Wandering Stars

About Mysticism and the Mystical Experience

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”

― Meister Eckhart

“The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical.”

― Albert Einstein

The Wandering Stars philosophy maintains that Mysticism is the perennial taproot of all vital spirituality, and furthermore, that it is just as much our birthright to experience the mystical as it is to express any other noble human impulse, whether creative, ethical, scientific, or philosophical. The human religious impulse, which is simply our need for spiritual community and the preservation of hard-won spiritual knowledge, itself springs from the deep root of the mystical experience.

Mysticism’s unique power to open the inner door to transcendent spiritual experience and awareness is often misunderstood, and it is generally dismissed by the incredulous as nothing more than a morbid fantasy, an obsession with death and an imaginary afterlife, and a immature fascination with paranormal powers like clairvoyance, channeling of spirits and psychedelic mental states. Most especially, for those who are committed to such a materialist view of life, the word mysticism and the associated terms “occult” (which means hidden) and “esoteric” (understood only by a small exclusive group) is a label meant to warn people away from anything that violates their own limited standards of everyday, conventional norms of rationality.

Unfortunately, in the West, the various expressions of mysticism have been damned as “paganism” by the prevalent forms of Christianity, and widely considered harmful, heretical and even Satanic - ever since Roman times at any rate. Meanwhile the “enlightened” secular materialist/atheist simply waves them all away off hand as the uneducated and superstitious attempts of ignorant people to try to make themselves feel better about the vicissitudes of this apparently cruel world, and of their and their loved one’s inevitable and (to them) absolutely final death.

With the advent of the psychedelic culture of the 60’s, mysticism began to make inroads back into the group consciousness, and the rest is truly history; but in the very capitalistic Western societies, there was a not-so-coincidental boom of those who saw an opportunity to make lots of money from it. Thus, the so-called New Age movement was born, with its barrage of various gurus, teachers, products and miracle cures of varying degrees of spiritual authenticity - top to bottom. In fact, many of you might wonder if Wandering Stars, or our own ‘The Egyptian’ sacred oils, unguents and incense for sale here aren’t simply just more of the same. We will leave that to you, dear reader, to decide. I will say here that I am sure that the Beatles and the Maharishi were sincere back then, and so am I today.

While the New Age certainly did put mysticism and various mystical systems on the cultural map and into the public spotlight, there was also the persistent problem of snake-oil salesmen and cult personalities who sought, and still seek, not only to load their bank accounts, but also to gain power over others for their own self-grasping ends. The unfortunate result: they raise a noxious smokescreen that burns the eyes and stinks in the nostrils of those curious and open-minded people who would otherwise be quite open to seeking out the mystical experience.

“Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.”

― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

Tom Robbins repeats a commonly felt conviction among the “spiritual but not religious” among you, I am sure. And he isn’t wrong, that is, as long as the religion he speaks of is one that doesn’t practice and/or demonizes mysticism, as with most contemporary Christian churches. However, I am concerned with this burgeoning anti-religionism since it is at odds with reality, and generally damns the beneficial mystical religious traditions wholesale along with the one(s) that betrayed them. Instead of accusing “religion” of killing mysticism, Robbins would have been better to name the actual killers, rather than promote general anti-religionism.

The “spiritual but not religious” person’s viewpoint is perhaps a natural response to the sins of the Christian church, as is atheism, which I feel is are both necessary and healthy responses to the fraud perpetrated by Christianity for generations since the early days of the Roman Catholic Church. But as I say far too often, we should take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The ani-religionist hasn’t really thought it through completely you see; a religion is nothing more than an organized community institution, established as a place of meeting and to record and pass down hard-won spiritual knowledge, much like a university. In fact, most of the “spiritual but not religious” people actually practice techniques which are of derived from two particularly large and well established religions: Hinduism and Buddhism. You would have no yoga or meditation techniques to practice were it not for those religions retaining and passing down the knowledge through their institutions.

We should look into the word itself for insight: the word religion is from the Latin re-ligio - to reconnect. Like the Hindu word Yoga, which means to yoke, it suggests a means to reconnect with the divine, which is precisely what modern mystics and the “spiritual but not religious” seek. In this way, the Wandering Stars philosophy and practice is a religion of sorts, since it seeks the same ends and uses pretty much the same means.

Meanwhile, there is a movement now among the secular materialist scientists to a return to the divine, what they call Anatheism - a return to god, whose most vocal champion is scientist Rupert Sheldrake, whose books and Youtube presence is well worth looking into. A link is offered below.

“Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men´s eyes, because they know - or think they know - some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.”

― Bram Stoker, Dracula

In truth, mysticism is our genetic birthright - as current research on mystical experience in neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary cognitive science now shows. Our universal potential for mystical experience has been revealed to be indelibly engraved upon our brains – we are genetically coded for transcendence. This research was ably presented by in the 2004 book “The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes” by geneticist Dean Hamer. This includes the presence of highly specialized neural receptors which have evolved over tens of thousands of years expressly to receive the intake of consciousness expanding entheogens such as Cannabis and Psilocybin, among others. For example, it has only been recently proven that the early forms of Judaism circa 450 BCE burned cannabis on it’s temple altars as a form of divine intoxication.

Current studies with the psychedelics, which were only fairly recently released for research by the FDA, have shown them to not only to be virtually harmless and nearly always pleasant when used in controlled settings, but actually serve as powerful medicine in the treatment of trauma, addiction, depression and PTSD. Remarkably, these startling insights are emerging more from science labs and psychology clinics than from academic research centers or bodies of religious study, shining a bright spotlight on the biological basis for our deep psycho-spiritual or otherwise Mystical experiences. See Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy: A Paradigm Shift in Psychiatric Research and Development from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Unfortunately, all of these nearly harmless and highly beneficial sacred plant entheogens, except one, are on the FDA list of Schedule I Dangerous Narcotics, and remain a Federal offence to possess, grow or trade. That one is the crown jewel of our work here at Wandering Stars: Salvia divinorum, the Diviner’s Sage. See The Salvia Divinorum FAQ.

Rather than undercutting mysticism by reducing spiritual experiences to merely brain states, this new research suggests that our brains are in fact biologically hardwired and oriented toward seeking the mystical experience - including through the aid of sacred entheogens. It has become more and more accepted by science, which has grappled with the mysterious nature and origins of consciousness, to view the brain now more as a receiver, and consciousness more along the lines of a source of transmission and information, like the internet “cloud”. Of course, this is precisely what the mystical traditions have taught for many millennia. See The Brain as a Receiver research paper.

“there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.”

― Albert Einstein

What this all appears to be leading to is a new social/spiritual movement in it’s own right, where materialist scientists begin to jump the atheist ship, and through the actual science itself - along with logic, find a way back to the divine through Mysticism. As mentioned earlier, this return to the divine from the place of atheism, has been referred to as anatheism, a term coined by Richard Kearney in his “Anatheism: A Return to God After God”, which speaks directly to such materialists. The biological scientist Rupert Sheldrake, whose fascinating theories on novelty as a teleology are unsurprisingly shunned by mainstream science as psuedo-science, has run with that ball. I offer his engaging lecture here - it reflects much of the Wandering Stars philosophy through the eyes of a learned and previously atheistic scientist.

Anatheism: Rediscovering God - Rupert Sheldrake Lecture

For me, the most poignant part of Sheldrake’s lecture was his conclusion, based upon the science, that the Universe is conscious, that all of the Stars are conscious, including our Sun. That makes of them beings, which ties in to the premise of our Ancient Egyptian Sacred Sciences, expounded here at Wandering Stars. Here we see that when the ancients put a face on the sun, it wasn’t just to be cute.

This is all very heartening and fascinating, of course, but as important as these philosophical and scientific approaches to mysticism may be, it is only through the practical cultivation of the mystical that we may personally experience it; and this is done through the application of some tried and true methods: meditation, yoga, ceremony, aromatherapy, sound therapy and the use of entheogenic power plants.

These practices cut right through and transcend all the talking points and rhetoric, and each one, in their own way, truly opens up mystical states of consciousness in all who earnestly seek after it. And in my opinion, of all of these, none is more powerful to this end than the psychedelic experience. For those of you who are curious but afraid of the risks, I heartily recommend this well researched and cited article What do we know about the risks of psychedelics?

Even so, of the aforementioned practices, meditation is still the primary doorway to the liberating insights of the mystical experience. Meditation is an inbuilt human capacity that anyone can practice, no matter what one’s belief system may be, although it has been traditionally applied most intensely in disciplined religious settings like monasteries and ashrams, which are not for everybody.

Still, the meditative yoga of Hinduism, the contemplative practices of mystical or “Gnostic” Christianity, Buddhist meditative practices, and similar practices in other religious traditions all work with our inherent mental programs that activate a biological process that leads from everyday awareness to a non-dual union with the whole of life - the “cosmic religious sense” spoken of by Einstein earlier. And therefore they all have something to teach us.

“I'm painfully aware that the experts in fields like religion and spirituality sometimes feel that bringing mysticism down so far into ordinary life is an insult to the great mystics and makes it all too light and breezy. I feel just the opposite. I believe that one day we'll understand that we've lost out on religion because we made it too lofty and distant. I see it as a simple quality of everyday life, and in that simplicity lie its beauty and importance.”

― Thomas Moore, A Religion of One's Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World

About Mysticism and the Mystical Experience © 2020 Shane Clayton - Wandering Stars Publishing (except as noted)

All Rights Reserved

Wandering Stars is dedicated to expounding the Sacred Science of Ancient Egypt

In memory and in honor of John Anthony West

Born July 9, 1932 - Wested February 6, 2018

AUM