Archives: Third Party Stories

Yeshe Tsogyal (757 – 817) is well known among Tibetan Buddhists for her lofty spiritual attainments, and she widely regarded to be the mother of Tibetan Buddhism.  During her life, Yeshe Tsogyal travelled extensively, performing advanced spiritual practices in the caves and monasteries of Tibet and Nepal.  Over the centuries, the historical Yeshe Tsogyal has assumed the status of a deity to many Buddhists – “The Queen of Bliss.”  Both the Nyingma and Karma Kagyu schools of Tibetan Buddhism recognize Yeshe Tsogyal as a female Buddha.

In the following poem from an eighth-century manuscript, Yeshe Tsogyal, after telling of her “ordinary” spiritual accomplishments, describes her “supreme attainment” [mystical enlightenment]:

“Then to tell of my supreme attainment.
I possess the threefold concentration.
The wisdom mind, Samantabhadri’s [primordial Mother Buddha’s] vastness,
Is not hid from me.
And Ultimate Reality is but my jewel and plaything.
I do not hope for Liberation
And of the pains of Hell I have no fear.
Far from the nihilism of nonbelievers,
Such is the calm assurance of profound Dharmata [intrinsic nature of mind]!
The Great Perfection [Nirvana], which no action can accomplish,
Is indeed the fruit I have won,
The all-pervading presence of the Atiyoga [primordial, true state].

Wherever space pervades, my wisdom mind is present.
My compassion now outshines the sun.”

Quoted by Robert Ullman et al. in Mystics, Masters, Saints, and Sages: Stories of Enlightenment.

Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447 – 1510) was an Italian Catholic mystic who served as an administrator of a large city hospital. She was born into an aristocratic family and was married under pressure to a man with whom she was not a good match. After struggling with depression for a decade, Saint Catherine had a life-changing mystical experience. She then committed herself to helping the sick and the poor in Genoa’s slums, serving the less fortunate for the remainder of her life.

Saint Catherine wrote about the process of spiritual development, stating:

“When the good God calls us in this world, he finds us full of vices and sins, and his first work is to give us the instinct to practice virtue; then he incites us to desire perfection, and afterwards, by infused grace, he conducts us to the true annihilation, and finally to the true transformation. This is the extraordinary road along which God conducts the soul.  But when the soul is thus annihilated and transformed, it no longer works, or speaks, or wills, or feels, or understands, nor has it in itself any knowledge, either of that which is internal or external, which could possibly affect it; and, in all these things God is its director and guide without the help of any creature.”

Saint Catherine described her mystical experience as follows:

“In this state [i.e., mystical consciousness], the soul is in such peace and tranquility that it seems to her that both soul and body are immersed in a sea of the profoundest peace, from which she would not issue for anything that could happen in this life. She remains immovable, imperturbable, and neither her humanity nor her spirit feels anything except the sweetest peace, of which she is so full, that if her flesh, her bones, her nerves were pressed, nothing would issue from them but peace. And all day long, she sings softly to herself for joy…

I am more confused than satisfied with the words I have used to express myself, but I have found nothing better for what I have felt. All that I have said is as nothing compared to what I feel within, the witnessed correspondence of love between God and the Soul; for when God sees the Soul pure as it was in its origins, He tugs at it with a glance, draws it and binds it to himself with a fiery love that by itself could annihilate the immortal soul.  In so acting, God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God; and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued. As it is being drawn upwards, the soul feels itself melting in the fire of that love of its sweet God, for He will not cease until He has brought the soul to its perfection.”

Quoted by Carol Lee Flinders in A Little Book of Women Mystics

Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887 – 1985) was an American philosopher and mystic. After being educated in philosophy and mathematics at Stanford and Harvard, he devoted himself to the goal of achieving a level of consciousness beyond that of standard human conception.  Merrell-Wolff explored a number of mystical paths, ultimately dedicating himself to the path of jnana yoga and the writings of Shankara, the most influential expounder of the nondual philosophy of Advaita Vedanta.

Merrell-Wolff had a profound mystical experience in 1936 that provided the basis for his transcendental philosophy.  Wolff’s published books, which detail his experience and philosophy, include Pathways Through to Space, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, and Transformations in Consciousness: The Metaphysics and Epistemology.

Merrell-Wolff wrote the following about his spiritual awakening (note that we have inserted paragraph breaks below for ease of reading):

“I had been sitting in a porch swing, reading….Ahead of the sequence in the book, I turned to the section devoted to “Liberation,” as I seemed to feel an especial hunger for this.  I covered the material quickly and it all seemed very clear and satisfactory.  Then, as I sat afterward dwelling in thought upon the subject just read, suddenly it dawned upon me that a common mistake made in higher meditation – i.e., meditation for Liberation – is the seeking for a subtle object of Recognition, in other words, something that could be experienced.

Of course, I had long known the falseness of this position theoretically, yet had failed to recognize it.  (Here is a subtle but very important distinction).  At once, I dropped the expectation of having anything happen.  Then, with eyes open and no sense stopped in functioning – hence no trance – I abstracted the subjective moment – the “I AM” or “Atman” element – from the totality of the objective consciousness manifold.  Upon this I focused.  Naturally, I found what, from the relative point of view, is Darkness and Emptiness.  But I Realized It as Absolute Light and Fullness and that I was That.

Of course, I cannot tell what IT was in Its own nature.  The relative forms of consciousness inevitably distort nonrelative Consciousness.  Not only can I not tell this to others, I cannot even contain it within my own relative consciousness, whether of sensation, feeling, or thought.

Every metaphysical thinker will see this impossibility at once.  I was even prepared not to have the personal consciousness share in this Recognition in any way.  But in this I was happily disappointed.  Presently I felt the Ambrosia-quality in the breath with the purifying benediction that it casts over the whole personality, even including the physical body.  I found myself above the universe, not in the sense of leaving the physical body and being taken out of space, but in the sense of being above space, time, and causality.  My karma seemed to drop away from me as an individual responsibility.  I felt intangibly, yet wonderfully, free.  I sustained this universe and was not bound by it.  Desires and ambitions grew perceptibly more and more shadowy.  All worldly honors were without power to exalt me.  Physical life seemed undesirable.

Repeatedly, through the days that followed, I was in a state of deep brooding, thinking thoughts that were so abstract that there were no concepts to represent them.  I seemed to comprehend a veritable library of Knowledge, all less concrete than the most abstract mathematics.  The personality rested in a gentle glow of happiness, but while it was very gentle, yet it was so potent as to dull the keenest sensual delight.  Likewise the sense of world-pain was absorbed.  I looked, as it were, over the world, asking:  “What is there of interest here?  What is there worth doing?”

I found but one interest:  the desire that other souls should also realize this that I had realized, for in it lay the one effective key for the solving of their problems.  The little tragedies of men left me indifferent.  I saw one great Tragedy, the cause of all the rest, the failure of man to realize his own Divinity.  I saw but one solution, the Realization of this Divinity.”

Quoted from Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Pathways Through to Space.

Photo Credit: Franklin Merrell-Wolff from www.franklinmerrell-wolff.com.

Rabia Basri (717 – 801) is one of the most celebrated Sufi mystics. She is regarded as the person who first set forth the Sufi doctrine of Divine Love, referring to God as “The Beloved.” She is also considered to be the first female Sufi Muslim saint. While Rabia Basri did not leave any written works herself, Hazrat Fariduddin Attar, a later (1145 – 1221) Sufi saint and poet, narrated much of her life using earlier sources.

Rabia Basri described her experience of Divine Love (mystical consciousness) – and the “blotting out” of her individual sense of self – in her poem, “Reality”:

“In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
the one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?”

Regarding her worship of God, Rabia Basri once famously stated:

“O my Lord! If I worship Thee on account of the fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee with the hope of Paradise, exclude me from it, but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, then withhold not from me Thine Eternal Beauty.”

Painting Image Credit: Hazrat Rabia al-Basri from the Great Thought Project.

Saint Catherine of Siena (1347 – 1380) was a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, a Catholic group comprised of laypeople whose lives are dedicated to prayer and service.  Most of Saint Catherine’s writings (except her letters) we dictated to others during her ecstatic states.

Saint Catherine once said, “The human heart is drawn by love as by nothing else, since it is made of love….Love, love, love one another! Be glad, be jubilant! Summertime is coming! For on the night of April first God disclosed his secrets more than usual.  He showed his marvels in such a way that my soul seemed to be outside my body and was so overwhelmed with joy that I can’t really describe it in words.”

In another of her letters, Saint Catherine provided a description of her mystical experience as follows:

“Truly the Soul’s being united with and transformed into him [God] is like fire consuming the dampness in logs.  Once the logs are heated through and through, the fire burns and changes them into itself, giving them its own color and warmth and power.  It is just so with us when we look at our Creator and his boundless charity.  We begin to experience the heat of self-knowledge – which consumes all the dampness of our selfish love for ourselves.  As the heat increases, we throw ourselves with blazing desire into God’s measureless goodness, which we discover within our very selves.  We are then sharing in his warmth and in his power, in that we begin at once to feed on and savor souls…”

Quoted by Carol Lee Flinders in A Little Book of Women Mystics.

Black Elk (1863 – 1950) was a famous American Indian medicine and holy man of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.  At nine years of age, Black Elk suddenly fell ill and remained in very poor condition for several days.  During this time, he had a great vision and learned many things to help heal his people. Black Elk had many other visions throughout his life that reinforced the vision he had as a boy. He once stated, “All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really one.”

John G. Neihardt, author of Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, quoted Black Elk as saying the following about one of his mystic visions:

“I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world.  And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.  And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father.  And I saw that it was holy…but anywhere is the center of the world.”

Black Elk further said that, “The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Taka (the Great Spirit), and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us” (as quoted by Joseph Epes Brown in Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux).

Jacob Boehme (1575 – 1624) was a German Protestant mystic, theologian, writer, and cobbler by trade. His most well-known book, Aurora: The Dayspring, or Dawning of the Day in the East, is considered a classic of spirituality. Boehme once stated that “Heaven is nothing other than a revelation of the Eternal One, where everything works and wills in silent love.”

One biographer wrote that, at the age of twenty-five, Boehme was “surrounded by the divine light, and replenished with the heavenly knowledge, insomuch as going abroad into the fields to a green, at Gorlitz [a town in Saxony, Germany], he there sat down and viewing the herbs and grass of the field, in his inward light he saw into their essences, use, and properties, which was discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures.”  Of this experience, Boehme wrote, “In this light my spirit saw through all things and into all creatures, and I recognized God in grass and plants.”

Boehme described a later period of mystical experience as follows:

“In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the descent and origin of the world and of all creatures through the divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the external and visible world being of a procreation or external birth from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual original and existence, and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to explicate the same.”

Writing of “Primal Love,” which he experienced during his absorption in the Godhead, Boehme stated that “it may fitly be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehensible by any of them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, to express it by.”

Quoted by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Nancy Clark (1941 – ) is the founder and facilitator of the Columbus, Ohio branch of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, Inc. (IANDS), a worldwide non-profit organization dedicated to studying and providing information on near death experiences. Until her retirement, Clark worked as a cancer researcher and Cytology instructor at Ohio State University and in the clinical Cytology arena in different laboratories. The author of Divine Moments: Ordinary People Having Spiritually Transformative Experiences, among other books, Clark has devoted her life to spiritual work.

A few days before her mystical experience, Clark – who years prior had had a near death experience during childbirth – had a premonition in a dream of the death of a very close friend. Clark later learned that her premonition came true:  the same night of her dream, her close friend had died in a plane crash. Clark gave a eulogy at her friend’s service, stating that her mystical experience occurred, “Simultaneously while [she] was delivering [the] eulogy…”:

“I was addressing the audience with the eulogy and I spoke perhaps three sentences when all of a sudden I became aware of a brilliant white light coming from the left rear of the chapel at the ceiling. I did not see this light with my eyes, but, rather with some other unexplainable source. It was more of an  “inner awareness.” I find it very difficult to describe. I could see but it was definitely not through my human eyes.

Upon seeing this light, there was immediate recognition on my part that it was God. I felt I was in the presence of my creator, a very exhilarating, spiritual feeling. I can’t explain how I knew or how I recognized God’s presence. The best I can do is to say that there was a transference of knowledge placed directly into my consciousness. In other words, I was being fed the information that I was supposed to receive.

The light completely surrounded me. I felt as if I had merged completely with the light and “belonged” to it. I felt a greater sense of reality and truth in this state.  I felt as if I was “home.”

The love that was emanating from the light is by far the most difficult aspect of my experience to relate to others. I feel so inadequate to speak of this love. Not because I am not a scholar, a theologian, a scientist, or someone who can dissect it and analyze it. I am limited simply by being human! It was not a human kind of love. It was not within the framework of our human experiences. Therefore, it defies human explanation. I can only say that it is because of this love that was channeled to me that I am able to remain strong and travel down life’s highway knowing that a great truth has occurred.

I wanted to remain in the presence of this light forever! I felt as I was in a state of grace. All my sins were forgiven and I felt perfectly and totally FREE. If I had somehow been asked at that moment if I wanted to go with this light and leave my earthly life behind, I would not have hesitated and I would have chosen to go. Not because earthly life is so bad, but, rather, that’s how incredibly beautiful the light was.”

Quoted by Kenneth Ring, Ph.D. in Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience.

Photo Credit:  Nancy Clark from www.freewebs.com/nancy-clark.

Paul Brunton (October 21, 1898 – July, 27 1981) was a British-born philosopher, writer, mystic, and world traveler. In his thirties, he left a journalistic career to live among yogis, mystics, and holy men, and he studied Eastern and Western spiritual teachings. Brunton spent his life on a spiritual path, and he holds a preeminent position in bringing to the West the East’s doctrine of Mentalism. Brunton wrote numerous books, including A Search in Secret India, The Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga, and The Wisdom of the Overself. Today, the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation (PBPF) serves “as a resource for individuals seeking to deepen their experience and gain broader understanding of themselves, their deeper Self, and the Real.”

Paul Brunton’s spiritual quest began early in life. At the age of sixteen he experienced a series of ecstatic states, as a direct result of having meditated regularly and intently for six months. Although the immediacy of these mystical experiences waned after several weeks, their afterglow lasted for three years, and they decisively shaped the remainder of Brunton’s life. Brunton continued to have mystical experiences, including an important one in the early 1930s, while sitting with Ramana Maharshi, a leading Hindu mystic of modern times. Brunton said that his “own final illumination happened in 1963” and described his illumination as follows:

“Suddenly, I realized that this was a crushing of the self by an unknown power beyond myself.  It was then that I began to fervently pray….

Next a feeling of oneness with God followed. I seemed to know and understand much that I had never understood before. My ego was going and my happiness increased every moment.  I felt that this newfound faith would guide me through every possible situation….”

All day long I felt that I was in communion with God so that I was either praying or talking to him, and he was constantly with me as my beloved companion whose presence I felt strongly. At times I would become so immersed in this feeling that I thought I was God!  I felt that the real me was invulnerable. No one could hurt it no matter what they did to the outer person.

The Divine presence seemed to be very near.  In fact, I knew that it was my real essence. Whenever any difficulties or problems arose, I found that all I had to do to solve them was to say ‘Not my will but thy will be done.’ With enough patience, they would invariably work out in the best way….

The word ‘I’ was pronounced in me; I saw it was the only reality, all else illusion. I was in every person there, but they did not know it and clung to its counterfeit – body intellect and desire – which blocked their way to spirit. ‘I AM’ is the foundation of truth and reality of the whole universe…..I was not the body and felt so free of it that I knew I could not die; in the real ‘I’ I would always be able to live for it was God….

The power of God surged through my being with such force I realized that within myself, at the center of my being, God was always there, strong, great, loving, blissful. And when I looked around at my fellows I saw that there too, deep within every one of them, He dwelt, serene and quietly. Only they were not aware, not awake to this Reality….

I was Love; there was no need to go out of my way to love anyone. Similarly, in illumination I found I was the basic condition of all other virtues. There was no need to aspire to any specific one of them. So instead of seeking them one by one it is enough to seek illumination….

All my experiences now began to fit into a pattern.  All fear left me.  The world was transfigured with light.  A few hours later whilst in bed in a state between sleeping and waking, I became conscious of a vast cosmic experience…I felt that the entire universe was a unified whole in which everything related to everything else, and that I, myself, was one with it. I could see now that everything that had happened to me in former years was part of a tremendous plan and had to happen that way. There was purpose and meaning in it all….The world and everyone in it is controlled by a vast Universal Mind. Every act and word is within the Mind or Plan….

The Cosmic Vision revealed the true meaning of freedom and fate, and showed how illusory is the feeling of free choice which we possess. I understood perfectly the Bhagavad Gita’s statement that God is the real doer of everything and we are only actors in God’s drama…I understood too Mohammed’s constant injunction to resign oneself to God’s will. In recognizing that we are parts of the pattern of circumstances and accepting it, we let go of the ego, thus fulfilling and finishing the divine Idea in us. But if the Oriental fatalists sit down to wait for something to happen, they will be forced, eventually, to get up and do something about it. But even their misconception is part of the scheme. However, for someone to appear among them and show up their error and arose them – even this too is a further part of the plan….

Everything has to happen the way it does….Even our weaknesses and faults are used to bring about the preordained happenings. There is nothing wrong, nothing evil, everything contributes to the ultimate good.”

Quoted by Kenneth Thurston Hurst from Paul Brunton:  A Personal View.

Genevieve W. Foster (1902 – 1992) was a charter member of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York who “considered herself a Jungian [a follower of psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung]” who “lived and worked outside the Jungian circle, among Freudians and others.”  She specialized in work with emotionally disturbed children. Foster authored a book about her mystical experience, The World Was Flooded with Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered, which was published in 1985.

Foster wrote the following account of her mystical experience, which came to her “at the height of [a] mid-life crisis” (note that we have inserted paragraph breaks below for ease of reading the account):

“The climactic event…came…I believe in the spring of 1945 [at the end of March], and it came in a visitation that all my upbringing and education told me was simply an impossibilbity – unless of course one was psychotic…I was at home…[in the] afternoon…I lay down for a nap on the living room sofa.  I will tell the preliminaries as well as I can after thirty-odd years, since I think they are interesting.  I had a dream of levitation; I seemed to be suspended in the air a foot or two above the sofa.  But my good Jungian training had emphasized the importance of ‘keeping my feet on the ground,’ so, still in the dream, I said to myself, ‘This will never do,’ and I managed to pull myself back down to the sofa.  There was a further fragment of a dream, something about the beating of wings above and around me.  Then I woke up.

The experience I then had would have been called hallucinatory by a psychiatrist of the day, perhaps by most today.  In the technical language of mysticism [according to researcher Evelyn Underhill]…it is what is called ‘intellectual vision.’…That is, I saw nothing unusual with my outward eye, but I nevertheless knew that there was someone else in the room with me.  A few feet in front of me and a little to the left stood a numinous [i.e., divine] figure, and between us was an interchange, a flood, flowing both ways, of love.  There were no words, no sound.  There was light everywhere…Indoors and out, the world was flooded with light, the supernal light that so many of the mystics describe and a few of the poets.  The vision lasted five days; [then] I had a sense of fatigue, and could sustain it no longer, and it faded…

[T]he experience was so overwhelmingly good, that I could not mistrust it….[T]he common metaphor in our daily speech, ‘to see the light’ often jocosely used, must have come ultimately from just such experiences in the old days when they were still recognized as valid….even though such a vision has faded, life can never return to its former pattern….it altered my life permanently, and that value of which I was permitted an awareness in those few days has for me transcended all others….Any work that I did thereafter was done not as a personal achievement, but as an offering to that Other whom I now recognized….

[During my experience] I knew that I was ‘companioned’ and that the Companion was numinous….I have had ever since an intuitive awareness of being ‘companioned.’  That numinous figure is still there, I know, and it is the deficiency of my vision that prevents me from seeing it.”

Quoted from The World Was Flooded with Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered by Genevieve W Foster.