13 Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices

The sciences demand logical intelligence. The arts demand intuitive intelligence. Philosophy however requires both of these. Therefore philosophy is a narrow discipline as regards production, consumption and talent in general. Philosophical works are understandably not your typical bestsellers. But of course this does not make philosophy any less important. Philosophy heralds the advances that later reach both the sciences and the arts. Without a Nietzsche, there would never be an Einstein or a Picasso either. The time would not be ripe, as they say; there would be no resonance, no receptive environment that makes Einstein precisely an Einstein and Picasso precisely a Picasso.

From once having been an obscure philosophical idea, emergence with time has become a central concept within the sciences. The idea is that a specific system can change so dramatically in conjunction with a small shift in its degree of complexity – at a tipping point – that the system as a whole is transformed from one kind of phenomenon into something completely different, where the new emergent phenomenon appears with entirely new properties and qualities that entail that it must be classified as something entirely new in relation to the original system. According to relationalist physics, an emergence moreover means that nature as a whole goes through a change. The emergence has such a decisive ontological significance that a return from the new to the old paradigm is impossible after the emergence. Between different emergent phenomena with, in principle, the same component parts, there is a hierarchy. Every emergent transition forms a new level in the hierarchy. But because every suddenly arisen emergence has its own just as suddenly arisen laws and rules – this is quite possible as long as the newly created laws and rules do not threaten the existence of the actual hierarchy – it also changes nature as a whole for all time in a relationalist universe.

The syntheist biologist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman investigates the metaphysical significance of emergences in his book Reinventing The Sacred. Kauffman points out that there is nothing built into physics from the start that says that it should emerge and give rise to chemistry, in the same manner that there is nothing built into chemistry from the beginning that says that it should emerge and give rise to biology. Neither chemistry’s nor biology’s future births are in any mysterious way preprogrammed within the Big Bang at the genesis of the Universe. Rather, emergences tend to occur quite suddenly, and quite independently of all previously applying laws of nature. They thereby add an increased complexity to the Universe, rather than just develop something built in beforehand, as the totalist determinists from Plato via Newton to Einstein interpret the function of emergences.

Kauffman argues that the apparent presence of emergences means that the principle of self-organisation must be added to Darwinian natural selection in order for the sciences to hang together and provide a comprehensive picture of nature’s various processes. Emergences and their self-organisation quite simply add something fundamental to the sciences that natural selection lacks, namely an idea of how the pre-adaptive material, which is later the basis of the success story of the evolutionary process, actually arises. The point is that the emergence per se is not a product of Darwinian natural selection; rather it is something as remarkable as a suddenly arisen and self-organising phenomenon, spontaneously emanating from a disorganised chaos, which later turns out to be a piece in the jigsaw puzzle with a perfect fit when circumstances in the otherwise Darwinian process change.

The emergence’s potentiality is based on a single simple principle: however many actualities might exist in physics, the potentialities that precede these actualities are always still far more numerous. It is sufficient to go to every human being’s genesis in order to establish that this is the case: for every dividual that is born, nature wastes millions and millions of sperm and also a large number of eggs, which are never made use of at all. And now we are just talking about the eggs and sperm that in spite of everything are actualised as precisely eggs and sperm – the virtual eggs and sperm are in turn many times more numerous. Out of this infinite multiplicity, the emergences stand out as the great winners, as the possibilities that an ultra-creative universe sooner or later must produce anyway, and they are impressive in their pre-adaptive ability to self-organise durable and stable complexities. It is not strange that people have allowed themselves to be carried away by nature’s ability to generate emergences throughout history.

On the other hand, it is a mistake to imagine that in some mysterious way these emergences are givens, that they follow some kind of metalaw of nature – which in that case must exist even before the genesis of the Universe, which of course is an impossibility in an internal self-creating universe without a creating god that is both external and preceding. The Universe has namely not created itself in the past, it is creating itself all the time. In this, Kauffman breaks radically with reductionism, the fundamental axiom of the sciences since Newton’s heyday. According to reductionism, everything can be deduced downwards in the hierarchy; as if everything that arises higher up and on a later occasion always lies fully preprogrammed at one of the lower levels on a previous occasion. According to reductionism for example, biology is really only an advanced form of chemistry, while chemistry is really only an advanced form of physics, and nothing more than this.

Reductionism quite simply assumes that the Universe and its history follow a preordained trajectory, which in some mysterious way is preprogrammed even in the Big Bang. Bizarrely enough, the actual creation of the Universe must therefore be both well-planned, immediate and long since concluded. Kauffman replies that this absurd idea – the reductionist illusion – arises because philosophers and scientists are fixated on only following the hierarchies from the top down, as if things cannot be anything other or more and greater than the sum of their constituent parts. But if one instead studies the hierarchies from the bottom up along the arrow of time – contrary to the masochistic fantasy of how spiritual power and thereby also physical existence must be structured from the top down – one discovers how suddenly arising emergences change the entire playing field once and for all through contingently introducing new phenomena into existence, which in turn contingently give rise to new paradigms in history. Emergences quite simply generate new laws and rules in at least their own region of the Universe, without these specific behavioural patterns having existed anywhere else previously. Thereby it is proven that the arrow of time is real – rather than illusory, as Plato, Newton and Einstein imagine it to be – and determinism is thus dead.

A dynamic system is regarded as ergodic if its behavioural patterns on average over time concur with its behavioural patterns on average in space. Scientists are fond of ergodic systems since they are relatively simple to turn into mathematics – they are of course, seen as totalities, comfortable constants rather than messy variables – and thereby even relatively simple to use as building blocks. However we do not live in an ergodic universe, which reductionism persistently insists that we do. In fact, nothing occurs in the same way twice, every event is instead completely unique, every apparently identical repetition takes place in a completely new, specific context. Kauffman even claims that without the reductionist illusion, the metaphysical premise for classical atheism also falls down. The insight that we live in a non-ergodic universe must quite simply have dramatic consequences for metaphysics too. An anti-reductionist explanatory model is required that replaces the reductionist model. Existence is enormously much more complicated, the future is enormously much more open and harder to predict, and the Universe is enormously much more active than the reductionist illusion has led us to believe.

Kauffman points out that above all the Universe is characterised by an enormous, constant creativity – it is quite simply capable, in a pantheist spirit, of constantly giving rise to completely new phenomena with completely new laws and rules, right down to their metaphysical foundations. Therefore Kauffman draws the conclusion that the presence of emergences calls upon us to create a new religion – or to use his own parlance: he encourages us to allow a new religion to emerge from our consciousness – once the insight of the central roles of the emergence and self-organisation in relationist physics become widely accepted with full force in informationalist metaphysics. Decades of extensive complexity-theory studies have made Kauffman a convinced and almost militant syntheist. His book’s title Reinventing The Sacred says it all.

With his theory of the sum of all histories, the physicist Richard Feynman proves that a particle can follow all sorts of potential paths from A to B. The vacuum’s energy exhibits the least amount of energy in space, but is never at the zero level. A vacuum is always something and never nothing; it is filled with incessant fluctuations, there is never any passive condition of non-being anywhere. On top of this, Planck’s constant is a kind of emergence engine of physics: below the Planck length there is pure chaos, above the Planck length organised cosmologies arise. Therefore the Planck length is the least relevant component in all physical measuring, it is the level where the organisation of existence first appears as a discrete emergence on top of which the ensuing higher emergences such as chemistry, biology and human consciousness have been able to arise entirely spontaneously.

If emergences within hierarchies are central for the sciences, there is no reason why our studies of mental and social phenomena should be facilitated by defining emergences within mental and social hierarchies as well. It is sufficient to note that a new level in a mental or social phenomenon is no longer reducible to its constituent parts, and we have thus identified an emergence. In this way Christianity is emergent in relation to Judaism, socialism is emergent in relation to liberalism, syntheism is emergent in relation to atheism, to name just three clear and close-at-hand examples. While interactivity is emergent in relation to the mass media, the mass media are in turn emergent in relation to written language, just as written language is emergent in relation to spoken language. Etcetera.

In accordance with the reasoning above, if we regard atheism as an emergent phenomenon in relation to theism, the fundamental dismissal of the concept of God no longer appears as such – that is, that which gives the position its name – as its most important theological achievement. No, atheism’s most substantial achievement is its summation of all sorts of theist positions as a uniform and cohesive alternative to repudiate, that is, atheism’s dialectical construction of theism as an idea. Seen as an emergent phenomenon in relation to atheism, as the historical and intellectual intensification of atheism, syntheism in turn is a metareligion, a faith that its practitioners unabashedly practice as a pure religion in itself. Thereby it also confirms and supports all other art forms’ freedom to act from the metaperspective: art as art for art’s sake, literature as literature for literature’s sake, philosophy as philosophy for philosophy’s sake, and so on. And therefore syntheism instinctively rejects all of individualism’s calculations of utility. What syntheism seeks instead are the place and the time for itself as an event. This event is manifested within love, art, science, politics and religion: syntheology’s five generic categories.

Syntheology is in turn the intensification of syntheism that is enabled when it sees itself as a truth as an act and focuses on one single wisely chosen eternalisation, in order to intensify the thinking based on this fundamental point. It is precisely this we mean when we say that correctly practised theology enables an intensification of philosophy. Syntheology’s well-chosen eternalisation is neither God nor the Individual, as in the previous paradigms, but religion per se as the network before all others in the informationalist society. The term religion – in its original significance as a social phenomenon that connects people with each other – is in fact synonymous with the term network. This means that syntheism is the metareligion that binds together humanity through practising a truth that sees the network – that is, religion per se – as sacred. Syntheology thus realises what has always been the innermost dream of a religion for religion’s sake.

When it comes to the syntheist agent, it is important to distinguish between the concepts dividual and subject. Informationalist Man is a dividual, but syntheism’s ambition is, based on dividuality, to develop an authentic subjectivity. In order to go from the usual reactive dividuality to unique, active subjectivity, the dividual must be isolated from the surrounding world’s constant distortions – be separated in order to be liberated from the lingering individualist ideology – which is enabled through purposeful spiritual work within the syntheist congregation’s walls. In this isolated, conscious, enlightened environment, the dividual can develop genuinely critical thinking, understand and experience herself as the syntheist agent. Through the identification with herself as an eternalised truth event, the authentic syntheist subject appears. Syntheists call this state clarification, and fidelity to the clarification is manifested through the syntheist baptism which is called the infinite now. In this state, the mind focuses on a single point in space–time where there is serenity, where all existential tensions are finally released, where the subject creates a tranquillity which makes it possible to quite simply be.

The historical escalation from eternity via progress to the event as the metaphysical engine of the paradigm has put increasing pressure on the individual human being. The informationalist dividual hears a multitude of voices within herself – what Freud imagines as a solid unit that he calls the superego – which constantly calls for more, different and stronger efforts. But the dividual is also notoriously afraid of being disconnected from the reward system that is connected to these efforts, in particular the wordless meeting with the other and the other’s gaze. What does the other want from her? What can she do to satisfy the other’s desire? Even if only to avoid being confronted with her own desire and dependence on the other that the realisation of her desire threatens to entail.

Civilisation is in fact terrified of the threat of disintegration. The domestication of materials, plants, animals and, last but not least, Man himself, starts with magic and its invocations. Culture is ultimately the domestication of nature. Correspondingly, the informationalist dividual wrestles with the dread of social isolation as the Internet age’s potential disintegration (if you are not located inside the networks, in practice, you cease to exist anymore). Modern Man experiences how questions and demands loom large to alarming levels. It is hardly strange that he lives under terrible stress. But then again, he is constantly busy with an incessant patching up of fracturing surfaces instead of doing something about deep spiritual needs, merely because modern Man has allowed himself to be convinced by the myth that says that such a credible course of action is impossible. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The syntheist community differs radically from the socialist idea of the collective that oppresses the dividual and forces her into submission. Here there is no talk of false consciousness. Rather, it is about the following: the less self-interest the dividual brings to the religious ceremony, the more powerful the spiritual experience. The spiritual work focuses on training the participants in a process that moves from the dissolution of the ego to a climb up the syntheological pyramid. Through this direct participation, the dividual becomes an active agent in and for the syntheist community, where the congregation is somewhat larger and more important than the separate dividual: the network of relations that gives the dividual context, meaning and existential weight in relation to herself. It is a matter of letting go of the ego fixation and allowing oneself to dissolve into the hierarchically higher collective emergence, where the community stands out as something greater than the sum of its constituent parts, as the most powerful agent. This is the infinite now, the immanent transcendence, the point where the connection to time and space disappears, where the dividual dissolves into something larger than herself, where Syntheos appears and completes the syntheological pyramid. The symbol for the infinite now is of course the lone photon, the light in eternity.

Ego fixation and its engine narcissism are strictly compensatory phenomena. These conditions are driven by fear and ignorance rather than by consciousness and reason. What gets the ego fixation to allow in the spiritual experience is the growth of ethical self-love as the correct way to confront the dramatic subjective experience. Self-love is thus the antipole of banal narcissism. The most common logical error about self-love is otherwise that it should require that one passively waits for an emotion. The background to this is the delusion that all forms of love are feelings and nothing but feelings. But at least self-love is different in comparison with other forms of love in several respects. Partly because it is a logical imperative and not a sought-after effect: there is one relationship in life that you can never opt out of, that you must learn to live with, and that is the relationship with yourself. Partly because self-love is fundamental for all other forms of love – it is the passions’ own Higgs field – love of others and of life gets its power from self-love and not the other way around. On the other hand, narcissism is based on self-contempt and is nothing other than compensatory behaviour on top of this self-contempt – a clear sign of self-love that is deficient.

Self-love is naturally no guarantee for the genesis of any other love. On the other hand, the person who genuinely loves herself in the capacity of a syntheist agent within an intra-acting phenomenon has the ability to also love the rest of the world outside the subjective experience. World view and self-image are two sides of the same coin, the one being dialectically dependent on the other for its existence. This also applies of course to the relationship to one’s own reflection. Therefore self-love is both a mental and physiological necessity for being able to love at all, including amor fati, the logically and ethically conditioned love of world history up until now. She who lacks self-love, who hates or is indifferent towards herself, is unquestionably unable to love anything else whatsoever. Moreover, she who hates herself must shift that hate onto some other person or some other object in order to be able to experience her existence without constantly being reminded of the hated self. However, the self-hating human being cannot love at all. Therefore she transfers this self-hatred onto the existential dissolution into ressentiment – bitterness against existence as a whole. This expresses itself as the idea that things could and should be different than they are, which they cannot and therefore are not going to be, which in turn can be experienced as comfortable by the self-hater who, without any doubt or reservations, can settle in permanently in his ressentiment.

This ressentiment expresses itself as blind submission to and worship of various external phenomena. The reason for this is that worship is a form of passion that does not require any love whatsoever; worshipping is driven by impulsive ruthlessness while loving is driven by long-term benevolence. Passionate but ruthless fascism is the self-hate ideology par excellence. When it comes to emotions, ressentiment can be every bit as passionate as love. It can create a dependence on more and be experienced as every bit as existentially satisfying as love. The American shopaholic in the department store, as well as the unscrupulous Nazi camp commandant and the Islamic fundamentalist who detonates bombs among innocent civilians, are extremely passionate beings, but their glowing passions stem from self-hatred, not from self-love. These are passions that seek destruction and an intense enjoyment, rather than love’s search for playfulness and gratifying pleasure. It’s about a twisted hatred which, just like all other forms of hatred, stems from constitutional self-hatred.

What is interesting, when we get closer to self-love and self-hatred, is their diametrically opposed logical premises. Contrary to the conventional image of love and hate, where love is presumed to be directed at a thing and hate directed at a nothing, it turns out on closer inspection that quite the opposite is actually the case. Self-love is always directed towards Atheos, the necessary void at the centre of the subject. All love is love for the void in the object of love, but this fact never stands out more clearly than in the very act of love, this truth as an act of blind faith without either substance or emotions, from which all passions then get their driving force. A person who loves does not know more precisely what it is that she loves about her beloved, since what she loves about the beloved is the void in the centre of the love object and the possibility of projecting love onto this object that this void in fact makes possible.

At the deepest level, love is a will to love without any ulterior motive, because the art of loving is the art of living. Wanting to love is wanting to live a life with integrity. Self-hatred, on the other hand, is always directed towards a phantasmal substance in the subject. Hatred must constantly find something concrete to hate in the hated one, since the subject itself as a void merely absorbs and never resonates. Atheos can only be loved or denied but never hated, since hatred is inevitably dissolved in the void. In contrast to unconditional love, hatred requires a concrete resonance from the hated object. Hatred does not want to give anything; it merely wants to temporarily dump self-hatred onto something else, and therefore hatred is conditional. Wanting to hate is wanting to die and wanting to take all life along with oneself into death. It is the total lack of integrity.

However, no resonance exists in a void. Therefore the self-hating human being must constantly find something concrete within herself to hate. Something that is not a void for the subject. Therefore self-hatred constantly locates new attributes in the hated subject that it objectifies and reifies in order to recast into an object of passionate hatred. Self-hatred is therefore to be regarded as an orgy of finding, reifying and subsequently mocking the shortcomings of the subject – based on an unattainable external template concerning how the subject ought to be in order to pass muster as an object of worship. As if it would ever be possible to love anything just because it is good enough according to an externally established norm. It is as the existential philosopher Hannah Arendt says: “Evil is banal”. It quite simply gloats in its alienation vis-à-vis the world, in what antiquity’s Zoroaster, as early as around 3,700 years ago, calls druj, the passionate enjoyment of existential lying.

According to syntheism, self-love is truth as an act above all others. Love yourself, without involving any emotions whatsoever, because you have no choice. Just act. Out of this conscious and logically cogent self-love as truth as an act flows love to everything else that exists in an intensely pulsating, creative Universe. The opposite of alienation-enjoying self-hatred could hardly be clearer. But self-love stands firm only in this fundamental conviction: that in essence love is a constitutional act without emotions and from which all other love passions later emerge. And this act in its purest form is self-love; the love of the encounter between the self and the divine where integrity arises. The moment when one’s self-image and world view attain a harmonious reconciliation with each other is the event that the syntheists poetically call the infinite now or the immanent transcendence.

Thereby self-love, as truth as an act, is the obvious foundation for all syntheist rituals and ceremonies. It is the eternally recurring starting point for all spiritual work, whose ultimate purpose is to give the members of the congregation a strong and stable personal integrity without narcissistic elements. Since the self is in constant flux, and since all other emotions are dependent on the act of self-love, the act of self-love must be repeated time after time after time in the syntheist agent’s life. This repetition – this cycle of difference and repetition, as Gilles Deleuze would express the matter – constitutes the Nietzschean core in the syntheistic spiritual life. A look at one’s naked body in the mirror, followed by the decision to unconditionally accept this body as the current expression of Pantheos, as the Universe’s construction for housing the subject and its consciousness and passions, as an object to love merely by virtue of an existential decision, a personal primordial event. “This is what I am, this is the body that houses my many dividual identities and I love this body in order to be able to love myself, in order to thereby be able to love anything at all. Because I identify myself with the will to love.” Truth as an act cannot be expressed any more clearly.

Once the foundation of self-love is laid, the syntheist agent is open and receptive to the process that is called transparency within the community. The purpose of transparentisation is to maximise openness within the congregation, to bring its members closer to each other, to allow intimacy to develop, so that the collective manifestation of Syntheos is realised. Religion is about bringing people together and giving them an emergent, collective identity that is greater than the dividuals separately and greater than the sum of all the dividuals together. This occurs, for example, through the establishment of sharing circles, where the agents bear witness to their innermost thoughts and experiences in front of each other. However it is of the utmost importance that the transparentisation – in the spirit of the French philosopher Michel Foucault – follows the ethics of interactivity (see The Body Machines) and therefore is carried out from the bottom up rather than from the top down; that is, it is those who are strongest, most powerful, those most established who open themselves up first before the community in a process where everyone shares more and more of their innermost emotions and thoughts for every round of the sharing circle.

Through this transparentisation, agentiality in the phenomenon in question migrates from the separate dividuals to the community itself. This is what we call the manifestation of Syntheos. The ethics of interactivity are intimately connected with the identity of the subject. Therefore the syntheist agent – both as dividual and community – is very much an ethical being. And with conscious ethics as a generator of identity, the subject in turn becomes a formidable syntheist agent. Here we reconnect with Zoroaster’s amoral but highly ethical ideal: “You are your thoughts, your thoughts govern your words; you are your words, your words govern your actions; you are your actions, your thoughts, words, and actions together constitute your ethical substance, they are and shall be your identity.” At the same moment that the believer identifies fully with her thoughts, words and actions, Zoroaster’s concept asha goes from being a phenomenological description of existence to becoming an ethical ideal. It is in this merging of phenomenology and ethics that the subject and asha become one with each other.

The obligation to love fate under all circumstances, Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s ethical ideal amor fati, is a central concept in syntheism. The Universe is indifferent to our human cares and woes, does not give our species preferential treatment over someone or something else, accords no special status whatsoever to anyone or anything in relation to anyone or anything else. We can only forgive ourselves for our shortcomings as human beings precisely because we are human beings, not heroes. And in this self-forgiveness, the now plays a central part. Since, according to Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s imperative, we are duty-bound to love all of history up until now – partly because it is the only history there is, partly because it is something that at any rate we cannot do anything about – we are also duty-bound to love our own life story up until now. And in this imposed love there also lies self-forgiveness as a logical obligation and not as a longed-for emotion. Syntheists create rituals in order to constantly return to the necessary self-forgiveness, including collective rituals to support the journey towards the insight of self-forgiveness, and then not least rituals that question and combat the enjoyment that is connected with self-hatred, the moralistic opposite of ethical self-forgiveness. There is in fact no place for self-hatred and its enjoyment within syntheist spiritual work.

The step from love to art is short. In his book The Master and his Emissary, British philosopher Iain McGilchrist pins his hopes for humanity on art and religion. According to McGilchrist, art and religion are the human expressions that can be used effectively in order to confront the big threat – what McGilchrist calls the condition of anomie. As is well-known, the term anomie was coined by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in the late 19th century. According to Durkheim, anomie starts with a total and irrevocable internal alienation and dissolution of values, which invokes an intense existential consciousness, which in turn generates a complete and devastating external paralysis. Durkheim expresses this by saying that the anomic human being can no longer see the world, but instead is staring back at existence; a blank stare that at once is both neurotically paralysing and psychotically megalomaniacal.

Consequently art plays a central role within syntheism. Art seeks to move away from alienation towards religion, not least when it investigates alienation itself, as if it were the only theme that remains for art to process. Like syntheism in itself, art is implicit rather than explicit, ambiguous rather than monotonous, sensible rather than rational, and above all, always incarnated. Therefore, really interesting art has always been transrationalist. Rationalist art would be unbearably banal and meaningless. Rather, art must be truer to life than life itself. Through art, Man can regain his gaze and abandon staring, and with this living gazing on the world there follows a living relationship with the surrounding world. McGilchrist claims that the key to this deeper artistic understanding of the terms of existence is melancholy. This is related to the fact that melancholy is the emotional consequence of a joyous acceptance, followed by a glorification of the multiplicity of existence. Thereby melancholy is the complete opposite of the Platonist simplification. Which possibly explains why melancholy, according to McGilchrist, was idealised during the Renaissance but despised during the Enlightenment, even by protosyntheists such as Spinoza and Leibniz.

This would mean that if syntheism were to be linked to the Renaissance and Romanticism, melancholy is also the key to syntheist art. Which of course also applies in the reverse direction: for art, syntheism is the only possible way away from individualistic isolationism towards the holism of network dynamics. But it also requires an artist who builds her work on participatory pleasure instead of narcissistic enjoyment. The artistic auteur is thus yet another Napoleonic ideal that must die in the informationalist society. The reason is that syntheist art is created by an artistic dividual who believes in the community’s utopian possibilities, rather than by an artistic individual who revels in a ressentiment vis-à-vis her own time. And this must also occur without the art ever being allowed to fall into the trap of rationalist banality and lose its magic. Art must be constantly founded on and return to Atheos.

Syntheist art is not merely participatory and dividual rather than isolationist and individual; it is also a metaphysical art in the deepest sense of the term. With the advent of syntheism, art can leave cynical and cultural relativist inquiry which has been its axiomatic norm under late capitalism – from a Nietzschean perspective, what can be called a voluptuous revelling in the death of God – and instead devote itself to a transcending and utopian creativity. But this requires a distinct break with the late capitalist art world’s eschatological mythology – history has not reached any ending in the sense that Francis Fukuyama speaks of – and its fixated, academic power structure. This in turn requires the artist’s will to smash the individualist myth of the auteur as art’s Napoleonic patriarchal genius. Syntheist art is in fact liberated from the creator of the art and his atomism – it formulates the idea and then insists that the idea must be free. It knows that it is a small but fundamentally manifold part of a greater holistic phenomenon – it does not act as the distanced rebel for the purpose of self-glorification, but serves an even greater utopian ideal – and it is art’s relationship to this phenomenon, within which it acts as a cohesive agent, which is of interest.

Syntheist art operates either from an estimate of the anticipated influence on the wider phenomenon – even if this forecast naturally seldom or never hits the mark perfectly – or even more preferably based on its own emotional composition, as an ethical art which strives to be a syntheist truth as an act. It also strives to establish a relationship to the universal through the particular. Syntheist art does this within these extremely restricted arrangements in order to maximise its creative expression – isolation and limited resources have always been key ingredients for innovative creation – but these tendencies are further strengthened in a society characterised by a massive informational surplus. Therefore informationalist art is best produced and reproduced in environments such as syntheist monasteries and participatory festivals.

According to David Hume, habit is a necessity for the dividual identity. We call the religious habit ritual. Syntheist rituals are often or regularly repeated habits with the purpose of strengthening the particular identity of the dividual and social identity within the community. Since syntheism unites around interactivity as an ideal, syntheists first and foremost conduct participatory rituals. Participatoryism is a principle which entails the participants meeting in radical equality without any hierarchies whatsoever between them; a meeting where each and every one is assumed to take full responsibility for herself and his own well-being as well as to actively participate and co-create rather than passively receive and consume. This means that syntheism is a radical egalitarianism. From an intersubjective viewpoint, all people have as much (or as little) value, and there is continuous work within the community to maintain this radical ideal. This means that syntheist leadership serves the community from below rather than manipulating it from above. It is driven by a will to lead the community through the mobilist chaos of existence to a more profound eternalist understanding of the conditions and opportunities of existence, from which the ethics of interactivity can be applied through truths as acts which are determined and then carried out.

This explains why the syntheist ritual is always structured as bottom-up rather than top-down. At the same time, it is important to understand the nature of the spiritual experience. To begin with, it is not strange that spirituality is associated with the subject. Since spirituality must be experienced and cannot be thought – and thus even less so communicated as a spiritual experience per se – it is not just fundamental for the syntheist subject; it is also in the reverse direction very much syntheistically subjective. The experience is felt; it is not thought and it is not formulated: it really is felt if indeed it takes place at all. And it can only be described metaphorically afterwards; it cannot be conveyed as it is per se. Therefore by necessity spirituality is a practice rather than a doctrine. The doctrine can only discuss how the practice should be carried out and stimulate it, but the doctrine can never replace the practice. Spirituality is an inner and transcendental experience.

As early as during its first years of emergent self-organisation on the Internet – for example on collective web sites such as syntheism.org – the syntheist liturgy developed four different categories of rituals. The first category consists of ceremonies that support and confirm transitions in life, such as naming ceremonies, manhood rituals, baptism, confirmations of belonging, divorce rituals and burials. The second category is periodic festivals which are connected to the four seasons: Atheos is celebrated at the winter solstice and begins the Athea quarter; Entheos is celebrated at the spring equinox and begins the Enthea quarter; Pantheos is celebrated at midsummer and begins the Panthea quarter; and Syntheos is celebrated at the autumn equinox and introduces the Synthea quarter. The third category is meditative techniques, such as contemplation, meditation, yoga and contact improvisation. The fourth and last category comprises rituals focused on the infinite now, the transcendental experience, through structured shamanism and advanced psychedelic practices.

The syntheist liturgy at the dawn of the Internet age is very much about desecularisation, a historically necessary ambition to sacralise late capitalist Man’s radically secularised lifeworld. For this reason, the syntheist liturgy has developed a nucleus consisting of two dividual components – a kind of spiritual lecture that is called a homily, and an often deeply personal testimony; as well as four collective components – a collective sound-making in order to manifest the affinity of the physical bodies present, a quiet phase of contemplation and meditation, a listening to carefully selected music which often is related to the theme of the current homily, and finally a closing peace salutation where all those agents in the community who are present wish each other well. A less liturgical gathering is called an act of worship, and a large liturgical gathering is called a mass. The liturgy is led by a master of ceremonies, who is complemented by a lecturer and one or more personal witnesses, where the homily has a collectively consolidating and universally valid subject while the testimonies are particular in nature. The syntheist liturgy is of course not bound to a physical space: it can just as well be carried out as a virtual ceremony.

When we move from the oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos to the oscillation between Entheos and Syntheos, we are also in a deeper sense moving from the transcendent to the immanent. That which binds the Universe together, for example, is not that it de facto is a cohesive unit per se – over time different parts of the Universe may have developed completely different laws, substantially independent of one another – but that the Universe has a single common origin and since then has been tied together by cosmic time. This means that the void and the Universe as transcendental concepts are tied together by the immanent time line. However, this does not mean that the possibility of a credible transcendental experience must be ruled out. Through structured shamanism and advanced psychedelic practices – for each and every one as dividuals, or even better and more powerfully as a community – the possibility of a transcendent experience that we associate with Entheos is opened up; an acceptance and enjoyment within the entheist oscillation between Atheos and Pantheos, with the utopian focus directed towards Syntheos.

The syntheist religious experience is thus a transcendental experience within an immanent world, and absolutely not some kind of mystical excursion to some other parallel world in a dualist universe. Syntheism is of course de facto radically monist. We therefore speak of an immanent transcendentalism, a strongly emotional experience of both boundary-transcendence (Entheos) and entanglement (Syntheos) within and deeper down in a strictly immanent world (localised between Atheos and Pantheos). Instead of for example the Abrahamic ascendance to a supernatural Heaven, here we are talking about a syntheist entry into immanent reality. And since syntheism is a metareligion, with Syntheos constantly in its sights, it promotes and celebrates this connection of people.

In this, the syntheist family plays a central role. The Latin word familia can be found in every Indo-European language. This reveals that the concept of family has an extremely strong significance for human well-being, even if its detailed content has been altered throughout history. The family consists of those people who are closest to us, regardless of whether these are our biological relatives or not. This means that a living religion can hardly exist without a clear idea of the family, nor a sustainable idea of the family without a supporting metaphysics. In true relationalist spirit, the syntheist community’s members are called agents. An agent can be anything from a dividual member in a human body to a complete congregation consisting of many separate dividuals. On the other hand, the self-appointed victim and his concomitant victim mentality has no place within syntheism, since the victim seeks isolation from and independence vis-à-vis all external forces and therefore constantly looks for scapegoats and excuses when confronted with immanent reality, that is, the exact opposite of syntheism’s human-created gods and its quest for the sacred connection. The syntheist metaphysics around the family and the family’s agents is of course based on Syntheos, the divine manifested as the community between people.

A necessary component in hypercapitalism – and its infiltration and colonisation of the human, existential experience – is the hypersexualisation of the social arena. Capitalism must commodify even the most sensitive and most intimate of human experiences in order to consummate itself. And capitalism cannot get there without first being liberated from both responsibility and shame concerning its own ruthless exploitation. This freedom from responsibility occurs through the creation of the sexualist ideology, not to be confused with sexual liberation, which in its capacity as a cultural predecessor to informationalism’s relationalist view of humanity strives in the exact opposite direction. The problem is in fact that hypersexualisation requires a fundamental and deep-seated self-hatred, an all-encompassing conviction of inadequacy of the self, what Foucault calls “the internalised police”, a kind of turbo-driven superego that arises as a necessary by-product to hyper-Cartesian self-centredness.

The internalised police in turn generates the internarcissistic culture that drives late capitalism’s ultra-commercialised quest for identity and often expresses itself through an extremely tedious obsession with so-called self-fulfilment. The hypersexualised human being possesses and above all continuously changes more or less colourful shells, where weariness with the self and the presumed ability of these shells to attract booty in the form of high status, and affirmation in the form of a desired partner, determines the growing intensity in their constant changeovers. When we arrive at the historical tipping point where the dominant hyper-Cartesians are constantly chasing identities for their insatiable and immeasurable internarcissism, no obstacles remain for sexuality’s takeover of the public sphere. Under severe pressure from myths – concerning the metaphysical potential of sexual desire, and concerning the free market’s ability to satisfy eternally craving human desire – late capitalist society is hypersexualised. But it is precisely here, in exposing the sexualist ideology, that the door to syntheism and its genuine, and also sexual, liberation is opened.

Note that syntheism does not argue in favour of any form of abstinence or asceticism. Historical asceticism is an inheritance from the Platonist paradigm; it has no central place in a fundamentally monist and mobilist religion such as syntheism. Interestingly enough, Zoroastrianism is the only one of the classical world religions that lacks ascetic imperatives, and it is also the only monist and mobilist world religion before syntheism, seen as a whole. Thus there is not either any hostility to sex whatsoever within syntheism. There is nothing wrong with sex in itself – there is no kind of sex at all between consenting adults that is the least bit morally objectionable – it is just that sexualist ideology, and the hypersexualisation which is its consequence, has nothing to do with the sexual act itself. Its soul-poisoning individualist categorisations of people as interchangeable shells that constantly put off rather than realise sexual acts is, if anything, in fact hostile to sex rather than sex-affirming.

Sexualism’s mistake lies in it changing sexuality from a free and creative, existential pleasure into a constrained and unconditionally moralist imperative that fans the escalating consumption of vapid identity. Hypercapitalism is quite simply driven by a moralistic order: Enjoy! Freedom and creativity are disconnected from the sex, which thus has been sexualised, that is, has been transformed into a destructive enjoyment of constantly postponed pleasure. Thus, the sexualist imperative is not to be interpreted as a “Be fertile and multiply” or even “Have sex!”, but rather as a “Make yourself sexy, make yourself a passive self-contemptuous object, or die!”, where it has become entirely irrelevant whether any sexual act ever occurs or not. Nothing could be more alien to syntheism. Sex is namely a highly natural, immanent phenomenon that is to be liberated from the bottom up, not a sacred transcendental activity that should be fenced in by a distancing, hierarchy-making set of rules from the top down, which historically has been the case, and which, under this offensive sexualism, is more so than ever.

The sought-after sexual liberation under capitalism if anything gets its follow-up in the chemical liberation (for a more exhaustive treatment, see The Global Empire) under attentionalism. The development of a post-atheist religiosity founded on the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborating syncretistic, religio-social practices, and not least the explosive flora of entheogenic substances, lays the foundation for a dissolution of the conflict between theism and atheism; a conflict that, in a Hegelian dialectical process, transitions into a synthesis in the form of syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. At the same time, sexual liberation is displaced when its underbelly, the hypersexualisation of the individual, is exposed as the capitalist consumption society’s underlying engine: sexualism ultimately became a straitjacket of the superego where chemical liberation offers the only possible way out. We do not lose liberated sexuality by returning to some kind of asceticism or abstinence with old-school religious overtones. We only gain access to means and ceremonies that finally enable us to start domesticating and mastering liberated sexuality to our long-term advantage. Indirect desire at last has the chance to balance the direct, vacuous, repetitive drive.

The attentionalist dividual uses the enormous offering of new chemicals to constantly modify and develop her creative multiplicity of personalities. Obviously, this may be an adaptive strategy vis-à-vis the demands and expectations of his surrounding world, but it can also be about subversive, revolutionary tactics in order to overthrow capitalism’s restrictive status quo. When the chemicals set the classic constants of intelligence, gender and sexual orientation in motion, the foundation of obsolete individualism is eroded, and transitions into a concluding hyperphase as an escalating consumtarian underclass phenomenon. Therefore it is the consumtarian who, right to the bitter end, forces herself to constantly improve and refine herself and her own identity, to invoke a hotly desired underlying ego-essence, accompanied by tabloid culture’s demands for consumption-generating self-frustration. The netocrat, on the other hand, has long stopped believing in a cohesive individual and instead cultivates innumerable different personalities, not uncommonly invoked by and developed with the aid of carefully designed chemical cocktails.

The myth of sobriety is crushed once and for all. Sobriety was invented in the newly-industrialised Europe in the 1830s with the purpose of keeping the factory workers in check. But of course no form of sobriety exists, and has never done so. The human brain is a battlefield for constant conflicts between lots of different hormones and chemicals. There is no sober ego: that we refrain from alcohol or other external stimulants, does not mean that a chemical equilibrium prevails in our brain, where all levels constantly vary wildly. Ask a woman who has been pregnant or a man who has lived with a pregnant woman. And we self-medicate all the time to the best of our abilities, carry out various actions in a more or less desperate hope that the brain’s reward system will make us happy with sundry chemical kicks. This becomes evident at the same moment that the agent is divided and appears as the first subject who determines the mood of the agent, and as the second subject that experiences the mood that the first subject has decided on and administered. Thereby, chemical liberation fans the growth of dividualism. And late capitalism’s bizarre, global quest for the enormously extensive, illegal drug trade appears to be the last exploding supernova in the tragicomic history of the myth of sobriety.

Syntheism is the home where psychedelic practices are carried out responsibly and with creativity with regard to what is best for the congregation and the participating agents. Where solid scientific facts meet reported spiritual experiences, a practice is constructed which is often carried out in defiance of prevailing norms and laws in the surrounding society. But psychedelic practice is an act of faith of the inquiring mind, a truth as an act, before which the syntheist never subordinates herself to the nation state and the narrow-minded and prejudiced norms of bourgeois society. This applies even if chemical liberation entails a syntheist martyrdom. The social arena is of course already filled with a host of different psychedelic practices. The Swedish historian Rasmus Fleischer also points to the fact that even pathologised psychological states such as eating disorders and other self-destructive behaviour must be regarded as psychedelic practices. Sexuality and entheogens are closely related to each other. This explains, for example, why it is extremely hard to be focused on both things at once. Both sexuality and entheogens are fundamentally a question of manifesting the drive, that is, to repeat what is meaningless ad infinitum. But through this meaningless repetition, meaning is created, where sexuality generates eros and the entheogens generate philia.

Practising sensual actions in the entheogenic state liberates the actions from all forms of sexuality; they can therefore advantageously assume a central role in the entheogenic ritual without the ritual thereby being sexualised. Entheogens namely make the subject aware of the meaningless emptiness of the sexual act, which means that the sensual act without sexuality – where Atheos transitions into Entheos – releases a powerfully transcendent ecstasy in the entheogenic state. Man constantly longs to get away from extimacy within himself towards intimacy with his closest friends. But intimacy is only possible when two or more agents really understand each other. Where language does not suffice to convey understanding, sensuality through eros and the entheogens through philia are used as precisely the spiritual tools that strengthen and maintain the intimacy between people. It is precisely because of their enormous existential and subversive potential that sexuality and the entheogens have regularly become the objects of the most false accusations, the most bizarre taboos and the most brutal persecutions throughout history. The forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge is the oldest and probably best known euphemism for the psychedelic substance.

The reason for this moral panic and these eschatological propaganda campaigns is that sexuality and entheogens are associated with both pure pleasure and if possible even more so with subversive mysticism and its search for a mental, or if one prefers, a spiritual rather than a physiological pleasure. Under capitalism, sex and chemicals are regarded as incompatible with industrious work in the socio-economic-affluence-promoting factories. Sexual and chemical minimalism is therefore promoted for educative purposes and disseminated with vehement rabidness – as a kind of secular fundamentalism, with zero tolerance as the new utopian salvation – as soon as industrialism takes hold of Europe and North America during the 19th century. Pure and thus animalistic pleasure stirs up both envy and terror, for how does one go about domesticating unreserved pleasure? How does one accommodate it into civilisation’s death worship without castrating, distorting, prohibiting and destroying it?

Subversive mysticism injects yet another threat, since its practitioners are not perceived as difficult to control in the same way as the sexually experimenting. Rather – which is even worse – they are experienced as if in some obscure manner they actually control the suspicious one himself. Therefore throughout history, this eucharistiphobia repeatedly expresses itself either through sexuality being made taboo if entheogens are tolerated in any way, or that entheogens are banned if liberated sexuality happens to be tolerated. Most paradigms and societies hate and attempt to minimise and if possible exterminate these two phenomena. The esoteric is equated with the satanic. Only in the syntheist utopia with its theological anarchism can the dream of liberated sexuality be found side by side with the dream of a free usage of entheogens – with the express ambition of realising the enormous potential for humanity of both of these dreams. For what is the anarchist society if not the very community where human pleasure is no longer restricted? And from the reverse perspective, what is thought control in its deepest sense, if not in fact a quest to control sex and drugs? Or to express the matter as a popular, countercultural t-shirt slogan: Drug control is thought control.

Revolutions are fundamentally material, not spiritual. Revolutions consist of new technological complexes, not of flocks of courageous heroes. The real revolution, as we said, is not the French Revolution in 1789, but the arrival of the printing press in the 1450s, without which what is called the French Revolution would have been an impossibility. The history of mankind is a dialectic between the constant the body and the variable technology. This dialectic was fundamentally changed with the genesis of 21st century human technologies, where even the body is technologised. This new human being, an android, a cyborg, is no longer human, but transhuman. The body is no longer a predetermined, fixed object to relate to, but an ongoing project that we ourselves are influencing and reshaping all the while, and in the long run also creating. Whether we want to or not, we have been cast into the transhumanist revolution, which is chemical liberation par excellence. But in order to place the transhumanist revolution in its correct context, we must define its relationship to the informationalist event.

So if revolutions only occur of their own accord – whether they are emergent or contingent phenomena – how can syntheists steer the three dramatic and parallel revolutions of our time towards a single common event: the singularity? In the world of physics, a singularity is a state where temperature, pressure and curvature are infinite at the same time. In such a singularity a universe, for example, can expand ten million times in a single moment, which makes possible, for example, the cosmic inflation in conjunction with the birth of our own universe. The singularity is a possibility for a universe such as ours to arise spontaneously. Precisely because the universal expansion is an expansion within nothing, it may be inflationary, far beyond the speed of light (which is otherwise the greatest possible speed within this universe). So how does syntheism relate to the Universe? What characterises the relationship between Man and his feared superior – the Universe?

An excellent theological starting point is the experience “the Universe rolled right over and crushed me, with colossal and indifferent weight, and this steam-rolling made me both religious and deeply grateful”, a reaction that witnesses recount time after time after having, for example, gone through the ayahuasca and huachuma rituals in South America or the iboga rituals in Central Africa, which are considered the most powerful but also the most traditional psychedelic practices that humanity has developed. It becomes even more interesting when these recurring testimonies are followed by the words “And aside from this there is nothing in the experience that can be verbalised”. This is the core of the syntheist spiritual experience. Its doctrine takes us the whole way to its practice. But the syntheist spiritual experience in itself can never be verbalised and it is precisely for this reason that it goes under the paradoxical name the unnamable. What we both can and should verbalise, however, is the logical insight that we attain after the life-altering meeting with the unnamable: The criminalisation of entheogenic substances must be regarded as the greatest and most tragic case of mass religious persecution in history. Rarely if ever has human evil been so simple-minded and banal. Therefore first and foremost syntheism strives for humanity at long last to have access to complete freedom of religion. It might be about time.

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58