This is pretty long, but I think some people may benefit from overhearing another person’s extraordinary experience. A reader (whose privacy I protect by leaving off his name) recently emailed me asking if I would be willing to ask questions on his behalf, and added:
“Also, you mentioned on your “Contact” page that thing you like hearing most is firsthand experiences. If you want, I can tell you the story of a certain jaw-dropping mystical experience I had which totally defied the “laws” of “reality” and cemented for me a growing inner knowledge of Unity and my own multidimensional nature.”
I answered that I’d be glad to ask, and would be very interested in his experience.
[From him]
My experience. Sorry, but you’re getting the long version. Don’t know how else to tell it. Here goes.
Well, to start, this is the only time something like this has ever happened to me. A peak experience. I’m tempted to call it “once-in-a-lifetime” but avoid it because to do so may make it true. The story sounds a little paranoid-schizophrenic at times, but all I can say is, no, that’s not it. Through my profession and degrees, I’m fairly qualified to say that, as qualified as anyone is to judge their own sanity. (Though I gather that such officialdom is of little consequence to you… I can’t remember if it was Jane or Seth who called academic degrees “badges of ritualized ignorance.”)
Anyway.
2 nights before: In meditation, I try to contact my connection to the divine, the “sacred inner heart.” I don’t or can’t feel anything, and I feel frustrated, hurt, and rejected.
1 night before: For the only time in my life, and after about a year of craning my neck up to look on a near-nightly basis, I see a UFO in the sky. (Well, could be our own government, but whatever. It was not plane, helicopter, or drone. 3 lights flying up extremely high in triangle formation, each pulsing its light in unison.)
The day of: I go to a stand-up comedy event with my friend. I talk to the girl stationed at the front to admit people and tell her I’ve already bought my ticket, I selected Will Call, I ask her where Will Call is. Even though this is her whole job, she’s never heard of Will Call. So our conversation is like: “WIll call.” “Will call?” “Yeah, will call. Where’s will call?” “Will call? You’re saying that you will call?” “No, to pick up the tickets: will call.” “Will call? Your name is Will Call?” On and on like that, a real Who’s On First scenario. So we end up saying back and forth to each other the words “Will call” at least 10 times.
Also, on the way back from the event, I forget to put my lights on. So gradually as it gets darker more and more other cars on the road notice and are flashing me. For some reason I run through every possible reason for this except the most obvious one. So we’re both driving home like dumbasses going “They’re definitely trying to communicate something! They’re trying to give us a message! What are they trying to communicate? Do we have a cat on the roof?”
(I only piece it together after the fact that the above 4 events all seem to be a big drum-roll/ countdown with the message: “You’re about to get a return call from the universe.”)
Now, at this point I’m home. 10pm ish. Walking around outside by myself, in the area around my neighborhood, listening to a Seth audiobook. (As I am wont to do.)
The inner side of the experience is this, and this is going on throughout the whole outer side to follow: In the Seth book, he gives directions to contact your higher self. Imagine yourself as a single cell in a larger being, imagine sending that larger being energy and receiving energy back from the being. I do this, and wow, I feel overwhelmed with this feeling of divine love. Never have felt such an upswell of unconditional love or positive emotion of any kind without an apparent objective stimulus. So, feeling this, I almost lose touch with my surroundings, so I’m laying on the grass shirtless (it was a hot night), just basking in this cosmic love. I would probably look quite foolish if a neighbor were to walk by, but I’m not in the mood to care.
I continue my walk, on this emotional high. And in the sky I think I see a UFO. Not sure, but it’s suspicious. I have the feeling I’m really about to meet some ETs, so now my elation is mixed with real fear, because at this moment it seems like an immanent possibility. And I quickly realize that the thought of actually meeting an ET now is quite scary and overwhelming. Well, no flying saucer materializes, so I continue my walk. But still I’m keyed up with this mix of divine love and mystical fear. And I have the sense that something is telepathically trying to communicate with me. Of course, every other second I’m thinking “No, that’s crazy” but I’m persistently getting that impression and I’m communicating back. With what exactly, I’m not sure, but mostly I think I had it framed as “ETs”, physical or non-.
This maybe-real telepathic communication continues, I still feel on the edge of something contacting me, I’m on the lookout, and I come to an area on the path where I have a view of a high treeline at the edge of some woods, about 70 feet away. I see a small, bright, yellowish light floating high in the trees! In a position where I can’t see any natural reason for a light to be. I’m extremely excited at this point, and I telepathically say something like “Are you really there?” And instantly when I say that, a second light appears next to the first, a gust of wind comes toward me from the direction of the two lights, and as it reaches me and whooshes by all the crickets beneath my feet start singing. I feel the presence of something. I telepathically agree with whoever this is, “Let’s meet back at my house and talk.” As I start walking back I think, “Holy shit, can this be real?” And then instantly after thinking that, two bats swoop down straight for me and circle my head twice, inches away from my face. On the short 5-minute walk back to my house, directly on the path I always take, animal after animal is stationed like a breadcrumb trail. A deer. A cat. A fox.
I get to my backyard and I’m thinking, Wow, Holy shit, the ship is coming. I’m expecting my telepathic guest, whoever or whatever it is. Feeling connected but also some fear because, holy shit what’s happening. The sky is mostly clear, except I notice a bit in the distance a medium-sized cloud, wide enough to cover the area taken up by around 4-6 houses. This “cloud” seems to make a beeline for me sitting there on the grass in my backyard looking up. It seems to come over to me fast, then pauses directly above me/my house for 15 minutes. As this is going on, there’s all this wind and what feels like “energy.” The cloud is stationed above me now, and I clearly see throughout the whole thing flashing lights. All throughout the cloud, as if it were filled with hundreds of fireflies. At this point, I literally think “I must be dreaming.” It’s the only time in my life I have believed it was more likely that I was dreaming than that what I was witnessing was reality. I check, and nope, I’m definitely awake, extremely awake.
After about 15 minutes, the cloud starts moving again and flies off fairly quickly, like it came. I then tried to channel whoever or whatever this was that I was communicating with, because why not. Normally I feel a lot of self-doubt with channeling and it feels like I’m making it up. This time, I got into a trance and felt I was just being fed one word at a time, not knowing what the next would be, not knowing at all if what I was saying was actually forming real sentences and coherent thoughts. Later, upon transcribing, indeed it made sense.
Of all the elements of this whole experience, the channeling part is what I put the least stock in, partly because the resulting material feels a bit too generic for my credulity, but I’ll just give one quote from it for completeness:
“Your selves are loved, protected, and fed by the grace of “us over here” all the time–meaning really only an army of what is essentially You. Yet we are alive and active in deeper parts of yourself: loving, healing, bringing the light. I can’t stress enough the importance of generating for God, or what you could call the Most Whole Overself. This being is at once rapidly evolving and eternally One, and you are reflections of that. Take the time to notice the ways in which your body generates physical manifestations such as touch, taste, hearing. And you will know what God feels in all the parts of His–Its–soul. We are essentially one and yet many. Your continuous self is continuous with All That Is. Never is there need to be frightened for you are whole and insoluble to the everlasting nth degree!”
Oh and I should mention. Ever since that night (about 8 months ago), starting the day after and continuing up to the present, I’ve had a new sense installed. Don’t know what else to call it.
Basically, every time my mind/heart is in a place of peace and stillness, I get a warm pleasant pressure/tingling sensation in my 6th chakra/ 3rd eye area. The more of an intensely peaceful state, the more intense this feeling gets. On the medium-to-high end, it is not subtle in the slightest. It’s unmistakable, like to the point of being the strongest, most noticeable sensation in the whole body/mind.
The way I interpret this “new sense” is something like a consciousness frequency level indicator. As if I said to the universe: “Could you please give me a concrete way to surmise moment by moment whether I’m in the right state of mind for my goal of awakening?” And that’s how I experience it, like a constant feedback system to let me know whether I’m on the beam. When it’s active, I’m instantly 50% more calm and focused, and any anxiety I had been feeling disappears. Sometimes I will intentionally “turn it on” (which I have taught myself how to do) during a therapy session with a client, and it seems to instantly make me more calm, present, and helpful.
For me, this “new sense” is the most evidentiary element of the whole experience. A parting gift from the universe. If it weren’t for me continuing to experience it on a daily basis, I probably would have written off the whole experience by now as overactive imagination.
[I responded as follows]:
This was worth waiting for! A couple of comments first on your remarkable experience. (May I share it with my lists, omitting your name?)
- I only piece it together after the fact
The fact that you only pieced it together after the fact ought to help reassure you that it happened to you, not by you.
- … Seth …. Imagine yourself as a single cell in a larger being, imagine sending that larger being energy and receiving energy back from the being.
I can think of no better way to destroy the obstructive assumption that you would somehow have to overcome distance, would have to “go somewhere” in order to contact your higher self. And that it worked, you can not be in doubt.
- … the thought of actually meeting an ET now is quite scary and overwhelming.
The difference between daydreaming, or thinking of something in the abstract, and confronting the possibility for real. Very graphic and concise description. MY anticipation of change in my upcoming Gateway program, in 1992, was accompanied by a bit of dread, as well, which a psychic friend of mine assured me was actually a good sign, that something within me was worried as to what might happen to it as a result of the change. That is, it was a sign that something inside knew full well that it wouldn’t be a case of “nothing happened.”
- This maybe-real telepathic communication
Yeo, that’s the way it works. You can’t be sure it is real, you can’t dismiss it out of hand. You have to go with maybe. Another indicator of a non-imaginary and non-normal experience.
- I’m expecting my telepathic guest, whoever or whatever it is.
You couldn’t know what to expect, but you – something within you that couldn’t be denied – did expect.
- … it feels like I’m making it up.
“Probably I’m just making it up” is a phrase heard so often in Monroe debriefs! It has become an in joke, really, it is heard so often. I have come to think that the phrase is a sure sign that something real happened, because the person saying it can’t deny that something happened, but had no handle on it, and knows only that s/he didn’t deliberately invent it, but is not ready to claim it as an actual, valid, occurrence.
- … channeling part is what I put the least stock in, partly because the resulting material feels a bit too generic for my credulity…
In 30 years of experience, I find that one never really knows at the time to what degree an experience is “mine” and to what degree “other.” Once I ceased trying to be sure of what one could never be sure about, it released a brake on my ability to communicate. Given that you and whoever you communicate with are sharing a temporary joint mind, the results are going to come out in a flavor somewhat you (because after all it has to proceed through your linguistic centers, except for images) and somewhat other (in that the content will reveal itself to be other than you would have expected, though that recognition of otherness may not occur until after you are done communicating).
One thing for sure: Don’t judge the content by your expectations either before or after the communication. There is no reason for you to assume that a message will conform to your expectations, and plenty of reasons to be unsurprised when it doesn’t.
- … had a new sense installed.
That’s a very good way to think of it. Trust it and cherish it, and it would be as well to have a fiduciary attitude toward it, something between reverence and stewardship. It is, after all, what you wanted.
- … consciousness frequency level indicator
Not only a valuable sense, but a concise and helpful name for it, very non-woowoo.
- …continuing to experience it on a daily basis
“Use it or lose it.”
- I probably would have written off the whole experience by now as overactive imagination.
Good that you don’t. It will help move you to another world, with wider boundaries and greater possibilities, a la Thoreau’s statement in Waldon.
[From him]: After saying it was okay to share, he added this comment on my answers :
- Once I ceased trying to be sure of what one could never be sure about, it released a brake on my ability to communicate.
Recently, thanks to the Rita books, I have made a big step in this direction. Getting it that “this side” and “the other side” are One changed things for me. I had imagined channeling/contacting spirits being a major feat requiring superhuman psychic discipline. In light of your/Rita’s work I realized there’s no separation, everyone is right here, closer than my nose. No more difficult than picking up a phone and listening to the voice of whomever I call.
Also, reading between the lines it appeared to me that your reception style does not involve hearing words pop clearly into your head, and so once I applied this to my own attempts, I realized that the access was right there waiting, it just wasn’t in the form I had anticipated.