The Dragon and the Eastern Orthodox Church
Reflecting on The Return of the Dragon in Light of Eastern Orthodox Teaching on Out of Body Experiences
When James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure to DNA in 1953, they were doing so as part of a race. Other great thinkers such as Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling and their own peer Rosalind Franklin were tight on their heels. If circumstances had been slightly different, the names we remember for discovering the structure might also be different. But once Watson and Crick posited the double helix, their discovery was confirmed by many others in their field. As more and more people looked at their solution, the confidence the world had in what they had put forth became firm. Ideas that, once formulated, find confirmation when looked at by other thinkers are on a firm foundation.
The ideas in The Return of the Dragon seem shocking. I am always hesitant to try to explain my book to someone. I would prefer they read it and get all the evidence I saw because the conclusion minus the evidence sounds slightly crazy. But what I have found is that people that know the requisite fields of study well that have read the first edition of my book generally agree with the conclusions. Further, in a sort of reverse peer review, I have found confirmation of some of the key principles in the works of historic thinkers in science, philosophy, history, and religion.
The effort of The Return of the Dragon, was to understand what happens when humans have experiences with entities and spirits while on psychedelics. And I looked at the first hand experiences in light of the principles found in science, philosophy, history and religion. And I found much support for my shocking thesis: that entities exist in another dimension and that the use of some drugs can and do bring us into contact with them.
It is interesting that in the ancient “primitive” religions, the ideas central to this book have just been assumed to be true. And I argued that Christianity itself once understood these principles. But on Christendom, I have to acknowledge that there is a certain amnesia in the church. Ask any modern Christian leader what happens when a person takes psychedelics, and the majority of them will give an answer that is quite similar to the atheist. They will talk about brain chemistry and express skepticism towards the idea that real entities and spirits are being encountered.
But I am a Western Christian (with experience and education in Catholic and Protestant institutions). And up until very recently, my experience with the churches of the East had been limited. But thanks to reading Fr. Seraphim Rose’s The Soul After Death, I have learned that the Eastern Orthodox church has much more literature about out of body experiences than the Western Church does. So I thought it might be interesting to compare the findings I have reported in the Return of the Dragon to that ancient body of literature as detailed by Rose. In making that comparison, I was amazed that (completely independently) I came to many conclusions that accord with Eastern Orthodox teaching. Below are some of those key areas of agreement.
Out of Body Experiences are Real
When people travel out of body - whether on psychedelics, in shamanist trances, or in the near death experiences of people with cardiac arrest - they experience conscious states and tell stories that sound fantastic and impossible. They speak of meeting entities, angels, demons, and elves. They speak of seeing beautiful geometries and wonderful landscapes. They speak of astral projection and state that their souls float out of their bodies.
The response among both academics studying these experiences and Western Christian leaders is most commonly something along the lines of “What a strange brain phenomenon.” But I have argued that these experiences cannot just be dismissed in this way. People see and experience things that are very hard to dismiss as dreams or hallucinations. They report seeing things they could not have seen. Experiencing things they could not have made up. And they are often personally convinced that what they saw was as real (if not more real) than what we all see every day. As a result, I concluded that we must take these experiences (at least many of them) to be true experiences of real things and not simply dream like hallucinations.
Interestingly, the Eastern Orthodox Church also has historically taken out of body experiences to be genuine experiences. Fr. Seraphim Rose reviews the large body of literature in the church detailing both the out of body experiences of saints as well as the experiences of sinners as related to the church. As a result, Rose confirms that we can and should take the experiences seriously and his words closely parallel my own on the subject,
“This general pattern of events in out-of-body experiences, hitherto unrecognized, cannot be explained adequately on the hypothesis that all such experiences were dreams and that all the ‘doubles’ described were mere hallucinations.”
In The Return of the Dragon, I wrote, “We think we are more advanced than the ancients but what if — at least on this question — they understood things better than we do?” And with the study of historic Eastern Orthodoxy, we see that again perhaps people who lived long before modernism understood things better than those of us living in the modern, post-Enlightenment West.
Entities are More Than Pure Spirit
Dark matter is an attempt by scientists to make the math of the universal laws of physics work with the observations of the universe. Dark matter is invisible yet needed to explain what we see. In Chapter Four, I argued that things seen while on DMT and other drugs might be part of the explanation for dark matter. There may be real things in other dimensions (including entities) that impact the state of the universe. When I wrote those words, I knew that this was in contradiction to much of the teaching of Western Christianity. I cited Thomas Aquinas who argued angels are bodiless and comprised of only an intellect and a will (spirit) and lack a corporeal form. Aquinas believed an angel could assume an appearance only by projecting an image into our minds. And while my argument didn’t rest on the entities having bodies, the dark matter theory certainly suggested it. So imagine my surprise when I realized that the teaching of the historic Eastern Orthodox Church confirmed the corporeal form of angels and demons!
Here is Fr. Rose on the history of Eastern thought on the subject,
“St. John Damascene, in summing up in the 8th century the teaching of the Fathers before him, states: “Compared with us, the angel is said to be incorporeal and immaterial, although in comparison with God, Who alone is incomparable, everything proves to be gross and material — for only the Divinity is truly immaterial and incorporeal.””
But he argues that this doesn’t prevent angels and demons from taking forms that do not always match their true appearance. He writes, “In saying that angels, “do not appear exactly as they are,” St. Damascene does not, of course, contradict St. Basil, who teaches that angels often appear “in the form of their own bodies.”
In short, according to Rose, the historic teaching of the Eastern church lends itself very well to everything I wrote in Chapter Four. Entities that exist in the other dimension might indeed have corporeal form and therefore might indeed be impacting the physics of this world and be detectable to science (under the placeholder name of dark matter).
Even good seeming entities are always (or almost always) bad/tricky/etc
In Chapter 6, I showed the strong correlation between societies that took drugs for spiritual purposes and those that saw serpent gods and sacrificed humans to those gods. I then used the warnings of the Christian bible and the historic church against pharmakeia to argue that perhaps the reason for the prohibition was that the entities and spirits seen while on psychedelic drugs were hostile to humans (or what the bible would call demons). I think this case was strong but at the time of my writing it I realized that additional support would have helped the reader. And sure enough, after publication some questions came. Some people that read the first edition wondered, is it possible some of the entities seen in drug induced mystical states were good? I should note that even if the answer was affirmative that some (but certainly not all) of the entities were good, it would not undermine the danger associated with the practice of using drugs for spiritual purposes (that has clearly led to much more evil than good in societies that widely practiced pharmakeia).
But this is another conclusion that I based on the evidence that I had seen was confirmed by Eastern Orthodox teaching on the subject. Fr. Rose, again summing up the historic teaching from the Greek Fathers, writes the following about entities seen in out of body experiences,
“The beings contacted in this realm are always (or almost always) demons, whether they are invoked by mediumism or other occult practices, or encountered in “out-of-body” experiences. They are not angels, for these dwell in heaven and only pass through this realm as messengers of God. They are not the souls of the dead...”
Foreshadowing the Thesis of The Return of the Dragon?
In The Soul After Death, Rose focuses primarily on near death experiences (as the title of the book suggests). But he does spend a bit of time talking about the very similar experiences that people see while practicing the occult and comparing those visions to historic Orthodox teaching as well. And in the middle of that discussion he writes the following,
“The “astral plane” can also be contacted (but not necessarily in an “out-of-body” state) through the use of certain drugs. Recent experiments in administering LSD to dying persons has produced very convincing “near-death” experiences, together with a “condensed replay” of one’s entire life, a vision of blinding light, encounters with the “dead” and with non-human “spiritual beings,” and the communication of spiritual messages concerning the truths of “cosmic religion,” reincarnation, and the like. Dr. Kubler-Ross has also been involved in these experiments.”
And in this one sentence (lacking any further discussion), Fr. Seraphim Rose intuited the very thesis of The Return of the Dragon. With his excellent scholarship of Eastern Orthodox teaching, he was able to see a very similar conclusion to the one that The Return of the Dragon took these many chapters to show.
Somewhere in the middle of writing The Return of the Dragon, I was struck how my thesis was consistent with thinkers from so many disparate fields. It made sense of science, philosophy, history, and many theological traditions. I wrote,
“And so we have an interesting overlap between traditional Christianity, ancient paganism, cutting-edge astrophysics, and the experiences that take place when someone is on psychedelics. If confirmation of an idea grows as more sources of knowledge confirm it, it seems that the idea that other dimensions exist, and that some interaction with them takes place in this world, is an idea that is gathering a firm foundation.”
What I found after reading The Soul After Death, was that the foundation must now be considered stronger. Christian thinkers from the East have concluded much of what I have concluded and done so completely independently. For these reasons, the conclusions cannot be ignored by anyone today whether Christian or not.
I'll have to check out "The Soul After Death," I agree it's important to get the Eastern perspective to help balance the West. Another way I've heard it explained is the West is heavy into WORD while the East emphasizes IMAGE. (Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination, by Godawa for example)
The best video I know from a Protestant that supports the Eastern metaphysics is Inspiring Philosophy's "Pan-entheism" (a lot of good early church quotes, his "Emergent Universe" is the good one for Christian quantum physics).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xki03G_TO4
Regardless if it's precisely true or not, it helps give that metaphysical Eastern way of thinking I think is important as it combats materialism/naturalism but without going the gnostic/kabbalist or too heavy into neo-Platonic routes. For an Eastern Orthodox guy to explain symbolgy, Jonathan Pageau's "The Symbolic World" is good on YT (like symbology of the Garden of Eden as Cosmic Structure, how after sin there was a metaphysical fall, St. Ephrem the Syrian's writings).
All that being said, one has to be careful as C.S. Lewis went off track at times into the occult side of things, something he struggled with at times - http://harrypotterpower.com/lewis.html (I still really like Lewis and that article might be too hard on him, but the quotes he made about having that "lust" for the occult is posted there he struggled with, to me it shows the power of God in leading Lewis out of it and testifies that God is greater and more desirable when you really find Him. I'm reading The Problem of Pain now).
It's why sometimes I do get a sense of fearful caution even with the Eastern Christian metaphysics, as that lust for secret gnosis going too deep obsessing on IMAGE can take hold of you and you end up believing something off track easily; like Pseudo-Dionysius I can't handle, I start getting panic attacks the same way when I was looking into occult type stuff when I was into psychedelics (AND without them I started getting those visions). So I mainly only study the Bible now, even reading that Lewis article made my heart start racing because I know exactly what that man is talking about...
"Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future" by Rose was pretty good also on the UFO's being interdimensional demons and that leading into a New Age World religion in the future.
The Eastern Church gives a particular meaning to the contemplation of the icon.
This comes from the metaphysical base on which it is based, the tripartition of reality between the sensible world, the intelligible or divine, and between the two, the world of images symbolized in the church by the iconostasis.
This tripartition is essentially oriental, it is found among the Persians in the notion of alam-al-mital, and among the Arabs with the barzak.
It is about an intermediate, median reality, where the images have a role which overflows the approach which one has of the images in the sensitive world.
This is the zone of visions. Henri Corbin gave a contemporary approach to this in-between by naming it "imaginal", to avoid confusing it with the imaginary.