Inspiration for Writing Mystical Literature
And publications to submit your mystical stories to
Are you interested in writing Mystical Fiction or Mystical Poetry? There are few readily accessible examples to model your work on, especially if the famous ones don’t speak to you (because they’re on-the-nose lessons delivered by one-dimensional characters who only exist to illustrate delusional ideas.) But there are a few solid examples. And there are also many sources of non-fiction resource material for mystical concepts. I share brief excerpts below.
And if you write Mystical Literature, there are not a lot of easy-to-find venues to submit stories and poems to. So I compiled a handy list of links.
Inspiration
From The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin
“Nonlocality — In the 1960’s, physicist John Bell mathematically demonstrated that according to quantum theory, a pair of particles that were once in contact, but have since moved too far apart to interact, should nevertheless instantaneously behave in ways that are too strongly correlated to be explained by classical statistics. As Bell wrote in 1964, “there must be a mechanism whereby the setting of one measuring device can influence the reading of another instrument, however remote.”
What this means is that apparently separate particles would not really be separate after all but remain connected regardless of how far apart they were. . . If quantum theory predicts, and experiments prove, that the world is in fact nonlocal, then what prevents us from imagining that psi phenomena are our experiences of that connectedness? It is not the theory that prevents us from doing so, but our ability to imagine a connection from the theory to experience.”
From The Energy Healing Experiments by Gary Schwartz
“Why would the heart’s electromagnetic fields cease at the skin? Is the body encased in an electromagnetic shield? Clearly it’s not. Once the heart’s electrical and magnetic fields reach the skin, nothing prevents them from continuing. Nothing. As a result, they natural and effortlessly extend out into space.
As we observed earlier, electromagnetic fields travel in space at the speed of light, so that approximately one second after your heart has beat, its electromagnetic wave will have traveled approximately 186,000 miles into space. Yes, the magnitude of your cardiac electrical and magnetic fields will be extraordinarily tiny. But the physics of electromagnetic fields is very clear about the fact that, in principle, our electromagnetic fields extend into space. And once they are in space, like the Energizer Bunny, they keep going and going and going.”
From The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You, by Dorothy Bryant:
“And I too. I too. From the center of my being the light broke in waves, in orgasmic waves, outward to the extremities of my body, every cell of my body melting together in the waves of light that flowed outward from my center, and over me from the very air around me, from everything. I breathed it into me and it poured out of me, sweeping through me like a million orgasms. I was full and whole. I was part of the light and of all the other things that shone in and with the light. All were one. And whole.
“In that instant, I understood all the stories and dreams and songs and dances of Ata, stories of jewels and of sun, of fire and of ocean. I understood the many versions of each story and the contradictions and paradoxes, and I knew that they were all, in their own way, true. For I had glimpsed the reality behind them.”
From Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris
“The white fur greyed to hourly ash as the night aged in the trees and the fugitive fiery green of dreaming leaves turned faintly silver and grey in anticipation of the pale shadow of dawn.
It was the first night I had spent on the soil of Mariella. So it seemed to me in a kind of hallucination drawing me away from the other members of the crew. Every grey hammock around me became an empty cocoon as hollow as a deserted shell and a house.”
From “One and the Same” by Octavio Paz
White gardens that explode in air
Spaces
A sole space that unfolds
Flower-face
And dissolves
Space into space
All is nowhere
Place of impalpable nuptials.
“Sunset at a Lake” by Robert Bly
“The sun is sinking. Here on the pine-haunted bank, the mosquitos fly around drowsily, and moss stands out as if it wanted to speak. Calm falls on the lake, which now seems heavier and inhospitable. Far out, rafts of ducks drift like closed eyes, and a think line of silver caused by something invisible slowly moves toward shore in the viscous darkness under the southern bank. Only a few birds, the troubled ones, speak to the darkening roof of earth; small weeds stand abandoned, the clay is sending her gifts back to the center of the earth.”
From The Call of the Dervish by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
“The dhikr dance opens us up to planetary emotion, instead of the emotion of the individual. It’s part of what’s called group consciousness. You become part of the group that is getting into a certain attunement. When you move, you are the energy that causes you to move: it’s not your own energy, but the energy of the group that you are focalizing in your particular person. This is a completely different dimension of meditation, because you’re not sitting alone and isolating yourself in your meditation, but are participating in the whole group. The group itself is, of course, reflecting the feeling of the planets.”
From Open Secret versions of Rumi: John Moyne and Coleman Barks
page 556
“Daylight, full of small dancing particles
And the one great turning, our souls
Are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.”
From Samadhi and Siddha by Sri Chinmoy
“There is also a fourth state, called turiya, which means the transcendental consciousness. This consciousness is neither outward nor inward; at the same time, it is both outward and inward. It is and it is not. It has the capacity to identify itself with anything and everything in the world, and, again, it has the capacity to anything and everything on earth. Furthermore, it constantly transcends itself. Turiya is the highest state of consciousness,, but there is no end, no fixed limit, to the turiya consciousness. It is constantly transcending, transcending its own beyond. . . ”
From “Sun Stone” by Octavio Paz
Willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
A pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
Tree that is firmly rooted, and that dances,
Turning course of a river that goes curving,
Advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
Arriving forever:
The calm course of a star
Or the spring, appearing without urgency,
Water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
Flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
A single presence in the procession of waves,
Wave over wave until all is overlapped,
In a green sovereignty without decline
A bright hallucination of many wings
When they all open at the height of the sky. . .”
From Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves by Clifford Pickover
“Cliff: Do you think Hopi Indians may have a better chance of understanding quantum mechanics (or modern theories of physics that say time is an illusion) than non-Hopis? Why?
Joumana: I would rephrase the question as “than certain non-Hopi cultures,” because certain other cultures are already equipped to understand the paradox at the heart of quantum physics. Western cultures have issues with it because they leave no room for paradox. Their languages are very keen on fragmenting the world and labeling each part very clearly and unambiguously. The Hopi language, on the other hand, classifies things differently, without necessarily separating them. Their minds are already trained to grasp juxtaposed states that would look irreconcilable to Westerners.”
From The Dreaming Universe by Fred Alan Wolf:
“Carl Jung created and developed a theory of psychology that went beyond Sigmund Freud’s work in one essential way: he recognized that order can exist in the human psyche in a noncausal manner. This means that humans experience some situations that cannot be related in a normal cause-and effect temporal order, i.e., in the usual manner that we often use when we ask when faced with troubles or sudden benefits, “What did I do to deserve this?”
. . . Quantum physics as introduced another form of order. This order cannot be seen as a temporal pattern that can be experienced, usually in hindsight but sometimes instantaneously, wherein several events not necessarily happening at the same time nor even at the same place are correlated. This correlation is not just a functional dependence of one or more events on another event or set of events. It is not a teleological connection either (as the tree is hidden in the acorn). We cannot look at some of these events in the pattern and conclude that they were the causes of the other events n the pattern.”
From Being and Vibration by Joseph Rael
“As children we were taught that we existed as pressure point activators for the sacred sites within the village. Every twenty feet or so were consecrated points on the ground which carried special blessings. These shrines were buried in the ground and were only visible to the inner eye. As we walked through the village, we pushed them into aliveness with our bodies’ pressure on them. Because we lived as energy, we began to understand that everything in each designated location was the resonating vibration of the play of principal ideas. The holy shrines were placed there because the vibrational essence of those holy sites would enhance the psyche of community and of each individual within community. The vibration would bond us to a love relationship, a knowing that life was in love with us, that we held the living life within our lives. This knowing kept me loyal to my beloved landscape.
A trail connected the lower village to the higher village, like the connection between the lower, middle, and upper worlds. Since all life is a metaphor, what was really happening when I walked twenty feet or so on the trail, was that I was connecting one vibration with another, one principal idea with another. In walking I was “Time and Purity, Beauty and Awareness of God’s Light.” The village was architecturally designed so that the physical people lived alongside the supernatural beings who would manifest themselves through the sacred ceremonies. And the sites continually gave sustenance to the people who lived there. Superimposed on the physical village was the psyche of community and superimposed on the psyche were still many other realities, disappearing into infinity.”
“One and the Same” by Octavio Paz
Spaces
Space
Without centre no above or below
Devours and engenders itself and does not cease
Whirlpool space
And it falls into height
Spaces
Clarities
Cut into jewel-points
Hanging
From night’s sheerness
Black gardens of rock crystal
Flowering along a bough of smoke
White gardens that explode in air
Spaces
A sole space that unfolds
Flower-face
And dissolves
Space into space
All is nowhere
Place of impalpable nuptials.
The physicist David Bohm wrote:
“As you probe more deeply into matter, it appears to have more and more subtle properties. . . In my view, the implications of physics seem to be that matter is so subtle that it could be almost alive or intelligent.”
Submit
Poetry
These links are to essays about Mystical Poetry.
I hope something in this mixture appeals to you and inspires you to write and get your work out there to the public. Best wishes on your journey.
