Indigenous Rituals Connecting Life Between the Physical & Invisible

[Randy Eady]

Beliefs, where spirits inhabit the environment and offerings are given in thanks or supplication to nature, have been present and existed in the Carribean region long before conquest & colonization. 

Is there a way to abstractly wrap our hands around communicating such experiences, and making attempts to rationally or scientifically explain mystical states? How would we categorize or sort out what experiences count as “mystical?” 

Of the variety of such experiences, how can they be explained? Only on physiological and psychological grounds?  Or is there a transcendent reality contacted during mystical experiences? If transcendent, how does this reality appear, and is it different to different people? 

Even more so how are such experiences described if they are ineffable? And what difference might there be between a mystical experience and the ordinary experience of our everyday world?

Scholars across disciplines observe while esotericism and mysticism seem inextricably linked and experienced – both revolve around a perceptual field of cyclical spiritual approval and disapproval.  

Mysticism seemingly and foundationally embedded with the spiritually esoteric, to comprise a key facet of religion, along with informing the highest agencies of social, cultural, intellectual, and artistic creations. 

Originally dismissed as mere idolatry, the rituals underscore two core tenets:  they are philosophically holistic and cyclical.