A New Hope
It’s no secret that humanity is moving away from organized religion and towards personalized spirituality. Humans are no longer content with mediated access to the divine/sacred. But without a tradition and community to ground us, we are at serious risk of self-deception, especially when experimenting with altered states of consciousness.
I am a firm believer that developing and maintaining a holistic ecology of spiritual practices is the best way to cultivate wisdom, find peace, and help manifest a more beautiful world for us all. I believe this is the only way forward for humanity. We need a radical shift in our collective consciousness if we’re going to survive for much longer. But we are mistaken if we think we have nothing to learn from the spiritual traditions of the past. They have survived and prospered for hundreds if not thousands of years for a reason. And they have all produced people of extraordinary virtue and character.
We now have the opportunity, for the first time in human history, to look back at the traditions of the past through the lens of rationality, reason, and scientific research to analyze and assess what would be useful to carry forward and what would be best left behind. And some incredible people have done just that and I think they have some very important guidance for us all.
So, here I’m going to provide you with some guidance on how to create a holistic ecology of practices to form your own personal system of mysticism and I will share with you the exact parameters I kept in mind when creating my own. Hopefully, this will help you avoid the most common pitfalls people run into in this pursuit and step into a life of thriving.
Reverse Engineering Enlightenment
Ok so first of all, what kinds of practices should you include and why? To answer this we need to consider the perennial problems with which humans always must contend. These problems are impossible to avoid because the very machinery that makes us adaptive also makes us prone to self-deception and self-destructive behavior. And all of these problems can interact with and exacerbate each other. According to cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, these are:
- Parasitic Processing
- Modal Confusion
- The Reflectiveness Gap
- Clash of Perspectives
- Anxiety
- Alienation
- Existential Entrapment
Don’t worry. I’ll briefly explain what all of that means but I highly encourage you to watch John’s masterpiece ‘Awakening from the Meaning Crisis’ on YouTube for a much more in-depth explanation. It’s a long series, it took me several months to watch all of it, but it is definitely worth it. If you want to know how humanity got so screwed up and how we might navigate our way out of this mess, start there.
Parasitic Processing
Our brains have developed to be very sophisticated prediction machines. They are constantly evaluating what is going on around us and trying to figure out what might happen next. This incredible ability is one of the things that makes us so intelligent and helps us avoid danger. However, that same machinery can cause us quite a bit of trouble. Because of our natural biases we can be misled and can falsely conclude that the probability of a bad outcome from a situation is higher than it really is. When this happens we experience anxiety which causes us to lose cognitive flexibility, which is our ability to change what we’re thinking about and how we’re thinking about it.
This in turn causes our framing of reality and our own possibilities and potential to become narrower. This hinders our ability to problem solve. This increases our likelihood to make mistakes or fail which further reinforces our negative outlook and increases our anxiety. This can become a vicious cycle which can lead to despair and addiction. That cycle is parasitic processing and it can be very difficult to escape from.
Because parasitic processing is a very complex dynamical system that resists and works around any single intervention, the way to counteract parasitic processing is through cultivating a counteractive dynamical system that works for you instead of against you such as the Eightfold Path in Buddhism or the Eight Limbs of ashtanga yoga or the ecology of practices that we’ll be creating here.
Modal Confusion
We have confused the having of propositions with the becoming of wise. We have two different kinds of needs. Having needs and being needs. Having needs are needs that are met by acquiring something such as food and water. To meet these needs we operate in the “having mode”. Being needs are needs that are met by becoming something, such as becoming mature. These needs are met through the process of self-transformation.
Modal confusion happens when we try to satisfy being needs while operating in having mode. Instead of becoming mature, we buy a car. Instead of being in love, we have a lot of sex. Instead of becoming wise, we acquire propositions. We try to satisfy needs that can only be met through our own personal transformation by acquiring things, knowledge, and experiences. This leaves us unsatisfied, which locks us into this modal confusion and we keep trying to have more and more which can lead to addiction. And, of course, our culture of consumption makes all of this worse.
The way to counteract modal confusion is through practices that cultivate a deep remembrance of the being mode or sati in Buddhism, such as yoga, or mindfulness practices.
The Reflectiveness Gap
This has to do with the relationship between self-reflection and immersion. We lose our sovereignty or agency when we are either too reflective or not reflective enough. If you aren’t reflective at all you just give in to every urge and impulse and are very reactive. But if you’re too reflective you can become paralyzed by overanalyzing everything. So there is a kind of Goldilocks zone in between those two extremes. However, there is no perfect balance here that will work for all situations. Some situations require much more reflectiveness than others to be navigated optimally.
The way to counteract the reflectiveness gap is through the cultivation of the flow state. When you are in the flow state you are operating at the optimal level of reflectiveness. But we need to be mindful and wise about when, where, and how we cultivate flow. Because not all flow states are equally beneficial. We need to cultivate the flow state in such a way that the ability to enter the flow state bleeds into other areas of our lives. For example, I recently went roller skating at a roller rink and I realized that the best way to stay upright and avoid running into other people was to get into the flow state because I had been cultivating flow in other ways and I recognized the opportunity and knew how to quickly drop into flow. Video games are often reliable flow state generators and this is one of the reasons they are so enjoyable but they don’t teach you how to get into the flow state outside of the video game context, in fact, they can actually make it more difficult. This can lead to people being locked in so that the only time they experience flow is inside the game which can lead to addiction.
Absurdity/Clash of Perspectives
There are many instances when two perspectives clash in a way that seems irreconcilable. When we view any problem we can view it through a narrow perspective or a broad perspective, for instance in medical ethics they talk about the individual and the population. When taking the narrow perspective, the uniqueness of the individual is the center of focus, but when taking the broader perspective all individuality or uniqueness is overlooked and what is best for the collective is the center of focus sometimes even at the expense of the individual. This can result in the experience of absurdity when it seems that the clash of perspectives is irreconcilable.
The way to alleviate absurdity and the clash of perspectives is through cultivating scientia intuitiva, or prajna, in other words, a non-dual state in which we can see from both the cosmic perspective and the individual perspective simultaneously. It is a deep, intuitive realization that the perspective that reaches out and upward to what is ultimate is the same perspective that is reaching deeply into me. This is exemplified in my poem Dance of the Cosmos.
Anxiety
Most people know exactly what anxiety is from personal experience, but anxiety is a vague, nebulous sense that something is wrong or that something is going to go wrong and involves inner conflict. Anxiety is a sign that you are disconnected from yourself in an important way.
The way to counteract anxiety is through the cultivation of inner dialogue or internalizing and indwelling the sage; someone such as the Buddha, Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, Socrates, Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, or Hazrat Inayat Khan, just to name a few. Internalizing is the ability to have an internal dialogue with the sage and indwelling is attempting to see through the perspective of the sage. This can be done through lectio divina, role-playing as the sage, or other visualization and active imagination exercises.
Alienation
Humans are social creatures. We need relationships and community, especially if we want to grow and develop. When we’re isolated we become highly susceptible to self-deception and we become unstable and ungrounded. Alienation is a symptom of disconnection from others.
The way to counteract alienation is through being deeply connected to others or communitas. This does not mean having more friends or followers on social media. Modal confusion often exacerbates alienation, especially through social media. This communitas can be cultivated through any practice that affords deep connection such as Platonic dialogue, Authentic Discourse, Circling, or, in my case, through what I call Family Dinner Night, the hiking group I organize, and some of my ceremonial work.
Existential Entrapment
We all face moments in our lives when we are presented with a choice from which there is no way back and such that we cannot possibly know what is on the other side. A good example of this is having a child. Having a child changes what is relevant, or salient, to you in such a way that it transforms who you are forever. You can’t know what you’re missing out on if you never have a child, but you also can’t really know what you’ll lose. You can listen to other people and their experiences but you won’t really know until you experience that perspective yourself. That is called existential ignorance. Another example is when people know that they want to adopt a different worldview, maybe one that is less paranoid and more open and expansive, but they can’t imagine how to make that worldview significant and viable for them. People become trapped and end up in existential entrapment when they let that ignorance paralyze them. This happens around having children, starting romantic relationships, choosing a career, choosing a university, and even maturation. One of the most common reasons people go to therapy is because they feel “stuck”. That feeling of being stuck is the experience of existential entrapment.
The way to counteract existential entrapment is through gnosis. Gnosis that is gained through enacted analogy and enacted anagoge combined with an altered state of consciousness and set within a ritual context, in other words, serious role-play. (Anagoge is a process of reciprocal expansion and opening of both agent and arena. Meaning the individual becomes more mature and virtuous while simultaneously coming into greater contact with reality and seeing a wider field of possibility.) This can be through therapy or live-action role-playing or martial arts or ritual etc. The point is to try to experience the other perspective while also remaining within your current one. To play within that liminal space so that you can compare the two. This allows you to see and experience what it would be like on the other side of a transformation while remaining who you are now. And it should also provide you with the skills to actually go through the sensibility transcendence required to make that other worldview viable to you. This is accomplished through dynamical reframing guided by the therapist, dungeon master, or ritual leader.
And all of this must be set within a wisdom framing so that alleviation of these problems of self-deception and the affordance of self-optimization are paramount, and must be coupled with the cultivation of an agapic way of being.
Designing a System for Human Optimization
I know that is a lot of information and it may sound like those are intractable problems. How could we possibly hope to make sense of this world and cultivate wisdom when we are so prone to self-deception in so many ways?
It is an incredibly complex and difficult problem, but I think we can navigate our way through it. We simply need to let go of the idea that there is a single solution to all of this. There is no panacea, no magic bullet, no one practice that will ameliorate all of these problems. This is why we need a holistic ecology of practices that work together in dynamical fashion to counteract this ecology of problems. I’ve already introduced several practices we can use to counteract these perennial problems but we’ll also discuss ways to incorporate them into your life. Because I know that forming even one new habit can be difficult and daunting let alone a whole list of them.
But, first, I also want to draw from other sources so we can make sure our mysticism system meets as many of our health and wellness needs as possible while also helping us to cultivate wisdom. For that, I want to turn to Dr. Andrew Huberman, one of the greatest living science communicators, and the five things he says we should focus on every day for optimal health and wellness. Those are:
- Sleep
- Nutrients
- Movement
- Light
- Relationships
We will see that some of those perennial problems are directly addressed by focusing on these five pillars of wellness. We will also use these to design our ecology of practices so that our spiritual practices are also meeting our physical and mental needs. The reductionist perspective should be discarded here. You should try to move away from thinking of science, religion, and spirituality as separate and incompatible and also move away from thinking of physical, mental, and spiritual wellness as separate pursuits addressing separate problems. They are not. And if we try to create separate habits or practices to address each problem separately we will very quickly run out of time in our day to actually live. Our goal is to create practices that focus on as many of these pillars of wellness as possible while also addressing the perennial problems from above.
I’ve also drawn inspiration from Jamie Wheal and his chapter “Designing Meaning 3.0” from his amazing book Recapture the Rapture which is about “bringing a Human-Centered Design process to the challenge of Meaning.” Because that is exactly my goal in helping you design your own mysticism system. I want this to be “broadly relevant and locally adaptive”. Meaning I want this to be useful to as many people as possible and also be easily adaptable to meet the needs of each individual.
So, let’s take a look at what we’ve covered so far. To cultivate holistic wellness, which includes physical fitness, mental health, wisdom, and a sense of meaning while addressing the perennial problems we need the following:
- An ecology of practices – specifically practices that cultivate:
- The “being mode”
- Flow
- Non-duality
- Internalizing the sage
- Communitas
- Gnosis
And we also want to address as many of the five pillars of wellness as we can which were:
- Sleep
- Nutrients
- Movement
- Light
- Relationships
The “Being Mode”
We need to include a practice that cultivates a remembrance of the being mode instead of the having mode that our consumerist culture constantly pushes us into. In the being mode, we are not concerned with acquiring, categorizing, or manipulating things, we simply become aware of them and enjoy them as they are. Mindfulness practices, mandalas, yoga, and walking meditation are all great for this. Any way that you can get out of having mode and just be.
Flow
There are nearly infinite ways to cultivate the flow state. It’s the feeling of being “in the zone”. I’ve gotten into the flow state cooking, singing, roller skating, rock climbing, working out, playing music, and probably even more that I can’t remember. Martial arts, dancing, singing, surfing, and playing music are all common ways that people get into the flow state but this is going to be specific to each individual because it is based on individual skill, knowledge, and experience. Nevertheless, the parameters to enter and maintain the flow state are the same, no matter how you cultivate it. To induce flow you need to find the right balance between the perceived level of skill and size of the challenge at hand. If it’s too challenging it will cause anxiety and if it’s not challenging enough it won’t be engaging. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the first person to research flow and one of the founders of positive psychology, there are eight characteristics of flow:
- Complete concentration on the task;
- Clarity of goals and reward in mind and immediate feedback;
- Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down);
- The experience is intrinsically rewarding;
- Effortlessness and ease;
- There is a balance between challenge and skills;
- Actions and awareness are merged, losing self-conscious rumination;
- There is a feeling of control over the task.
However you cultivate the flow state, you will need to choose something you are relatively good at and you will need to make sure you are free from distractions while doing so. A phone ringing, text notification or other distraction will very quickly and reliably get you out of flow. The practice I use to reliably cultivate flow is ecstatic singing which I describe in detail in my blog post and video.
Non-Duality
We deal with the problem of absurdity not at the level of propositions but at the level of perspectives because it is ultimately always generated by a clash of perspectives. To deal with absurdity then we need a practice that cultivates a state of non-duality. We need to recognize that our attention is both bottom-up from the features and top-down from the gestalt, and the way we are related to the world is one in which we can be co-creating. In my poem Dance of the Cosmos, there is only one “I” which expresses itself both as the Source or Creator looking down on the universe all the way into the individual and as the individual looking upward and outward into the cosmos. The two perspectives that initially seem separate realize their unity. Reading that poem and trying to indwell its perspective can be a practice to cultivate non-duality. The goal is to deeply look both into yourself and out of yourself into the world, and recognize that these are ultimately the same perspectives.
Internalizing the Sage
As adults, we are not at our final stage of maturation or development. As the child is to the adult, so is the adult to the sage. There should never be an end to our development. Even the idea of becoming a sage should be one of continual growth and ascent, not some final stage to be reached. But for an adult to develop they need a sage, or sages, to internalize just as much as a child needs adults to internalize. This is one of those points where mysticism becomes locally adaptive. You have the freedom and the responsibility to choose your own sage or sages. I’ve listed some examples above.
My system is built around internalizing St. Francis of Assisi which is why his words are quoted so often, but I’ve gone through this process with several sages at this point, and it is kind of like building an advisory council in your mind. One you can refer to at any time and which can provide you invaluable guidance, assurance, and inspiration.
I also created a specific practice for internalizing sages that I call The Clare Method, named after St. Clare of Assisi. It involves getting a picture or image of your chosen sage and putting it on your altar or where you meditate, and gazing at it. Then, read about them or read their own words, preferably both. If reading a story about them, try to indwell them and put yourself into their perspective and imagine yourself as them, behaving as they behave, thinking as they might think, caring about what they care about. Then, put the book down, close your eyes, and contemplate upon them with the desire to imitate. I recommend doing this with one sage at a time until you can have an inner dialogue with them. I found at a certain point I would start reacting to things by thinking, “Ramakrishna would say…. Or St. Francis would respond…”, for example. That’s a sign that you’re internalizing.
Communitas
As I said before, humans are social creatures. We derive meaning from relationships and connection and it’s absolutely essential to our health and wellbeing. That’s why relationships are included on Andrew Huberman’s list as well. And we want to cultivate deep meaningful relationships. We want to commune with others and feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.
And out of those five pillars of wellness, the most difficult to incorporate into our ecology of practices is going to be nutrients. I encourage you to take a look at what you eat and think about what you eat in terms of nutrients rather than simply taste and convenience. There is a very good reason that most spiritual traditions have a diet associated with them, many times a vegetarian diet. As a general rule, it is best to eat the widest variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains as possible every week while limiting processed foods and added salt, oil, and sugar. I also recommend getting comprehensive blood work done at your annual wellness exam with your primary care physician, if you can, to make sure you aren’t deficient in any important nutrients such as vitamins B12 and D3 that most people are deficient in without supplementation. No matter how healthy your diet and lifestyle are, it is possible that you could be deficient in those two vitamins if you aren’t supplementing. A lot of people are. I was and I take those daily.
Do not skip or overlook this point. It doesn’t make sense to develop an ecology of wellness practices and ignore or overlook something as foundational to health and wellness as nutrition. You will have serious difficulty making progress anywhere else if you don’t address this.
You can make this a spiritual practice, as well, and one which also addresses relationships, and cultivates communitas. I do. It’s something we call Family Dinner Night. Every Friday night I cook a big, healthy plant-based meal and serve it with my homemade wild-fermented kombucha. It’s an open invitation to anyone in the Los Angeles area and different friends, family, and sometimes new faces come and we commune together and share the meal around my table. In this way I can serve my community and give back by buying and preparing the food and opening up my home, it cultivates communitas and nurtures my relationships, and it provides a lot of nutrients for me and everyone who attends.
Gnosis
Remember that gnosis is gained through enacted analogy and enacted anagoge combined with an altered state of consciousness and set within a ritual context. The goal is to play within a liminal space between your current worldview and a higher or more expansive one so that you can glimpse or experience what it would be like to live within that other world and other perspective while remaining in your current one. Gnosis is our response to existential entrapment which occurs due to existential ignorance and the glimpse we gain in gnosis dispels that ignorance and affords self-transformation and worldview transformation.
This is why gnosis is often experienced as an overwhelming revelation or epiphany. It frees us from the deepest kind of entrapment and the longer we’ve been trapped the more powerful and intense the experience when we break free. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is a perfect example of the kind of ritual that we’re talking about here. Enacted analogy and enacted anagoge, serious role-play with guidance towards the goal of reframing, are standard tools of therapy. That combined with the altered state brought on by psychedelics and set within the ritual context the therapists provide checks all of our boxes for gnosis. And that is why it is so incredibly effective at curing PTSD, end-of-life anxiety, and other serious mental health issues. Within my own system of mysticism, this is exemplified by The Ceremony of the Rising Sun which is a complex but very effective ceremony designed for this very purpose.
I believe that gnosis is often what people are seeking when they go to ayahuasca retreats and plant-medicine ceremonies, however, those experiences are not usually designed to produce gnosis. They get the altered state of consciousness set within a ritual context but they are missing the enacted analogy and anagoge. Those ceremonies are usually designed for either healing or pleasure, not gnosis. There’s nothing wrong with healing or pleasure, in my opinion, but it won’t free you from existential entrapment. I think people get into modal confusion again here and mistake having intense experiences with being transformed so they keep coming back for more and more. And I think this is a very valid critique of these communities, that they don’t produce transformed people but experience junkies looking for the next peak experience. This is why we’re building an ecology of practices, one which can include a psychedelic-assisted ceremony, but also has other practices to keep us from falling into self-deception.
Back to the Pillars of Wellness
Alright, so now we’ve covered all of the perennial problems and ways to counteract them and we’ve touched on a couple of the five pillars of wellness as well so I want to return to the rest of those and wrap this up by showing you how to put this all together. We’ve talked about nutrients and relationships so now we need to cover light, sleep, and movement. To do that I’m going to introduce you to two more of my rituals: The Morning Ritual, and The Evening Ritual.
The Morning Ritual is designed to be performed right after waking or at dawn and it involves intentional light exposure, prayer, yoga, meditation, and gratitude. I’ve covered this extensively on my blog and in my first book so I won’t go into all of it here. But you can see that this combines several of the things we are trying to include in our ecology of practices in one ritual. It covers light and movement from our pillars of wellness and the being mode from our responses to the perennial problems.
The Evening Ritual is designed to be performed right after sunset or right before bed and it involves prayer, yoga, self-hypnosis, and gratitude because I want to begin and end each day by focusing on the things I am grateful for. Once again, I’ve covered this extensively on my blog and in my second book so I’ll refer you to those for more information. This includes movement again and the whole thing is designed to help you calm your mind and relax your body so you can get better sleep which checks off our last pillar of wellness.
Putting It All Together
With all of that information covered, we are ready to build an ecology of practices and create our own system of mysticism! Let’s recap what we need to include one more time and this time I’m going to show you how my practices cover all of these. We’ve got the five pillars of wellness from Andrew Huberman:
- Sleep – The Evening Ritual
- Nutrients – Family Dinner Night
- Movement – The Morning/Evening Ritual
- Light – The Morning Ritual
- Relationships – Family Dinner Night
And the solutions to the perennial problems from John Vervaeke:
- An ecology of practices – specifically practices that cultivate:
- The “being mode” – The Morning/Evening Ritual
- Flow – Ecstatic Signing
- Non-duality – The Dance of the Cosmos
- Internalizing the sage – The Clare Method
- Communitas – Family Dinner Night
- Gnosis – The Ceremony of the Rising Sun
We’ve also discussed other practices and options for each one of these so you can choose a practice for each category that works for you. In my books, I also provide you with the framework for my own rituals and guidance on how to create your own version if you don’t want to use mine. If you do want to use mine, instructions for all of these rituals, practices, and ceremonies can be found for free on my website except for Family Dinner Night which I’ve described above.
Isn’t Something Missing?
I hope this was helpful to you all and hopefully, it provided some clarity on what you might be able to focus on to continue to grow and develop or to improve your health and wellness. I believe that mysticism, and by that I mean a personal spiritual ecology of practices like I’ve just described, can provide us with everything we need to thrive. And since I want this to be as broadly relevant and locally adaptable as possible there is one big piece of the puzzle that I have left out. You may have noticed this already but I failed to mention metaphysics and all of my reasoning is rational and scientific instead of religious. This was done on purpose. I believe this system can be adapted to fit within any metaphysics and this is another point where this project becomes locally adaptable.
You need to find a metaphysics that works for you and provides you clarity. This can be agnostic, scientific, or religious. I do not believe that any certain metaphysics is “correct” or “right” and all others are wrong. That seems very much like a kind of self-deception to me. But that doesn’t mean that this is unimportant. In fact, I believe the opposite. If you come from a spiritual or religious tradition, that’s great, you are good to go. If not, then find something that works for you. Read Jamie Wheal’s book Recapture the Rapture where he outlines his version of agnostic metaphysics or Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature or Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life and see if any of that resonates with you.
For now, this is where I will have to leave you. The rest is up to you. I’ve provided you with knowledge and tools to reverse engineer enlightenment and create your own system of mysticism but you must walk the path. I hope it brings you peace, joy, and meaning.
Love,
Justin
❤️🙏☀️