Archives: Third Party Stories

A.H.M. is a woman from the United States who shared her experience with Robert May, author of Cosmic Consciousness Revisited, and wished to remain anonymous. Her experience took place during the 20^th century.

“I am with a group doing a Zen meditation walk in a light drizzle on the last day. I’m feeling very vulnerable and am concentrating on a question about the void. As I came around the house I look up.  Everything stopped. The view shifted. It is like space has cracked open and shifted. The light changes – brilliant silver flashes. Colors change. Perspective changes. There is no time. Instantly I “know” and see the illusion of the material world.  I know that everything at every level, microcosm to macrocosm is perfect elegant order. I feel perfect – enough – totally loved and know I always have been. I am expanding in that love to bursting. I feel beautiful inside and out, loved and cared for.  I am laughing and crying. People come down the street and I see they have no substance and I hear “they are the walking dead.” I weep with compassion for us. Everything I see around me is filled with wonder and newness – such joy and sadness. I feel loose in the universe with no boundaries. I am in bliss and despair – filled with energy and light. I am filled with gratitude and a sweetness as I gaze at the wonder of the orange I have in my hand. Little happenings are hilariously funny and bring me to tears. Such beauty – such love – such sadness and joy and life! It is overwhelming – no words describe this – no one can know the feelings; the experience.”

Quoted by Robert M. May in Cosmic Consciousness Revisited.

Wendy Rose-Neill was an English journalist and psychotherapist who, prior to her mystical experience, described herself as a “radical humanist” with no spiritual inclinations.

Rose-Neill’s mystical experience occurred while she was tending her garden in Buckinghamshire, England on an Autumn day:

“I felt as if I had suddenly come alive for the first time – as if I were awakening from a long deep sleep into a real world.  I remember feeling that a veil had been lifted from my eyes and everything came into focus…Whatever else I believed, I realized that I was surrounded by an incredible loving energy, and that everything, both living and non-living, is bound inextricably with a kind of consciousness which I cannot describe in words…the experience seemed endless – as if I were in some kind of suspended eternal state of understanding.”

Wendy Rose-Neill had a similar experience several months later.  She stated that she never discussed her experiences with anyone, mainly because she found the experiences so difficult to communicate.  Rose-Neill wrote about how the experiences affected her life:

“These two experiences felt as if they were revelations, and that I had inexplicably tuned into some mysterious vibration of which I’d been unaware before…I’ve had many other versions of the…experience…less intense, but still involving my whole self in this extraordinary way…their general effect has been to enrich the quality of my life and to give me a sense of continuity and meaning which has taken me through times of great personal crisis, when it seemed that everything was crumbling away. From these experiences, I have also gained a profound sense of wonder and mystery about the earth and the universe we inhabit, and an ever-deepening respect for all of life.”

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

Arthur Koestler, (September 5, 1905 –  March 1, 1983) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. In 1968, he was awarded the Sonning Prize “for outstanding contribution to European culture” and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

The mystical experience quoted below occurred in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Arthur Koestler, a German exile writing for a British newspaper, had been arrested by Nationalist forces in Málaga and sentenced to execution. He spent every day in prison awaiting death (only to be released three months later under pressure from the British government). Koestler had busied himself by etching mathematical formulas on the walls with a spring he extracted from his mattress. He wrote that he was most elated by his reconstruction of Euclid’s proof that the number of prime numbers is infinite.

“And then, for the first time, I suddenly understood the reason for this enchantment: the scribbled symbols on the wall represented one of the rare cases where a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means. The infinite is a mystical mass shrouded in a haze; and yet it was possible to gain some knowledge of it without losing oneself in treacly ambiguities. The significance of this swept over me like a wave. The wave had originated in an articulate verbal insight; but this evaporated at once, leaving in its wake only a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue. I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that “this is perfect – perfect”; until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind – some trivial circumstance that marred the perfection of the moment.  Then I remembered the nature of that irrelevant annoyance:  I was, of course, in prison and might be shot. But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be: “So what? is that all? have you got nothing more serious to worry about?” – an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the intruding annoyance had been the loss of a collar-stud. Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence. It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Then there was no river and no I. The I had ceased to exist.

When I say “the I had ceased to exist,” I refer to a concrete experience that is verbally as incommunicable as the feeling aroused by a piano concerto, yet just as real – only much more real. In fact, its primary mark is the sensation that this state is more real than any other one has experienced before – that for the first time the veil has fallen and one is in touch with “real reality,” the hidden order of things, the X-ray texture of the world, normally obscured by layers of irrelevancy. What distinguishes this type of experience from the emotional entrancements of music, landscapes or love is that the former has a definitely intellectual, or rather noumenal, content. It is meaningful, though not in verbal terms. Verbal transcriptions that come nearest to it are: the unity and interlocking of everything that exists, an interdependence like that of gravitational fields or communicating vessels. The “I” ceases to exist because it has, by a kind of mental osmosis, established communication with, and been dissolved in, the universal pool. It is the process of dissolution and limitless expansion which is sensed as the “oceanic feeling,” as the draining of all tension, the absolute catharsis, the peace that passeth all understanding.”

Koestler further stated that the above referenced mystical experience, along with his others, “filled me with a direct certainty that a higher order of reality existed, and that it alone invested existence with meaning.”

Quoted from Arthur Koestler’s autobiography, The Invisible Writing.

Omar Khayyám (May 18, 1048 – December 4, 1131) was a Persian polymath, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, and Islamic theology.

The following poem by Khayyám describes his mystical experience:

There was a Door
To which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past
Which I could not see:
Some little Talk a while
Of ME and THEE.
There seemed – and then
No more of THEE and ME.

The late yogi Paramahansa Yogananda offers the following “Spiritual Interpretation” of Khayyám’s experience in Yogananda’s book, Wine of the Mystic: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:  

“After I had withdrawn my consciousness and life force…I stood at the door of Infinity, unable to find the key to its mysteries, the way to complete freedom in Spirit…My soul, reaching even this high state of attainment, could not penetrate the veil of the inner light of superconsciousness…beyond which lay the…Unmanifested Beloved – the Absolute.

There was a little talk or conscious vibratory exchange between soul (me) and Spirit (Thee); and then, in deeper ecstasy, I became united with the indescribable Infinite.  In that oneness with the Absolute, there remained no separate existence of my individual soul.  A tiny bubble of laughter, I became the sea of mirth itself.”

Quoted from Omar Khayyám’s The Rubáiyát.

Barbara Ehrenreich (August 26, 1941 – ) is an American writer and political activist.  She is the author of numerous books, including Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything.

Ehrenreich recounts her mystical experience as follows:

“[S]omething happened when I was 17 that shook my safely rationalist worldview and left me with a lifelong puzzle … that morning in 1959 when I stepped out alone, [I] walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world – the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings – suddenly flame into life.

There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of. It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze. I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.”

From “A Rationalist’s Mystical Moment” by Barbara Ehrenreich, as printed in the April 5, 2014 New York Times.

Photo Credit:  Barbara Ehrenreich 2 by David Shankbone, New York City.

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837 – 1902) was a prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century.  Born in Methwold, England, Bucke and his family emigrated to Canada when he was one, and the family settled near London, Ontario. Bucke was an adventurous young man, and, in the winter of 1857–1858, he nearly froze to death in the mountains of California; he was the only survivor of a silver-mining group of which he was a member. Bucke was forced to traverse the mountains and suffered severe frostbite as a result—a foot and several of his toes were amputated. He would wear a prosthetic device for the rest of his life.

After this incident, Bucke returned to Canada, eventually studying medicine at McGill University in Montreal. Bucke became a psychiatrist, and, ultimately, the head of the provincial Asylum for the Insane in London, Ontario. Bucke authored three books: Man’s Moral Nature, Walt Whitman, and Cosmic Consciousness, a study of mystical experience, which is his best-known work.

Bucke describes his own mystical experience as follows:

“It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next, he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught. The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew; neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind.”

Quoted from Richard Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness.