From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Thu Nov 28 2002 - 16:01:05 GMT
Hi Mari:
Welcome to the discussion.
> Can you talk about your "mystical experience": what it is/was, when it
> happened and how it effected your life. Did it change your thinking? etc.
> If anyone else has had what they believe to be a "mystical experience" i
> would like to hear the details about them as well.
So far I've had three mystical experiences, once while playing football in
high school, another while viewing a small painting by Monet at the San
Francisco Art Museum, and a third while coming over the brow of a
sand dune and suddenly beholding the ocean. In each case, I felt a
momentary but palpable expansion of awareness so that the separation
between me and the world vanished and I felt at one with my
surroundings.
The best description of the mystic experience I've read was written by
Arthur Koestler in the death cell of a Spanish prison while he was
occupying his mind with the intellectual elegance of Euclid's proof that
the number of primes is infinite:
"It 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
wordless awareness that 'this is perfect--perfect.' 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 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."
Platt
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