Archives: Submitted Stories

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early forties
Current location:  United Kingdom
Age at time of experience:  39

Background – I had been depressed for years (perhaps 10), though never sought a professional opinion.  My wife child and I had been living in the UK for 8 years.  Our marriage had drastically fallen apart on account of my wife having PTSD.  I was working away from home during the weekdays, and coming home on the weekend. My most important experience happened on the way home from work…

I was on a commuter train in the UK, heading from Liverpool to my home in Durham UK (a three-hour journey).  I was reading a book on the wisdom of yoga.  I really liked this book and it was my second or third time reading it.

I had a lot on my mind: My marriage problems, the stress of my job, my depression, and my extreme exhaustion due to working away from home (to name a few).  As I started reading a particular chapter in the book, thinking about the definitions that were presented on the “ego ideal” and the “ideal ego”, I started to close my eyes. 

Because, the sun was shining bright, which doesn’t always happen in the UK, I was aware of the bright light gently passing through my eyelids.  This is nothing out of the ordinary.  Then, as the train passed through what I think was a section of trees, I could see the shadows of the leaves and branches affecting the light that passed through my eyelids; again, nothing out of the ordinary. 

Then, the shadows and light took on interesting patterns – beautiful symmetrical patterns.  At first there were local patterns in one place, and then both eyes were filled with perfect tiny patterns from the light and shadows.  Then, the light that was passing through my lids started to break down into rainbow colours, as if my eyelids were prisms. My eyes were still closed at this point. 

As I watched the strange, yet beautiful patterns unfold (for how long I don’t know) there came a total feeling of bliss – a feeling of total enlightenment.  I can’t describe the feeling, other than it was pure joy.  I just “got it”, meaning I seemed to understand everything about being connected and one with everything, subject, object and cognition.  All the information was just there.  Downloaded, really. 

I just sat in awe of the lights, the feeling of absolute bliss and also at times opened my eyes to explore the world in and outside the train.  The train pulled into the station and I stepped out.  The deep feelings expressed did not go away.  They were as intense as when they were first observed. 

On my walk from the train station to my home (about fifteen minutes) I was captivated in the wisdom that was spilling from my thoughts.  I never thought this way – real wisdom, connection, love, understanding, patience, care etc.  Then, a thought popped into my head.  I will be asked for money before I get home. 

The area I live in never has homeless people about.  I have never been asked for money while in Durham outside of the train station in the five or so years I had been commuting.  As I rounded the top of the hill, about fifty meters from my house, a couple approached me and asked for money (there was no way I could have seen them as I walked up the hill – and I must stress that in this area of town, this never happens and has never happen to me before; it is beyond unusual).  I walked with them back down the hill and got money out of a bank machine for them.  I then walked home. 

The next day I woke from a deep sleep with exactly the same intensity of bliss, and this occurred for a full week, where it was at the same intensity.  Many things happened during this week.  The strangest thing was I was out walking my dog, while still experiencing this extreme bliss.  A thought popped into my mind that I was to take a fork in the path and head in a direction that I never go, as I will need to help someone. 

So, I did take that fork.  About a kilometre up the path I came upon a large walled garden and was drawn to the garden.  I poked my head in.  The two people that were inside the walled garden were distraught.  They had erected a large canopy tent the night before and it had blown over during the windy night.

There was to be a public garden party to celebrate this particular place the next day and they were fearful that the tent was ruined and that they didn’t have the manpower or strength to raise the huge tent.  I offered my services and an hour or so later, we had erected the massive (and very heavy) tent (it was a canvas canopy with a central pole, the size of a telephone pole, but half the height).  I was thanked for helping and invited to the party the next day. 

The next day arrived, and in bliss I arrived.  I entered and was greeted by a lady who was talking to her friend about a mysterious traveler who helped them raise the tent the day before.  I looked at her and laughed and said “I’m that strange traveler” …  As I said, there were so many weird experiences during the whole week. 

The key point though is that I knew I was “called to service” to help the community.  I was somehow able to predict when, and where I was needed.  I had a sense of connectedness to everyone and everything.  Might I add that my professional job is in chemistry and I don’t believe one bit in predictions or seeing the future or whatever went on.

After a week, the bliss started to fade away and I was back to normal three or four days after.  I will never forget this experience, the wisdom I spouted, the sense of knowing and seeing, and all the whacky stuff that I did.  It has slowly changed my life forever.  A few years after, I had other experiences and am now studying original sacred texts and reading interesting books on spiritualism and mysticism.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-sixties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  45

For several years I had been thinking about the need for the church to begin seeking true reconciliation between the races and reaching out to all people.  Then, one fall evening, I went for a walk and suddenly the “veil was pulled back” and for a few minutes I perceived the unity of all things in God. 

Please understand, the unity I saw was not metaphorical, but, very literal.  All things, especially human beings, are one in God. This unity is impossible for me to put into words.  It is not a unity where we lose our identity and merge into the Absolute, yet we are all one in God individually and corporately.

I didn’t see anything visually.  There was no flash of light or a voice from heaven, instead I simply understood the nature and true identity of all things in God.  I can’t describe it more than that.  I will say it was absolutely overwhelming and earthshaking and reached into the deepest place in my soul.

The feelings that accompanied this insight were liberation, joy and love.  Then as quickly as the curtain was opened, it was closed.  I would love to have that experience again.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in late thirties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  20

I had done LSD before. Enough to know what I was getting into (maybe a dozen times prior). I’d done mushrooms, ketamine, MDMA, etc. and had lovely experiences. Experience that usurped my ego borders and brought me experiences of profundity and the nebulous. This night was not like those others.

The trip came on fast and hard. So fast (I could feel myself surging in under 15 minutes) I was liable to get scared, and I would have had I not made the conscious decision to let go and surrender to the experience. I sat down next to a bonfire and began to meditate.

The swaying trees above became a sovereign presence and an abiding friend throughout my journey. The ambers from the fire danced above me comingling with the stars. I could feel an ocean of energy swelling within me. I could see the Buddha in the flames and then the flames possessed me.

I walked down to the beach of a large lake on a calm night when the stars and sky and lake and horizon fuse into infinity. Everything opened up. Infinity flew out in every direction; into the cosmos and into my mind. Reality at the largest scale mirrored the infinity of the microcosm. The capacity for a symbolic relationship with this reality was shattered into this infinity. The Now stretched on into eternity.

The illusion of time became a banal and obvious truth. Values of any kind ceased. Any sense of better than our worse than, divine, shit, all was on the same cosmic footing. All was equal. Everything about my life, my ego, my everything, scattered into this everything. Without reference point; without division; without value; without time; without separation – there is. Just Being.

And it filled me with bliss. I had never known the meaning of bliss or infinity or eternity until that moment. And this awareness was pure knowing. Not knowledge. Not information. It was revealed truth which was innate to my very existence. I was one with it. Zero separation.

In that state, there are no thoughts or opinions to be had. It just IS. And what seemed to be the moment of reentering myself was the thought. Thought itself pulled me back into the relative. And that first thought had the value of “the holy.” The ground that I stood on, the stars in the sky, the plants and animals, and skin on my bones became infused with a spirit/essence of the divine.

And I was flooded with love and gratitude. And I cried and cried. With joy and sorrow and pain and hope and everything about this life and its greatness. Words cannot do it justice. Words are like flinging dog shit at a Monet. This reality can’t be scratched. It’s beyond the relative. Beyond human. Beyond any species or planet. Beyond anything. But it’s made manifest in us.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early fifties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  51

There were three main parts to my experience:                                       

1. Deep empathy and identification with other people: my wife and daughters in particular.

2. Deep empathy for myself, in particular, my past selves and especially my childhood self – understanding that I was doing the best I could and that life was challenging. 

3. Intense appreciation for the beauty of the trees, moss, rocks and other beings around me.

4. A period of perhaps 15-30 minutes where I completely or perhaps nearly completely vanished.  This brought up fear in me, but with the support of the two friends I was with, I was able to just be with it – It was silent and contained only a few simple images – one of a purple ink like substance very slowly jetting into water or some other substance and slowly mixing with it.

Overall, I was in a place of total and deep appreciation of the beauty around me, the miracle of life, the gift of my own life, and the people in my life.  The afterglow lasted for at least a month and is still accessible fairly regularly through meditation and time in nature.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in late sixties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  69

I took 5 grams of mushroom, and had visions of fractal patterns while wearing an eye mask and headphones, listening to music. After about an hour there was still an “I” experiencing this, so I wanted more. I took 2 1/2 more grams. More time passed and “I” was still there, having lovely beautiful ecstatic experiences. I asked for more. I took the total amount I had taken so far (another 7 1/2 grams). 

This time I got to a point where I got scared. I had been instructed to “let go” into any scary thing, but my fear was that if I let go, I would go crazy and never come back. I let go anyway. This was followed by a deep peace and comfort. I was in the hands of God, and i knew that everything was OK just as it is. Nothing needs to be fixed; life doesn’t need my help.

Then i had a long period of watching life toy with my ego, which was hilarious. My ego (or whatever it was; I was just calling it that) kept trying to “take credit” for things like being alive, but it was already alive. Or, when there was a feeling of overwhelming gratitude, the ego wanted to take credit for being the thing that was grateful. But there was no “thing” that was grateful — there was just gratitude. It wanted to “experience” something that was already being experienced (You had to be there.)

I had the image of the ego as a pitcher of water in a river. The pitcher isn’t doing anything. Or the ego is like a dog chasing a car, nipping at the tire. The car is life, the ego keeps trying to catch it and hold on to it. Then there’s a me that notices all this, and laughs uproariously.

I tried to think of my wife, my sister, my friend, but there were no individual beings in this place. The trip is never over. I saw the work of Kali, constantly eating the world and simultaneously giving birth to it. There’s a universal river of love emanating from the goddess of compassion, through all mothers forever, and that river is flowing in me and all of us. I belong. Life loves to dance joyfully with me — we’re engaged! 🙂

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-twenties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  20

During my most significant mystical experience, my conscious “self” partially left the physical field of time and space and “I” was aware not only of my immediate surroundings and sensations, but of an infinitely large space filled with an intense aura of complete and total Being, and at the very center of this large space (which at times would appear to break off into beautiful patterns of energy) was a single point of energy/conscious awareness that was the Ultimate Reality of everything: of consciousness, of existence, and time and space itself. This Ultimate Reality that I perceived of was on a separate plane of existence entirely from my normal reality, yet simultaneously existed side by side with normal reality, and this Ultimate Reality was felt to exist within me, in the center of my chest; in my “heart cave.”

Along with the 2 other past psychedelic-induced mystical experiences, this experience especially was one of, if not the most profound and meaningful experience(s) of my life, and I felt that the only thing left for me to do was to go out and love the world with all my being.

Once this “message” was fully received, my normal waking consciousness slowly returned to me through a series of strange (not pleasant, but also not unpleasant) feelings and sensations—similar to a kind of feverish delirium—as I laid in my bed attempting to fall asleep (I’ve decided that LSD—especially the “come down”—lasts too long and that If I ever attempt to have a drug-induced mystical experience again I will use psilocybin, which I have successfully used once before).

After I finally did fall asleep for a while, I woke up feeling disoriented, but, with just a little bit of effort, was able to remember the intensity of the experience.

It was all so real. Just as real as any other experience I’ve ever had in my life; as real as the experience of my typing this now. And yet the bought of strange sensations and delirium that occurred when my normal consciousness returned as I tried to fall asleep did cause me to question the validity of the experience, but after going back and writing down everything that happened the next morning, I realized that what I experienced that night was indeed an intense and powerful mystical experience.

I concluded from my experience that Consciousness, Being, Self-hood, Buddha-hood, God, and Thus-ness are all words for the same Thing which is the root and essence of everything. It’s all Me and it’s all Here Now.

As I sat on my back porch and meditated, and as the effects of the LSD began to take a hold of me, I had a profound experience where suddenly my consciousness and my waking self felt connected to, and in fact identical with, the chemical languages of the plants around me; I felt and could even HEAR the forest and the bugs responding to my conscious experiences… when the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place—when I began to realize the secret of who I was—the wind would blow, the trees would rustle, and the bugs would buzz as if applauding me for discovering (or at least getting closer to discovering) the true secret about my—or rather our—Self. Then, something clicked and the mystical experience—after creeping up on me steadily—finally became self-evident. In that moment when everything finally clicked and when I felt that I WAS the trees and the bugs and the things all around me, a firefly flew up and hit me right in the head as if to say, “You’re IT!!!” And then I got the message.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in mid-sixties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  55

I tried to write about this experience many times, but even though I managed what is below (which appears in my book, LEARNING TO SEE IN THREE DIMENSIONS), it’s only the best I could do. Truly, words are and have always been so inadequate for the task. The incredible Beauty that characterized my experience just escapes all powers of description.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God…” Gerard Manley Hopkins

As an older adult with severe double vision, no depth perception, and “convergence insufficiency,” I saw a special Vision Therapy trained optometrist for about a year. The experience I write about below happened just before I ended treatment.

Early one morning, well before day lightened behind the fence of trees to the east, I went to move my snowed-in car to make way for the plows. As the automatic door opened, letting me out into the cold, I could see falling snow against the street lamps. I headed towards the car, thinking of nothing but the cold. Then, without any expectation of it, my brain clicked, like the flip of a switch, and something in my vision changed. Instead of seeing the snow fall in a sheet, curtain-like, in front of me as I always had before, I now walked inside it, as if in a snow globe, separate flakes plummeting around me, each on a different plane, riding a separate moving point in space as it fell.

Startled, I blinked my eyes, thinking the curtain would close in again. Nothing. I looked down at a snow-covered bush next to me on the sidewalk. The ends of its bare twigs were lightly mounded, contrasts heightened, the whiteness of the snow and twigs gently vibrating with laser-etched clarity and precision of detail.  I can only describe what came over me then as a feeling of connectedness, of affection for the universe. I smiled as I stood there, realizing that I was seeing depth, I was seeing space, and the spaces between things, for the first time. At least for the first time that I could remember, for the first time since who knows how long. That was seemingly all it was, but it was everything. 

I had a dream once that I never forgot, a dream in which I ate chocolate and in which I stroked a cat. I was able even in the dream to taste and swallow the chocolate and to feel the soft silkiness of the cat’s warm fur. Both of these acts, though in reality mental, not physical, took enormous effort, even courage. I felt, while sleeping, that if I were to break the spell of whatever made these experiences “forbidden,” so it seemed, neurologically speaking, something would happen. It was not clear to me at the time of this dream whether it would be catastrophic or miraculous, and as a result, while I managed to push through those barriers, even in sleep, my apprehension, indeed my terror, was immense.

This experience in the falling snow was very similar but it happened while I was manifestly awake. Space, I saw with sudden breath-taking enlightenment, is not negative. The “negative space” artists speak so passionately of doesn’t exist. Space is a real, solid kind of stuff that gives definition and substance to matter. In fact, if space, the medium that surrounds everything, changed the ordinary boxwood in the snow before me into a burning bush of miracles, what couldn’t it do?

Now, I must admit now that contemplation in sub-freezing temperatures of snow-covered shrubbery and buried cars and yellow street lamps, among other things, has never been my favorite way to spend an early morning, yet it seemed a very long time before I went indoors.  When finally, rubbing my hands to warm them, I made my way to my computer to jot down some notes, I put my fingers out and, was immediately taken by the fact that my hands went outwards into space! The very sight of the keyboard elevation made my heart ache. What could be lovelier than the fact that keys themselves protruded above the keyboard? The words were palpable and delicious, not just with possibility but with Reality: “outwards,” “protrude,” “elevate,” “above.” My typing fingers — they hovered in a tangible space over the keys, and I could see that there was a space between my fingers and the keyboard. Indeed, it was a small miracle the way Space gave form to those small squares, indented just slightly to fit the pads of my fingertips! All this was too much for me and alone in my room I found myself laughing aloud. Suddenly, the entire universe was friendly.

I went around my apartment. Look at this! Look at that! Joyous beyond all measure, I couldn’t pry my eyes from things. Dish towels announced themselves, as their threads stood up, cupped and rounded by space, each one loved into being by the fact of the air that surrounded it. Folds struck me as the most beautiful objects I had ever seen. Folds in terrycloth fabric differed utterly from folds in other material. Even paper bent around an angle, embracing a fold, allowed sculpted space on each side to bring tears to my eyes. Who would have thought that material, bent, could become a form of such magnificence?

And on it went. Doorknobs yearned, reaching out from doors into this Loving Space. Bookshelves provided welcoming recesses, intimate and implicit with corners, as if saying, Come in, we will protect you. There were delicious concavities in every spoon!  My circuit of the room over and over would have been ridiculous, had not everything been so unspeakably lovely, and so thoroughly devastating.

Snow-covered bushes computer keyboard, a hand extended into the air — I understood in an instant that it was space, this lovely positive Space that sculpts the entire world, just as a sculptor carves stone. I knew then that it is only because most people are so accustomed to depth perception all their lives that they lose all ability to perceive its beauty, to see how much space quite literally embodies.

Later, but how much later I will never know, the vision faded and as my eyes relaxed, my ability to see “3-D” was lost. But I still remember, towards the end of the experience, how as I looked into an empty wastebasket, I was bowled over to understand that it had a rounded interior. The sheer “interiority” of it, the fact that the space inside it implied roundedness so matter-of-factly that I did not have to feel it to know this– why hadn’t I understood any of this before? It struck me as a terrible failure and yet the most transcendent discovery of my life. I knew then that if the world was charged with the grandeur of anything, it must be a positive, optimistic Shaper of things and that this Shaper is the world’s, the universe’s, Creator, which we instead call, as if it were nothing, “empty space.”

Could it be possible that most people will never have an opportunity to experience such overwhelming love for spoons and doorknobs and computer keys or even for hands above the paper or every possible human nose that sticks out into space? If so, it might even be the reason we humans have let ourselves destroy our environment, the most precious matter in the Creative Space around us.

Because we did not understand how space is our Creator, creator of the universe, because humans did not see or feel Creative, or know how connected we all are through Space, we have destroyed our environment and ourselves in the process. How could we have done otherwise? We did not know because we could not see. And if we could not see, how could we know the truth: that Space is Love that creates the world and makes us and all matter beautiful.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in early forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  33

It was the summer before starting my first job as a special education teacher in Portland, Oregon. We had just moved there with my husband and bought a house. We had had some difficulties but where trying to work things out.

I can’t remember what was worrying me that day, but I went to The Grotto, a sacred place nearby dedicated to the Mother Mary. A Catholic community runs the grounds and there is a statue with candles and places to pray outside by the grotto. I was raised Catholic although I am non-religious.

I went there to pray. I prayed for guidance and release of the ego. I wanted to let go and called grace to be free. My prayers were answered. I went home, smoked some weed in my back yard and woke up so to speak.

It was infinite bliss. The realization that we are all one. That all is love. That all is nothing. That we are nothing. Life is but a dream. Joy. Peace. Awe.

It was summer and I had nothing to do but sit out in the yard and smile in awe of consciousnesses.

I was not interested in seeing anyone or doing anything in particular. I just took care of what was needed at home and sat in the yard. I would not call it meditation, as to meditate feels like having an intention. I just was there, fully present. My mind was quiet all of a sudden.

When I started working and had to deal with the insanity of my job, I could not hold on to the experience. As I got stressed, I felt my mind coming back. Sometimes, to distract it, I would do puzzles (sodoku, solitaire, etc.), so I could feel the consciousnesses while it solved the games.

It was a little bit like having an outer-body experience. With time, I lost it. However, I have never fully believed in the dream since then. I play my part and I get lost in my mind still. I forget and think I am a person, but I know I am not.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early forties
Current location:  Canada
Age at time of experience:  22

Omniscience – moving past language, space, and time to know everything all at once – all paradoxes resolved, all binaries empty. Knowledge through identity.

A sense of More, then an envelopment in that More.

An awareness of the person next to me and a call to them to keep talking in order to stay grounded. A feeling that there was nothing to fear, yet a strong pull to not “give in” to the content/moment.

Most of the above was interpreted and coded into Christian language through the perspective of a personally-cultivated and non-church-based, non-literal Christian practice that had lasted approx. 10-12 years.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-sixties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  19

It was my first experience with psychedelics. I worked at the Grand Army Plaza Brooklyn Public Library and 2 of my co-workers that were a couple of years older than me asked me if I ever tried acid. At that time, I only smoked weed and told them I had never tried acid. I was afraid, but they said they would give a quarter of what they usually took and that it would open my mind. I took it about 1 hour before I got off from work.

As I was leaving the building with my sister, who also worked at library, I noticed everything seemed more vibrant and unique; like I was discovering things for the first time. Across the street from the library was a beautiful park with trees lining the entrance to the park. As everyone was walking down the steps of the library to the street, I stood at the top of the steps marveling at the trees swaying in the wind; the greenness of the trees.

My sister asked me what was wrong, and I tried to explain the beauty I was experiencing. She was confused by my behavior. I don’t remember anything about our bus ride home, but I do remember when we got home, I went directly to my room to avoid my mother; I was sure she would know I was tripping.

My room had a black light and black light posters (it was the 70’s). What I remember distinctly was playing Elton John’s “Rocket Man” over and over because the lyrics were describing exactly how I felt. I knew that what I was experiencing was a revelation of the true nature of reality. I felt I was in touch with the divine.

My first trip was one of the greatest experiences in my life. I think I was tripping for about 5 – 6 hours because after a while I was afraid I was never going to come down. Slowly I felt I had come down to “reality” but I was left with the feeling I was not the same person I was before the trip. I am now 64 years old and I still believe that trip altered my consciousness permanently.