Archives: Submitted Stories

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-forties
Submission date:  August 1, 2022
Current location:  Ireland
Age at time of experience:  18

I had the intense feeling of being one with everything. A total dissolution of all boundaries, shape, direction. A feeling of submersion and flow in all conceivable directions at the same time. Total peace and completeness, but not conscious of self at all. There was no me, everything was me and I was everything.

Waking up was terrible at first. Realising I was in a room with so many things that were separate from me, that I couldn’t feel, that weren’t me. It took me a while to adjust and appreciate the profound experience I just had. I had been an atheist/agnostic until then, but have been very spiritual since, as I think I was (with) God during this experience.

I keep saying that I don’t just believe in God – I have experienced God and therefore know that there is God (or whatever name you want to give this holistic oneness, not tied to any one religion for me; Christianity just afforded me some approximate vocabulary).

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in mid-seventies
Submission date:  July 27, 2022
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  58

I cannot describe [my experience] adequately with words. This is my attempt. I was just doing my usual “meditation” with no expectation or agenda other than to feel calm and relaxed. I think it was on a weekend, in late afternoon. It was just an ordinary day, nothing exceptional at all.

I was sitting quietly, just letting my mind wander, and in my imagination, I saw myself standing on top of a huge sphere the size of a planet, surrounded by nothingness, like an infinity of black nothingness. There was something very tiny, like the head of a pin poking up from the sphere just in front of my foot and I decided to step on it. When I did, I found myself at a point where all that is and nothing co-exist. Well, not really coexist. All that is and nothing were the same.

At first I was startled, and then I felt sort of welcomed, as if this was where I belonged, this was my home, the home of my heart and soul. I was flooded with joy. I literally felt joy course up through my feet and fill my whole body. And then one after another, understandings fell into my being. All that is is nothing. All that is is perfect. Reality is perfect nothingness. Love is the only thing that exists; everything else is an illusion. All that is is love. All that is is one. Human, physical reality is not real.

I am using words to describe the understandings, but they don’t do justice to the experience. I wept with joy, but I can’t describe why. The closest I can come is to say that every fiber of my being became infinite truth.

There is also another reason that I wept, which may make me sound like a crazy person, but it is what it is. The first time I had what I would consider a mystical experience was when I was 13. My home life at that time was very dysfunctional and stressful. I often went to bed feeling totally confused and overwhelmed.

At night, while I was sleeping—I suppose I was actually dreaming, but at the time it didn’t feel like dreaming—anyway, a “person” would speak to me. This person wasn’t human, and she spoke in a language I had never heard before, but I understood her completely, because she spoke to my heart, not my brain. She would explain to me why things were happening the way they were in my family.

Besides the explaining, the experience of her presence was something I still can’t explain [fully]. It was as if I was in a different reality, where I didn’t actually exist as my 13 year-old-self, but I existed somehow beyond that in a way that was much greater than my human existence, and I knew that my greater existence was loved by this “person” who visited me, and that love was all that mattered. Absolutely nothing about me as a 13-year-old human being was of any consequence, it was as if all my faults and failures didn’t exist.

These visits happened from time to time until I was in my early 20s. I never knew what they were or how to understand them. But they literally saved me. And I knew they represented some truth that I hoped someday I would understand.

It was the mystical experience I had when I was 58, that I wrote about above, that helped me to realize that it and the visits that began when I was 13 were the same, just a different way of experiencing them. And so, I wept when I realized the connection.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early sixties
Submission date:  July 24, 2022
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  58

I am working on a more comprehensive writeup.  I was contemplating the nature of the concept of a hammer.  What was and what was not a hammer, etc.  At a point where I realized that a hammer was not a hammer, but only exactly what it was, all human distinctions seemed to fade away.  It was like having removed all binary thinking.  All of the noise of human cognition faded and I was able to see clearly for the first time.

All of a sudden, I felt as if I was also someplace else.  It was not someplace else, but more like being in “more” of the same place.  It was like experiencing everything extra-dimensionally in a way that explained everything that was happening more completely than I thought possible.  It was potentially holographic in some sense.  It was like I suddenly understood vastly more than I should have been able to understand.

Rather than being unsettled by the realization, my reaction was “Hmm, interesting”.  I was exceptionally calm.  It seemed natural, because it all made sense.  After three years of thinking about it, I know that I cannot directly remember any of it.  I believe this is because the machinery of human memory is not designed to remember additional dimensions.

All that I am able to recall are “artistic impressions” of what I experienced.  It was a place where things like spatial dimensions existed only as a way to artistically express things that were more fundamental.  I remember being amid “concepts” that were extremely fundamental.

At one point, they seemed like a crystal of interconnected truths.  At the next moment, they were represented as a field of flowers that I could pick.  As if I drew petals from several flowers together, I was able to create an expression.  It was not a sentence per se, but had the feel of a well-formed formula.  As if it had a syntax.  I created an expression that said something so true that I had to recognize it as divine.

It has become clear to me that the truths expressed in this language defy direct translation into human language because all human words divide things in incompatible ways.  The closest I can come is that it was a statement similar to “Truth makes matter move”.  The way it was expressed, however, made it an absolutely true statement about they wat everything in the universe behaves.

I was struck dumb and humble by the meaning of what I saw.  It seemed absolute.  It was at that point that I experienced (not heard) a voice in my head saying something that I had heard a few weeks prior at a family get-together.  I heard “Turn around and see perfect wisdom.”  So, physical dimensions manifested around me so that I could metaphorically turn around, and, upon doing so, I saw my second perfect divine truth.  It was the most perfect opposite of the one I had just seen.  It said something that can roughly be translated to “Lies make matter move.”

In that instant, holding two perfectly paradoxical opposite divine truths in my head at the same time, I experienced something that I would describe as transcendence. The fact that I was driving a car this entire time is also interesting.  Since this experience, I have an on-going addition “sense” that I also can’t describe well.  I also continue to have mystical experiences of a less profound nature on a somewhat regular basis.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early twenties
Submission date:  July 21, 2022
Current location:  Israel
Age at time of experience:  20

Prior to my first psilocybin experience I was feeling depressed for several months. That’s when I decided to try psilocybin. Me and one close, experienced friend who guided me went on this journey together. It was on the last day of winter. This night was one of the most magical nights of my life.

If my depression was a hole, psilocybin was a hand reached out in help. It allowed me to live in the moment, it allowed me to think freely, it put an end the incessant and endless repetition of words and thoughts inside my head, it allowed me to be me. It unlocked a way of thinking that I haven’t felt in years. It was childlike Wonder all over again.

At the end of the night, me and my friend went to the beach to an outcrop over the water. It was raining heavily, very windy, and the ocean was roaring, but we weren’t bothered. We both felt as if each breath was worth gold. Completely connected with nature and the universe and life itself, it was enough to move me to tears.

This experience, without a doubt, will be remembered as one of the most profound experiences I have ever lived.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-fifties
Submission date:  July 19, 2022
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  55

[It} is very hard to [describe my experience]. My intention before my journey was to Kneel before God. Afterwards I discovered that it was impossible, because I am in God. “God is the dancer and creation is his dance”. I am part of his dance. I can’t kneel before him if I am part of him.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early seventies
Submission date:  July 19, 2022
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  28

I had been talking with a good friend in my apartment for some time. He eventually left and I decided to walk a few blocks down my street to a convenience store. It was a nice sunny day on a tree lined street with older houses.

Shortly after beginning my walk, I noticed that I felt exceptionally good, almost “high”—so much so that I wondered if I’d been smoking marijuana… No, I hadn’t. Then I just kept walking observing and monitoring how I was feeling. It was incredible! I felt so light and relaxed and well—like I hadn’t a trouble in the world and actually it felt like there were no troubles anywhere. Everything seemed perfect and fine, just as it was supposed to be. I felt such intense joy!!

Words don’t do justice to the depth and intensity of my feelings and observations. I saw a woman walking in my direction on the other side of the street. I didn’t know her and had never even seen her before, but I glanced at her and felt such an incredibly deep love for her. One might say that I felt ecstasy and didn’t want this spiritual experience to end.

Instead of going to the store, I made a turn and walked to a small neighborhood park. There I sat under a large tree just taking in the whole experience—still feeling such joy and love and heightened energy. I was trying to understand what was happening with me. I knew it was something good and desirable.

Besides the intense feelings, I also had a sense that the physical things I saw right before my eyes were just one layer so to speak—that there were other, deeper levels or realms of reality behind them. I had the sense, too, that everything in the world was fine, that there was nothing to worry about, and everything was as it was meant to be.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-sixties
Submission date:  July 19, 2022
Current location:  The Philippines
Age at time of experience:  40

“A Glimpse of Oneness”

In March of 1999, I participated in a one-week Zen retreat. For a little more than 20 years, I had been practicing Zen meditation on and off, primarily by myself. I only went to the retreat to jump-start my Zen practice. I never imagined that something wondrous would happen to me.

The retreat started uneventfully. S.P. Roshi, our Zen teacher, was late. She mentioned how bad the traffic was. It started with an orientation talk.

We were asked to count our breaths for a day or two before the koan Mu was assigned to us. The koan Mu was to be synchronized with our breath. We were instructed to mentally repeat Mu with each out breath while sitting in the meditation hall with an upright back.

But it wasn’t easy sitting in meditation for five to six hours every day. I spent most of my time dealing with physical pain (at one point I was sweating from the almost unbearable pain) and battling mental distractions. I mentioned it to S.P. Roshi. She told me: “You’re in pain because you are fighting your thoughts.”

I felt better after following her advice not to resist my thoughts, but instead to simply let them be – letting them come and go.

By the fourth day, I was achieving a certain level of stillness and depth during our meditation sessions. During our morning break, as I was holding a piece of biscuit in the dining room, something out of the ordinary happened to me.

The world as I knew it collapsed in an instant! Time stood still, and space disappeared! There was no time and space, no I and you, no inside and outside! I had a glimpse of the world of Zen. I could only describe it as a thunder-and-lightning realization that the universe is a palpable Whole!

Touching a piece of biscuit,

Heaven and earth are recreated.

Sipping a cup of coffee,

Whole rivers are swallowed in one gulp.

Emptied of notions of “self” and “other,”

In a flash, the True Self revealed!

I was initially overcome with anxiety and fear. I thought I was going insane, hallucinating, and losing my mind!  I told S.P. Roshi about it. She reassured me: “This is as close as you can get to experiencing your True Self.”

Those words of S.P. Roshi had a significant impact on my life. If this had occurred outside of the retreat without her guidance, I would have written it off as a hallucination or, worse, a psychotic breakdown. And it would have been a huge mistake on my part.

After the experience, I viewed the world in a fresh way. It was as if scales were peeled off my eyes and I saw the world for the first time in all its splendor and beauty! Everything and everyone was luminous and radiant! And I saw every being, every object as precious, and having an absolute value.

This was accompanied by a deep peace which I haven’t experienced before. To use biblical language, it is what probably St. Paul meant by “the peace which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). I experienced, too, a freedom and spaciousness in my life that is “as vast and boundless as the great empty firmament,” to borrow the words of one of the koans of “The Gateless Gate.”

The after-effects of the experience lasted for weeks. And just remembering those days gives me an exhilarating feeling of joy!

This happened many years ago, and looking back now I can see that my Zen experience has transformed my life in a way that I could not have imagined. It has opened my eyes to possibilities in my life that I never knew existed.

In the end, what Zen means to me is summed up in these words of Goto Zuigan Roshi:

“What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.”

Note: Seven months later, during a one-week Zen retreat, this experience was confirmed by the Zen Master K.J. Roshi as kensho, i.e., a Zen enlightenment experience.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female (age not provided)
Submission date:  July 6, 2022
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  19

When I was 19 years old, I was out with my friends, and suddenly I felt like going home . It was about midnight which was early for me in those days. When I got home I plopped on the couch in our family room, as my parents and brother were sleeping upstairs.

I closed my eyes and felt as though I was in the stars. It was most spectacular! I was amazed because I was still awake yet felt splendorous euphoria, love, time, and light, expanding, and enveloping me. I felt vast yet minute, heavy yet light, but it was the holiness of love  and rainbow light that made me ask, is this the edge of heaven? Then the realization of heaven is really real. I was on the edge of heaven and I wanted to stay there. I asked, “can I stay here?” The love I felt was so, so unexplainably beautiful, a bliss beyond words.

The ringing of the telephone snapped me back to the couch. I was annoyed because I didn’t want to leave that experience yet. It was my grandmother’s doctor calling for my father to let him know his mother had passed away forty-five minutes ago. Even though I didn’t see my grandmother in this vision, I am convinced that this was a shared death experience.

One of my big takeaways from this experience, is that we are so, so loved by Universe, Creator.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in late fifties
Submission date:  June 19, 2022
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  26

I was sitting on my couch in my living room, alone.   It was a tiny apartment I had rented in NJ, where I took my first job as a veterinarian.  I think it was a weekend, when I could relax and do nothing in particular.   I recall it was mid-day.

It came about suddenly, and lasted a fraction of a second.  All at once , I had a deep feeling, a deep realization of perfect peace.  A feeling that I knew everything in the world was perfect, exactly as it was that second. I remember the 2 words that flashed through my mind :  “of course”  . Like a realization of something so obvious, that was right before me, but somehow never before seen, known, or  appreciated.

This feeling came upon me  seemingly completely out of nowhere.  It disappeared as quickly as it came – an instant.

I remember sitting up quickly ( I was lying on my back on the couch in the living room ) and thinking – “what just happened ?”  I could not recreate that moment again, as desperate as I was to try to figure out how.   But I have never forgotten that moment.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early sixties
Submission date:  June 16, 2022
Current location:  United Kingdom
Age at time of experience:  40

I sensed my consciousness rapidly expand.

I could think at infinite speed…

I looked around me and I had a sense of union, I was the tree I stood beside, the tree was part of me, where ever I cast my attention I felt union.

I saw a unique design within everything, the interconnectedness of all creation, the choregraphed beauty of creation.

I had a sense that if i asked any question I would get an immediate response, however, I suddenly felt no need or wish.

Then the most joyous feeling of happiness….the presence of God – unbridled – unconditional love.

I had a sense of losing myself a union into light and love….

Since then, I have sought to go back to it all my life.

It totally changed me, although it has taken years to settle with me…