The previous blog post marks 200 entries on ThyMindOMan.com that I have written over the past year and a half. I thought I’d take this occasion to reflect a bit about what I have done here, and introduce a new feature of the website.

Some friends have encouraged me to write a book about my insights into mysticism. I did actually write a manuscript a couple years ago while I was transitioning from Mormonism to perennialism/universalism. It was about the mystical core and origin of Mormonism. It was over 300 pages with 700+ footnotes, and it poured out of me over the course of just a few months. I never finished it though. I did, however, present a paper at a conference introducing the subject, which was also the inaugural post of this website.

One of the reasons I haven’t published the book is because I had experiences after writing it that seemed to supersede what I had written. At times I’ve felt perhaps like Thomas Aquinas did when on December 6, 1273, he had a particularly long ecstatic mystical experience, after which he stopped all work on his magnum opus Summa Theologica. When his companion begged him to continue his work, Thomas replied, “I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw [chaff, worthless] to me” (mihi videtur ut palea). Aquinas may have encountered the limits of language and intellectual thought.

But I have written another “book,” which is already published. This one. The 200 blog posts on this site represent many of my thoughts on mysticism over the last year and a half, thoughts that came to mind after the previous manuscript had been written, and touching on many of the same topics but from a newer perspective. These blog posts add up to over 85,000 words. If put into print, this site would be a book between 300-350 pages in length. So, this is my book. I don’t know if I will ever publish this in print, or the prior manuscript I wrote, but I am happy with what I’ve written here, sharing my thoughts on many topics related to mysticism.

Although all the articles can already be found through the tags or search feature in the top right-hand corner menu, or just by browsing, I thought it might be useful to put together a “topical guide” of sorts of what I’ve written here, to provide another way to find and access the articles. I’ve created a page for this Topical Guide, and also added it to the navigation at the top of the site.

I hope sharing my thoughts with you on these topics is beneficial to you in your spiritual journey. They are just my thoughts, ways that I have come to conceptualize spirituality over the past few years, and mysticism in particular, which I believe holds the purest spirituality that we can encounter in life. But as I note on my About page, my thoughts are not absolutely true. They are pointers, symbols, metaphors, guides, analogies, relative truths. They are the way my mind has attempted to make sense of spirituality, religion, and God, through my personal experiences, learning, and unlearning. I offer it in case it might be of help as you navigate these topics yourself.

Ultimately, I believe each one of us should come to a knowledge of truth for ourselves, and not through any other, but in direct experience. I know this is possible.