March 24, 2009

What is the meaning of my life?
Is there really such a thing as God?

If you find yourself asking these questions, you’re not alone. I’ve wondered the same things all my life. In 2003, I found the answers; not by looking for them but through a mystical experience that sought me.

According to merriam-webster, the term mysticism means “the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality.” It refers to an incident of connection to God, the Divine Source, the Most High or whatever term one feels comfortable calling It, accompanied by a feeling of inner peace and unimaginable bliss. It’s as if the experience itself has been orchestrated by a higher intelligence, something separate, yet inextricably entwined with one’s deepest sense of Being.

From a psychological standpoint, in “Body Mind Spirit,” K. Ramakrishna Rao describes it thus:

“Religious experience, the mystic experience, the peak experience, and all paranormal experiences may have one thing in common. They are the encounters with consciousness as such, pure consciousness in which there is no subject-object distinction … but a transformational process that often results in remarkable behavioral changes and beliefs and sometimes translates itself into informational content.”

How can I explain it so that you too, can know? I can’t, but I can give you a taste:

Have you ever felt the wonder of gazing at the stars on a warm summer night and thought about all the people over eons of time who might also have witnessed them?

Have you considered that the concept of time may be nothing but illusion or had the feeling that you’ve been here before?

Have you relished the sensation of freedom when taking off your shoes and socks and burrowing your bare feet into powdery, warm sand?

Have you known a sense of smallness as you stood at the base of a mighty glacier and questioned what a responsibility it would be to be a glacier? Or pondered what the  glacier knew that you didn’t?

Have you ever strained your ears to hear the messages these things have been trying to tell you?

These are the flavors of mystical experience.

Have you appreciated the tiny eyelashes of a newborn baby or felt the fragile hand of an elderly person with its paper-thin skin, blue veins rising just below the surface? Knowing your grip could easily crush that frail hand, your instinct instantly acts to protect something so tender and vulnerable.

Have you ever fallen so deeply into art where you are no longer conscious of where your identity ends and the identity of the artist and the work itself begins?

These moments are the first steps on the path to mystical experience.