making sense of our mystical experiences
Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
The cultures of the West, inherited from western Europe, are devoid of openly expressed mystical teachings. We lack the cultural traditions that bring the mind out of the mundane, material world to recognize some mysterious source from which this world and its phenomena arise. As such, we have no socially acceptable way to appreciate and understand our personal mystical experiences or how to realize their implications.
Of course there are lingering spiritual traditions in Europe, including Celtic lore, Norse mythology, etc., but most have been overshadowed, demonized, squelched, or marginalized by mainstream religion, especially Christianity. And now, especially in America, we have a hodgepodge of self-appointed gurus and ersatz enlightened personalities who have found a way to monetize their brand of New Age spirituality by promoting it to the masses. Ironically, they speak in ignorance about enlightenment.
So what happens when we have a mystical experience and need to know its implications and meaning? What writings, myths, or socially-embedded teachings can we turn to for some greater realization?
a mystical experience yearns for a guide
When I was 19 years old I worked for Sears Roebuck and Company as a delivery man in Miami, Florida. Being a fit young man, this was the perfect job for me during summers and holidays throughout my college years. The work was hard and the pay was great, though Miami’s high temperatures, high humidity, and physically demanding labor often left me exhausted by the end of a long day.
I was living at home with my parents at this time, and after work one afternoon, tired and hot, I walked through the front door and out to the patio where I sat down and rested my back against the sliding glass doors. I sat beneath the eave facing our screened-in swimming pool.
Predictably, gray rain clouds began to form and the sky turned dark and heavy, blocking out the late afternoon sun. In the distance thunder began to roll, and in minutes the impending storm was upon me. Lightning cracked close by and the thunder roared then vibrated the concrete patio beneath me. I welcomed the cooler air and gave myself over to it. In my state of exhaustion I closed my eyes and, despite the lightning, allowed myself to be enveloped by the changes in the atmosphere. The rain first began to fall in sporadic drops and then quickly grew into a deafening cacophony as it pounded the roof, the concrete patio, the metal framing of the screens, and the water on the surface of the swimming pool. The sound of the rain grew so loud that nothing else could be heard except the occasional bolt of lightning as it cracked overhead and shook the earth.
My attention became fixated on the rain pounding all the surfaces it could find. It was like being in the midst of a drum symphony that filled and rocked my beingness. And then something very strange happened: Everything fell silent. No noise, no rain, no lightning, no wind. There was absolute, silent, still, quietness. Nothing at all. Along with the ending of the deafening din was the ending of me. There was no sense of existing, no body, no thought, no sense of self. All was gone and deleted while the world continued with its ear-shattering symphony that I could no longer hear because I did not exist. And then a few seconds later I existed again; and with the return of the din I wondered what had just happened. Where did the sound, the sights, and my own self go? How could everything turn into nothingness when the world was being hammered all around me?
I closed my eyes again, and again all ceased to exist. There was nothing at all, and yet I was not asleep. It was this “I” that had disappeared completely while the awareness remained. But the awareness was beyond the sound and expressions of life. It was there where nothing else existed.
The process of a deafening storm with rain pounding the environment had somehow given way to absolute silence and peace in a cycle that, to my amazement, repeated several times, with each episode lasting only a few seconds. When the storm finally began to let up, I went into the house wondering what had happened. The experience made such an impression on me that I still vividly remember the details nearly 50 years later. What had happened to me?
how do you process an experience without a resource?
No doubt, my complete annihilation was momentous, but I had no cultural guideposts or teachers to offer any explanations or implications of the experience. What could have been a life-altering experience ended up being nothing more than a mystery — a strange occurrence without explanation or meaning that happened to me. But did it really happen to me or is there a better explanation?
the reemergence of the me
My experience did not lead me to question who I was or what I was made of. After the experience, I was still the same “me” with the same identities, attachments, likes, dislikes, relationships, curiosities, desires, and fears. Little had changed except that now I carried a mystery with me. But what would I have realized if I had been in a culture that offered explanations and wisdom beyond this shallow, materialistic westernized culture into which I had been born, conditioned, and reared? What if I had been born in India, the heart of Africa, or the depths of the Amazon rainforest, having been brought up in a tradition familiar with mystical experiences that could be recognized according to its myths and guideposts, and explained by gurus or shamans who could have shown me the implications of my experience? What if I could have visited a guru who understood what I had gone through? I didn’t even know what a guru was when I was 19.
a real live mystic would have been helpful
In the decades following that experience in the storm at the age of 19, I had had many other similar experiences of complete and utter annihilation of the sense of self and the conditioned mind of thoughts, memories, ideas, and knowledge. I have also had untold out-of-body experiences and unusual realizations beyond the ken of science and Western culture and its insufficient teachings. I was all on my own to figure out what was happening.
nothing happened to me at all
It took me decades to discover something that cannot be understood with the intellect: Nothing had happened to me on that stormy day in 1975, or during any other mystical experience, because the “me” of the egoic, conditioned self is not who I really am. Perhaps if I had a guru I would have learned that the real me is the one that is not a body or the object of experience. In other words, the real me is not a me; it is the subject, not the object. It is not a being, but a point of awareness that is observing experiences. The real me was not in any of my experiences, but rather that which was aware of them.
Maybe it would have been helpful for me to to have read the following passage from the guru Siddharameshwar when I was 19 instead of 59. Then, possibly, I would have related to the silent stillness I had found in the midst of that storm rather than the one who seemed to have experienced it:
“Who are you? Know this: One who knows oneself becomes the Self [consciousness]. If lust, anger, temptation, etc., arise, let them arise. They will eventually subside. How do they affect you? Know that you are quite different from all these. Knowing that ‘I am beyond knowledge and ignorance, different from all,’ remain steady, at peace like a king. Know that God, your Self, is without shape, without attribute. Then you become free.”
