Arjuna Ardagh:   Translucent Experiences:   Common Characteristics

For a dozen or more years, Arjuna Ardagh has been studying individuals from all over the world who have spontaneously had a  type of breakthrough experience almost absent from the anecdotal literature until fairly recently.  He describes it as a "Radical Awakening."    One such person is Byron Katie, a woman, who had suffered years of morbid depression.  At one period in her life, she got to the point she would not leave her bed.  In the moments before the extraordinary event, she was feeling totally at the end of her tether -- full of anger and outrage, one dark thunderstorm of a mood.  Sounds like she just wanted to die.  Suddenly, she felt totally overwhelmed with  an unimaginable warmth and laughter and joy welling up from within.  It was as if this great being or greater Self was suddenly present, full of love and empathy, but completely -- radically -- its own magnificent being.  And in spite of her long-lived pathological state up to the instant before, she found herself laughing with sheer delight and wonder!             From that moment forward, she was a totally transformed woman.  She got out of bed and regained her life, fully healed from her formerly afflicted consciousness!  There was also an extraordinary work of insight that came with this Presence that eventually bore fruit as a clearly inspired teaching, one product of this being her first book, Loving What Is:  Four Questions That Can Change Your Life*.          According to Ardagh, the characteristics associated with such experiences are ..            1 . A new sense of well-being   2 . Increased joy in life   3 . Diminished fear   4 . A natural impulse to serve and contribute to the world in a real way.              * Here's an oh-by-the-way:  How many people have been institutionalized, put on drugs, sometimes for the remainder of their lives, under similar circumstances?  Truly one of those 'WHO KNEW?!?' situations.  Thanks especially to Stanislav and Christina Grof and those who have helped their pioneering work with people suffering what they have recognized as "spiritual emergency" and as facilitators from that crisis state to "spiritual emergence," we now have a powerful healing context within which to understand and support people in profound psychospiritual distress.             ~~~~~~~~~~~~~    *    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~             Culture, context, and origin of EHEs can play a powerful role in how we may be enabled [or sometimes less-abled] toward  understanding, accepting, integrating, valuing, and utilizing such Gifts as EEs/EHEs.   Compare these several different experiential points of view, which  basically all point to the same characteristics of shifted consciousness, which PMH Atwater describes as "Brain Shift / Spirit Shift":   1. An overview of the five-stage EHE Process:  Drs. Rhea White and Suzanne Brown, as a  result of their research and an exhaustive review of the pertinent literature in the early 1990s, identify five stages within the EHE process itself.  Two other short articles delineate the whole 5-stage EHE Process.  One by R. A. White offers an objective view, and S. V. Brown counterbalances with a subjective view.  Another even more direct trait-related article by White is this one:  Brief Overview of Exceptional Human Experiences.        2. Near-Death Experiences model [Kenneth Ring ; Evelyn Elsaesser-Valarino]   3. Cultural Creatives' Values [Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson]   4. Shamanic Vocation [Holger Kalweit]   5. Translucent Experiences [Arjuna Ardagh]   6. Mystical Experiences [Louann Stahl]   7. The long-studied observations of the Spiritual Emergence Network [Stanislav and Christina Grof]   8. Presencing / Presence [Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers, and also Eleanor Rosch, whose work extensively supports this perspective.]   9. Theory U [C. Otto Scharmer; this and Presence (#7) are closely related.]   10. Brain Shift / Spirit Shift [PMH Atwater's NDE-based model describes these aftereffects in the context of an explicitly unique consciousness.]   11. The collaborative, life-long lived inquiry and experiences of Sri Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfasa [aka, The Mother] [see Satprem, essential biographer for both]                The surprisingly universal focus, by the time one has made a clear commitment suggestive of the values and meaning-filled lives shared with such emphasis, regardless of whichever "lens" one might look through, is about a lifepath of service to others, to the good of the whole, and to the Earth as a sacred being.   What particularly stands out is the reverence for all life that lives in Experiencers [EHEers, no matter which model you use], as well as in EHE Empaths, and their passionate and compassionate altruistic instrumentality within community and for the world, which could be deemed an active expression of "moral consciousness."  The more profoundly Shifting the experience, the more fully the Experiencer recognizes the sacredness of all life as a Living Whole.  Such EHEers live and speak and act within the perceived context of [our] ONENESS, as if there is a Singular Consciousness that pervades and is recognizable, accessible, and communicative from within all beings and being, even the most seemingly inanimate.