Hiking, with the mix of physical activity and being in nature, simultaneously empties and stimulates me. When the body lays inactive and gets cooped up, physical and psychological waste accumulates. When I was studying mystical traditions more heavily, I took weekly hikes both for physical exercise and for my mind to work through different ideas in a way that followed their natural flow. It was during this time when I felt like I was most connected to the Universal Mind/Spirit (which you could conceptualize as God but that comes with too much Judeo-Christian baggage, in other words, it's too specific to a certain religious tradition. But my connection to the UM has caveats which I'll explain later). I wouldn't call it being in touch with the Sacred since that's more of being overtaken aesthetically and emotionally by the sublime (in both big and mundane ways). But the Universal Mind is the substance or spirit that underlies the fundamental fabric of reality. Some people approach it through religion, science, or philosophy but these subjects really only end up explicating the World Mind/Spirit which is one of many aspects of the Universal Mind (though quantum physics would be closer to approaching the UM). The World Mind is historically contingent and it's historical contingencies unfold its universality over time. Jung was probably one of the few people to map out the cartography of the World Mind with great sophistication. It does sound pretentious of me to say that I feel connected to the Universal Mind especially since I'm no mystic, so realistically it's that the World Mind is becoming much clearer to me even though it's only a monad of the Universal Mind. As the World Mind, and by extension the Universal Mind, always reveals and explicates itself, a lot of these systems are ways to translate and systematize our understanding of these Minds. They're not transcendent but fully immanent. The Universal Mind might seem transcendent since it's still beyond our comprehension but we too still haven't fully explicated the Word Mind which is something we more readily embody. These Minds can be known through rational investigation but they're especially (particularly the Universal Mind), to my estimation, most readily explicated through the Sacred. On the small scale it's being awed by the beauty of the world or being in a flow state. On the other end, it's a full on mystical experience which William James categorizes as,
Ineffable: the experience is incapable of being described and must be directly experienced to be understood.
Noetic: the experience is understood to be a state of knowledge through which divine truths can be learned.
Transient: the experience is of limited duration.
Passivity: the subject of the experience is passive, unable to control the arrival and departure of the experience
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Va...ous_Experience
Ineffable: the experience is incapable of being described and must be directly experienced to be understood.
Noetic: the experience is understood to be a state of knowledge through which divine truths can be learned.
Transient: the experience is of limited duration.
Passivity: the subject of the experience is passive, unable to control the arrival and departure of the experience
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Va...ous_Experience
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