The Next Shaman Will Be Shambhala

The mystics are forming circuits and realms, it's great

The New Experiment

I was on a call recently, with someone who swam in the currents near mystic psychosis a few years ago, and found his way through. Not a simple task. We were talking about the intelligent energy of the universe. As one does.

He brought up these ideas I see around sometimes: the next Buddha will be a sangha; the next sage will be a stoa; the next Christ will be a church. This idea that in our era's embodiment of divinity, something that used to come through individuals must now come through collectives.

He painted me a picture of the way he sees this, a picture I find compelling. A picture of a new experiment the Divine is trying out:

The Divine has realized that individuals usually can't hold the charge that's needed to pulse Sacred wisdom into the world — they can easily burn out or go into psychosis. (Especially because these days, more charge is needed than before.) So nowadays, groups are being brought together to hold the divine wisdom-energy that needs to come through. This is the new experiment Reality is trying out to bring Sacredness and Wisdom into the world.

This frame landed with me. Pretty much every mystically-inclined person I know has noticed the past couple years that things seem to be moving faster. People are coming online to who they are, developing their spiritual gifts, and stepping into relationship with one another. The mystical social fabric has been getting a lot more dense.

One of these friends was driving me to the train station recently, after we'd spent the past week in a ritual container together — "It's gotten completely insane," she said, "it feels like the X-men are assembling."

Mystic Circuits

I've had conversations with others where they bring up similar comparisons, but the X-men analogy sticks with me in particular; I was big into the comics as a kid, and I dove back into more recent comics a couple years ago. The mutant lore resonates with me.

In recent comics, there's been an idea of "mutant circuits." These are groups of mutants whose powers synergize with one another, in ways that let them do things together that none of them could do on their own — things that are way beyond the sum of their individual gifts.

One of these examples gets absurdly mystical — without going into too much lore, they basically teleport into the Mystery-Beyond-The-Far-Shore, into the White Hot Room at the core of creation, and condense particles of God into a metal that they bring back and use as galactic currency. It's a whole thing.

I felt some flavor of mutant circuits on that call, when he said that the Divine is coming through groups of people, rather than individuals. It had the ring of truth to it.

I look around, and it does seem like two of us in connection can hold a lot more than just the sum of what we could each hold as individuals. Five of us in connection can hold much more than the sum of what we could hold as five individuals. We're starting to form mystic circuits.

Safety in Numbers

I spent the past month on retreat with a small group of mystically-inclined folks I trust, a truly special group, and some of what became possible there was stunning. Coming out of that, the thesis makes more sense to me than ever — I do think that as more and more mystics connect with each other, spend time with each other, allow their pieces of the Divine to move between one another, something is starting to harmonize. Something is becoming possible that isn't possible with lone prophets and mystics, or even just loosely-connected ones.

And, just as important — my sense is that this way is safer, more stable. Mysticism is never safe safe, but something does ring true about the way that 5 bodies together can hold more than what those 5 bodies could hold individually.

Joseph Campbell often gets credited with saying that the mystic swims in the same waters that the madman drowns in. This is hard not to notice, when you step into study, practice, or social circles around mysticism. We all seem to know this.

I got touched by God
and it fucked me up
like an electrical current
pulsing through my veins.

— "The Feels" by Labrinth

But part of this change from individual mystics to mystic circuits seems to be some degree of stability. My sense is, if we stick with the drowning metaphor, that the change is less in the sense of “you won’t fall overboard,” and more in the sense of “when you fall overboard, we’ve got you. We’ve got you.”

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I have more to say here, but I think it might need to wait. For now, I can just reiterate and point forward towards some shapes I see.

• Contact with the Sacred can lead to danger and psychosis

• The Divine seems to be coming more through group fields than individuals lately

• These group fields can create more potency alongside more stability — an excellent combination

• There are tradeoffs to this set-up, of course; a whole damn lot of maturity is needed for groups like this to function, and for the individuals in it to fruitfully take part in it (developmental maturity plays a much bigger role here than is maybe obvious)

• Each group/pairing/subgroup seem to create a bit of its own shared realm; these realms have their own wisdoms and potentials — we might say something like "each of these shared realms is potentially a buddha, potentially a shaman, potentially a sage with its own wisdom and qualities."

• As more of these individuals connect, more of these groups form; as these groups encounter each other, a larger network forms; any given individual or set of individuals might be a participant in any number of different groups, a co-creator of any number of shared realms; as these continue to mix and interconnect, I think impossible things will become quite casually available.

• (It's hard to say exactly what I mean by the title of this article, but this sense of shared realms feels central. Each group is a world, in some way — and those worlds seem to Do Something beyond what any of the individuals making them up do.)

• Wake up, wake up — don't waste a moment. (Zen poem)

• The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep. (Rumi)

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