Recently, someone asked me what ‘mystical’ meant to me. It was a fascinating space to articulate what had felt only intuitive before.
As I’ve delved deeper into the mysteries of the world, I’ve found that so many of the ideas, thousands of years old, that I relegated to superstition and coping mechanisms for a hard life, are true.
It has come through direct experience. Traveling back to my past lives and feeling my soul in another body, living another experience. Feeling my ancestors coming to visit, hearing their voices, and learning from them. Having my thoughts read and hearing others’ thoughts. Touching someone and feeling the energetic configuration of their wounds, offering the energy that heals. Feeling the gods show up around me, feeling their intentions and offers. Traveling through time. Visiting bardos, hell realms, and other dimensions. Communing with angels, holding boundaries with unattached spirits.
It feels as if I have stepped into a fantasy novel. Every day I am discovering a new layer of reality, of what is possible.
The mystical speaks to us in the language we can hear
Integral theory talks about the different stages that humanity’s evolution has gone through.
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At magenta, we lived as shaman. All of reality spoke to us – the trees, the caterpillars, and the wind. We swam in the waters of meaning, each layer folding in upon itself. At red, we became warriors: dominance, power, and protection drove our experience. At amber, we became the priestesses, the knights, and the lawmakers. Divine structure prevailed.
Somehow, in these phases, superstition was woven into the delivery mechanism for the mystical. There were forces outside of our control, both light and dark, and dancing to the gods in the field was important, necessary – the way to be in communion and keep ourselves safe.
I think back to the witch trials and the world of paganism. Life was dark, hard work, and the mystical emphasis mirrored that – faeries, demons, light magic and dark magic. Following the rules – hanging iron above your door to ward off the faeries – made sense in a world where so much felt beyond control and threatening.
Our access to the mystical evolved alongside our stages. The god of the old testament was tribal, powerful, righteously vengeful – the gift of red. Engaging with such a god required sacrifices, loyalty, and proof of commitment. You didn’t fuck with God.
At amber, the mystical became about conformity. Follow the rules, and you will reap the rewards. It is not that any of this isn’t true – there is a heaven realm, the Kingdom of God, and it is exquisite. And yes, it is harder to access if you have murdered someone, because your energy field becomes clouded. It’s just that this truth was delivered in the language we could hear at the time.
At orange, things shifted even more. Have we had access to the mystical through orange and green? Perhaps. We’ve worshipped the gods of prosperity and abundance. We’ve followed the lore of manifesting. We’ve reclaimed the wisdom of the group with a new understanding of the individual.
But we’ve also lost access to the old mystical, dismantling the superstitions structures and throwing out the reality they contained. We’ve claimed the gift of the mental field’s clarity, of the individual hero’s journey, of unleashing our own creative expression. But our suspicion has also barred entry to true reality. In gaining the gift of clarity, we’ve lost access to the mystical of yore.
And now we’re being called to integrate the two. We’re not being called to go back into the old mystical, but forward into a new fusion.
When we’re in the waters, it’s hard to see the waters themselves. The Scottish peasantry living 500 years ago didn’t know that their lens to the mystical was just one lens – for them, whether or not there was iron over their door was a matter of life or death. So what is our delivery mechanism now? What will people 500 years from now look back and think: Wow, so strange that they needed that to access the mystical, because now, we have access to true reality without needing those structures?
You can see it in the way that we’re picking apart dogmas now. We’re not taking the whole structure of Buddhism or Christianity, but breaking it down into its essential components, rebuilding vehicles with those components. There are frameworks appearing left, right, and center – Integral theory, character structures, Enneagram. We’re allowing the arising of structure as a way to hold us through our journey into deeper reality. Awakening to the mystical is an individual process, going deep within yourself, and then emerging into group consciousness as a sovereign individual.
This is the language humanity speaks now – the language of clarity, structure, truth. Individual intuition, and group intuition that respects individuality. And the mystical will be delivered through this language.
We don’t need to pray every day to avoid being smote down anymore. But just because we don’t need that, doesn’t mean that the people living through those phases of evolution didn’t need that. We don’t need to hang iron on our doors, or follow the ten commandments. But that doesn’t mean that faeries aren’t real, or that heaven isn’t there for us to find.