experience stories format
Mystical Experiencer: Male in early forties
Submission date: May 12, 2022
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 33
While I was meditating [the experience occurred]. Merging with god, oneness, bliss, infinite love, feeling that we are eternal, nonduality, white lite accompanied by a violet light.
When it was over I cried uncontrollably then was frightened by what happened.
Mystical Experiencer: Female in early sixties
Submission date: April 13, 2022
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 60
I went to a Native American Church Meeting (Tipi ceremony). It was a little smaller gathering this time. It was a prayer for someone’s daughter and it seemed quite intimate for the family. It was beautiful calm weather out and the ceremony lasted all night. There was singing and drumming and in the center of the Tipi is a fire. The coals burn in a certain way and the Roadman can read the coals. Peyote goes around the Tipi as the ceremony continues. It’s in the form of a granular powder, fresh peyote buttons or peyote tea. You consume it in each form as it’s passed around.
I had done the ceremony before but this time it took on a different meaning for me. Looking at the fire, I felt connected to everything everywhere. It kind of speaks to you. I felt I was THAT. I AM THAT. I felt enormous, infinite and so ALIVE. I did not feel heat of the fire, the light did not hurt my eyes. I was completely free. I was it ALL. I was fully conscious. I had never been so aware of my surroundings without but also within. I felt I recognized that consciousness. It really was the highest state I had ever been. I had an understanding of what the ceremony really meant. Writing about it is helping me remember that day. It hasn’t left me; it will always be with me. I feel I touch it once in a while. It’s really HOME.
Mystical Experiencer: Male in mid-eighties
Submission date: April 8, 2022
Current location: Australia
Age at time of experience: 37
Initially very distressed and unable to cope with deteriorating circumstances of failing marriage over several months. Prayer and meditation for psychological support did not appear to relieve stress and sleep deprivation. Suddenly woke one night at 2 am and had an aura where I experienced a cool sensation on the centre of my forehead between the eyes. Became aware of a warm sensation of pins and needles on the vertex of my scalp that radiated down my head, neck, torso, limbs to my feet following which the feelings of stress and anxiety resolved, replaced by joy leading to ecstasy and a sense of oneness and love with the environment. Feel into a deep restful sleep.
Woke up next morning feeling refreshed but suddenly became aware of an alternate thought stream in my mind directing me to teach the Christian gospel. Entered into an internal dialogue with this higher presence in my mind that such a directive was not feasible as I had a son to care for (my former wife had cohabitated with another man) and a surgical practice to maintain. In the dialogue with this higher spiritual presence, I offered to write a book on Universal Spirituality. This was accepted and I subsequently wrote the book.
I carried out extensive research in neuroscience, developmental psychology and spiritual philosophy for the book. I also researched the personal psychological experiences of Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Paul and Mohammad when they had their calling, to better understand how a Call by what is referred to as the Holy Spirit, influenced the direction of their lives.
Mystical Experiencer: Male in mid-thirties
Submission date: March 20, 2022
Current location: Netherlands
Age at time of experience: 34
During Quantum Light breathe meditation, at some point I completely felt no resistance anymore to existence going through my body and the chains broke. My eyes went wide open, and I could feel deep connection with everything I saw. The mountain in front of me, was me. The bird that flew over me, was me. I was everything and everything was me. I could not believe the deep sense of inner peace, love and oneness that I felt with everything around me. It was so overwhelmingly beautiful that at some point, when realisation kicked in of what I had experienced, I could only cry. I cried for 30 minutes because of the beauty of what I had seen. Then a small panic kicked in, with questions coming up on what was this, who am I now, what happened, etc. Afterwards I felt a bit strange and confused.
Mystical Experiencer: Male in early thirties
Submission date: March 20, 2022
Current location: Australia
Age at time of experience: 18
I was depressed and reading a book of Eckhart Tolle to distract me from that state. At one point he gave the task to watch my thoughts. I was sitting on my bed, rolling my eyes up towards where I located my thoughts.
Suddenly, I got pulled out of my mind. My thoughts and emotions became smaller and smaller till they finally disappeared completely…. I think I did not understand what boundless, unconditional love meant till that point in my life.
Mystical Experiencer: Female in late thirties
Submission date: February 24, 2022
Current location: Australia
Age at time of experience: 16
First time meditation was tried, a kundalini awakening occurred. The body was tingling and ecstatic as the energy buzzed up and went through the whole body. Then I went for a joyful skip to the hill up the road and sat in exquisite mindlessness — no thought, silence. It was a state of divine perfection it was so blissful and wonderful.
Then the body went home and wrote jokes and laughed until the early hours of the morning. When awoken the next day, the buzzing tingling stopped. The sense of self was totally lost. The body was awake nonstop for 2 weeks laughing and joking to itself — life became comical and ended up being hospitalised in a psychiatric ward for 2 weeks after that.
Took over 10 years to realise it was an awakening. The sense of self never came back and still is gone though.
Mystical Experiencer: Male in early seventies
Submission date: February 19, 2022
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 19
It was Spring of 1968. I was in my 2nd year of college at Drexel University in Philadelphia PA, majoring in chemical engineering, hating it but not knowing what else to do with my life.
As a younger child I had been raised in the country with few friends close by. I was most comfortable walking in the woods, where I felt one with the trees. I didn’t like going home because living with my father meant constant pressure. We had no religion — my mother was Presbyterian and wanted us to go to church but my father forbade it. He wouldn’t allow God’s name to be spoken in our house.
Getting away to college was a relief, but moving to the city and living in a dorm was stressful. I was conflicted, shy, not used to socializing, and I was depressed. I made friends but never felt really at ease with them.
One Sunday about 10 friends and I decided to take mescaline at Valley Forge State Park. We drove out from West Philadelphia in 2 cars. We took the mescaline inside the cars, then got out and walked out in the middle of a large, open grassy meadow framed by trees, just as the drug was taking effect.
The trees were moving in waves. Some of the others danced and sang but I preferred to lay back and look at the sky. It was an intense blue with few clouds. I could see patterns moving in the blueness. As I was peaking, I felt one with the earth. I had a vision of roots growing out of each of my shoulder blades and far down into the earth.
If you had seen a cross section of me and the earth from the side, the roots would have looked like giant angel wings extending out from my back. I was very happy, ecstatic actually. The entire earth, maybe the whole universe, was alive and vibrant. Everything was unified, nothing was separate. (I later had much more vivid and detailed experiences like this on LSD, so some of my memories of this first experience may have blended with later ones — they were all on the same continuum).
I had a sense that I knew exactly how the universe worked, what everything meant, how it all worked together like one big organism. I also had a strong sense of certainty that this way of seeing things was The Truth — there was no doubt. I thought that this Truth was the secret of the ages, that it was concealed from all of us in everyday life and that I’d remember this truth forever. Of course, after I came down I forgot most of the details. But that sense of what is True stayed with me. And I needed it at that point in my life.
Mystical Experiencer: Male in late eighties
Submission date: February 18, 2022
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 59
Lasted about 20 minutes with detail rapidly diminishing from great to very little over the period. Started with my amazement and desire not to miss a thing then realized it was fading and became confused.
The room was solid bright light and my eyesight was faultless, yet I remember little except a feeling of wonderment and the realization that I was part of the universe and being alive was great!
It was very spiritual in that things did not matter but the realization that I was forgetting as fast as I was trying to remember panicked me.
Immediately after I tried to write what I felt/thought but any notes are long gone.
Afterward I was moved to visit my son in an army facility in Arizona on my way home (NJ) so I flew down to see him. He was in deep depression and after I left he called his mom and told her I saved his life.
Apparently I was able to counsel him in a way that I didn’t know I was capable of.
The incident changed my life very much–I became a better person generally. I began writing and was more concerned with others. I can’t describe it… It was the best thing ever happened to me. I feel blessed yet am not a particularly religious person. I have begun to be a philosopher of sorts…
I am alive today because of that incident…
Mystical Experiencer: Male in mid-sixties
Submission date: February 7, 2022
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 19
I’d been leafing through a book of Kirlian photography, intrigued by the beauty of the results of that process, and started reflecting on what an electrical field actually is. I was trying to create a useful concept in my head that I could use whenever I encountered information referring to such fields, like in the popular-science writings on physics and cosmology I was becoming increasingly interested in.
Definitions of fields seemed tautological to me, as they always took an approach like “a field is whatever it is measured to be at various spatial points,” so they didn’t help much. I thought very hard about it, bringing into mind this and that idea, juggling conceptual components around, flipping things this way and that, until I gave up in exhaustion and stood up from my chair.
Right at that moment, everything I thought “I” was dropped away, fear of suffering and death were obviously silly, and I instantly knew that although all of reality was perfectly clear and easy to see, I’d never be able to explain anything about it to anyone (although I knew I would try).
Mystical Experiencer: Female in early seventies
Submission date: February 4, 2022
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 54
I can only describe my “most significant mystical experience” by describing them all as they seem related and built in power, though they were all three very brief in “standard time” (though while they happened time was irrelevant). Basically, all three involved an experience which when described loses something in the “translation” from experience into words. It was an experience of complete and under Oneness/Non-duality with another living thing/being. The first time as I was walking on a sidewalk and looked at a window box of flowers/vines and all separateness disappeared…was I the plants? Were the plants me? I can’t truly verbalize it.
The second time was walking in a park and a squirrel and I merged. It was the same thing…a Oneness and brief glimpse of what felt like the Truth of existence.
Finally, the one that really has changed me was in, of all places a bathroom of a movie theater in a mall in New Jersey. I know, it sounds crazy. I walked into the bathroom and there was a woman employee cleaning the room and we looked at each other and all duality dropped away. She was still there and I was still there but all that reality, the separateness, the room, the material reality of everything receded despite it all still being there. All that mattered was this amazing Oneness. I always (and rarely do this) dislike trying to tell this because just using words is dualistic; to say “she and I were one” is to still distinguish between us so it’s frustrating trying to describe it. It can’t be described really. We weren’t just One for those moments, it was an experience of knowing we are All One Always. It felt and still feels like I was suddenly given a gift of knowledge that was incredibly important and precious. I still carry that sense with me all these years later. For several weeks after that experience I kept having all these small opportunities to do little kindnesses or helpful things for total strangers…things that I know I would not have noticed were there to do prior to this experience.
A few months later I happened to stop by a meditation center not far from where I live and saw they were offering a week long retreat on Non-Duality…with a teacher of Advaita Vedanta. The word grabbed me. I felt so relieved that there was a word for it and maybe other people who knew about it. So I went and finally felt what I had experienced could have a context of understanding. I have always been interested in spiritual teachings. I had learned to meditate years before and studied Buddhism. I had been raised protestant but converted to Judaism and was interested in Kabbalah. So, I became immersed in studying Advaita Vedanta for a while.
I realize I was continually hoping to repeat my experience. But lately, I think I realize that seeking to repeat the experience is a waste of time. I was given a Glimpse of the Truth, or Cosmic Consciousness, whatever you want to call it, and since then I feel much more grateful just to have had that. I now feel content to tell myself, “I am a spiritual being having a human experience” and I trust that whatever spiritual journey I am on I will be guided.
