I was recently interviewed by Mark Vernon, author of A Secret History of Christianity, for the Realisation Festival Podcast—an initiative to engage the community around this annual festival of soul and ideas. We explored my journey through Dialogos, psychedelics, healing, and the liminal web, ending with a pertinent moment on Christianity, which is included in the clip above.
What I’m distilling here is the essence of my project, Christianity Beyond Itself: that Christ is not only about the liberation of the heart, as many Christians recognize, but also the liberation of the mind. Christ dissolves the boundaries between the heart and the mind.
At the core of the challenge in modern Christianity is that it teaches how to liberate the heart but not the mind. This is what Christianity Beyond Itself seeks to address, and it does so in two core ways:
Bringing the transformative dialogue practice of Dialogos to the heart of Christian culture. This is a practice in which each side engages in profoundly deep listening and is receptive to a mutual transformation and evolution of their ideas—learning to tap into a field of wisdom that is available in reality itself.
The integration of plant medicine with Christianity. Plant medicines play an essential role in dissolving the boundaries of the mind, bringing a more expansive Christ consciousness. Equally, they support the healing of fragmentations and ancestral blockages that we hold collectively as trauma.
I started my journey as a young intellectual considering the crisis of the modern West in relation to Islam. My undergraduate and master's theses both centered on the problem of ‘Islam and the West’ and what we needed to understand to address that.
I believe the project of Christianity Beyond Itself is the central response to that crisis—both in relation to pluralism, which, as O.G. Rose demonstrates in Belonging Again, is an inevitable and inescapable condition, and in relation to ‘the meaning crisis’ as articulated by John Vervaeke.
Christianity Beyond Itself is a ‘deep vibe’ that is synergistic with Vervaeke’s notion of the philosophical Silk Road—a space in culture, fostered by Dialogos, in which wisdom can be exchanged across traditions, and transformative encounter and mediation can occur between religions. Christianity Beyond Itself is the Christian side of the philosophical Silk Road.
This project is key to the evolution of Western culture, which cannot branch into its next phase without rooting down into its own deeply Christian (and pre-Christian) architecture. As moderns, we are like a plant alienated from its own soil, trying to grow with shallow roots.
Individually and collectively, I encounter many Western people who are blocked from the wisdom of the Christ-heart and their own heritage due to their unprocessed Christianity trauma. As a result, we float in a ‘spiritual but not religious’ mindset that lacks civilization-building substance. We act out inverted and sublimated Christianity through pathologized modern ideologies. We go looking for wisdom everywhere but in our own lineage. We rob ourselves of the rituals of birth and death, and the depth of connection with the divine that makes all things possible and conquers death.
Christianity Beyond Itself builds on an understanding and sensitivity to the deep trauma that many carry—both from the shadow of the church, in relation to the collective of the church community, and the deep trauma of alienation from God. There is no Christianity Beyond Itself without Christianity Acknowledging Itself. We can make this possible through a devotion to the process of collective healing and an ongoing quest to dynamically integrate and mediate the full scope of psychotechnologies available in Christianity, other religions, philosophy, indigenous wisdom and plant medicine.
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I really enjoyed the Realisation Festival and think you may too. It will take place this June in Dorset, U.K. and tickets are now available.
You can hear the full interview with Mark Vernon here, I hope I can return the favour Mark on SENSESPACE to further this conversation.
