Mystical Experiences:   What They Share in Common

The format has been changed slightly from its original paragraph form.  Otherwise, this is quoted directly from this most evocative treatise, A Most Surprising Song:  Exploring the Mystical Experience by Louann Stahl.              1 . The experience is lived, participated in, not comprehended with the mind alone, while the sense of reality and the sense of being at last awake is so great that normal consciousness seems a pale imitation.   2 . It is an experience of overwhelming joy and love, often accompanied by a preternatural light, brilliant and luminous beyond measure.   3 . The mystic experiences the "peace of God, which passes all understanding" (Phil. 4:7), along with a sense of the unity of all creation -- a unity underlying a wondrous and awesome diversity.   4 . While an illumination of the meaning of life is often a part of the mystic's experience, the explanations they attempt are most often obscured in paradoxes the human mind cannot untangle.  Inevitably, the mystics tell us that the experience is ineffable, our concepts and language simply cannot embrace it.  Their tongues are tied, as that of the man who ascended from Plato's Cave.   5 . Time as we know it is transcended; the mystical experience exists outside of time in an "eternal now."                            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~    *    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~             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.