Archives: Submitted Stories

Mystical Experiencer: Man in his late fifties
Submission date: May 27, 2023
Current location: United States
Age at time of experience: 49

The breathwork sessions I did on my own were intense. The breathwork sessions I did with a facilitator at my side were even more intense. I can hardly describe these sessions. They are vivid, cathartic and mystical in their own right. The one particular guided breathwork session where I had a mystical experience was far and above more spectacular than anything I ever experienced before. Since it’s hard to describe one of my regular sessions, imagine the impotency of words attempting to describe this one experience. It’s beyond description, but my experience is similar or the same to what is described online or in writings by others.

With a guiding breathwork facilitator, I began the session as we did in the past. I was on a table, lying on my back with my eyes closed. This time an inviting enveloping bright light started to dominate the session. It started small and grew rather quickly. The light was both within me and it surrounded me. I was thrilled with the experience. It was the most , welcoming light you can imagine. It was infinite in its size scope and brightness. Then there were feelings of unity, love, and ‘oneness’ which were beyond powerful. The deep knowledge and expansive appreciation that everyone and everything are “one” brought tears of joy. I was sobbing tears of joy and was in total awe. I was no longer in the room. My existence was on a plane with the entire universe. I did not want to leave this state.

But at some point, I came into my body still glowing and still in awe of the gift I was given. Once I could appreciate the presence of the facilitator, Sandra, I remember speaking my first words. Still sobbing tears of immense joy, I said “I was touched by the light of God.” That’s what happened. I was touched by the light of God. Back in my body I was still glowing and felt like I was floating. I was concerned about driving home but managed to do so. I was filled with love for everything and everyone. I felt like I was still aglow. Once home I sat in the car contemplating encountering my wife and two small children. Would they know I was different? I managed to interact with them in a normal way. As time went on the glowing feeling got less and less. It lasted about 5 days. Initially, I was immune from stress and frustration, but as time went on, I returned to my typical experience.

Eventually the stress of life returned. But I’ve always kept the memory of this gift.
For years, I never spoke of the event. I had no idea what it was. During my breathwork sessions I’ve always hoped it would repeat itself, but it never has. Recently I learned what a kundalini awakening is. When I had my experience, I had no knowledge of such things. I feel I had a kundalini awakening. I’ve always drawn strength from

experience, and I am beyond appreciative, but I would certainly not say I remain enlightened. I really don’t know what long term effects it’s had on me. I suspect there have been good things. Mostly I appreciate the gift.

Mystical Experiencer: Woman in her early sixties
Submission date: March 4, 2023
Current location: Canada
Age at time of experience: 26

I was relaxing, almost in the state just before sleeping. I was laying down with my eyes closed. As I relaxed deeper, I saw myself walking on a path that had many beautiful flowers along its border. I could hear chimes since there was a slight breeze. I was surrounded by trees, birds and nature. The sun was very warm as I walked along the path. Then all of a sudden, I was gone, in the sense that my physical body was gone.

I was there but not in my solid physical self. I was the brilliant flowers swaying in the breeze, I was the color of the flowers! I was the sound of the chimes, I was the clouds, the trees and everything that was around my physical body. I was everything and I was expansive. I had no borders so to speak, no physical borders. I was everything and everything was me.

Mystical Experiencer: Man in his early sixties
Submission date: February 26, 2023
Current location: United States
Age at time of experience: 58

I woke up to use the restroom and when I went back to bed. I began falling asleep yet retained my consciousness (aka a lucid dream or beginning to drift into sleep). At this time, since I was already amid worshiping God, I surrendered my spirit to Him. I felt my soul’s physical departure from my body. I sensed being lifted out of my bed, upward then into a void blackness.

This out of body experience was accompanied by a sense of full surrender and trust in God. When I should have feared the absolute void, I gave my full trust to God. A vision began to form and slowly I found myself floating near the ceiling of a large cathedral. A priest was consecrating the Holy eucharist and a choir which was not visible to me was praising God, singing “How Great Thou Art”. As I joined the choir, I felt a unity with God that I never felt before. What I felt was an infinite sense of love and oneness with God. It was as if I was a single atom but felt the immensity and power (expressed as love) of an infinite sun. When I say infinite, I truly mean I could not put a measure to this – it was expansive, overwhelming yet I felt I was completely at home. I was infused and saturated with God’s love and wonder. While as I experienced this all the answers in the universe were known, yet now it’s impossible to impact a fair facsimile of what actually took place.

There are no human words to impart how I felt. At the same time, I received some infusion of knowledge but not in a rational sense. I learned that God’s love and mercy is infinite in depth and time and for my soul too understood that it has loved God and been love forever as well. I praised God throughout this experience and could have continued doing so forever. But then my vision dissipated slowly, and I became fully conscious. This was a glimpse into I think the 4th or 5th mansion as described by St Theresa of Avila. A glimpse of heaven. Truly a gift I will never forget, but also a slight foretaste of what I hope will greet my soul and when I die. I want to stress that this was a gift following an invitation. Had I not entrusted my soul to God, I would have awoken. But I did and I received an infusion of grace I could never earn on my own merit. I will say I understand God’s presence cannot be fathomed with our human minds and it’s no wonder people who have passed on temporarily don’t want to return. It’s as if you are blind then given a view of the sunrise over the ocean – then your sight is taken away. Our physical bodies are so limited in this way. This was a “red pill” awakening.

Mystical Experiencer: Man in his early forties
Submission date: February 25, 2023
Current location: Belgium
Age at time of experience: 14

I was sitting in our garden, fascinated by the body of a deceased pigeon lying there. A bunch of ants came crawling towards it. I was utterly captivated and kept staring at this little scene. Then, suddenly, barriers fell away, I was no longer staring at the ants: Instead, the ants and I became one. Then, this oneness grew, like ripples on water: I also became one with the pigeon. And then, rapidly, I felt (I was) becoming one with the surrounding grass, the flowers, the trees in the woods behind our garden, the hedge, the house, the people inside the houses, then the clouds, the sky, the mountains, until I merged with the whole cosmos. This lasted for several hours.

Mystical Experiencer: Person in their mid-thirties
Submission date: February 14, 2023
Current location: United States
Age at time of experience: 34

I went to the dark sea of infinity. I was no body and nothing, and yet I was everything and nothing at the same time. It was dark but I could see I was pure consciousness, no thoughts absolutely nothing. Time did not exist, it felt timeless.

It’s been very challenging, after this experience, to integrate all these experiences and to let deconstruction of all or any conditioning from life dissolve. Time has become an illusion and I’m currently experiencing it all simultaneously in the now moment, moment to moment staying in observation of it all.

Mystical Experiencer: Man in his late forties
Submission date: February 12, 2023
Current location: United States
Age at time of experience: 46

I am in recovery and am a member of a few 12-step fellowships. Since entering them in 2013, I have routinely prayed and meditated, even though I did not necessarily believe there was something out there because that was what I learned to do. When I was 45, a close friend and mentor instructed me to seek guidance on a matter I was struggling with from the Universe by conducting an experiment: posing a question and requesting a sign if the answer to my question was a “yes”.

I did not think the experiment was likely to yield an answer, but I was open-minded and went along with it. I got an answer. I could not believe it. So, my mentor suggested I ask for a confirmatory sign. I did. And I got confirmation. This experience radically altered my view of things. It confirmed for me that there was a higher power.

Less than a year later, I went to rehab for drug addiction, and while at rehab, I made a practice of going out on to the mountain and meditating in silence. In the course of this practice, I had a sense that I was not alone. There was something with me, guiding me. I heard it and felt it in the cold, in the trees, and in the wind. That was my mystical experience, and I was radically altered in the remaining time in rehab.

Since then, I have had many experiences–signs, “coincidences”, messages, and the like–that I do not necessarily regard as “mystical” like the one I experienced on that mountain in February of 2021. But I know that there is something out there that is guiding me and others.

It is the truth and reality that many seekers have found since time immemorial and is the wellspring from which religions and many spiritual traditions have arisen, and my search for it continues to this day. I have successfully reproduced this experience often in my morning meditation and conscious contact with God on a number of occasions.

Mystical experiencer: Man in his early eighties
Submission date: October 18, 2022
Current location: United States
Age at time of experience: 29

I was doing active self-enquiry with a partner in a group over a three-day weekend. I was ‘holding’ the question, “Who Am I?” On the morning of the third day, I realized that everything I knew about myself had nothing to do with the real Self, my true nature. I visualized myself as a hologram, 4 feet tall, about 8 feet in front of me. Everything I had always taken myself to be pertained to the hologram and none of it was about the real ME.

Then I saw myself standing on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, looking across to the opposite rim. It went down with no bottom in sight. I knew I needed to be on the opposite rim…I could not stay here. I didn’t know how to get across. Then, shortly after, the scene dissolved into a vast infinite space, in which I ceased to exist. My mind disappeared and I was free!

Then, when my mind started to become active, I had one thought at a time, rolling like a wave over the ocean. I clearly saw what the thought was made of…a powerful energy of the same essential nature as my essential Self…the True self. My mind was pretty much blank, until my girlfriend, also in attendance, said something to me. Without considering how she might take what I was about to say, I uttered my spontaneous response.

She got offended. I found it amusing so I laughed. I was in Bliss, which lasted about 2 hours, as mind began to come back. I saw the ignorant folly of my habitual thinking patterns and how they were not even my thoughts…they were ‘provided’ by society. I was indeed free!!!

Mystical Experiencer: Man in his mid-thirties
Submission date: October 10, 2022
Current location: United States
Age at time of experience: 36

I had decided to kill myself. I wasn’t just contemplating the decision but had made the decision. What is scary and makes me think I would have followed through is that I was completely calm. I just didn’t feel I had anything to live for anymore because my career as a lawyer was collapsing and I was miserable in my marriage. I was extremely self-centered because I felt this way even though I had a beautiful, healthy ten-month- old son. From my perspective then, he only added to my burden, though I never regretted his existence.

After deciding to kill myself, my next thought was that I needed to get a gun, that was the way, nice and clean, certain. And I probably shouldn’t do at the house, lest my mom be the one to find my body. Wal-Mart was probably easiest for getting the gun. Suddenly, I was transported to the side of a mountain. I was overlooking a valley with a river that I think had a bend in it. I remembered this scene because I had seen it in a Thomas Cole painting before. In fact, it was a compilation of Thomas Cole paintings and maybe the paintings of other artists. There were pine trees around me. I might have heard birds. Suddenly, a wind, a breeze blew over me, and I felt a perfect peace, an absolute peace. I might have heard the rustling of leaves. I felt God in the breeze. There was no voice, no words, but I felt God speaking to me. He said, “So you promised me to be Muslim” (five years prior I had converted to Islam to marry a woman but our relationship didn’t work out, and I didn’t ever follow Islam despite my conversion). “If you serve Me, I will show you a happiness you never imagined.” I knew God was telling me to keep my promise of being a Muslim. Then the breeze left, and I thought, just as Bill W. had, “So, this is the God of the preachers.” I must have culled this from my unconscious mind because I had read Bill’s story before.

I was returned to my normal state, standing where I had been. I immediately started following Islam the next morning, waking up on my own before my alarm went off at 5:30 for the dawn prayer. The worst things about me–looking at women with lust, fantasizing about women while masturbating, masturbating at all, the desire to have sex outside of marriage–all immediately left me. People in the coming weeks noticed an immediate change in me, that I was less selfish and self-centered, more patient and kind. This was through no concerted effort on my own. I started taking an interest in people I hadn’t had in years and re-connected with high school and college friends, even reaching out to relatives I had generally ignored. I became a one-woman kind of a man whereas for the last decade or so I had struggled with being faithful in my heart and mind. God has kept His promise.

I have known and generally do know a happiness I could have ever imagined, even in my wildest dreams.

Mystical Experiencer: Woman in her mid-fifties
Submission date: September 27, 2022
Current location: United States
Age at time of experience: 10

This happened when I was ten. I was raised agnostic by my parents but had a strong sense of the inherent aliveness and connectedness of all things, that I now understand was animist in nature, but did not have any frame of reference for at the time. I don’t remember what was happening before, I think I was outside just playing as kids do. I was alone. It was a kind of vision, as it was incredibly clear and vivid, in fact the reality of it was more real than the so-called reality waking life.

What I saw was myself as a younger version of me, in early summer or late spring, perhaps 4 or 5 years old. I was walking on the land near where my home existed in waking reality, except there were no indications of human habitation, nor any other human beings, at all: only myself and the landscape, which was rich and glorious, unspoiled, completely wild and natural. I knew it was the same land because I recognized many of the trees which grew near my home in waking reality, and I also recognized the way the sun was shining through those trees, too, the direction of sunlight coming from the East, slanting through the trees which made long early morning shadows on the grass. So familiar but not, greater somehow. Birds were singing their songs of the morning. This was familiar to me from waking life, I knew in the vision it was the same place as where I lived in waking life, but also something beyond this reality. A more *real* reality, the true reality as it was supposed to be – that it was all the time in fact – but that we could not see when “awake”.

The tall meadow grass at the foot of these trees was covered, every blade, with bright, shining dew. The trees were all along my left, their trunks long and tall, with great arching branches covered with leaves gently stirring although there was no wind. Their branches moved as if dancing, slowly together. I walked along a kind of deer path where the grass was shorter, located at the base of the trees along side of a narrow (perhaps 100 feet wide) sunlit grass and flower-covered meadow that was marked with the bars of the shadows of the tall, dancing trees. (In waking reality, this meadow had always been simply a corn field, much wider than the vision meadow, with the same trees (although smaller and duller) on one side and a paved road on the right side of the corn field, and it was as such well into my adulthood too – it had never been a meadow, never left to lie fallow, in my waking life, had always been either covered in cold and dreary exposed soil and corn stubble in winter through early spring, or lined regularly with rows of growing corn from summer into fall, with a large farmhouse at the far end).

In my vision, though, again no indication of a corn field or of other human beings, or their “stuff”- no houses, no cars, no road – just trees and meadow, grass and flowers and sky, sunlit, warm, all shades of springtime green and gold. And it was beautiful, all the world was new and breathtakingly present and alive. Each drop of dew on every leaf of every tree and on every blade of grass and every flower reflected the silver golden light of the morning sun refracted through water droplets, the sun which shone warm and benevolent over all of it, including me. The light of the sun and in the dewdrops was all of it, and it was me, too, and we were all One Thing. Alive. Connected, full, whole. Again, I was young, 4 or 5, smaller than my waking self (although waking self was still only 10!) and dressed in thin white cotton dress, long sleeved, that dragged to the ground; I could feel its wet hem against my ankles and feel the cool dew of the grass against my bare feet. I was neither warm nor cold, pleasantly comfortable, and I felt completely safe and secure, even though entirely alone on the planet as it seemed. The only human. I was ok with this aloneness, because I knew I wasn’t really alone. I was everything. I didn’t want it to end, and again I don’t know how long I was in this vision, as it was timeless. But when I came out of it, it was daytime, I was outside of my house, apparently, I had been running around in the backyard when it was triggered.

I went inside and found my mom and asked her, “Have I ever wandered outside alone when I was a little girl, when I was 4, and you couldn’t find me?” And she said, curiously, “No, never, we wouldn’t have let you get outside, the road is too dangerous!” (Our road was very dangerous in fact; a straight, open country road where cars liked to accelerate as they passed along the cornfield; we had several barn cats get killed by cars on it throughout my childhood).

I told her all these details of my vision, said it had been beautiful and I loved being in it, “but what did it mean, was it god?” And she told me, “it was only a dream”. But it was not a dream, it was more real than this life and her answer never satisfied me. But I held this vision very close all my life, a touchstone of love, beauty and wholeness. It is with me still and has been a source of great solace and healing all my life.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in mid-twenties
Submission date:  September 23, 2022
Current location:  Poland
Age at time of experience:  23

There was a sensation of alienation and gradual dematerialization of the body.  I was surprised with my reflection in the mirror. I had a feeling of standing by my side instead of inside my body. Gradual fragmentation of reality began and I felt as if my mind transferred to another universe. There was immense peace, spiral color fractals and feeling as if I was an isolated consciousness.

My first thought was I got somewhere, where people eventually go after death. It struck me somehow, because my whole life I was an atheist and such an idea was so unexpected. Heaven? Vast spaces / gardens / palaces full of fractals. God / gods are fractals? The flow of existential questions occurred, deep compassion for the suffering of people worldwide.

[Psychedelic] mushrooms wanted me to heal others. Perception of many parallel realities, the non-existence of the body / its fragments. All human knowledge felt absurdly irrelevant.  A direct sensation of eternity. Complicated three-dimensional illusions, reflections, lines. The sparkling sky. Suddenly I felt I could go back to my body but I don’t have to, no fear.