NON-FICTION / Paranormal
The veil between everyday reality and the place where mystic experiences happen is receding....
This month’s featured book, MYSTIC ENCOUNTERS chronicles a lifetime of the author’s own paranormal experiences.
INTRODUCTION
Mystic perceptions are vehicles that allow a person to bring another set of skills (visual, auditory, sensate) to the capacities we normally employ to view reality. With a mystic boost, we get an additional viewpoint, a lens of a different color from which to view everything that is.
I’m a nurse; I’ve seen patients awaken from comas of varying depth. Often the patient thinks, Wow, did I imagine things; I was really confused. In most cases, the patient knows he suffered from hallucinations. And now he’s back in reality.
In contrast, the mystic returning from his vision thinks, I was somewhere else; from there I could see things more clearly, more deeply than we see from here. This waking is the dream; that vision, the reality. The mystic vision may have been brief, but for that time, the mystic saw from a greater perspective, felt with a deeper knowing.
Whether one mystic encounter or many, the effects on an experiencer’s life may be profound. Does mysticism give a clearer picture on reality? Maybe, maybe not. It’s difficult to tell because mysticism not only involves perception but also interpretation. And interpretation usually involves the already-extant structures of the mystic’s mind. This will be true in the recounting of my own mystic encounters which follow.
The veil between the every-day reality and the place where mystic experiences happen is growing thin in our era. Ironically, much of the growing information concerning mysticism has come about through our increasing capacity for scientific investigation and measurement. Whatever the explanation, whatever the cause, the mystic experiencer finds himself looking at a new landscape, through a new door, a door now ajar.
This book lays out my personal encounters. Like other first-person accounts, this is a case study to put under the microscope for study. I happen to be one of those people for whom mystic encounters began after a long search for philosophic meaning in life. This is not to say that a search for meaning and mysticism necessarily connect; nor is it to say which is cause and which effect if they do connect.
At the time my experiences began over forty years ago, I was immersed in a science-oriented nursing career. I knew nothing of the mystic world. Today, given a long number of years and a large number of mystic encounters, I’ve had much time for reflection on this peculiar territory. As a PhD-prepared academic, I’ve coped by bringing systematic scrutiny to the process: a familiar tactic applied to an unusual subject matter.
What is a mystical experience, and how can it prove to be so powerful in a life? I like Bruno Borchert’s description in MYSTICISM: ITS HISTORY AND CHALLENGE, where he says mystical experience happens when:
. . . a deeper layer of reality rises to consciousness. It is a reality that has always been there, though it has been unperceived; it is a reality that is hidden, so to speak, in the ego and in the surrounding real world (p. 7).
I like this explanation because it presents the true mystery: Is mysticism to be found in the brain, or in the world (out there, in reality)? Or in some rare interweaving of these two potential sources?
Having mystic experiences created several needs for me. First, I wanted to put the mystic encounters in the framework of the rest of my life. Just where did these experiences fit in? Were they natural or signs of an imbalance? Did the encounters reflect the nature of reality? Or a brain gone awry? These are tricky questions in a society that, despite the growing recognition of mystic encounters, still looks askance at them. I struggled to find a view of reality that integrated my mystic encounters with my life as a professor, a nurse, wife and mother.
I needed to fit mysticism into a larger coherent view of reality external to myself. Or perhaps I needed to fit myself into the larger coherent view of reality presented in mystic encounters. Mystic encounters challenge some prevailing viewpoints, especially in a world where left brain, scientific thinking predominates. I had much to learn in glimpsing reality through this unusual door set ajar.
REFERENCES
Borchert, B. (1994). Mysticism: Its history and challenge.
York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc.
Chapter 1
BREAKING BARRIERS
I’m driving a little green sports car very rapidly down a road between two grassy green plots of land. The green of the land and the green of my car are bright, almost emerald. Despite my attempts to slow it down, the car accelerates, picking up more and more speed. I’m terrified as the car, now totally out of control, is tossed high off the road. Until this moment, I don’t know that I’m dreaming. Yet the fear I feel as the car wildly careens off its path awakens me without taking me out of the experience. As the car tumbles earthward, it cracks through an invisible barrier and lands in a very different place. If ever this were a dream, it no longer is.
I’m now cognizant of being in two places at once: sitting up in my bed with the sun bringing in the first morning light, and in this place behind the ruptured barrier. Metaphorically speaking, it seems as if the car has jumped off a reel of film, broken through the screen, and landed on a stage. I think, “I’ve flipped off the usual reality.”
My sense of vision expands in all directions with no limitations. Yet the image is more complex than that. I look around from my perspective on the stage and see every person who has ever lived or ever will live. Again in metaphor, it’s as if each person were seated at an old fashioned school desk with a computer on top of it. And on his screen each person views the unique movie of his own life. Indeed, he doesn’t recognize that there is a screen—only his life. I realize that each person stays in one film for a lifetime, and that each thinks his life is the only reality. From my greater viewpoint on the stage, I can see that some realities are similar, some widely divergent. But no one questions his own movie.
Perhaps later, I think, we’ll see all the lives (films) in which we have starred. At the time, this was not a characteristic thought for me, but there it was. Somehow the notion of many lives seemed a natural conclusion when humans were seen from the greater perspective—the view of all their lives from the underlying reality of the stage.
I saw that the same human might have many lives, yet the perspective could vary each time. Most seemed unaware of their other lives: past, present and future were irrelevant. Each life had its own film, yet I could discern which lives were connected. I wondered how much these joined lives influenced each other, but I could not attend to this question in my amazement at viewing the total panorama.
This was the beginning of my first mystic encounter, an experience neither sought nor even imagined in my wildest fantasies. Astounding as it was, the experience didn’t end there. Just as I was trying to absorb this one-of-a-kind revelation, I heard a voice.
The second part of the mystic encounter shocked me even more than the first. Somehow the initial vision didn’t ring of pathology to me, yet the following component, an exchange with a voice from elsewhere, smacked of something more suspect, something to be carefully analyzed, then hidden. How could I be hearing voices? I thought of my experience as a nurse with psychiatric patients; I remembered numerous schizophrenics on locked wards talking to people who weren’t there.
Yet here I was, listening to someone not from my reality. In a few terse words, a voice from some other dimension, said to me that they (undefined) were interested in seeing how far a person could go in developing mystic perception without the aid of a guru, a teacher. Would I be their experiment? Was I willing to see what mystic experiences would emerge without the benefit of any school or philosophic tradition?
For a moment the suggestion sounded absurd to me. But then I thought of the rapture and insight experienced from the stage in that preceding encounter. Could I possibly turn down an offer for more such experiences?
Thus began my first exchange with someone who wasn’t there. Not unlike a telephone call from a stranger with a rational, constrained and business-like voice. Although words were used, something else peculiar happened. It seemed that he conveyed additional meanings in a penumbra surrounding the conversation. The speed and efficiency of this mind-to-mind communication carried so much more than mere words.
I later found this bundling of multiple ideas reported by Robert Monroe in ULTIMATE JOURNEY. He labels these compact bundles of knowledge or information as rotes. I was beginning to understand that nothing in this encounter followed the rules of my prior life.
I was bombarded with competing thoughts: thoughts about the proposal, thoughts about catching meanings that weren’t in words, thoughts about my sanity.
Although I couldn’t see him, I had a sense that the communicator was masculine, all business, and not interested in idle chatter. Was I interested in accepting this challenge or not? If not, the experience I just had would be the last of its kind; I wouldn’t be bothered again. Even as I received this proposal, I knew it was a stacked deck. Further experiences like the preceding one, wondrous and amazing as it had been, would be hard to turn down.
And, although I was not an out and out professional iconoclast, I was known for not accepting anyone else’s path if its only recommendations were tradition and authority. In essence I was a good candidate for accepting an uncharted journey. It teased my mind that they, whoever they were, were asking a valid research question. How far could one go without a guide? The question implied levels of mystic development, and that thought intrigued me, although I couldn’t recall ever before having a serious thought about mystic encounters.
I had no doubt that the challenge wasn’t as simple as it looked. Obviously, there were twists and turns, difficulties glossed over. Yet the challenge teased me. A jump in the dark; did I dare? A few moments of internal debate, and then I accepted the challenge.
“Okay,” I answered, “I’ll do it.” Although I didn’t realize it until later, I had not answered aloud. What I sent to the communicator was simply a thought.
I felt his agreement, a terse acknowledgement. I imagined that if I could see him, it would have been no more than a curt nod.
And then he was gone. I was fully back in my body, and I felt as if I had just signed an important contract, even though some of the stipulations had been delivered in the weird penumbra of meaning. Nor did I ever break that agreement.
Trying to Make Sense of It
The experience had happened rapidly, but thinking about it, trying to make sense of it took much longer. Going back to the beginning, I thought of two small sports cars: the green one in the mystic vision and the little red one I drove in real life. Then I remembered a specific day that had occurred not long before this mystic encounter. It was one of those special days that becomes framed in time, while all the others meld together into a jello sameness. On that framed day, I recollected driving that little red sports car home after making a particularly well received professional speech. I was rapidly advancing from being a local speaker to a national one. I was becoming a leader in the nursing profession and was filled that evening with a real sense of accomplishment.
I recall feeling that I had completed everything I imagined my life would hold. I was married to the man I loved, my daughter was bright and maturing nicely, and my career was well established. I had found my professional voice; I was presenting my own ideas to groups—not just regurgitating the ideas of others. I had a sense of completion, and I wasn’t yet 40. Not bad, I thought. I felt that, if I died that night, I would have no regrets—not that dying was on my agenda. I believed that anything else in life would be bigger and better, but more of the same. I had arrived and could see the future which looked like an enlarged and colorful version of the present.
The last thing I anticipated was that my life would radically change. Among the possible changes I might imagine, mystic encounters wouldn’t even have been on the page. True, I had spent much of my life looking to understand reality, but I saw that as an intellectual quest. I certainly didn’t expect to find an answer elsewhere. My search was conducted primarily through many courses in philosophy. My bachelor’s degree was in philosophy and my doctorate was a joint program of education and philosophy. It was familiar turf.
The other domain I explored was that of the human body and the human condition. Nursing had been a good venue for that exploration—from physical, psychological, and sociological perspectives. I was just out of high school when I began this career. Nursing was an open pathway for me, college was not. I grew up in a poor section of a small Pennsylvania town famous only for disastrous floods. My mother was clever: we children didn’t realize we were poor. I came to realize it when our school system joined with the school system of the wealthy part of town for our high school years. At first, I wondered why my skirts didn’t hold their pleats like the other girls skirts did. Was I careless? I didn’t know the difference between good materials and cheap ones.
My high school had a two-track system. Those from our side of the tracks took the commercial program; those from the better part of town took the academic one. But I wanted to be a nurse, so I crossed that invisible barrier. It was difficult to determine who resented me more: the girls who belonged in the academic world or those from my side of town who considered me a traitor. Of course the boys of that age were oblivious to such social strata. When I graduated as valedictorian even the school was dismayed. How could a girl who wasn’t going to college be valedictorian? They decided that the valedictorian didn’t have to make a commencement speech that year. I didn’t care; I had the credentials I needed to enter nursing. I would be the first in my family to go beyond high school. College? Not a chance. If I became a nurse, I could be earning money so that my younger brother, the only male child, could have that opportunity. Women’s Liberation was a long way off at that stage.
So I became a nurse, a head nurse, a nursing supervisor, head of a nursing school, a director of nursing, picking up academic credentials along the way. When I had my first mystic encounter, my life was mostly among medical people, probably those least likely (at that time) to accept a mystic experience as valid. At best, my medical colleagues would search for a brain pathology and, if possible, a way to prevent recurrence of such an aberrant state. My choice to accept the experience as a gift surprised even me.
Yet there were qualities to my experience that couldn’t be ignored. Foremost, it revealed a greater underlying reality. My normal life paled by comparison. The first encounter was more intense than any other experience of my life. I did not doubt its validity. No one could have convinced me that ordinary life was as real as the mystic encounter. The experience had been much fuller and clearer than events in my waking life. The mystic world felt to the waking state as waking felt to the dream state. Once I’d awakened, no one could have convinced me that the ordinary world was equal to this new perspective. The term, mystic, seems to imply something wispy, shifting and ephemeral, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
Other qualities of the mystic encounter reinforced that impression. The intensity of the mystic experience left little room for doubt. It was as if life were a pastel wash, beautiful and subtle. And then I came upon this Van Gogh of an experience. Could someone tell me that I was imagining it? That a pastel wash was as bright as it ever gets?
And the mystic encounter had breadth. I literally saw every human being living out his own reality. I could examine each one’s screen from my position on the stage. Vision was too small a word for this enhanced sight.
Another jolt of the mystic encounter was the mode of direct knowing—immediate understanding, not something to be learned. The mystic encounter gave me instant and direct knowledge of reality without intervening reasoning.
Of course, I was much taken with the fact of being simultaneously in two places (on the stage and in bed). I was surprised that this bilocation held no sense of threat to the self. Still, being in two places at once was certainly a new experience.
I now know this phenomenon to be common, reported by mystics, psychics, shamans and others in altered states of consciousness. In Carlos Castaneda’s THE FIRE FROM WITHIN, don Juan, the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, strives to produce such a split in Castaneda. Unlike some mystics, I never had any childhood dissociative experiences or any other sort of psychic split before this encounter threw me into two places at once.
As a nurse, the closest experience I knew was reported by patients who underwent near-death experiences (NDEs). Usually they left their bodies completely. Once a patient was out of the body, typically his consciousness would shift to a self that was looking down on the damaged body, no longer feeling its pain. Many found that they could move that consciousness to other locations at will. Later they often recounted the sensation of being drawn back into the body with a jolt, returning to its pain and limitations. I never heard a near-death returner report mental bilocation, although I’m sure there must be some such reports. In contrast, shamans often report bilocation, with sentience in both locations, but this I only learned later.
Another stunning fact was that I was able to interact within the encounter. The voice I heard seemed totally external to my own mind. (I realize others may challenge this.) It involved a real exchange—a proposal put forth on his part; a choice on my part to accept or reject it.
I was to hear that same voice possibly four or five more times over a lifetime—always in situations where my life was threatened. Usually these situations had to do with treatment during illness. The voice never used three words if two would do. For example, one message was, Stop that drug. No more words, yet somehow I knew the intended medication. The communication usually carried just a tinge of annoyance that I had gotten myself in a situation where intervention was required. Ironically, my physician came to trust this voice perhaps more than I did—arguing with me years later when I debated ignoring one such message.
Afterthoughts
I wrestled with many issues after this unique experience. They were not all solved over night. What worried me most was my encounter in relation to the many schizophrenic patients I had known who also heard voices and saw visions. How could I say that my experience was different from theirs? Somehow hearing voices bothered me more than the visionary aspects. How many patients had I treated who heard voices? Many, and in no case did I think the owner of the voice was other than the patient himself.
How then, could I credit the same experience in my own case? With time I came to answer that question in several ways. First, a patient’s voices were almost always threatening to the patient’s sense of self. Often they conveyed guilt, relying on intimate knowledge of the patient’s internal feelings. Or the voices encouraged the patient to inflict pain or bodily assault on himself or others. These voices inevitably proved to be psychologically destructive or (more rarely) fed the patient’s megalomania.
I knew that most of my colleagues would offer a psychological explanation for the voice I heard. Perhaps a Jungian proposal: the voice as an aspect of my animus or my shadow self. As I thought about it, it was obvious that every theory would have its own interpretation. Yet the voice I heard offered no negative aspect of self; it offered a proposition I could take or leave.
I recognized another difference between my experience and that of patients hearing voices, having visions. For the patients, these encounters interfered with their ability to live a productive life. In my case, this wasn’t true; I continued with my normal life.
Having decided that I wasn’t crazy, I still had to find meaning in the first and following mystic encounters. First, they clearly weren’t religious. Even without a religious filter, they led me to revise my interpretation of reality (for example, predicting sustained existence as more likely than life as a terminal condition). Yet I would call such a position metaphysical, not religious. Although I had spent much of my adult life seeking to understand our existence, I had long ago given up any notion that an understanding of reality would be found in religion.
My science background had taught me to be suspicious of such beliefs. I had substituted that scientific certainty of the 60’s and early 70’s for any religious alternatives. There was no way to resolve conflicting religious opinions except by being skeptical of them all. In truth, the knowing that arises in a mystic encounter is unlike conventional religious conviction. Religions involve faith, belief in the absence of proof. In contrast, my mystic perceptions needed no faith at all. They were seen by my own eyes, as it were. True, mysticism provided a different lens on reality: a better lens than the one normally provided by our bodily senses, a view from a superior place—or so it seemed to me.
Although I had exchanged a religious viewpoint for a scientific one, my complete reliance on science had been shattered much earlier. When I was working on my doctoral degree, my teachers had stressed the necessity for disinterested research, an attitude that approached every query with an open mind. Science, so they said, had no values but the truth in the form of valid findings. Yet I saw colleagues who chose to investigate unpopular subject matters squeezed out of the academic community or made laughing stocks within it, no matter how rigorous their research. I saw supposedly dispassionate scientists dismiss as hysteria anything that challenged their objective view of life.
I concluded that scientists were as much captives of their beliefs as were those with tightly held religious tenets. In a capstone incident, I served on a hospital research committee with the authority to accept or reject all institutional research projects. I was the only nurse member; the others were physicians. The research we were reviewing that day proposed to compare recovery rates of post-surgical patients untreated by Reiki to those whose care included Reiki treatment (a therapy of applying universal energy by a sort of laying-on-of-hands). The physician members of the committee admitted that the research proposal was as tight as any they had ever reviewed in terms of its design and methods of measurement. Yet the project was voted down. “We’d look like fools,” the chairman said. Subjects that escaped their scientific intellectual box were dismissed without further exploration.
Nor was I more satisfied with the directions taken in my pursuit of graduate philosophy. My keystone event in this arena of life occurred in the early 70’s. By then, I was a teacher in a school of nursing. I remember one winter day when I rushed to my own graduate class late because my young nurse students were delayed leaving the clinical unit. One of my students had gone into her patient’s room only to find him dead. She ran to get me; the patient had no pulse, no respirations, no vital signs. A young man still in his thirties, he had had relatively minor surgery. Yet he was gone.
I felt that one moment of doubt concerning whether it was wise to start cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. We had no idea when he had died. If we successfully resuscitated him when he had been gone too long, we could end up with a breathing body in a vegetative state. Yet the only choice was to begin resuscitation immediately. We were lucky: we got him back with his faculties intact.
Directly after this incident, I dashed to my doctoral class only to find my professor and classmates deeply immersed in searching for the real meaning behind the sentence: He took an axe and felled the tree. It was a time when a semantic approach to philosophy was popular, the implication being that one could search for meaning by examining the written word. I walked in on their intense semantic debate and could only shake my head. Daily I worked in a profession that dealt with life and death as matters of routine; I had rushed from a life and death situation to join in the endeavor of seeking meaning in a bunch of words. I wanted to laugh at the intensity displayed by this group tearing apart a sentence. That day, I had thought, philosophy is no better than religion or science. I was running out of options when my mystic encounters began.
It was strange to find an answer coming from inside oneself instead of from the external accumulated wisdom of the ages. I was stunned by this totally unexpected source. And, whether or not I granted an external impetus to mystic encounters, I knew my brain had to participate on some level.
From the first I suspected a brain structural change that allowed my mystic encounters to happen. I remembered actually feeling that invisible fabric rip as the little green sports car careened through the screen and onto the stage. (Modern mystics travel in modern conveyances.) I wondered if the perceived rip were a physiological event as well as a psychological one.
Whatever the answer, I struggled to understand the effect. My original interpretation was that mysticism opened a door not everyone entered. I recalled tales during World War II of Oceanic Islanders who could not see the airplanes that crossed above their islands because their notion of reality didn’t include the existence of such things. I assumed my philosophic openness had allowed me to see what existed beyond the fragmented barrier—a sight that most people lacked.
Yet shortly after my first experience, I found myself thinking: it was a bleed-through of something that we’re not supposed to remember. My instinct said that the experience occurred because of a break in a normal barrier to memory. I felt rather than thought that mystic experiences were had by everyone, but that the memory of them usually was blocked. In any case, the rupture had catapulted me through my own insular screen onto the stage of a greater reality.
However they operate, do mystic encounters reveal a greater existence? Most of us who have them believe so. Something known by direct experience is more difficult to dismiss than something learned by schooling. Yet if it takes an altered state of consciousness to open (or keep open) the door to that other reality, there is a new sort of negotiation taking place between what is in here and what is out there. Does mysticism bespeak only of the human mind? Or of external reality? Or of a negotiation between internal and external sources?
Mystic encounters are attributed exclusively by some (usually those who don’t have them) to little known aspects of brain rather than to an external reality. This is not to say that further research may not show that mystic encounters represent bizarre brain activity or some freak leakage from the collective unconsciousness. Yet those who have mystic encounters usually feel that they reveal a greater reality that is out there—in the cosmos.
As to the content of those experiences, the fact that I had spent much of a lifetime in serious inquiry into the nature of reality surely affected things. Because my search had been primarily philosophical in nature, I believe my mystic experiences reflected that approach. In retrospect, when I revisit my first experience of people living out lives in their own movies, unaware of the greater reality beyond their screens, I cannot help but be reminded of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Surely my updated version of film reels neatly equated with his view of people imprisoned in a cave, their backs to the sun, mistaking shadows cast by a fire for reality. Like Plato’s account, my experience turned me from the shadows to the sun, employing a philosophic image rather than a religious one.
Years later, I was awed to see the same motif vividly presented in a movie, The Matrix. Although the underlying myth had been mixed with today’s need for an action plot, I knew it could be no accident that the main character, Neo, was lifted from illusion (the matrix) into reality by a character named Morpheus (sleep being an altered state of consciousness). And the reality revealed to Neo was one where each person still in the matrix was living a dream that he thought to be reality.
Whatever the content of an experience, any mystic must feel the same sense of awe and wonderment that I felt this first and every time thereafter. Even if one believes in a broader, deeper reality, that’s quite different than experiencing it first-hand. Indeed, that’s one of the challenges in communicating mystic experiences to others, especially others who don’t have them. Words can’t relay the intensity, the vividness, and the immediacy of the actual experience.
Within the space of a few minutes, my entire perception of reality had been inexorably changed. Years of studying philosophy couldn’t touch the impact of these few minutes. That a deep reality lay just beneath the surface of our lives was something I now knew. It was awesome for one who previously had assumed that the scientific reductionist viewpoint was our closest approach to knowing reality.
These were my main thoughts as I adjusted to being a mystic while still living an active left brain-dominated life. Despite all my internal dialogue, I wasn’t prepared to share my experiences with anyone early on. In the case of my career, that was an easy decision. Such experiences had no place in administrative councils or graduate faculty meetings. Nor, at that time, would such accounts have played well in the university’s medical domain. This was the late seventies: medical science was still debating whether to challenge things like acupuncture. It was not the era of a brave new medical world.
My personal life involved a more problematic decision. I was living a whirlwind life, with my husband holding a major administrative position in a college system in Chicago, me in an administrative position at Columbia University in New York. It was the era of the Women’s Movement. We had a commuter marriage, and I thought I was very modern. At that time, we assumed women could do anything. Commuting and tackling a new job? Just a few additional elements any woman could have added to her schedule.
Yet it’s clear to me in retrospect that my mindset was far from liberated. My first thought was, how would news of this mystic stuff in my life affect my husband? Would he worry? Would it bother him that I was coping with this so far away? Right or wrong, I pictured it as an imposition on his already pressured life. How could I lay anything else on him when I already left meals frozen for him to defrost when I wasn’t home?
I knew that he already resented my taking a job so far away. Yes, he had agreed, even with apparent enthusiasm. But I had failed to read the hidden script that said I was expected to turn down the work opportunity. Aha, the liberated woman still carried major guilt. My husband was starting a new challenge in his own career. So I didn’t burden him with words of mystic encounters. The fact of frequent career-based separations made it easier to leave mystic experiences out of the marriage. Apparently I wasn’t as liberated as I thought at the time. Leaving him untroubled was more important than any need I might have to share the strange fact of mystic encounters entering my life. Later—there was no later. Some decision points come only once, and I had chosen to leave him out.
That was the beginning of my compartmentalized life: nine parts normal, one part mystic. I had no idea how that mystic side would grow, or how it would play out in my life.
REFERENCES
Castaneda, C. (1984). The fire from within. New York: Pocket Books
Monroe, R. A. (1994). Ultimate journey. New York: Doubleday.
Plato, (1992). The Republic (Book VII). Trans. G. M. A. Grube,
Rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Chapter 2
PLANETS, SOLAR SYSTEMS, MYSTIC WORLDS
I was faced with a beautiful golden door having a pointed arch at the top and covered with figures in bas-relief. I realized that behind this golden door, there was another with other figures, and behind that yet another—and so forth, on for hundreds, maybe thousands, of doors. Each golden door was etched, carved, sculpted, from a different period of history. The doors were large; I felt as if I were standing in front of them and had to look up to see the arch.
Somehow I could leaf through these golden doors almost as if they were a file box, even though the images on them were life-sized. Then, if I desired, I could open any selected golden door. When I opened a door, the people changed from gold figures in relief to moving, three-dimensional human beings, and the gold changed to the natural colors of the scene. The period of history represented inside the opened door would spring to life before my eyes. I did not enter the scene; I watched what happened as a spectator. I opened the first door just to see how it worked. Then, for what seemed like eons of time, I leafed through the various golden doors, just to compare the historical periods.
Planet Earth
Of course, I have no way of knowing whether the scenes depicted when opening a door were historically accurate. In any case, the experience was profound and entrancing. It was also typical of my early encounters. They all seemed to deal with the universe and/or creation on a planetary or cosmic level. These cosmic encounters continued but soon other subject matters entered the equation.
At the start, my mystic experiences came about once every three to four months. Slowly but inexorably, they picked up speed. Near the end of my encounters about 35 years later, I had a mystic experience every time I awakened. The intensity of the events also grew along with the frequency, and I had many years of wonderful experiences.
At first all my encounters occurred as I awakened; they featured the same sort of bilocation I had experienced in the first encounter. I learned that this just-waking state is labeled hypnopompic and encompasses an altered state of consciousness, a borderline state between sleeping (with dreaming usually in my case) and waking. It appears that this phase is prolonged for some people and probably transited very rapidly by others. It may be that much mysticism can be explained merely by the fortune of being able to maintain that state longer than most people.
The opposite altered state of consciousness, at the edge of falling asleep, is labeled hypnagogic. Eventually, I had experiences in both states, and the deeper experiences always occurred in the hypnopompic phase. The hypnagogic state had more somatic feelings than the hypnopompic, and it typically lacked a script. The experience itself was its own meaning. Hypnopompic and hypnagogic experiences were later joined by visions that occurred within dreams (to be discussed later).
Few hypnagogic encounters dealt with the cosmos or Planet Earth. Usually they addressed smaller topics. But here is one that dealt with Planet Earth piece by piece. The hypnagogic experience began just as I went to bed, but I never actually fell asleep—or so it seemed. I was conscious of my waking self. But perhaps I was drifting between sleep and wakefulness in bed, with Sam, my Bedlington terrier, beside me partly buried beneath a pillow:
Without any sense of falling asleep, suddenly I was aware of many alternate and beckoning realities rising visibly on the wall across from my bed. There was an unending series, each reality slowly replacing another. Most of these realities began with a scenic view. It was a charming experience, quite awe inspiring.
A reality would be preceded by a gray shadow that signaled a new extant scene arising. At first the gray was an outline of what would come. Slowly the gray would be filled in with color and detail. The scenes were like beautiful paintings at first, but they later would shift into a format closer to a moving picture. They might contain people, moving trains, elements like rain and snow. Yet there was a peacefulness to them, as if they moved in slow motion.
The realities became more encompassing than merely being pictures on the opposite wall. Some of the realities were suspended between the wall and my bed. Then they began to incorporate my bed and me with it. In one such reality, I realized that there was a man in the bed with me. We were lying beneath white sheets, him curled up to my back. I struggled to remember what reality this might be in order to figure out who he was. Somehow, I didn’t want to face away from the visions on the wall lest they disappear. Then he spoke and I realized it was my deceased first husband. I felt his body beside me, and he told me I had a funny look on my face. I wasn’t surprised to hear it. I knew at the time that he was dead and that this was, indeed, an alternate reality.
On the wall across from us (a wall and a different reality at the same time), a mountain scene was rising to fill the preceding grey shadow. Somehow I knew it was Mauna Loa—a strange thing to know since I had never been there. The scene was Polynesian: beautiful colors, the mountain itself mostly blue and gray. The reality was rising from the floor to fill in its projected shadowy precursor.
I realized it was just one reality and that being with my husband was another one, and that being in bed with Sam (my dog) was another one. I felt the press of many other realities not yet explored. It felt as if they were all vying to be perceived. The number of realities present at the same time was growing. More and more of them were contending for space between the wall and my bed.
My husband was trying to convince me to stay with him, that his was the real world. Other realities were drifting by in bits and pieces, and I became afraid of losing my bearings. I made a conscious decision to come back to the reality where I could best anchor myself, the one with my dog, Sam. I suppose I made this choice simply because I knew this was the reality I inhabited when this wonderful experience began. I forced myself back to that reality and immediately the others were gone.
The decision to exclude the other realities felt like a voluntary blotting out. The realities presented in that room felt no less real than the option with Sam. My choice of which world to enter was not based on a difference in the quality of these realities.
Such an experience makes clear how easily one could abdicate the so-called sanity of the accepted waking world. Not surprisingly, I thought of the many institutionalized psychotic patients I had seen on the back wards. I had just gained a fuller appreciation of their lives in other dimensions. I also had an enhanced appreciation for Lawrence LeShan’s notion that we select our reality and blot out all other options (ALTERNATE REALITIES: THE SEARCH FOR THE FULL HUMAN BEING). This hypnagogic tour of alternate realities was awe inspiring and thoroughly enjoyable. There was no script, no message except for the fact that there were many equally real options. I have always wondered what would have happened if I selected a different reality instead of the one occurring in my present lifeline. What if I had elected to stay with my husband?
In this experience, vision was the main sensory input. But in mystic encounters other senses are often not only involved but enhanced. For example, in another planetary vision, my sensing capacities were radically changed:
The place had seven or eight dimensions, making it much stronger, deeper, and more vivid than life on Earth. The encounter can’t be relayed adequately, but I completely experienced the multidimensionality of the place. All things were multifaceted, including inanimate objects as well as animate ones. It wasn’t that the people, animals, and things were so much different from their counterparts on Earth, but more aspects of their being were overtly visible (perceivable might be a better word).
It was an elating experience to be in this place that was so much more real, more intense, more alive than my normal life. I awoke from this particular encounter (hypnopompic) abruptly, still in the more-than-four-dimensional existence while simultaneously back in my bed, all vestige of sleep instantly gone. I was able to continue in the multidimensional place for perhaps two minutes after awaking. I stayed as long as I possibly could. Then my mind was strained back into the narrow confines of my body.
I haven’t quite lost the sense of that larger, multidimensional existence. It was an experience that left me elated with the knowledge that a place of greater and richer texture than this one exists. This multidimensional world certainly produced a major high. The downside was that my waking world shrunk by comparison. If one had to pick between the two realities, normal life was much more shadowy, ephemeral, and blunted.
This time I felt like I was being stuffed back into the body through the top of my head. I was squeezed in like filling shoved into a sausage casing. This sense of being forced back into a body was to become typical of these hypnopompic experiences, and I always perceived it as being thrust back through the top of the head, in contrast to some reports by others of a link with a silver cord at the solar plexus.
I felt like huge hunks of my being were draining away as I lost my ability to stay in the multidimensional place. The multidimensional experience was the first time I resented having to come back into the body, the first time I balked at its limitations. Each time thereafter I felt extreme frustration in having to return. Once I was entirely located in the body that feeling left, but the transition period was crushing.
At the time of this first multidimensional encounter, I attributed the differences to the place. I thought I was somewhere else. On analysis, it would have been more accurate to attribute the differences to my enhanced perceptive abilities. In reflection, I realized that the place I visited probably was here on Earth. The place wasn’t what changed; what changed was my ability to perceive things.
Indeed, in some ways, Earth encounters seemed stranger than experiences in many other locations I had visited. For example:
I had just arrived on Earth very recently, and it was so odd to be in a place that went from dark to light every day. It wasn’t good or bad, just so very strange. It was still new to me, and I was awed by the pattern. Wherever I had come from, it was always very light, with no such alternating pattern as occurred on Earth. Earth wasn’t good or bad, just different.
Other Places: Cosmic Events
Many of my encounters involved other non-Earth planets or moons. An off-world mystic dream that had a sense of total reality was one in which I was exploring on a moon—not the Earth’s moon because it had a breathable atmosphere. We had just arrived on the moon. I was one of the explorers:
We were trudging through sand. One of our party accidentally stepped on something that activated an ancient mechanism. A row of five golden thrones arose from beneath the sand. The thrones were large, as if meant for giants. Each was fastened directly to the next one like a bunch of row houses.
After the row of thrones was discovered, further archeological work revealed that this moon was a fighting base. Two groups once fought a war against each other here. Gadgets found indicated a civilization slightly more advanced than ours, but we calculated that the two sides decimated each other in the war. Except for the row of large thrones, all other artifacts seemed to be designed for people of about our own size.
We discovered many mechanisms and ways of life of the ancient groups. One discovery was two matched transportation tubes through which the inhabitants had traveled on air currents over much of the moon, one tube for each direction. The tubes appeared to be of clear plastic. One of the tubes worked long enough for two of our members to ride the air currents to the next station; then it died. We were surprised at the degree of sophistication of these earlier people.
We entered one typical house. It was rather small, one story, built so that all rooms faced outside except for the bathroom in its center. We found a picture of the station recessed in one wall. It portrayed a hot arid moonscape. The picture moved upward to reveal the water source—a series of pipes. Postings were translated (I don’t know how) to mean that the people in this dwelling were allowed to draw water twice a day. We concluded that water rationing had been necessary.
All of our party wore similar spacesuits, although I didn’t see anyone using protective head covering after we landed. We were a small exploratory force, and I got the feeling we planned to be there for a while.
The scenario played out straight and logically. The only aspect that seemed symbolic and therefore possibly out of place, was the row of thrones (which appeared very early in the experience).
Many of my cosmic mystic experiences had to do with creation themes:
Different realities are being made. I watch planets come into existence. At first I am not concerned with the source of this creation. One of the first realities that I see is a fiery place. I don’t see it on a planetary level, but instead I’m in one place on the planet. There are hard rocks, heat, and steam rising from places where water hits the boulders. My concern is that the planet has little or no breathable atmosphere.
I’m not present in a body, so I don’t need an atmosphere. Yet I’m concerned that these realities (more than one is being created), will not support life. I learn to have more control over what I make (by now I’m clearly the creator), and the final few realities contain appropriate atmospheres. The last one is a heavily wooded place somewhat like the Black Forest. I have learned how to create planets with breathable atmospheres.
At first I was disturbed with this vision because of the role I played in the event. Too many patients with delusions of grandeur will make you concerned when you feel yourself creating planets. Perhaps one of the greatest needs of a mystic is a good sense of humor. I learned not to be disturbed by creator dreams. In a similar encounter:
I dropped a strange sort of bomb that turned the earth into various layers, each with its own forms of life. This occurred early in the life of this planet. I was worried about radioactivity, but only two layers held that danger. Civilizations arose in these different layers, seemingly at different rates of time. They ranged from primitive to sophisticated. The bombing had created a total re-landscaping of the earth—or earths since it was now layered into many earths, each different. From my perspective, there was no sense of time elapsing between the creation and the growth of civilizations in the appropriate worlds. Yet I could see that each resulting planet had its own internal timing.
After a while, I quit worrying about whose memories were presented as my own; I quit worrying about who created what. I just enjoyed the beauty and power of such creations.
The following mystic vision was of the expanding cosmos, of all existence:
In this image, all of reality was an enormous engraved drum, with a coppery and pewter-appearing finish in beautiful interweaving design. The surfaces were burnished rather than bright, but the drum (existence) was a beautiful work of art. To call its surfaces relief works might come closer to the image than to call them engraved.
The drum was more than a symbol; it was all of the cosmos, overwhelming in its size. Whenever there was any conflict or incompatibility within existence, the universe solved the problem by increasing its size, sometimes almost doubling in an instant.
After one particularly astonishing enlargement, I was terrified by the enormity of the increasing size and weight of the universe. Until that moment, I was unaware of being a separate self. What if it falls? I asked myself in horror. Then I thought, it contains everything that exists; there’s nowhere for it to fall. Yet the fact of the universe’s increasing size was awesome and fearsome. My terror became intense as I became aware that I was feeling the fear.
In this experience, as in many, initially I was unaware of myself as a separate being. At other times I was aware of myself having the experience. In this case, the final enlargement of the drum so terrified me that I shifted back into being a separate self. This sudden shifting from no-self to having a self later became a problem, as we’ll discuss in subsequent chapters.
My Roles in Visions
In essence, the roles I take in visions are of three kinds. First I’m a participant. In this case, I’m right there in the script. This is just like the role most of us take in dreams. Similarly in these visions, I don’t realize that I’m in an altered state of consciousness at the time. I took this role when I was a fellow explorer landing on the strange moon earlier in this chapter. I was there, involved in the action. This sort of role moves ahead easily unless I become conscious of myself (lucid) upon which I know I’m in the middle of a vision.
In contrast, often I take the role of an omniscient observer. When I’m an outside observer, it feels like going to the movies. In contrast to the participatory role I watch the presentation, become immersed in its plot but never mistake myself for one of the actors. Observing does not mean that I can’t, in some instances, intervene in the drama, shifting from my observer role into a participant role. Yet, on some level, as an observer, I’m always aware of being the audience. I’ve never gotten the popcorn, but otherwise I’m mentally ensconced somewhere, watching the action, cognizant that I’m watching and having no more sense that I am one of the actors than I would have in a waking movie theater.
Here’s an example of the observer role:
I see a prisoner (era undetermined) in what is almost a cave—it may have been a cave adapted as a prison. I think that the man I see, strong of body, middle aged, may have been me in a different lifetime. I see that he wears some sort of loin cloth that leaves his chest, arms, and legs exposed. He is strong, all muscle, no fat. I knew that he’d killed many people. It was as if their dismembered bodies and lots of blood were still around him. (This was a mental perception by the man, not that the body parts were in the cave.) What’s strange is that the man perceives this and feels absolutely no guilt. The sense of having been that man at one time was very strong.
In the observer role, I have total entry into that man’s mind. I feel his thoughts. I felt that I was him, not that I am him. I never lost my observer position in this experience.
Every observer role means that I am, to some degree, lucid. I’m aware that I’m watching events unfold. Unlike a movie, however, my observations extend directly into the emotions and thoughts of the characters, as well as into what they do on the stage. Because these visions are lucid it is often possible for me to step out of the observer role and enter a participant role if I desire.
The third role I take in visions is that of selflessness. Selfless visions are those in which I’m not consciousness of my own separate existence at all. The drama simply is. These encounters are like a movie without an audience. In selflessness, the vision simply exists. Because I’m not conscious of myself, there is no lucidity. When I have these experiences, I’m not differentiated from the vision content. I just don’t exist. There is a vision without a viewer.
In this chapter, I was selfless in the example of all reality being a beautiful engraved drum. I took that role—with no notion of having a separate self. The vision was just there—without a witness. That is, until fear arose when the drum rapidly expanded. Then I was shocked into being aware of having a separate self, of being a particular person.
Location Uncertain
Not all my encounters took place on what we think of as planets. Some took place on worlds without matter: energy worlds. These worlds usually seemed more evolved, not peppered with violence. And the lack of weight was absolutely delightful.
It is easier, of course, to convey worlds where matter exists. Clearly, worlds exist in many radically different dimensions:
In one experience, I was a teacher in some other realm or dimension. We were in a massive outdoor theater, an enormous building of heavy, yet open, stonework. We were all dressed in white robes. I was teaching students to play music that was exact, true, and perfect. The instruments were something like bells and triangles yet stringed as well, not exactly like any instrument I had ever seen.
The tones produced were bell-like but fuller. When the notes were struck cleanly, they carried meaning as well as sound: intellectual meaning—whole bundles of knowledge conveyed with a single true note. At the same time, the music was equally beautiful in terms of its sound qualities.
Again, I awoke in my bed bilocated. In my surprise, I thought, I’m a tri-teacher. I had, however, no knowledge of what that term meant. The self that I was in that place (yet simultaneously observed once bilocated) was a larger, more comprehensive self, but somehow that didn’t infringe on the identity of my earthbound self. By larger, I mean a self that has more knowledge, more power, and exists in a domain with different rules than our four-dimensional Earth space-time. This was an early experience, and the first in which thoughts bridged two or more perceptive channels, in this case with thoughts and sounds joining to create meaning. Later, I was to get accustomed to different sense modalities being joined in ways that can’t happen when we’re in our normal bodies. Colors bound with emotions, sounds bound with sensations, all sorts of linkages.
The next encounter also has elements that seemed unworldly:
There is an enormous building called the Institute, golden in color, with parts that give off sort of a pearly nacre glow. The building is glorious, and it has a function: in this building all the various ages of man meet. Linkages over all the many human eras take place here.
A guide tells a tour group that sometimes one age will wage war on another age. This is possible through the time links at the Institute—sort of war through time instead of the usual war taking place over geographic space. The guide asks the group what will happen if one age of man wipes out another. No one in the group speaks.
Then, I say, “We’re all the ages, recycling (reincarnating). If one age wipes out another, then we will have wiped out ourselves and all of history.”
Only then do I realize that I’m not part of the tour group. Instead I exist in an ethereal body of light. I am looking down on the group from above.
Mystic Worlds
My mystic visions were diverse, ranging from cosmic occurrences to events on a single planet. The planets and systems were our solar system or elsewhere. But they all felt very real.
I think of descriptions given by near death experiencers (NDEers)—usually of peaceful gardens inhabited by deceased friends and relatives. I have not traveled to that particular way-station (which I label as Ellis Island), although I have experienced the bright light phenomenon so often associated with that trip.
I doubt that most worlds need to be explained in terms of space or space travel. It may be that different worlds simply reflect different vibratory rates where they may be perceived by minds in synchronistic states. Indeed, they may be right here—in a different dimension rather than in a different place. Alternate worlds appear to have different portals—different doors opening to different keys. My assumption is that diverse alternate states of consciousness represent those keys.
Usually my visions of planets and solar systems were wonderful experiences, awesome in character, memorable in scope and depth. The cosmic connection was dominant in my encounters for many years. And these were some of the most beautiful experiences I had.
At Home
During these early years, I got used to living a compartmentalized life. Fortunately, my mystic life didn’t interfere with the development of my career. My encounters stayed neatly tucked around dreams. The earliest experiences (hypnopompic) occurred following dreams. Later, hypnagogic (before sleep) were added—like the Mauna Loa encounter in this chapter. Lastly, visions within dreams occurred. In the latter case, a vision didn’t cause me to wake up. I simply remembered it on awakening.
Meanwhile I studied the mystic literature, surprised to find that it omitted any link to the brain, or, worse, implied that any connection between brain and mysticism negated the validity of the visions.
I also studied all the medical information I could find that might relate to mystic phenomena. There, I focused on the temporal lobe and soon discovered how fortunate I was. Many people with temporal lobe differences had traumatic visions, not beautiful and entrancing ones like mine. And worse, some people were captured by a vision, when in the midst of another activity. Injuries could occur that way. For example, a person might arrive at an emergency room with burns or injuries acquired during one of these blackouts. I never experienced spacing out. It would have been more than awkward in my busy career.
Just as the mystic literature avoided mention of the medical world, so the medical world avoided mention of mystic events except as aberrations. It was as if the two worlds wanted nothing to do with each other—at least in the minds of those who dealt with them.
Nor did my commuter marriage survive this prolonged early period. Somewhere along the way I learned that it’s harder to be a superwoman than one would expect. Eventually my first husband and I agreed that, in the future, we might get remarried if we ever happened to live in the same city at the same time.
But that never happened. And as time went by, I met my second husband, Jim, and was introduced to yet another world: the circus—Barnum and Bailey.
My first husband and I remained in a good relationship. I continued to edit much of his writing. In one very bad year in the late 80’s, both of my husbands died—a double sadness that could not be shared with many people How could I say that I’d lost two husbands in one year?
Mystic Encounters: The Door Ajar is available in trade paperback for $12.99. Visit the bookstore
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Chapter 1 - Breaking Barriers—1
Chapter 2 - Planets, Solar Systems, Mystic Worlds—13
Chapter 3 - Dreams and Visions—25
Chapter 4 - Reincarnation Themes—41
Chapter 5 - Where Mysticism, Religion and Spirituality Meet—57
Chapter 6 - Sensations and Perceptions—67
Chapter 7 - Archetypal Encounters—79
Chapter 8 - Shamanic Encounters—89
Chapter 9 - Mysticism and Creativity—103
Chapter 10 - Encounters with Eternity—113
Chapter 11 - Mysticism and the Mind—123
Chapter 12 - Mysticism and the Brain—131
Chapter 13 - Mysticism: The Brain and Testing—141
Chapter 14 - Later Mystic Encounters and the Ishtadeva—151
Chapter 15 - Life after Mysticism—163