The Modern Pioneers

From the Lesson

Nietzsche closes Zarathustra with the Zeichen — the sign — the arrival of the lion and the doves that tells the prophet his higher men are on their way. He does not describe those higher men. He leaves the description as a task for the reader.

This lesson attempts a partial description. It names four disciplines that, together, constitute what the modern practitioner of the systems catalogued in this Portal is doing when he or she practices them seriously. The practitioner who takes up all four is not merely a hobbyist of the esoteric; she is a pilot — one of the small first cohort — of what Nietzsche called the self-overcome human being.

Discipline One — Meditation as Sounding Chamber

The forty-minute morning sit — vipassana, zazen, dzogchen, self-inquiry, breath-observation, choiceless awareness, or any of the disciplined traditions catalogued in this Portal — is the sounding chamber in which the tuning-fork of Part I can actually be applied. The practitioner who has not built this chamber cannot hear which of her values ring solid and which sound hollow, because she does not sit still long enough to hear anything at all. Meditation is not the goal; it is the acoustic condition under which every other discipline becomes legible.

Discipline Two — Entheogenic Exploration in a Container

Where legally and safely available, the disciplined use of the entheogenic sacraments (psilocybin in the Oregon and Colorado programmes, MDMA in the MAPS Phase III protocols, ayahuasca in the Peruvian and Colombian vegetalista lineages, the Bwiti iboga initiation in Gabon, the traditional Native American Church peyote ceremony where the practitioner has legitimate access) is the operative discipline by which the tablet-writing capacity described in the McKenna lesson is actually recovered. Container is the operative word. Without a container — set, setting, tradition, sitter, integration — the entheogen is a route to the failure modes rather than a route through them. With a container, it is one of the most powerful accelerators of the individuation process available to the modern human being.

Discipline Three — Grounding in the Earth

Zarathustra's first commandment — bleibt der Erde treu, remain faithful to the earth — is the discipline that keeps the first two disciplines from producing an inflated, disembodied, ungrounded practitioner of the sort who quickly becomes a hazard to himself and his community. Grounding is literal: the daily walk, the garden, the animal companion, the local food, the human friend, the physical work with the hands, the ecological attention to the place where one actually lives. It is also symbolic: the natal chart contemplated as this life in this body, not an escape from it; the Tarot draw sat with as a mirror for the actual week, not a prediction of an imaginary one; the dream received as a message from this psyche, not a portal to somewhere else. Every discipline in this Portal has an earth-form and a fugitive-form. The practitioner cultivates the earth-form.

Discipline Four — Building New Structures

This is the discipline that most exactly answers Zarathustra's demand to break the old tablets and write new ones. The practitioner does not merely receive the tradition; she builds. She builds new metaphysical structures — the private working cosmology that integrates what she has actually learned, distinct from the inherited creeds of her childhood. She builds new religious structures — the small circle of practitioners who meet monthly for a shared ritual, the home altar, the annual solstice observance, the personal calendar of feast days drawn from her own encounters rather than from a distant priesthood. She builds new cultural structures — the essay, the podcast, the local circle, the piece of writing that transmits what she has learned to the next practitioner in her line. She builds new artistic structures — the drawing, the song, the poem, the film, the sculpture in which her operative material takes public form and becomes available to others as a symbol. And she builds new literal structures — the studio, the retreat house, the garden, the small business, the family — inside which the other four disciplines have room to develop across decades.