How to classify this mystical excperience?
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I think your post was beautiful.
I will leave the comments to others cause I have not had the K&C.
I attemtped to Wilfully bring about the K&C using the prescribed ritual.The only thing I will say about the Ritual is that i gave myself 100% to my HGA and was rebuked.
Growing up and even now I can feel G-D around me intimately. But for about 2 weeks after that ritual I could not feel His presence. I felt like I was completely alone, disconnected from society, and even from the spiritual plane. This is what they mean when they talk of hell: Hell=Separation From G-d.
I think this can relate to you because when I read your post I felt my experience was 100% opposite of yours.
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
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@stikik said
"Anyway, one night, trying to go to sleep, my mind was racing, desperately trying to find some way to understand reality (or something like that) .. I got really annoyed and impatient with the limitation of my thoughts, and started to see how any thought I was having was false, as they merely seemed to constitute conclusions automatically excluding the opposite (or indeed all other types of) conclusions. (For example, if I was thinking that "Life is like a learning experience", that seemed to be too narrow and exclude everything about life that did not fit the description of "learning experience"). I would dismiss each thought as it appeared, dissatisfied and irritated. I guess this can be compared to a kind of neti-neti meditation.
As I got more and more impatient with my useless thoughts, I remember starting to perceive the smaller "notions" that these thoughts were composed of, and these too seemed unsatisfactory and false. I would brush each of them aside even before they got the chance to combine and form coherent thoughts."
When I was in Art School, in the early eighties. There was a period of many days when I went through almost exactly the same process of critical self-analysis that you have described so clearly— a progressive unraveling, and compulsive rejection of the mental commenting that is all but unconscious most of the time, describing and even creating a notion of the world that is little more than a fiction. This culminated in an extraordinary experience that was singular and, how to say it, was totally other and truer than anything I had ever known previously. Curious that I have recently attempted to give some sort of definitive, and lasting written description to this experience, and now I am reading your post. This is something I have avoided doing for so long because it could only be a further reductive iteration to the memory, which was the first falsehood following hot on the heels of the experience itself, but unavoidable as such. The similarity of your description to my experience is striking. So maybe there is something to be gained in struggling to find the appropriate words, reinforcing your experience, and also making an initial stab at describing how this worked for me. I am not going to describe the experience itself, just the sort of thing that preceded and seemed to produce the experience.
I guess there is a lot to say about how I was able to do this in the first place, and why I actually began to dissect this otherwise mostly unconscious process, but like the experience, it will have to wait. For now it’s enough to describe the activity, the process of observing myself thinking about the world as I was looking at it.
In its essence, I would have a thought, mostly unwilled, that commented on what I was engaged with visually or interactively—for example, I would see another student in the painting studio cleaning his/her brushes and my ‘back brain’ would comment on them, their art, the kind of person they were, and so on. In this way I would define them in such a way as to explain their place in my world. These thought were, without exception, negative thoughts. This kind of thing was happening all the time, and formed a major part of everything I saw or did—even my own conscious thoughts had these subtle comments attached to them. This was the background noise of my mind, which was always there, but fully automatic and for the most part subliminal.
My process of observing, and my subsequent processing of what I observed, was compulsive. I would see the thought arise, and then I would try to undo the ‘damage’ by telling myself what I was really doing, i.e. making things up about the world. Each time I became aware of this inner monologue I would stop, in the moment, and describe to myself that I had no real knowledge or insight to justify the judgment. In short, I was attempting to be absolutely honest with myself.
I was struck by two things about this incessant commenting: The first was that it was happening all the time, and I mean all the time; the second was that it was automatic, it just did it on its own—it was a habit.
Then one day, as I was looking up from the floor in my apartment where I had strewn some art materials and was arranging them for composition purposes something else happened. I saw the light streaming in my window, and this gave rise to the impulse, as I have described it, that would result in the subtle comment. At the same time I was also poised to debunk it, as this had become its own habit by this time. But the connection didn’t happen. The impulse didn’t complete itself, and in that instant something else, something extraordinary happened.
Thank you for providing me with this opportunity to map this out. Sorry for the length, the subject tends to demand a lot of words, and many run-on sentences.
Love and Will
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@stikik said
"Yes, it seems to be this moment when the thought is not even contradicted with it's opposite or discarded because of it's limiting nature, but just does not happen!
.. ("Samadhi"?) .. The machinery-modus stops, and the brain can finally function freely, or something like that ..
"I am a bit reluctant to give my experience the august designation of Samadhi, though I feel certain it must have been pretty damn close. I maintained my separate sense of self throughout, unless of course I missed something because it just wasn't part of what I remembered when it was over.
Other similarities between your experience and mine are that I was fairly active, working at various magickal practices, before my experience. I was perhaps working in a more ordered fashion, but looking back on it I had no idea I would experience anything along the lines of what happened. At the time the experience seemed to have come out of the blue, but over the years I have become more appreciative of the things I was actively doing that were somehow supportive. I plan to lay out the larger context of the work I was doing at some point and hopefully identify some direct cause and effect relationships between the work and the experience.
Also, like yourself, my life changed as a result. This is a bit more complicated, and it doesn't track so neatly with the changes you noticed in your life, but there was a major change and reordering of my priorities, and the course of my life for the next quarter of a century.
As for the experience itself, it was totally different! No pulsing light, voices, explosions of energy in my body, nothing even remotely comparable. This is one reason I tend to think the disruption of the normal mental activity is not the experience. It is necessary, but it doesn't directly produce the experience as much as it allows something other to happen.
Here are a few excerpts from the description of my experience, pardon the references to things not fully explained, the quotes are taken from a much longer and fuller description:
"What seemed to happen was this. In the briefest of an instant I was somehow rushed, or I had somehow managed to rush to the very opening of the cave. The distance separating me from that portal was very great, and yet that distance was overcome instantaneously.
I was standing there, on the threshold of the world—the universe, potent and present—in its entirety. I cannot stress this one point enough—the whole of the universe was present, not just a representative part of it, but all of the ‘all there was/is,’ present and accounted for. It pressed against my awareness. At the same time, some part of me was still on my knees, seeing the light that was still shining in from the window, illuminating the dust motes in its rays. "
"I remember a degree of intimacy I had never known before. The crudest analog would be a bold, shameless nakedness in every respect and on every plane: psychological, spiritual, and physical—the complete openness of a lover. As such, this ‘all’ was feminine, which even as I understood this, I also understood it to be a woefully inadequate way of describing her. But there is it—she was a goddess. After the experience there lingered a thrill that I could only relate to a kind of pure, limpid, charged sexuality."
This second excerpt is included because I have always related this experience to the first chapter of Liber Al. It is one of the most important reasons I am a Thelemite.
Love and Will
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@stikik said
"I have since tried to do meditations in the vein of neti-neti where I pay attention to the things happening from moment to moment and continually dismiss any thoughts, memories, sensations etc. in order to get to what is beyond these, but have not had the same success, and I guess I got discouraged and finally stopped. Some yoga-teachers that I have spoken to also claimed that it is impossible to "stop thought". What do they mean by this? Is this true?"
You should do something else. What you did in the first place was spontaneous, and cannot be reanimated.I bet that the yoga teachers aren't really knowing what they're speaking of. Yes, ofcourse. it is a common mistake to try and repress things. But it is just as easy to stop a thought as it is to stop a car. Just do it. It would be like saying that you cannot stop a car, which of course is also true, because the planet is moving all the time. In that sense, the thought cannot be stopped - it has to stop itself.
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@Alrah said
"I can't recall now who originally said "there are as many Samadhi's as there are petals on the Lotus."
"As a term, Samadhi can mean a lot of things, after all, it's just a word. My personal bias is to make words means as little as possible because this gives me a sense that they are precise and therefor better tools. Nevertheless, I understand that usage and context are the more important considerations in any discussion.
@stikik said
"I do not mention this in my journal, but as I remember it, I was in a state where I sort of "knew" everything that was going on, the whole dynamics of inside/outside higher/lower seemed transparent. The things I did not know, I knew that I did not know .. (The known unknowns
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"I remember being blown away immediately after the experience. One part of me was like, Whoa! At the same time another part, the smaller part, which was fully reconstituted as soon as I came back to my normal reality, was more than a little shaken and even appalled! It was like, "you mean that all these little things I so desperately want are empty in comparison to this limitless fullness? NOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
If you will endure another quote from my record:
"I said the universe had been destroyed, and indeed, in every way that mattered it was. The rules, the understandings, the assumptions, the fears, the hopes, the most secret rationales hidden in my heart of hearts, those things that caused me to cling to life and struggle against it in an attempt to wrest from it some fulfillment, these were all swept away. These things were all like so many individual drops of water, which in that instant, being swept up, lost any sense of importance because here was all the water, now unified, cosmic. We want things; I wanted them, still do for the most part. I want to be famous, loved, rich, free, safe, acknowledged; I want pleasures, drugs, spiritual wholeness…
"Your last point about the intervening years, the hiatus in the work, was a personal source of confusion for me as well.
@stikik said
"Reviewing my diary from this period has also inspired me greatly. I did not realize I was doing so much dedicated work, and under such difficult circumstances!
Now I feel like I am back in the world of angels and elementals again .. Coming out of this looong Malkuth-period I have been in lately, (establishing a career, perfect place to live, paying off my debt etc.), I associate approaching this inner universe with Tav-work, which I guess is sort of appropriate for me at this time I also seem to have become aware of the Briatic world, which I was not back then "After this experience I basically put all this work on hold and did something else. I would ask myself constantly during this time: what of the experience, what of my very real desire to know the truth of my innermost being and reality?
I can say with honesty that I never once ever said to myself that I was through with these things, I just didn't have the space for them. This was confusing; what was I doing? Was I running away, clinging to a faithless notion of the world that I had invested all my hopes in and couldn't let go of, despite what I now understood to be its limitations?
Or was I doing a necessary work by being in and of the world, allowing it to hone the elements of my character through intense experience and struggle? I would return to this work on my self, but with what gifts in tow?
It's all how you decide to tell the story, how you end up spinning the events to fit one or another way of looking at your life. These days I am more sympathetic to the second version than the first. It was necessary to live in the world. I was a much more incomplete soul before this period in my life than I am now.
Love and Will
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Shortly: It's been exactly the same for me. It's extremely hard to get back to normal things, when I know that they're all completely empty. And extremely hard too, because if I'm not in meditation, I'm in depression, and I've been diagnosed with panic disorder. I've right now promised myself to keep myself up to speed for one month, and then check for more after that. I've been slowly taking my head out of my bum for months.
On a few occasions in dhyana or whatever it is that I've been in, I've felt like I should die, feeling that it's impossible for me to do the things that I should do in this lifetime, and therefore get on with it. Basically I felt that everything that I've been has gone, and cannot be gotten back. My older brother has put a good amount of guilt in me, making me believe that my personality has become evil and completely mad. The mad part is because I have opinions differing from his, well, differing just about everyone else's.
My mystical experiences, as you describe them, have been pretty much the same. But I can go to those stages any time I wish and remain for as long as I wish, and that's the dilemma, whether or not to use it, and to what extent. My normal state of consciousness is pretty close to it, or something. So it's been the same for me, I've felt that I have to get myself out of that thing to get other things going well.