"Spritual Experience"? Never had one...

[oildrops]

I've been exploring the depths of my conciousness since I was very young. I have explored lucid dreaming, auras, mind melding. I've long moved beyond drugs and pop culture spirituality, and into serious yoga and energy practice. I believe and connect with a deep sense of purpose (most days), and meaning in the apparent meaninglessness and beauty of life.

 

I have never had a "spiritual" experience. Never have communicated with guides, or have purposefully left my body. I don't really care what happens to me after I die, and I have no interest in immortality or knowing what's next. I have a cynical belief that our biological rejection of arbitrary existence has driven us to intellectualize and philosophize too many complicated belief systems. I am happy with uncertainty, and that's good, because it's mostly what there is. Of course, certainty is possible, as all possibilities are.

 

Have you had a "spiritual experience" that has solidified any ideas, truths or beliefs? Have you been able to shoot ghosts out of your head that tell you what color car you should buy? Have you astral surfed the cosmic waves of love energy untill your heart chakra exploded into all encompassing emptiness and nirvanic bliss? Has your dead cat contacted you to tell you she hated fancy feast?

[RongzomFan]

the falling sensation in bed is said to be OBE

[taijistudent]

I had a couple of very interesting series of spiritual experiences in the broadest meaning. They came unexpectedly and also went away just as unexpectedly. I do not believe one can work toward a spiritual experience (working toward one can possibly be counterproductive in that the effort becomes an obstacle). I think these experiences just come when they come. And they aren't much. It is more like looking through some binoculars or a microscope and seeing something new. Subtle but quite interesting. Then it is a matter of trying to make heads or tails of what has just transpired.

[SEEKER OF TRUTH]

My greatest spiritual experience, was getting honest with myself, for the first time in my life. Honest about my behavior, about my relationships with others and how all the choices I had made up to that point in my life, were with only me in mind (selfish and self-centeredness).

 

It was quite the life changing experience. Ego and denial tend to keep us from such truths about ourselves, sometimes for entire lifetimes.

[Jetsun]

I have met a couple of masters and just what they radiate is a form of spiritual experience in my view, no fireworks or amazing things happened like obe or spirit talk just a sort of recognition that the path is real and there really is a different life possible has a deep powerful effect on you, or it did on me. Other than that I had direct spirit interaction when I took Ayahuasca which is the fastest route you can ever take if you want such an experience, but I think meeting a master is more obviously beneficial than such an encounter with plant shamanism and there are many masters easily available to visit these days.

[Mokona]

I've been exploring the depths of my conciousness since I was very young. I have explored lucid dreaming, auras, mind melding. I've long moved beyond drugs and pop culture spirituality, and into serious yoga and energy practice. I believe and connect with a deep sense of purpose (most days), and meaning in the apparent meaninglessness and beauty of life.

 

I have never had a "spiritual" experience. Never have communicated with guides, or have purposefully left my body. I don't really care what happens to me after I die, and I have no interest in immortality or knowing what's next. I have a cynical belief that our biological rejection of arbitrary existence has driven us to intellectualize and philosophize too many complicated belief systems. I am happy with uncertainty, and that's good, because it's mostly what there is. Of course, certainty is possible, as all possibilities are.

 

Have you had a "spiritual experience" that has solidified any ideas, truths or beliefs? Have you been able to shoot ghosts out of your head that tell you what color car you should buy? Have you astral surfed the cosmic waves of love energy untill your heart chakra exploded into all encompassing emptiness and nirvanic bliss? Has your dead cat contacted you to tell you she hated fancy feast?

My spirit guide has forceably and on multiple occasions caused my body/energy to bliss out, has spoken through me, communicated to my mind and communicated with a few of my friends.

 

I find it very strange that she stook around for as long as she did(she is still around sometimes) becuase i'm only a beginner. It really solidified my beliefs though.

 

When conversating at work with cooworkers.. and a powerful, warm energy swoops in.. and feels loving.. and the 2nd chakra starts to blast bliss... People used to think I was dehydrated and passing out at work.

 

I've nearly OBE'd several times but always get to frightened when on the threshold. It's so freeeaky!

 

EDIT: I've never done illegal drugs. I use Aspirin or Motrin for headaches and that's probably the worst of it.

Edited March 7, 2013 by Mokona

[Flolfolil]

anything i could possibly experience is just form, so i don't know if i could legitimately call anything spiritual experience. If i feel bliss or something its completely explainable in terms of brain chemicals. Astral projection and psychic happenings could all be coincidence or just a product of knowing my environment well enough to make a super educated guess

 

but i'm cool with that, i like the world

[oildrops]

Sounds black and white with that "never" in that sentence.

 

Perhaps all the minutes and hours and lifetimes, from the moment you were never born, have all been spiritual. Deeply, deeply spiritual. You just haven't ever noticed.

 

Best to you _/\_

 

I think you understand the meaning of my post.

 

I was struck by overhearing a conversation and realized the phrase is used often, and I have never understood it. When I close my eyes and I am consumed by a kaleidoscopic vortex and a mask begins to tell me a story after doing yoga for several hours, I don't categorize it as "This is a spiritual experience. Before was not". I don't know what that means. I don't talk about my practice to anyone anymore because I am bad at explaining my interests in a way that doesn't make me come off at someone "on a spiritual journey", which makes me cringe a bit.

[Birch]

I'll add one. I don't know that it counts as it was during a dream. For whatever reason I make distinctions between dream happenings and otherwise but this one had a 'realism' to it. Anyway, so in the dream, I am asked to assist someone in an exorcism. I walk into the place where the entity is (some kind of ethereal golden something appearing inside a painting) and I think to myself 'What an easy gig this is' and 'it's only a dream' then the ethereal thing speaks in very stereotypically demonic voice and I say to myself 'Oh no, this stuff is for real and who on earth was I kidding when I said yes I could help?'

 

 

I woke up in terror. But the end of the story was we did exorcise the whatever it was. So I reassured myself that I could do it, the fear dissipated and I went back to sleep.

 

I remember making a choice between discounting the dream entirely or allowing that I'd done an ok job on my first exorcism. I can't say which choice is the better one. I still consider the event a dream. So I found it weird I'd prefer to go with the exorcism story as having a decent outcome. Maybe because it dropped the fear better than saying 'it was just a dream'. Or, did I really help out on an exorcism? I guess I won't know till I start get calls for repeat business haha.

[oildrops]

Interesting dream. It gave me an idea that if creative energy is enhanced with "spiritual practice", and if someone is not accustomed to it, it would have a profound effect.

 

If we are infinitely connected inside and out with the universe, then any experience, not just a supernatural event is a manifestation of creative energy.

 

I have come to the idea that life is subtle, the way it is lived by us humans, and that sometimes the patterns experienced are the closest to consciously realizing the divine nature of all. When we realize that we are floating on a giant mass of matter that has been here for billions of years, it makes it almost a spiritual experience to wake up in the morning. It's sometimes fun to visualize dragons and spirit guides, but I'm convinced they are a creation of the mind.

 

I just don't know how it is possible to have an experience to solidify a belief system without already wholy subscribing to that belief system. It's a catch 22 for me, and I'm not trying to be obtuse, or exercise dialectics. Some people "find" jesus, or experience the buddah nature, or they realize they have a soul and leave their bodies, changing and forming a belief. But doesn't that attachment further a dual nature? It's as if the experience would give a foothold to climb higher, and I have seen the effects of those who became attached to a natural event or thought process leading to a belief system only to later realize that a tree can have the same effect on the energetic system as a bible.

 

^another thought, I think group behavior can lead to someone having a spiritual experience, think of the energy produced in a southern baptist church, or pagan ceremony with very intense individuals.

[Birch]

I can only talk about my experiences as an atheist, pretty science-leaning, somewhat enamoured with nature, artistic bent, bit of of a lefty (sssh don't tell), bit of a sentimentalist (sssh don't tell). Really, I can't say practice has done anything more than lead me to where I already was before it all got crapped up.

[oildrops]

Sounds familiar to me! My post above was a rant, not really responding to your excorsism dream. I have been reading "the Tibeten yogas of dream and sleep" I will make a post in the book section once I am finished with it. I have effectively practiced guitar and studied for a class in my dreams. Depending on how lucid I am, I can make real progress in something I am familiar enough with while in conscious life. Maybe you can now rid people of demons? I had some pretty intense visualizations before sleep the other night that I couldn't seem to stop, and they were very frightening, I felt like I was being attacked. It's sometimes good to get that stuff out into a visual field I Think. I think.....

[Birch]

I think I feel better when I tell other people about it. Hum

[Apech]

<.....>

 

Have you had a "spiritual experience" that has solidified any ideas, truths or beliefs? Have you been able to shoot ghosts out of your head that tell you what color car you should buy? Have you astral surfed the cosmic waves of love energy untill your heart chakra exploded into all encompassing emptiness and nirvanic bliss? Has your dead cat contacted you to tell you she hated fancy feast?

 

You have a very strange idea as to what a spiritual experience is. For me a spiritual experience is an inner realisation as to the nature of yourself and/or reality ... i.e. profound change in consciousness. The things you list are more like the side product of increased sensitivity to energy/consciousness (call it what you will) ... things like that may happen but are not the key/point/ purpose of spiritual work.

[Taomeow]

Has your dead cat contacted you to tell you she hated fancy feast?

 

 

 

The cat I loved and lost as a little girl did give me a full blast spiritual experience, which I expressed in a poem, whose free-form translation I post below (the Russian original is rhymed iambic hexameter). "Bars" was his name, it means snow leopard in Russian and Mongolian.

 

 

My Bars, I've had a great mystery revealed to me,

so I've come to believe in paradise

with a sign over the entrance that says, "Pets OK."

 

I am willing to share the vast spaciousness beneath the eternal celestial dome

with crazy cat ladies, spinsters and bachelors, mad Englishmen,

with anyone who'd loved a cat or a dog for their devotion

and devotedly shares paradise and ephemeralness with them,

 

my Bars, philosopher, sybarite and Casanova,

I had a dream, a far-away future year carved in a tombstone

and above that number, my own name,

but, Bars, you won't ever be a senior's cat --

with you, I will be ten years old again, so wait for me

 

biding your time, hunting the pious rats in the fragrant groves,

and pray, as is the local custom, for the sinful and the mangy,

the skinny, the stealthy, the stray -- for they're all kin after all.

 

There's fluffy herds of your lovers roaming around,

or rather packs, and there's hundreds of ladders and roofs and windows,

and, my Bars, I believe in a paradise that never shoos cats away --

if it exists it does not, and exist it does.

 

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

Spiritual experience is hard to pin down... For starters, a dualistic separation between "spiritual" and "physical" determines that no spiritual and experience are a contradiction of terms.


If we hold that physics and spirituality are separated, then no one in the whole sum of time immemorial has ever had a genuinely spiritual experience.




That being said, i've had a spiritual experience, according to my opinions of my perceptions




I was no more than 2 1/2 years old, my Grandfather died of a heart attack, and that night: I watched him leave with two bright and blinding silver and gold bodies-too bright to look at, yet shone no light outside their body/area, while my grandpa was dark, ashen, and shadowy, as if a physical body in the night.

The gold body may have acknowledged me, but i cant remember much of that event... just that grandpa was with 2 pure bodies "going home"... i knew in my heart... still know it...

[ॐDominicusॐ]

I've had soooo many, I've lost count. Been out of the body, check. Seen the spiritual realms, check. Chakras, check. Merge w/ Oneness, check. Seen the souls of recently dead, check. Remember pre-existing prior to being born here on earth, check. Experienced first hand that the mind and body are not inherently who I am, check.

 

What remains in my life at this point, is a timeless Now, a grand scheme of things perspective, a detachment from myself/body/mind, and ever and ever deeper expansions of the All Pervading Source and the Emptiness it abides in.

 

I never sought these things in the beginning, but when they came, they knocked me on my ass with ecstatic blisses and ego death. I'm too far down the rabbit hole to ever be able to go back to how things once were.

 

The Physical body due to various channels being open, is now so sensitive, I can no longer drink alcohol, eat certain foods, do drugs, be around certain areas/people/music, etc. Can literally feel in the channels changes in air pressure, storms coming, empathic skills to know others completely .......etc

 

It's literally night and day. It's as if I lost myself in Infinity ....drop of water fell back into the ocean, with various scenaries along the way

[Taomeow]

The Physical body due to various channels being open, is now so sensitive, I can no longer drink alcohol, eat certain foods, do drugs, be around certain areas/people/music, etc. Can literally feel in the channels changes in air pressure, storms coming, empathic skills to know others completely .......etc

You will enjoy the next phase then... the body so sensitive that you can drink anything you like and transform it into whatever you like, eat anything and benefit from it, take drugs only to prove they don't have any effects on you, and be around any kind of areas, people, music without being bothered.

 

Alas, this is a state that also does not stay put... there's strong currents in the "now" and once the flow takes you to a troubled spot (and it's eternally troubled, has always been and will always be... your best hope is not to get stuck there, to keep moving on with the flow...), you lose all you've gained and marvel at your own ordinariness, or worse than ordinariness, as though nothing magnificent and mystical has ever happened to you.

 

And this, too, shall pass...

[Taomeow]

After much ado that would qualify as "spiritual experiences," I've come to believe that there's only one spiritual experience worthy of its claims:

that of permeability of consciousness. This is the state which I (and some researchers) believe was our primal state, before the advent of whatever came to destroy it (the jury is still out as to what it was), before the demolition of native cultures. Permeability of consciousness means you are neither stuck in your individuality, "ego," separateness, nor unable to perceive and manage it. You can be you -- and you can permeate the not-you. You can talk to trees, to ancestors, to weather phenomena and have a meaningful sentient experience communicating with all aspects and manifestations of reality. You can turn into a tree, channel an ancestor, become a force of nature. But you are not stuck there either, as you are not stuck anywhere. To turn into a tree or to revert to The Huntress, to be a tender mother to your child or the child to the Great Mother -- you are what you choose/need/are told by your environment to be at any given moment. This is the "spiritual experience" that used to be business as usual. It was not an instance, it was a constant. I remember...

[Birch]

"I can no longer drink alcohol, eat certain foods, do drugs, be around certain areas/people/music, etc. Can literally feel in the channels changes in air pressure, storms coming, empathic skills to know others completely .......etc"

 

I figure I had this for a while too. Bloomin' pain in the butt. It hasn't moved to the other thing Taomeow mentioned yet - which sounds good - but I definitely feel ordinary - which is quite a nice relief after all the weird:-)

[oildrops]

You have a very strange idea as to what a spiritual experience is. For me a spiritual experience is an inner realisation as to the nature of yourself and/or reality ... i.e. profound change in consciousness. The things you list are more like the side product of increased sensitivity to energy/consciousness (call it what you will) ... things like that may happen but are not the key/point/ purpose of spiritual work.

 

I guess my tongue-in-cheekiness was lost in translation. But then your name does say "ghost cat" above it....Bootsie? Sorry about the swimming lesson when you were a kitten.

 

My personal definition is evolving second by second, I think that is why it is confusing for me.

[FmAm]

My greatest "spiritual experience" was realising non-duality while doing maths. I didn't even know that such "thing" or concept existed. I was quite shocked at that time. Although the experience itself was nothing special (it was like noticing that the table is white), it questioned my whole worldview. It took me a while to find out that I wasn't the first one to realise something like that. After some detours (in studying some scientific and nondualistic philosophies) I've started to value the teachings of the Middle Way and dependent origination more and more.

Edited March 27, 2013 by FmAm