Mystical Experiencer: Male in mid-sixties
Submission date: August 15, 2022
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 15
I was sitting quietly for a time at a friend’s house, waiting for him to join me and was looking out across the desert and the mountains in the distance. My friend’s older sister came and sat next to me. We started talking over various ideas (couldn’t tell you what they were), but she kept presenting the flip side of things, shifting back and forth, and asking questions that seemed paradoxical.
I recall sitting for a long time, with both of us remaining silent, while I attempted to resolve or understand how these apparently disparate ideas could be true—they seemed like they both held a truth, even while seeming contradictory. Then something gave way. It wasn’t an intellectual realization or one grounded thought. It was more like a total, radical shift in view in which all oppositional notions, all things at antipodes, were not in argument, didn’t negate one another, but were all part and parcel of one thing, one reality.
This wordless apprehension or understanding didn’t stop there, but radiated from or out to everything. The world, life, the totality, was perfect, in harmony and I was somehow part of all of that, connected to everything. The desert had always been beautiful to me—the deep silences, open spaces, the subtle shades of light greens, tans, browns all capped by vast blue. At that moment, the beauty, the perfection, the sense of awe, wonder, gratitude was…well, kinda annihilating. But not a bad sort of annihilation. The sort that the “I” it thought I was melted away, or perhaps blended into, all that was/is.
I felt a deep calm, yet excitement. I felt like I was melting into the ground yet exploding out into the sky. I felt utterly quiet, yet brimming with energy. Again, the apparent world of opposites was coinciding within me, directly as felt experience, without any contention or discord. There was nowhere else to be, nothing to be done. All was perfect as it was. My child’s mind asked, coming up with the worst imaginable thing it could, “Even if a father should kill his son!?” The answer was, “Yes, that’s part of the perfection as well.”
