Modernity has discarded the old ways to live and learn. The vocabulary of our ancients has been over-generalized, and meaning completely washed away. As language changes from generation to generation, the old knowledge, myths, songs become incomprehensible and misinterpreted. There's good and bad sides. The good part is that a lot of the old incomplete or wrong knowledge is now expired. The bad part is a lot of valuable knowledge is also lost. And the modern replacements aren't always better. Outside of expert circles, everything is being replaced by a dogmatic worship of science, performative business and economics.

Refusing to abandon some of the vocabulary of our ancients and to expand on substance: the mystic is on a solitary path to first-hand knowledge. Also known as a seeker of truth, a "seeker", a "traveler".

The mystic has to filter out the external agenda, realize there's reductionism, observe reality as it is, explore different interpretations for inspiration. The modern mystic is an independent practitioner working outside of state, corporate and communal influence.

How is a mystic different from a skeptic? They have similar goals with different approaches. The mystic is willing to work with more than empirical knowledge. The spiritual world is to be explored. Some understand and integrate with the divine, others learn to tolerate the unknowable and the infinite.

Every additional layer between you and knowledge is highly likely to innocently misinterpret or willingly deceive. Popular media summaries and news, rumors, casual conversation are the obvious examples. Institutional religion and academia have to be verified with personal experience and high rigor at every step to keep it grounded with reality. Academic re-exposition, mentorship, preachers, priests, monks, lamas, thought leaders, renowned teachers, masters, gurus, ritual specialists, ideologists, dogmatists, conformists, sorcerers, mediums, oracles, prophets, politicians, historians are all acting according to their own agenda. They have either an explicit or a hidden price, so have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Worth a brief mention that the misinterpretation and deception are not only external. Always consider that as humans, we are prone to self-delusion, self-destruction and taking shortcuts even when we have pure unfiltered reality and facts in our hands.

It may look strange to see some of those old supernatural functions mentioned here, but realize they still exist. They have new names, rebranded to separate from being recognized as such, but effectively with the same function. So it's worth studying ancient knowledge in order to recognize the modern equivalents.

Blindly discarding words because they carry a supernatural definition or interpretation is naive. For example the oracle served extremely important geopolitical, diplomatic, risk-management and intelligence functions. Governments couldn't function without them. High-level decision making is usually dealing with imperfect information and can't algorithmically derive an answer, so the oracle provided one with plausible deniability and transfer of blame. The function still exists. It's veiled in pseudoscience and has many names. It might be stochastic analysis, an economic model, statistical inference carried out by a corporate risk-analyst or a central bank forecaster or an academic peer reviewer. No amount of math and science can compensate for imperfect information and yet we have to make decisions every day. In daily life, everyone is their own oracle, prophet, fortune-teller even though most wouldn't like to admit it after 20 years of empirical science dogma in academia. In fact digital divination is alive and well ¹.

Scientific dogmatism likes to call things supernatural and occult, attaching a negative connotation. Science pretends that things that can't be measured and captured in a spreadsheet don't exist and should be dismissed. Something lacking explanation is not the same as being refuted by science. The "refuted" and "unexplained" are often conflated on purpose.

Another thing we are conditioned to ignore: magic exists. Magic is real, although most of it is relatively mundane to most people as it isn't about violating the laws of physics. In fact magic is one of the predecessors to different engineering disciplines. It is a symbolic applied practice that manipulates the world. Runes, inscriptions, incantations, rituals, instruction manuals (grimoires, spellbooks), special names, secrecy. Whatever it takes to bend reality to human will. And all of those are practiced today. Modern examples of magical symbolism are social engineering in corporate logos, catchy songs for branding, mantras and slogans. It's an indirect manipulation of how humans perceive and interact with reality. Software is made with formal symbolic language, conceptually similar to a runic script, that alters reality.

books about mysticism, divination, spiritual guidance:

• Al-Ghazali: The Deliverance from Error. Discusses the dangers of religious indoctrination. Al-Ghazali was a sufi mystic, lived during the islamic golden age. Famous for his critique on contemporary philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and al-Farabi.
• The I Ching (book of changes). You ask the book a question and it provides an answer. A divination tool (cleromancy, read the book after a coin toss).
• Shí Yì (Ten Wings). Commentary on I Ching. Philosophical commentary on the symbolism of the divinations.
• Zhuangzi: The Inner Chapters. A foundational taoist text, teaches spiritual freedom, the path to wisdom.
• Fal-e Hafez (omens of Hafez). A collection of poems by the sufi mystic poet Hafez (Divan-e Hafez) used as a divitation tool (bibliomancy, open the book at random). Hafez was given the title Lisan al-Ghayb (tongue of the unseen) for the prophetic ambiguity of his poems. The same title was used in Frank Herbert's Dune for the fremen prophet Paul Atreides Muad'Dib.

symbolic magic:

• De Umbris Idearum (on the shadows of ideas). Describes memoization via a custom-made symbolic information retrieval system. The author Giordano Bruno published many occult esoteric philosophy books. He used magical symbolism to link celestial powers and human thought. He's one of the predecessors of Newton and similar in that they both designed magical symbolic systems to solve scientific problems. Newton himself was an alchemist and both were interested in hermeticism.