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Contemplation From Mystification to
De-Mystification By the Druid Finn “Clouds fall from the mind, In most
religious and philosophical traditions, contemplation has been
understood as a way of reaching beyond the ordinary. To contemplate was to
rise above appearances and seek union with a reality deemed higher, purer, or
more divine. In this sense, contemplation has long been tied to mystification:
the cultivation of mystery, the practice of opening the mind to a
supra-natural realm, the hope that through silence or vision one might
glimpse “what lies beyond.” The modern
druid rejects this trajectory. For him, contemplation is not a ladder into
the clouds, nor an ascent into metaphysical after-worlds. It is instead a
precise, procedural act of cognizance rooted in Nature Systems Theory
(NST): the understanding that all identifiable realities emerge as
ordered, transient discontinuous, quantised events reified by observation
(hence contact). Contemplation Defined Procedurally In the
modern druid’s terms, contemplation is a bounded sequence of
attention-acts. Each act is a discrete cognitive contact: the mind
confines random inputs into a focused loop, holds them steadily, and
stabilises awareness long enough to generate insight. This is not a
continuous trance but a quantised, serial procedure—an iteration of contacts,
each one short-lived yet cumulatively clarifying. For the
druid, the object of contemplation is nature itself: the totality of identifiable
emergent events presenting as realitites. A
photon’s strike, the ripple of wind on a pond, the falling of an oak leaf—all
are instances of the universal emergence procedure manifesting as bounded,
therefore identifiable realities. To contemplate is to attend to these emergents without importing supra-natural inference. De-Mystification vs. Mystification Here lies
the druid’s decisive break from mystical tradition. Where the mystic seeks
union with a hidden beyond, i.e. the meta-physic, the druid confines himself
to the given (i.e. the physic). Where others cloak experience in mystery, the
unobservable, he strips it down to observable procedure. In short, the druid’s
contemplation amounts to de-mystification. A simple
contrast clarifies this:
The Lineage of Perspectives Why this
difference? It stems from contrasting ontologies of reality. ·
Dualist traditions (e.g.
early Judaism, much of Christianity, many strands of Hinduism) posited a
radical separation between divine and human, eternal and temporal, spirit and
matter. In such frameworks, contemplation naturally aimed at bridging the
gap—hence mystification. ·
Non-dualist traditions (e.g.
Advaita Vedānta, certain schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Sufi metaphysics) softened
the division by teaching that all is ultimately one but still held that this
unity lay behind or beneath appearances. Contemplation here sought the hidden
Absolute, the timeless substrate of phenomena—still a form of mystification,
only subtler. ·
The druid’s monism (e.g. Ekatva Vedanta, Pantheism) accepts no “beyond.” For him,
there is only nature as procedure, endlessly emergent in bounded events.
Nothing lies behind, above, or after. Contemplation therefore has no
supra-natural object; it has only the emergent moment. This makes it
necessarily de-mystifying. The Druid’s Insight What does
this mean in practice? For the druid, contemplation is not passive gazing nor
ecstatic vision. It is active recognition of how nature works—the
discontinuous procedure, as set of constraints or rules, by which identifiable
reality emerges. To contemplate the oak is not to revere a sacred symbol of
eternal life but to witness a living emergent, a complex event confined by
time, space, and energy, just as the druid himself is. This
redefinition removes the haze of mysticism. It grounds contemplation in the
real, observable, and procedural. The act becomes less about seeking
transcendence and more about learning to see emergence clearly, moment by
moment. Conclusion In sum, the
modern druid transforms contemplation from an exercise in mystification into
an exercise in de-mystification. This transformation reflects the
difference between dualist and non-dualist orientations on the one hand, and the
druid’s monist orientation on the other. ·
Dualism: contemplation bridges the
gap to a divine beyond. ·
Non-dualism: contemplation pierces
through appearances to a hidden Absolute. ·
Monism (Finn): contemplation attends to
emergent nature, nothing beyond. Each act
of contemplation is a bounded event of awareness, which, when serially
iterated, yields the only genuine fruit of contemplation: clarity about the
way nature itself discloses. For the
modern druid, contemplation begins and ends with nature. It is
de-mystification, not mystification. |