Mystical Experiences Quotes

The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work. ~ Terence McKenna

Divinity lies all around us, but society remains too hidebound to accept that fact ... The mother sea and the fountain-head of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual. ~ William James

Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit,it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being. ~ Jacques Maritain

One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

This is an organic religion. A religion of the people from heart to heart; a faith that finds the presence of the Divine within life, and nature, and ourselves. We don't have teachers and books because we are our own teachers, and our book is the sacred book of the Earth. We believe that we can connect with the God and Goddess and hear their voices, receive their inspiration directly and take responsibility for our own actions, without the intermediary of a pope or rabbi. We have a loose set of beliefs and morals and a ritual structure that is common to all Wiccans, but there is room for creativity and deep mystical experiences. This is a faith with roots as old as the earth.
Meri Fowler ~ Arin Murphy-Hiscock

If you are ready for mystical experiences, you have them. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

Most accounts of mystical experiences ... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose? ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

We're in the same position as any scientist. All we have to go on is experiential evidence. And sooner or later we have to trust our own experience, because that's all we really have. Otherwise it's a vicious circle. If I fundamentally distrust my experience, then I must distrust even my capacity to distrust, since that is also an experience. So sooner or later I have no choice but to trust, trust my experience, trust that the universe is not fundamentally and persistently going to lie to me. Of course we can be mistaken, and sometimes experiences are misleading, but on balance we have no choice but to follow them. It's a type of phenomenological imperative. And especially mystical experiences - if anything, as you say, they are more real, not less real, than other experiences. I ~ Ken Wilber

By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical. ~ Georges Bataille

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith. ~ Salman Rushdie

It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature.'
'Really?'
'Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies or, also, sad women, very sad women who were fat or whose husbands had left them or something. There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were very important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school. Anyway, he was one of them. He concentrated on the prairies, with a lot of native names, and wise native people, like there's a young boy with an Ojibway grandmother who will teach him the ways of the forest, sort of thing, and there's a lot of history, like a lot of the Riel rebellion for example.'
'The what?'
'History. And there's a lot of disaster, on the prairies, like people having to rebuild their sod houses after floods and so on.'
They drove on the humming highway for a while.
Then Nicola said, 'So you haven't answered my question.'
'What question?'
'Do you think he's any good?'
'Oh. The thing is... it's not, it doesn't matter. It's important. So it doesn't matter if I think it's good or not.'
'Okay. So it doesn't matter. So I'm asking you. What you think. Do. You. Think. It's. Good.' She slapped her bare thigh.
James paused for a ~ Russell Smith

Mystical experiences (unlike scientific conclusions) cannot be communicated from one person to another. Philosophers and little children are continually amazed that we, unaccountably, find ourselves in a somewhat intelligible world. ~ Sam Keen

Luther goes so far as to say that vocation is a mask of God. That is, God hides Himself in the workplace, the family, the Church, and the seemingly secular society. To speak of God being hidden is a way of describing His presence, as when a child hiding in the room is there, just not seen. To realize that the mundane activities that take up most of our lives - going to work, taking the kids to soccer practice, picking up a few things at the store, going to church - are hiding-places for God can be a revelation in itself. Most people seek God in mystical experiences, spectacular miracles, and extraordinary acts they have to do. To find Him in vocation brings Him, literally, down to earth, makes us see how close He really is to us, and transfigures everyday life. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

There are moments of oneness with the Beloved, absolutely ecstasy and bliss. That is nothingness. And this nothingness loves you, responds to you, fulfills you utterly and yet there is nothing there. You flow out like a river without diminishing. This is the great mystical experience, the great ecstasy. ~ Irina Tweedie

It's starting to catch hold, and in large measure it's because we're starting to understand that much of what we have talked about in ancient mythology and mystical experience and so forth can pretty well be modeled within the world of quantum physics. That's a 20th century phenomenon also. ~ Edgar Mitchell

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience. ~ Bernard Malamud

Let it be stated clearly that mysticism is an a-rational type of experience, and in some degree common to all men.

It is an intuitive, self-evident, self-recognized knowledge which comes fitfully to man. It should not be confounded with the instinctive and immediate knowledge possessed by animals and used by them in their adaptations to environment.

The average man seldom pays enough attention to his slight mystical experiences to profit or learn from them. Yet his need for them is evidenced by his incessant seeking for the thrills, sensations, uplifts, and so on, which he organizes for himself in so many ways--the religious way being only one of them. In fact, the failure of religion--in the West, at any rate--to teach true mysticism, and its overlaying of the deeply mystic nature of its teachings with a pseudo-rationalism and an unsound historicity may be the root cause for driving people to seek for things greater than they feel their individual selves to be in the many sensation-giving activities in the world today. ~ Paul Brunton

Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time. ~ Bill Viola

Thomas Merton, of course, constitutes a special threat to Christians, because he presents himself as a contemplative Christian monk, and his work has already affected the vitals of Roman Catholicism, its monasticism. Shortly before his death, Father Merton wrote an appreciative introduction to a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual manual or "Bible" of all Hindus, and one of the foundation blocks of monism or Advaita Vedanta. The Gita, it must be remembered, opposes almost every important teaching of Christianity. His book on the Zen Masters, published posthumously, is also noteworthy, because the entire work is based on a treacherous mistake: the assumption that all the so-called "mystical experiences" in every religion are true. He should have known better. ~ Seraphim Rose

Syntheses between East and West based simply on a similarity of "spiritualities" or "mystical experiences" could not be achieved even then - how much less so today! So we must judge any program as inadequate that tries simply to let India and Europe encounter each other at the halfway-station of Byzantine hesychasm, in the practice of the Jesus prayer and of certain bodily positions and breathing exercises - all ways in which Eastern Christianity reorientalized itself after the period of the great synthesis. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Mystical experiences do not necessarily supply new ideas to the mind, rather, they transform what one believes into what one knows, converting abstract concepts, such as divine love, into vivid, personal, realities. ~ R.M. Jones

So the Buddha is presenting awakening not as a single mystical experience that may come upon us at some meditation, some private moment of transcendence, but rather as a new engagement with life. He is offering us a relationship to the world that is more sensitized to suffering and the causes of suffering, and he gives rise to the possibility of another kind of culture, another kind of civilization. ~ Stephen Batchelor

Mystical experiences nearly always lead one to a belief that some aspect of consciousness is imperishable. In a Buddhist metaphor the consciousness of the individual is like a flame that burns through the night. It is not the same flame over time, yet neither is it another flame. ~ Marilyn Ferguson

The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. ~ William James

I have had mystical experiences with horses. I felt they were communicating with me in horse communication. ~ William Shatner

It's two things: it's totally impersonal and it's totally personal, simultaneously. That's the nature of the mystical experience of life. Everything about life is impersonal, but you have a personal experience. And the bridge between the personal and the impersonal is called prayer. ~ Caroline Myss

But don't chase these mystical experiences
or feelings of light.
They are meant to be rungs on a ladder.
And like most things they will change.
They will disappear.

They aren't meant to stay.
They are meant to be teachers.
They show us what is possible,
and give us hope that
we can find our way home. ~ The Infinite Spark Of Being

Physical processes alone will never completely explain the existence of the universe , life , and consciousness . Religious answers are just wishful thinking and wanton fabrication cast over a bottomless pit of ignorance . To explain their occult and mystical experiences , magicians are forced to develop models beyond the scope of materialistic or religious systems . ~ Peter J. Carroll

The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception. ~ Thomas Merton

In modern neurotheology we examine the physical bases to spiritual, religious and mystical experiences and beliefs, that implicitly appear to reduce this rich phenomenology to only neuronal functions. So, the thing is, there was no divine intervention necessary in the evolution of spirituality and religiosity. "Human Brain is the true God of all beliefs". ~ Abhijit Naskar

Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God. ~ Aldous Huxley

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody. ~ Tom Stoppard

The first and great evidence of our walking by the Spirit or being filled with the Spirit is not some private mystical experience of our own, but our practical relationships of love with other people. ~ John Stott

In an unconscious dynamic within most societies, the majority, or more accurately, the ruling or predominant minority, predicate or dictate the 'accepted' paradigm, traditions and beliefs; and the millions of people with unusual interests and even mystical experiences don't know that they are actually a huge and mostly voiceless group in the society. ~ Stephen Poplin

Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred. ~ Abraham Maslow

Your attachments are the source of all your problems. The need to be right, to possess someone or something, to win at all costs, to be viewed by others as superior - these are all attachments. The open mind resists these attachments and consequently experiences inner peace and success. To release attachments, you have to make a shift in how you ~ Wayne W. Dyer

I absolutely could create a lightsaber."

"You could not create a lightsaber."

"I could too. It's all a science."

"I thought being a Jedi was mystical?"

Irene snorted. "Mystical, my butt. It's all about science. ~ Shelly Laurenston

If you are tired of living on the beaten path that everyone else walks, venture into the woods. Some people would be afraid they would get lost, but a confident woman expects to have a new experience that might be outrageously wonderful. ~ Joyce Meyer

A mystical path requires courage as you must take a first step of faith so that the second may be of science. ~ Luis Marques

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

However far back you go you will find all experiences linked by slender threads. ~ Robert Hellenga

And I am someone who does not let inconsequential boys and near-death experiences stop her. ~ Tris Prior

'Party Down' was one of the most magical, special experiences of my professional career. Also special in my personal life, too. I made really good friends, and I had just a great time, and it was a great part. ~ Ken Marino

Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short. ~ M. Scott Peck

People are inclined to say that I am Ramona. I'm not sure that's true, but I did share some experiences with her. ~ Beverly Cleary

In order to become a reflective, autonomous and self-mentoring individual, one has to continuously learn from people, experiences and new ideas. ~ Prem Jagyasi

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed ~ John Green

Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness. ~ Kelly Link

If a country successfully translate the principles of truth and honesty into their social life, then that country experiences peace, tranquillity and serenity. ~ Sunday Adelaja

I was assigned to the Waffen-SS but was never involved in any crime. Besides, I always felt the need to write about my experiences in a larger context one day. This has only developed recently, now that I have overcome my inner aversion to writing an autobiography in the first place, specifically one having to do with my younger years. ~ Gunter Grass

Art is a kind of magic. Creativity is mysterious, even to artists, who might be able to name their inspiration but can't always explain how their influences and experiences came together to create this new thing- this painting, this story, this song. If you break art down to its base elements, there's nothing miraculous about the letters of the alphabet or a drop of paint. But an artist can put those elements together to create something powerful, something that moves us and withstands the test of time. A work that no one but that artist could have imagined, let alone created. ~ Sarah Cross

The visual and literary arts are of perennial interest to me, and these art forms have become more and more a part of my life; they have become companions of sorts. I cannot imagine my day to day experiences without the presence of these art forms. They're absolutely essential. ~ Michael Hersch

What do you know about women?
They smell nice, they don't like to be told they can't do something, and, when they're naked, they hold some sort of mystical power that overrides our brains and makes us do and say things that would normally be inconceivable. ~ Katie MacAlister

Dear universe... I am ready and OPEN to receive ALL the blessings of joy, abundance, and prosperity you have in store for me today!!! Right NOW - I AM present - and opening the gift of this PRESENT moment! Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!!! I AM SO HAPPY AND THANKFUL to be alive in a world that provides a full buffet of exciting choices! I feel overjoyed knowing I have the POWER to sort through my inner thoughts and outer experiences and CHOOSE the things that I want in order to create "my perfect world" around me!!! I AM - THE CREATOR OF MY OWN REALITY!!! ~ Adi Atar

I can't live in the past, but the echoes of the past live on deep inside of the core of my being. I am learning to turn and face past experiences so that I may see them, touch them, feel them, bless them and finally own them. I am calling back the parts of myself that I abandoned when the pain was too strong and when life got 'too much'. I am accepting with Grace that my life is an exquisitely unique journey of mishap, magic and marvelous misadventure. ~ Kristin Granger

I store away my experiences and don't feel really happy until I've found a way to write about them. ~ Len Deighton

Every record, you've got more experiences to draw on as a writer and a musician. ~ Jerry Cantrell

Total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought. ~ Susan Sontag

What does it mean that we find victims who suffer with dignity more attractive than victims who don't? What does it mean that we don't mind it when perpetrators, torn apart by their own experiences, weep openly - but we are rendered uncomfortable when victims do the same? I don't mean that each and every person has this experience: many of us feel like weeping when we see the carnage created by a suicide bombing and the grieving and shocked faces of the survivors. I mean instead that in all I have read, I detect a strong cultural bias toward aversion when confronted with victims who act as if they have suffered.
[…]
"Fragile, powerless, and helpless victims make us uncomfortable, evoke complicated responses in us, and make it hard for us to empathize with the humiliation they underwent.
[…]
one claim I make in different ways in the book - and very explicitly in chapter 3 - is that to be really credible, a victim has to appear to have mastered his or her suffering. ~ Carolyn J. Dean

I like new ballets because they're totally new. As you get older, new experiences are harder and harder to come by, so it's pretty great to have a new experience. ~ Robert Caro

We writers love our wanderings. In search of newer experiences and newer fragrances, we keep drifting from place to place! ~ Avijeet Das

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction. ~ Paul Auster

It is now recognised that dissociation is a way of forgetting, for a time. The mind siphons off the bad memories into a separate part, and reclaiming those hidden-away memories us a complex process. So, when the memories resurface it does not feel as though they belong to you, it feels alien, more as if someone had told them to you, or you had seen the images in a film. ~ Carolyn Bramhall