Archives: Third Party Stories

Joseph Salmon (known to be alive from 1647 – 1656) was a highly regarded 17th century English religious and political writer.  For a period after 1650 he was a Protestant minister in Kent, in South East England. A Neo-Platonist, Salmon described humankind’s life in time as a descent from oneness into multiplicity.  He believed our true life is in unity; the aim of the mystical path is thus to return our spirits to their original center.

Salmon described his mystical experience as follows:

“I appeared to myself as one confounded into the abyss of eternity, nonentitized into the Being of beings, my soul split and emptied into the fountain and ocean of divine bliss.”

Quoted by Sidney Spencer in Mysticism in World Religion from Salmon’s Heights in Depths, and Depths in Heights.

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) was an Irish poet and a leading literary figure of the 20th century; in 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Among Yeats’ most well-known poems are “The Stolen Child”, “The Second Coming”, and “Sailing to Byzantium”.  Yeats had a lifelong interest in mysticism and spiritualism.

W.B. Yeats described his “seeing” experience (mystical experience) in the following poem:

“My fifteenth year had come and gone.
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and an empty cup
On the marble table top.

While on the shop and street I gazed,
My body for a moment blazed,
And twenty minutes, more or less,
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.”

Quoted from The Psychology of Awakening by Gay Watson, Stephen Batchelor, and Guy Claxton.

John Richard Jefferies (1848 – 1887) was an English novelist and essayist who wrote about nature, providing passionate, inspirational descriptions of the English countryside.  Jeffries’ 1883 autobiography, The Story of My Heart, describes his beliefs about the spiritual nature of man and the world.

Jeffries described his mystical experience, which some would deem to be an experience of “nature mysticism”, as follows:

“There came to me a delicate, but at the same time a deep, strong, and sensuous enjoyment of the beautiful green earth, the beautiful sky, and the sun; I felt them, they gave me an inexpressible delight, as if they embraced and poured out their love upon me.  It was I who loved them, for my heart was broader than the earth; it is broader now than even then, more thirsty and desirous.  After the sensuous enjoyment always came the thought, the desire:  That I might be like this; that I might have the inner meaning of the sun, the light, the earth, the trees and grass, translated into some growth of excellence in myself, both of body and of mind; greater perfection of physique, greater perfection of mind and soul:  that I might be higher in myself.”

Quoted from Jeffries’ The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography.

David Spangler (1945 – ) is an American spiritual philosopher who describes himself as a ”practical mystic.”  Spangler helped build Scotland’s Findhorn Foundation into a center of residential spiritual education.  According to its website, “The Findhorn Foundation is a dynamic experiment where everyday life is guided by the inner voice of spirit…”  Its program residents “work in co-creation with the intelligence of nature and take inspired action towards [the Foundation’s] vision of a better world.”

Spangler’s mystical experience occurred when he was seven years of age and sitting in the back of his parents’ car while en route to Casablanca for a shopping trip.  Spangler experienced a form of out-of-body experience at the start of his experience, and described the mystical experience as follows:

“All at once I am filled with a feeling of energy coursing through my body and a sensation as if I am expanding like a balloon.  Before I can think about what is happening, I find myself somehow outside my body but enveloping it.  Looking down and in some fashion within at the same time, I see my physical form, my parents and our automobile, tiny objects rapidly shrinking out of view.  When they are gone, I am alone in an unbroken field of white light.”

After some time of identity with light, in which he had various spiritual realizations, Spangler experienced oneness with an all-encompassing presence:

“As if a curtain were drawn aside, I had a visual impression of the universe, a great wheel of stars and galaxies, suffused with the golden glow of billions of suns, floating in a sea of spirit.  It was as if I were seeing as this presence saw, and for one instant we were as one.  In that instant, it was as if I were one with everything that existed, every atom, every stone, every world, every star, seeing creation not from some great distance but from the inside out as if it were my very body and being.”

Quoted by Paul Marshall in The Shape of the Soul from Robert M. May’s Cosmic Consciousness Revisited: The Modern Origins and Development of a Western Spiritual Psychology.

Photo Credit:  David Spangler from http://lorianpress.com.

H. Warner Allen (1881 – 1968) was a British journalist, editor, and writer covering topics ranging from wine to spirituality.  During WWI, he was a special correspondent for The Morning Post and Daily News.  Allen’s works included his mystical trilogy:  The Timeless Moment (1946), The Happy Issue (1948), and The Uncurtained Throne (1952).

Allen described his mystical experience, which occurred while he had closed his eyes at a concert, as follows:

“Rapt in Beethoven’s music, I closed my eyes and watched a silver glow which shaped itself into a circle with a central focus brighter than the rest.  The circle became a tunnel of light proceeding from some distant sun in the heart of the Self.  Swiftly and smoothly I was borne through the tunnel and as I went the light turned from silver to gold.  There was an impression of drawing strength from a limitless sea of power and a sense of deepening peace.  The light grew brighter, but was never dazzling or alarming.  I came to a point where time and motion ceased.  In my recollection it took the shape of a flat-topped rock, surrounded by a summer sea, with a sandy pool at its foot.  The dream scene vanished and I am absorbed in the Light of the Universe, in Reality glowing like fire with the knowledge of itself, without ceasing to be one and myself, merged like a drop of quicksilver in the Whole, yet still separate as a grain of sand in the desert.  The peace that passes all understanding and the pulsating energy of creation are one in the centre in the midst of conditions where all opposites are reconciled.

Allen also described his illumination, or immediate reaction to the experience – a “wordless stream of complex feelings” – as follows:

“Something has happened to me – I am utterly amazed – can this be that?  (That being the answer to the riddle of life) – but it is too simple – I always knew it – it is remembering an old forgotten secret – like coming home – I am not “I”, not the “I” thought – there is no death – peace passing understanding – yet how unworthy I –“

Quoted by Paul Marshall in The Shape of the Soul from Allen’s book, The Timeless Moment.

Photo Credit:  H. Warner Allen from https://www.mediastorehouse.com.

Irina Tweedie (1907 – 1999) was a Russian-born British Sufi and teacher.  Her books, Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master and The Chasm of Fire (an abridged version of Daughter of Fire), have together sold more than 140,000 copies.

Tweedie described her kundalini awakening (mystical experience) as follows:

“Burning currents of fire inside; cold shivers running outside, along the spine, wave after wave, over legs, arms, abdomen, making all the hair rise.  It is as if the whole frame were full of electricity….  Then it happened.  It was as if something snapped inside my head, and the whole of me was streaming out ceaselessly, without diminishing, on and on.  There was no “me” – just flowing.  Just being.  A feeling of unending expansion, just streaming forth.

Quoted by Marjorie Woollacott in Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind.

Photo Credit: Irina Tweedie from https://goldensufi.org.

Kathleen Raine, Ph.D. (1908 – 2003) was a British poet and William Blake scholar.  She was interested in spirituality – Platonism and Neoplatonism in particular – and frequently contributed to the journal “Studies in Comparative Religion”.  In 1981, she co-founded the periodical “Temenos” and, in 1990, she founded the Temenos Academy of Integral Studies, “an educational charity in London which aims to offer education in philosophy and the arts in the light of the sacred traditions of East and West.” In 2000, Raine was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).

Raine described a mystical experience she had one evening while sitting near a table she used for writing her poetry.  While looking at a hyacinth on the table, and gazing at the “eye-like hearts” of the flowers, her consciousness shifted:

“I found that I was no longer looking at it, but was it; a distinct, indescribable, but in no way vague, still less emotional shift of consciousness into the plant itself.  Or, rather, I and the plant were one and indistinguishable; as if the plant were a part of my consciousness.  I dared scarcely to breath, held in a kind of fine attention in which I could sense the very flow of life in the cells.  I was not perceiving the flower, but was living it.  I was aware of the life of the plant as a slow flow of circulation of a vital current of liquid light of the utmost purity….  There was nothing emotional about this experience, which was, on the contrary, an almost mathematical apprehension of a complex and organized whole, apprehended as a whole.  This whole was living, and as such inspired a sense of immaculate wholeness.  Living form – that is how I can best describe the soul of the plant….  The experience lasted for some time – I have no idea how long – and I returned to dull common consciousness with a sense of diminution.  I had never before experienced the like, nor have I sense in the same degree; and yet at the time it seemed not strange but the most intimately familiar, as if I were experiencing at last things as they are, was where I belonged, where in some sense, I had always been and would always be.  That almost continuous sense of exile and incompleteness of experience which is, I suppose, the average human state, was gone like a film from sight.

Quoted from The Land Unknown by Paul Marshall in The Shape of the Soul.

Photo Credit:  Kathleen Raine from That Wondrous Pattern: Essays on Poetry and Poets.

Martin Buber (1878 – 1965) was an Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher, educator, writer, and translator. He is widely regarded as one of the 20th Century’s leading intellectuals. Buber is best known for his 1923 book, Ich und Du (I and Thou), which distinguishes between “I-Thou” and “I-It” modes of existence. In 1930, Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, but resigned from his professorship in protest immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, Mandate Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and sociology. Buber is the author of numerous works, including Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, a book that describes higher states of consciousness from throughout the world.

Buber described his mystical consciousness as follows:

“Now from my own unforgettable experience I know well that there is a state in which the bonds of the personal nature of life seem to have fallen away from us and we experience an undivided unity. But I do not know – what the soul willingly imagines and indeed is bound to imagine (mine too once did it) – that in this I had attained to a union with the primal being or the godhead. That is an exaggeration no longer permitted to the responsible understanding. Responsibly – that is, as a man holding his ground before reality – I can elicit from those experiences only that in them I reached an undifferentiable unity of myself without form or content. I may call this an original pre-biographical unity and suppose that it is hidden unchanged beneath all biographical change, all development and complication of the soul. Nevertheless, in the honest and sober account of the responsible understanding this unity is nothing but the unity of this soul of mine, whose “ground” I have reached, so much so, beneath all formations and contents, that my spirit has no choice but to understand it as the groundless. But the basic unity of my own soul is certainly beyond the reach of all multiplicity it has hitherto received from life….”

In Mysticism and Philosophy, the late Princeton University Professor, W.T. Stace, offers an important examination of Buber’s experience and of Buber’s interpretations of that experience. Writing in the late 1950’s, Stace first notes that “Buber’s opinions as to the correct philosophical interpretations of what he experienced are of course entitled to profound respect.” Stace continued: Buber’s account provides “almost indisputable further evidence” – from a contemporary, psychologically sophisticated intellectual – “that the experience of an undifferentiated, distinctionless unity…is a psychological fact, and not, as has been suggested, the misdescription of incompetent introspectionists.”

Stace also points out that “The remarkable fact is that [Buber] has, at two different periods of his intellectual career, given two different and mutually inconsistent interpretations of the same experience. His own earlier interpretation, made apparently immediately after undergoing the experience, was in accordance with the main mystical tradition. He believed in transsubjectivity and accepted it as truth that “he has attained to union with the primal being.” But later in his life he has changed his mind and now asserts that the undifferentiated unity which he experienced was only the unity of his own self…

[T]here is certainly much to be said for accepting the interpretation which [Buber] gave at the time he had his experience, while it was still fresh and alive, in preference to an interpretation which came as an afterthought, perhaps because of the pressure of the Jewish tradition against the concept of union. For there can be, I surmise, little doubt that the environmental pressure of the culture to which he belongs was basic cause of a change of mind which quite obviously went against the grain of his own more spontaneous feelings.” (From 1938 until his death in 1965, Buber lived in Jerusalem.)

Quoted from Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man.

Photo Credit:  Martin Buber, Jerusalem 1953 by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Jacquetta Hawkes (1910 – 1996) was a British archaeologist and writer. Hawkes was the first woman to study archaeology and anthropology at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, where she graduated with first class honours. She was the daughter of the scientist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins who received the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Her many works include A Land, The World of the Past, and The Atlas of Early Man.

In the following passage, Hawkes described her mystical experience, which occurred while she was a young lady working on an archaeological project on Mount Carmel in Israel:

“One night when the land was still fresh from the rain, I was wandering near our camp enjoying the moonlight, when an intense exaltation took possession of me. It was as though the White Goddess of the moon had thrown some bewitching power with her rays. It seemed to me that our arid satellite was itself a living presence bounding in the sky – I do not understand this use of the word “bounding”, but it comes insistently, and I cannot but use it to express some deeply felt vitality. Indeed, the whole night was dancing about me.

It appeared that the moonlight had ceased to be a physical thing and now represented a state of illumination in my own mind. As here in the night landscape the steady white light threw every olive leaf and pebble into sharp relief, so it seemed that my thoughts and feelings had been given a quite extraordinary clarity and truth.

So powerfully was I moved by this sense of possession that I climbed up on to a high outcrop of rock against the mouth of the wadi and knelt down there. The moonlight swam round, and in, my head as I knelt looking across the plain to the shining silver bar of the Mediterranean.

From far behind me, still muffled in the folds of the mountain, I heard the bronze sound of camel-bells. To my sharpened but converging senses they seemed like a row of brown flowers blooming in the moonlight. In truth the sound of bells came from nothing more remarkable than a caravan, perhaps twenty camels with packs and riders, coming down the wadi on its way north to Haifa. But even now I cannot recognize that caravan in everyday terms; my memory of it is dreamlike, yet embodies one of the most intense sensuous and emotional experiences of my life. For those minutes, and I have no notion how many they were, I had the heightened sensibility of one passionately in love, and with it the power to transmute all that the senses perceived into symbols of burning significance. This surely is one of the best rewards of humanity. To be filled with comprehension of the beauty and marvelous complexity of the physical world, and for this happy excitement of the senses to lead directly into an awareness of spiritual significance. The fact that such experience comes most surely with love, with possession by the creative eros, suggests that it belongs near the root of our mystery. Certainly it grants man a state of mind in which I believe he must come more and more to live: a mood of intensely conscious individuality which serves only to strengthen an intense consciousness of unity with all being. His mind is one infinitesimal node in the mind present throughout all being, just as his body shares in the unity of matter….

[A]s the moon leapt and bounded in the sky, I took full possession of a love and confidence that have not yet forsaken me.”

Quoted by Craig Pearson, Ph.D. in The Supreme Awakening.

Photo Credit:  Jacquetta Hawkes from www.bbc.co.uk.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977), also known by his pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a prolific Russian-American author and poet.  A graduate of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Nabokov taught Russian literature at Wellesley and Cornell. He is considered to be of the twentieth century’s most brilliant writers. Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s most famous novel in English, was ranked fourth on the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels. Nabokov also spent considerable time on the composition of chess problems.

Nabokov described his mystical moments as follows:

“I confess I do not believe in time.  I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.  Let visitors trip.  And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants.  This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain.  It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love.  A sense of oneness with sun and stone.  A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

Quoted from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory.