Modern Mystical Movement

I often mention that in the Western world, when we hear the word "shaman," most of us tend to conjure up an image of a masked and costumed indigenous tribal person, dancing around a fire in the dark, involved in some sort of mysterious ritual, accompanied by singing and drum beats. But inside that cultural shell of mask, costume and ritual, there is a woman or a man with a set of very real skills. The shaman is the master of the trance experience.Read more

On December 10, 2011, the New York Times ran a column in their Op-Ed section titled Undecided about God in which the author, Eric Weiner, proclaimed with conviction that Americans are a nation of talkers and self-confessors who are terrible when it comes to talking about God. In his opinion, this is because the discourse has been co-opted by the so-called True Believers, on the one hand, and by the Angry Atheists, on the other. But what about the rest of us, he asks?Read more

I, like many of you, watch the news on television and on June 29th, it was revealed that 39% of the people of America believe that American Culture is in permanent decline and that our deepening financial crisis will never be resolved.  In response, I recalled the words of Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson from their book ‘The Cultural Creatives’  published in the year 2000:

“We should take hope for we are traveling in the company of an enormous number of allies…” Read more

In many of the essays I have written over the past several years, I have repeatedly made mention of the fact that a new spiritual complex is coming into being in the West, one that exists beyond the well-patrolled borders of organized religion, one at whose center lies the realization that each of us has the ability to make the direct, transpersonal connection with the sacred realms that defines the mystic... the shaman.Read more