Modern Mysticism in the Mad Mundi: An Antidote to Meaninglessness
By: August Mayne
Tags: Religion, Psychology, Consciousness, Mysticism, Science

Rationality is one of the greatest gifts of our existence. Our ability to apprehend beyond the world of immediate sensation has endowed us with capabilities and luxuries that our ancestors could not have dreamed of. It is also our greatest weakness, as we can rationalize our way into any mode of being. The intellect is proficient at mitigating fear, and we can tell ourselves whatever story that keeps us in line with our current selves or adopt ones that moves us ostensibly forward. However, it can also become drunk on its own power and leave the world of immediate experience completely behind. In the age of modernity, the subject has been left entirely out of the discourse as, more and more, our cultures and belief systems have adopted material reductionism, the idea that we are nothing more than a random propagation within an incomprehensibly vast timeline; that meaning, purpose, and divinity are nothing more than mere “rationalizations” used to assuage the fact of our inevitable demise.

There is good reason for this phenomenon. A millennium ago, the church demonized everything that was in nature, that was material, and proclaimed that anything that was spirit could not be manifest within the physical world. One of the core truths of humanity, however, is to look where we are told not to, and so the minds of the day set about trying to discover spirit hidden within materia, a practice we now refer to as alchemy. Alchemy is the prototype of our modern scientific tradition, i.e. the scientific method. Interesting to note how the views of our modern scientific culture and archaic religiosity overlap despite the two wanting nothing to do with one another. Both make the claim that there is no spirit to be found in the physical world or through direct experience, with the exception of the church’s chosen members that would have the direct experience of the divine for all that were “beneath” them. Science has thrown out the idea of spirit altogether, favoring only the physical.

Hyperrationalism is the foundation for the postmodern condition, which makes a claim worth examining: that all human experience is idiosyncratic to the individual and that such interpretations of reality are heavily influenced if not inseparable from arbitrary systems of culture. It fails to acknowledge, however, any real shared human experience, and some of the systems it claims as arbitrary are in fact hard-wired, as can be observed by the ways in which we are embodied. We need only look at our five senses to understand that there are limited ways of apprehending reality.

Particularly over the 20th century, rationalism boiled to a head. This is what led Nietzsche to proclaim the death of God. Humanity had become drunk upon its own powers of perception and doggedly fought to remove any irrational influence. The 20th century saw the most horrific consequences of hyperrationalism (eugenics in Nazi Germany, communism and genocide in the USSR, China, etc.) stemming from our confusion of humanity with the divine. The Enlightenment was equally important in altering this human-divinity relationship, however the pendulum had only swung in the opposite direction — another core truth of humanity. Until we began apprehending the physical and not just the phenomenological truth of the Universe, e.g. heliocentricity and the rise of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, humanity and all other manifestations of the physical world were considered profane or unholy, to be denied and distrusted. Hyperrationalism did away with the idea of divinity altogether, holding Humankind as most high. Now we have the opportunity to balance the scales and solidify our species’ plane within the cosmic order. No one is right in this argument that chooses a side. It requires an examination of our conceptions of what is divine and profane, what is sacred and what is secular. Humanity, like God, is neither divine nor profane, good nor evil, but both. God is within the motion of all things seen and unseen, and we are integral to that process of being. The development of self-awareness offers us the ability to envision alternatives. As a result we can (and have emphatically) divorced ourselves from the rule of Nature though we are still motivated by Her drives in every moment. It is difficult to be satisfied when we continually imagine more luxurious lives with more fun, more engagement, more sex, more wealth, etc.

Mysticism can be expressed as a redirection of the intellect to attend to inner experience and to admit humility in the face of what it cannot know, to develop a faith in the infinite connections that link our existence with that of the whole Universe. It does not seek to explain away the phenomena common to all of us such as dreams, intuitions, synchronicities, or direct mystical experience. Neither does it reject the power of the intellect to discern and understand the nature of physical reality. The heart of science is observation, but how does one observe the observer?

Modern mysticism, then, can be a powerful antidote in this world gone mad. The plethora of competing narratives has made the apprehension of truth impossible, and few are willing to admit their incapability of understanding the problem. In the eyes of the modern mystic, there is appreciation and constructive criticism and debate, not this panacea of hatred and derision so endemic in this pandemic. It fully appreciates the wisdom and arrogance of scientific inquiry while savoring and investigating the mystery of existence. Heart and mind need not be opposed, they can exist in harmony. Terrence McKenna referred to this phenomenon as the Archaic Revival, the union of our modern skill and expertise with the rites and experiences of our ancestors. He certainly had a preference for the sacred medicine/psychedelic components of our antiquity, and it is apparent why. There are few things as powerful as a psilocybin or dimethyltryptamine experience to awaken us to the realities beyond the ones that we can immediately apprehend.

The virtue of mysticism is that it validates and relies upon the subjective experience, the phenomenon of being alive and self-aware. This is the component our modern worldview eschews and ridicules, rationalizing deities and worlds beyond the physical as mere stories to comfort our fear of death. Mysticism does not ask that we sacrifice our doubt or reason, in fact it asks we exercise them while remaining open to the mystery. It asks that we become disciplined but makes no distinction to the path. Because mysticism is concerned with direct experience, the only one that holds sway on the path is the individual that takes it. Any of the traditions of antiquity, many of which survive to the present day, are helpful. In my own experience each offers their own wisdom and are best approach as an amalgam. There are certain areas of overlap, of course, such as engagement with the breath, methods of observing and honing awareness, etc.

Mysticism does require a degree of faith in the beginning, as our modern minds are so distracted and enfeebled that it can take a great deal of practice and patience before anything becomes palpable. However, this faith is rewarded by bolstering awareness of direct encounters with the divine. I will argue that we encounter the divine more or less constantly, and in moments of our deepest despairs and greatest losses it overwhelms us, but often we do not recognize the nature of it. As one continues along the path, faith is rewarded by direct encounter which promotes greater awareness of the mystical all around us, creating a generative positive feedback loop that helps us to hear the messages more clearly in their many varieties. If any of this has resonated, there is a truth that is being spoken to you. I will not attempt to persuade anyone to take any one particular path or suggest ways to approach mystical practice — these I leave to the individual. I will, however, offer some of my direct experiences with the divine to elucidate the subtleties in which they approach us, and the dangers of rationalizing them away.