If you die before you die, You won’t die when you die.
That’s the key.
I call it The Immortality Key.
It’s the big job.
It’s what we’re all looking for, right?
The meaning of life.
What does it mean to be alive?
What happens when we die?
Is there a God?
Is there a point to any of this?
Well, according to the ancient philosophers and mystics, there are answers to these questions.
Like, real answers.
They’re not hidden away in some book.
Or some dark corner of the internet.
They’re not necessarily in your local church or temple.
And even if Moses, Jesus and the Buddha himself were sitting in your living room …
they couldn’t tell you.
Because it’s nothing you can actually learn.
Nothing for your rational brain to compute, at least.
You know, my hero, the late Joseph Campbell, once said: it’s not the meaning of life
that we’re after …
“I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive … so that
we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
But you can’t very well experience that rapture, until you’ve experienced its opposite.
“You don’t know what you got ‘til its gone,” says Joni Mitchell.
So until you’ve experienced death – not in some abstract or metaphorical way – but
an actual death that feels acutely and terrifyingly real.
In this lifetime.
How can you know what it means to be alive?
And how can you even talk about an afterlife until you’ve seen it for yourself?
These are the Mysteries.
Now, in some form or another, these Mysteries made their way through the high civilizations
of antiquity.
Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China.
But it comes to us – to Western civilization -- through the Ancient Greeks.
Many of whom spent a lot of time in North Africa, by the way.
13 years in the case of Plato, the godfather of Western thought.
So what did we inherit from these high civilizations?
What are these Mysteries?
Like the Mysteries of Eleusis that called to the best and brightest of Athens and Rome,
including Plato and Marcus Aurelius, from about 1500 BC to the 4th century AD?
They were sacred rituals for turning mortals into immortals.
You went to Eleusis as a human being, and you walked away a god.
How did that happen?
Through the ceremonial experience of death and re-birth.
Let’s be very clear: Eleusis and the other mystery cults of the time were the real religion
of the Ancient Greeks.
The people who built Western civilization: democracy, the arts and sciences, the theater
that became our Hollywood, the Olympic Games that became our sports industry, the open
marketplace of ideas that we take for granted every day on social media.
Didn’t you ever wonder how the people who invented all this, and the very word for skepticism,
could somehow believe in a bunch fairy tales?
Did they really think Zeus was perched on some mountaintop, hurling thunderbolts down
at us hapless humans?
Or Poseidon was in the middle of the sea, patrolling the wind and waves with a friggin’
trident?
C’mon, man.
Take Cicero.
The great Roman statesman of the 1st century BC.
He called Eleusis “the most exceptional and divine thing Athens ever produced.”
Not democracy and free speech and all the rest of it.
Eleusis was the thing we could never forget.
It was said to hold the entire species together.
Why?
Because you went to its sacred temple to experience nothing less than death and re-birth.
And only those who had made the long march from Athens to the torch-lit sanctuary, drunk
a magic potion, and witnessed the “blessed sight and vision” (as Plato called it) were
said to conquer death.
By experiencing just a taste of immortality – that rapture of being alive.
If you think about it, that’s more science than religion.
Once you’ve seen God, there’s no un-seeing God.
You’ve proven the hypothesis for yourself.
So what the hell was goin’ on?
Frankly, we don’t know.
It was all secret.
To reveal what you saw in Eleusis was to risk execution.
Which is why Huston Smith, perhaps the most influential religious scholar of the 20th
century, called it “the best-kept secret” in history.
Like other rites of passage, it was thought some “archaic techniques of ecstasy” were
to blame for that famous vision at Eleusis.
The same techniques employed since time immemorial in “tribal initiation rites” or “admission
to a secret society” to create that near-death experience.
Like fasting and sleep deprivation.
That’ll definitely get the job done.
But there was another possibility.
Remember that magic potion?
In Greek, it was called the kukeon.
A kind of primitive beer.
But it wasn’t the only magic potion splashing around the Mediterranean.
Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy and madness, he had a potion too.
To drink his holy wine was to drink the blood of the god.
In fact, you were drinking the god to become the god.
This is where we get the whole idea of enthusiasm, from the Greek word enthousiazo.
The essence of the god lives within you.
You have become divine.
So what kind of beer and wine was this?
In 1978, at the height of the War on Drugs, a controversial theory claimed these magic
potions must have been some crazy psychedelic concoction.
Beer and wine spiked with mind-altering drugs.
Maybe that was the best-kept secret behind the vision at Eleusis that lasted for 2,000
years.
Maybe that fueled the wild parties of Dionysus in the mountains and forests from Spain to
Italy to Greece to the Holy Land – giving birth to our poetry and music, our comedy
and tragedy.
Either way, the psychedelic theory was the wrong idea at the wrong time.
With no hard, scientific data to support it.
Why does any of this matter?
Because at the time, there was another healer who was into Mysteries.
And he had a magic potion too.
And it made you immortal too.
And he told weird stories that were recorded in Ancient Greek.
The same Ancient Greek that was spoken by Plato and the initiates of the Greek Mysteries.
And when this healer was asked why he told such weird stories, or parables, he said:
well, I’m talking about musteria here.
And he uses that word in Greek: Mysteries.
I’m not gonna share the damn secret with just anybody, he says.
But I’ll tell you what.
“I’m here to give sight to the blind.”
As long as you die for it.
“You must be born again before you can see God’s Kingdom,” he says And once you do
that: “I tell you for certain (amen, amen) that you will see Heaven open and God’s
angels going up and down.”
In Greek, this healer was Iesous.
We call him Jesus.
And just like Dionysus, he was the son of God, born of a Virgin, who took on human flesh
to leave us a gift.
The gift of holy wine, his blood, that turns humans into gods.
But unlike Dionysus, Iesous founded the biggest religion the world has ever known.
Today, it’s over 2.5 billion people.
Like, a third of the planet.
And if the earliest Christians knew how to brew up a psychedelic beer or mix up a psychedelic
wine.
And those magic potions were a direct path to die before you die.
To have that vision of the Kingdom of Heaven.
And the best-kept secret of Christianity is the same as the best-kept secret of the Ancient
Greece that preceded it.
Then it would re-write the entire history of Western civilization.
Now, the real question is what does this all mean for us today?
How do we die before we die in the 21st century?
There’s no one answer, of course.
But in our leading medical schools, psychedelics are proving to be a safe and reliable means
of producing that death and re-birth experience of the Ancient Mysteries.
Now, I’ve never done them myself.
Psychedelics are absolutely not for everybody.
They are powerful and unpredictable, and need to be approached with caution and reverence.
But under the right conditions, with the right preparation, there are genuine mystical reports.
Over the past 20 years, almost 75% of the volunteers at Johns Hopkins and NYU who’ve
taken just one dose of psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, will rank it
among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.
So as these compounds become legal in the coming years, it begs a big question.
Have the Mysteries returned?
Well, some of these clinical volunteers say their psilocybin journey is like a mini-death
all in itself.
A foreshadowing of what awaits them at the end of life.
And just like the initiates of the Mysteries of Eleusis or the Mysteries of Dionysus or
the earliest Christians 2,000 years ago … by pre-experiencing their death, they’ve found
the Immortality Key.
They’ve re-discovered that ancient principle: the only way to experience God is to let go
the rational mind.
And when the ego gives up, your consciousness begins to expand beyond the body, beyond space
and time, beyond the very categories of being and non-being, to find itself … looking
back at itself.
Well, there’s your new definition of God, said Joseph Campbell:
“There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man, and that
is what looks like God … this business of understanding the relationship of mortality
to something in you that is transcendent of mortality is the big job.”
But if you don’t die now, you might never experience that Ultimate Mystery of Being
as the Mystery of your Being.
That to know yourself at the deepest level … is really to know God.
I mean, we don’t have word for it, but we call it God.
This divine spark that lives in you.
And you might never understand that Heaven is not what happens when the physical body
wastes away.
And there is no afterlife.
Because there is no after.
There’s only right here, right now.
“The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth,” says the Gospel of Thomas, “and
people do not see it.”
For the ancient philosophers and mystics, it was never about living forever within the
field of time.
Just going on and on until the stars fade, and the cosmos goes dark.
It was never about life after death.
It was always about venturing into the timelessness of the infinite present to realize your own
divinity.
And the divinity of everyone and everything around you.
Which is love in its purest form.
Maybe that’s what it means to be fully alive.
And maybe that’s what ancient sacraments were for, like holy beer and holy wine.
To help us glimpse that perfect love and perfect peace.
And maybe what we’re seeing now is a modern-day sacrament descending on Western civilization.
During her psilocybin session, one of the volunteers, Dinah Bazer, a self-described
atheist, had the overwhelming feeling of “being bathed in God’s love” and the sudden epiphany
that “every moment is an eternity of its own.”
Sounds awfully familiar.
“Eternity isn’t some later time.
Eternity isn’t a long time.
Eternity has nothing to do with time.
Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out.
If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.
And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.”
If you die before you die, You won’t die when you die.
Well, if that’s the best-kept secret in history.
Maybe it’s time for the secret to
get out.