I thought I had seen something like that, but then I still woke up an atheist.
psst, DS: stop by the gift shop next time. They have some cool stuff in there.
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
What Are Mystical Experiences Like?
- Thread starter Debater Slayer
- Start date
psst, DS: stop by the gift shop next time. They have some cool stuff in there.
Who would you gift stuff to when everything is one? Wouldn't that mean giving everything to yourself, thereby making you a selfish being, thereby abruptly halting your experience of loss of self?
I think I've just done something akin to division by zero. Pay no mind to what I'm going to say after this point if you want to stay sane.
Every One? This is just a theory, but I do recall rather clearly (and I'll stop rhyming now) that while I was skipping from star to star the thought occurred to me that, "Hey, you know what? Atm, I'm just looking at everything without trying to figure any of it out and (and this is probably important) without judging any of it. It's like a movie: I didn't write the script so I have no idea what's going to happen next, or what should, or where it's all going or what it's all ultimately supposed to add up to, but it's entertaining my socks off, the special effects are blowing my mind, and the writer must know his business because I'm feeling a deep and profound catharsis with each and every character on the screen, which is saying something since the cast is every living creature on the planet, along with a respectful nod to anyone who might be living anywhere else. So, I'll just sit here and be entertained, applaud in the right places, and maybe subconsciously learn something that'll help me be, if not a better person, at least a bit more useful and/or less of an ordeal to myself and who or whatever happens to cross my path from here on."
Edit: oh yeah, the "theory" I mentioned at the beginning of all that is: "If I can take a bit of this with me I'll be a happier person and that kind of thing tends to be contagious".
No idea, DS. As with most people in most places, I didn't bother to read the TOS.
I think "Division by zero" is exactly it.
Problem is, most people can't count to zero, or don't see any reason to try.
Last edited:
In
Listen to Leonard Cohen's "Love Itself."
Reality.
Jumi
Well-Known Member
Well said. This is descriptive of many experience I have had, but not all.
That always happens to me too.I thought I had seen something like that, but then I still woke up an atheist.
Jumi
Well-Known Member
From a few experiences:
It's like being a baby in the womb of the universe. Having all stress, fear, expectation, hope melt away.
It's like your physical senses being purified, hearing things from a far. Seeing without seeing. Knowing the language of the birds.
It's going into a tunnel of flashing rainbow lights and emerging up in the clouds. An abode of mythical beings.
It's like being a baby in the womb of the universe. Having all stress, fear, expectation, hope melt away.
It's like your physical senses being purified, hearing things from a far. Seeing without seeing. Knowing the language of the birds.
It's going into a tunnel of flashing rainbow lights and emerging up in the clouds. An abode of mythical beings.
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
Spaciousness, timelessness, oneness, connectedness, and other words ending in ness.
Last edited by a moderator:
I think that is probably the best way to describe it. Speaking as someone whose had mental problems for many years and has experienced different levels of consciousness as a result, I would say that myticism is the ability to see the illusionary nature of knowledge and that our abstract way of thinking can not fully incapsulate the world in our thought process. Zen Buddhists put it as "he who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know." Dialectical reasoning may have some similarities with eastern myticism in thinking in terms of graduations of being rather than the simplistic "yes-no, true-false, right-wrong" duality which can be deeply authoritarian and cripples our ability to experiencence the gradations of meaning. so far as my experience goes, it is the ability to accept that we are primarily emotional animals and to give up the 'need' for certianity. I don't think an atheist can simply deny mystical experience as religion is a mode of reasoning, but as a materialist I would simply say that it does not reflect a change in the outer world, but a change in our own mental state and to seek naturalistic explanations for it.
YmirGF
Bodhisattva in Recovery
My experiences normally flip in and out of physical perception. It can be dizzying, but one does get used to it.
In physical terms, I often feel a strange tickle on my skin, almost like be touched by a feather. Colours are enhanced and brighter. Music has a pronounced emotional impact. In short, every physical perception is enhanced.
On the inside, there is a palpable feeling of expansion and my centre of focus is usually about 1 metre above my physical head, and mushrooms outwards... like an inflating balloon. There is usually a very slight metallic sound, not a ringing in my ears, but an odd metallic sound the both precedes the expansion and stays around for the first while. Then there is silence. In that silence there is an astounding clarity, of intuitive grasp, of seeing connections between things that are not normally apparent.
With the expansion, and as the clarity builds and comes to the foreground of awareness one is usually enveloped in an intense white/silvery light. Unlike others, I no longer ever have a sense of "no self" as my ideas of self have evolved to include this aspect of being. This is what I've come to call the larger identity. Beyond that.... it's pretty hard to describe the way images come and go in the seat of consciousness, though multi-image projection overlays could, in theory, crudely approximate the experience... ...with the possible exception of conveying being in more than one place at the same time.
In physical terms, I often feel a strange tickle on my skin, almost like be touched by a feather. Colours are enhanced and brighter. Music has a pronounced emotional impact. In short, every physical perception is enhanced.
On the inside, there is a palpable feeling of expansion and my centre of focus is usually about 1 metre above my physical head, and mushrooms outwards... like an inflating balloon. There is usually a very slight metallic sound, not a ringing in my ears, but an odd metallic sound the both precedes the expansion and stays around for the first while. Then there is silence. In that silence there is an astounding clarity, of intuitive grasp, of seeing connections between things that are not normally apparent.
With the expansion, and as the clarity builds and comes to the foreground of awareness one is usually enveloped in an intense white/silvery light. Unlike others, I no longer ever have a sense of "no self" as my ideas of self have evolved to include this aspect of being. This is what I've come to call the larger identity. Beyond that.... it's pretty hard to describe the way images come and go in the seat of consciousness, though multi-image projection overlays could, in theory, crudely approximate the experience... ...with the possible exception of conveying being in more than one place at the same time.
Last edited:
Orbit
I'm a planet
It felt like oneness with all. It felt like love and compassion. It felt like a higher perspective.
lovemuffin
τὸν ἄρτον τοῦ ἔρωτος
To try to describe experiences without using words that refer to later interpretations:
I have felt what seemed like an expansion, usually focused around my chest, it is sometimes accompanied by something like a tingle throughout my upper body, or something like a pleasant almost electric (in the nerves, anyway) shock that runs up my back. There is a euphoric feeling sometimes, that makes me want to sing or in some way to verbalize a response to the feeling, or to write poetry. Other times it is quieter. A calmness, a feeling of peace and equanimity, especially a calming of concerns about the future, or regrets about the past. It stills the mind and brings it more to a focus on a beauty in the present, whether of the physical feelings, or of the environment being contemplated. It is peaceful. Sometimes there are somewhat overwhelming feelings that are hard to describe, but seem to encompass compassion and a mix of sadness and joy for others, tears, a strong desire to love and be connected with everyone and everything. Sometimes I feel like I am on the verge of grasping something without knowing what it is at all that I'm grasping for. Sometimes there is something like an exaltation and sweetness to contemplating a particular phrase, or prayer, or bit of a song, or something.
So to sum up, I've become fond of certain words that seem, symbolically, to encompass these various moments: joy, fullness, peace, silence, stillness, compassion, love. Those might be the most essential to me.
I have felt what seemed like an expansion, usually focused around my chest, it is sometimes accompanied by something like a tingle throughout my upper body, or something like a pleasant almost electric (in the nerves, anyway) shock that runs up my back. There is a euphoric feeling sometimes, that makes me want to sing or in some way to verbalize a response to the feeling, or to write poetry. Other times it is quieter. A calmness, a feeling of peace and equanimity, especially a calming of concerns about the future, or regrets about the past. It stills the mind and brings it more to a focus on a beauty in the present, whether of the physical feelings, or of the environment being contemplated. It is peaceful. Sometimes there are somewhat overwhelming feelings that are hard to describe, but seem to encompass compassion and a mix of sadness and joy for others, tears, a strong desire to love and be connected with everyone and everything. Sometimes I feel like I am on the verge of grasping something without knowing what it is at all that I'm grasping for. Sometimes there is something like an exaltation and sweetness to contemplating a particular phrase, or prayer, or bit of a song, or something.
So to sum up, I've become fond of certain words that seem, symbolically, to encompass these various moments: joy, fullness, peace, silence, stillness, compassion, love. Those might be the most essential to me.
Ha, ha! I was going to resist this explanation business, but this one ain't bad. Nice work.
So what is insanity? For the sake of this discussion we might set aside diseases of the brain, and focus on the normal human experience of insanity in our regular daily lives.
Insanity is illusion, right? If I see little green aliens under my bed, you would label me insane.
So what is this normal chronic very human insanity which becomes apparent once we have something to compare it to?
It's just another illusion. An illusion of separation. An illusion that all of reality is divided between "me" and "everything else".
Where does this illusion come from? What causes it?
Imho, it arises from the inherently divisive nature of the medium we are made of, thought.
If the illusion arose from inaccurate thoughts, then we could fix it by the process of philosophy, a process of challenging thought content to weed out the flawed thoughts.
But if the illusion arises from thought itself, from the medium which all thinkers and thoughts are made of, then philosophy is seen in a new light, because it is made of the very thing causing the illusion.
This raises the question of whether attempts to describe, analyze and explain mystical experiences are really constructive steps forward.
It might be more useful to describe simple meditation techniques anyone can use to lower the volume of thought. And then once they've had such experiences themselves, they'll no longer have any need of explanations from others.
As I see it, all attempts to describe, analyze and explain mystical experiences are really just one more way to put off actually having them. That's like standing over a freshly cooked meal and talking about it. Why not just eat it?
Orbit
I'm a planet
Because we are human and like sharing our experiences with others. That's why. No one here is trying to analyze or explain it, we are sharing experiences. This is the Mystic DIR, after all.
Rick O'Shez
Irishman bouncing off walls
I don't feel there is a need to define it too closely. As the first line of the Wiki entry says:
Mysticism is "a constellation of distinctive practices, discourses, texts, institutions, traditions, and experiences aimed at human transformation, variously defined in different traditions."[web 1]
Mysticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An explanation of a mystical experience is not the same thing as a description of one. In order to describe one, you have to speak from a place of experience. To "explain" mystical experiences is to try to explain why others claim to have them. An example of this would be the skeptic trying to explain why mystics claimed to experience what they do by saying "it's just the brain", pointing to neuroscience. Or another explanation might be on the more magical and mythical level, saying that such experiences claimed by mystics are of the devil, or if they liked the description by the mystic, that is was God touching them. Those are explanations of mystical experience.
Explaining mystical experience is not the topic of this thread however, but to describe one's own experiences. That's what all of us have been doing in it, so I'm not sure where this notion of this as being trying to explain mystical experiences has crept into this thread. That's not the topic. There's plenty of that in the designated debate forums where others are skeptical of these experiences and wish to "explain" them or argue about them, in the sense of trying to understand them because they lack much if any actual experience. They need to explain them for themselves in order to know what to think about them, or to think about their own fleeting experience they may have once had that they are seeking to try to explain to themselves, either its validity or its aberration, a spot of bad cheese, etc.
For me, the game as it were, is to find better ways to paint pictures of my own continual experiences. I have no need to explain them to myself or to others, which is not remotely the same as sharing my experiences by describing them with others. Also, to try to understand them for myself, is different than trying to find an explanation of them for myself, but to simply learn from them to further illuminate my life. Again though, that's not explaining them, but merely learning from their Light to integrate their lessons into my life. "Lessons in the Light," is how I like to describe what opens in me as I enter into meditation. Quite literally that is what they are for me. This is a description of my actual experience everyday within meditation, and elsewhere as I walk within this Awareness.
Last edited:
Just because YOU think we should only have certain kinds of discussions and certain uses of words in the DIRs does not mean that you get to flaunt the rules. This is a DIR for people who wish to discuss the mystical experience and related topics. You apparently wish to end all discussion about anything that doesn't fit with your interpretation of reality; you have not followed the rules of the forum because you are not being respectful (although you certainly could be, if you would pose your points differently).
The DIR is not a place for a debate (Read the Rules again). If you want to DEBATE this topic, go start a thread on this topic in the Religious Debates section.
If instead you want to complain about the way the English Language is used by other people, or argue with the people who organized and who run this forum according to the agreed-upon rules, there are places here to do that, as well. Find them. Use them.
lovemuffin
τὸν ἄρτον τοῦ ἔρωτος
Perhaps the point Typist is making is that to attain inner peace, one must respond to his posts with Silence
Too funny.Perhaps the point Typist is making is that to attain inner peace, one must respond to his posts with Silence