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Spiritual/Religious Experience: A Presence

Here’s an abridged version of something I wrote about immediately after having the experience early in 2002. Someone who hasn’t experienced something like this might dismiss such an account as, say, a vivid dream. I can also see how someone could interpret this sort of experience literally and decide that they really had traveled, met other people and so forth. Personally, neither of these approaches was an option.

I am on the move, traveling far and wide from place to place but in some manner that is neither observed by others nor understood by me. It’s a dark, disembodied, onrushing sensation, a kind of rapid transit flying. All the while, I feel myself closely accompanied by a great and unseen Presence, a person of some kind who I can't see although I seem to know where he is.

I go in and out of many houses, meeting many people – sometimes folks I know and sometimes not, but always well received. Initially I’m a little uncomfortable with my unconventional “floating” way of moving room to room whenever others aren’t around – like they might catch me. I’m never all that worried though because of the continuing sense that I am closely and powerfully accompanied.

At times the physical exploration becomes exceptionally crisp and vivid, like when I find myself standing in front of a small wall-hanging – a weaving or tapestry about the size of a sheet of paper. It's a red Z on a white background, and seems to be some sort of symbol. Although the design is simple, the redness is spectacularly brilliant, as if redness had eyes that could stare back at you.

Children dressed in white who are supposed to be from my elementary school, though I can’t identify them, are standing around waiting for some event or ceremony to take place that I’m involved with. A boy gives me something, I don’t know what, which I’m honored to receive.

After what seems like hours, I’m standing at one of the windows in my own bedroom. Morning has come. I’m about to open the blinds.

I see the blinds in such great detail, observing how the shaded light filters through each slightly yellowed slat, that I’m almost certain I’m awake. But when I try touching them to confirm this - two, three times - I don’t seem to feel anything.

Still trying to figure out if I’m awake, I try relaxing all my muscles and find that I feel no sensation of starting to fall. At that point I momentarily notice that I’m actually still in bed and that the room is still dark…

I enter a house to deliver a message to a father about his son. The boy’s a little worried, but I know it’s nothing that will upset the father. The father and son seem to be locals, but they have guests who appear to be from the Mideast. The guests in turn each half rise from their seats at the table to grasp my hand in both of theirs, greeting me with friendliness and respect.

There are lulls between some of these episodes during which I enter a barely conscious resting state, as though trying to recover. These end when I hear the sound of my heart beating hard against the mattress and feel the Presence rejoining me for further travels. It’s at one of these junctures that my concern with how fast my heart is racing takes me out of the experience. Disoriented for a couple minutes and then amazed, I get up to write down these words.

Many Paths to the Same... Question?

“It’s True for Me” Means What?

In different ways, a number of you have suggested (previous post) that when it comes to religion and spirituality, our beliefs are true for us as individuals. Certainly every belief is true to every believer in the sense that believers believe what they believe. Or if we want to use “true” as a synonym for “meaningful,” then this works too. Clearly everyone finds their religious/spiritual beliefs meaningful or they wouldn’t believe them.

I don’t think that by saying beliefs are true to believers themselves people meant to state that religious/spiritual beliefs are entirely subjective – like dreams or hallucinations. Certainly beliefs or claims of knowledge about divine matters sound like factual statements of some kind - statements concerning realities beyond the speaker’s own state of mind. Examples: we are immortal; Jesus is Lord and Savior; Mohammed is Seal of the Prophets; the law of karma, the law of attraction, heaven, hell, nirvana, cosmic consciousness…

Many Paths…

The idea of “many paths to the same Truth” is an attempt to reconcile the great variety of religious and spiritual beliefs that people hold. But it has some problems.

Many of humanity’s beliefs are incompatible and even contradictory. For example, Jesus can’t both be God (Christianity) and not-God – a completely human prophet who helped pave the way for Mohammed’s ministry (Islam). And when it comes to trying to pin down what that Truth is to which all paths lead – that’s not so easy either.

If this is because the Truth is beyond words, OK, but still… how could you know or what would convince you that whatever ineffable experience you had referenced a cosmic Truth and not a particular kind of subjective consciousness that’s peculiar to members of our own species? How would you know that you know?

To know, don’t you have to know that you know?

A commenter to the previous thread mentioned a relative who’d been to a white light and back. She writes that she herself has experienced other peoples beyond where she is.

I’ve also had experiences that fall in the “altered state of consciousness” category. One involved a sense of being accompanied by a presence and traveling to visit people around the world.

Although that’s what the experience felt like, I don’t know that I really went around the world accompanied by a mysterious presence. I don’t know how I’d tell the difference between having an experience that felt like that from one that really happened.

Did this experience feel more real and significant than a dream? Absolutely. Did this feeling of reality reveal to me that the experience was in fact real and not imaginary?

Absolutely not. I know it's possible to strongly feel that something is true or real without it being so.

More than Faith: Divine Knowledge

People sometimes consider themselves to know divine truths. They may say that they know that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, or that they see angels, know that saints intercede for us, perceive energies or auras, receive visitations from deceased loved ones that prove personal immortality…

I expect that pretty much every spiritual and religious belief that people have ever held has included a minority of adherents who go beyond saying that they believe to stating that they know.

What Do You Think?

How would you know that, say, your vivid vision of your deceased grandmother or a feeling of her presence was really a visit from beyond the grave and not a product of your memory, imagination and so forth? What would let you know – not just believe, but know – that it was real?

Do some claims of divine knowledge strike you as more credible than others? If so, what might make one claim more credible than another?

What Do You Hope For?

It seems to me that there are at least these four things that people hope for religiously or spiritually:

1. Their individual lives and the lives of loved ones

2. Our species

3. Our planet, as in “Maybe some other species will come along and do a better job with life on earth if we don’t last long.”

4. Reality or being itself – hope for the entire universe and whatever full or complete context may hold it.

1. Hope for the individual – Most westerners find this presented by their religious traditions as hope for personal immortality.

On the one hand, you hate to think of yourself and those you love being annihilated in the end. On the other, you can reach a point in life where you sincerely don’t want to be immortal. The idea of being yourself forever can seem way too long as you realize your inherent limitations.

2. Hope for our species - This might be the most widely shared item on the human hope list. Most of us want to see our species survive and thrive long term. It would appear though, that this is a universe in which all species go extinct sooner or later.

3. Hope for the planet – It’s easy to imagine a scenario where humans go extinct through human or natural causes (or some combination of the two) and some other life form takes our place to “live long and prosper” (Mr. Spock). On the one hand, this has a hopeful ring to it, kind of. On the other, humans are all dead.

4. Hope for reality or being itself – It’s hard to imagine just what this means. Language can’t do more than allude to such a possibility. I think, for example, of a phrase from the Christmas carol, “Joy to the World” that goes “and heaven and nature sing.” Or Tennyson’s reference to “that one far-off divine event to which creation moves.”

You Don’t Need Hope If You Have Certainty…

One commenter on the previous thread seemed to suggest that hope may be unnecessary or irrelevant. I’d have to guess that this commenter, like quite a lot of people, feel that they know things turn out well and that such knowledge makes hope unnecessary.

###

What do you see as the biggest threats to our species in the long run? How hopeful or hopeless do you feel about overcoming them?

If you consider yourself to know something about life that leaves you with no need for hope, then what is it that you know and how do you know it?

If you lack this kind of certainty, what kind of hope is most important to you?

“Hope Springs Eternal…” in the Believing Breast?

“Man is, properly speaking, based upon Hope, he has no other possession but Hope; this world of his is emphatically the Place of Hope.” What, then, was our Professor’s possession? We see him, for the present, quite shut-out from Hope; looking not into the golden orient, but vaguely, all round into a dim copper firmament, pregnant with earthquake and tornado. … Doubt had darkened into Unbelief…

From “The Everlasting No” by Thomas Carlyle, 19th century essayist

Is hopefulness about life important to how you feel and live in the present? If so, and you hold religious or spiritual beliefs, do you consider them necessary to your hopefulness about life?

If you’ve rejected spiritual and religious beliefs, do you feel hopeless about life? Is that OK or hard to live with?

The Spiritual Mentor as Crazy Person

When I wrote the following lines several years ago, a new sense of identity, a new feeling for my place in relation to life as a whole, was coming into sharper focus for me despite how hard it is to articulate.

None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one.
I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it,
Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life
Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home.
I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care
Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring.
Care like you died and kept on caring.
Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events
Happen with no reflection or without meaning to,
But only because you mean it so much
That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.

Not long after writing this I had a chance to put it to the test…


It was a mild and sunny Sunday afternoon late in the winter of 2002 as I pulled my aging Toyota hatchback into a space at my local Giants grocery store in Arlington, Virginia, across the Key Bridge from Washington, DC. I was disabled but still getting around. You couldn’t tell yet from looking at me that there was anything wrong – you had to be around me a little while to see the stuff I had trouble with, for example, reaching and bending.

As I painstakingly went about locking my heavy “Club” to the steering wheel and prepared to leave my car, I noticed a large SUV pull up directly behind me in my rearview mirror. It looked like this might have something to do with me, but I couldn’t imagine what, I wasn’t sure, and I half forgot about it as I concentrated on getting out of my vehicle without hurting my back.

As I stepped away from my car, the man in the SUV, who’d rolled his windows down on both sides, started shouting obscenities. After several seconds, I could hear, scattered among the expletives, that he was claiming I had deliberately taken the space he was going to back into.

It was pretty confusing. To begin with, there were empty spaces all over the place. But as the yelling continued, a vague image flashed across my mind that as I was pulling in, there may have been a large black vehicle twenty or thirty yards away with its back up lights on that must have been his. I don’t think anyone could have guessed that he was specifically targeting the space I’d chosen.

“I had no idea what you were doing,” I called out simply and with no trace of an attitude. The torrent of obscenities continued. After a pause, and without any note of sarcasm or hostility in my voice, I suggested, “Why don’t you just take it easy?”

His swearing intensified. That’s when I looked both ways and unhurriedly stepped directly in front of his vehicle toward the store’s entrance, just as if he’d politely come to a stop in order for me to cross. From the corner of my eye I saw him lurch into reverse, hauling his still swearing self out of earshot.

OK. First, I’ll admit that at one level of myself, what I did was to flip him a very special kind of bird. I gave him a really hard choice. To save face, he’d have to run me over in broad daylight with a large number of late Sunday morning grocery shoppers looking on. So my ego had it figured out that I’d probably win this one.

Second, part of my self-possession was pure disability. I couldn’t run and I couldn’t fight. I didn’t have a lot of choices.

But mainly, the choice that I made, and what allowed me to make it, was a matter of trying out that emerging sense of self that’s so hard to put into words. I’d truly felt calm, strong, and in control throughout, with only the slightest trace of an adrenaline rush. Looking at it more closely afterward, I saw that a kind of mental pulling-back had occurred in the face of his outburst that had allowed me to view the situation from a wider, almost external perspective.

From that perspective, whether he won the encounter or whether I did, meant infinitely less to me than it did to him. Because at the level that had felt most real to me, I wasn’t playing his game at all.

Stepping in front of SUVs driven by angry people who sound like they might want to kill you is still hard to come by as a regular spiritual practice, even in most major American cities. Plus it might hurt. But my opportunity that day to find out for sure whether I really had a new bottom line was irresistible and the main point of how I’d behaved. Now I had no doubt that I’d come to identify more with the One that held me than the one who was being held, and that I was capable of seeing and acting from out of that basis in reality.

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About "the One” – To paraphrase St. Paul, what I refer to here is “the One in whom we live and move and have our being” – that is, the Wholeness of the whole story that holds the story of each little life, the greatest Context that exists. Some will think of this as a Creator existing apart from creation, others as being or reality itself.