Demystifying the Mystical
However to approach this journey of life when there is such an unhelpful combination of confusing, contradictory and too much information in general? Wander into any bookstore and you’ll find the spirituality section groaning under the weight of books of every kind, from the traditional to the modern. Enter the world of online spirituality and you could readily be lost forever. Many people sadly are; I saw some of them in India.
Many people are alienated by the idea of religion anyway and tend to include spirituality as being the same. The world we live in with its manifest injustices, the prevalence of fundamentalist creationist beliefs and extremism with associated atrocities make it too easy to dismiss the notion of ‘God’, as with “If there really is a loving God, why does ‘he’ allow such things to happen?” The proliferation of New Age spirituality, appropriating, as it often does, many ancient and Indigenous spiritual beliefs and practices simply compounds the skepticism that many people experience. Modern science has also done its best to debunk any form of belief in the immaterial world of the spiritual, as discussed at the length in the essay In Defence of Faith
The aim of this website therefore is to try to demystify the spiritual experience, or at least purge it of unnecessary jargon and new age absurdities. In so doing, I have perforce simplified many subjects which are not simple in any way. As an academic by training and profession, it has ever been my custom to read widely, to check sources, to think everything that I read through carefully before committing myself to making statements. But the generality of folk reading this would simply be alienated if I approached these pages as though they were academic treatises.
I have focused here mainly upon the Eastern Yogic and Hindu traditions which are ancient, complex and mystical. The tendency to simplify and homogenise, more especially in recent years, has meant that these highly eclectic systems of belief with their complex metaphysics have often and unhelpfully been confused, in many instances also simplified to the point of being trivialised. For example, many commentators, including modern gurus, tend to present Eastern Yogic traditions as though they are one system, yet there were many and these were in a state of evolution down through many centuries, with different rishis (sages) offering new interpretations to the prolific corpora of texts. There is no ‘one’ system, nor one unified way of understanding them. Clearly, however, I must try to offer some coherence in order that readers who have little or no understanding of Eastern (or any) religion have a chance to comprehend what I am saying.
If anything that you read here takes your interest, I would simply suggest that you look for further information. The much despised though commonly used Wikipedia is actually a very useful portal into many of these subjects. Across the long summer of the Indian lockdown, I spent much of my time improving my knowledge of ancient Indian philosophies and Wikipedia was usually my starting point, before progressing to more formal literature.Therefore most of what I have written here concerning concepts such as Brahman, Paramatman, Shivaism and so on, can be easily checked online in this way.
Keep an open mind if possible and aim to expand your horizons in what constitutes ‘religion’, faith, and most of all ‘God’.
Structure of this Website
1) A Blog presenting informal accounts of my different adventures on the Road to Salvation
2) Personal narratives about my own journey, beliefs and what I call Pilgrimage:
- Prelude
- Pilgrimage. A Very Personal Journey
- To Be a Pilgrim
- My Parting Word
- Postscript. Final thoughts from Rishikesh
3) Spirit Matters: Introductory sections offering brief explanations of the principal themes associated with spirituality, theology and Eastern concepts of Divinity:
- Of God and Self
- Self and Self Realisation
- Gurus, Guides or Do It Yourself
- New Age Gurus and Selling the Sacred
4) Eastern Theologies and Western Mysticism
These are pages of information in more depth about the principal Eastern Yogic traditions compared with Western Mystical traditions. A discussion upon New Age trends, including the use of psychoactive substances for the induction of Mystical states of experience is included.
- Dvaita or Advaita? The Dual-Non Dual Debate
- Dualism and the Bhakti movement
Mysticism
- Experiencing Divinity: Advaita and Mysticism Revisited
- Mysticism Revisited. A Personal View
- To Be A Mystic. Concluding Remarks
- Use (and abuse) of Psychoactive Substances
5) Guidance for Seekers. Approach and Practice
- Doing the Work, or Looking the Part?
- Seeking Enlightenment. How to look and whether to pay
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- The Age of Recreational Spirituality
- Finding Your Grail
- Self Realisation Simply Put
- The Well Within
- Being Human in the Present Day. A Cautionary Note
- Conclusion: Your Journey, Your Life
A Note on Translation
Explanatory Notes: images used and references/recommended reading
Home page images
For those interested in understanding more of the different Hindu belief systems, I highly recommend the website hinduwebsite.com
Featured picture from:
