This is what the mystics say (and it makes sense to me): There is an experience many humans have had called the mystical experience. It cannot be described but only experienced. If you can describe it, that ain't it. In a clumsy attempt to talk about it, people say things like "All Is One" and "Love Is All There Is" and "As Above, So Below." But it remains indescribable, ineffable, inexpressible. A dictionary defines "mystical" as meaning "having a divine meaning that transcends human understanding", which isn't really much of a definition at all. The interesting thing is that, while we cannot apprehend it intellectually, humans can experience it as a feeling perception. Almost every culture and most religions have a name for the mystical experience, and there are records of people experiencing it from early recorded times to the present. Some talk of it as emptiness, some as fullness, the void or the god-who-cannot-be-named (and that doesn't fit into a book). The Hindus, as I understand it, have the concept of an indescribable and infinite Presence in the universe, and they regard all of humanity's gods and goddesses as faces (or facets) of that infinite being. The faces exist so that we humans may more easily relate to the god-being, but they are just small aspect-faces of something infinitely more vast and unknowable by our ordinary conscious minds. What if god/dess is in a stranger's smile? What if god/dess is in your hand when you touch a sorrowing friend? What if god/dess is in the blue bell — bell, leaf, stem, and root? What if god/dess — the real thing — isn't an old man with a flowing beard or a curvy woman with fabulous hair or a hairy creature with horns? But... what if god/dess is them as well? What if god/dess has no location in space, no one moment in time, no limits or boundaries? Are you big enough to be yourself and god/dess? To allow everyone and everything to be itself and god/dess? What if all of O Universe is just... faces of god/dess, the unknowable, all one? We humans try for control and find it very difficult to accept that we really don't have a lot of control in this universe. Largely, the universe goes on with or without our approval, and the most we usually manage is a modicum of self-control in the present moment. As I write these words, I'm very aware that my own life is, at this moment, insufficiently trusting of the process — and that the trust needed isn't about people or control but simply in the ability of O Universe to unroll the future properly, whether it suits my fancy or not. I've been getting lessons about this, and now I need to apply them. (And I wouldn't have recognized any of that if I hadn't been trying to explain all this — I thank you for being present so that I was moved to write this "for you"!) So. What if our radiant, rainbowed, soap-bubble Universe is self-aware? If you do an internet search on "non-local consciousness" or "nonlocal consciousness" or "non local consciousness" (different sets of results!), a plethora of astonishing things comes up, ranging from modern more-or-less scientific thinking to the most ancient mystics and magicians — and in non-local consciousness there is room for it all. People who have had a full-blown mystical experience of infinite Oneness don't feel a need to believe in it. It's there, like the sun rising in the morning every day. People who haven't experienced it tend to range from denial to disbelief to "don't know" to belief without full understanding. Unfortunately, the mystical experience strikes like lightning, wherever and whenever it will, sometimes triggered by a small or large event but as often as not just out of the wild blue. Fortunately, again like lightning, it strikes where there is the least resistance. So it's about surrender — and you cannot force surrender. But meditation can help openness. Letting go of adamant opinions and self-imposed rules can help us to let go into just being present. Trust in the process is what it is all about. This is not easy — which may be why more people don't have the experience. All I can personally add to this is that the mystical experience feels (to me) a lot like love, but love without limits, bounds, or conditions, without pain or sorrow or transient happiness, without subject or object. It has no I-thou, not even an I but it only and infinitely IS. You can see that trying to explain it by describing Okay, most of what I wanted to say was about the mystic's perception of the universe, which fits so well with the concept of non-local consciousness, but I do want to add a bit about mediums, channels, witches, magicians, tarot readers, computer programmers, artists, healers, and others of that ilk. These things all work, to varying degrees (which depend on things we don't understand very well at all). Weird stuff happens. It happens often to people who are trying to do things that require use of both linear and holistic thinking at the same time, and whether you call it co-incidence or synchronicity or serendipity or something else (any word for things we also don't understand), weird stuff has probably happened to you. In recent times most scientists have been in total denial about these happenings. There are always a few, even in the Western World, who have begun to catch up. The process is well on the way.
Photo Copyright ©2013 by Tara Larsen Chang. All rights reserved.
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what it is not is not very satisfactory either. And yet no one knows any more if I say, "It is an ultimate experience of empathy with the Universe, wrapt in unconditional, unbounded love." In fact, I'm not satisfied with that definition either. It is both more and different from that. It's a feeling, and you have to feel it to know. Indescribable.
