Indigenous nations in North America demonstrate mystical participation in creation, where personal and communal symbols integrate psychic, somatic, and social energies with local landscapes. These experiences, often synesthetic, become conscious through rituals that link words, actions, sounds, sights, and sensory observations. Ritualized expressions reflect back on personal, communal, spiritual, and ecological realms. Native American religious ways are lifeway complexes addressing human limits and fostering mature mystical understanding, countering dismissive views of native communities as fragmented or romantically reimagined.
Contemporary psychotherapies range from behaviorism, which ignores inner experience and focuses solely on behavior, to transpersonal therapies that aim for peak knowledge and compassion. Between these extremes, psychoanalysis raises the question of whether its ideals of love and work can be considered spiritual. Body-oriented therapies approach the spiritual realm in a vague way, while humanistic therapies sit at the hinge between a scientific, materialist approach and a gnostic one that sees Spirit as humanity's true nature.