Mystical Studies And How They Work Today

By Charles Kelly


Mystics can trace their roots to the most ancient of religions, many of which can have a surviving tradition, sect or denomination. A lot of methods for worship come also come from these and may be found in traditions, customs or cultural mores in a country who had them. In one sense, the virtues in these are founded on the rituals or ceremonies that they used.

It is mostly lost today, but it has become so much a part of cultures that the consciousness of a people merely practices them as natural. Mystical studies are partly sectarian impetus, and partly the search for those lost connections to the ancient sense of the divine. Human memories are short, and conflict can have erased the connections from tribal memory.

Shamanism was also very widespread before, a kind of worship that was about the more physical aspects. The worship was for trees, rocks and animals, later denounced as barbaric by churches and also other religions. There was a custom for having kings that acted like real divinities, but when one white hair appeared anywhere on his body, he would be sacrificed on a fallow field.

The ceremony of sacrificing kinds on fields was a fertility process, helping to make land more bountiful. If his blood is joined with the earth, the belief was that divinities became satisfied and would help the land become fruitful. When agriculture became more intensive and effective, there was need for a new mystic system for people.

This was more about philosophy, deeper views of the cosmos, and it was first promoted during the rise of Jews or even earlier. The philosophers who became mystics would later found powerful religions now formally established today. They were instrumental in creating schools and the academe, inspiring the rise of arts, culture, and science and technology and the like.

Today, formal studies in mysticism are those that are academic in nature, the preserve of theologians and similar experts. The studies have been sanitized to fit the concept of higher consciousness that all axial religions espouse. The axial religions are those founded on a historical thousand year human turning point, like Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Islam.

The base practices or beliefs are seen as holdovers in the racial memory, and things like a rash of violence are seen as symptoms of these. However, there is no true connection to how ancient religions could cause these. The studies here therefore also aim to find how those practices and beliefs may be subconsciously present and active in present day cultures.

The church considers many things cardinal sins and will be connected to behavior in domestic settings or the wider compass of social action. For the studies, these are threads that can lead to understanding of darker sides of religions that had supposedly died a long time ago. Axial systems had the mission of eradicating them, but there have been survivors, running deep in hidden ancestries.

The relevant studies in this sense are therefore those that are clean, contemplative and intensive. There may even be vows for abstinence or penitence, but these studies can be secular too so that it can shed light into human experiences of the past. The aim here is to create a very refined high sense of the divinity that can help humanity progress.




About the Author: