Help me challenge my beliefs.

reply to post by SpaceGoatsFarts

edited out, as i feel, it would be too enlightening for all...

In a sense, you are right, "I" did all the work, at least from my perspective. And yet, when I'm going to develop my story here, you may start to see that maybe I did not do all the work.


Imagine a lab rat, trapped inside a huge maze, labyrinth, filled with obstacles and traps, rewards and snares.
I'm that rat. Maybe you are too. But anyway, here I am. Trying to understand the meaning of this all, running scared in all directions, bumping into walls, triggering strange devices giving me electric shocks or sometimes, if lucky, a piece of cheese.

This place makes no sense. It depresses me. I start pondering the meaning of this all, and the more I think about it, the more depressed I am, because it's just one big joke played on me by who knows to see how long I will survive in this madness. I tell myself I don't care anymore, and start to wander aimlessly, secretly hoping that I will fall into a deadly trap to end this stupid game.

But it doesn't work as planned. Each time I come across one of these punishment devices, it's like it mysteriously stops working. The more I try to end this, the less it works. Now I'm really pissed off! I'm forced to play this insane game and I can't even quit?

Once again, I fall into depression, and I stay where I am, apathetic and lost. I start to loose track of the time, of identity, I'm in a dark place. A very grim one, and at the same time, it's not really frightening, it reminds me of my mother's womb. How long I stayed there? I don't know, I don't care.

And then, suddenly, lying on my back, I see something I did not before. A strange symbol designed on one of the walls of my prison. I don't understand what it means, but it intrigues me. I start looking for other similar ones, and I find plenty. Where they even there before? Maybe, I'm not sure. But what is certain is I only remember looking on the ground and in front of me before, but now I'm looking all around me.

Fast forward, many trials and errors later, I can now make sense of these symbols, they tell me where the cheese is, and where the traps are. They even sometimes show me how to deactivate those traps, usually with the help of seemingly useless small objects someone left lying around these traps. Who put these "tools" there? Who wrote these symbols? I don't know. But what I know is that my prison is now my playground. I'm entertained and I even start dreaming that some symbols might eventually lead me to the exit of this place. One must have dreams to keep living I tell myself.

I still don't know if there's someone behind all this, but it's bigger than me and almost like designed specifically for me. Also there's still that unexplained luck when all the traps stopped working when I wanted to end it all. Maybe it's my guardian angel, maybe it's that "Scientist" my older brothers were talking about when we were still living together in the plastic box.

I don't know who built this place, this labyrinth, but it surely helped me learn new tricks. I feel more safe now, more equipped to face whatever next I'll encounter.





Now this is all fiction of course, because I'm not a rat. But I think it captures a little what I'm trying to express regarding my approach into the mystical experience. I did not asked for this. It was designed for me. At least I like to think of it that way. "But maybe it's just random events in your life, and you trying to find pattern in it?" you might ask.

Maybe. Hopefully I have a basic knowledge of probabilities and statistics so I can tell what's likely from unlikely.

Littlewood's law states we can all experience one miracle (event with a probability of 1 over 1.000.000) every 35 days.

But what can my rational mind say when I start to experience one miracle every 35 minutes for three weeks?
It can say a few things:
- You are crazy. It's all in your head.
- Consider yourself lucky and shut the frack up. Stop overanalyzing everything.
- What you consider a "miracle" isn't one. You think it's unlikely because you think these events occur out of pure randomness, with no causal will behind them. Maybe your picture of the situation is incorrect. Maybe there is a causal will behind these events, it's just you don't know yet what caused them.

As of today, my mind is still cycling through these three answers, basically, as "Science" can't prove one or the other. But all I can say is I'm not the only one on Earth to have experienced this in a way or another. Actually, it's pretty common. And there are books about this. Serious books. From educated minds. Even from scientists

Originally posted by BBalazs
reply to post by SpaceGoatsFarts

 

edited out, as i feel, it would be too enlightening for all...

edit on 31-1-2012 by BBalazs because: (no reason given)

edit on 31-1-2012 by BBalazs because: (no reason given)

Oh dang, what did I missed?

Could you at least PM it to me? I'm all for sharing

Originally posted by SpaceGoatsFarts
But what can my rational mind say when I start to experience one miracle every 35 minutes for three weeks?

Before you ask me to develop this a bit more, I'll do it, because this is going to be the end of this loooong answer to you, Furbs.

What exactly did I experience that made say something like I experienced a miracle every 35min instead of every 35d?


What is mysticism?

"The present meaning of the term mysticism arose via Platonism and Neoplatonism—which referred to the Eleusinian initiation as a metaphor for the "initiation" to spiritual truths and experiences—and is the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight. Mysticism usually centers on practices intended to nurture those experiences."

An initiation to the experience of the conscious awareness and communion with an ultimate reality. I like that one. But it sounds like I had a '___' trip or something? "Ultimate reality"? What the frack is that? This the kind of crap junkies talk about.

Maybe.

But I assure you I was sober. For 3 weeks I was sober, and for 3 weeks I was in wonderland. But it wasn't all in my head, unlike a mush or '___' trip. I interacted with people during that time, my parents among others, and they were as puzzled as me as to what was happening. You know what some call "synchronicities"? A feeling to be like connected to other things through some grand scheme of things? Well, I was in that feeling for all the duration of the experience. I was not only feeling connected to everything and everyone around me, I was experiencing it. I was getting feedback from the world around me.

I saw how by the changing my mood and thoughts, my perception of the world, and thus the world around me, started to change. Sometimes it was just subtle, like if scared the world would turn dark and spooky suddenly, and as soon as I would be happy the colours would come back and be more vibrant than ever. Like I said, I was changing my perception of the world, and by that, I was changing my world.

But this is no real mystery. This is perfectly normal if you think about it (and yet how many people continue living in a gloomy mindset knowing that it will affect their life and experience of the world? Why do you think people on ATS looking for conspiracies will find confirmations everywhere?) Like I said, mysticism is not mysterious actually, it's pretty simple. But what matters really is to EXPERIENCE it for yourself. To try.

That is for the most "mundane" effects I witnessed during that time. To introduce you to it. But much more happened. Much much more. If you want more examples, I can tell you a few;
- Experiences of something like telepathy. Me thinking about something specific and my mother suddenly asking me why I was thinking about that
- Experiences of thoughts projection. Me thinking about something and immediately witnessing it happen around me.
- Experiences of prescience. Me experiencing events I had foreseen long in advance.

All these experiences go back to what I quoted in the definition above: "conscious awareness and communion with an ultimate reality"

From the moment I started to acknowledge the existence of this ultimate reality, my life changed, for the best. But I won't make the mistake of telling you what that "ultimate reality" is because it would be a lie to tell you I know.


Now, it could still be delusion from me, but like I said, even if it is, it's fine for me because it makes my life better. And furthermore, I know it's all part of an existing and documented process (again, read the linked book if you have the time ;D), so that helps me to keep my ego at check so that I don't think I'm "special" and start talking like a guru, because I'm far from being a saint.


That, in a huge nutshell, is my personal experience of mysticism, and why I can't say it's only my hard work that got me there.

Mysticism:
"An initiation to the experience of the conscious awareness and communion with an ultimate reality."

Remember my lab rat story above. I'm the lab rat. The ultimate reality is not only the maze, its laws and it's purpose. It's also whatever made this labyrinth for the rat to learn whatever the rat wants to learn. The rat did all the job of learning, but if it wasn't for the existence of that maze, and the fate to be selected from the plastic box to be put in the maze, the rat wouldn't have the ability to learn.

Mysticism is the maze, the Labyrinth. I had the luck to enter it, and I'm glad someone built it for me to lose myself in it

I said earlier that poets are better than I to express mystical realities. I still think so:

The Labyrinth

Gliding along the winding path
in a circle of safety
releasing my grip on my cares
and opening up inside,
dilated at the center of my soul. . .
not a hole,
a vessel
a place of silence
a vacancy reserved for God
for spiritual communion,
an inner sanctuary
purified by the consuming fire
of the Holy Spirit
and what is left there. . .
etched in the center of my soul,
is:
"I am with you, there is nothing to fear"

edit on 31-1-2012 by SpaceGoatsFarts because: (no reason given)