Rising from the Ashes of God
Integration
A new mythology is the psychedelic philosophers’ highest ambition
By Kevin Quigley , works available via Gallery 46
Hardcore philosophers like Junger, Reich, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Whitehead were happiest wandering around the woods.
You’d be forgiven for thinking they were only content when their books were being burned by all three of the Stalinists, Nazis and the Christian Evangelists (Spinoza and Reich’s actually were).
Yet “God is nature” proclaimed Spinoza (who also was not beyond emotional intelligence, advising: “The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”)
“We live in a post-cartesian, post-christian world,” Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes said to introduce the panel ‘Should we return to the gods of nature?’ at Amsterdam’s 2022 Institute of Art and Ideas festival, “the ecological crisis and the hard problem of consciousness steam from the bifurcation of nature. Déscartes split mind and matter; now we have thought as an extension of thought, science as extension of knowledge. and still don’t know how we get mind from meat. Viewing nature as simply physical discounts any part it plays in that.”
“What are the laws of nature? Physicists say they’re constantly changing”
In his Vital lecture on philosophy during the course’s first module on approaches to psychedelics, Sjöstedt-Hughes summarised: “Whitehead had the advantage of relativity and evolution: he is a combination of Einstein, Darwin and Spinoza. He concluded that nature has an intrinsic worth, not just spiritual worth. If a virus can be determined ‘living’ why not an atom or a molecule? The future is creative, not yet formed.”
He cites Whitehead’s ‘Process Philosophy’ as the closest to a post-quantum physics spiritual framework humanity has. With humility – “We have to acknowledge that we are nowhere near the answers, and that 5-MEO DMT and other peak experiences bring up ontologies unfathomable to the regular Western version, or any other.”
Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes’ philosophy goes beyond even the ‘panpsychism’ touched upon by voices like Anneka Harris in Conscious, where all matter contains some spark of life. It brings both ancient and renaissance hermeticism into the era where God is dead: “It combines process philosophy with Amerindian-style metaphysics, which are complex as opposed to animistic. God doesn’t ‘love’ you – he is comparable to Aristotle’s ‘prime mover’ rather than a benevolent force as such. Eternal life is now, stepping out of time.”
The psychoneural, where consciousness and the physical nervous system combine, exist within and are one with the natural, material world; the ‘lived experience’ that Terrence McKenna considers superior to any spiritual system: our purpose, vessel and environment in an infinitely expanding, spherical space opera.
“De Quincy said, ‘memories are never lost only found again. But what is memory?” Bellows Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes like a young Brian Blessed, “What are the laws of nature? Physicists say they’re constantly changing. If the past doesn’t exist, should it have more status than fiction?” Before whispering conspiratorially, “the druidic yearning we see in Britain could be connected.” Dr Aiden Lyon believes psychedelics could create a new mythological wisdom to underpin society.
“We have to acknowledge that we are nowhere near the answers”
There are now at least three Druidic orders vying for eyeballs in 21st Century Britain. Six thousand people turned up at 4:49am on summer Solstice 2022 to watch the sun hit the Heel Stone in the centre and spread rays throughout the circle.
Stonehenge at Summer Solstice 2022
In a British major kind-of newspaper, noted for usually disapproving of this sort of thing, a top-rated comment below its article on the gathering reads, (sic) ‘You don’t have to travel to Stonehenge and dress up to show your love of nature, the natural world and the Earth's life force, it is all around us. Feed the wildlife, plant flowers and trees, celebrate it that way, and respect it, it’s in us all ,we are part of it. We have a Female Blackbird that literally follows us around our small garden and stands at the green house door to be let in to help herself to the box of wild bird food we have in there, what a privilege for a wild animal to communicate with us and trust us to enter into the greenhouse when we are there. There’s magic in our own gardens and stones.'