Archives: Third Party Stories

Baba Kuhi of Shiraz (~980 – 1050) was an Iranian Sufi poet-mystic.  He traveled extensively in search of stories concerning Sufi shaikhs and their sayings, and he spent many years in retreat and prayer in a mountain cave just north of Shiraz.  Of his works, a book on Ḥallāj (a Persian mystic) called Bedāyat ḥāl al-Ḥallāj wa nehāyatohu has survived.

The following excerpt from a poem by Kuhi describes his mystical experience:

I opened mine eyes and by the light of His face around me
In all the eye discovered – only God I saw.
Like a candle I was melting in His fire:
Amidst the flames outflanking – only God I saw.
Myself with mine own eyes I saw most clearly,
But when I looked with God’s eyes – only God I saw.
I passed away into nothingness, I vanished,
And lo, I was the All-living – only God I saw.

Quoted by F.C. Happold in Mysticism:  A Study and an Anthology.

Photo Credit: Baba Kuhi from http://english.tebyan.net.

Douglas W. Shrader (1953 – 2010) was Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Oneonta.  He authored numerous publications, including Near-Death Experiences: Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious Perspectives (1995) and Seven Characteristics of Mystical Experiences (2007).

Dr. Shrader described his mystical experience, which occurred when he was 18 years of age, as follows:

“It was the summer of ’71. I graduated from high school and worked throughout the summer as a lifeguard at a country club. It was an excellent summer – the stuff of adolescent dreams and cheap B movies – but now it was drawing to a close. I found myself walking slowly along a narrow dirt path in the densely wooded mountains of Eastern Kentucky, playing my well-worn 12-string guitar, and writing a song whose words and chords I have long since forgotten.

Suddenly, without warning, my life changed – the world changed – forever. In an unsolicited blinding flash – in a timeless, eternal moment that encompassed creation, annihilation, and everything that falls between the two – I was stripped bare of all my preconceptions: preconceptions about myself, about the world, and about God.”

“There are surely elements in my background that laid foundations for the experience. They may even have prepared me in some important sense. Even so, the experience itself was unsolicited, unexpected, and – in terms of occurrence, phenomenology, and content – intensely surprising. As odd as it may sound, the experience was both unsettling and reassuring.

Although I had never taken a class in Philosophy or Religious Studies, I had thought deeply about philosophical as well as religious topics. Even as it occurred, I tried desperately to make sense of the experience. Like a small boy trying on his father’s clothes, nothing seemed to fit. I tried first one thing and then another. Many ideas and concepts that I expected to fit seemed totally inappropriate. Others fit in a loose, unmanageable manner (like a father’s hat that sits on the child’s head, but obscures his vision because it falls in front of his eyes). Eventually, having emptied my conceptual toolbox and exhausted my linguistic dictionary, I quit struggling. I surrendered to a warm, loving presence which so totally engulfed me that the “me” that it engulfed was no longer separate from the experience.

Any description that I could provide of the experience, once I surrendered, will be inadequate at best. Worse, my words are as likely to obscure and mislead as they are to inform and illuminate. Acutely aware of this problem of ineffability – long before I had learned the term or encountered [William] James’ anatomy of a mystical experience – I made a silent promise to myself to keep the whole affair a closely guarded secret. The concern was not simply an intellectual one: I did not need a dictionary to tell me that my peers might regard the experience as “confused and groundless speculation” or “superstitious self-delusion” [definition #3 for “mysticism” in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language].”

“As I write these words, thirty-six years later, that experience is as real, as vivid, and as unyielding as it was when I looked far…less like a middle-aged professor. It has shaped, informed, and provided both contours and color for every aspect of my life, every dimension of my being, every experience, every thought, every emotion, every moment of happiness, every hour of sorrow, every expectation, every hope, every doubt, and every disappointment: in short, every breath that I take.”

“Colleagues who have known me for a long time may be deeply and profoundly surprised by these…remarks. That extraordinary experience on a late summer day in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky is always with me – closer, more reliable, and more important than the beating of my own heart – more essential to the person that I have become (and to the person that I am in the process of becoming) than my twenty-nine year career as a Professor of Philosophy, my relationships with students and friends, or even my marriage of thirty-two years to Barbara: the love of my life, my best friend, and soul mate. Yet it is not something of which I speak on a daily basis. In fact, it is something of which I almost never speak at all.”

Quoted from Douglas W. Shrader’s 2007 paper, “Seven Characteristics of Mystical Experiences.”

Photo Credit: Douglas Shrader from www.oneonta.edu.

Paramahansa Yogananda (January 5, 1893 – March 7, 1952), was an Indian yogi and guru who introduced millions of westerners to the teachings of meditation and Kriya Yoga.  He is the founder of The Self Realization Fellowship and the author of many books – his best known being Autobiography of a Yogi.

Below Yogananda describes his first experience of “cosmic consciousness” (mystical experience):

“An oceanic joy broke upon calm endless shores of my soul.  The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light.  A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes.  The entire cosmos, gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being.  The sharply etched global outlines faded somewhat at the farthest edges; there I could see a mellow radiance, ever-undiminished. It was indescribably subtle; the planetary pictures were formed of a grosser light.

The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing into galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras.  Again and again I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame.  By rhythmic reversion, sextillion worlds passed into diaphanous luster; fire became firmament.

I cognized the center of the empyrean as a point of intuitive perception in my heart. Irradiating splendor issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. Blissful amrita, the nectar of immortality, pulsed through me with a quicksilverlike fluidity. The creative voice of God I heard resounding as Aum, the vibration of the Cosmic Motor.”

In his later years, Yogananda wrote the following poem, “Samadhi,” endeavoring to convey the glory of its cosmic state (as quoted from Autobiography of a Yogi):

“Vanished the veils of light and shade,
Lifted every vapor of sorrow,
Sailed away all dawns of fleeting joy,
Gone the dim sensory mirage.
Love, hate, health, disease, life, death,
Perished these false shadows on the screen of duality.
Waves of laughter, scyllas of sarcasm, melancholic whirlpools,
Melting in the vast sea of bliss.
The storm of maya stilled
By magic wand of intuition deep.
The universe, forgotten dream, subconsciously lurks,
Ready to invade my newly-wakened memory divine.
I live without the cosmic shadow,
But it is not, bereft of me;
As the sea exists without the waves,
But they breathe not without the sea.
Dreams, wakings, states of deep turia sleep,
Present, past, future, no more for me,
But ever-present, all-flowing I, I, everywhere.
Planets, stars, stardust, earth,
Volcanic bursts of doomsday cataclysms,
Creation’s molding furnace,
Glaciers of silent x-rays, burning electron floods,
Thoughts of all men, past, present, to come,
Every blade of grass, myself, mankind,
Each particle of universal dust,
Anger, greed, good, bad, salvation, lust,
I swallowed, transmuted all
Into a vast ocean of blood of my own one Being!
Smoldering joy, oft-puffed by meditation
Blinding my tearful eyes,
Burst into immortal flames of bliss,
Consumed my tears, my frame, my all.
Thou art I, I am Thou,
Knowing, Knower, Known, as One!
Tranquilled, unbroken thrill, eternally living, ever-new peace!
Enjoyable beyond imagination of expectancy, samadhi bliss!
Not an unconscious state
Or mental chloroform without wilful return,
Samadhi but extends my conscious realm
Beyond limits of the mortal frame
To farthest boundary of eternity
Where I, the Cosmic Sea,
Watch the little ego floating in Me.
The sparrow, each grain of sand, fall not without My sight.
All space floats like an iceberg in My mental sea.
Colossal Container, I, of all things made.
By deeper, longer, thirsty, guru-given meditation
Comes this celestial samadhi.
Mobile murmurs of atoms are heard,
The dark earth, mountains, vales, lo! molten liquid!
Flowing seas change into vapors of nebulae!
Aum blows upon vapors, opening wondrously their veils,
Oceans stand revealed, shining electrons,
Till, at last sound of the cosmic drum,
Vanish the grosser lights into eternal rays
Of all-pervading bliss.
From joy I came, for joy I live, in sacred joy I melt.
Ocean of mind, I drink all creation’s waves.
Four veils of solid, liquid, vapor, light,
Lift aright.
Myself, in everything, enters the Great Myself.
Gone forever, fitful, flickering shadows of mortal memory.
Spotless is my mental sky, below, ahead, and high above.
Eternity and I, one united ray.
A tiny bubble of laughter, I
Am become the Sea of Mirth Itself.”

Quoted from Paramhansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi.

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist.  Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon.  In 1855, Whitman self-published the poetry collection Leaves of Grass, now a landmark in American literature.

In Whitman’s Song of Myself, he described his mystical experience:

“I believe in you my soul…

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love…”

Quoted from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman.

Alfred Tennyson (August 6, 1809 – October 6, 1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria’s reign.  He remains one of the most popular British poets.  Among his best known works are “In Memoriam,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” and “Ode Sung at the Opening of the International Exhibition.”

Tennyson described his mystical experiences in his poetry:

“More than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine – and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark – unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world …”

“A kind of walking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone.  This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life…”

“Yes, it is true there are moments when the flesh is nothing to me, when I feel and know the flesh to be the vision, God and the spiritual – the only real and true.  Depend upon it, the spiritual is the real; it belongs to one more than the hand and the foot.  You may tell me that my hand and my foot are only imaginary symbols of my existence.  I could believe you, but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal reality, and that the spiritual is not the true and real part of me.”

Tennyson said of his mystical experience (in a letter to the prominent 19th century physicist Professor John Tyndall), “By God Almighty!  there is no delusion in the matter!  It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind.”

Quoted by Richard Maurice Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness.

Ryushu Shutaku (1308 – 1388) was a Japanese Zen priest and poet of Nanzen-ji Temple in Kyoto.

The following poem by Shutaku describes his mystical experience:

Mind set free in the Dharma-realm,
I sit at the moon-filled window
Watching the mountains with my ears,
Hearing the stream with open eyes.
Each molecule preaches perfect law,
Each moment chants true sutra:
The most fleeting thought is timeless,
A single hair’s enough to stir the sea.

Quoted by Andrew Harvey from The Essential Mystics: The Soul’s Journey Into Truth.

Image Credit: photo of print from www.greatthoughtstreasury.com.

Saint Teresa of Ávila (March 28, 1515 – October 4, 1582) was a prominent Spanish mystic, Roman Catholic saint, Carmelite nun, author of the Counter Reformation, and theologian of contemplative life through mental prayer.  She was a reformer of the Carmelite Order and is considered to be a founder of the Discalced Carmelites along with Saint John of the Cross. Among her most famous works are The Way of Perfection and Interior Castle.

In her book, The Way of Perfection, St. Teresa describes her “Prayer of the Quiet,” and the resulting mystical consciousness:

“The soul rests in peace…all [her] powers are at rest. The soul understands, with an understanding quite different from that given by external senses, that she is now quite close to God and that, if she drew just a little nearer, she would become one thing with him by union.  She does not see him with eyes of the body or the soul.…The soul understands he is there, though not so clearly.  She does not know herself how she understands; she sees only that she is in the Kingdom….

It is like the suspension of all internal and external powers.  The external man does not wish to make the slightest movement but rests, like one who has almost reached the end of his journey, that he may resume his journey with redoubled strength.…The soul is so happy to find herself near the fountain that she is satisfied even without drinking.  She seems to have no more desire.  The faculties are at peace and do not wish to move…However, the faculties are not so lost that they cannot think of Him whom they are near.  Two of them are free.  The will alone is held captive.…The understanding desires to know but one thing, and memory to remember only one.  They both see that only one thing is necessary, and everything else disturbs it….I think therefore that since the soul is so completely happy in this prayer of quiet, the will most be united during most of the time, with Him who alone can satisfy it.”

Quoted from The Way of Perfection (translated by Alice Alexander) by F.C. Happold in Mysticism:  A Study and an Anthology.

Bernadette Roberts (1931 – 2017) was a former Carmelite nun and a contemplative in the Catholic tradition.  After spending eight and a half years as a monastic, Roberts left the life of a nun and enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of Utah, where she stayed for three years before moving to California.  Roberts earned a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and, later, a master’s degree in Early Childhood Education from the University of Southern California.  She taught physiology and algebra at the high school level and eventually opened a Montessori school in Montana in 1969.  Roberts authored several spiritual books, including The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey; The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center; What is Self?: A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness; and The Real Christ.

Roberts described her mystical experience as follows:

“[T]oward later afternoon, I was standing on [a] windy hillside looking down over the ocean when a seagull came into view, gliding, dipping, playing, with the wind. I watched it as I’d never watched anything before in my life. I almost seemed mesmerized; it was as if I was watching myself flying, for there was not the usual division between us. Yet something more was there than just a lack of separateness, “something” truly beautiful and unknowable. Finally, I turned my eyes to the pine-covered hills behind the monastery and still, there was no division, only something “there” that was flowing with and through every vista and particular object of vision. To see the Oneness of everything is like having special 3D glasses put before your eyes; I thought to myself: for sure, this is what they mean when they say ‘God is everywhere.’”

Quoted by Robert M. May in Cosmic Consciousness Revisited.

Photo Credit: Bernadette Roberts from www.spiritualteachers.org.

Plotinus (204/5 – 270) was a major philosopher of the ancient world.  His metaphysical writings have inspired centuries of Pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Gnostic metaphysicians and mystics.  You can read selected works from Plotinus online for free here:  The Essential Plotinus.

Plotinus wrote of his mystical experiences in his Enneads:

“Many times it has happened:  Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme:  yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.”

“If the initiate has seen, she knows that in the experience there were not two; seer was one with the Seen (it was not really a vision but a unity apprehended).  The person formed by this mingling with the Supreme must – if she only remember – carry its image impressed upon her.  She is become the Unity, with no distinction in her either in relation to herself or anything else, for there was no movement in her, and she had no emotion, no desire for anything else when she had achieved the ascent, no reason or thought, her own self was not there for her, if we dare say this.  She was as if carried away or possessed by God, in a quiet solitude, in the stillness of her being, altogether at rest and having become a kind of rest.”

Quoted from The Six Enneads by Plotinus.

Muz Murray (1941 – ) is a spiritual teacher and the author of Seeking the Master: A Guide to the Ashrams of India and Sharing the Quest, a guide to a spiritual life in the world.

Muz Murray’s first mystical experience occurred in 1964 while he was “gazing vacantly” at the sea after enjoying a meal in Cyprus near the port of Limassol. Murray “was feeling very tranquil and relaxed” and wrote the following of his experience:

“I began to feel a strange pressure in my brain. It was as if some deliciously loving hand had crept numbingly under my skull and was pressing another brain softly into mine. I felt a thrilling liquidity of being and an indescribable sensation as if the whole universe was welling-out of me from some deep center. My “soul” thrilled and swelled and I kept expanding until I found myself among and within the stars and planets. I understood that I was the whole universe! Yet suddenly I became aware of huge entities millions of miles high, maneuvering in space, through which the stars could still be seen….wave upon wave of extraordinary revelation swept through me, too fast for my conscious mind to record other than the joy and wonder of it. In those moments of eternity I lived and understood the truth of the esoteric saying “as above–so below.” I was shown that every cell had its own consciousness which was mine.”

Muz Murray’s experience lasted about three minutes, at most. However, he stated that “my whole cocksure, intellectual assurance of how I imagined the world to be, was destroyed in one go…” and the experience “was enough to change my whole life.” Murray described the fact that, after his experience, he avoided meat, alcohol, and tobacco.  He also eventually devoted his life to the practice and study of mysticism, in contrast to his previous non-spiritual lifestyle.

Quoted by Nona Coxhead in The Relevance of Bliss: A Contemporary Exploration of Mystic Experience.

Photo Credit: Muz Murray from www.mantra-yoga.com.