From: SWZwick@aol.com
Date: Thu Nov 28 2002 - 16:34:40 GMT
I had a mystic experience, and it's responsible for bringing me to this
forum. I feel like an idiot every time I describe it, but here goes:
It was a beautiful spring day in April, eight yeard ago. I'd been trying to
understand quantum physics -- I mean really visualize what was going on,
rather than just learning the rules. At the same time, my head was spinning
about a girl I was involved in (or with?) -- trying to figure out what my
feelings were and whether your head or heart leads in these things and all
that stuff. Then, one day, I was walking in the park feeling all those trees
coming to life, and vaguely remembering a description from DH Lawrence about
Lady Chatterly feeling the sap rising through the trees around her. I'd read
that book in high school, and I suddenly remembered something else I'd
learned there: that trees are carbon, and that the leaves weren't coming from
the trees, but that the trees were coming from the leaves, which were
filtering carbon out of the carbon-dioxide all us animals were exhaling.
Hardly profound, but it did the trick. I tripped over into what I first
thought was an acid flashback: for the next eight hours or so, I had no
thoughts, in the sense of having words in my head, but every thought I'd ever
had in my life was right there in front of me, in the form of images and
awarenesses. I guess that's how animals feel, and I realized that we don't
really think in words, but in images. I felt like I was the world, and the
world was me. I was God!
Anyway, after I came out of it, I realized that something neurological had
been going on, and also figured that if I were some simple carpenter or camel
dealer, I might actually believe that I'd communicated with God, and I'd be
out standing on street-corners whipping up wars or telling young illiterates
to go blow themselves up. Instead, I went to a book store and saw ZAMM on
the shelf. Remembering Herman Hess's Siddhartha sitting under the bo tree
(again, from a high school class -- but I was 32 at the time this happened,
so all these books had been read 16 years previously), I figured there could
be something in the book to tell me what had happened. So I bought it and
read it in a day, realized that Persig had actually managed to document the
process I'd gone through, and started talking about it way too much.
Everntually I learned to shut up and get back to work...
As for how it changed my life, I'm not as anal as I used to be. I feel the
holistic sense of oneness has some validity. It clears away the muddle we've
picked up with life and lets us see things we alway knew, but didn't know we
knew, and I generally feel more love for all people and act less selfishly as
a result...
Oh, yes: and all those descriptions of mystic experiences make perfect sense
to me...
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