How to have a mystical experience...

N

Nattering Nabob

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What is a mystical experience? It is experiencing God for yourself instead of relying on the accounts of others.

Why should I try to experience God for myself? To answer all of those questions that require explanations which are beyond verbal comprehension.

How do I go about attaining the mystical experience? This may not be your path but it was mine and it worked for me.


I did what my conscience told me to do. After coming to a low point in my life I cried out to God and asked why I was not closer to him. I knew that I should be closer to Him than I was in my misreble condition. Basically I was made to understand that I should take a concrete step to get closer to him. "Take a step towards God and He will take a step towards you." James 4:8. I knew that with each step I took towards God I would be that much closer to him. A "step" was anything my conscience told me to do. Sometimes a "step" was denying myself that extra piece of dessert. Sometimes it was helping someone who needed help. Sometimes it was religious reading. My conscience was my guide, but at each step I clearly understood that I was getting closer to God and farther from my old self. I visualized each act that my conscience told me to perform as a step on a ladder to Heaven.

How far should you take this "step by step process"? I would refrain from fasting or from restricting sleep as many monks have done...they do such things under strict supervision from others who know the great dangers involved: many have starved themselves and overworked themsleves in a misguided attempt...Martin Luther relates how he almost killed himself even though under strict supervision. Avoid anything that could adveresly effect your health in the slightest manner.

Aside from that your conscience is indeed your guide. It will tell you when you are on the right track and when you are not.

A word of warning. This process is not for those who are unstable or are not ready. Carl Jung once spoke about coming into direct contact with the subconscious and said something to the effect that, "You are not in danger of losing your wits but until this time you never knew what they were for".

When the process I described led me to my mystical experience I was very afraid of losing myself. I began to act selfishly (the opposite of what my conscious was telling me to do) to regain my old sense of self and this worked as a safety valve.

What was the experience like? If I related that to you it would just be a bunch of hollow words. Suffice to say that afterwards I understood who I am and who God is. To me it was earthshaking.

As I said this may not be the path for others but it was my path and afterwards I read a similar story related in the Philokalia whereby a young man followed his conscience in the belief that it would lead him to God (in this case the man prayed whenever his conscience told him to).

Also let me say this. I came to understand afterwards that I was drawn to this experience and that I did not initiate it. Why do I say that? Because I have tried to duplicate it with misreable results. Even having seen where this path can lead I cannot force myself to do it again. I know it sounds fishy but I can explain it no other way.
 
This makes sense, very often there are experiences given by grace and not by works to use an old phrase. I often wonder about the value of these experiences in relation to truly understanding God. Stanilav Grof wrote about "spritual Emergencies" as many persons who displayed pathological behaviors were actually in the process of a spiritual emergence, and if medicated or treated would be arrested in that process. Stories of the God Intoxicated, those who have had an abrupt Kundalini awakening, things like that.

Much has been written about the dangers of the spiritual path should an awakening happen without preparation. Even Dr David Hawkins (Power vs Force) says that many who have had an enlightenment experience are never able to re integrate into society. Maybe then taking heaven by storm would not be advised!
The Tibetans practice a teaching in the Gelugpa lineage called Lamm Rimm if I am not mistaken, which means the Gradual Path to enlightenment.

However as you say NN these experiences may not be at the time or conditions of our choosing. So the question would form itself: what should we do to prepare the way of the Lord?

Peace
Mark
 
difficult to tell with you sometimes...start a thread on entheogens i got some input...:)
 
Paladin said:
Much has been written about the dangers of the spiritual path should an awakening happen without preparation. Even Dr David Hawkins (Power vs Force) says that many who have had an enlightenment experience are never able to re integrate into society. Maybe then taking heaven by storm would not be advised!
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I would second that. I once despaired so much of where I had taken my life, I prayed to be re-made into something better. After a brief but nonetheless wrenchingly bad reaction to Prozac which followed my ill-considered request and which left me teetering on the brink of the great black void, I got what I asked for. Not quite what I intended, but what I needed.

Don't mess with God you people. Elijah hid in a cave for a very good reason. Have respect.

God drops a seed in your life and it grows within you. Now the first shoots are starting to appear. Almost everything I had has gone and the good stuff is coming through. This is powerful stuff. Mescalin might give you the visions. God gives you the reality.
 
Virtual_Cliff said:
I would second that. I once despaired so much of where I had taken my life, I prayed to be re-made into something better. After a brief but nonetheless wrenchingly bad reaction to Prozac which followed my ill-considered request and which left me teetering on the brink of the great black void, I got what I asked for. Not quite what I intended, but what I needed.

Don't mess with God you people. Elijah hid in a cave for a very good reason. Have respect.

God drops a seed in your life and it grows within you. Now the first shoots are starting to appear. Almost everything I had has gone and the good stuff is coming through. This is powerful stuff. Mescalin might give you the visions. God gives you the reality.
Click to expand...


I think this is why we are taught to ignore phenomena in our meditations because of the glass ceiling you get with drug use. There is a deeper, crystal understanding that comes with spiritual growth. As St. John of the Cross speaks of in his writings:

This wisdom is loving, tranquil, solitary, peaceful, mild, and an inebriator of the spirit, by which the soul feels tenderly and gently wounded and carried away, without knowing by whom, nor from where, nor how. The reason is that this wisdom is communicated without the soul's own activity.

Peace

Mark
 
Hi All!

When I first read the title of this thread, I admit that I sighed and shook my head. I don't really know why, except maybe I was thinking that striving for a mystical experience was the first step in never finding it. But after some thought, I decided that perhaps I was wrong--to a degree.

All I know for now is all I know for now. :) I think we can ask for anything, and the answer can be "yes". But I have come to believe through personal experience that if the request is important to God/The Source/Love (however you see) then this increases the possibility of a positive response. Chris recently posted a quote on another board--"The universe arranges itself for those whose intent is clear". I don't know the author, but it made good sense to me.

I guess what I am trying to convey is that I think it is not the desire for the experience that is so important. It is the requests we make. When we have a deep yearning to understand something very important, something we have never understood but have longed for from within our very core and essence, then I think this is where the "mystical experience" begins. And then we must be willing to see, even when it seems to contradict everything we have ever known or experienced before.

InPeace,
InLove
 
It is not a single mystical experience I seek, but a continual mystical experience. Oneness with the Creator, God, The Source of All Things, or whatever it is you are trying to conect to. I'm convinced that rather than seeking, we should be living life as a mystical experience (And I'm not just talking about getting visions and loopy feelings, but a sense of correctness in ourselves lined up in the will of God, in tune, so to speak). To seek the experience in and of itself is missing the point. Oh, those kind of things will happen, but it is a natural outflow of the abiding in that state of grace or whatever you deem it. It's kinda what athletes experience when they are "in the zone", ya know what I mean? You can tell when you are in it and when you are not.

I may add, how do atheletes know when they are in the zone? When they are playing well. How do they know they are playing well? When they are scoring points. How did they get there? Practice.
 
With all due respect Dondi, I have come to believe that mystical experiences are exceptions to the rule and due to their singular nature cannot be repeated, regularized, ritualized, or practiced. They can only be recorded and memorialized. To do so would lower the experience from a "one-of-a-kind thing" to mundane and repetitive gobbledygook over time, much like the rest of life's experiences.

Now I say all of this based on some personal experiences, and while there was a certain amount of "loopiness" to it all, there was also a profound sense of awe and fear involved. A total loss of control over what I was doing and why. I became a messenger, and that was my only role. It was usually not a type of experience that most would want to be immersed in continually. While an ongoing sense of being in some sort of "zone" as an athlete might experience might seem to be possible, my opinion is that most humans would not seek out the short run levels of discomfort and pain that most mystical experiences tend to entail and try to extend them over the long term.

Of course the purpose of religion is to regularize, repeat, ritualize, and practice that which has usually been a singular happening and cannot be exactly be repeated, etc. It's a trap that we all place ourselves into in the process of trying to perpetuate singularities into the Sacred And The Profane, which, by the way is the title of a most excellent book by Mircea Eliade which describes this particular conundrum as it applies to religion and society very well.

flow....;)
 
flowperson said:
With all due respect Dondi, I have come to believe that mystical experiences are exceptions to the rule and due to their singular nature cannot be repeated, regularized, ritualized, or practiced. They can only be recorded and memorialized. To do so would lower the experience from a "one-of-a-kind thing" to mundane and repetitive gobbledygook over time, much like the rest of life's experiences.

Now I say all of this based on some personal experiences, and while there was a certain amount of "loopiness" to it all, there was also a profound sense of awe and fear involved. A total loss of control over what I was doing and why. I became a messenger, and that was my only role. It was usually not a type of experience that most would want to be immersed in continually. While an ongoing sense of being in some sort of "zone" as an athlete might experience might seem to be possible, my opinion is that most humans would not seek out the short run levels of discomfort and pain that most mystical experiences tend to entail and try to extend them over the long term.

Of course the purpose of religion is to regularize, repeat, ritualize, and practice that which has usually been a singular happening and cannot be exactly be repeated, etc. It's a trap that we all place ourselves into in the process of trying to perpetuate singularities into the Sacred And The Profane, which, by the way is the title of a most excellent book by Mircea Eliade which describes this particular conundrum as it applies to religion and society very well.

flow....;)
Click to expand...

Maybe we differ in our interprtation of what a mystical experience is. Perhaps if you could define what you mean by a mystical experienceit might help me distinguish the difference.
 
Perhaps what makes the mystical so mystical is its inherent inclination to escape definition.

InPeace,
InLove
 
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