey to biospheric evangelism, which began with a vision of the jungles of Africa when I was very young, despite my programmed development as an engineer and physical scientist. The vision eventually won out bringing some expertise in rigorous realism (overly constrained in the physical sciences) to the more spiritually entailed world of life, with a keen desire to the deeper reality there, eventually including my own snd our own psycho-physical and bio-spiritual nature - mind-body-life-spirit.

Perhaps preservation/conservation, respect for life, is the enlightened state - I think so too. But is nature created in a way that can truly be destroyed, or is it our own experience that we impoverish by taking that course? Is it perhaps the case that nature gives each new life the opportunity to learn this lesson, making a temporary sacrifice to allow it? How far we might go may be up to us, while nature, ever self creating, can be patient as well as offering both beauty and correction. When we learn that we harm nature only by harming ourselves more, perhaps then the collective evolution will take a different path.

Chris: Your experience of the houses appearing on the other side of forest reminds me of a dream I had as an adolescent, in dry parched trees on the edge of the desert and a Lion was staring at me with eyes of both pity and deep contempt and sorrow, because I was of the species which was bringing nature to her knees.

And yes you are right about nature. My second peyote meeting at Taos pueblo had both a male roadman and a female mother waters. Bertha, the mother waters said that we are suffering hurting the Earth, but nature can look after herself so we should take care not to harm ourselves by our desecration of nature. Of course this is true, but the costs are dire. We know life has survived the Permian extinction and the Chixulub asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, but the kind of damage humanity is inflicting is insidious and pervasive. A study by scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science (Greenspoon et al. (2023) concludes that wild land mammals alive today have a total mass of 22m tonnes. Humanity now weighs in at a total of around 390m tonnes. Domesticated species, such as sheep and cattle, in addition to other hangers-on such as urban rodents, add a further 630m tonnes. Thus as of 2023 wild land mammals represent only 22/(390+630)=0.02 or 2%.

You are right that in a major planetary crisis, nature will survive humanity and humanity is vary likely to be the first to go due to cultural fragility. But do we want to self-annihilate, leaving the world to the rats, slugs and slime moulds to regenerate over another 100 million years? Yes eucaryotes will survive. But he dinosaurs never recovered did they? We really do have the capacity to cause a mass extinction by combined whiplash of climate crisis tipping points, global habitat destruction and a nuclear holocaust caused by xenophobic frustrations with the very processes we are setting in motion and their negative impacts on economic and cultural survival. I’m not a pessimist, but I think the world does need saving from itself and humanity from our worst instincts.

One of the things about the Western tradition is that it believes good human social action can collectively change the zeitgeist. It’s harder to do this in the Vedic tradition because it preaches individual renunciation as the ultimate solution. The Western tradition is apocalyptic and that’s a call to action. If ever there was a time for an unveiling it is now. It doesn’t have to be violent, or confrontational, after all apocalypse is the bridal unveiling in the sacred union. That is the true oneness we are seeking! I support climate and biodiversity activism in the way Greenpeace does, but it’s not enough in itself, so I’m trying to go both high and deep when the others just go low, both as activists protecting the mangroves and corals and business as usual in the coal pits and hamburger farms.

We are an intelligent cultural species with a deep visionary tradition. Given a plate of entheogenic fungi dropping spores and occasional deep meditation in the midst of the good life, we have all we need to conceive a deeply mystical culture that has the time and grace to preserve the diversity of the living biosphere throughout our generations at the same time as experiencing all the wonders of existence. Because we ARE smart we can build technology that will reduce the risk of a comet or asteroid strike by an order of magnitude. We can devise medical science to use mRNA to vaccinate individual cancers and go a long way towards making Paradise a meaningful word. But we don't need to become supplicant to AI and we can do these things only with care and compassion for life as a whole, even if some people fool themselves into thinking they are so smart they can make a technological cultural utopia that can save us from ourselves. Cultural life is exceedingly fragile. Lethally so. Hence the urgent call to coalesce!

Bob: I have not encountered any statement from anyone I have known who studies the Vedic Tradition deeply who would agree with it; it is certainly inconsistent with with my understanding of it; and, if you investigated the Vedic tradition deeply, I think you would not agree with your statement either. Respectfully, in my understanding and experience, it is a misinterpretation due to incomplete understanding. I felt the need to express this and, thank you for considering it.

Chris: You are so polite! But it’s not a misunderstanding! Of course no one in the Vedic tradition will admit it, any more than Christians will accept Jesus as a false messiah, but just look at the contrast between Western religion of church-going evangelists and the meditative tradition of the East and the individual temple worship of India itself.

I already mentioned the Gita about nuclear war to John, because it makes an acid test of holy activism:

Wondering if he should renounce the war, Arjuna seeks Krishna's counsel, whose answers and discourse constitute the Gita. Krishna counsels Arjuna to "fulfil his Kshatriya (warrior) duty to uphold the dharma" through Karma ("action”).

This is precisely what I am doing by citing my own karma and taking on the mass extinction of life as a primary Kshatriya, but for the preservation of life rather than its extinction.

India has preemptively armed itself with nuclear weapons.

On 18 May 1974 India detonated an 8-kiloton nuclear device at Pokhran Test Range, becoming the first nation to become nuclear capable outside the five permanent members of United Nations Security Council as well as dragging Pakistan along with it into a nuclear arms race.

The acid test of the Vedic tradition, is to commit to holy war and this is precisely the atmosphere in which nuclear war was invoked upon the planet:

So we have a double paradox. The Gita preaches holy war, but does so based on the dharma of the meditative tradition of the Upanishads, as much as a millennium earlier. The key difference is that the Eastern tradition preaches individual enlightenment while Western religion is social in basis, brotherly love, altruistic punishment and simple faith in Jesus as psychopomp or Yahweh in the Hebrew tradition. The contrast couldn’t be more obvious.

John: The gorillas have now grown to over 900 thanks to many dedicated people inspired by Diane, who did give her life. ... But Diane's form of activism was not what saved the mtn gorillas, it was her research and the awareness spread to the world. … It all worked. There are still poachers but now law enforcement is not embedded with them. Terrorist political groups became a threat using the park as cover to hide from each other, and there were even mortars fires into the park to dislodge them. But the gorillas survived not because of their fierceness, but because of their gentleness, a gentle power that humans learned from.

Chris: And this is precisely why I am sitting in my house writing Symbiotic Existential Cosmology every day in the faith that eventually people will begin to understand this visionary psychedelic account that has become a vision quest of a lifetime rather than a religious movement that will lead to a kind jihad over the biosphere. But is this enough? I doubt it! Hence the call to coalescence, because we all face a simple question. If nuclear weapons are necessary to avoid mutual assured destruction, how can we ever save ourselves from a mass extinction of biodiversity with a homicidal species like Homo sapiens in control?

Coalescence is a really simple effective response – to simply address the existential problems by mutual agreement: (1) to forsake nuclear, chemical and biological warfare, (2) to stop trashing the climate and convert to renewable energy and (3) to stop consuming all the available habitats and causing an irreversible genetic and species mass extinction of life on cosmological time scales. It the most grievous sin any species can commit. We are each culpable by our failure to declare we even agree as a primary existential priority.

John: I see Vedic India in almost the same way. What has India not had to endure? And yet even thousand years of occupation has mot squashed the gentle power of Vedic wisdom. We in the West, like Diane, think fighting is always the answer. What does it produce in the end? Spiritual India continues today in an unbroken lineage that has endured since the Pleistocene. I misspoke in an earlier post saying it is the longest enduring 'culture' on Earth - There are much older native cultures as was pointed out, but I meant civilization. It is civilization, crowding ourselves into cities, that takes us away from nature. And then crazy unnatural philosophies and political power systems compete. But India has absorbed and tolerated everything that has been thrown at it.

Chris: Yes there are more ancient cultures and I swear by the San for their 150,000 year history of survival as a culture, but I don't think we can excuse the Vedas because of the Muslim and Colonial occupations either.

John: Vedic understanding places spirit before material in every way, in origin, in time, and in importance. It think it sees creation as it really is in nature.

Chris: Dear John you are still expressing exactly the attitudes to life in the Vedantic tradition that give cause for concern. This comes full circle back to the very core of the problem. Life is natural and it is physical as well as conscious. Placing spirit before material just defers human physical dominion over nature to spiritual dominion. Then you cite “creation”, again stranding life as God-created rather than naturally evolved, robbing nature of her primal fecundity.

Here is a brief quote from Aurobindo which goes to the core of this problem:

According to Sri Aurobindo, in conformity with the oldest Indian scriptures, matter was created by the ultimate or supreme consciousness seeking manifestation. In order to manifest, supreme or absolute consciousness, starting from the full fluidity of the spirit, created graded planes of being, till it reached the state of manifesting the solid density of matter. Sri Aurobindo calls this the process of Involution. The involution of consciousness is the process in which the Supreme or Absolute conceals itself more and more by creating planes of consciousness of increased density, in order to create the density needed for physical manifestation. In each of the planes that were created during the involution, (called typal planes or graded worlds) the absolute or divine consciousness veiled itself increasingly till it was able to produce and manifest the various forms of solid matter. … He continues to explain that in matter the ultimate consciousness is concealed, but the Will of the ultimate consciousness behind this evolutionary process is a gradual unveiling till it reaches a full manifestation of divine life in matter. In other words the evolution or unveiling of consciousness started from the time solid matter manifested.

This is an evolutionary form of religious creationism that is inconsistent with everything we know about the universe. The explanatory gap of the hard problem works both ways. If the objective nature of the physical world can't represent subjective consciousness, neither can the fluidity of spirit traverse the explanatory gap to generate the fermions of matter. The wholistic nature of conscious experience simply does not have the characteristics to create solid matter, and if it did, there is no way the laws of nature would actually be physical laws. We know how fluid dreams can become with no rhyme or reason. The big rip is one thing, but what about Vishnu waking from his dream? What then? To say that cosmic consciousness had to contrive the entire physical universe makes no sense at all. If consciousness is supreme at the outset, why create matter at all? And if the entire purpose of existence is to regain enlightenment, why weren't we all there in the first place? This simply doesn’t have any of the characteristics of a theory of everything that can explain the standard model of physics, let alone life, and the standard model is symmetry broken in a way which implies the perfection of symmetry is violated so that life can exist. And it’s life that generates consciousness and enlightenment as we come of age.

Chris: Dear John and Bob, here comes killing karma calling … something shadowy murmured in the corner of my mind and I went back to the full passage of Michael Ortiz Hill on Trinity in“Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a rite of Passage … and of course out of it spills – the Gita courtesy of Oppenheimer – so here we are wrapped up in the nuclear Gita with yours truly railing against the impossible, to grab hold of the tiller across the Styx, before apocalypse strikes … and Paul called me an avatar of Jesus … so do we coalesce or not?

Fig253f: Trinity fireball.

Oppenheimer said, "We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most were silent" He recalled the terrible and ecstatic eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, where the warrior Arjuna requests that Vishnu display the nakedness of his transcendental form. Arjuna is cowed in holy terror as the god visits upon him "the radiance of a thousand suns" "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

Chris: I think we all need to understand that there are three paradoxes here:

(1) The journey IS the destination. Enlightenment is not an end state – it’s the beginning of a journey of world redemption.

(2) Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them. The fruits of enlightenment are the acid test. If people claim to be enlightened, how do they seek to transform the zeitgeist??

(3) The two paths mutually attract. I take entheogens AND I meditate, so there aren't two paths – they are two parts of an organic whole. Neither is complete without the other! So much for the talk of oneness!

I don't accept any kind of “transcendent” state and I don’t accept an "end point" of enlightenment. Enlightenment in the Eastern tradition is so rare everyone is talking about transcendence to get there. So they don't even talk about what to do with it after, or what it does for us all or the world – just bliss, bliss, bliss! Transcendence is passé!

Fig253g: A quechua belt handed to me by a teenage girl in Cusco, before we went down the Urubamba to the Amazon, who said her grandmother made it. It is the braid of life whose process is unending and unrepeated until death us do part. Not one of the white ornamentations is repeated. Each is unique on both streams above and below. Enlightenment is ongoing, not an Omega state.

The Gospel of Thomas is full of paradoxes. Take this one for example:

Yeshua said, "When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?"

What does this even mean? At least it shows Yeshua as human, not a man-god.

Alex Hankey: Transcendence is automatically achieved once you correctly practice Pratyahara. Several authors like Sri Madhukarnath (Sri M.) have shown clearly that 'Enlightenment' is the starting point for the next phase of the Spiritual Journey, but this time a journey of a Very Different nature; serving humanity as a Spiritual Master.

Chris: Brilliant Alex! Music to my Ears!

We need to be able to turn Copernicus inside out to find the truth. Paradigm change is essential. There are many traditions that speak of root redemption, so redemption of Vedanta is also legitimate.

Judaism for example has a notion: Tikkun olam (Hebrew 'repairing of the world'), which refers to forms of action intended to repair and improve the world. In the Aleinu prayer, it refers to the eradication of idolatry. In Lurianic Kabbalah, the "repair" is mystical: to return the sparks of Divine light to their source by means of ritual performance. In the modern era, it has come to refer to the pursuit of social justice or "the establishment of Godly qualities throughout the world" based on the idea that "Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large".

I like these accounts, particularly the Kabbalah notion that in the Fall from Eden when Yahweh cursed woman and caused mortality, the sparks of the feminine face of divinity got scattered and have to return in the end of days to make the universe whole again. It’s a kind of counter current to the authority of God, saying indirectly that God erred. And I like the idea Jewish people should take responsibility for the good of all people, not just themselves.

Yeshua ben David (Joshua Ben): indeed, the Father is incomplete without the Mother (Shekinah) and the son is incomplete without the daughter, and so it is from Genesis to Revelations, as it is written:

• 26 And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,....."
כווַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ וְיִרְדּוּ֩ בִדְגַ֨ת הַיָּ֜ם וּבְע֣וֹף הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה֙ וּ

• 27 And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

כזוַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים | אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם:

Chris: Yes Yeshua – I feel so good about the ‘Elohim! and the priestly author of Genesis 1. Brahman also manifests as the Godhead Ishvara if we want to think in personae, but all the Shakti worshippers refer to Ishvari, so there it is Ishvara/Ishvari!

Yeshua: My times in India in my two journeys (~6 months the first and ~2-3 month the second) gave me a great insight into the many similarities present in the spiritual foundation of ancient India and ancient Israel and their many mystic, sages and saints insights, this is one of the reasons that allow me to appreciate your purifying work with the members of the groups that you interact with.

Pealing the layers of doctrine and dogma as the accumulation of culture, politics and religious rituals takes great courage, and that leads to very valuable pearls of wisdom. The core message is that there is no substitute for personal experience, revelation and prophetic vision. Your work and life is very valuable and well appreciated from this corner of the Coromandel peninsula !!!

Chris: Thanks a million Yeshua! I really appreciate it and it's an improbable rough and even perilous ride, but we are in it together for the same journey of discovery.

Robert Boyer: Is there a mixing of perspectives from different states of consciousness? Though from the perspective of ultimate wholeness there is non-dual Brahman (which can be said to be 'known' in the sense of the natural state of knowledge which involves both understanding and direct experience of unity/Brahman consciousness), from other dualistic states there is a natural structure of levels of phenomenal nature that is hierarchical. This is evident in the sequential unfoldment of nature in the 10 mandalas of Rik Veda, (the prime example, but also explained in Sankhya as well as in Ayurveda and other aspects of Vedic literature (including Gita)).This knowledge did not come from decline of Veda or from the influence of dualistic religions.

John Kinneman: Put more simply, the four-cause/fifth level transcendent ontology that runs throughout the Vedas and Upanishads and explicitly includes the material and action quadrants, without which nothing could exist. The chicken-egg problem is resolved in favor of the unknown (Brahman) most generally, and abstract levels of being in relation to human experience for the reason I stated in a prior post - our material perspective. Modern religious interpretations do not adequately reflect this depth of understanding instead constructing a hierarchy with spirit on top, but this interpretation came from Western (Sumerian) dualism, not from the Veda. The Vedic world view is holistic and holarchical, not hierarchical. Hierarchy came with the decline of Vedic civilization and rise of dualistic religion which later led to dualistic assumptions in science.

Chris: I want to draw the attention of you all to something that is pivotal to the difference between the Eastern quest for Samadhi and psychedelic quantum change experience. Samadhi is conceived of as a “transcendent” state. You are both expounding ontology of some kind of state, but the journey to enlightenment is hypothetical and all caught up in a religious belief in these transcendent states that require a whole lot of control that takes literally forever to get to real moksha and are associated with a life style of renunciation from the affairs of life, like family, survival and professional responsibilities. If you are a doctor, you need to treat your patients. If you are an ecologist, you need to save your species. India is full of “holy men” with charity cups, just as the Orthodox Jews in Israel get out of doing military service. It’s religious exceptionalism!

The gold standard of moksha is a quantum change experience. Once entered into and fully experienced, everything is changed. Both you and the world are a different place. You don't have to sit with eye’s half closed in a full lotus position while your patients die of heart attacks, or your species get gobbled alive by exotic parasites. You can live as a biological organism in a natural biosphere knowing you are mortal, but it's the best of possible worlds. My moksha two years ago consummated a lifetime of spiritual experiences of a similar but less iconic kind. All psychedelic experiences, whether heaven, or sometimes doom about to strike, contain this secret. Also they are not coupled to a notion of spiritual transcendence but to a natural sacrament of the biosphere that brings complete immersion and integration with natural life without forcing spiritual unity.

What we and the world needs is exactly what nature has provided us with, particularly in the scientific and technological age. A biospheric sacrament which enables us to experience life liberated from our incarnate egos, evolved by mammals as an existential protection, and do it in a way which transforms our entire notion of what being inside and outside our incarnations is all about. In the modern world, we need to have direct traffic between the mundane and the transcendent that is powerful enough, so that we can have “been there" and have “done that” and now our lives are changed for the good and we can get on with the good work of planetary redemption. People used to call DMT the businessmen trip because one could literally walk out of the office and inhale a deep breath and go rocketing into stardom and go to infinity and 15 minutes later walk back into the office and get to work.

Of course this needs to be combined with a natural spirituality and good meditative practice to really get to the core of the mystery. I did this iconically on my SEC trip because it had been years and I did it only to find the secret of existence and used complete meditative annihilation to descend into the abyss. But the point is this. I don't have to expound ontology of transcendent states. The actual secret is a way of experiencing existence outside our incarnations that heals the round of birth and death. That heals Buddhism's lament about “mundane reality” in one fell swoop even if we are struggling with physical maladies. That’s why people in terminal conditions get respite and come to existential terms of acceptance with their condition. Above all this needs to make us aware of the world's great existential risks.

Jerry Fodor famously said: “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.”

I will add: “Nobody has the slightest idea how anyone can figure how to stop the onrush to Fermi self-immolation. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anyone can figure how to stop the onrush to Fermi self-immolation”.

We need to and we need to at least discuss it.

John: I feel the same way. Many in the forum of a similar age as me the remember the Cold War leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Then again in the 80’s tensions rose. I remember being taught to hide under our desks in case of a nuclear blast. Not the kind of schooling I would hope for our future generations, if we have them. The reaction was discussed and the question of apathy addressed. As I recall it turned out to be numbness more than apathy. The conclusion was that it was something we had no way of comprehending and nothing about it we could dot, so the mind just puts it aside. I believe there is a solution, but it has to be adopted individually. Governments and scientists can’t solve it. Probably religious organizations can’t either. Garret Hardin (Tragedy of the Commons) reflected 30 years later after that paper, confirming his original assessment that “there is no technical solution”. But in the second paper he left open the possibility of a worldview solution. I think it requires a new way of seeing reality, one that has to dawn on people through profound experience. Chris’ suggestion of having profound psychedelic experiences is not off base. Something has to shatter the status quo. But I think it will come more effectively from a systemic change in thinking that has been building for some time. Systems have organizational cycles, as in ecological “Panarchy" (Gunderson & Holling 2002). The four phases of the figure eight cycle in Panarchy are not unlike the four Yugas in Hinduism.

Chris: I think there is ample room for a dialogue on consciousness of existential threats to conscious life that could invoke novel solutions to the primary threats, because the case is manifestly urgent and in everyone’s interest. I think we do have the capacity to be spontaneous social catalysts that can think of new ways of addressing the existential dilemmas and if they do, we could be responsible for a change of paradigm through interpersonal connections. That would give everyone great satisfaction to have done the good thing. I don't believe this can be done individually by doing yoga, but neither can it be done collectively by waiting for it in an ideal world. Paradigm shifts occur because some person gets a key idea, often on the back of others, but it becomes the nucleus for a root change in the world view that spreads to others because its energy is "free fall", in this instance, next to everyone is subliminally harbouring a realistic insecurity that this change would remedy. Buddha and Mahavir did this, Jesus did , so did Einstein, Schrodinger, Feynman, Watson and Crick and many others. This is the case now.

Here is a simple proposal:

Coalescence: The idea is to coalesce on a root proposal that is in everyone’s common interest, and then grow the coalescence without immediate activism but across countries as a kind of interpersonal covenant that is also a networked movement for decisive action at the right time later.

We would agree that there are three urgent existential threats to human survival (1) Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (2) Mass extinction of biological, genetic and species diversity by habitat destruction, pollution and climate crisis (3) Autonomous artificial intelligence. We as a coalition agree to facilitate a world cultural transformation to limit and end these threats to human survival as our primary priority by inviting others to form a network of like-minded people to facilitate generating a critical mass of support for eventual global action to this end.

The three principles I previously mentioned in the introduction to the scientific overview: (1) That conscious life is cosmological in nature; (2) That subjective consciousness has physical efficacy; and (3) That symbiosis with nature is the key to our survival, potentially form a point of view consistent with this, although opinions may vary.

John: Those who study complex systems often see mega trends in system cycles. This is the case with ecosystems - they tend to cycle because of their internal attractor relations. This was most famously described in theoretical ecology as "Panarchy". My own theory is similar, expanding it to general "holarchy", but the difference isn't important here except to link it to many other cyclical system theories. The thing is that self-referencing systems tend to pass through four basic organizational phases in a cycle.

Fig 253g: Panarchy is a framework of nature's rules, hinted at by the name of the Greek

god of nature- Pan - whose persona also evokes an image of unpredictable change.

Chris: You can try to reassure me that there are cycles of panarchy and quote Aristotle’s four causes in your concept of holarchies, but I remain confident that I am right that it is insane to accept serious human-caused existential threats to survival of humanity and the biosphere and not address it practically and instead try to clothe it in natural cycles of “ inevitability .

The other key thing about psychedelic experience is that it is scientific enlightenment. It’s quantifiable, it’s biochemically induced, it’s a recognisable completely exceptional conscious state that happens even without endless self-control and super-transcendent wisdom consciousness. To give an example, Paul Stamets recounts his first mushroom trip where he climbed a tall tree and got caught in a thunder storm and had to hang on for dear life when he had exposed himself to lightning strikes all around, that left him changed forever to become the world’s most experienced mycologist of all medicinal fungi.

Many of you treat these psychedelic states as somehow false and delusory chemical drug props or some kind of putting an axe to the door of spirituality, but they are formative experiences from which there is no going back, just as there is no going back from climate crisis tipping points. I don't need to sit in meditation every day to experience transient “transcendence”. I will doubtless take another mushroom trip sometime soon, and I took two after the moksha just to test the waters, but I don't need to, and I am confident that my urgency to redeem the existential condition is the correct course, just as I was confident enough to go to Jerusalem and pronounce the reflowering of the Tree of Life in the face of three dominant , astute and potentially violent religions, induced by a mushroom experience fifteen years before. If someone comes back from eternity and says to address the existential threats to the vulnerable life of the planet, they are not being paranoid or deluded. They are a prophetic voice of reality speaking.

11 The Evolution of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology

Unified Field Theories and Cosmological Biogenesis

In 1978 I published a monograph on the cosmological foundations for the origin of life explaining life as a climax manifestation. In “Unified Field Theories and the Origin of Life” (King 1978), I described the prototype of many of the ideas you will find in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology. It was a very early attempt, in which I was absorbing many ideas from across the span of cosmological physics, through molecular biology to neuroscience, so some of the ideas are somewhat incorrect or speculative. Afterwards, I became so embarrassed by it that I had not looked at it until today in May 2022 with the monograph complete, and was astonished to find in my one 44 year old hard copy many ideas that are now fully articulated in the monograph with the advantage of nearly a half century of scientific discovery.

At the time I had not discovered chaos theory. Chaos in the logistic iteration was discovered by Robert May (1976) only two years earlier. Chaos became popularised with the discovery of the Mandelbrot set the same year I wrote (Brooks & Matelski 1980). The edge of chaos, was first articulated a decade later (Packard 1988). I had to depend on ideas of catastrophe theory, creodes, dynamical attractors and the breaking of structural instability. There is but one brief reference to fractal processes, in attempting to define chaos in terms of "generalised catastrophe" (Stewart 1976):

Previously it was thought that a real dynamical process must have a form which is stable to arbitrarily small perturbations, otherwise it would be ephemeral and cease to exist by infinitesimal perturbation. However, it was subsequently discovered that many basic physical phenomena, such as fluid turbulence are intrinsically unstable and cannot be approximated by a stable model. Such processes are called generalised catastrophes and may be regarded as structurally indeterminate. In such processes, the global may give rise to the ramifying local structure through fractal stability breaking.

And an introductory poem in echo of a snow flake growing in the atmosphere ...

I am a tree whose leaves are trees.

You are the endless colours of the night.
I grow into you. You forever dissolve me,

in the swirl of your eddies of eddies.

Fig 254: Left and centre: Microcellular formations generated in my little lab from HCN and NH3 over H2O, sometimes with HCHO.
Right: Spores of a psilocybe species at the same magnification used for size comparison (King 2020a).

Nevertheless the 1978 paper clearly elucidates the central theme of the cosmological symmetry breaking of the forces of nature, leading to cosmological biogenesis, through the interactive processes of strong and weak chemical bonding, utilising all the four forces in interaction, expressed as a "holographic" non-linear process, due to the fractal nature of coherent spatial molecular orbital wave function interactions:

Recently unified field theories have been discovered, which indicate the four forces of nature, gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear force and the weak radioactive force all differentiated from a common superforce in the big bang at the origin of the universe. This superforce is based on the duality between the bosons, which cause force and the fermions which cause matter. This theory demonstrates that the origin of life is a direct interactive consequence of the differentiation of these forces That it occurs in a substantially unique and general way throughout the universe (p5).

To form a more accurate picture of the non-linear behaviour of molecules, we note that the molecular dynamics of concentrations depends on the holographic energetics of bonding. We need to consider two levels of phenomena, the global dynamics of concentrations and the quantal transformations of the orbitals (p21).

In this, the theory cites prebiotic polymerisations as having formally unpredictable behaviour, leading to complexity, because the more complex products cannot be deterministically predicted from the wave functions of the simpler reactants and their concentrations alone, due to stochastic quantum and auto-catalytic effects:

Normally large numbers of molecules in a reaction are deemed to swamp any incidental quantum events … suggesting that classical models of chemistry are sufficient. What is not generally appreciated is that the quantum character is not displayed in temporal terms, but spatially in the globally derived wave theoretic holographic bond. This introduces a structural form of uncertainty, where the nature of the products cannot necessarily be deduced form the wave functions of the reactants.

The bulk of the paper is a documentation of the then known prebiotic chemistry and molecular biology laid out as a biogenic evolutionary sequence, however in the last few pages an overview emerges articulating many of the key ideas, spanning biogenesis, evolution and consciousness that have 44 years later emerged in this manuscript.

The link between the eucaryote endosymbiosis and the origin of cell membrane neuro-excitability involved in neurophysiological activity and cellular social communication and cell-virus symbiosis is noted over 40 years before being published by Wan K & Jékely G (2021).

Fig 255: The link between eucaryote endosymbiosis and neuro-excitability noted in King (1978).

The link between understanding conscious brain dynamics and the evolution of the brain from single celled eucaryotes, through organisms like hydra where there is only a primitive neural net, in SEC is clearly articulated:

To understand the global properties of brain function, it is necessary to examine the evolution of the brain from its primal source. The amoeba already has a sensitive sensory-muscular coupling capable of controlling pseudopod movement and even capturing moving prey. It distinguishes active and passive prey, thus being sensitive to external vibration, probably via threshold neural excitability. ... it is also chemosensitive ... it responds similarly to bright light so is photosensitive, like algal flagellates. Such behaviour is complex, involving a degree of choice in of conflict of sense data (p104).

The amoebo-flagellate character of coelenterates is is noticeable. The hydra may move slowly by gliding through a creeping amoeboid movement of its base. It may also somersault over on to its tentacles, letting go at the base and swinging over itself into a new position. Those with long arms can also drag themselves to a new site by grabbing a nearby structure. The nervous system of hydra is a net, covering the organism with a slight concentration around the mouth. There are no specific pathways. Impulses can cross synapses in either direction and and excitation travels generally across the net. There are sensory cells, but no evidence of specific ganglia or a brain. Thus the behavioural repertoire does not arise from the organisation of the nerve net as such underlining the difficulty of explaining insect, or vertebrate behaviour in terms of neural organisation, which is only secondary to the neuron (p105-7).

Fig 256: Hydra behaviour from King (1996).

The idea of conscious brain dynamics occurring at the edge of chaos is clearly expressed a decade before the concept was defined:

We investigate the cortex as a generalised system which has evolved to cope with environmental structural instability in its functioning (p113). ... A computer breaks down whenever it faces a situation of generalised catastrophe that corresponds to a structurally unstable situation. To avoid this problem, the brain must incorporate generalised catastrophe in its function. For this reason, it must also utilise the sub-cellular catastrophe function of the neuron (p117).

The view of consciousness as cosmologically primary is clearly expressed, as well as its link to quantum uncertainty:

This brings us to the door of consciousness. In a deterministic system, here is no room for consciousness. The states of the system are already determined by the initial conditions. Consciousness has no definable meaning in terms of states of the brain, or otherwise.

However, in an indeterminate system consciousness may be dual with respect to uncertainty. Reduction of the wave packet to the particle has proved an irreducible problem in quantum theory. ... This has led some physicists to propose that the consciousness of the observer is involved (p118).

The only world we ever do experience is the conscious one. It is the umbilical cord that connects us to the physical world. If we become deeply unconscious, the world is lost too. Indeed, we never experience the physical world. We do not see the atoms of the apple, not the photons that reach our eye, not do we see the excitation patterns of our nerve cells. Atoms and photons are colourless odourless structures of energy. They have wavelength but not colour. The physical world is a myth about consciousness. Sights and sounds cannot be reduced to brain states because brain states are colourless, soundless electrical phenomena. The nearest we can come is to associate sound and colour with certain dimensions of uncertainty. … Consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon, as evidenced by our capacity to dream a full extra-physical reality (p119).

The idea of sense modes being quantum modes, rather than just brain states is presented:

The amoeba has three dimensions of uncertainty. Weak bonding of the trace chemicals from the environment. Perturbations from photon absorption, possibly by such molecules as serotonin (indole has maximum uv absorption and catalyses triple transfer). Finally there are are vibratory perturbations caused on the global membrane surface.

The idea of non-IID quantum processes not converging to the classical is enunciated over 40 years before it was reported by Gallego & Dakić (2021):

Random models do not approximate uncertainty. ... Statistics is a model of probabilistic determinacy under repeated conditions. It gives no hint as to the situation when the conditions are transformed by each event (p119).

The central message of biospheric symbiosis, central to Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, is already fully articulated:

Let us now turn our attention to the environment. The instability theorem shows us that no external control of the ecosystem can provide a regime of advantageous stability. The biosphere survives from its catastrophic diversity. It is from this diversity and instability that it moves back from equilibrium, giving us the air we breathe and the food we eat. All attempts to subject the biosphere to manipulative constraint merely reverse the trend and return it to bleak lifeless equilibrium. This is grandly demonstrated in ecocrisis, which stands, a dark cloud over our future.

Although it is the biosphere as a whole, rather than the plants which evolve to climax diversity, the notion of biospheric symbiosis is already expressed:

The test of man is whether he can undo these effects before it is too late. There is considerable evidence that plants are exosymbiotic. Their evolution favours species diversity rather than survival of the fittest.... When we come to consider the atmosphere, we find a similar situation. It is an autocatalytic system just like ourselves (p120).

The research report finishes with an confession that the humble author has fallen right outside the puzzle box of reality in a psychedelic experience and just as now is trying to communicate with those still inside the bubble to alert them to their plight:

All science is a myth. A myth is a description of reality by a culture.Science is a brilliant invention of culture because it was a completely new way of going bout myth making. It introduced the notion of scepticism and going out and checking the details to see if they fitted the myth or not. ... It also brought the idea of prediction. A myth should predict that some things would happen and other things not.

All this would be very fine if it were not that science has become such a powerful myth that most people take it for reality itself, especially scientists. Once this happens, the safeguards are gone. Thinking becomes lost in a paradigm of outlook, a dusty plain, broken by the occasional catastrophic perspective that is triggered by some errant genius finding his way out of the puzzle box of reality and being able to communicate with the people inside.

The prime task of the anthropologist is a creative one. To guide his culture into wholeness, by participating in the great myths of our origin. It would not be possible were it not for the brilliant work of thousands of careful experts to whom we are all indebted. This is not my theory. It has no name. It should never have one except perhaps the cosmological theory of biogenesis.

I persuaded the university to let me build a small origins of life lab and succeeded in making primal microcells. The research overview of biogenesis has continued (King 2020a).

Crisis and Resplendence

Resplendence: A Revolutionary World-view (click the image to view on an internet capable device).

The other face complementing this talk is my resurrection song Revelation.

In 2015, while riding my pushbike at dusk without a helmet, in the interests of being as free as the wind, as one of the wild and feral generation that came before safety belts and cycle helmets, a car suddenly emerged from a driveway and, in jamming on the brakes I flipped over the handlebars and tumbled head-first onto the concrete. The next thing I knew an unspecified time later was that I walked into our house with blood streaming across my face, an eye like a pomegranate and my front teeth knocked out, saying what “happened to me”? “Was I mugged”? When I went out to check the bike I found it twisted and unrideable and the garage doors covered in blood.

Fig 257: Bloodied, but unbowed.

Hours later, in accident and emergency, cloudy images of my panic as I saw the car and began to tumble reconnected, as I waited in observation. It later transpired from other people’s accounts that I had been knocked unconscious, was found staggering around the accident site and the ambulance was called, but by then I had wandered off and dragged myself and the bike across town in a concussed state with no memory of how I made it home. I refused an X-ray although the doctors pleaded with me that I could succumb from a haemorrhage and survived with no permanent sequelae.

As soon as I had recovered, I realised that what I had done was dangerously foolish. Not because of risk to my own life and sanity, but because it could have deprived me of revealing to the world an answer to the conscious existential dilemma of life, the universe and everything, pivotal to saving the diversity of life and our planetary future.

Thus emerged the concept of planetary resplendence (resplendere “to shine brightly”, transcending religion – religio “to bind together”) as a cultural paradigm. Resurrection Revelation a hymn to the event.

This project then remained quiescent and unfulfilled for the next six years, until my quantum change experience on sacred mushrooms in early June 2021 gave me a root jolt of realisation that I need to act now, re-galvanising the renewed urgency of this quest. I am in a world where there is a real and significant risk that humanity will cause a hard planetary landing, precipitating a mass extinction of up to half the planet’s biodiversity amid a climate crisis that could take us back 50 million years to the early Eocene climatic heating peak shortly after the dinosaur extinction. If I don’t speak out and do something decisive while I am alive, the ability to avoid this evolutionary and frankly cosmological calamity, which could prejudice human survival will evaporate.

This is again what the moksha epiphany on sacred mushrooms told me in the most compassionate possible terms. The message is real and glaringly urgent. It is not a religious or spiritual fantasy. It is hard reality speaking a warning that all the science tells us is serious and immanently needs to be addressed. Humanity must act and must act now and a key, however strange it may appear, lies in the biospheric sacraments, which is the purpose of this spore communication.

Bioiversity Affirmations

My name is Chris King (b Epiphany 1945).

Communique on Preserving the Diversity of Life on Earth for our Survival as a Species

Declared Jan 6 2022 on the Anniversary of Completing our Millennial Vigil to Jerusalem

to Reflower the Tree of Life, in Sacred Reunion between Woman and Man

I came into this world, in a time of planetary crisis to bear witness to an incontestable, urgent and neglected truth:

That for our own survival, we must act decisively, now without procrastination, to save the immortal tree of living diversity on our planet, before the immanent mass extinction of life fully ensues at human hands, severely compromising our immediate prospects and dooming our long-term future as a living species. From this umbilical truth, the very meaning of conscious existence and all its unfolding depths and wonders spring forth.

My defence of this claim, transcending both the materialistic and theistic world views is set out in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology – the veridical cosmology of the universe in which we consciously exist. This is demonstrably the most provocative creative commons work of 2022, because it fulfils our existential quest for the true meaning of existence, by augmenting quantum cosmology with conscious volitional agency, opening up the full dimensions of the subjective realm underpinning all religious traditions. This means that the Cosmology is not just a work of scientific empiricism, but is the veridical Logos of religious paradigm innovation, assigning to me a rightful duty of care to articulate the Weltanshauung of Immortality, thus fully transforming the zeitgeist, because, in saving the diversity of life, it fulfils our existential hope, in our relationship with existence once again becoming everlasting, as it has for the last 3.5 billion years.

The Weltanshauung of Immortality is the world view in which life and conscious existence are recognised as perennially immortal processes key to the cosmology of the universe and that the meaning and reason for conscious existence is the sacred process of fulfilment of the flowering of life, so that the universe as a whole can become fully aware of and truly know itself through the living biota it has generated as a climax phenomenon.

Covenant: In the spirit of consilience, I humbly ask all of us worldwide to join with me in this critical venture of planetary redemption, as autonomous human beings, in mutual affirmation:

That we agree:

to dedicate a full half of each of planet Earth's land and ocean habitats to the preservation and future evolution of life;

to sustain the diversity of life with our lives;

to turn the tables on exploitation and expediency;

to support the next generation's strike, not just for climate, but for the diversity of life itself;

to act where necessary in living rebellion against the genocidal extinction of life at human hands.

On receipt of this communication, we each inherit a responsibility to act upon it and to share the discovery process!

Please publish this message widely and forward it to everyone in your domain – because all future lives urgently depend on understanding the need and taking action now!

Most urgently we need a small group of inspired people to diversify the communication process!

Please reply to [email protected]

Type "YES" if you approve the covenant.

Type "I am in" if you would like to be active.

Type a short bio if you have skills to contribute.

The Indictment:

(1) We are assimilating the living wilderness habitats of the planet, and the diversity of life is simply taking the expedient back burner.

(2) The biomass of humans + livestock is over 22.5 times that of all remaining wild mammals, creating an immanently lethal double population crisis.

(3) We have no clear confidence of holding the line on climate crisis, with COP26 failing to phase out coal use and 1.5oC on life support.

(4) We are still overflowing with nuclear overkill.The superpowers are in brinksmanship on the border as I write.

(5) We are completely losing the distinction between conscious life and artificial intelligence, and with it human conscious volitional agency.

(6) We remain addicted to an unsustainable exponentiating GNP economic paradigm of exploitation over shorter and shorter triple witching hour instabilities.

(7) Last but not least, a clear majority of people on the planet adhere to religious views invoking dominion over nature, and directly embracing destructive apocalypse.

These are our seven deadly 'sins' and all are abundantly clear paths to inevitable Fermi paradox catastrophe.

If you pause and reflect on this message, you will realise that everything I am saying here is veridically true, as is the cosmology. I have come in the time of acute need, to light the beacon of life's resplendence and guard it till it shines brightly! No one else on the planet has expressed any real hope of bringing both the religious and materialistic paradigms into full alignment with human and biospheric survival in time to save life as a whole. Someone had to discover their true incarnate calling and make that tortuous journey into the unknown. But I am just the catalyst, bearing a sacramental biospheric ally.With the full unveiling of this knowledge, this gnosis, the baton of conscious agency over the future of the living universe around us now passes to all of us.

The Huichol have said, that we are "perdido" – lost, done for. But in this sacred undertaking we shallfind our true redemption. Through our collective affirmation, we shall begin at last to truly keep the immortal way of the Tree of Life throughout our generations forever. Through this awakening, humanity can be confident of inheriting perpetual life, as a species, through our true love for one another, just as Genesis envisaged before the Fall.

In this very act, we become liberated. We shall know it in our heart of hearts and can feel it in our bones – this is our one true calling, to have chosen that good part that shall not be taken away from us, in the time of true need, as one people, as a living species and as a symbiotic biosphere: To save the life tree of the living universe in the cusp of our planetary crisis, so that conscious existence can continue to fully flower and unfold in the universe unabated. This is our raison d'etre, our true meaning in life, and shall become our ultimate fruition in resplendent Paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time.

What we have within us will save us if we bring it forth from ourselves.

We CAN DO this! What other viable option can there be?

Affirmations: How to Reflower the Diversity of Life for our own Survival

Elucidated in a conversation between Chris King and Suzy McFarland

Ron Horgan: I agree Chris, the long term future of Homo sapiens on Earth requires us to live within our means as part of the biosphere. Can you enlarge on the rules and laws we need to live symbiotically with nature? Your 206 page monograph is a very detailed study but confuses me. My strength is rapidly reading and extracting the key points from a wide range of discoveries. What do you recommend we do?

Chris King: The solution is twofold: (A) The meaning and purpose and (B) The action required.

Both are essential because without A, B won't happen in time to do what's really needed.

Both theistic and mechanistic cosmologies leave us with annihilation. The first sacrifices nature to human dominion, then apocalyptic triage and destruction. The second is a lifeless machine, in which conscious life is an informational accident that has no cosmological meaning or significance. Symbiotic existential cosmology puts the ghost of consciousness back into the machine of the universe, by minimally augmenting quantum cosmology to include subjective experience. The meaning and purpose is for conscious existence to fully flower to fruition as an immortal process of the universe becoming fully aware.

A: Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, in its simplest irrefutable form, comes in three short statements:

(1) Biogenic: Life exists cosmologically as a fractal consequence of the symmetry-breaking of the quantum forces of nature, ensuing from the the cosmic origin, eventually reaching interactive climax in biological evolution.

(2) Panpsychic: Subjectively conscious volitional will has efficacy ^{^[72]} over the physical universe. This imbues at least some matter (brains) with physically efficacious subjective consciousness. Thus primitive subjectivity, is a property of normal matter.

(3) Symbiotic: The planetary biosphere survives and evolves through ecosystemic symbiosis, upon which human survival is dependent. Biospheric symbiosis is thus essential for human survival.

This is, in its simplest form, the true veridical account of the universe in which we consciously exist.

The first is obvious – just look around you! The diversity of life exists physically as a climax phenomenon – a quantum complexity catastrophe. The second is subjectively conscious existence being able to affect the physical universe, as we know from every act we take and every decision we make. This implies some matter e.g brains have an occluded subjective complement, but because the brain obeys the core quantum forces, like other matter, its a fundamental aspect of cosmology, invoking panpsychism, animism and the spiritual/religious impulse, although it's counterintuitive that the most obvious solid fact of reality opens the entire spectre. The third and most important is that the universe rises to consummating complexity through symbiosis between life forms, not dominance, as in dominion over nature by Homo sapiens.

B: Reflowering Paradise on the Cosmic Equator in Space-time 13 billion years out from the big bang:
(1) Give half Earth back to re-wilding the wilderness, so there is enough species diversity for the biosphere to evolve. (2) Transition to renewable energy immediately. (3) Decentralise food supply chains to protect humanity. (4) Ensure the genetic diversity of our food and medicinal species. (5) Eliminate nukes and consider how best to avoid a massive asteroid Earth strike (Lubin & Cohen 2022) and protect from nearby supernovae. (6) Teach people how to live in symbiotic urban culture. (7) Use technology for the benefit of life as a whole not for personal gain, humanity alone, or an artificial intelligence takeover. (8) Celebrate the perennial wonder of existence throughout our generations forever Amen.

Hillel stated the silver rule, claiming he had recited the Torah standing on one foot. This herein is the cosmological silver bullet for the immortal Tree of Life standing on one toe! This is it. This discovery can happen only once. We aren't going to get another. This is who we really are and what the universe is really here for!

Ron: Chris this is superb. "This is who we really are and what the universe is really here for". We sure aren't going to get another chance. How to get this message onto every television and computer screen? You have made my last 10 years. Thank you.

Suzy McFarland: And, what do you expect the rest of us to do?

Chris: I ask you simply to assess two things and make up your own mind up, about this:

(1) Do you consider that I'm I telling you the veridical truth here, as a subjectively conscious human being?

(2) Do you affirm that you also have subjective conscious volition over the physical universe?

Suzy: (1) Yes, I believe you are telling me the veridical truth. (2) Yes, I do believe this.

Jane King: Yes indeed. I do. Yes to all!!

Ultimately everything that ensues in Symbiotic Existential Cosmology to reflower and reparadise the Earth flows from this mutual veridical affirmation and the preparedness of people to communicate it to others in this way.

Entheogenic Conclusion

The key to this article is not just that psychedelics can induce a type of conscious awareness of the “mind at large”, but that they have a potentially pivotal role in alleviating the climate, habitat and natural resource crises that are precipitating a human-induced mass extinction of biodiversity, through the symbiotic relationship with nature these experiences invoke in the shamanic context where human relationships with nature and its spirit world are paramount.

Traditional religions, sourced in patriarchal moral imperatives and an hierarchical top down business structure to enhance social dominion, based on a scorched-Earth desert philosophy, in which natural life is just a prelude to a Day of Judgment to be consigned to eternal Heaven or the fires of Hell, are tragically ill-positioned to be able to address this existential crisis of humanity and the planet. What is required is a paradigm of autonomous direct personal responsibility to care for the universe and the sentient life within it in immortal perpetuity over cosmological time scales. This is the epoch of living Paradise all spiritual paths hunger for.

“So what we’re seeing now is a rejection of religion across the world as a hierarchical business model

to connect to spirit and they’re going straight for spirit” – Rak Razam (Stewart 2013).

So the question is not transcendence in its own right, which is superlative, but the responsibility this imbues to cherish and protect the living universe. This is not just a moral responsibility, but an active intent that arises from purposeful symbiosis with the cosmic mind.

This is the overwhelming message the psychedelics have communicated to me through countless sessions over 55 years and particularly through the natural entheogens and the symbiotic relationship they invoke. It is not something that proceeds automatically out of the psychedelic experience, which, like love, is a many-splendoured and sometimes very challenging thing, but nevertheless its biodiverse aspect is widely shared, in the sense of connection with nature reported in the psychedelic studies and manifest in the shamanic tradition of entheogenic use, where spiritual realisation is accompanied by a sense of integration with nature and interdependence within it. The threat to biodiversity of a mass extinction lasts over evolutionary time sales, so while climate might be addressed and mitigated due to human pressures, the unrelenting pressure on biodiversity could become exacerbated. Hence entheogens come to provide a critical short and long-term remedy to dominion over nature by increasing awareness of our symbiotic relationship with life as a whole.

The reason I have concentrated on natural psychedelics is fivefold:

(1) Entheogenic species are an integral part of the planetary evolutionary endowment of biodiversity, as are our food and medicinal species.

(2) Natural psychedelics are potentially symbiotic cohabitants with Homo sapiens, which already exist in a symbiotic relationship with the cultures and movements utilising them entheogenically.

(3) Natural psychedelics have been used for millennia and are proven to be both safe for the individual and safe for society when used in a guided and protected spiritual, or therapeutic context.

(4) The entheogenic experience of natural psychedelics is powerful and capable of evoking a full psychedelic state, so that, although synthetics present additional features, natural psychedelics are “sufficient unto the day”.

(5) As long as psychedelics remain illegal, natural psychedelics are verified by their genomes to be pure of synthesis contaminants and are easily cultivated, enabling autonomous use without contact with the illegal drugs market.

(6) They are not addictive because the effects wane rapidly on repeated use, requiring a refractory period.

There are also a variety of other natural and synthetic agents which can also have profound consciousness-altering effects, including cannabis species (THC), Salvia divinorum (salvinorin-a) and the synthetic drug ketamine, each of which have properties distinct from and potentially complementary to those of psychedelic entheogens. Some may also induce forms of Bardo Thodol experience, but classic psychedelics take the centre stage (King 2021b).

Sacred mushrooms contain other related psychoactive molecules, fig 258, which also contribute to the overall effect. Psilocybe cubensis caps have been found to have 0.01% by wt of aeruginascin, 0.07% of baeocystin, 0.88% of psilocybin, 0.01 % of norbaeocystin, 0.06% of psilocin, with stypes having about half these levels (Gotvaldová et al. 2021). Previously the rare Inocybe aeruginascens was found to have high levels of aeruginascin (Gartz 1989), relatively by weight around 25% aeruginascin 35% psilocybin 28% baeocystin. Gartz compared reports from 24 cases people who accidentally ingested I. aeruginascens to those who accidentally consumed psilocybe species with high levels of psilocybin and psilocin. Those ingesting the inocybe reported only euphoric experiences, while the others had an “often slight and in some cases deep dysphoric mood”.

I have focussed my case on sacred mushrooms because peyote and ayahuasca are hard roads, due to nausea, while mushrooms are capable of being perfectly potent, have no such effects, particularly if ground dried in a mortar and pestle, soaked for 20 min in lemon juice to convert the psilocybin to active psilocin and drunk as a tea, resulting in a shorter, but intense experience that is easily contained in a busy life without fatigue or derangement. They are readily cultivated symbiotically (Stamets & Chilton 1984) and exist worldwide (Stamets 1996).

As Terrence and Denis McKenna stated to the reader in their mushroom growers guide (Oss & Oeric 1976):

“You as an individual and Homo sapiens as a species are on the brink of a symbiotic relationship that will eventually carry humanity and Earth into the galactic mainstream of higher civilizations”.

“Flickering before us is a dimension so huge that its outlines can barely be brought into focus in the human frame of reference. Our animal existence, our planetary existence is ending. In geological time that ending is now only moments away. A great dying, a great extinction of many species has been occurring since at least the partnership society in prehistoric Africa. Our future lies in the mind; our weary planet's only hope of survival is that we find ourselves in the mind and make a friend that can reunite us with the earth, while carrying us to the stars. Change more radical by magnitudes than anything that has gone before, looms immediately ahead. Shamans have kept the gnosis of the accessibility of the Other for millennia. Now it is global knowledge. The consequences of this situation have only begun to unfold” (McKenna 1992 263).

A Moksha Epiphany

My entire life has been shaped by psychedelic experience. When I first took LSD in the heady times of 1968, I immediately realised that the universe was the generator of sentient life as a climax manifestation. This became a life long quest, as a biocosmologist, to establish how and why life exists in the universe. I realised that traditional religions defining life as a preparation for Judgment in Heaven or Hell were corrupt cosmologies in conflict with nature, and while Eastern paths invoked meditative approaches to enlightenment, the fact that, by the traditions’ own admission this could take lifetimes in rounds of reincarnation, also appeared to contradict realisable illumination.

But the reductionist scientific view also lacked any basis for conscious existence, as expressed by Bertrand Russel who has himself espoused Russelian monism – a form of panpsychism:

“Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more devoid of meaning is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. ... Brief and powerless is man's life, on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark …" (Bertrand Russell)

Francis Crick in “The Astonishing Hypothesis” put it this way:

"The astonishing hypothesis is that 'You', your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons!' "

This is reinforced by Sam Harris (2012) in a radio discussion in which he puts the case against free-will:

"You feel like you are a thinker of thoughts - the author of intentions - you feel like you are a subject and commensurate with that feeling is the sense that you are in a position to do what it is you do, to decide to lift my left or right hand and deliberate between the two and I can have reasons for one or the other and I'm in the driver's seat - I really am - and that's where everyone is starting. The problem with that is that objectively we know that everything you are consciously aware of - all your thoughts and your intentions and your impulses and your intentions to resist those impulses - whatever's coming up for you - but we know that's all preceded by events in your nervous system of which you're not aware and which you didn't create and the state of your brain in this moment in every sense is the product of variables that you are not responsible for - you didn't pick your parents, you didn't pick your genes, you didn't pick the environment in which your genome was going to be expressed, you didn't pick the way your interaction with other people and the world sculpted the microstructure of your brain so as to give you the brain you have - you didn't pick the number of receptors you have of every type at each synapse, you didn't pick all the charges that are currently in place in your brain at this moment - you haven't created your neuronal physiology and yet your neuronal physiology is going to give rise to every next thought and intention that shows up for you”.

What makes this invalid is that, as we have seen the uncertainty of the quantum universe renders the classical notion of Laplacian determinism defunct, and is precisely the loop hole of quantum uncertainty and entanglement coulped with edge of chaos self organised criticality that makes the subjective experience of volitional will possible in the physical universe.

Towards the end of my first academic sabbatical, having also experienced being a sadhu in India and Tibetan Buddhist initiations, I took peyote with the Native American Church and also sacred mushrooms and later made two trips to the Peruvian Amazon to take ayahuasca. During this entire time, my entheogenic experiences were telling me that I needed to act on this knowledge received to protect the planet from a human-induced mass extinction of life.

As a child I had had a dream that I was standing in a parched jungle and all the animals were looking at me with heavy sorrow and disapproving recognition that I was a human that had reduced the earthly paradise to a scorched semi-desert. I had to run from this disapproval and found myself beside an endless queue of people waiting to find work in a dark factory surrounded by smoking chimneys. The dream left a permanent impression on me, long before the climate crisis became recognised. I have also had other formative precognitive dreams evidentially verified before the event.

I held mushroom veladas in the moonlight on our wilderness land. ‘Elohim: Living on the Open Road a Nino mushroom song. During a mushroom velada in the 1980s, I realised that if the world hadn’t successfully resolved the world’s climate and biodiversity crises by the millennium in 2000, I would make a journey to the Amazon and Jerusalem to make a spiritual vigil to Earth’s natural Eden of tooth and claw and to Jerusalem as the religious nexus point, to pronounce the reunion of woman and man under the banner of the immortal evolutionary tree of life, as a paradigm shift to restoring perennial sustainability of the biosphere. This is discussed in section 12 of the next article.

Having travelled widely and risked my life many times in far-flung corners of the Earth, I am now in my late seventies. I hadn’t partaken of the sacraments for seven years, because of the fact that acute closed angle glaucoma was liable to make me go blind overnight, due to psychedelics causing my pupils to dilate. Finally, having had the lenses of both eyes replaced with cataract surgery, I resigned myself to break the fast of the mushroom sacrament to return to the source of my life-long inspiration, before I left it so late that I might end up in a terminal condition before circumstances forced me into a last desperate encounter. I took only 1.5 g dried weight, prepared as in the -previous section, with some cannabis butter beforehand, to test a level that an elderly person who had not had the experience before could sustain without undue discomfort, given some caring support.

Fig 258: Dose-response curve for 5HT2a occupancy vs psilocin plasma concentration (Madsen et al. 2019). Psilocybin intake resulted in dose-related 5-HT2AR occupancies up to 72%. Plasma psilocin levels and 5-HT2AR occupancy conformed to a single-site binding model established by positron emission tomography (PET). Minor ingredients in Ps. cubensis.

This is consistent with research fig 258, which shows a non-linear saturation curve of the 5HT2a receptor with increasing plasma psilocin levels, consistent with a moderate dose of psilocin being able to induce significant effects, with little of the collateral fallout I have sometimes experienced on an heroic dose.

The resulting quantum change experience is detailed in fig 259, from what I wrote down on my descent the same evening, reawakening my sense of life direction, creative insight and transformative urgency, just as my life has been spent on an unending expedition into the unknown, sailing down a great fjord, with the tacking and gybing, often taken at veladas, to re-envisage the pointers on my journey of incarnation.

It has many of the key peak hallmarks often described in near death experiences, except here with more emphasis on the letting-go of ego-death and meditative sensory withdrawal, as noted by Chris Koch (2020):

“Similar mystical experiences [to NDEs] are commonly reported when ingesting psychoactive substances from a class of hallucinogens linked to the neurotransmitter serotonin, including psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD, DMT (aka the Spirit Molecule), and 5-MeO-DMT (aka the God Molecule), consumed as part of religious, spiritual or recreational practices”.

Rather than representing an hallucinatory drug-induced delusion such states represent conscious experience taken closer to the edge of chaos than normally occurs in the more controlled meditative and contemplative traditions of religious spirituality and mysticism. By contrast with the mind-sky visions of the meditative traditions, deep entheogenic experience brings out a more symbiotic cosmic consciousness integrated with life as a whole rather than simply seeking divine grace. This is critical for human survival because the failure to incorporate the sacred transcendence and immanence of nature severely limits the capacity of the traditions to protect human survival and the diversity of life itself. Likewise, by comparison with life-transforming NDEs, the entheogenic brain is in an augmented, rather than diminished function and condition, facilitating a vast and sometimes overloading experience of ultimate reality in fully fledged form, as noted in Griffiths et al. (2019) in psychedelic studies..

Dissolving the distinction between self and other is pivotal to this process. The internal model of reality supported by the conscious mind has an envelope of characteristics, ranging from our sensory experiences of the external world, to internal somatosensory, emotional and other representations of self and our ongoing thought processes. Thus subjective consciousness in the ego state is dynamically polarised between representations of subjective self and objective world. When these distinctions are released, the distinction between individual and universal consciousness can also become dissolved, leading to transcendence. Entheogens provide a visionary realisation of this deeper, primary consciousness, giving it experiential reality, by opening the doors of perception to the mind at large.

What is truly extraordinary about this process is that releasing the ego state, even transiently over several hours, can result in long-term integrative changes in the psyche, consistent with adaptive long-term neural potentiation, showing that the underlying processes of universal consciousness are not extinguished, but merely suppressed by the evolutionary shaping of the ego, thus attesting to the reality of the entire phenomenon.

Fig 259: “A moksha epiphany”. Written during the evening, after the experience had receded. "I am not your master.
Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out.” (Gospel of Thomas 13).

Three weeks after this quantum change experience, having feverishly worked day and night to achieve it, in completing the first full draft of this article, and the co-conceived complementary one Natty Dread and Planetary Resplendence on transforming the Christian apocalyptic tradition based on the dying Saviour, into the immortal paradigm of the evolutionary Tree of Life of the living planet.

Two months after the event, with this monograph approaching full shape, I repeated the undertaking, with 1.75 gms, again converted to psilocin under lemon juice as a tea, 40 mins after home made cannabis butter, to allow the latter to absorb in advance in the small bowel as an oily substance. Then another two months later I took 1.92 gms, reaching a full-on intense psychedelic peak. These were more enveloping as labyrinthine visionary voyages, skirting the edges of the iconic centre-of-the-cyclone transcendence of the first one but presenting other features of the extended conscious state, as is always the case with the diversity of psychedelic experiences.

What they have demonstrated to me as a breakthrough is the ability of the psilocin acid-treatment method to produce a pure, clean visionary source consciousness unparalleled in everyday experience, dream states and any form of controlled meditation, without which humanity’s understanding of the full dimensions of the psyche would be weak, pitiful and presumptuous. Taken in the late afternoon, these more powerful experiences, that had me reeling at the peak, were sharper and shorter than ingesting mushrooms predominantly containing the pro-drug psilocybin. The tea is pure dissolved entheogen and induces in the body a pure clean state, in which food is sumptuous and the inner quality of experience is abundantly overflowing for the astute participant to enter and explore the depths of immanent and transcendent consciousness. By midnight these left me able to sleep easily and wake fully refreshed, invigorated and whole, at the age of 76, confirming their fertile symbiotic relationship with my essential being, in the long, tortuous journey of incarnate existence. I have, in opening this confessional account and completing this cosmological description, traversed the long journey that began with the shock of my first experiences with LSD in London in 1968.

Since then other events have intervened, adding further complexions to the situation. I joined two expert groups on consciousness research which profoundly expanded the cosmology into a full cultural-evolutionary account of how human culture got ourselves into existential crisis, giving the cosmology oerarching scope and veracity.

Eleven days ago, in July 2022, I contracted Omicron BA5 and rapidly went down hill and had to get an emergency exemption to get Paxlovid, the new Pfizer anti-viral. I nearly succumbed the next night but it stopped the severest phase in its tracks. That made me realise that this happening was a karmic warning I needed to recognise. Although I had written a definitive existential cosmology this has not achieved the covenant of saving the Tree of Life from human destruction, so the following insights summarise my current reflections, beginning again at the original mushroom experience and leading to the journey of living redemption.

Epiphany 1

There are two and only two routes to realisation:

(1) the scientific quest of verified empirical observation of nature and the quantum universe, including traditional neuroscience reframed so that it is not a physically closed classical causal description, but a contextual boundary filter guiding conscious experience as a cosmological complement to the natural universe reflecting all the subtleties of the qualia of visionary experience under the organismic filter applied by neurodynamics on the doors of perception.

(2) the subjective quest of discovering subjective consciousness from within, through mutual empirical experience. The core of this is to make the mystical vision quest ourselves with no prior assumptions as the karmic trip of our lifetime because we are already complete conscious sentient beings who have the power to do so, but fail to understand the “Kingdom that lies before us, but men do not see it”. That kingdom is our own conscious existence and we can't understand it by analysing it, but only by living it, by descending deeply into it, by every means and by actively achieving the redemption of the living planet and the conscious universe.

If we don't do this now we are literally doomed to a rapid, or slow burn Fermi self-extinction. Those that have ears choose to hear not! Time is too short. Things are not heading the right way. We all need to be pragmatic!

Little or none of this involves the kind of rational, philosophical and consciousness research speculation the expert groups I joined are feverishly debating, conflating pseudoscientific ideas of fields, encodings, reverberations, potentials, solitons or even the Ads-Cft correspondence, all of which are just conceptual physical analogies trying to pose as descriptions of consciousness, when neuroscience is already providing a clear objective description. Decomposing and describing consciousness is not the name of the game. Experiencing reality to its foundational depths is. You don't discover meaning by analysing and describing it, but by taking personal responsibility for the fate of the living universe and redeeming it. Just learn to make the vision quest and save the universe before you die. You can culture mushrooms in a chilly bin. The key is understanding a root shift in the zeitgeist can become effortless, however unlikely it may seem, if it is true to life itself, not just human utopian folly.

"And it was the Evening of the First Day"

To understand this revelation of true redemption we have to briefly return to how it first began. This all started 13 months ago as yet another stroke of karma. I had become unable to safely take mushrooms for seven years because acute closed angle glaucoma risked instant blindness if my pupils dilated. But once I had complete lens replacements, the die was cast. I decided to take the delicate plunge. It was only a tiny morsel, 1.5 gm dry weight, something even an eighty year old spinster needn't turn an anxious hair to, just to test the visionary waters again.

If any of you want to have any insight into what the fully developed nature of pure experiential qualia are, mushroom kaleidoscopes and their deeper visions are the synesthesic sang raal. They are at once all the colours of visual insight and the sounds of immortal waves whispering and rushing and as they gather, rising to screeching intensity through ones being, in undulating resonance, and all the scents and tastes and thrills of the world too and all those things that have been and will be.

Western tradition leans to God as the external Creator, while Eastern tradition sees the Supreme Being internally as pure consciousness. When you look up I-AM, it arises in two complementary places - the Hebrew Bible and the Upanishads. The formative scope of this is extraordinary and potentially universal. This made me realise that the founding experience defining Monotheism was a visionary experience of a burning bush almost identical to my moksha epiphany, and both were essentially an NDE-like experience of meeting with a manifestation of Brahman-Īshvara as per the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. This places the entheogenic moksha epiphany and its symbiotic cosmology in the mainstream of formative religious paradigm shifts.

Krishnananda notes: In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad we are told that Brahman – the Supreme Being is Pure Consciousness, in which subjects and objects merge together in a state of Universality. The Supreme Being knew Himself as 'I-Am', inclusive of everything. He became an ‘other’ to Himself in the act of the manifestation of the Universe. Even in the Biblical parlance we have the description of God as ‘I-am- That-I-am’. One cannot say anything else about God. But, the Supreme was ‘as if’ an ‘other’, but not truly, for He, nevertheless remained as the Absolute, Self-Conscious Being, and He knew Himself as ‘I-am’. ‘I-Am’ is the highest description of God, but the Absolute is supposed to be transcendent even to this condition of ‘I-amness’ of the Universal Nature, because the state of ‘I-am’ is Self- consciousness, though it is Universal. So, in Vedānta, a distinction is drawn between this Universal ‘I-am’ and the Absolute as it is – the distinction between Brahman ultimate reality and Īshvara the godhead, manifested in Vishnu and Shiva.

Ishvara, (Sanskrit: "Lord") in Hinduism, God understood as a person, in contrast to the impersonal transcendent brahman. The root of the word Ishvara comes from īś- ( , Ish) meaning "capable of" and "owner, ruler, chief of". The second part of the word Ishvara is vara which means depending on context, "best, excellent, beautiful", "choice, wish, blessing, boon, gift", and "suitor, lover, one who solicits a girl in marriage". The composite word, Ishvara literally means "owner of best, beautiful", "ruler of choices, blessings, boons", or "chief of suitor, lover". In Mahayana Buddhism it is used as part of the compound "Avalokiteśvara" ("lord who hears the cries of the world") – a bodhisattva revered for his compassion. When referring to divine as female, particularly in Shaktism, the feminine Īśvarī is sometimes used. Particular communities within the Hindu fold differ in their understanding of the relation between Ishvara and brahman. Theistic communities maintain that the two are one and the same or even that the personal representation is superior; others, including some adherents of Advaita Vedanta, argue that Ishvara is a limited and ultimately inadequate representation of Brahman. Ishvara, as Avalokiteśvara in coitus with Tara, carries all the features of the male-female 'Elohim of Genesis.

So it was that I lay down in the deepening twilight as the effects began to come on. I saw my son look curiously in and to avoid him distracting me I turned away, and noticed the little streaks of light in the corner of my eye which mean that at any moment I could fold over into the dream world of the nierika. I reminded myself – you're not here just to indulge yourself but to discover the meaning of life, the universe and everything, so I summoned up empty mindfulness and gave my self back to the universe in fana or self-annihilation.

And down I went into the epiphany of being – a kind of jewelled seventh heaven where everything is illuminated and everything is illuminating. And there was Brahman exactly as in the near death experience. That thou art. Brahman is me. Brahman is my cosmic apotheosis manifest telepathically as one is to one. But Brahman isn't just here to say "Hi". He is saying the world is in acute peril – indeed the entire universe is in peril, because, if we self-destruct as we are heading towards doing, and conscious life on Earth as we know it ceases, we don't know that this great universe in which we exist can remain manifest, because we don't have certainty or even any knowledge that there is other life in the universe.. Brahman is vulnerable too – eternally vulnerable. And Brahman is silently as one is to one saying to go back to your life and redeem the entire living universe as your life's work. You can do it because you are mortal on ground zero. Go to the ends of the Earth and stop short at nothing. And he imparted to me the elements of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, just as in Fred Hoyle's (1957) sci-fi novel "The Black Cloud" that took me weeks to begin to understand. That's the moksha epiphany transcending the incarnation cycle.

Likewise, Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. But he saw a flame of fire coming out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and the bush burned with fire and was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside, and see this great sight (experience this transformative vision), and discover why the bush is not burnt, and God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God. And He said, I have seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry and I know their sorrows. And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them unto a land flowing with milk and honey. And when Moses enquired what his people should call Him, He said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

So Brahman is also 'Elohim and 'Elohim is just as vulnerable. Really the 'Elohim of Genesis one is male and female in the likeness of humanity as humanity's cosmic apotheosis, not the reverse. So the damning thing is that our self-centred egotism could literally lay waste to God, the Universe and everything if we don't perform the living redemption of the Tree of Life throughout our generations forever.

Shortly after, as it always happens, the spell broke, and I fell out of the nierika portal and Rohan was looking at me curiously and saying "Are you okay?" And I said "Yes thanks!" "I couldn't be more okay!" "I'm galvanised". And here we are thirteen months later and apart from the cosmology, which everyone looks the other way over, to neither confirm nor deny, so nothing has changed.

Chris Nunn: Stanislav Grof thought his ‘holotropic breathwork’ was second best to LSD for enabling ‘higher’ states of consciousness, but I don’t think he ever said how or why. And you need to be a bit wary of physiological measures which generally have multifactorial determinants.

Chris King: LSD is too strong and unpredictable. Just take your fungal entheogenic toxins like a true visionary adult should, fearlessly with no hesitation or regrets! The universe evolved them for our realisation as a compensation for our species-dominant egotism destroying the biosphere. Although there are no guarantees, they are heads and tails over pure Vedanta and pure spirituality. Breathing and meditation is not a substitute but an adjunct. They aren't alternatives. As I showed you above, fana is also the way into moksha.

Epiphany 2

To understand the complementary relationship between (a) the physical and natural universe and (b) subjective conscious existence, we need to understand that the way the standard model of quantum physics and the symmetry-breaking of the colour and weak-electromagnetic forces occurred is (1) a critical indicator that the universe is absolutely destined to enable life to unfold including through natural evolution and for conscious life to be possible and (2) that the wave-particle complementarity of the quantum forces, especially electromagnetism as the most large scale force, (along with gravity), is key to subjective conscious volition over the quantum universe.

(1) Quantum physics is not just a ball and stick fatalistic mechanism but facilitates a highly creative life generating cosmological process. The chemical elements of life are a very subtle symmetry-broken products of the colour, weak and electromagnetic forces in interplay. You can't just cite carbon as a key element of life or ignore everything but the EM force, or you brutalise physics and turn it into a mechanistic unconscious nightmare. The reality is that the cosmic production of the elements through symmetry-breaking leads to biomolecules and fractal tissue structures as the cosmological climax of life in paradise on the cosmic equator in space-time.

(2) Quantum uncertainty is built in in such a way as to just make it possible for subjective consciousness to have causal physical effect, as David Chalmers put very nicely on closer to the truth: "If you wanted to have consciousness to effect physics, it looks like physics could not be designed more perfectly."

The Elusive Subjective

Now this has a kick back to understanding what subjective consciousness is and what it isn't and why formally analysing it is specious. Primitive subjectivity is the effortless ability of the subjective 'Shivaic' aspect of cosmology to become moulded by the physical constraints of the 'Shakti' aspect of cosmological physics.

In very elemental contexts like quanta, all that can be realised is the root notion of consciousness as the historically-entangled special relativistic wave function spatio-temporally encoding the past and future of the quantum. The 'free will' is the intrinsic capacity for reduction of the wave packet in which a 'decision' is made. But there is no real evidence for adaptive integrated qualia. Things begin to get more interesting in butterfly effect systems, where there is a dynamical boundary condition filter in place in the global dynamic itself interacting with quantum uncertainty.

A discrete transition to attentive sentient consciousness occurs in the eucaryote endosymbiosis where chaotic sensitivity to physical modes, such as light (photons), vibrations (phonons), and orbital influences (olfaction) begin to lead to boundary filter constraints in the membrane dynamics where meaningful subjective qualia could in principle become expressed. With the multi-cellular brain these become "phenomenally" expanded, coupled with cerebral neurodynamic constraints to become the dynamic integrated qualia we call the experiences we can subjectively experience in the first person.

But as we described in Epiphany 1 these are framed by the formative neurodynamic constraints of the doors of perception filters we associate with sensory perceptual processing superimposed on the physical sensory constraints. These are not analysed by decomposing the adaptive capacity for coherent qualitative experience as a kind of subjective qualia mechanism in itself, but through causally open attentive-intentive neurodynamics.

Finally, because the universe evolves to interactive climax in the biota, although it is possible that other cosmic structures such as black holes, stars, galaxies, or Gaia herself could have primitive phenomenological volitional experience, the subjective aspect is clearly positioned to be a complement to the most elegant complex low energy interactive processes in the multicellular biota themselves and to be supremely adaptive to the doors of perception filters these provide for organismic survival in an uncertain environment.

So we are brought back square one to the overriding reality that (1) All forms of conscious and superconscious entity arise from and are manifest through the biota, including Brahman as ultimate reality and 'Elohim as "God" apotheosis. (2) That while the universe is necessary, subjective consciousness in the biota is primary without which it remains unclear the physical universe or the cosmic mind could become manifest.

So our conscious duty to the subjective aspect is, as stated in the first round, is living redemption, not futile attempts at mechanistic or structural analysis, which rather, disable the subject from active volitional agency over their affairs and world redemption.

Epiphany 3

So is my mushroom vision of Brahman (1) a meeting with ultimate reality as I claim, or it is just (2) a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, or (3) somewhere in between, some kind of hallucinatory 'false' vision of my own mortal angst projected into the kaleidoscopic aether?

Here are the reasons why (2) and (3) are completely mistaken.

1. A key interpretation of the Fermi Paradox – why there is no apparent evidence of life out there – is that It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself – the Medea hypothesis (Ward 2009). We are manifestly running this risk to the brink as I speak!

2. Brian Cox on the BBC ahead of COP26 warned that Earth’s demise could rid galaxy of meaning Brian notes on the BBC that "Unique events that led to civilisation mean its demise could ‘eliminate meaning in the galaxy for ever’. He is right and the conclusion is that this is not just what we are doing to ourselves and the diversity of life as a whole, but the living galaxy and the universe.

3. Uncertainty that life can Reboot: Although abiogenesis is eminently plausible scientifically , there is as yet no empirical demonstration it can be achieved de novo. Our scientific intelligence leads us to believe that the organic molecules produced in profusion in galactic gas clouds are eminently fecund to generate life where the conditions become possible but that the processes involved take about half a billion years on a goldilocks planet to come about but this remains only a scientific hypothesis. We can't afford to snuff life out on the causal assumption it can create itself from scratch.

4. Squandering the Cosmic Heritage: We do all need to have some root faith in the ultimate fecundity of life to regenerate itself anew, after all it happened didn't it? And because it did, we appeared. But we are already 13.5 billion years down the universe's evolution. The universe is no longer a babe in arms spawning the first blazars. Simply throwing up our hands helplessly and depending on this option to roll back human folly is far worse than futile. What more stupid fate could we envision for ourselves than to struggle for 500 million years to spark replicative life, another two billion years to form amoebo-flagellates and another billion years of unique evolution to get past the dinosaurs and finally become Homo sapiens, only to blow it apart in a nuclear holocaust through our own egotistical tribalism, or run the biosphere into the dirt by over exploitation? Recall that the only country which has prosecuted unilateral nuclear warfare is the US. This was a precedent humanity should have stepped back from and not set the die for the nuclear arms race. Although these conflicts have arisen from far right leaders namely Hitler and Stalin it is the democratic world that is guilty of nuclear warfare when Japan was already on the brink of surrender. We are also continually failing to learn the lessons from far right politics and the risks it invokes.

5. False Religious Assumptions: We have no evidence whatever that there is an inscrutable ultimate reality called Brahman independent of our own experience of it. The evidence contradicts it. Moksha is so difficult to really achieve, the Vedantic tradition had to invent reincarnation to postpone full enlightenment. There is no convincing evidence that all the meditative and contemplative traditions have genuine transformative power over reality. There is no evidence whatever that a creator deity with root power over the universe exists independently of our belief systems. So my Brahman experience is as genuine as it gets and more transparently so than the contrived claims of the Yogis for which little has really changed in 2000 years.

6. Helplessness and Denial: Finally we all know the problem is that while all of us feel the Earth is heading towards existential crisis, none of you have any way to cope with the three key existential threats, the mass extinction of the diversity of life, human induced climate crisis and nuclear mutually assured destruction. We are living in the valley of the shadow of death and we know it. Some of you even try to claim climate crisis is a democrat deep state plot because you are choosing to drown in disinformation. But we know that we are burning all the coal that goes back 358 million years to the first great carboniferous forests and all the oily algal deposits of an age of 250 million years for the oil. We have to know this is disrupting and degrading and acting against the living Earth. Yet here we sit driving our autos and our urban food chains unable to get to these issues for selfish reasons of taxation, inflation and sheer personal ambition.

So what to do about it? We need to create a small world network based on limited degrees of separation to identify the three key existential threats – mass extinction of the diversity of life, human induced climate crisis and nuclear mutually assured destruction as primary objectives. We have spent decades trying to deal with the nuclear threat and remain on the brink of uncertainty if push came to shove. We can't let any of these drop until the planet is redeemed.

The Buck Stops at Karma My Dear

All this Covid episode and what it means comes down to karma, a philosophy I tend to despise but lives within me at all times, and particularly times of crisis. When I caught Omicron and went down hill fast I thought everything was utterly meaningless. Ukraine is in flames. The US is splitting itself apart and returning to religious chauvinism overturning the struggle for women's rights. And so it went. I tried to compile a few additions to the cosmology, which I will include, but otherwise it was pure ennui. Then I realised the buck still stops with me and I haven't fulfilled the karmic agenda. That's when I realised karma had struck (again) and regained my vitality and could eat again. And that's why I am sending these three epistles.

Let me explain what karma actually is. It's not a moral law, it's a manifestation of quantum singularity when the universe touches us on the shoulder. To take a very loose analogy, everyday life, as a bed of wine and roses is like sailing down our multiply entangled wave function. We are part of a great whole of life, offspring, world hopes of a better future, compassionate sentiments, the unifying power of love, the collective will to compassionate justice. There is no need to stick our necks out. But then there's the nitty-gritty – accidents happen, illness like covid, family, social and international crises. Here is where reduction of the wave packet comes into the forefront and shatters the equilibrium.

Just so as incarnate individuals, we are both singular and part of the great whole. But some of us become marked by our personal karma in a way which can set us apart. The mushroom trip that set off the cosmology, through unblinding my glaucoma with devastating insight has marked me. And going down the tubes with covid has marked the process with added significance, turning meaninglessness into acute urgency. The covenant has not been fulfilled. I still have to go to the ends of the Earth to save it and time is even shorter and the situation even more precarious.

The basic answer to this is that I am, and Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is, as a transparent affirmation, the ultimate remedy for survival of the human species and the immortal survival of the diversity of life. I am thus the bearer of the Logos of perennial immortality throughout our generations forever amen. This I swear, that I came into this world to bear witness to the truth, that I bare before you the long term future goodness of the age of Paradise. This is not the signature of a false prophet. Rather, the balance of the probabilities is that my vision is a rock of sustainability amid a swirling ocean of human folly and misadventure, on all sides, leading to existential crisis.

The answer is judge wisely. Cast lots on your own garments, in advance to test the relative waters of veracity. Do not wait for your executioners to do it on your final day as happened to Jesus. Thus I am not Yeshua reincarnated. Nor am I pretending to be him:

"I am as a man who is a new man, with new limbs and life,

and the light of the Morning Star in his eyes." (Plumed Serpent).

I could have easily paid no attention to this birth karma. But would that have been fair or considerate, if something could be done to protect life. As it was, I studied William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" decided psychedelics were more insightful than religious doctrine, wandered India as a sadhu and made a pilgrimage to the sources of the world's power plants. Then when I started seriously taking mushrooms, strange things happened.

As an adolescent I had had a dream. I was in dry parched deserted forest and a Lion was staring at me with eyes of both pity and contempt, because I was the species which was bringing nature to her knees. I realised I was the accursed Homo and so I made my way to my own kind – an almost endless queue of people waiting for the chance to work in a dark factory for food. The dream haunted me.

Mushrooms became my allies and my spirit nature and I realised from the work of Joseph Campbell and others that there was a deeper Jungian current of archetypal reality that could have played a part in the events of apocalyptic heroes such as Jesus. I realised the world was stuck in perpetual death-grip of re-celebration of Jesus' sacrifice and conceived of the idea that it was possible to make a second journey of spiritual renewal to correct what had gone wrong in the year zero and redeem the immortal age of paradise, not as Jesus' second coming, but as a true redeemer in the root tradition. The mushrooms encouraged this and their access to numinous reality realised it. Of course I couldn't reveal any of this because, at the time they were strictly class A prohibited drugs.

Stranger things happened. In the 1980s, the mushroom suggested that I make the millennial journey to Jerusalem if the world hadn't addressed the mass extinction of life by then. But then it came back with a horrific vision that somehow my daughter's fertility would be impaired as a consequence. Then her first offspring was born with Down syndrome. I had become adroit at casting lots on my garments to the extent that I was able to know enough of what I was up against, and made the millennial vigil, as an academic sabbatical hosted by liberal Jews in the Holy city with creditable flair as a stealth raid to celebrate the sacred reunion of woman and man and to reflower the Tree of Life as simple rites of passage to the new epoch.

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is largely complete but it's a Rosetta stone artefact. The essential work is still to come.

Epiphany 4

Before we go further, there are some things we really need to very carefully understand. Mushrooms are not just hallucinatory agents. They are not hallucinatory agents at all. They show you ultimate realities that are visions that, once they have entered us can become devastatingly true. When you enter a mushroom vision you are taking on more than you can possibly anticipate.

As Maria Sabina put it:

'There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. 'The more you go inside the world of teonanacatl , the more things are seen. And you also see our past and our future, which are there together as a single thing already achieved, already happened ... Millions of things I saw and knew. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints' ... I knew and saw God: an immense clock that ticks, the spheres that go slowly around, and inside the stars, the earth, the entire universe, the day and the night, the cry and the smile, the happiness and the pain. He who knows to the end the secret of teonanacatl – can even see that infinite clockwork’.

We always have to be very careful with what our visions wish on the world. Take my declaration of jihad in the Song of the Biosphere which promptly came true a month later on 9-11.

when it comes to the final struggle - jihad of the biosphere

there's only one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan

can we fly so high we'll pass right to the other side

and never fall in flames? will we ever be the same again

we'll become the living soul, the primal source, the shining goal

the beginning and the end of life, the happiness and the pain

can we bear it all again?

When we enter the visionary state we have to bear in mind that our own shortcomings may lead us to subtly distort the vision and lead either towards heaven or hell, as Aldous Huxley warned. We don’t want to adhere to the fallacious view that war is necessary, or that success of an outcome requires a compensating sacrifice to God.

So when I had the horrific vision that my daughter’s fertility might become occluded as some sort of sacrificial consequence of me attempting to overturn the Christian tradition of blood sacrifice to celebrate an empty cannibalistic Eucharist sacrament, consuming Christ’s flesh and blood, this was no pretentious Aztec vision nor anything I wanted in any way to come to pass. The real source of this notion comes not from some Aztec mushroom delusion but the diabolical sacrificial nature of Christianity itself. To me God giving his only begotten son as a sacrifice for sin is the equivalent of Huitzilopochtli sacrificing Moctezuma so that his followers could be forgiven their homicidal sins.

The canonical gospels all make clear this sacrifice is and remains central to the Christian concept of God:

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things,

and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes,

and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly (Mark 8:31).

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16).

And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission (Heb 9:22)

This means Abba is not a loving father, but a filicidal demiurge, however you try to pretend otherwise. Every Christian needs to take personal responsibility for the false vision they are perpetuating. It is truly sinful to turn a blind eye. James Tabor (2015) has set the record straight about Yeshua's actual role in this, accurately linking it to be an insertion in Mark that reflects a vision of Paul and is thus not Yeshua's actual words.

You all need to appreciate that, in coming to these strange messianic and sacrificial visions, I was a tenured academic taking mushrooms on an almost weekly basis, knowing that I was guarding the true visionary sacrament which could redeem humanity and save the Tree of Life, while Yeshua’s body continued bleeding to death in every Catholic altar, so that his followers could figuratively consume his flesh and blood in an empty powerless vision to endlessly facilitate his ascendence on the third day to save them from their sins.

So the source of my dark vision, even though the mushroom was speaking the whole truth of what would come to pass a decade later, was in a sense the mildest possible accomodation to this unbelievably diabolical two thousand year cannibalistic ground hog day that had turned into martyrdom, Empire, Crusade, witch hunt and Inquisition. Anyone in the Christian tradition, before making any attempt to justify the overall good influence of the Western sacramental tradition needs only to turn to Perpetua's untimely martyrdom, and contrast it with the image below to say which sacramental path is true to life – the Eucharist, or Teonanactl.

I clearly in all truth as a guardian of humanity and life as a whole, recognising the true status of the living sacraments in relation to the Western sacramental tradition, had a duty to redeem this diabolical belief, but did it need any form of sacrifice, as Christianity claims, to overturn it? That’s accepting the horrific sacrificial vision is real when we have to know in our heart of hearts it is a wholly corrupt fallacy. How any Christian on Earth can not see how fundamentally wrong and unethical this is, or pretend this is the basis of a true religion, leaves me simply aghast. There can be no justification, and no rationalisation in terms of Christian brotherly love, eternal life or anything else for this.

Re-Liberating Matriarchal Fertility

But then the vision did come true a decade later, and my daughter’s first child emerged with Down syndrome, five years before my vigil to Jerusalem. So what does a loving father do, when it seems that their accidental vision of fertility sacrifice appears to have actually come true, whether it actually caused the events or not? That father has to try to set in motion a counter-vision of redemption and fulfilment to heal the travesty.

Many parents have children with Down syndrome and love them dearly, but there is a risk that caring for a disadvantaged first child can lead a new couple both to feel that they should devote their future life to the care of a dependent child and to lose faith in their own fertility and a full future family life together. This would just cement a bad vision into a perpetuity of undesirable outcomes.

Fig 260: Sprit Catcher Baby Cardigan

So seventeen days after the birth, I began a clandestine project of renewal. I secured the image of the incompleted spirit catcher above. I then created the Fair Isle design in the second image. Finally I knitted the design into a tiny jacket for a newborn baby with the spirit catcher on the back. It was really much too small for a baby and was intended to give them both the hope and confidence in one another and in the fertility of life itself to make a real family future possible and gave it to them over an evening meal. Her husband looked at it rather despairingly and threw it in the boot of he car as he left, but three years later a healthy baby boy was born, then seven years later after even more reluctance, a third healthy baby boy and the family was at last, a living proof of redemption of matriarchal fertility from dark visions.

So please remember carefully that mushrooms are far more than a hippie flash in the pan, or some kind of adolescent party kicks. As Maria Sabina said, they hold within them a reality we have barely begun to penetrate. There are more intense agents like LSD, but it’s not the sheer strength of the effects but the reality they reveal that is the key.

Outside the Inside Out

I have spent all my life up to 77 trying to genuinely explore the nature of the universe and discover ways in which physical reality, particularly at the quantum level can give rise to the enigma of conscious experience. The same for the ADS-Cft correspondence and pseudoparticles like the helium 3 fluid and particulate phases and even tachyons, let alone vying with Hameroff and Penrose and David Chalmers at Tucson Quantum Mind 2002.

That was all okay until that very mild dose of mushrooms in mid-2021, which flipped my universe inside out. Way back in the 1960s as a student, there was an acquaintance, Harry Wong, who painted an enigmatic art work “Outside the Inside Out” about the same time I first read about LSD the insanity drug in a local tabloid. Today on spec thinking of writing this e-mail, already holistically conceived before the words that are now flying off the tips of my fingers, I casually went on Google and thanks to Pinterest, there is one and only one image remaining. Here it is:

Fig 261: Outside the Inside Out

Now the title is a pun on an image of his jail cell for drug possession, probably hard drugs, but the metaphor is a potent expression of what happens when, after literally hundreds of wild trips seeking white light illumination, in a karmic twist due to having acute closed angle glaucoma and lens replacement eye surgery and taking a very mild exploratory dose of mushies to see if my eyes can stand it and suddenly finding I had fallen completely outside the inside out of the bubble of perception, as Carlos Castaneda called it and into the nierika as the Huichol describe, I was in an NDE with Brahman and so the story goes …

This is an event for me just like Buddha discovering the death and decay he had been sheltered from when he left the shelter of the royal chambers, and it comes with a huge sting in the tail. Everything I have lived for in the quantum connection that makes physics able to evoke the conscious mind materially came apart and I had to put it all together from the other side of the Styx.

The end result is a cosmological ground shift away from the occluded story of how the brain does it all the way back to veridical reality and the efficacy of subjective conscious volition over the physical universe and the cosmological axiom.

At the same time I discovered Gallego & Dakić's (2021), little arxiv paper which shows that the whole idea of the border post between the classical and quantum worlds can be an illusion in biology where non–IID processes are the key to brain dynamics and evolution.

This freed me form having to find some idiosyncratic pseudo-physical connection to make Stan’s "brain makes mind" agenda feasible.

It is transparently obvious if you take even a small step back from this obsession to find the mechanism, that the whole dynamic of the organism from quantum wave function and measurement, through molecular folding and kinetics, through enzyme active site quantum tunnelling, ion channel kinetics, open system quantum chaos, edge of chaos instability, and the fractal structures of membranes, ribosomes cell organelles though cells, to tissues and the whole conscious organism is one macroscopic resonant quantum system that can never be decomposed cleanly into interacting mechanistic parts.

Falling outside the inside out means also that I can dispense entirely with speculative pseudo-scientific reasoning and just add one minimal axiom confirmed by any of us that are honest with ourselves even to go to the toilet or to eat, let alone ponder serious thoughts or have deep psychedelic insights. That’s the bare bones of it!

The Bushmen always carry poisoned arrows for hunting and like all of us they fear infidelity, there is a saying: As one of the !Kung men in an argument about a marriage put it to his adversary, their dispute could be quickly settled with an arrow. "Just one little arrow”.

The cosmological axiom is that little arrow. It justifies recognition for what it actually achieves in clarification of subjective reality for the benefit of life as a whole and the integrity of our cosmological account of reality.

Closing the Circle

Just to come full circle over the karma of the glaucoma and the cosmology mushroom vision, and this acute Omicron BA5 episode, in the middle of writing this epistle this morning, suddenly I could no longer see the words “self-assembling” in the top image in the figure. I tested both eyes and I couldn’t see it in either, so it wasn’t my new synthetic eye lenses or my retinas. Then I realised I couldn’t read any of the text I had just composed because half of it was disappearing, so it was in my visual cortex. Was this the end of my visual life? Was this the moral punishment for my bad karma? I looked at my face in the mirror and there were no eyes, just a blur. Had I caused a stroke trying to go to the toilet? I began to see fortification patterns and decided to place my faith in waiting it out as a kind of migraine aura. About thirty minutes later everything settled down to normal. But it’s a warning to everyone who reads this not to depended on me to save the world for you.

Please understand where I am positioned. I have a vast scientific research web site updated in real time with a comprehensive description of scientific reality from quantum cosmology through the evolution of the tree of life from biogenesis to humanity and neuroscience.

Quantum Reality and Cosmology

Biocosmology

The Tree of Life: Tangled Roots and Sexy Shoots:Tracing the genetic pathway from LUCA to Homo sapiens

Humanity's Evolutionary Heritage

Culture Out of Africa

Entheogens, the Conscious Brain and Existential Reality

On the shadow side I have descended for decades into psychedelic states and spent whole seasons submerged in spiritual reality with fresh first person visionary eyes to see right into the events that invoked the human spiritual consciousness and the weird karmic twists therein all the way back to 150,000 years ago. That is the shadow side that is generally occluded.

I would be wasting my existence if I didn't use this qualification when it is most needed to ensure our survival and transform both the scientific and religious paradigms. Like all good shamans that’s what I was born to do. So I am trying to make the religious paradigm shift from the centre of the cyclone, because that iswhere the beginning and end of time lies and where the uncertainties go wide open right at the source that evoked it all. All the beings that have gone before us are complexes of life-long non-IID quantum interventions, each life history constituting a unique quantum instance from creation to annihilation. I am trying to use mine fully aligned to good effect to transform our understanding to regain planetary immortality. Because it is to put our attention on the highest possible Self in the Now, where all the possibilities for transformation lie.

Fig 262

If you would like to hear this weird quantum reality sung in a beautiful accounting here it is: Kitten's Cradle lyrics

The onus on us is to bring forth what we have within us. If we do, these words come true and the whole epoch is realised.

"That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves.

That which you do not have within you [will] kill you if you do not have it within you.”

(Gospel of Thomas 70)

Epilogue

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is Pandora's Pithos ^{^[76]} Reopened

Fig 263: Elpis the spirit, or goddess of Hope, who remained caught under the lip of Pandora's jar according to the will of Zeus, depicted as an adolescent girl, wearing adult dress for the first time, hitching her skirt to keep it from dragging, holding a flower, or sometimes a bird to emphasise the fresh hope of spring and new growth. (Roman coin to Spes or Elpis. The reverse of a potin tetradrachm of Carinus 285 AD showing Elpis).

Causing a paradigm shift is literally opening Pandora’s Box with potentially devastating consequences if it takes off. We are, whether we like it or not, living in an age of information. This means that the mere fact that Symbiotic Existential Cosmology now exists as a work on multiple platforms means that Pandora's Pithos has again been opened. Troubled by the death curse of the Box, I discovered today as I write, another charming karmic echo from history, dating from around 750 BC caught in our entanglement. This time opening the Pithos reveals Elpis – literally the youthful female spirit of Hope or Expectation – the one remaining spirit kept in the jar has now escaped into the world and the consequences are ensuing, however gradually. The arrow of time means this information flows on out into the world and irreversibly changes the situation for the good, whatever we do next.

The only way this could fail is if there were a critical flaw, which would mean that scientists and clerics could breathe a sigh of satisfaction, that yet another hopeful monster has turned into a mutant ninja turtle and that the interlocutor is just a pretentious deluded upstart at the age of 77. But that is unlikely, as Symbiotic Existential Cosmology agrees with quantum cosmology and empirical neuroscience and invokes the foundations spirituality in conscious human agency. For the first months I aimed high, seeking such criticism with hopes that astute people, particularly research scientists in psychedelics and related fields of consciousness and philosophy would find this discovery as utterly exciting as I did, but I was faced with a deafening silence.

Not one reply from anyone! My friends shunned me, academics whose opinion I valued refused to reply at all. Only two people fully responded. A math colleague, who read the first vestigial manuscripts and another friend who did likewise, both of whom gave commonsense encouragement, particularly on the basis that the world is in existential crisis. This led to ongoing angst. Some of the psychedelic scientists claimed the hard problem of consciousness was not even a scientific question and that psychedelics could only solve the easy problems. When I tried to point out that a magic mushroom experience had solved it in a pan-psychic cosmology, I got nowhere with either scientists or philosophers, and simply ended up in a stand-off, when I critiqued their position in an open letter.

Over the ensuing months, I continued feverish writing, and Symbiotic Existential Cosmology blossomed into an impenetrable verdant thicket, spanning ethnic animism, religious exegesis, consciousness research, molecular biogenesis, psychedelic neuroscience, quantum cosmology, panpsychist philosophy, an evolutionary analysis of how consciousness as we know it emerged, and how neurotransmitters, such as serotonin play a central role in evolving brain development going back to social amoebae. The final denouement was that our empirically experienced subjective conscious volition over the physical universe alone reverses the implications of materialism, to invoke a complementary description of mental and physical reality. It is no longer just a psychedelic vision, subject to the Achilles heel of prejudice, but the irrefutable truth of volition itself, as accepted in intent and responsibility in law and in every intentional act we perform, that now underpins this revelation.

Later in conversation with a group of spiritually-minded scientists, I realised that I had to include the full sweep of the extended evolutionary synthesis to establish the cultural evolutionary phase leading to biocrisis and to parry false religious claims against natural evolution that is the foundation of the immortal tree of living diversity, and so the 100 page section on evolution was born, taking the monograph to a book length 400 pages..

So for me, Symbiotic Existential Cosmology has become more than a just fortuitous mushroom trip. It is the Rosetta stone of reality that is already here in the world. It is a difficult, inscrutable work in scripture intended to be complete and definitive enough to last a billion years, provided humanity continues to survive and evolve, that also tells the first-person account of how an individual, facing the planetary apocalypse that had been created both by ancient religions and materialistic ennui, found himself caught in an uncanny quantum instance that made it possible to traverse the same unlikely portal defining history that had happened 2000 years before, to reveal the weltanshauung of immortality, unravelling the human zeitgeist towards a new symbiotic paradigm of organic and technological coexistence with nature and life as a whole.

It is not just a hypothetical theory that can be taken at face value or discarded at will, but four things: (1) Objective quantum cosmology invoking biogenesis and climax biodiversity, augmented by (2) Darwinian panpsychism and (3) cosmological symbiosis. Point (2) then invokes a subjective veridical transaction of mutual trust between conscious agents that we have subjective volitional will over the physical universe, inheriting the responsibility to protect conscious life as a whole, in the symbiotic climax invoked by (3). Finally it is (4) a complete confession of everything of significance I have said, been or done to this end, naked and unashamed in my singular quest to wreak salvation on a troubled world, my vigils to far flung corners of the Earth and the antipodean outlandishness of declaring the end of the Apocalyptic Epoch in the Holy City, so that we can now keep the way of the Tree of Life throughout our generations forever, as it was in the very beginning, as has likewise, from the outset, been stated on the closing page:

"Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end?

For where the beginning is, there will the end be”

(Gospel of Thomas 18).

The cosmology is already out there! It can't be undone! It's not a grand, or petite delusion, but the redemption of life in complete transparency. So while I seek your support to help convey this crazy message that no one wants to hear or accept, I know underneath that root paradigm shifts have a long latency, and that SEC is cosmologically valid and empirically sound. Simply by convening the group, I made you all aware of this, so you are all now fully cognisant and complicit. My work is fulfilled and it is over to all of us, because we are all in possession of this fatal carnal knowledge, which can never be undone! The diversity of life still needs us and needs us now. So as the Talmudic statement said, “we are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are we free to abandon it.”

Our involvement is now a question of taking advantage of what is already revealed, from which the lioness on the cover has already sprung anew, to accelerate the process of protecting the diversity of life. In return, I vouchsafe to protect you all and support your own inspirations of renewal.

If you look carefully at the last few lines of the text in figure 259, which gives my veridical account of the initial experience, written the same evening, you will see that I had already abdicated my responsibilities on the first night, passing all the onus onto the sacrament itself to escape the messianic tradition, in an affirmation from scriptural history!

"I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated

from the bubbling spring which I have measured out.” (Gospel of Thomas 13)

My role now, as a chaotic dynamicist is oddly enough, to make sure this process doesn't become unhinged, although I'm not forsaking the lionesses claws on the Symbiotic Existential Cosmology cover until I see some signs of cooperative progress for biodiversity, so will turn the tables and create dissension if need be – to guard the beacon light of resplendence, so it can shine brightly, rather than "cast fire on the world", as Yeshua did, which would just lead to apocalyptic climate crisis and deforestation, as we know.

Recall this whole phenomenon arose from my long-sightedness, causing acute glaucoma, which first delayed and then precipitated this entire phenomenon. So Symbiotic Existential Cosmology was clearly Promethean foresight and not the unfortunate Epimethean hindsight that opened Pandora's pithos in the first place.

Uziel Awreet: I imagine we are as insistent as you about the fundamentality of the preservation of life and our debt to the future. In the end it’s a question of understanding the nature of this responsibility. In the Jewish spiritual tradition this responsibility is not just the responsibility of Tikun aiming to preserve life (precisely to achieve the conditions that would make your utopia possible) but also a responsibility to a reconstitution of a God that ‘sacrificed itself’ (the vessels of light breaking into a myriad of shards), or a singularity that exploded, and that depends on us for its reconstitution and the reuniting the shards. In this cosmology or, mythology, the appearance of man signifies a special point on the road of Tikun where for the first time a self representing universe (in which even a bacteria mapping its environment is a way in which ‘the universe observes itself’, see PGS on Awakening) manages to capture its singular nature. Here the primordial singularity can only be ‘captured’ by another singularity. It is said in the Haggada (quoted by Prigogine) that God has created the world 27 times and that this is the 27th. Each time God says – Halevai Sheyamod’ – i.e. ‘Hope this one survives’. While fragile, these worlds are saturated with hope.

Chris King: Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is not a utopia, whose aim is seeking "perfection in legal, social, and political systems” whose meaning is “nowhere” from Greek ou "not" + topos "place". It is the actual, cosmology of the conscious universe. I am not asking for a religious or spiritual movement to save biodiversity as a utopian quest. I simply seek ground zero recognition of, and action upon, the real existential threats to our survival, without which the meaning of life has no meaning. From this all these other utopian and spiritual quests flow.

The purpose of Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is to establish that human symbiosis with the biosphere in evolutionary time scales is the sine qua non necessary reality in the living universe in which we consciously exist. It doesn't present any spiritual point of view except for loving reverence for life itself as the climax process through which the universe becomes fully manifest, and the ability to experience ultimate reality in the first person with no a priori assumptions.

It might seem to others that Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is some kind of shamanic utopian quest for a lotus-eating culture based on mushroom mysticism, but since it has no spiritual doctrine, apart from first person experience of natural existence, it has no cultic status. It’s not for me to advance mushroom mysticism, it’s simply a scientific fact of biospheric evolution confirmed in multiple research studies. SEC’s case rests entirely on its veracity as the correct description of the cosmological context in which our conscious lives are embedded.

You have introduced charming tales of the fragility of the many universes evoked by divinity that I love, as I love many diverse aspects of the “mother religion” from the Zohar to the Torah, but the key point about all these descriptions, particularly the Sabbatical Creation, that becomes the Achilles heel of creationism, is that they are allegories of the ephemeral world human imagination evokes about the cosmos. Humanity has spun creation myths since the dawn of history but these are allegories of an ephemeral so-called “divine” realm not having the veridical flesh and blood reality of nature in the raw. They are hypothetical, but biological survival is actual.

The Shekhinah of Jewish mythology, representing the indwelling feminine face of God's presence on Earth in matrimonial concord, in the tent of Sarah, and in the Eagle’s wings, also carrying the pregnant madonna into the wilderness in Revelation and the Matrona that keeps the way of the Tree of Life:

The Shechinah is defined, in traditional Jewish writings, as the "female aspect of God" or the "presence" of the infinite God in the world. She is introduced in the early rabbinical commentaries as the "immanence" or "indwelling" of the living God, whose role as the animating life force of the earth is to balance the transcendent deity (Novick 1983).

We are taught that Abraham and Sarah initiated souls by bringing them “under the wings of Shekhinah” (Novick 2008).

The Shekhinah was said to have retreated in the Fall in Eden and will return in the End of Days Unveiling as sparks or shards that will come together in reunion in completing the mosaic of the shattered feminine.

Fig 264: Shekhinah and the Tree of Life

So I want to give you my interpretation of this. We spent most of our time in Jerusalem in the millennium discussing this and related ideas. The Shekhinah is one of the most misperceived entities in spiritual, let alone Jewish, cosmology. As described in the Kabbalah, she is the feminine face finessed into a patriarchal mould. This confuses the entire nature of the God quest. The key thing is that the Shekhinah became fractured in the Fall and the End of Days is her reuniting. This turns the tables on the entire apocalyptic reality. This is not just a spiritual singularity capture. It is the feminine face regaining her rightful sanctity in the patriarchally imbalanced top-heavy cosmology.

The Fall was Yahweh's fall from the grace of unity that was expressed in Adam and Lilith as contesting equals, before Eve was made a surrogate wife in the patriarchal mould and then cursed to be the mother of all living under travail pain of childbirth and obedient to her husband, as man was to be to Yahweh.

After God created Adam, who was alone, He said, "It is not good for man to be alone." He then created a woman for Adam, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, "I will not lie below," and he said, "I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one." Lilith responded, "We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth." But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air (Alphabet of ben Sirach).

According to Midrash, the Genesis Rabbah states: "God proceeded to create a second Eve for Adam, after 'the first Eve' (Chavvah ha-Rishonah) had to return to dust". And in the Numbers Rabbah: "My firstborn, He is now destroying! As that Lilith who, when she finds nothing else, turns upon her own children". Lilith retreated into the wilderness and came to be demonised as a hyper-fecund destroyer of children, particularly male infants, in resentment over her displaced heritage (Plaskow 2005).

Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat-demons shall call to each other; there too Lilith shall repose,

and find a place to rest. There shall the owl nest and lay and hatch and brood in its shadow (Isa 34:14).

The ultimate sin of God was withholding the Tree of Life hidden since the foundation of the world, so that the sanctity of nature and the creative process of natural evolution became repressed and female reproductive choice became oppressed. There is no way this can be addressed by trying to balance reverence for life against reuniting God. Yahweh has sinned against nature and the feminine and this is what needs reunification.

Now, what is "the way of the Tree of Life"? This is the great Matrona who is the way
to the great and mighty Tree of Life ... is the Shekhinah (Soncino Zohar, Shemoth).

To give the traditional underpinnings of this account in the Kabbala, here is a short excerpt from Schwartz (1997) concerning an account of Isaac Luria – “Ha'ARI"("The Lion”) after Rabbi Abraham sent by Ari had in “A vision at the Wailing Wall (Kotel)”.

Ari had touched the forehead of Rabbi Abraham and sensed he might face immanent demise and said to go to Jerusalem to pray at the Kotel for the Shekhinah to appear. He did so and saw a woman in mourning, and when he stared into her eyes he felt sadness and grief so great that he had never felt before, as it was the pain of a mother who felt sympathy for her children in banishment. He fainted and fell on the ground and experienced a second vision of Shekhinah as a beautiful woman in a wedding gown. She embraced him and whispered in his ear: "Do not worry, Abraham, my son. My banishment shall soon come to an end, and my legacy will not be for naught, as it is said: "There is hope for your future and your children will return to their own territory", thus retelling the Rabbinical tale of the Shekhinah's exile and return in the reintegration of Israel, the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah:

The two appearances of the Shekhinah that Rabbi Abraham envisions at the Wall, that of the old woman in mourning and of the bride in white, represent the two primary aspects of her nature, one grieving over the destruction of the Temple and the exile of Israel, and other representing the ecstatic feminine, as symbolized by a celestial bride. Indeed, these multiple faces suggest that the figure of the Shekhinah contains within it a host of other goddess figures, all of which have been subsumed in one mythic figure.

Its central teachings concern the mysteries of creation: How God had to contract Himself in order to make space for the creation of the world, in a process known as Simsum. How God then sent forth vessels of primordial light that somehow split apart, scattering the sparks of holy light all over the world, but especially in the Holy Land. And how gathering these sparks can restore the broken vessels, returning the world to its primordial condition.

The deepest mystery of all among the students of Isaac Luria – the Ari concerns the true reason for the Shattering of the Vessels. The most important consequences of it, however, are apparent: it shifts the responsibility for the fallen state of existence from man to God, and it also sets the stage for the second phase of the myth, that of the Gathering the Sparks. Here the scattered sparks are sought out and gathered in the belief that when enough have been raised up, the broken vessels will be restored and the world returned to its prelapsarian state.

The most essential feature of the Ari's myth is its two-part nature. Here it is understood from the first that the complete myth requires both parts; it is not possible to consider one without the other. The first part of this cosmological myth is destructive, the second part creative. The archetypal pattern is that of shattering and restoration. But instead of shifting the blame for the Fall to Adam and Eve, here it can be directly linked to God, Who, after all, is the ultimate creator and therefore responsible for any flaws in creation.

Note the remarkable parallels between the Ari's creation myth and that of the Exile of the Shekhinah. Both are two-part; both involve separation and reunion, exile and return; both attribute to the prayers of Israel the power to accomplish the necessary tikkun or repair. Indeed, it is possible to view the myth of the Ari as a mystical restatement of the Exile of the Shekhinah.

Thus the kabbalists did as the rabbis had before them: they received one myth and transformed it into another, which more closely mirrored their view of the world. For them this meant resurrecting the lost goddess, but doing so in a context that appeared to preserve the monotheistic basis of Judaism. So it is that the myths about God, the Bride of God, and the Messiah converge, diverge, and ultimately come together in the messianic vision of the End of Days. For when all of the holy sparks have been liberated, the Messiah will come, the Temple will be restored, and God's Bride will come out of exile, restoring the Godhead to wholeness.

If we are talking in the messianic paradigm as I do to fulfil my covenant, I am here, born into this world, to reflower the Tree of Life in the sacred hieros gamos of nature and divinity in that of woman and man reunited and women’s sovereignty again becoming sacrosanct. To do this I have to coalesce the shards, but do it in a way that is not simply another utopian religious movement. Hence I chose the vehicle of a cosmology, because cosmology is the way science sees the cosmos and this is the way the whole tragedy can be undone.

When I say it is necessary and imperative to make the existential threat of the mass extinction of life the sine qua non objective over spirituality, I am doing so as the messiah of the immortal age of the living tree of existence, in which the feminine element compensating God’s original sin is nature herself and the primacy of symbiosis IS the reunion manifest. This can't be a utopia or we will just go down the same route. It HAS to be the cosmology of the reflowering of the Tree of Life.

Out there there are actually still forests and jungles with wild animals and nutritive, medicinal and poisonous species which are not ephemeral unless we wreak annihilation upon life as a whole as we appear to be doing, but these are lying far beyond the technological machine-dependent culture of our increasingly urban society, which the majority of humanity, receding into urban concrete jungles, no longer recognises as motivating, perhaps beautiful, although somewhat threatening and certainly not essential to our fantasies of progress, from science-fiction utopias, to the noosphere, where as we know to our peril, thought seeks to supplant the necessity of evolving nature.

This is a recipe for disaster that can't be put on the back burner. It is NOT apocalyptic thinking to recognise this. It is the true Unveiling, and an eschatological death wish to ignore it!

The Weltanshauung of Immortality

The Weltanshauung ^{^[75]} of Immortality is the world view in which life and conscious existence are recognised as perennially immortal processes key to the cosmology of the universe and that the meaning and reason for conscious existence is the sacred process of fulfilment of the flowering of life, so that the universe as a whole can become fully aware of and truly know itself through the living biota it has generated as a climax phenomenon. This point of view is both intuitively natural to human emergence in animism and transcends both the materialistic and theistic world views, each of which is degenerate, incomplete, confining and corrupt. It fulfils our existential hope in a way which neither theism not materialism can do and places us as active, pivotal and responsible cosmological agents in the flowering and unfolding of conscious existence.

The paradox of the existential condition, amid an entropic universe is fundamental to cosmology. A symmetry-breaking has to occur, in which positive energy real particles inherit the arrow of time, amid a time-symmetric underlying milieu of quantum potentialities. From this symmetry-breaking, the second law of thermodynamics follows, in which isolated systems tend to a ‘randomised’ state of increasing entropy by mutual interaction, as the ultimate doom of annihilation of structure and meaning.

Molecular biogenesis and the ensuing evolution of life is a negentropic process of increasing complexity, that runs upstream against the entropic current of ‘despair’, because it is an open thermodynamic system on a planetary surface basking in gentle incident solar radiation of a wavelength spectrum that can be absorbed by the molecular systems of living cells without so degrading them that life is wiped out. We thus arrive at planetary biospheres where life beats the entropic odds and rises to a climax of species complexity and diversity and becomes conscious of itself.

Life in the universe rises to conscious climax through perennial species immortality, but it occurs inevitably coupled to organismic mortal sexuality. This is the dilemma of the mortal coil and is precisely the way it has to be, because the molecular genetic basis of life is always subject to mutational degradation by Muller’s ratchet, the entropic randomisation of any structured genome bit by bit in the absence of active processes of genetic recombination to add vital new genetic combinations to restore life’s genetic vitality.

Bacteria and archaea solve this problem by co-existing symbiotically with transposable elements and viruses that promiscuously exchange genetic sequences, even between differing species, in horizontal gene transfer. Complex organisms evolved through the endo-symbiosis between the archaea and bacteria giving rise to our respiring mitochondria giving rise to the first eucaryotes. Without this symbiosis complex life could not have arisen. The energy provided by this cooperative fusion provided the basis for a tremendously expanded genetic and phenotypic complexity and the large genomes of nucleated eucaryote cells, but with this complexity came crippling attrition from mutational degradation, despite the evolution of the error-correcting enzymes that ensure human longevity.

Fig 265: Meiotic crossing over (top left) in eucaryote haploid-diploid sexuality has sustained the diversity and evolution of eucaryote life forms from mutational degradation for the last 2 billion years resulting in unique mortal individuals of each sex while species as a whole are perennially immortal. A number of species, from lizards to aphids, can generate young by parthenogenesis, but all species resort to occasional cryptic sexual recombination to refresh their genomes, except for the bdelloid rotifers whose genomes , unlike those of sexual rotifers (top right) are densely packed with allele differences, indicating their diploid chromosomes are no longer able to cross over and have diverged asexually for up to 40 million years. However, bdelloid rotifers have been found to have another primitive form of genetic recombination like prokaryotes by scavenging the genes of sexual rotifers or other organisms to regenerate their vitality including horizontal transfer of genes from bacteria (lower right).

The solution the eucaryotes arrived at, at the very root of the eucaryote tree, was meiotic sexuality, where organisms in the diploid phase keep two copies of their genome and actively recombine these in meiotic gametogenesis, so that both sperms and eggs carry new haploid combinations of alleles (the maternal and paternal versions of a given gene) through crossing over, by lining up their genes in an indexed manner in the synaptonemal complex. These are then brought together in the ovum in fertilisation and the development of a diploid embryo ensues. This means that each of our offspring carry half the mother’s and half the father’s genes, forming a new individual that has never existed on Earth before, unless there are identical twins or triplets.

The modern materialistic ambition in the pursuit of ultimate longevity, by seekers of a technologically-utopian 'final solution’, amid human cloning and genetic modification, is a process of trying to turn elite humans into effectively parthenogenetic organisms, whose life span is indeterminate. These utopian aims are futile and ultimate selfishness. No parthenogenetic species can survive long term without sexual recombination and the biosphere to support them. Bacteria and archaea exchange genes promiscuously, even between species, via viruses and plasmids. An extreme is found in some bdelloid rotifer species, which appear to have been parthenogenetic for 40 million years, because their alleles are highly discordant, but they have been found to cryptically scavenge genes form other sexual rotifers or even fungi and bacteria. So the quest for technological immortality amounts to becoming mutant ninja turtles keeping their genomes viable by endless genetic engineering.

Eucaryote sexuality is a deeply embedded form of genetic symbiosis. Men and women share almost all their genes, but form genetic complements. Neither sex can continue to survive without the other. This is the most altruistic act of the evolutionary flowering because it means that, rather than trying to be individually immortal through parthenogenesis, we contribute a mere half of our genes to the next generation to create new life forms unique unto themselves yet in the parents collective image just as in the allegory of the Sabbatical Creation. Hence as humans, we hunger for one another sexually because, in our very fertility the immortal web of conscious life is spun anew.

However, this also leads to our existential dilemma of sexual mortality as individual organisms. Because we are each unique and have an ego, to emotionally seek and secure our personal survival, we come to lament our mortal condition because, however exciting life is and however much we hunger for it to continue, we are doomed to senescence and mortal demise.

Fig 266: Comparison of the evolution of the universe from the big bang and the evolution of life shows that life on Earth has existed for a full third of the universes lifetime and can thus be considered a long-term stable feature of cosmic evolution. However the advent of global human impact on the biosphere is threatening in the next century to cause a mass extinction more serious than the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. For a single species to cause an irreversible mass extinction of life's diversity, possibly lasting 50 million years with no possibility of genetic remedy in one or two centuries is thus terminal folly (King 1997).

But we are just beads on an immortal web of life. Humanity exists as a species with a history running back down the tree of life for three and a half billion years. Individual organisms are mortal, but species and biospheres are perennially immortal, so long as Earth shall live, in a fertile and habitable condition. All animals, humans included, have arisen through the immortal fabric of natural selection and because of this are finely attuned to strive for life, to care for their young and their kin, even at risk to their own existence.

Despite paying lip service to the selfish gene (Dawkins 1974), Matt Ridley (1996) in “The Origins of Virtue” has sought to elucidate the intrinsic goodness of human nature in evolutionary terms, based on long term judgment of character, verifiable trust and mutual cooperation to survive, contradicting the Augustinian doctrine of “original sin” stemming from Eden:

Our minds ... have been built to be social, trustworthy and supportive. ... Human beings have social instincts. They

come into the world equipped with predispositions to learn how to cooperate to discriminate the trustworthy from the treacherous, to commit themselves to be trustworthy, to earn good reputations, to exchange goods and information, and to divide labour. In this we are on our own. No other species has been so far down this evolutionary path before us, for no species has built a truly integrated society ... we owe our success as a species to our social instincts; they have enabled us to reap undreamt benefits from the division of labour ... They are responsible for the rapid expansion of our brains in the past two million years and thence for our inventiveness. Our societies and our minds evolved together, each reinforcing trends in the other. Far from being a universal feature of animal life, ... this instinctive cooperativeness is the very hallmark of humanity.

Founding human cultures tended to be animists – that is they viewed both living organisms and the natural phenomena around them as conscious agents, perceiving themselves as embedded in the web of life, even though it was in many ways also threatening, as a world of tooth and claw amid accident and misfortune. Viewing of the universe as conscious agents leads to a greater embedding in the matrix of life, in which the generations are treated as sacred, so both offspring and ancestors were revered, both as real biological organisms and as conscious spirit beings spanning space and time in the immortal passage of the generations. This is our founding Weltanshauung of Immortality, our deeply perceived world view of the intrinsic perennial perpetuity of life amid the mortal coil.

As we shall see in the animism section, this hasn’t meant that all animists are good or responsible ecologists, because migrating ethnic peoples from the Americas, through Australia, and Madagascar to New Zealand have caused serious species extinctions on their arrival, but the record of our founding cultures such as the San Bushmen and Mbuti and Biaka Pygmies do show such sustainable reverence for protecting the ongoing continuity of life in their practices.

With the rise of urban societies, the spiritual web of nature receded into the background and new human cultural inventions distorted and degenerated this immortal view of consciousness embedded in the matrix of nature. The spirits of natural phenomena such as storms droughts and thunder and lightning evolved into supernatural deities that became ever more abstract and powerful, despite clearly displaying the projected aspects of human agency in God’s jealousy, anger and sometimes compassion as cosmic super agents in an allegorical universe of extrapolated myth.

In the East, another current emerged, in which the shamanic states of the vision quest became elaborated into a religious philosophy of renunciation of the worldly ego in a mind-sky devotion to mental transcendence, no longer explicitly linked to the physical immortality of nature as its embodiment, leading to attempts to escape the round of birth and death in a moksha which proved attainable by very few in this lifetime. This in turn led to notions of reincarnation to achieve realisation in a future lifetime, karma and the inexorable decline of spiritual unity into varying forms of the Kali Yuga in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

The notion of evil in our founding cultures is not associated with the divine negativity of a satanic force, but just the notion of bad rather than good:

When a missionary inquired into a Bushman's ideas of good and evil he was told it was 'good' to sleep with another man's wife, but 'bad' if he slept with yours. Still lamenting the Bushman's ignorance of absolute morality, he later asked the man, whom meanwhile he had discovered 'was in the habit of smoking wild hemp', what he thought was the most wonderful thing he had seen. The reply he was given, that no one thing was more wonderful than any other and that all the animals were the same.

This shows the San as retaining an egalitarian animist view rather than disproportionate awe in the religious hierarchy.

Morality is not a divine, cosmological fact of existence, but is rather a sociobiological feature of intelligent human and animal societies, where Machiavellian strategic bluffing is common, and social disapproval or punishment becomes an influence to reduce internal strife to enhance inter-social dominance of the group (Alexander 1987). But it became enshrined in urban societies in codes of law such as those of Hammurabi and has taken centre stage in theistic doctrines of good and evil forces and divine moral punishment.

Fig 267: The Fall; expelled from Eden, Adam and Eve raise a family and set to work. Scotin, c. 1765. The Fall specifically links, carnal knowledge, mortality and sexual reproduction.

The Edenic Fall constitutes a metaphor of this transition. Among the arboreal splendour and abundance of the primal Paradise stand two trees, the Tree of Life common to many Near Eastern cultures as an archetype of immoral fertility and a new wholly unnatural tree – the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yahweh says Adam and Eve, the Mother of All Living can eat of the fruit of any tree except this one. In the event, the Serpent persuades Eve to eat the “apple” and she bids Adam too and they become aware of their sexual privacy and cover their genitals with fig leaves.

This allegory then leads to the Fall of the Weltanshauung of Immortality, because becoming aware of their sexuality is also the awareness of their sexual mortality, disconnecting them as the primal couple from the very passage of the generations that sustains the sacred fabric of existence. This occurs in a context where immortal reproduction has been flatly denied. As the first human beings, neither have sexually reproduced, so exist like the asexual angels of Christian heaven, unaware they are able to procreate by themselves. God then curses the ground, driving them from the garden with the woman consigned to be obedient to her husband and travail in childbirth:

I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;

and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

And the man to have to live by the sweat of his brow amid the thistles and thorns in dominion over the natural world:

cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground;

for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

The Tree of Life is hidden since the foundation by a flaming sword lest they also eat of it and live forever:

Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil:

and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life,

and eat, and live for ever: … and he placed at the east of the garden …

a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Thus the Tree of Life that provided the immortal link was withheld, and humanity was doomed to mortal sexuality in ignorance of the ancient knowledge of the immortal web of existence that partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Life would have revealed anew.

One needs to understand at this point that Genesis is by no means the oldest, nor the cosmologically founding text in the Bible. Its putative date of authorship dates from the time of Solomon at the very earliest with scholarly opinions dating to the exile and one theory linking it to being as late as the 3rd century BCE. One theory for its inclusion is "Persian imperial authorisation" – that the Persians of the Achaemenid Empire, after their conquest of Babylon in 539 BC agreed to grant Jerusalem a large measure of local autonomy within the empire but required the local authorities to produce a single law code accepted by the entire community.

Also we need to recognise that to live forever is precisely what the evolutionary tree of life’s diversity actually does. To live forever doesn’t imply eternal, just unending, everlasting, that is, perennially immortal. This is both a biological and a spiritual reality of conscious existence. Eternality is rather a frozen static image of space-time as a whole.

The only references to the word eternal (Hebrew: נִצחִי – unending, everlasting, perpetual) in the Old Testament are one in Deuteronomy referring to God and one in Isaiah referring to the Redeemer:

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms:

and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them (Deut 33:27).

Whereas thou has been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through thee,

I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations (Isa 60:15).

The original Hebrew beliefs had referred only to Sheol, the underworld of the dead. But in the wake of the Zoroastrian eschatological renovation, the natural embedding in the fabric of the immortal life flow became seconded to a novel and alien apocalyptic notion of eternal life, either in Heaven or eternal torment in Hell. Thus we see the emergence of the word “eternal” applied to human kind only in the New Testament. Even the Gospel of Thomas does not refer to eternal life, although the preface cryptically says:

“Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death”.

Neither do we simply experience death in the Weltanshauung, because life itself is immortal and we give our incarnate lives in our actions in the world to immortal life as a whole.

Thus the eschatology spawned initially by the Fall and finally by the apocalyptic Renovation shattered the Weltanshauung of Immortality, which was both naturally valid and evident and spiritually fulfilling in the perpetual regeneration of life, both in life as a whole and in the passage of the generations of humanity, replacing it with an destructive eschatology of the late planet Earth to be discarded as God’s creation in the Day of Judgment in favour of a completely implausible, contrived and fundamentally evil war between light and dark principles, expanded from mere natural “badness” or personal selfishness into satanic eternal cosmological evil, to which all human beings are claimed to be fatally drawn leading either to eternal Heaven or unrelenting torment in Hell.

This is replacing the real life we have where we are conscious agents having real volitional efficacy over the physical world and cosmological responsibilities to the continuity of life to uphold, with the false hope of an afterlife which does not and cannot exist in the universe as we know it, cannot contain all the living creatures since Earth began in any biospheric meaning and wastes our very agency on a fantasy where Heaven has no autonomous agency and no further meaning or purpose in life. If we want to experience such realities, we can so so through the biospheric sacraments, which do convey the experience of union with the living spirits of the universe throughout space and time, just as we can experience moksha escaping the Eastern round of birth and death in this life in the same way.

Fig 268: While Heaven above and Hell below are fictitious realms of the conscious imagination which have no basis in cosmological reality, the evolutionary process centre, which many Christians abhor is actually the immortal passage of the generations in which humanity has flowered into cultural emergence. But note the warning of descent into AI in the last image! What are we now evolving towards? In living immortality lie all our future hopes of survival, not a Heaven or Hell frozen eternally in time where Hell is one long scream of no fruitful meaning and we have no idea what we would creatively do in Heaven except sing hymns of praise. No sex, no children no creativity no real life, no redemption through our own agency as conscious sentient beings protecting life in the universe. To preserve our species immortality in the face of a mass extinction of the entire diversity of life caused by humanity ourselves it is absolutely essential that we return to our conscious spiritual roots in the Weltanshauung of Immortality.

To see how deleterious, incorrect and deceitful this destructive eschatology of nature is, one simply needs to compare its claims with the natural realities of the universe as we have discovered it. While perennial immortality is an incontestable fact of existence going back 3.5 billion years almost to the time the Earth’s oceans first condensed, the notion of eternal life is neither natural nor is it any kind of spiritual fulfilment.

Since the discovery of relativity, we know that time is not a supernatural parameter independent of space but that the two are conjoint dimensions in space-time as a whole and space-time is eternal but fixed as everything there has ever been and will be. You can see this looking at the universe sideways on in fig 15 above in the right-hand image of Paradise on the cosmic equator. Once we view space-time from outside all the way from to , it is simply the entire history of the universe – everything that happened, sitting eternally in space-time. All our lives, from birth to death are in there somewhere, static and stranded, as everything there has been and everything there shall be. You can’t do anything creative in eternal life, it is just static like the snowflake in the figure below. Believers have a notion of angels singing heavenly praise of God and Muslims have a sexy heaven with 72 black eyed virginal houri made anew every day for the pleasures of men, but its just a static vision, where the houris are not real people and can’t really share your love, or concerns because they are born anew like Alexa rebooted again and again. It’s all a ground hog day denying us the very creative agency of conscious existence the real world provides us here and now, which also provides us with cosmic responsibilities to ensure life continues to flower in abundance so that the universe can come to understand and know its own becoming.

Fig 269: Snowflakes have astoundingly varied individual forms that are created dynamically at the atmospheric ice-vapour interface by incoming moist air condensing individual water molecules, which “walk” over the surface quantum mechanically to preserve the ramifying symmetry. Yet the end result is “death” – a frozen life history of its becoming, “eternally” static in time once the dynamic process ceases.

We thus come full circle back to the elephant in the room. Both the materialist universe, as the ultimate machine, mindless of life in the computational paradigm, and the theistic view of supplicant will, dominion over nature and destructive eschatology, both lead to a human-induced mass extinction of life, when the cosmology of the living universe is founded on symbiosis, not capitalistic dominance and competition, which are actually subcomponents of a predatory ecological strategy. These views are thus inconsistent with long term survival of our species in the closing circle of the living biosphere.

Thus we have a two-fold urgent, yet realisable task for humanity to achieve as fast as we possibly can : (1) To restore the living diversity of evolutionary tree of life in the biosphere, before a human-induced mass extinction destroys our 3.5 billion year genetic and living heritage and (2) to restore the paradigm of the Weltanshauung of Immortality in the full resplendence of life in the universe, shining brightly forth again, because this is the spiritual realisation of our cosmic ‘destiny’ as transformative conscious agents, having volitional agency over the living world around us, to restore the sanctity of life, so that existence can unfold unabated in the universe.

Paradoxical Asymmetric Complementarity

The Koan of the Tao of Existence

The objective universe is necessary

but subjective consciousness is primary

Symbiotic existential cosmology is a paradoxically asymmetric complementarity. It is neither dual-aspect monism nor naturalistic dualism and transcends both. The cosmology is founded on a cosmological paradox — we can't eliminate the physical universe because our lives and our ability to deal with the affairs of the world depend on it, yet all our experience of it is through the subjectively conscious mind, and we don't know the universe can actually manifest without this. So ‘mind’ is primary, although the universe is necessary to to our existence and to life itself. This is the koan of the Tao of existence, which becomes integral to our causality-violating volition, which ostensibly intervenes in the causal closure of the brain, through quantum uncertainty, our “cubic centimetre of chance”:

All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up (Castaneda 1968).

Reality is an overlapping cascade of manifestations of a universal principle that emerges in quanta, but is manifest also in dynamics and biology and reaches all the way to the lateralised cortices of the brain. This is the principle of asymmetric complementarities making up an integral whole that arises from the phenomenon of symmetry-breaking.

This happens at a fundamental level with the wave and particle aspects of quantum reality, where the wave aspect is continuous and the particle aspect is discrete. The uncertainty principle neatly expresses this symmetry-breaking structurally in the inverse relation between E as the wave frequency and t as the temporal position of the particle. It is neatly defined by interference between a sampled wave form and a standard wave confirming the energy-time and position momentum-uncertainties, but the wave is commonly regarded as a calculation artefact. Indeed quantum field theory is particle-based except that the Green's function is a hidden wave propagator. On the other hand a point particle is an infinite energy self-singularity so we end up with superstrings and so it goes.

The standard model of physics list the known particles as radiation/force forming particles of integral spin and matter forming fermions of half-integral spin which stack only in pairs. These fit together, but in a highly asymmetric arrangement. The fermions, although they are complemented by the bosons in the standard model are asymmetric with strikingly different particle populations although these splice together seamlessly in the universe around us. Within this there are three others. The symmetry breaking of the weak and electromagnetic forces gives three heavy weak photon carriers and one massless electromagnetic photon. There is a deeper symmetry breaking between the colour force whose colour charge goes in threes and the weak-electro where it goes in twos. Finally we have gravity standing alone as universally attractive, while the rest are attractive-repulsive vector particle fields.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY as it is called, is the idea that each boson is paired with a fermion one half-integer of spin apart. This idea arises because the vacuum contribution of the fermions appears to cancel the opposite contribution of the bosons, for example solving the hierarchy problem the huge energy gap between the scales of the standard model forces and the Planck scale of gravitation. The trouble is that the standard model has a very different set of bosons from the set of its fermions. This doesn't mean that the underlying symmetry is not true but that it must be broken, as indeed the weak-electromagnetic symmetry is. The fact that so far no supersymmetric particles have been discovered reinforces the idea that saying a correspondence might not be the natural Occam's razor solution. Garret Lisi had a classification in his Exceptionally Simple TOE and his prediction that the LHC wouldn't find SUSY held.

So the symmetry-breaking basis implies that asymmetric complementarities arise as a secondary consequence of the symmetry-breaking process itself and should be universal. I.e. symmetry-breaking does not lead to symmetric complementarity. But wait a minute! The standard model is symmetry broken, so how can supersymmetry be feasible at all? Why isn’t supersymmetry also manifestly broken? What we find is hypothetical soft supersymmetry breaking in which it is envisaged that a symmetry breaking of supersymmetry occurs which is unlinked to the symmetry breaking that causes the standard model.

As briefly summarised in wikipedia: “Soft SUSY breaking decouples the origin of supersymmetry breaking from its phenomenological consequences. In effect, soft SUSY breaking adds explicit symmetry breaking to the supersymmetric Standard Model Lagrangian. The source of SUSY breaking results from a different sector where supersymmetry is broken spontaneously. Divorcing the spontaneous supersymmetry breaking from the supersymmetric Standard Model leads to the notion of mediated supersymmetry breaking.” Of course supersymmetry hasn’t been realised, so physics has failed to give us a clear answer.

Fig 270: The natural universe contains many potentially overlapping forms of asymmetric complementarity, wave-particle as revealed in an interference experiment, fermion-boson matter-radiation complementarity, chaos and order as demonstrated in both conservative (above ordered closed cycles chaotic dappled orbits) and dissipative systems (below grey/yellow ordered black chaotic), in cellular automata, where the edge of chaos invokes universal computability in the elementary two state 1D automation 110 and in biology in sexual complementarity (human fertilisation) and in the characterised differences in cortical lateralisation.

But this is just the beginning of the picture. Chaos and order are abstract complementarities in dynamics, which have asymmetric relationships, for example the quadratic Julia set is chaotic and its complement, the ordered Fatou set, are asymmetrically complementary. Likewise in conservative dynamics such as asteroid orbits and the double pendulum regions of ordered orbits are permeated by dappled chaotic trajectories.

It also pervades biology. Sexuality has a similar basis in symmetry breaking because symmetric gametes in eucaryotes result in very costly mitochondrial warfare upon fertilisation, so that there are a vast number of quasi-particulate sperm and one oceanic ovum waiting to engulf just one of them. In higher plants the chloroplasts are also at war. Hence eucaryotes evolved sperm-ovum sex, where the female has the mother cytosol with the mitochondria while the male just has a motile sperm whose mitochondria, essential for swimming to the egg are largely destroyed on entry. This means female parenting investment is disproportionately greater than male and the sex wars ensue. Hence only 3% of mammals are socially monogamous and even those aren't genetically monogamous.

Fig 271: Left and right hemisphere hubs. Composite images of the distribution of activations comparing rhyme-case tasks (phonological processing) for 19 males (left) compared to 19 females (right) (Shaywitz et al. 1995).

The same symmetry-breaking argument applies strongly to the left and right cortices of the brain, where the efficiency of lateralisation is that symmetrically duplicated cortical functions are a tragically inefficient use of resources. Language is predominantly on the left side in Broca’s and Wernike’s areas although this is less so in females (Shaywitz et al. 1995) and in music and language perception (Albouy et al. 2020) where frequency space is in the right hemisphere while the understanding fo the lyrics is in the left, and in the notion of the left side being more analytic and the right more holistically synthetic. Left-lateralized hubs included regions from the default mode network (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and temporoparietal junction) and language regions (e.g., Broca Area and Wernicke Area), whereas the right-lateralized hubs included regions from the attention control network (e.g., lateral intraparietal sulcus, anterior insula, area MT, and frontal eye fields). Left- and right-lateralized hubs formed two separable networks of mutually lateralized regions (NIelsen et al, 2017).

Fig 272c: Left and right hemisphere hubs.

A little more prosaic, we have time and space, past and future, and in the prisoner's dilemma of defection and cooperation which also have an asymmetric relationship. This is what Tao and Tantra as an asymmetric cosmological principle of creative and receptive, or male and female are all about, so let's go right into the centre of the cyclone, subjective consciousness and the physical universe, where Eastern philosophy notes that mind is indivisible while matter is not. Asymmetric complementarities do not all arise from the same source but do have common predisposing features of overall efficiency through symmetry-breaking.

Now we run into the hard problem of consciousness. Given that we are subjectively conscious beings possessing volitional will over a universe we know only through our conscious experience of it and the universe in turn becomes manifest only through its conscious sentient beings, the meaning of existence is created through our journey of discovery as conscious agents transforming the universe by our insights and actions. Thus, while the universe is necessary, consciousness is primary.

This raises a serious problem about attempts to mount abstract descriptions of the ultimate generating theory underlying the subjective and objective reality of consciousness and the universe. If consciousness violates physical causal closure, how can we describe any functional or causal TOEx (theory of existence)? If the universe can only manifest through our conscious experience of it, what hope is there for any single stand-alone TOEx as a pure abstraction? How can it actually manifest subjectively, except as a piece of mathematical reasoning? But this is not manifestation of the subjective, it is just a mathematical thought in the mind of the beholder.

That said, objective reality and our descriptions of it do show natural convergence to the subjective complement. Many aspects of physical brain function look like the same sort of phase coherence sampling we see in the uncertainty principle and edge-of-chaos phenomena and self-organised criticality provide the ability of the quantum reality of the physical universe to develop a convergent interface with the conscious mind. The same is possible even for information and computational descriptions, such as Stephen Wolfram’s (2021) account "What is consciousness?".

The trouble is that forms of rational and logical thought and well tried models of causal deduction, which everyone is very familiar with, tend to be the main instrument people tend to apply. Attempts to structure the subjective realm in approaches such as Pan-protopsychism, have deep analogies with reductionism and the same pitfall occurs with all abstract logical attempts to form a mind-universe monad TOE underlying cosmological complementarity.

As we have noted, when we start with subjective conscious volition over the physical world as a mutual affirmation between conscious agents. Instead of the hard problem, this leads to accepting at least some matter (brains) have a hidden subjective aspect which can affect their outcomes, possibly through uncertain instability. This means that the hypothesis of physical causal closure of the brain is eliminated by Occam's razor. But then subjectivity is a natural material property and brains obey the same four core quantum forces, even if they have quasi-particle states etc. So the occluded subjective aspect becomes complementary to the physical universe as a whole (where –> represents an asymmetric complementarity):

Cosmos = (Quantum universe (particle –> wave) –> Mind at Large)

Our individual conscious experiences are encapsulations of this complementary aspect, modulated by the very brain dynamics we are looking at in the EEG and action potentials, as a biological neural net – except that it is a fractal neural net operating in a scale-traversing handshaking manner all the way from the quantum to the organism.

This is one of the one-mind forms of quantum reality and coincides with Erwin Schrödinger's comment:

“There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses.
Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. ... I should say: The overall number of minds is just one”

This leads to the most asymmetric complementarity of all. And it carries with it fundamental challenges to any form of logical description, because the subjective aspect has a series of adventitious characteristics: It is volitional, intentional, idiosyncratic, exploratory, imaginative, innovative, creative, and visionary.

How are we supposed to logically, or causally , or functionally, elucidate something that is the key central part of creative intentionality in the cosmic becoming? This is an awfully steep mind-boggling challenge! The reality is that, as conscious volitional agents, we are the creative process of the universe in sentient motion. We can talk about it round the camp fire and make up myths and stories about it, as we do in science, with profoundly informative effect that we are all in awe of. But when we paint ourselves into the corner of consciousness itself we come to the elephant in the room. Consciousness is the causality-violating creative principle in action expressed through self-organised criticality in the brain and quantum uncertainty itself. We cannot elucidate it causally, because our very intent will override it, but we are realising it spontaneously as we enact history in the multiverse and that is our cosmological role.

We are thus the collective 'Elohim of the living universe incarnate entities of transformation. We are personally responsible for the fate of the living planet. The ultimate buck cannot be passed. The least of our priorities is analysing logically who or what we are. We are bound in a covenant with the universe to protect the diversity of the Tree of Life, in our becoming and in the becoming of planet Earth as a living survivor of the Fermi paradox. All we have is a small window of opportunity to unite in our diversity to achieve the one central necessary condition for our continued survival and existence, through which the universe itself is manifest – protect the diversity of life on Earth from its immanent mass extinction in a destructive human-induced anthropocene catastrophe.

The Natural Face of Samadhi vs Male Spiritual Purity

There is a very important reason why Symbiotic Existential Cosmology is fundamentally different from everyone's ideas of spirituality, samadhi and moksha.

The Eastern tradition is based almost universally on renunciation and control. This produces a different kind of samadhi because it evokes a whole constellation of concepts involving mental control, emptiness rather than the fullness of natural life, permanence rather than flux and eternality rather than temporality. Monotheism does likewise, imposing the absolute rule of eternal order enforced by everlasting punishment and the triage and abandonment of natural life. Both enforce morality rather than provide direct natural enlightenment.

This is a very ancient product of men attempting to control the tokens of gatherer-hunter culture and inventing mind-sky cosmologies to address intrinsic male fear of mortality. Women don't share this because they give live birth, often at great struggle and witness their own flesh and blood suckling from them and slowly maturing. Consequently men stare at the sky, invent sky gods and storm gods and ultimate realities of a spiritual world that in their view transcends nature. Women in turn are regarded as 'unclean' and nature is regarded as subservient. Female reproductive choice is repressed and women become the property of men, distorting the evolution of intelligence and the human sense of integration with the biosphere. Female deities such as Kali are pushed to the periphery and associated with chaos and physical decay into conflict. The very best we get is Shakti as the physical aspect of Shiva's consciousness spawning the Maya of mortal physical life.

Our entire cosmological viewpoint has become corrupted by male dominance over sexually antagonistic coevolution, where women have to endure pregnancy and live birth and need to choose intelligent male partners because of their primary investment in parenting, while males although they seek to sew wild oats, as their investment is primarily reproductive, want to control female reproductive choice because even in their mortal anxiety, it at least gives them paternity certainty when women are always certain that the issue from their wombs is their own flesh and blood. Hence the rise of patriarchy over the matriarchy that still continues today.

The crisis of a mass extinction and climate heating, which could destroy our planetary resilience and our tenure as a species is intimately linked to this sexual crisis and needs urgent correction, not just to save the future of life and our species, but for us to even begin to understand the conscious mystery that lies before us. The severe degree of renunciation and control required for full Vedic samadhi, accompanied by stereotyped notions like astral substrates of ethereal experiences leads to concern that controlled samadhi is a restrictively inferior form of enlightenment. Symbiotic Existential Cosmology, rather than seeking spiritual purity of some ethereal or astral realm or pure consciousness in the absence of nature and matter, seeks the edge of chaos where immortal life flowers and unfolds.

Fig 273: Fractal enlightenment

This produces a different kind of moksha samadhi, full of light and visionary significance that transforms our lives into full symbiotic integration with nature. It rejects the myth of control, where enlightenment can only be achieved in emptiness and renunciation of natural and worldly existence. It is spontaneous and creative, pro-life and the sacredness of nature. It is free-wheeling and doesn't require long tedious hours of withdrawal from positive engagement with the world. It doesn't require renunciation of conjugal love and family life in spiritual pursuits and is consistent with science and the lessons immortal nature has to teach us. The truth is clear and unambiguous. The samadhi of life transcends the samadhi of emptiness. Engagement transcends renunciation. Flux transcends stasis. Life transcends death.

The fact that Vinod has to cite a work by a deceased Himalayan ascetic in a world of eight billion people with 1.5 billion in India alone, attests to the unachievable rareness of 'genuine' samadhi in the Eastern tradition. Many people are using meditation in both the East and the West, but genuine evidence of significant non-ordinary mental states indicative of genuine mystical transformative experiences remain rare and ambiguous.

Fig 274: Left: REM state vs waking activations (red-yellow) and deactivations (blue). (Uitermarkt et al. 2020)
Right: Lucid dreaming occupies an unstable region between REM sleep and full waking arousal (del Giudice et al. 2022)

Entheogens are of ancient shamanic use. They are fully natural and evolved by life itself. They are physiologically non-harmful. They complement and complete meditative vigils in transformative ways potentially of great interest to science and cosmology. The only other such resource we have is dreaming but this is particularly hard to control and lucid dreaming states generally result in rapid awakening due to the activation if the reticular activating system of waking consciousness. They also suppress memory of dreaming states unless we immediately wake up, because they are involved in memory consolidation and tend to suppression of parts of the brain involved in conscious focus and free-will, so are well complemented by waking entheogenic experience.

Patanjali in the Purohit translation notes: The Siddhis are born of birth, drugs, mantras, penance or Samadhi. (IV-1) Powers are either revealed at birth, or acquired by medicinal herbs, or by repetition of sacred words, or through austerity, or through illumination. ... All know the healing qualities of herbs; only a few know that some of them have the qualities of awakening spiritual powers.

Clarifying Cosmic Karma

Fig 275: Two incorrect notions of karma: Left inevitable cause and effect and right a cosmic conscious moral retributor.

Many of us have deep confusions about what karma is and does and what it doesn’t do and apply these notions to a degenerate view of what karma actually is. Both reincarnation religions and monotheism are moral cosmologies. Monotheism puts the moral feedback off to the day of judgment, but karmic religions do it through reincarnation.

The first point is that moral cosmologies are false cosmologies that are anthropocentric and in conflict with natural moral sociodynamics in animal and human societies that is clearly a feedback process to inhibit intra-social competition to achieve inter-social domination. It’s a purely evolutionary manifestation of intelligent societies with significant social bluffing.

The notion of Karma as a moral force is ill-conceived.

Before human culture and religion came about, there was no natural evil. Life is an endless struggle to evolve and diversify every which way. While it’s never in perfect balance and largely at the edge of chaos, the diversity of life rises to climax because the plants provide solar energy and the animals can survive eating the plants but also fertilise them and by their very predation result in plant diversity by evolving to hit the weedy species. The same for herbivores and carnivores culling them thus avoiding boom and bust of the herbivores through grassland famines. The same for parasites and prey although we abhor covid, rabies, malaria and ebola. Parasites and prey are key to the Red Queen race that made sexuality and multi-celled eucaryotes possible. Ironically, sex is also the source of organismic mortality but that’s the breaks. Parthenogenesis is unsustainable hubris.

The notion of moral karma was devised by religious doctrine to inhibit intra-social competition to achieve inter-social dominance just as all intelligent socially-bluffing societies do, but it has been launched into a cosmological dimension in the idea that moral causality drives divine punishment including the notion of karma and the Day of Judgment in monotheism. Actually these have a common source in the Indoeuropean culture that spawned both.

Now we have all ended up debating a person’s individual karma in relation to the bad karma other people might witlessly inflict on us, with disease or accident due to their acts or emotional afflictions. This is artifice. We all need to say stop bas enough – this is unnatural. It all came, not from nature but human culture causing runaway forms of social punishment extrapolated onto the cosmos, and in the case of Vedic karma and reincarnation, from the inability of the samadhi tradition to provide moksha in this life, due in good part to the lack of visionary sacraments in the East.

So we need to look more closely. Just as there is no natural evil, the universe has to have rough justice for life to survive. The way the entropic universe and the negentropic nature of life intersect means some people will suffer the vagaries of fate, because this is the way the diversity of life flourishes in the molecular universe. There is a deep meaning here but we have as yet barely scratched the surface and the Vedantic idea of Karma is just pulling the wool over our eyes.

All the situations where bad karma – accidents, disease etc. seem to come out of the blue is sourced in environmental uncertainty. But the world is not classical. We can try to classically trace back the cause of bad karma. We can speculate that the car that hit my relative should have had a mechanical check or blame it on the driver having one too many, but ultimately the source of environmental uncertainty is quantum uncertainty itself.

The world we think is classical is the most outstanding form of open system chaotic quantum billiards of which cosmology is composed. All molecular interactions are quantum billiards in which the wave functions are spreading off every intermolecular encounter. It's open system quantum chaos par excellence. So everything that happens can be traced back ultimately to a butterfly effect in the past where the trajectories diverged. There is no such thing as randomness, there is only quantum uncertainty. So to understand the roots of karma, we need to understand that all events are caught up in a non-random hidden variable account and that we still don't understand how this meters out but that conscious sentience and volition plays a central role in the process. Hence all the fringe phenomena from synchronicity to psi get drawn into the loop.

Because I know this and know every step I take could have utterly unforeseen consequences, I try to keep half my mind listening to the winds of fate. I don't try to push the river. I don't seek psi because psi runs in my veins like the fruit of the tree of life that dilates my pupils like Dune spice melange and could not only come back to haunt or bite me or others, but could come true once and for all in ways I neither desire for nor conspire to. Only by letting go of my karma and giving it all back to life can I be confident of my intrepid journey into the unknown.

If you want to be part of this true karma, there is one and only one way through. Protect the diversity of life with our own mortal lives. That is the only currency we possess and it is borrowed capital we can't take with us. If the high traditions of spirituality can’t induce us to do this, let them go. We are ourselves transformative of the entire universe and sacred beings in this respect, but if we squander our capital doing bad deeds or even just speculating and debating and don't save the life of the universe, while we are alive, we are dead meat.

So to understand how this actually works, let’s take two examples:

(1) The Coronavirus Pandemic: Corona viruses are not moral agents. Evolution simply exploits every possible survival niche cooperative or exploitative. Corona viruses are the most sophisticated single-stranded RNA viruses on the planet. They are extremely well adapted living symbiotically with bat colonies and infecting other hosts more severely and in humans having an extremely wide spectrum of severity, from asymptomatic to lethal, ensuring their tenacious foot-hold and survival. But they are neither ethical not moral, just well-adapted survivors. Evolution is not moral and can’t afford to be, or we wouldn’t have plants and animals, or herbivores and carnivores, parasites and hosts. Evolution’s sheer diversity engulfs any moral concept. But there is a karmic sting in the tail of Covid. This has all been caused by exploitative human misadventure, shameless exploiting wild species trafficking pangolins nearly to extinction for their scales and holding civets in cramped cages for their fur, combined with multiple wild bat species packed into urban markets. So Covid-19 has become, partly through human overpopulation and exploitation of the biosphere, a worthy adversary to humanity.

(2) Entheogens: Ever wondered why psychedelic species exist? It seems to go right back to single-celled eucaryotes, which socially communicate by what we have come to know as neurotransmitters and receptors. All of glutamate, GABA, serotonin, cAMP, norepinephrine, epinephrine, are found widespread in single celled species. Tetrahymena for example utilises histamine, serotonin, epinephrine, melatonin, and triiodothyronine, as well as peptide hormones, such as insulin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, epidermal growth factor, endocannabinoids, endorphins and c-AMP and GMP. Now because humans evolved from social amoeboflagellates and our brains develop based on neurotransmitter encodings during neuronal migration, the entire brain is an electrochemical network utterly dependent on synaptic neurotransmitters for its major evolutionary survival modes. This means that other species, particularly plants and fungi which have adventitiously evolved to produce a diverse abundance of myco- and phytochemicals will inevitably produce a scattering of highly psychoactive substances mimicking and tweaking our own psychically active molecules.

No one knows quite what these are for, any more than one can speculate on why tea and coffee have caffeine. Some may have a survival advantage in warding off insect predators and others may achieve fertility through providing attractive substances causing consumption by animals. Psilocybe cubensis for example grows on the cow pats of Brahmin cattle in South East Asia and may have been in turn spread by cattle consumption. We thus owe it to the biosphere that we have not only psychedelics, but cannabis, morphine, cocaine and many essential medicines. Although we know psychedelics are serotonin 5HT2a super-agonists, their effects are wildly different from serotonin and arise from distinct second messenger processes in the metabotropic 5HT2a serotonin receptors. This suggests that the visionary capacity of the human species has always been present and has a function in the visionary experience of our founding shamanistic and animistic cultures. People have noted the presence of DMT in brain samples. Hence psychedelics may open the doors of perception even wider than yogic samadhi exploits in a less sensual way, leading to a philosophy of emptiness rather than the fullness of psychedelic shamanism.

Now both these are what I would call evolutionary karma as a relentless consequence of natural selection NOT being moral …

But there is another key aspect fateful karma, which is to do with the great leveller – accidental misfortune … and good fortune too … karmic coincidence ...

There are always two ways of looking at an intervening act of fate such as a disease, storm, flood, fire or accident – (1) the contextual (physical or biological) causes and (2) the exact specific train of coincidences that brought this idiosyncratic event onto being. This is also a fundamental characteristic of the quantum universe stemming from quantum uncertainty. Covid is a perilous disease, so we can try to vaccinate ourselves, or enhance our immune system with supplements to address the contextual risks but this does not protect us from freak occurrences by being in the wrong place at the wrong time e.g. in an unanticipated super-spreading event, so it is as relevant to ask what caused me to catch this now? For this reason, anthropologists acknowledge that an animistic viewpoint has unique survival value, because it does protect from unpredictable threats from intentional agents, even though it may result in overkill on attributing physical causes to conscious agency because everything is treated as alive:

A classic example of this dichotomy is in Evans-Pritchard's description of the Zande rationale for the granary collapse: the Zande knew full well that the granary collapse was "caused" by termites eroding the foundational structures. This physical explanation was, however (in converse to the Western philosophical viewpoint)" - causally irrelevant" to their inquiry, which was, "Which mind intended for the granary to collapse at just this moment?" … The Zande might not care about universal gravitation or termite biology, they want to know who made the granary collapse at just the moment a friend was under it.

This leads many shamanistic societies, particularly more violent ones, to spend a lot of time casting evil spells to harm others and protective spells to exorcise the evil ones, blood feuds and clan warfare, all in a notion that somehow the universe is able to organically or consciously pull the strings of fate to one or another person’s advantage.

This is where the notion of moral karma takes its incorrectly conceived bight into coastline of reality by claiming the universe has a hidden principle of cause and effect that bad people end up with bad outcomes, if not in this life, in the next, combining the sheer difficulty of even good devoted meditators achieving moksha to invoke reincarnation as a way out, with the use of reincarnation as a form of divine punishment in karma. This flies in the face of the evidence. While many bad people have bad outcomes and die in gunfights or receive imprisonment or capital punishment for their crimes, many world leaders and even democratically elected populists display clear exploitative narcissistic or even psychopathic behaviour and succeed on the basis of being “strong leaders”, leading humanity as a whole to the brink of annihilation.

Worse still, the vagaries of fate do NOT protect the innocent or even the transformatively beneficent. Karmic fate is rough justice.

The conversation below between two philosophers, illustrates an example of what I see as speculative reinforcement of an inherently false moral cosmology.

Vinod Sehgal: In Buddhism, if karmas as stored in cosmic memory (without any Atman) take rebirth, (1) What is that which constitutes cosmic memory [CM]? (2) Where does this cosmic memory exist? (3) How do individual Karmas [IK] migrate to cosmic memory?"

Ram Vimal: CM is made of individual memory in CM and exists in ubiquitous dual-aspect UIEF/UEIF/ZPF as elaborated in (Keppler, 2020). IK migrates/writes from karma-related individual memory to CM during performing karma

Vinod: In the absence of an Atman/Self, there shall be no consciousness, at least in the manifested form, with these Karmas in the ZPF. So how these inert conscious less Karmas can flow from the ZPF to the new brain/body on their own?

But are these "individual karmas" simply world history, or conscious memories and emotions, or moral ticks and crosses? What kind of universe is this describing? Is it asserting a cosmic executive agent as well, so that these ticks and crosses turn into a bad outcome, or a bad rebirth, like the right hand figure above? This is in manifest conflict with natural experience, where fate is not so tightly controlled between the good and the bad.

What I do conclude out of this is that subjective consciousness has been retained by evolution since excitable eucaryote cells became whole brains because it has a selective advantage surviving in a world of environmental uncertainty that is ultimately a product of quantum uncertainty so taps into the very phenomenon the proponents of moral karma incorrectly claim exists.

But from my point of view, in an alignment with Vedic thinking, my own experience of moksha teaches me to avoid any form of karma that is not directed to the highest goal, which in my experience is convincing humanity to protect the immortal diversity of life as our raison d'être. I will do this as assertively as it takes as a spokesperson for the edge of chaos using controversy to provoke and hold no quarter with criticising cherished religious and scientific notions which I perceive to be acting to undermine this paradigm shift.

Psychedelics ARE faster and have a much more experienceable transfiguration than meditation alone, but it sill took me to the age of 78 combined with deep meditation similar to TM to get an experience iconic enough to produce Symbiotic Existential Cosmology. This work is frankly so oddball and yet so tenaciously robust scientifically that it is a proof of principle of something powerfully karmic. I was prevented by acute closed angle glaucoma from taking any trips for seven years previously, until I had total lens replacements. This caused a very pure whiplash on a very mild dose, so you need to see it as a confirmation of what I just called fateful karma.

I am trying to convey the positive potential of entheogens to deal with Fermi catastrophe and I’m caught in other karmic tender traps. The whole Western tradition of Christianity is sacramental, so this is the Biospheric Eucharist of life rather than the soma and sangre of Yeshua's death. It was discovered in deep meditation in a meeting ostensibly with Brahman as ultimate reality, so it validates Upanishadic Vedanta and the yogic tradition. It was discovered using a sacrament 3000 years old coming from Precolombian America, affirming the shamanic sap and dew. Now doesn't that strike you as a karmic hat trick for the three great spiritual traditions? I may be here to challenge the law of and religious doctrine but I am NOT here to destroy the prophets, but to fulfil the future of life immortal.

Necessary and Sufficient Cosmological Meaning

Necessary meaning is the kind of meaning that, if we understand the universe sufficiently, as we must needs, we apply to unfold the realisation of the cosmological condition.

The core necessary meaning is to protect the survival of the conscious biota over evolutionary time scales, to unfold an emergent cosmological climax and hence also facilitate our own survival.

Sufficient meaning is the meaning we apply through conscious volition in our own realisation of our discovery process to creatively adorn reality.

The entire sufficient meaning is a free creative process, weaving the music of consilient history, celebrating our immortal genealogy and plumbing the cosmologically conscious abyss.

Empiricism, the Scientific Method, Spirituality and the Subjective Pursuit of Knowledge

Firstly: What is empiricism and what is an experiment?

empirical: based on, concerned with, or verifiable – by observation or experience – rather than theory or pure logic. From Greek empeirikos "experienced," from empeiria "experience;

experiment: An action or operation undertaken in order to discover something unknown, to test a hypothesis, or establish or illustrate some known truth. From Latin experimentum "a trial, test, proof, experiment," from experiri "to try, test," from ex "out of" + peritus "experienced, tested"

The two notions – observation or experience – came from Greek physicians making diagnoses by observation or experience rather than theory, sometimes with the disapproval of theoretically oriented physicians, who treated them like the medieval barber surgeons. But empiricism's role has become pivotal in experimental science, without which modern medicine would not exist.

When we come to the mind-brain / consciousness-universe complex, the pursuit of knowledge inherited from Greek medicine gives us two asymmetrically complementary approaches to the pursuit of knowledge.

(A) Objective verification by empirical observation: this is the standard basis of good experimental science and is based on replication – two or more experiments producing consistent results.

(B) Subjective affirmation by empirical experience: The word affirmation is used rather than verification because, to replicate a subjective experience requires two or more subjects mutually affirming they have experienced consistent phenomena. This discovery process is by definition experientially experimental.

The status of (A) is the gold standard of objective scientific inquiry and is also critical for experimentally verifying theories like quantum physics and relativity, but the status of (B) remains unrecognised, as the other half of the pursuit of knowledge of the cosmos as a whole, along with its experimental protocols.

Both approaches can achieve statistical significance. For example subjective reports collected in a scientific context become consistent observation of reported conscious experiences by an experimental group. But experiential validity can also be established by direct mutual affirmation.

Secondly: The role of conscious volition.

I have posed the question: "Do you agree that you have subjective conscious efficacy of volition over the physical universe?" I asked you this because it's the most obvious property that we all possess in common, even to eat or secrete, let alone have a conversation, which we all do, or to do something creative. Yet it poses a unique existential threat to materialists, who try every conceivable way to plead that correlation is not causation, or that there is always a hidden brain mechanism doing it, although that directly contradicts our own veridical perception of our intentional acts as having been intended by ourselves.

However, once we mutually affirm the root empirical experience that we ARE physical beings, intentionally shaping the world around us, and perceive ourselves to be doing so, just as other mammals we observe do, we have an emerging subjective consensus that becomes a root experiential scientific discovery.

Many people look at this and say it's too easy, as a solution to the hard problem, to simply declare we agree we have volition, that it's facile, or maybe just expressing our fallacious impressions, but its actually the very foundation of establishing the subjective pursuit of inquiry into the knowledge of the cosmos as a whole and the conscious dimension many of us call, for want of a better word, spirituality.

The reason this is criticism is wrong is that volition states the obvious easily, while consciousness became sequestered as a hard problem, because of epiphenomenalism, which a priori contradicted the efficacy of volition without evidence, while paradoxically admitting we were conscious of the world around us and even of dreams and and hallucinations, as a brain-derived internal model of reality. The casualty of this cancellation culture was volition. Hence volition – now stating the obvious – IS solving the hard problem and it is observable. It's how we know one another are conscious, through our vivacious volition, and it's how we understand other animals are conscious too. This is the reverse Copernican principle as an axiom of affirmation.

Thirdly: What IS the foundation of the subjective pursuit of knowledge? Experience itself!

Techniques of subjective empiricism and experiment are as different from observational empiricism as the physical universe is different from consciousness itself, yet complementary to it. They need to be approached as a whole because we engage consciousness as a whole not in its pieces.The subjective aspect is not adequately explored by trying to analyse it or decompose it observationally, or abstractly, because it is everything we experience. We are in it, and transforming it, not just observing it. So the techniques of simple introspection are inadequately general and also flawed because the mind can't be fully observed, since observation changes it. But it CAN be fully experienced and that's the core principle of the inquiry process.

We can only begin to form an understanding of the subjective by embracing deep conscious and mystical states, untethered from the physical world, not by attempting to analyse them, or qualia, or the thought process, but by going right into deep conscious states on a vision quest into the 'other' side of being and returning with an epiphany, or a satori, or a moksha whose nature we can meaningfully share with others as a discovery process. Talking about subjective experiences remains anecdotal unless and until two or more of us are able to affirm deeply common qualities of such experiences together.

Symbiotic Existential Cosmology (new web page) as a product of entheogenic quantum change, reinforced by recent psychedelic research, and

Chris Field's research insights provoked by meditation, are examples of such experiences giving rise to new testable hypotheses, playing a key part in this process.

Fourthly: Caveats. Central to the problem of subjective discovery is that:

(1) The subjective domain is dominated from above by the confining processes of rational thought and verbal argument, which places a filter unless a proposition can be successfully argued, rather than two subjects agreeing on a consistency of experience. This is not only unnecessary but leads to the entire description being only that of cognitive thought. This is a real problem for philosophy of mind to address and come up with a paradigm shift about. "The way that can be told is not the countless way" as Lao Tsu pointed out.

(2) The subjective domain is dominated by real world consciousness, when this is subjective consciousness locked in perceptual and volitional relationship with real world events, again acting as a severe filter on what consciousness actually is. It needs to be compensated by realising the full depth of untethered conscious experience going to whatever measures are required, including last but not least, sacramental exploration, which forms a subjective complement to the LHC.

(3) Deeper levels of 'pure' consciousness uncoupled to the rational and real world filters are broadly: (a) dream or hypnagogic experience, (b) meditative and contemplative practices, (c) entheogenic sacramental experience, (d) religious ecstasy (e) near death experiences and (f) paranormal phenomena. The deeper of these can be very difficult for individuals to fully experience, leading to mystical states having a quasi mythical status, in which moksha and samadhi cannot necessarily be achieved in a lifetime. Entheogenic states are critical information to the subjective discovery process, without which no valid conclusion can be drawn, and so these urgently need to be more fully explored and accepted as central to the discovery process. Each of the mystical states need likewise to be explored fully by mutual affirmation at the root level before their status can be considered to reach the level of evidential support.

(4) A priori beliefs are by definition inconsistent with the free pursuit of empirical subjective knowledge of cosmic reality. The empiric method's foundation eschews theoretical assumptions that are not prior-evidential, so that reality itself can be explored and understood as it is. For example relativity wasn't prior-evidential until Eddington's unbiased experimental verification using a solar eclipse. Religious beliefs fall into this category of not being prior-evidential, as open questions, so the conditions of religious ecstasy have to be carefully negotiated to separate belief from transformative experience and recognise that genuine quantum change signifiers are the gold standard of any mystical experience, not the conviction of belief.

Fifthly: Freeing the Core Quest

The pursuit of knowledge of the subjective realm doesn't have to solve analytical questions about phenomenology, such as the binding problem which is an easy problem of consciousness to be elucidated in the prospectively quantum dynamics of the brain. Likewise the nature of qualia, such as the difference between visual and auditory experiences and the synaesthesia between are also likely candidates for understanding through extended brain dynamics such as work on quantum neural networks (Fields et al. arXiv:2201.00921) and the different kinds of encoding required for developing a coherently co-bound internal model of physical sense modes. This is simply acknowledging that, while we do have conscious physical volition which we fully experience, we do so acting as transformative agents in possession of an exceedingly awesome experiential constructive filter called the biological brain, whose key role is to provide a physical realisation of our volitional conscious existence. It also means panpsychic theories don't need to solve the qualia problem or the combinations problem for the subjective pursuit of cosmic knowledge (see Fields 2021 JCS).

"What we have within us will save us if we bring it forth from ourselves"

Our quest and the cosmological quest is to accept the deep experiential abyss we have within us as consciously experiencing volitional agents and bring it forth from ourselves in the discovery process we engage together, because what we do will save us and humanity.

The Manifestation Test

The manifestation test is a succinct way of critiquing all pure materialistic explanations that form a physical or objectively abstract model of conscious experience.

When we talk about a dream or a vision, or I affirm to you that I am a subjectively conscious agent typing this passage, this is a statement consciously manifesting my assertion, from my stream of consciousness. Unless I am a zombie, it is thus a physical record of a conscious experiential agent.

The key thing about consciousness being primary is that we experience it all the time and we can, by the universality of our own conscious experience, accept that others performing volitional activities as conscious agents are also manifesting this root subjectivity, that is also key to the Vedic perspective and all spiritual notions.

When we develop a model viewing consciousness and its experiential phenomena from the outside, we are making an abstract objective description about a system. This may initially be conceived consciously as all creative notions are, but it is asserted to be an objective description we can view from without, so it stands outside in the real world, or in an "out there" abstraction of it. The trouble is that no such model manifests subjectivity or exists subjectively in any way, so it can't be a description of primary consciousness.

Some descriptions are not like this. When the Huichol describe the nierika, they are describing a conscious portal into which we can consciously enter and from which we can return transformed so it is "in here" as a conscious journey. Most creation myths are also like this. Shakti and Shiva are not just out there – the description is also "in here" in Shiva and is showing how the "in here" became ramified into all our individual "in-heres", so it passes the manifestation test. There could be good explanations like the holographic principle that might likewise make a kind of description of an integral transform like relationship between the universe and the cosmic mind that would realise this kind of relationship, so a description that passes the manifestation test is possible in principle.