***The Mystic Path Out of the Box and Into Spiritual Power; Experiences, Sensations and Symptoms; Language as a Factor

The categories that human languages lock things into in our minds stifle creative thinking and block extrasensory perception. The categories are the 'box' to 'think out of.' Language fetters awareness: *Most people won't think of or even sense something they have no words for. *We dream of things we have no language for (a color without shape, a form without an outline) and therefore cannot retrieve the dream. *When a foreign concept blossoms, we put Galileo on trial for his life in our heads. *In some (obscure) languages, the forms of words (as in the conjugations of verbs, and what pronouns refer to) are not by time and gender; they are, say, by physical distance one is away (from the speaker), or the degree of family closeness, or a person's rank. Wrap your head around that one!

*Before the age of two, before language, our minds are structured parallel to 'out there.' That is why psychic perception and psychic experiences are so common and so accurate in very young children. They receive mental telepathy as pictures.
*At the age of two, when we are being indoctrinated with categories and labels, we are frustrated and cranky: We are railing against putting the system into place that changes the valid way we experience reality.
*After the age of two, once we have been reprogrammed to categorize—by naming and labeling things in our language--our inner being rails against whatever goes against the grain of the way we have those labels arranged.

Animals do sense what is going to happen and what is happening. Not having language in their brains is a factor that allows them this awareness. They were never two-year-olds who had to learn the cat is an animal, you are a person, the washtub is a thing, and the sand is something made out of a lot of things. No such distinctions clutter their awareness!

The mystic path includes training to deprogram one's mind of these blocks. The training is 'merely' experiences, many of which occur in sleep, dream state or trance. Mystics in training experience a feeling of 'stripping away' as well as an awareness of new input into the mind. The awareness of new input does not always include the input itself: You just know you received 'some stuff' at first.

At some point in the training, one sometimes perceives directly as animals do, and one's mind does revert toward the system one was born with, which is that each item is its own entity, and the connections that make the meaning are just that: the connections. Yes, during the reverting, one tends to experience the same irritation and disorientation two-year-olds feel when their psyches are headed the other direction. After the reverting, one can 'float' an idea over the entire contents of consciousness and up comes whatever is connected to that in any way. Effortlessly.

After the reverting, the cat is no longer an animal unless the subject is the difference between a person and an animal; the washtub is no longer a thing unless the subject is the difference between a person and a thing; and the sand is no longer one thing made out of a lot of things unless the subject is the difference between a singleton and a group item. In other words, distinctions occur only as connections are made!

The purpose of the training is to get our minds back into sync with 'out there,' so we can be a connection and can make connections directly between the different planes of 'out there' and our world, in order that some things be accomplished quickly.

Oracles (Delphi. Nostradamus.) often fracture language: Their direct perception of idea without the compartmentalization language must necessarily impose is a factor there.

To one extent or another, mystical training does blend the conscious, subconscious and superconscious—or whatever you want to call these nebulous things—into one mind.

Usually mystical training occurs when the individual is receptive to it and ready for it: It is a natural unfolding, a level of maturity. But, if you want to force or to expedite this level of awareness, here's how: Grow up! Lose the 'wah,' lose your 'entitlement,' quitcherbitchin', quit 'understanding' evildoers and quit making excuses for the trespasses you and others do: 'Call a spade a spade,' not to be obnoxious but to look the facts in the face as they are. Don't kid yourself. Do not flatter yourself especially, because you can't take off from where you haven't landed: If you imagine you are in lofty Seattle and you want to go to Fort Lauderdale, it is too bad if you are really in lowly Key West—it's a big ocean you will be driving through. Before you are on the mystic path, you will have lost your greed and lost your fear. Greed is an attitude of 'me,' it is deeper than wanting something others don't have yet.

A handbook for the process of preparing yourself for spiritual power is the book Way of Perfection written by St. Teresa d'Avila or Teresa of the Little Flower. The book is written as private instruction between herself and her nuns on gaining spiritual power. The writing in it is plainer, as contrasted to her obfuscated Interior Castle, which was written at the behest of the leaders of the Inquisition. In The Way of Perfection the writer asks how come we don't protest injustice when it benefits us? And makes the point that pettinesses are capital sins to spirituality. That point is in details! Another relevant book, a really deep one, is Dion Fortune's Training and Work of an Initiate. A modern book is Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics by Marsha Sinetar. It brings comfort to a person on the mystic path because It is the biographies and autobiographies of others on the path and how they are living.

Sensing parallels; seeing patterns; picking up telltale voice signatures in people, animals and spirits; awareness of causations without consciously observing effect first: These are some of the more easily identified new abilities that happen when the 'stripping away' and 'input' mentioned above is fairly advanced. At this level of training one has what seem to be psychic talents (and more), but no 'spirit guides,' no 'voices in the head' and no 'seeing things' that are characteristic of psychics as a group, no 'weird stuff' generally. There are some weird sensations at some stages, like feeling feathery or heavy; feeling large or small; like being aware of everything happening on the planet at a given split-second; being aware of every time a particular thing has happened ever; or like the air is heavy, green and waterlike-- but these symptoms are very minor, and do not persist.

Mystical training occurs when the individual's mind develops a reception to it: It is a natural unfolding, a level of maturity. Speaking of labels, most people who are experiencing these levels of perception do not label them as mysticism or spiritual maturity, or even separate the experiences from life events; they just feel they have a different 'slant on things' and 'maybe I'm crazy.' Lack of greed and lack of fear precede the training. No robed figure intones that you are now a mystic: That ain't where it's at!

Concepts in mass consciousness and myth (concepts such as right and wrong, such as ideals of 'freedom,' 'fairness,' 'democracy') exist at the mystic level. Group minds are there. So is mass consciousness. As a mystic, you may be working with these things, working on that level. You may also be doing combat at that level, if that is your calling. (Propaganda reaches—from its gutter—to motivate on the level of mass consciousness, often falling amusingly short.)

The psychic awareness and psychic abilities that arise from reaching the level of understanding we call 'mystic' are useful for practical purposes such as identifying patterns and motives in an individual's life, in current events, in history; and foretelling what will happen.

The most effective commonly used tools for divination reflect stereotypes or typical scenes in the mass consciousness of a culture in a general way. When these scenes are applied to the specific matter under consideration or specific question, the psychic's mind is forced to think intuitively and conclude intuitively on the mystic level. The scenes are pictures, which transcend language, which gets the psychic's mind into where causation occurs. Of course, the message has to be translated back into human language: That is the psychic's job.

Tarot can be a door to mystical thinking because frequently using the stereotypes and typical scenes depicted on the cards forces you to think in those terms and apply them to your life. That kind of logic rubs off on you.

You can demonstrate how tarot, for example, works, by taking anything based on common awareness—let's say traffic signs or cartoon figures or even sitcom characters—and applying the images or pictures of those to questions or situations to get an analysis or an answer. Eventually, you will work out meanings that function. This experiment has been done.

I will be writing a sequel to this missive regarding tarot, beginning with the matter in the last three paragraphs here.