What this Book is About

Spirituality and religion are regarded as being out of this world. The very reason many religions regard themselves as spiritual is because they envisage beings or worlds other than the natural world we live in, while many non-religious people see the beauty, goodness and order of our world to be reflections of values greater than our own. But do we need supernatural beings or transcendental values to satisfy our spiritual ambitions? Could we not find all the splendour of our spiritual imaginations here in our material world without them? Might our spirits not inhabit our same physical world and be subject to the same natural laws that we are? We could simply take our world for what it is and find spirituality in it.

Other-worldly spirits, minds or dimensions have been proffered as sources from which the material world has sprung. Regarding spirituality as arising in the material world bypasses the need for a spiritual source to reality. This relieves spirituality of having to explain materiality and having to revise its precepts with every scientific revelation. It puts the task of explaining the workings of the natural world firmly in the lap of the rational sciences while leaving spirituality to be distilled from what science reveals. By 'distil' I don't mean that our spiritual enterprise follow the rational disciplines of the sciences, only that it not contradict them. Science should be informing our spiritual contemplations as well as contesting them.

This book takes that approach. It sees our spirits arising in the material world just as we do. It suggests a spirituality in and of this world rather than one outside it.

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I did not aspire to this view. My original intention was to reconcile the extraordinariness of my experiences under LSD with my scientific education or with prevailing religious beliefs. But neither science nor mainstream religions had any conception of the psychedelic state of mind let alone an understanding of it, while a draconian prohibition seriously impeded investigation. Esoteric teachings such as Jungian psychology and Eastern mysticism appeared to offer the most plausible interpretations.

Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin offer us a unitary participation in the world astoundingly different to our usual participation as isolated individuals. Many have described the experience as spiritual ^#1, yet the crux of the experience is an embrace of the world we live in rather than a devaluation of or escape from it.

I find this physical view satisfactory because it accommodates a spiritual appreciation of the material world, accords with many religious myths and sits comfortably with my scientific education.

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So how might a physical view of spirituality be approached?

To start with I open up the idea of spirituality itself. Rather than restricting it to its traditional religious usage I invoke it as a catch-all for anything that influences us while remaining mysterious or beyond our control. We have no control over many of the physical phenomena that affect us: The rotation of our planet vis-a-vis the sun absolutely dictates our daily rhythms while the genetic shape of a human body is an important determinant of what we are and what we can do. These influences are unavoidable and beyond our control, and in this wider sense are spirits we cannot but obey.

But could such physical spirits be sentient? Could we revere them for their intelligence, love or wrath as we have our traditional deities? The only direct evidence we have of any sentience at all is in Earthly organisms such as ourselves while our traditional deities have remained purely conceptual. I too cannot prove any physical spirits to be sentient but I can envisage some having an equal if not greater plausibility than our traditional deities.

An essential element of sentience is the expression of meaning, and the meaning a physical phenomenon carries is signaled by its patterning and the patterning of its relationships. A patterning of sound for example, physical as it is, might carry a police siren's wail, a baby's cry, a bird's call, language, music or poetry. All these illustrate not only the variety of ways a physical phenomenon can carry meaning but the heights to which it can let that meaning flourish. The messages we communicate - speech, words on a page, decorations on a vase, electronic data, signs or songs, a pat on the back, a shared laugh - all are patternings of the material medium. Our organs sense our environment through signals in the material medium and it is through manipulations of the material medium that we respond. Our material world is a replete medium for pattern, meaning and sentience.

People often attribute mysterious patterns to transcendental sources, (and here I include mysterious patterns in our brains), but we could equally attribute them to this-worldly sources at scales not perceptible from our own. Molecular biology for example has revealed staggering layers in the microscopic patterning of living organisms, well beyond our normal scales of perception, while astronomy has revealed a universe far exceeding our normal capabilities. Even the physical operation of the world appears to be different at different scales, as the irreconcilability of quantum mechanics and gravity illustrates. Patterns can also change according to yet other patterns, which in turn may themselves be patterned - over and over and over again - with patterns at the extremes of such recursion lying outside our scales of perception. One has only to watch the intermingling of waves on a shallow beach to see how intricate a patterning of nature can be. It is in these far reaches and patternings of material reality that I see possibilities for spiritual sentience.

Spirituality could thus be understood in terms of scale rather than dimension. Humans, animals, bacteria and spirits all inhabit the same physical dimensions, only our scales of habitation differ. I see psychedelic drugs shifting our perceptions towards scales we don't normally frequent, prompting us to describe their experience as spiritual.

Our spiritual endeavours might therefore be directed towards a more profound engagement with our world (including with ourselves) rather than a transcendence of it. This would not mean an unfettered embrace of material consumerism but a finer attention to the world's natural expressions. By attending to the world and ourselves more closely we can perceive more of its patterns and then the patterning of its patterns. With heightened sensitivity to the scale of its patterning, our participation in the world is widened and our spirits become more accessible for engagement.

Engagement can take the form of a sharpened scientific scrutiny but it can also take the form of an immediate personal intimacy. We can enjoy as consummate a spirituality with a physical outlook as we can with a more traditional outlook for there may be greater players than we residing in the vastness of these outlying scales. Regarding spirituality in this way also allows perennial questions such as suffering and morality to be addressed in a different light. Nor does it preclude epiphanic states of consciousness or a post-mortal continuation of our awareness but it does circumscribe the contexts in which these can occur, and elucidating these will be a major theme of this book.

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At the core of this project are two modes to the patterning of our world that make its scale sensitivities really stand out.

In the mode I call architective, patterns reside in hierarchical levels, with higher level patterns overriding those below, while in the mode I call connective there are no levels of authority and patterns affect each other proportionally. These modes of patterning can be seen for example in the way armies organize in ranked levels while fish school without leaders.

I will show that the architective, hierarchical mode is scale dependent and the connective mode is not. Regarding spirituality as a physical phenomenon means that these modes and their scale dependencies are relevant to our spirits as well, and some spirits show proclivities for one mode or the other. We can glean information about our spirits from the modes of patterning they employ.

In his groundbreaking work "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" ^#2, Dr. Iain McGilchrist describes distinct modes of operation for the right and left hemispheres of our brains. His hemispheric modes align so closely with the connective and architective modes I will describe as to have me suggest that the hemispheric division of our brains is an evolutionary adaptation to a more primary dichotomy.

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A physical basis to spirituality is the foundation on which this book stands but its main aim is to recognize a fundamental duality to our world, as highlighted by these modes. A physical basis to spirituality means that this duality prevails over our spirits as well as ourselves - that there are two modes to spirituality and its contemplation.

What then about a singular God? What about the psychedelic experience of universal unity? In arguing for a fundamental duality I am acutely aware of the preference for monism by many thinkers and have myself experienced and accepted the universal unity that psychedelics can reveal. But monistic thinking requires that all contraries of our world, such as good and evil, mind and matter, body and soul, wave and particle, can ultimately be taken up in a single all-encompassing totality, whether it be a Supreme Being, a primary consciousness or a Theory of Everything. Our spiritual challenge is not to consolidate the contradictions of the world in an all-inclusive oneness, but to understand how such contrasting ontologies as a universal unity and a manifold of contraries can coexist without denying the ultimate validity of either.

This connective/architective dichotomy allows me to do just that. I can show how objects, people and spirits utilizing the connective mode can concert in a universal unity while those utilizing the architective mode necessarily separate out in a multitude of individual expressions. We can experience our world as intimately connected or as a collection of separate objects, depending on the mode we utilize. Our spiritual experience can be of a universal unity or of a specific deity, and we are capable of both.

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The first Part of the book, "Modes of Interaction", examines our everyday physical, biological and social interactions to flesh out the characteristics of each mode. The second Part, "Modes of Meaning", shows how connective and architective contexts permeate the meaning we find in the world, which in turn has implications for our understanding of consciousness. It is only in the third Part, "Modes of Spirituality", that I turn to spirituality, imagining how our spirits would negotiate these modes. The last Part, "Changing the Paradigm", envisages how an awareness of these modes and their scale dependencies can refine our approach to spirituality and provide valuable signposts for our psychedelic journeys.

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A brief biographical note to allay suspicions about my motives: I grew up orthodox Jewish and as a teenager in the 1960's was groomed for the rabbinate. On leaving school I chose to study physics and maths at university where I embraced atheism instead. In the 1970's a chance encounter with psychedelics rekindled the spiritual interest, this time in the direct experience of spirituality rather than the following of any religion. Attempts to reconcile the psychedelic experience with my everyday perceptions have occupied my attention ever since. This book is such an attempt.

My aim is not to convince sceptics of the reality of spirituality - only a direct experience can do that - but to offer those so mystified a framework for their experience. I have also published a more intuitive work called "The Oracle of Love" ^#3 based on the Daoist I Ching.

Though I did not follow a career as a physicist (I earned my living in computer software) my study of physics significantly coloured the way I see the world. Part I can be a little dry but the disclosure at its end is rewarding. The physics is elementary and hopefully accessible to everyone. Occasional statements that are beyond one's reach may be bypassed without losing the overall gist. On the other hand, I have stated the ideas much too simply in order to convey them as directly as possible and to as wide an audience as possible. The physics is mainstream and largely classical, only the perspective a little unusual so as to illustrate my thesis. Physicists please be forbearing - my intention is not to change the way we think about physics but the way we approach spirituality. On the other hand I do hope to change the way we think about consciousness, and cognitive scientists may be more justifiably aggrieved by my naivete. Nonetheless, I regard my insights concerning the modes of patterning and their scale dependencies to be definitive and believe them to significantly impact our spiritual speculations.

The book is not long. It prints to about 200 pages but can be dense for I am not a skilled writer. Appreciate too that I am grappling with unusual ideas and have probably made mistakes along the way. Questions are welcome - there's an email address on the cover page. My hope is that you will emerge from this adventure with a very different idea of what spirituality can be and a very different approach to the psychedelic landscape.