I have a little doggy sitting on my lap this morning. The air is cold here in Montana. It’s a damp cold. I don’t have any heat on in the RV. Not because I can’t, but because I just hate to run such an inefficient furnace. It burns too much propane, and for now, I have a heated blanket that’s keeping me warm just fine overnight.

Honestly, I’ve found that because I’m not too comfortable when I wake up, it makes me get right out of bed and get my day going. I’m notoriously a stay-in-bed-till-one kind of girl. Always have been. Sleeping in an RV is like camping. My face and shoulders are cold upon waking. My eyes are puffy. You have to just sort of get up and get out. Living on a cold morning in my RV, the choice to wake up and write feels like a tiny liturgy.

CUT

I’m thinking about the modern mystics again today. Mystical traditions or mystical inquiry fascinates me. Mystics are mystics because they’re about felt, embodied experiences with God. And, they’re never satisfied by one lineage or one way to understand the Divine. It’s the same reason why I call the Divine both God and Great Spirit. I interchange them, even in my own prayers.

Mystics are defined as a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with the absolute, “or who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect.”

I find myself around mystics naturally because that is my design. I see the mystics as feminine energetically. There’s something innately feminine about finding that felt sense of union with God. It’s why it’s been my journey and a needed one.

But even more than that, what’s absolutely bewildering to me is that I found myself in a place where I live right next to where a mystical church was headquartered. Where I am, here in Montana, a church named Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT) was established. It was created here in the 70s, largely influenced by Theosophy (which still influences HUGE followings in mystery schools around the world). CUT is a mystery school. Any of the Theosophy-adjacent creations typically are.

Some people call CUT a cult. A lot of mystic-oriented spiritual groups could call into that. Almost a bit too easily. I think you can call most things a cult, and it’s not a very good marker for how to understand something. It typically just puts up a block in our mind. Cult = bad.

There are some truly bad religious and spiritual organizations that have hurt and damaged people. That have caused traumatic experiences or made people’s lives worse. It’s not necessarily that being a cult means mysticism is a cult, or that they did harmful things, but it is both a daming word and a reason to be critical.

I would call One Taste harmful. I would call what Osho did absolutely insane. And, I would go so far as to call them cults. I have had friends, who were in One Taste, call it a cult and I trust their experience. The Rajneesh bioterrorism attack is still the largest biological warfare attack in United States history. These groups both aggressively pursued an outcome that, coupled with the corrupting quality of power, harmed a lot of people. You either came out a little fucked up or okay.

It’s the reason mystical inquiry gets a bad rap. Mysticism is about as old as humans are, but modern organizations, which are typically grounded in mysticism, have, in some places, though not all, harmed people.

We do have to remember, and this is why we need our discernment, that not all experiments are benevolent; power corrupts, and practices without accountability have hurt people. I have been a part of groups myself that are actively doing harm. And what I find is that mysticism, without containment, without structure and order, is too volatile, like fire without a hearth—it can illuminate, but it burns like a wildfire with no end in sight.

It’s why, even for my love of mysticism, and for me as a self-proclaimed mystic, I know, more than ever, the value of grounding in a lineage. And not just any lineage, but one that has truly stood the test of time, for which has created positive results year over year for people’s lives, and for which is so real and valuable that they created nation states. That’s the kind of theology that holds because truth is grounded in integrity.

Because again, spiritual and religious life should get you better outcomes. It should improve your life. A good theology affects your daily choices, and we hope that those daily choices are improving the world. What we believe affects who we are and how we are together.

And mysticism, for all that it innately is towards spiritual seeking and embodiment, without containment, without integrity, without a grounding in strong principles, can lead you into some weird places.

Mysticism on this land

What I love about mystics is the magic they find. The stones they get to turn over. They are the artists in the spiritual.

They create really unique magic: Invocations, meditations, rituals. When I say they’re unique, it doesn’t even give you a good understanding. It’s like a piece of art in itself. They create art through unique, individualized inquiry and experience with God. You can think of the range of magic like the range of artworks in the world.

Everyone starts to work with the same clay, the stuff we have as humans with senses: body, movement, sound, light, intellect, just to name a few. And from there, they sculpt. Think meditations where you imagine your heart as a doorway to the ‘monadic core’.

Mysticism had a notable rise in the 70s as a part of the counterculture movement of the 60s, psychedelics, and the introduction of Eastern spirituality to the US. People don’t realize that Eastern spirituality and spiritual traditions are still fairly new to the United States. The first Buddhist temple in America was built in San Francisco in 1853.

But even before that, the United States had mysticism embedded both in the land on which it was established and in the Puritan settlers who arrived with it.

Indigenous peoples have always had deep spiritual practices that centered on a connection to the cosmos and nature. Although we know what happened to the Indigenous populations, their embodiment and practices live on. Their spiritual wisdom is something really fundamental to how we understand this land and the unique Divine connection created by it and to it.

Puritan spirituality was also found in the early 13 colonies. It “was a form of Protestant mysticism centered on a deeply personal, yet biblically grounded, experience of God through the Holy Spirit, emphasizing practices like meditation, prayer, and diligent study of Scripture to foster an intimate, loving relationship with Christ. While distinct from the speculative or unscriptural forms of mysticism, it involved contemplative practices and expressions of "spiritual union," such as the ecstatic experiences of figures like Isaac Ambrose, and focused on the Spirit glorifying Christ rather than promoting unbiblical spiritual experiences.”

Most Christian mystical traditions focus on a deep connection to the Holy Spirit. Eastern Orthodox is the mystical sect of Christianity still in broad use today. There’s a popular article that seems to say Gen Z is moving “in droves” to Eastern Orthodoxy. I had seen some data on it at some point, but can’t find it again. Either way, the truth of how many people are moving to Eastern Orthodox is yet to be confirmed, but I trust in people’s personal stories for now and in the narrative that people are seeking that kind of mystical inquiry with the Divine.

In the US, you also had the Freemasons. Freemasonry is a fraternity who is publicly focused on “self-improvement, community service, and fellowship for men who believe in a Supreme Being.” That’s a fucking mystery school if I’ve ever seen one.

“Originating from medieval stonemasons' guilds, modern Freemasonry, formalized in England in 1717, uses rituals, symbols, and degrees to teach moral and ethical lessons. Members, known as Masons, advance through three degrees—Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master Mason—to achieve personal growth and strengthen their character through a symbolic system of allegory and symbolism.” Freemasons is still one of the most interesting secret societies ever to me. I’ve only met one freemason and, boy, did I both love him and fear him.

You need the church

Okay, but what’s the point, Val?

The point is that mysticism, even at its weirdest and most alarming (the secret rituals, the charismatic leaders, the utopian promises) teaches us a lot. Both about the truth of the Divine and how we can experience it, and the value of conformity to a lineage. 

Both Thomas Watson and Issac Ambrose were removed from the church for “nonconformity”. We might jump to see that as they were victims of a punishing church, or we could view it as the church was protecting people from them, for some of the harm that can come from unmoored spiritual experiments. When private visions, unchecked by tradition or community, slip into distortion, excess, or even exploitation.

Mysticism is a double-edged sword. 

The mystics can open a soul to wonder, but it can also open the door for manipulation when awe is twisted into control. When awe is out of balance. When awe is not matched with containment.

God can be felt and experienced, absolutely. But God is not just feeling. Not just orgasm, but discipline. And that is what the church and a lineage give us.

Mysticism, therefore, can be read as human experiments in the impossible mysteries and secrets of the cosmos: of how to live and move with the magic of creation so that we might get just a little closer to it. And that some of those experiments fail spectacularly and deserve our scorn.

And in that, we can be reminded of the quality of what is durable: church, lineage, how to use attention and ritual, even how to make communal repair, what works and produces results time and time again.

Love,
Val

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