Archives: Submitted Stories

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in late sixties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  41

I am having a difficult time focusing on the directive to describe “most significant mystical experience” much like a parent would resist labeling one off-spring with a superlative over another. I think each of my experiences were “MOST” significant. The construct of this survey is already causing me to resist being directed to choose one incident over the five as “most.”

I will do the best I can, but I want to be recorded as preferring to not make such a determination. I choose one of the five because it was the first to profoundly shift my world view, but not because I would label it as more significant than the others.

I was driving 40 minutes home from a mundane graduate level class at a land-grant university. It was storming, late at night, and the road was filled with tractor trailer trucks which were splashing my windshield excessively. My son and daughter were home alone and I began to process what their lives would be like if I didn’t make it home. I concluded that there would be positives and negatives to living without their devoted mother, and instantly I took what I can only describe as “a trip” while still driving that car.

Words cannot describe my experience, but what I can say is that later in life I discovered the impact of this incident was similar to what happens to people when they have had a near-death experience. My chest was filled with pure joy. I left any semblance of ego behind and fully embraced that we are all connected. EVERYTHING made perfect sense, and I felt like a spider on a spider web but at a cosmic level. I was filled with a profound sense of calm and love for everything in my world including rocks and trees. I felt absolutely no fear, nor have I felt fear since.

I ended up at home and slept well that night. I told no one about this incident because who would have believed me?

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in mid-thirties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  33

I don’t know if it can be explained by words. Very difficult to understand.

In November, I went into a madness. I cannot explain how it happened, but it changed my life.

It was a wonderful experience. I felt that I was aligned with myself and full of energy. I had a lot of meaningful dreams and probably hallucinations. My perception of time changed. I felt in peace.

If you never lived a mystical experience you cannot understand how it feels or understand.

It is very complex.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early sixties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  62

I experienced sitting in the “Holy of Holies” in the Temple in Jerusalem. (I am Jewish but do not believe in god.) I felt the unity of the universe, that I was sitting in the nexus of the universe, but I was certainly not the center of the universe. I was connected with everything. It was all one. There was a profound silence. I experienced the spaciousness of the universe. There was no ‘me’. I was floating in the spaciousness, groundless, falling, rising, spinning.

After a period of this experience, I looked up and saw ‘god’. God was a black figure. I saw no detail. I was in the shadow of this energy field that I experienced as god. I said to myself “I don’t believe in god, but this is clearly god.” This lasted for a long while as I looked away and back toward the black figure.

Finally, it was no longer there and I went back into the floating in space. I felt LOVE. I felt that love unifies all in the universe; that the universe is love. I became very tearful as I experienced love for my wife and my two sons. I felt an existential love for them much deeper than I had EVER experienced before.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in mid-sixties
Current location:  Canada
Age at time of experience:  65

Every December, I visit about 150 homeowners that I regularly keep in touch with. I do this between 5 and 8 o’clock in the evening when it is dark and cold out, so I can find people at home. I drive my car from home to home. This particular evening, I had probably visited about 7 or 8 residences by the time I reached this property. I had not that week, day or the hours before (or later), engaged in any kinds of drugs, exercise, meditation or highly charged emotional experiences. I was just going about my normal routine, working, by visiting one homeowner in my database after another.

I knocked and the lady of the house opened the door, and we had a friendly, relaxed chat on her front porch. Without any bidding on my part (in mid-conversation), I instantly slipped into a no ego, no self (no consciousnesses of self, no being a witness) mode. Even though it felt like I was just awareness, just being aware, my body did not seem to be present (it was like my body had disappeared). I had no sense of my ego or self. I felt like I was just being awareness. Time ceased to exist. I had a sense of eternity which I have never had before.

I continued to talk, listen and see. Everything I saw was extremely vivid (colours and objects were stronger and much more vibrant than usual), clear and alive (almost to the stage of sparkling). There was an awareness of ‘oneness’ or maybe a better way of saying it was ‘non-separation or non-distinction’ with everything around me. There was a sense of complete at-peace-with-the-worldness, calmness, joy (not sure that is the right word, perhaps more like a feeling you get when all feelings, emotions, concerns and judgments are gone – like the feeling of ‘grace’), a feeling of total equanimity, a sense that everything is exactly as it should be (the notion that things should or should not be as they are was never part of the equation). Of being totally in the moment. A total ‘lightness’ of being.

While this was happening the homeowner and I were talking with one another. It was totally natural to continue to speak and function without an ego or self. Unfortunately, it did not last long. The instant I ‘realized’ what was happening, my body, ego and self rushed back.  We continued our friendly chat a few minutes more and then I was on my way to the next house.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in mid-seventies
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  21

When I was 14, I had a brief experience of seeing that Everything is Consciousness. I was always thinking about dying in those days and worried about it. Even though I had the insight that Everything was Consciousness, I was afraid to believe it because nobody else did. My parents were scientists.

I discovered Teilhard de Chardin before my first LSD experience at 21 (more below), and the experience was so strong that it set me firmly “on the path.”  For that experience, I was with my husband and another couple at the other couple’s house. There was a big dog there. I believe I was alone in the kitchen except for the dog. The song “Monday, Monday” was playing (on a radio I think).

I felt that the music was the music of the universe, and felt myself on the planet swooping around the sun. I was riding on the Earth and the Earth was in motion. I felt that I was one with everything. I felt connected with the dog and knew it was thirsty and gave it a bowl of water. Everything was ordinary in the sense that there were no weird sounds or lights. The appliances in the kitchen, and all the objects were as usual, but I understood it all in a different way.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in early eighties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  34

I was in a very difficult marriage of 16 years, with four children aged 10 to 15. (I want to say that further in this description there is an ugly incident described, just to let you know ahead of your reading it.)   I had been raised Catholic but had stopped believing its doctrine at a fairly early age.  At this time, I did not engage in religious practices.

I was enrolled in an English lit class and was lying on a couch reading “Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley, which had been mentioned in class.  At one place Huxley says that what he was experiencing couldn’t be described as good or bad (paraphrase).  I put the book down on my chest and began wondering how something as positive and wonderful as his experience was could be beyond good or bad. 

I was looking out the window at a bird in a pine tree as I lay there.  All at once my question was answered.  I understood how everything and everyone was One.  One of the most beautiful parts of the experience was my understanding that our individuality (or ego) is the least important thing about us.  I stood up and I think I walked around a little in my living room.  My color sense changed in that everything was light-filled and brighter.  I understood that there are no paradoxes; none.  (I can hardly write this now it is still so powerful as I try to describe it.)  Of course, there are not words to adequately do so. 

I don’t know how long this understanding lasted, but it seems like it was an hour or more.  It is the most important day of my life.  I am and have been a very agnostically-oriented person.  I could never be untrue to this experience or deny it.  This was not a religious experience.  It did not give me a belief in an individual afterlife.

When my husband came home intoxicated as usual late that night, I was hopeful, said to him that we had a whole new basis for our marriage.  I tried to tell him about my experience.  He was angry and uninterested.  We went to bed.  He listened to the radio often as he went to sleep.  At that time, I had had no experience with classical music; I had tried to listen to it once as a child but my father said the piece was about trees blowing in the wind or something like that and I couldn’t hear that, and didn’t like it.

By some incredible stroke of luck during the night, classical music had come on.  (My husband did not ever listen to classical music.)  I woke up hearing this music on the radio.  I rushed out to the living room where we had one classical record that a friend had loaned me and I’d not listened to:  Beethoven’s 6th.  I put it on the stereo and it seemed to recreate or describe a part of the experience I had had.  Since that day I am very much an appreciator of classical music and play it frequently.

I left my husband some months after this experience.  The final break came when we were in a truck and I told him I was concerned about his smoking.  He said “Every time you open your mouth you vomit all over yourself.”  This felt like an assault on my experience, which I knew to be true.  I got out of the truck with the children and walked home.  Despite being afraid he might kill me, when he got home, I told him he had to leave, and I stuck to it.

This experience changed my life.  Perhaps I’ll have a chance to say this later, but I had some further experiences which I considered small sequelae to my earlier experience, one where looking at my kitchen cabinets I seemed to know the entire history of cabinetmaking, the relationship of humans to cabinets and storage, what it takes and what it took in times far past to be a cabinetmaker.  I had experiences also where I could see (not actually see of course) but felt I could see that trees and vegetation are connected deeply to the planet, the ground.  I have also experienced a feeling that I could never be lonely again, with nature around me, having seen somehow into the life of nature.

I also want to say I am a pretty rational and calm type, not given to emotional outbursts or excess.  One unusual thing about my history is that my IQ has been tested with the Stanford-Binet when I was 18 as part of a job application, the Wais II-R, and Miller Analogies (which has a high correlation with standard IQ tests) and I come out at the 99.9 percentile.  I am virtually uneducated, however, particularly in the sciences, even basic math, despite having an MS in counseling psychology, and I think few would ever guess my IQ.  I do belong to the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry, an organization for those at the 99.9 percentile and above in IQ.

I see your next question (Please indicate what you consider the content of your most significant mystical experience to have been…) and will check neutral, but you don’t have a response choice that is adequate.  It is so far beyond any category.  I have my answer to Huxley’s question.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-thirties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  36

I was sitting on my couch on a Tuesday afternoon. I had been feeling stressed with work situations and family issues. I started meditating and suddenly everything disappeared into a blackness or darkness. I felt like I was approaching something but all of my senses were gone. I could feel resistance against my body as I approached, but could not see or feel anything with my senses. It felt as if my soul was resisting whatever this thing was… an abyss, nothingness, some type of point of no return.

I had had a similar experience twice before, but this time I didn’t turn back. I keep going forward. It felt like everything in my being was resisting. But I continued closer and closer. There was some hesitancy, but not really fear or terror. Something like a loud rushing or ripping sound occurred, maybe even a scream of anguish within me, and then I crossed over into this nothingness. It was peace and calm like I’ve never experienced. All my senses were still gone. My ego was gone.

Then, I slowly regained my senses and awareness that I was still sitting on my couch. I wish I had better words to explain the peace I felt after that. I just kind of bathed in that feeling there on the couch for the rest of the afternoon. I think the experience itself lasted for 30 minutes.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  41

The first time, I was sitting in a chair in my room meditating, and I remember my mind getting so clear. I was having thoughts, but they seemed to be in the background. Or, it was like I wasn’t paying attention to them, but I knew they were there.

I remember my body feeling so heavy and there was a subtle vibration. There were these waves of what felt like electrical shocks, but without the pain, and the sensation of being large and small and then just nothing. There was no up, no down, no light, no dark, just nothingness, but it was a very significant nothing, and the nothingness was me, but without my body. I remember feeling so light and free.

But once I came out of it, and the body was back, it was a feeling that I was dying. My heart was racing, and I was sweating and breathing hard like I was dying. I couldn’t stop experiencing this void when I meditated (I later found out it’s called samadhi).

But after a while, I began to put things together. We are the nothing that something springs from. I’m not sure how many times I’ve experienced this, at least ten or so I think.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early seventies
Current location:  United Kingdom
Age at time of experience:  23

I had 3 small children and my house was in bad shape and needed decorating, and this made me depressed. I was slumped in my chair and in a dreadful state. At one point, I somehow dropped all internal focus, inner chatter, and self-importance, and simply and mechanically got up and got the paint and paint brushes and started to paint without reference to myself.

I painted extremely slowly and with tremendous focus while there was “no me” present. At some point, the world disappeared and universal consciousness was present. I have no words for this part and I knew I could never describe this event to anyone. Love was the totality of it; the undivided totality.

Eventually, normal consciousness began to reappear in stages. The first stage was that I was an eagle floating very high above a great empty valley and as the eagle, I was alone in my territory. This was my natural abode. In the next part of coming back to being human, I was aware of “my consciousness” awakening down at my left side, just above the waist.

In the days, weeks and months following, I both longed to return to this awareness, this beauty, love and joy, and at the same time felt insecure and scared of it.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early seventies
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  22

I was at an outdoor buffet steak dinner. Our mascot, a dog, greeted me, then went and urinated on a tree stump. I thought how wonderfully uninhibited animals are. Then I felt a physical sensation. I thought God was touching me.

I saw a light, like sunlight streaming through a green canopy, a feeling of a peaceful, bucolic environment. I lost the fear or knowledge of death – that was tremendously liberating. I felt a sense oneness and everything was right with the world.  All of time was happening at once. I felt that I fully understood the nature of things.

Then I looked down at the steak I was about to eat and it seemed as if a movie projector was turned on inside my head. I saw a cow, moving like an icon when downloading a program. I could not eat it. I’ve been a vegetarian ever since. I also could not drink milk. I didn’t at the time know anything about vegetarianism.

After this, I walked away thinking I’d had a psychic experience. Years later I read Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Bucke.