The shamans, healers, sages and wisdom keepers of all times, all continents and all peoples, in their ageless wisdom, say that human spirituality is composed of three aspects: relationships, values, and life purpose.
Spirituality means different things to different people. For some, it’s primarily about a belief in God and active participation in organized religion. For others, it’s about non-religious experiences that help them get in touch with their spiritual selves through quiet reflection, time in nature, private prayer, yoga, hallucinogens or meditation.
Spirituality is defined as the recognition of a feeling, sense, or belief that there is something bigger than ones self, that there is more to being human than sensory experience, and that the larger whole of which we are a part is cosmic or divine in nature. The spiritual refers to a person’s thoughts and beliefs rather than their physical body or surroundings.
For mystics, the spiritual is not something merely to think about but also something to be encountered. Spiritual phenomena may be said to be experienced when they are thought about in such a way that a depth of feeling becomes attached to them. When experience of the spiritual is heartfelt, the spiritual is found to be mysterious, awesome, urgent, and fascinating.
Mystics believe that their experiences disclose the existence of an extrasensory dimension of reality: phenomena whose existence cannot be detected through sense perception but become apparent during mystical experience. During mystical experiences, extrasensory phenomena are said to be directly perceived, whether by the soul, the mind, the imagination, or some other faculty. The phenomena that mystics encounter may be impersonal — a unifying principle, structure, process, law, or force — or personal — ghosts, spirits, angels, demons, gods or revelations derived from such personal beings.
When mystics make claims about extrasensory dimensions of reality, they are making the same type of claim that physical scientists do when they cite the laws of physics, or psychologists when they posit emotional complexes that govern responses to events. They are not speaking of the magical, mythological, or otherworldly; they are attempting to speak of aspects of the world of sense perception that are not perceptible to the senses.
The mystical experience can be defined as a sense of unity, or the experience of becoming one with all that exists. Mystical experiences may be encountered following the ingestion of classic hallucinogens. The following is a written description of an experience reported by a volunteer who received 20 mg/70 kg of psilocybin in a study conducted at Johns Hopkins:
“In my mind’s eye, I felt myself instinctively taking on the posture of prayer in my head. I was on my knees, hands clasped in front of me and I bowed to this force. I wasn’t scared or threatened in any way. It was more about reverence. I was showing my respect. I was humbled and honored to be in this presence. This presence was a feeling, not something I saw or heard. I only felt it, but it felt more real than any reality I have experienced. And it was a familiar place too. One I had felt before. It was when I surrendered to this, that I felt like I let go. I was gone…or I should say this earthly part of me was. It was still on the couch in some sort of suspended animation awaiting my return. I was in the void. This void had a strange and indescribable quality to it in that there was nothing to it but this feeling of unconditional and undying Love. It felt like my soul was basking in the feeling of this space. I have no idea how long this lasted. Time and space did not exist there …it was all different manifestations of this Love feeling I found myself wrapped in.”
There's so much more to talk about in this blog this time. But we think we'll save it all for a future posting. In the meantime, as always, we look forward to hearing about the spiritual & mystical experiences that you've had that took you to another level.
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