Into the Mystic!

"We were born before the wind, also younger than the sun...let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic." There's nothing like the mystic when it comes to healing ourselves. It reaches deep within, and takes what is in need of enlightenment, shines a bright light, and the process begins. Without a doubt, inner depths that form the rich, loamy, soil of the mystic can be off putting. We're scared to go down so deep, into the mystic.

We're scared, until we're in need,sometimes badly in need. James Hillman writes in his book, Healing and Fiction, that "Jung considers Freud too selective, too logical, shaping all shoes on one last. Everything may be founded on human nature, but human nature itself is founded on things beyond human nature." Nature herself is the mystic. When we've suffered in our lives, in childhood, it needs to be dealt with. Freud stopped there. We need to move on. We need to go forward into deeper dimensions of life, the mystic.

"My childhood was terrible", stated a middle-aged man. "It's taken all I have in me sometimes just to survive. It wasn't til I had the dream of  The Great Man that things began to change. I initiated my life journey of healing." William James, father of American depth psychology, wrote of "the integrated soul of all things in the cosmos without exception..." From this cosmic integrated soul, the mystic, came a transformative dream. "It gave me hope. And, I pressed ahead from there." The mystic...it gives us hope so we can press ahead from where we are onto where we are going, meant to be.

Mystic Consciousness

A relationship with the mystic in life, nature, the way of all things ushers us into a healing connection with self and significant others. It proves itself a balm in the midst of pulls to find answers outside of self, as is the case in addiction. I remember as a teenager a yogi telling me that mystic consciousness is "the natural high." Now, fifty years later, his words continue to ring true and satisfy my soul!

Lisa Miller of Columbia University recently wrote in the New York Times (2.11.14)research shows that "a personal relationship with a higher power is the most powerful form of protection against the unsuccessful grasp at what william James (the father of American psychology) called the 'mystic consciousness' of substance abuse, and for those in recovery against relapse. While we usually can return to transcendence through reflection and practice, this is not so when we pop in as a tourist, through drugs."

The alchemical Doctrine of Correspondence, "as above so below" takes us into bliss, the natural high, that comes from soulful depth. We can only genuinely feel as well, healthy, as we are living from an authentic place of truth to self and meaningful others. Correspondence means staying in touch, maintaining contact, relationship with self and intimate others. 

Mystic consciousness kindles bliss as fire provides warmth. Bliss glows from deep within. It lingers and is furthered through a reflective self, the practice of meaning and forsaking that which has ceased to be meaningful. "We are constituents of the absolute's eternal field of consciousness," wrote James. The mystic takes us within, to absolute consciousness. There we absorb the healing balm of soulful bliss, a natural high.