Mysticism: Notes

It is the wee hours of the morn, and everyone with a trace of common sense is soundly asleep. I've been giving some serious thought to our shared predicament as human beings-- the "existential crisis," i suppose you could call it.

I felt a call from the deeper Mind-- you would probably say, "imagination"-- to come into the office and write you a letter. This was a compelling pull of Love.

All the things that I believe-- about pre-existence of the Soul, about polybiography, about Mind and world, about God as supreme Unconscious--these are not just cheap, shallow ideas that came off the top of some "new ager's" head. It was not all made up by some yuppie who was looking for something to do on a boring Sunday afternoon. These teachings represent a very profound, ancient, and venerable philosophy. It has a few names, but I call it the "Enlightenment Tradition," or,
"Love-tradition."

It is also called the "Way of Love," "psychonautics," the "Way of Mind," and,most commonly, mysticism. Please do not let this word turn you off. It is abused regularly by religious leaders, scientists, and journalists, who should all know better. In fact, the only ones who use it correctly are academic scholars of religion and history, and mystics themselves.

What is a "mystic"? She is a person who has discovered that Mind is more real than matter. She has also found that Mind has several levels, including a "collective Unconscious," and a Core that is indivisible and perfect, traditionally called "Spirit," or "God."

So, she has completely, absolutely rejected the childish image of God as a "big daddy in the sky," a fairy-tale knight who gallops into your life and makes everything "okay." She knows that the only God is Love. God has never been the "ultimate extraterrestrial," some person "out there." God is "in here." God is not loving grandfather, Santa Claus, or genie.

This Way is not a religion. In fact, its major adherents were usually hunted and even murdered by the orthodox of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

This philosophy was born in the crucible of agonizing pain, horrific, utter anxiety. It was created by men and women who felt backed into a corner, squeezed mercilessly by a relentless universe. They were forced into the position that I (and probably you) have found ourselves in: Figure things out, or just go nuts! (That is, at any rate, how the discovery happened to me.)

Mysticism grew out of an ocean of blood, sweat, and tears. Its founders and proponents were people exactly like us-- those caught in the merciless tines of what seemed to be a blind, deaf, and uncaring cosmos.

Either the cosmos has meaning, or it does not. To live in a cosmos without any meaning was unacceptable to the sages, teachers, and masters of the Enlightenment Tradition. Did they have to come up with some very "strange"-sounding ideas? You bet that they did!

But it was better than going mad! These were sensitive, intelligent people who never gave up hope that the cosmos did have meaning. For some reason, they humbly concluded, they were just not seeing (able to see) that meaning. They were forced, often by horror, to think, not only "outside the box," but outside the familiar cosmos as we have always known it.

Here's just a simple example: As a part of their philosophy, they said that nothing existed but "Mind" or energy, sometimes organized into patterns. They made the most outrageous claim that could ever be imagined in your wildest, craziest dreams: They claimed that the whole "material" world existed only because that is the way that we perceive or interpret it. And finally, they also concluded that the entire cosmos was a dream-state within a great Mind. "Solid matter" did not really exist. Ultimately, that is, in "truth" (reality), there was no material cosmos.

Physicists, who were no-nonsense, hard-nosed, skeptical, materialistic, and scientific, had a ball, that lasted for centuries, laughing at these crazy mystics. In the twenty-first century, they are no longer laughing.

Why? Because of research in quantum physics, also called "ultramicroparticle physics." For we have known for a long time that everything is made of atoms. Atoms are made of neutrons, protons, and electrons. These are called "microparticles."

But when we started to ask the final question, "What are these microparticles made of?" we discovered an amazing, astonishing truth: There was never anything solid within the atom. Atoms are made up of "bundles" or "packets" of force called "quanta." Matter was a kind of mythology or "illusion," as the mystics had always claimed! The entire "material cosmos was energy, after all!

If the mystics had been right in such an outrageous, mind-blowing claim, might they not be right about other things as well?

When I first heard the word "mystic," probably as a teen, I just carelessly dismissed it as some kind of satanic or demonic "thing," although I had zero education or exposure.

Now that I've read fifty, and written twelve, books about the subject, I feel that I have a basis to be able to talk rationally and meaningfully about it. In fact, it is the greatest pleasure in the world to help people sort through the billions of haystacks to find the precious platinum "needle" of reality (truth). For, in the end, it all comes down to that single, simple question: What is real? With that, comes a secondary: Is anything ABSOLUTELY real?

Please take a couple of minutes of your valuable time to check out our website, at: loveministries.org

There, you can access, free, all of my books. You can also download them, free. (If you like real books, you can also order them.) Hang in there! The "fires" of hell are not to torment, but to burn away all the excess dross, leaving only the nonflammable Jewel!