ABSTRACT

Contemporary varieties of mystical practice are examples of changes in everyday social life. Brace Wilshire writes about people's self-condition as one of ecstasy deprivation, in which ecstasy is based on the depth of their connection to the environment. The costs of this connective lack are the widespread but privatized addictions and sufferings of the modern world. A sacralized self-environment dialogue differs from the conventional sociological understandings of "socialization", which mean the stamping of historical social routine to make a "person". It is the dialectic of reproduction and resistance, which polarizes power. However, a nondualistic, mystical sociology is not static or inert and is not a harmony of silent being; it is not a withdrawal from the world. Mystical models of Kundalini energy, alchemy, yoga, and shamanistic, celestial ascents, descents, and the everyday healing and social distribution of energy associated with the sacred are being pressed forward to sociological awareness by the course of everyday social life.