Archives: Submitted Stories

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-seventies
Current location:  United Kingdom
Age at time of experience:  35

I was in bed, unable to sleep, and I remember feeling very depressed that night.  I had recently seen a program on the crucifixion and I began to contemplate the death of Jesus.  I became so deeply submerged in the experience that I could feel it psychically. The scourging and beating and the shock of the nails left me numb with pain and horror. How could we do these things to the best and most noble of our species? A feeling of intense desolation was almost immediately followed by an indescribable sensation of joy and unconditional love.  I fell asleep wishing I could remain in this joy forever.

The following morning the love and joy still remained…. if anything, more intense than before. I beheld the earth and everything upon it with joy and a sense of oneness. I belonged to it and it to me. We were one…. I loved my fellow man and the mountains and the sea and the sky…. all were one and the same. I was enveloped in unconditional love and had no fear of death or loss. I felt I was in heaven.

I remained in this state for almost two months whilst maintaining my daily life normally. My work and family relationships remained entirely normal. I desperately wanted to remain in this (heaven on earth), but the experience gradually faded and I sadly returned to normality. I am not a religious person and do not attend any church, but I do hold Jesus and his life on earth in great reverence.

Over forty years later, I still remember this episode of my life vividly and have no fear of death or judgement. If this was a taste of heaven, I want to be there… if it was temporary madness, I would recommend it to you all.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in early seventies
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  29

After my first child was born, something shifted in my head. The world looked the same, but everything was filled with profound meaning. I was overwhelmed by how extraordinary it is that we are alive – that every day we should be waking up stunned to be here.

I felt that in giving birth I had gone out to the intersection of the natural and the supernatural worlds. I had traveled out to that place to bring back my child. I would travel there again at my death.

I saw that every birth is an incarnation of God. God takes on the identity of everyone in the world and lives within them.

I experienced unity with everyone in the world. It was joyful to me, but also frightening, as I would be taking on everyone’s losses as my own.

This experience came to me from God, the Universe, the Spirit world. I wasn’t more deserving than anyone else. It just came to me. The intensity of it scared me at times.

I gradually began to realize this did not happen to every woman who gave birth. I’ve had two more children myself and worked with many women giving birth and I haven’t seen this again.

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

I wrote a detailed account but can’t find it tonight. So, a bare bones description follows.

I think it really began about a year and a half before – I thought I was depressed because I did not laugh when I watched SNL. I read a book by Norman Vincent Peale – Positive Thinking? And began reciting a prayer every day from a prayer book a neighbor had given me when I got married.

We moved. My best friend’s husband died. My mom died and my dad came to live with us. At one point, all 3 of my children and my dog and cat were all sick. My dad needed constant care because he had just had his second stroke – he was very unhappy – complained all the time. He finally wanted to go home.

So, we took him back to Missouri from where we lived in New Jersey.  A neighbor helped us find a caretaker – he yelled at her and subsequent caretakers. We finally had to put him in a nursing home. My son got pneumonia, and my dad died shortly after that.

One day, I was sitting in my den, reading a book by Bishop Fulton J Sheen, and suddenly something akin to lightning struck me and I jumped out of my chair and sat on the steps staring at my chair trying to figure out what happened. I had understood at a level without words the interconnectedness of everything. Not just that everything affected everything else, but I could never exactly describe the whole concept.

There was a specific day that the experience started its journey, sometime in April I think – it lasted for several weeks. I read many many books (they leapt of the library shelves at me)  and understood them to my total surprise.  Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton, Leaves of Grass, Kahlil Gibran, Pierre De Chardin, Kabir, Rilke, Rumi, Meister Ekhart (no time to look up spellings), St. Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Thomas Aquinas, and many more from all religions. I devoured them.

All the while my children and husband seemed to not need me as much as usual. (When I came out of this my husband said he knew I was going through something but he did not know what). I would go into meditative states and have strange breathing patterns, but did not know that’s what they were until much later when I read the Secret of the Golden Flower by Whilem?

I had lucid dreams. I would connect with people on a deep level – verbal or non-verbal. I was in a state of heightened awareness which can accompany depression. The asst. pastor at the church I belonged to said she thought I was having a religious experience and that it needed verification.  She sent me to a therapist. I went to her once before I woke up and once after I woke up.  She was incredulous about how much I had changed.

One morning I woke up and all the heaviness was gone and I felt normal again, but I felt very changed and very happy! My husband gave me a beautiful lapis butterfly and diamond neckless that morning, and a neighbor brought me a beautiful plant (wish I could remember what it was).

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-thirties
Current location:  Japan
Age at time of experience:  16

I was pondering my own death.

What I thought was “me” dissolved into infinity, into an underlying unified field of love.

Only love is real. Love is Unity. Love is all there is. But we still have to be who we are and do what we do, and it all ends up ok in the end.

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

I awake to nothing.  No body.  No senses: no sight, no hearing, no touch, no taste, no smell, no thought.  No perception of time or space: no near, no far, no light or dark.  No heat, no cold.  No emotion: no joy, no fear.  Just calm awareness in a gray void. 

A moment / eternity passes.

Light!  A brilliant sun!  And with it, darkness: the fullness of empty space.  A small human figure stands in silhouette.  My awareness shifts.  I become the figure; a human body standing in space before a radiant globe.

I feel!  I am bathed in intense light and heat; light and heat so intense that if I were in a physical form I would be vaporized.  I am engulfed by boundless, infinite energy; overwhelming energy.  Another shift in perception: energy becomes love.  Energy and love are the same.  Energy is love.  I am embraced and cradled: enfolded by a boundless field of energy/love, love which is personal yet vast beyond comprehension.

I am seen; seen through.  The barriers and masks that we construct to present an idealized persona to the world are blown away.  Though the experience is veiled to me, I perceive that my life in its naked reality is being lived and fully comprehended by a conscious presence.  There is no judgment.  My being with all its shortcomings, failures, and rough edges is unconditionally accepted, loved, and cherished.

I become aware that what had first appeared like a sun is un-like anything from ordinary reality.  I am in the presence of a radiant, fluid luminosity.  An amalgam of water and light is the best approximation I can think of.  The sense of being before a conscious presence intensifies.

My mind buzzes with the desire to hold It, to explain and contain It with my thought.  The more I grasp, however, the more It slips away.  It cannot be grasped or named.  I give up, let go, and allow myself to simply rest with It.

With this shift from desire/grasping to acceptance I am permeated by light.  In a blaze, the dark husk of my body flakes away.  I become light.  I am one with the light.  I am the light, a fluid, radiant luminosity.  I have no body.  No senses: no sight, no hearing, no touch, no taste, no smell, no thought.  No perception of time or space.  I am calm awareness in a radiantly luminous field of joyfully dancing light. 

A moment / eternity passes.

I find myself with a luminous body.  A thought is expressed without words:  approach your live with joy and gratitude; compassion and acceptance.  A cosmic chuckle: clear-eyed and hard-nosed.  I am laughed at/with.  “Don’t take your Self so seriously” rings in my mind.

As I turn from the light a frigorific presence rushes from behind and past my left ear.  It is a transparent nothingness consuming all energy in its path.  It radiates a cold animus and an implacable will to be separate; to differentiate.  As it rushes past an iron darkness warps around me.  It fuses to me and I become dark and solid.

I awake to an ordinary day, my ordinary self and life and a huge why?

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-seventies
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  59

It came about easily, as sort of a cheap trick. All I did was to start thinking in a pattern I’d come up with the night before, which sought to realize what David Bohm calls the rheomode, by eliminating the word “I” and changing the things I was saying to myself like “I’m having a cup of tea.” To verb-based ideations like “drinking tea.”

And I disappeared.

The regular “I” disappeared, and the center of awareness that was there simply said “experiencing” and experienced. Without any evaluation. Without any criticism, self or otherwise. Without deciding if it was good or bad.

This experience was not something that happened to the usual me. I wasn’t there. What was there was “that.” Tat. This One. I must tell you that I experienced enlightenment. Or rather that “I” disappeared into enlightenment. It wasn’t an accomplishment. It was an accident. I fell awake. I fell asleep again, too, and here I am, speaking about what can’t be put into words again.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-forties
Current location:  Mexico
Age at time of experience:  44

Basically, I attended an Ayahuasca session. I’ve been to one more than 20 times before, but this time around I had a lot of personal stress with a troublesome girlfriend. After I drank the Ayahuasca with my trusted shaman, the effect kicked in very strongly.

I felt I was the Universe. I was all and nothing at the same time. I felt I was receiving the most precious gift, the maximum gift. No words can describe it. I felt not worthy of receiving it but at the same time I felt such a tremendous ecstasy and reverence.

I felt there were no boundaries that I was God and I can control everything and I can cure myself and others. That I can attract anything and I could manifest anything at will. I was crying and laughing at the same time with strange feelings that have no name or definition. I guess what it is called Nirvana.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in late seventies
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  64

The same “event” happened two or three times in full.  The first is the clearest.  I was sitting on a cushion in meditation in a quiet room facing a gas wall heater.  I have written about it many times and generally do not get good reactions from others.  What follows is the latest iteration.

I have written other renditions of the following over the years.  None have seemed adequate or finished.  I have shown different copies to people.  I know I have gotten two positive reactions and at least five and probably more negative, even attacking, ones. 

None of this matters much.  Those who seem to understand what I have written do not have many words for it either, and so cannot easily continue a discussion.  Those who were negative just created a short-lived defensive mode in me,

I was “just sitting” which is how I think about my meditations. This was around 2005. I was in that silence that others have named the “silence between words.”  It is more than just silence as there also is no light or energy.  From just sitting in the silence, I had an awareness that was aware of the Void. 

The Void was infinite and had no boundaries and contained nothing definable by our endowments.  After a peaceful bit of time (there was no real time), it seemed that a golden city started to show in the center.  Then instantly, it became Everything, although the Void was still there.

There was no sense of time before I was back in the silence between words.  However, over time, there was a sense of awe, a sense that death shall have no dominion (Dylan Thomas), that the Void and the Everything are equal, and co-equal, and co-existing. Both are infinite or “part” of one infinity, although more probably a negative and positive expression of the one.  Oddly, it did seem that the Void proceeded the Everything in my way of seeing.

It was also clear that everything is interrelated in one indivisible union which would include all aspects of nothing.  This unity supports all arguments in favor of ethical or altruistic plans or behaviors towards others.  In the Buddhist sense, this is the cause of the compassion for all.  The All would then have to progress (good karma) or fail as one entity over time.

I have no idea how to reconcile a total nothingness that allowed my awareness.  The answer might be in what constitutes awareness as it might exist beyond consciousness.

The described experience has happened several times.  Despite this, I continue to think of it as one experience and cannot remember any differences from one event to another.

I had a spiritual director at the time, Ken, who was a Methodist Minister and Contemplative Group leader, and I talked to him about it. I want to interject that my first formal teacher was a Hindu Yogi who taught the Jnana Yogi practice of “neti-neti” as the goal of (meditative) thought.  Neti-neti translates as “not this, not this” and is the equivalent of the apophatic in Christianity.  When I learned neti-neti in 1977, it made perfect sense to me.

When I told Ken about above, he had me read William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. In particular, he wanted me to understand the chapter on Mysticism (re., p 331) which in part reads —

1. Mystical states, when well developed, usually are and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individual to whom they come.

2. No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.

3. They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone… They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them…”

All three of these apply to me.  Ken emphasized the part about the breaking down of the authority of others.  He added this as another possible cause for the negative reactions I receive when presenting any of this.” 

At the time and after it, I was sitting in meditation with a Zen Group, a Quaker Meeting, a Christian Contemplative Group (Ken’s) and mostly by myself. I seem to have been born with the ability to meditate and naturally gravitate to silence. I like company but have no attachment to any dogma or group style.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early-seventies
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  31

As I was walking down an empty street in a light misty rain, and I had a voice in my head say, “words do not describe the world, they restrict it”.  At that moment I had a feeling of elation come over me.  I looked up at the clouds and trees and realized that I “know” them like the back of my hands, and I as I looked down at my hands, I realized I was all that.  I experienced the oneness of everything.  I saw beyond my words and meanings.  I knew in an instant that there is no death, only life.  That everything is the same thing.

I have no idea how long this lasted, but as I began to think about what was happening, the feeling left me. But the experience changed me forever.  I never looked at anything the same again.  I tried to explain this and was very unsuccessful for many years, so decided to write instead.  It left me with a constant quiet space in the back of my mind.  When I write, I go to that place and the writing always comes thru me.

I learned how to adapt this observing skill into understanding management/leadership/and the quality of making things.  I stopped telling people about this, and just used it to see things that others were blind to.  I retired from making money 17 years ago and now mostly continue to write. 

I have a blog called “wake up Tom Lane”. and I have 3 books that have had limited success.   Most people want answers, not a reflection on their own state of being and thinking.  And that is fine with me.  My last book is called “Perceptual Intelligence” or the intelligence of seeing process and system.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-twenties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  23

Devoid of mental chatter, I sat. A microscopic black speck drew my attention to the ground without distracting it from the sky. An ant moved diligently among the massive maze of grass, crossing blade after blade, until it reached the cluster of closed pink flowers that I hadn’t taken my eyes off of.

The sky turned a deeper shade of pink, a last call for that evening’s beauty. I sat there as the world danced around me. The cold concrete, the pioneering ant, the fledgling flowers, rows of tobacco stalks, rolling hills, and infinite sky. Thoughts remained paused; emotions dissolved into night air.

And then the world danced through me, speaking something beyond words: One is all and all is one.

Everything came into focus but no one thing stood out. They were all just as sharp as the other. That mystical phrase sank into me. I glanced down at my body; my arms still wrapped around my hinged legs. My bodily form melted into the truth I heard.

I am that one, I am that all.