Stages of the Mystical Journey

I recently spoke to a friend who confided in me that, for the first time, they had gone out into nature, at a friend’s suggestion, and gathered objects to make a nature altar. They picked particular leaves and flowers, after noting their mind’s initial resistance, and created a sacred space by their bed. That night they slept particularly well and awoke rested. Hearing this heartened me ❤

I would like to speak on stages of the mystical journey. I remember doing this same activity as my friend, and I remember the dismissive chatter of my mind back then too. Looking back at where I’ve come since then, and putting that into words, I see that I went through at least three distinct stages in my narrating / justifying / conceptualising of the mystic path. In turn, the extent to which my mind was ‘on board’ was the extent to which I freed up permission to do the activities that felt right, and to have mental peace while doing them in order to experience the outcomes. Perhaps with this framework you may feel more at ease with leaning into to your mystical pursuits.

Stage One – Placebo

So you don’t believe in anything that is faintly ‘mumbo-jumbo’. This hippy stuff is ‘woo-woo’, and God and faith and all that is so much gullible nonsense. But you still feel drawn to experiencing something out of your comfort zone, even if it’s collecting a leaf and putting it by your bed. That’s alright. We can justify it on ‘placebo’ grounds.

I started by going around my local parks and looking at the crows and thinking of the Norse God Odin. This evolved into actually saying that name out loud. That evolved into doing little symbolic actions. Tufts of ritual. Alongside this I did plently of other relational activities to things considered ‘other’ or ‘spiritual’ – leaves, nature, stone circles etc. My mind fiercely critisised me during these processes to begin with. because all it really knew was the social narrative that these things were fantasies and illigitimate. You might be having this process with your chosen modality. Wicca, prayer, meditating. That’s alright. We can at least say it is a placebo effect. It feels good. Something good comes of it, even if it is irrational. Keep going along this way and you may be drawn to more companionship, mentors and reading / learning that leads to the next stage.

Stage Two – Holistic Science

I remember the day when I changed my mind about the ‘chakras’. I’d heard plenty of them and dismissed them as Eastern, foreign, arbitrary concepts. A bit later down the line I was introduced to a (neo?) Pagan Celtic concept of ‘cauldrons’ which were apparently the ‘indigenous’ Celtic version. So now I had a reason to believe in them as they were in ‘my culture’ and not foreign. I still didn’t believe in them. That all changed when I did hours upon hours of ‘Chakra Breathing’ exercises during a Neo-Tantra course in Thailand.

This was real. There was a real different energy to each of my energy centres, and they really did store emotion, almost memory, almost experiences. My breath really was interacting with them. I couldn’t deny the experience I was having. This was entirely sober and it was repeatable. “It’s real man.” Nevertheless my explanation, if I’d been asked to give it, would have been a hazy ‘energy’ explanation that would have sounded New Age to most sceptics. Three years later I read a book which legitimised with a scientific paradigm my entire view of the chakras. They were, biologically speaking, the sympathetic nervous system. I won’t say more here bit I intend to expand upon it elsewhere.

This process, of something in the ‘woo-woo’ department becoming something in the holistic science department, was been a second stage of the journey for me in my relationship to Existence. What this ‘spiritual’ stuff is is real, scientifically. The same lesson can apply across the whole range of phenomenon. This brings us onto the third stage.

Stage Three – Faith

There came a time for me when, above and beyond the utility of these mystical processes, and above and beyond the rational explanations of them, there is the ‘Isness’ that suffuses them all. I mean a unity and coherence to everything, including selfhood, including consciousness and personality and life itself, all existence. I took the leap beyond rationality and trusted that my sincere communications, my felt will and intent beyond words is in a seamless communion with the ‘One.’ At the beginning I was doing things because I wished they were real, in a way. I felt like doing them even though a part of me thought I was silly for wanting it. Now the perspective is reversed. I think, moreso now, that my limited human perception is silly. That my mental desire to have tight, graspable concepts and defendable, provable positions – all this is the sillyness of a binary, mechanical mind. I am life within an infinity of life. I am the all even if, on a daily basis, it seems that I am only Adam the body and mind. I remember that I am forgetting my wholeness and connection to that wholeness. Forgetting that that wholeness is ordering and the agency behind all of the forms around of me, seen and unseen. This is the basis of faith. This is the third stage. And looking back, I see that the first two stages lead me here.

I do not wish to suppose that this path will be true for everyone, or that the concepts I have arrived at are the ‘right’ concepts, despite my loose wording. Rather I have narrated a process, a journey, whereby my behaviours changed and the emphasis transformed through my mind bypassing explanation, to explaining within a rational context, to arriving at trusting the legitimacy of the mystical experience without recourse to expecting to define it. It is. I follow it. I can explain it rationally, if imperfectly, but I don’t feel the need to. It exists independently of my, or I believe our, capacity to know, to name, to pin-point. In-fact much of that insistence on explanation may be at the root of divisions and diversions on the path. This existence is a gift to be experienced now. Sincerely. Whatever we name it.

Thank you for reading.