Archives: Submitted Stories

Mystical Experiencer: Male in early forties

Current location: U.S.A.

Age at time of experience: 26

[I was a] foster child [who] moved back. Went out to woods to meditate to clear the mind. Contemplating self-fading and the decay of vegetation where I sat. Felt invisible, then like the body was decaying, and sense of subject/object disappeared.

Total loss of ego, time, place. Overwhelming sense of connectedness and joy, but not my own, but across all things. This experience decayed into non-experience. Not sure how long lasted, but when dropped back to normal reality was disoriented and struggled to find way out of woods.

Mystical Experiencer: Male in early sixties

Current location: Spain

Age at time of experience: 44

I was in the garden quite early in the morning during a one-week meditation retreat. [It was an] experience of contact with God, unity with everything, beauty, everything okay, impossible to express it in words, overwhelmed by love, total certainty… Prior to the retreat I had gone through a quite deep personal crisis. After the experience I was in a state of bliss for several weeks.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  39

16 years ago I was an artist living in Los Angeles. I was focused on career success. I began working on a creative project that took my focus inward. I was not religious but was somewhat interested in Theosophy and Buddhism. I would say I was searching. 

I began to experience what I can only describe as the spiritual transmission of knowledge in Buddhist tradition. I began to actively practice becoming less attached to my material possessions and achieved a mystical experience of peace and oneness with all. 

I felt like I could not return to my old life and didn't. I began to live as what many would call a vagabond for next 16 years. During this time I lived as a beggar with no material possessions and continued to have experiences of a spiritual nature. I passed through several spiritual realities as visions. 

In the fall of 2015 I experienced unity with the divine or ultimate reality in San Luis Potosi Mexico and total and complete joy love bliss. I knew intuitively that my 16 years as a vagabond had come to an end. I returned home to my native Pennsylvania and began to make sense of my experience and begin a more conventional life.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-seventies
Current location:  Australia
Age at time of experience:  40

I and my partner and child walked up to the rim of the Canyon. Abruptly confronted with the majesty of the Grand Canyon, my normal consciousness stopped. I then became aware of an immense silent intelligent ‘Space’ that paradoxically, although silent, contained the noise of the nearby tourists.

Very oddly, this ‘Space’ contained the space of the Grand Canyon in such a way that it could have contained 10,000 Grand Canyons without in any way being filled up by them. It was of a different order of space. It was somehow infinitely empty yet could contain any number of things – while remaining empty. Its ‘spaciousness’ was somehow also its intelligence.

This intelligence seemed somehow ‘pure’ i.e. like a silent potential rather than active. After standing there for a few minutes we left. Neither my child nor my partner noticed anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t mention it, being rather lost for words. I described it to them decades later.

A few days or weeks before visiting the Canyon, I had consulted an alleged psychic in L.A. She predicted that I would soon have an extraordinary experience ‘in a high place’.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in early forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  26

[I had been a ] foster child [and] moved back. Went out to the woods to meditate to clear the mind. Contemplating the self fading and the decay of vegetation where I sat. 

Felt invisible, then like the body was decaying, and sense of subject/object disappeared. Total loss of ego, time, place. Overwhelming sense of connectedness and joy, but not my own, but across all things. 

This experience decayed into non-experience. Not sure how long lasted, but when dropped back to normal reality was disoriented and struggled to find way out of woods.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-twenties
Current location:  United Kingdom
Age at time of experience:  21

Having ingested 10-15 grams of psilocybin truffles some half an hour earlier, I lay on a bed in a hotel room in Amsterdam with my brother in another bed nearby. Quite suddenly, I felt an urge – more like hunger or thirst than a conceptually framed imperative – to be alone. I left the room and went into the en suite bathroom. My stomach felt unsettled, and I was slightly nauseous, so I lay down on the floor with a sheet to cover me. In this period I found it more comfortable to have my eyes closed. Relatively quickly, and with relatively sudden intensity, I began to have 'closed eye visuals' of various objects….

As they appeared to me, I found my thoughts drawn unaccountably in certain directions, usually towards introspective thoughts; particularly thoughts having to with the nature and stability of reality and of my identity. These thoughts and visuals grew in intensity over a period of about 1 hour. Eventually I found my fear and astonishment giving way to exhaustion and confusion. As this occurred, I noted at the time that the visuals seemed to respond to my mood. 

When I became exhausted, and attempted to ignore the visuals/ thoughts that accompanied them, the visuals themselves seemed to respond threateningly. Teeth were bared; insectoid legs skittered menacingly. This part of the experience culminated in the growing feeling of a threatening outer presence, seeming – without saying anything – to demand my submission. I remember thinking that I could not submit without a reason. It would go against all my principles to submit to anything without a reason. How, I thought, could anything benevolent demand submission without a reason? I remember that I failed to resolve this problem, but submitted anyway.

Following this, there is a brief blank. The next thing I recall is a consciousness of deep calm and rejuvenation. This calm transmuted quickly into an intense feeling of bliss, love, and beauty. I felt at the time, immediately and without question, that what I was feeling was 'religious' or had to do with 'religion'. I felt, without ever having been religious before, that I was in contact with what people have described as God. I remember feeling that death was not what I had thought it was, and that it was nothing to fear. I remember thinking about evil and suffering, and feeling, in the glow of that experience, that it could be redeemed, or that it already been. I remember having profound feelings about the ontological significance of what we call 'love'. I remember thinking that love was something like a substance, out of which everything is made. 

I remember not seeing, or seeing very differently, the supposed distinctions and boundaries between myself and the world, between different parts of the world, and even between certain concepts. It did not seem clear to me that love and beauty and truth and universe and man were really distinct in the way I had believed. Everything melded into one holy reality. And it seemed clear at the time, that only like this, only as ONE reality, could this thing be understood. I remember that when I rejoined my brother, I kept telling him i) that i was sorry, and ii) that i could not speak of what i was experiencing. The details of this second part of the experience are difficult to express.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early sixties
Current location:   Spain
Age at time of experience:  44

I was in the garden quite early in the morning during a one week meditation retreat.

Experience of contact with God, unity with everything, beauty, everything okay. Impossible to express it in words. Overwhelmed by love, total certainty….

Prior to the retreat I had gone through a quite deep personal crisis. After the experience, I was in a state of bliss for several weeks.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early fifties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  23

In my early twenties, during the big heyday of New Age stuff in Los Angeles in the late '80s, I felt extremely strongly pulled to spiritual things and spiritual inquiry.  I devoured books on Eastern religion and philosophy, Christian mysticism, New Age stuff like Shakti Gawain's "Creative Visualization," quantum physics by such writers as Fred Alan Wolfe, Paramahansa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi," and other classic tomes.  I brought stacks of pretty heavy duty stuff home from the UCLA library.  I meditated and habitually studied my own consciousness, and pondered Big Questions a lot. 

One evening in my apartment I decided to meditate in the bath tub.  I lit a couple of candles.  I made my mind very still, and I remember being entranced by how the concentric ripples in the bath tub collided with each other.  I had a burning passion to "break through" and "come to know that one thing by which all things are known," a phrase I had picked up in some Buddhist type book.  With all my heart I beseeched God out loud, practically demanded, "I want to know the Truth!"  It was a total surrender, willing to take whatever answer came.

And at that moment it was as if heaven fell upon me.  A tidal wave of Love and peace crashed down upon me from on high.  This presence, this …Intention… the very Creator itself… made itself present to me.  I felt consumed by it, in it and part of it.  I felt a Love that is indescribable, a Love I could never earn, could never come to "deserve" in a million lifetimes given how perfect and unconditional it was.  It was just Love for love's sake.  It was glorious. I felt like a wire taking in too much energy, so I did breathing exercises and physically relaxed so as allow as much of it in as I could handle.  I blubbered with tears of joy and humility.  I literally writhed in ecstasy.  I realized I was in contact with the very essence of reality itself. 

I suddenly knew what Blake meant by "seeing the world in a grain of sand."  Everything was whole and perfect and part of an infinitesimally intricate order.  Mere mundane existence itself was clarified as a miracle, awesome and sacred, as realized – really realized for the first time – that everything is contingent upon God and exists in God.  Everything was unified and infinite.  There was no time or succession of events or knowledge.  All questions seemed answered at once.   

I kept repeating to myself in astonishment, like a mantra, "all…all…" or "one…one…"  I realized my true self was part of the indestructible, unified whole, that I really had also never been born and would really never die.  I felt at once puny and egoless, but felt like God too.  I loved every being, every molecule in the universe.  If someone had broken in to harm me, I would have hugged and kissed that person.   

This went on for hours, until I was practically exhausted, and fell asleep saturated in Spirit, feeling utterly cleansed and purified.  For days I was nearly speechless at it, and remember walking around my neighborhood in a blissful cloud.  Everything, however mundane, was imbued with this great meaning.  There was joy in being.  

I could go on and on, but realize how inadequate words are. 

To see the possible answers offered in Question 31, I have to laugh.  There are no words for the Bliss this experience granted me.  It was like having multiple spiritual orgasms one after another for hours.   It changed my life forever. 

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early sixties
Current location:  India
Age at time of experience:  52

In spite of the fact that I didn't believe in god or practice religion I was yet thinking about what a god would be like if it existed. I asked myself how it would be possible to hear the prayers of many people simultaneously and from different parts of the world. I theorized that if I were god I would have to atomize myself to be present in many places at the same time, but I realized that there would not be enough particles to spread myself everywhere. Then I thought of splitting again, into sub-atomic particles. But I realized further that there would yet not be enough of me to hear the billions of humans.

Not disappointed by failing to find the answer, being a non-believer, I remained where I was, just listening to my breathing and external sounds, not relating, not searching, and not thinking anything when suddenly the word selfless popped up in the mind. And I sensed something indescribable flowing into me. I immediately understood. An entity would have to be selfless to be present everywhere at the same time.  It was as if a selfless being had aligned with me.

My eyes brimmed when I realized what was happening because I did not think myself worthy of the experience. The answer was so simple and the longer I contemplated the idea the sharper my perception became. It was as if having become endowed with extra-natural perception, with which I contemplated on yoga practice and realized that I had indeed been practicing selflessness every time I ended the session with shavasana, dead body pose, but did not know it because the preoccupations of the self had blocked it out.

I knew I had chanced on a profound realization, and that henceforth I will always be studying and understanding the concept. Each day, every moment it burgeons in consciousness, growing bigger than anything we know.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-thirties
Current location:  Ireland
Age at time of experience:  31

I had started working on the twelve steps about one year prior to having this mystical experience. I had had my first experience about ten months previous to this when I was very low. I remember the day in question quite well as I had been unwell with partially treated schizophrenia for a number of years but there was something especially mild about every aspect of that day.

I asked to leave work about 4pm due to ill health and went home for awhile. There I decided to go to an AA meeting at 7:30pm in Dublin city centre. I had been walking around the city for a while before it kicked in. I remember it exactly when I turned onto Anne Street South that I felt the beginning of something that everyone around me was not experiencing. It floated from underneath me and within me, lapping at the shores of what I could feel.

The experience can not really be described accurately but I felt an excitement and childlike connectivity to the universe. I was listening to a deep house mix and it happened, the tune Ragysh came on and was mixed into New Musik. Ragysh builds up quite intensely and the mystical experience undulated magnificently to the mix. Again it is quite indescribable. I felt a sense that this is what it would be like in the afterlife and I could feel the presence of God.

The night was coloured a shade of purple blue and in the AA meeting I met with Tony, a fellow member, and after the meeting explained to him that I was having a spiritual experience. He told me to enjoy it. For the rest of the evening I walked from the city centre to Rathmines puffing cigarettes, sixty I think in the end which a lot even for me. All I can really say about this experience was though my life had been difficult there was a Higher Power watching down. It gave me the belief to continue.