No one is sure exactly what went on in the Eleusinian or Orphic mystery cults of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Their images of death, rebirth, and transformation show many similarities to core Christian beliefs, but the essential teachings have been lost. The Gnostic gospels, rejected by the established church, hint at esoteric teachings, but their everyday practices have also been lost to us.

While religion outlines behaviors derived from a founder’s teaching, mysticism is direct awareness of the deity or source itself. Religion tells people quite clearly what they should do if they were in a higher state of consciousness, like practice universal compassion, follow the will of God, and share in divine love, but it leaves out the details of how one is to attain those abilities. Despite claims to the contrary, people are not usually instantly or profoundly transformed by baptism or communion. To become a “new man, to be reborn, to share in the Holy Spirit,” would take a much more transformative practice and experience than has normally been shared.

Christianity has its historical accounts of saints with their ecstasies, visions, miracles, and stories of profound human transformation. How they achieved this is not generally described outside of phrases like “pray without ceasing,” “stay awake,” or “silent prayer.”

Christians held their own saints as suspect, so the saints of other religions and their swamis, yogis, or monks were virtually seen as devil worshippers. Travelers to India, China, and Tibet at the end of the 1800’s brought back stories of mystical practices that sounded like myth or magic to Westerners. Many books were published on these topics, some legitimate, some outlandishly ridiculous and unfounded. Ancient works like the Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead made their way into Victorian parlors.

Attempts were made to educate the public on Hinduism and Buddhism, but were hardly effective in changing suspicious attitudes. Swami Vivekananda from the Ramakrishna Society gave his history-making talk on Hinduism at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, but occurrences like these had very limited influence on public prejudices. Practices such as certain forms of meditation and Hatha yoga were steadfastly associated with the pantheon of Hindu gods and the celestial beings of Tibetan realms, and seemed demonically magical and scary to Christian minds. Even today, Eastern religious terms like chakra, Kundalini, Chi, and Samadhi are confusing to most people.

   Oddly, religious people have always been comfortable with the founders of their religion having direct mystical experience, but do not tolerate very well people in current times having those experiences. People who sought transformation and higher consciousness did not want to be tormented, burnt at the stake, or lose their standing in society. The concept of heresy, any idea deviating from the established orthodoxy, gave rise to the occult by forcing anyone with the courage to question or experiment into underground schools and clandestine activity.

The Theosophists, a group ever searching into magic and Eastern mysticism was established by Helena Blavatsky in 1875, and while they helped to introduce Eastern religions to a wider Western reception, they unfortunately mixed it up with false claims, talks of invisible gurus, and the table tapping séances and spiritualism popular at the time.

Occult groups proliferated, and studies were made into alchemy, astrology, the Kabala, mediums, and all forms of Eastern mystical practices, mixing them all together into a crazy stew. Serious anthropologists, like Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, who contributed so much to Western knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, were handicapped by the damage Theosophists did to public perception.

In none of the Eastern works were meditative and altered states clearly defined or explained. Most of these writings would inevitably revert to the idea nothing could or should be done unless a person found a teacher and became an initiate. Patanjali’s’ Yoga Sutras outlined fine shades of stages of higher consciousness, but in terms too obscurely technical to be comprehended by most people.

Psychology has generally shied away from ideas of higher consciousness. There have been numerous articles on the nature of consciousness itself, all inconclusive and vastly confusing. The self actualization and peak experiences of Maslow come closest to examining human possibilities above the norm. Studies at the Menninger clinic in the Sixties with Swami Rama led to the development of biofeedback machines and the admission that meditation could lower blood pressure and provide a deep relaxation. There have been some studies on human happiness by psychologists, but nothing profound on actually altering states of consciousness or achieving permanent positive change of temperament and personality.

Generally psychology concerns itself with consciousness gone wrong and outright deviance of behavior. Freud depicted the subconscious as an almost inaccessible inner landscape teeming with sexual symbolism, and fortunately he has lost most of his credence. His student Jung ventured into the subconscious as a more creative and friendly realm, but even he did not entertain the possibility of an awareness so great there would be no subconscious, nothing would be hidden, and man would no longer “see through a glass darkly.”

Behaviorism, the carrot and stick approach to humans as automans, mostly predominated the field of psychology until the last few decades when the chemical model took hold. Talk therapy, which used to be the prescription for a lot of depression and anxiety, was once paid for by insurance. Now only pills are reimbursed. Many describe the effects of antidepressants to be a heavy numbing of experience. Page-long side effects accompany every ad for medication. A chilling feature of modern times is the invention of disorders to justify certain medication prescriptions.

It’s an odd fact that the prevalence of attention deficit disorder is tremendously higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Recent studies on brain imaging and multi-tasking reveal it to be not only the least efficient way of working, but even harmful to the brain. The admission or realization that there may be higher forms of attention than what has so far been considered the norm are yet to come from the field of psychology.

In the early 1900’s, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky made an attempt to bring Eastern meditative practices into more modern language and place the techniques within everyday life, but their writings were still encumbered with the occult terminology popular at the time.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1872-1949) was taught by Greek Orthodox priests in Armenia amidst a convergence of European and Asian religious practices. He thought there were genuine methods of transformation long held in the domain of monastic settings. The contemplative states of nuns and monks are said to require a renunciation of all pleasure and socialization, which is patently absurd. This was pointed out by Gurdjieff in his reference to his methods as “the Fourth Way” or “way of the sly man,” not requiring the extreme deprivations of the monk, yogi, or fakir.

Convinced that ways of profoundly raising consciousness were kept in secret and on the verge of being lost, he traveled widely with a group of fellow seekers and looked for remnants of mystical knowledge. What he was seeing about the human condition at that time led him to conclude humans were just a pale image of what they once were, losing not just a genuine spiritual life, but the ability to be free, becoming increasingly mechanical.

Dodging the murderous throngs running loose during the Russian revolution, Gurdjieff managed with great hardship, time, and money to get his entire extended family and many of his students and friends safely out of Russia. While he admired the honesty and simplicity of the peasants, the majority of his students were artistic people, musicians and aristocrats like the deHartmans, professors like Ouspensky, or writers and bohemians like Katherine Mansfield. Dozens of his students at one time worked on a large estate in Fontainebleau, France farming or performing Gurdjieff’s choreographed esoteric dance movements. Students of different nationalities worked together to translate into several languages very exact terms for Gurdjieff’s books and lectures on the Fourth Way system.

He cultivated a great air of mystery and was very entertaining. Intentionally off-putting, once he got the sort and number of pupils he wanted, he did everything he could to drive everyone else away. Ultimately Gurdjieff was one of those rascal gurus who is misunderstood in a thousand different ways, but if you are willing to sort through his deflections and theater, there is a wealth of vital information mixed in with the entertainment. Much of what he wrote was allegory, like Meetings with Remarkable Men. None of his cosmology was meant to be taken literally, but rather as a map of levels of consciousness.  

Peter Demianovich Ouspensky (1878-1947) took all of the main points of the Gurdjieff system and put them into a sequential and methodical form, so far unsurpassed. A very dry mathematician, he seemed to be the one student of Gurdjieff who was not artistic. In all of his writings he used humor only two times, but he did a great job of explaining a clear system and answering all the questions. Some of the books tend to bog down into too many pointless questions and answers, and reflecting the times, like Gurdjieff, he uses a number of vague occult terms, but Ouspensky’s clear, sequential steps still stand as the best guide to secular mysticism of the 1900’s.

The 1960’s were the heyday for exploration of higher human potential. A number of factors were at work. There was a strong backlash from the strict conformity of the Fifties along with more money and time to pursue interests. Writings of people like Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary increased curiosity about altered states and alternative spiritual paths. Hallucinogens gave glimpses of higher states of consciousness that grew into later research about how to achieve those states and make them permanent without the use of drugs.

During the Sixties people knew there was a lot more to reality than traditional religion and modern psychology told them, but were nearly drowning in strange books and literature from the last century. What to make of it all?

For a lot of people the first time any mention was made about a higher state of consciousness was during the Beatle’s involvement with Transcendental Meditation and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1960’s. It’s not too evident why it was even called meditation, as the technique involved silently chanting the same words or mantra over and over and over. The monotony of this is hard to exaggerate, though it might possibly appeal to the genuinely obsessive or those inclined to work on an assembly line, undaunted by repetition.

For the first time in the history of Western civilization, people felt they were free to openly explore Eastern ideas without being subject to religious persecution. Hippie travels to the East helped popularize practices of the Hindus and Buddhists. Some, like Hatha yoga, Tai Chi, and acupuncture made it into the mainstream. Almost every large city also had its Buddhist or Zen center where people worked at sit-still meditation. Communal settings were conducive to experimenting together and comparing notes. Groups and communes sprung up based on hundreds of different paths to consciousness exploration. In just about every large city a Fourth Way group or commune could be found reading books by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and sharing experiences of Self Observation.

Some forms of consciousness exploration were mixed with fiction. The books of Hesse and Castaneda were widely read in the Sixties and into the following decades, but how much of it was entertainment and how much real methods of transformation was heavily debated, and the most likely verdict is they were combinations of the two.

The popular writings of Alan Watts made Zen more understandable and acceptable. Thomas Merton, the contemplative Trappist monk and beatnik writer, studied and shared correlations between Eastern and Western religious mysticism. The Baba Ram Dass book Be Here, Be Now could be found in just about every hippie dwelling with its spooky pictures and descriptions of Hindu mystical revelations. Krishnamurti, the adopted wonder child of the Theosophists, became disillusioned with them, went through profound transformative experience, and traveled America with his lectures and books on Enlightenment, far more vague and baffling than Zen could ever be.

During the Eighties all of the Sixties forms of spirituality were mixed in with the mythology of Joseph Campbell, Native American symbolism and rituals, crystal healing, and hundreds of health practices. In the era before media expansion and the Internet, it was easy to believe a bit of everything. By the late Nineties the pendulum seemed to swing toward full blown materialism and away from any curiosity about higher consciousness, assuming all of it was as nutty as any conspiracy theory about aliens.  

The system of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, the Fourth Way, sought to take mystical practices away from the exclusive domain of religion and place it in language and context more approachable by modern people. Once their system is untangled from the occult jargon of their times, their techniques are uniquely appropriate for the modern mind.