Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Why Mystical Studies Are Still Important Today

By Charles Kelly


Mysticism has roots that date back into the most ancient religions, and a lot of these still have some surviving sect or tradition. Many types of worship from these ancient systems are present in the mores, customs and traditions of any one country that has played host to them. In a sense, virtuous behavior is something that is founded on religious ritual and ceremony.

This is lost more often than not, although they have been driven deep into cultural subconscious and also in the peculiar habits of the people. Mystical studies will have a sectarian spirit, and is also partly about the search for connections to those ancient spirits of worship. Memories can be cut off, sometimes during conflict or migration that can erase records and memory.

Shamanism was also very widespread before, a kind of worship that was about the more physical aspects. The worship was for trees, rocks and animals, later denounced as barbaric by churches and also other religions. There was a custom for having kings that acted like real divinities, but when one white hair appeared anywhere on his body, he would be sacrificed on a fallow field.

The ceremonial killing of this king on the fields was supposed to fertilize them, to make them fruitful. The blood of this once powerful being will satisfy the divinities of nature and therefore make the land bear bountiful harvests. When the problems about agricultural and nature became less, another kind of mysticism came in.

This was more about philosophy, deeper views of the cosmos, and it was first promoted during the rise of Jews or even earlier. The philosophers who became mystics would later found powerful religions now formally established today. They were instrumental in creating schools and the academe, inspiring the rise of arts, culture, and science and technology and the like.

The more formal studies about mysticism can belong to the academe, where people like theologians and psychologists can be. They have records that have been purged so that they fit the plane of higher concerns characteristic of all axial religions. These were founded during a timeline that lasted a thousand years, when humanity transformed, like Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.

The base practices or beliefs are seen as holdovers in the racial memory, and things like a rash of violence are seen as symptoms of these. However, there is no true connection to how ancient religions could cause these. The studies here therefore also aim to find how those practices and beliefs may be subconsciously present and active in present day cultures.

The church considers many things cardinal sins and will be connected to behavior in domestic settings or the wider compass of social action. For the studies, these are threads that can lead to understanding of darker sides of religions that had supposedly died a long time ago. Axial systems had the mission of eradicating them, but there have been survivors, running deep in hidden ancestries.

The relevant studies in this sense are therefore those that are clean, contemplative and intensive. There may even be vows for abstinence or penitence, but these studies can be secular too so that it can shed light into human experiences of the past. The aim here is to create a very refined high sense of the divinity that can help humanity progress.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment