Mapping The Mystic: Geographies of Ecstasy in Consciousness and Culture

Modern studies of mystic states focus on the 'ineffability' of the ecstatic experience — the impossibility of explaining what the experience was like. Yet mystic experience might be indescribable in modern culture simply because we’ve failed to culturally describe it. For those cultures historically who tread the mystic space with great regularity, there’s nothing indescribable about it. Mystic unity has been mapped. The people who have tread its spaces for thousands of years describe in scintillating detail landscapes, architectures, points, vortexes, luminosities, mandala-like configurations, all alive with animate entities. And these geographies are not simply described as personal visions, but as tangible externally existing landscapes that others can visit too. So where do such mystic scapes live? Are they a function of brain chemistry? An externally existing reality? An overlap of individual consciousness and the external world? All of the above? This episode unpacks the articulated geographies of mystic states and looks at the mystic experience beyond 'just brain chemistry' but rather as a state of alignment to greater patterns and forces that already exist within nature, forces that shaped our biology to begin with. Within this ongoing relationality, art, ritual, story, and song, work together to create a fully formed mythic structure through which human beings contextualize the world, and in an age of decontextualization and fragmentation, this mythic structure is as vitally important to the human bodymind as it has ever been. 

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