David Spangler

Mystical Experience of David Spangler

David Spangler (1945 – ) is an American spiritual philosopher who describes himself as a ”practical mystic.”  Spangler helped build Scotland’s Findhorn Foundation into a center of residential spiritual education.  According to its website, “The Findhorn Foundation is a dynamic experiment where everyday life is guided by the inner voice of spirit…”  Its program residents “work in co-creation with the intelligence of nature and take inspired action towards [the Foundation’s] vision of a better world.”

Spangler’s mystical experience occurred when he was seven years of age and sitting in the back of his parents’ car while en route to Casablanca for a shopping trip.  Spangler experienced a form of out-of-body experience at the start of his experience, and described the mystical experience as follows:

“All at once I am filled with a feeling of energy coursing through my body and a sensation as if I am expanding like a balloon.  Before I can think about what is happening, I find myself somehow outside my body but enveloping it.  Looking down and in some fashion within at the same time, I see my physical form, my parents and our automobile, tiny objects rapidly shrinking out of view.  When they are gone, I am alone in an unbroken field of white light.”

After some time of identity with light, in which he had various spiritual realizations, Spangler experienced oneness with an all-encompassing presence:

“As if a curtain were drawn aside, I had a visual impression of the universe, a great wheel of stars and galaxies, suffused with the golden glow of billions of suns, floating in a sea of spirit.  It was as if I were seeing as this presence saw, and for one instant we were as one.  In that instant, it was as if I were one with everything that existed, every atom, every stone, every world, every star, seeing creation not from some great distance but from the inside out as if it were my very body and being.”

Quoted by Paul Marshall in The Shape of the Soul from Robert M. May’s Cosmic Consciousness Revisited: The Modern Origins and Development of a Western Spiritual Psychology.

Photo Credit:  David Spangler from http://lorianpress.com.


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