Some mystics would tell us the only spiritual life worth talking about is the experiential kind, not the religious.
Why we are here is based on inner experience, gnosis, not the expectations of our country of origin, tradition, culture, teachings or habits.
Gnosis is connection to Reality. Those who have experienced it are marked by a reluctance to talk about it.
What we know of it suggests it is spontaneous, though some religious teachers claim they can induce it in their pupils by special disciplines. the Jesus of the Christian bible said his message was only for those already prepared by his God, perhaps a reference to the experience of gnosis. Bible and mystical references suggest it can’t be earned or deserved.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the experience happens to those aged between 20 and 30. Each experience brings with it a sense of departure from the body.
While it lasts, the feeling is of being infused as if anaesthetised with a profound sense of joy. Everything that exists or has ever existed belongs intensely to the one having the experience. There is no absence of time, just no such thing as time.
It is as if the subject is being observed with benign indifference, as if their existence is unremarkable, as if they are an essential part of a reality in which they exist for ever.
The experiences come with an undetectable gentleness as if from an infinite, unassailable strength. There is a sense that the even greater Reality is waiting nearby. Afterwards, some subjects conclude they are given as much of the experience as they can bear. As the experience begins to leave the loss is fought against with agitation and sadness, and a panicky sense of loss.
The experiences do not lead the subject to want to be a better human being. They can even make the subject impatient with being human at all. Being a “better”, a “good”, human being, become givens, “fruits of the spirit”. After such experiences these attributes seem axiomatic, automatic, needing no effort to achieve.
This gnosis is not anthropomorphic, human centred, not even biological.
Gnosis makes a clear distinction between the human spirit and what humans call the Holy Spirit, that which is of man, (matter, morality and ethics), and that which is Real, pure, the soul.
The soul is a part of what those who have the gnostic experience then know as their true identity, an identity which is part of a whole to which they will eventually return permanently.
The sense is that the soul is merely placed in the human mind and body in order to experience matter and when that is satisfactorily accomplished, when the soul is pure spirit, then the body is discarded and the mind is shelved as no longer required. Only souls are eternal, not humans.
All Is Well.
Mysticexperiences.net
Please feel free to reblog.
Note: This was originally posted in 2016 and is posted here again in slightly re-edited form. It is a restatement of my Mystical Experiences Of Reality, (MER) several times a year from my late 14 years to 35 years of age.
Mystical Experiences of Reality 
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Glorious.
The physical world can never have been a “good” place to exist. In the words of Hobbes….and so forth, human life on earth leaves much (or perhaps everything) to be desired. It is indeed so difficult to come back or want to come back from those times when one seems to have experienced a better state of being. Or non being – I am always acutely aware of the English translation of the word nirvana – a “blowing out” according to some.
In all the mysteries by which we are surrounded, it should not come as a great surprise perhaps if some sort of consciousness was not the basis of all existence, physical and otherwise.
And if so, then it does not seem too far fetched to imagine and hope that when body and mind are discarded, pure spirit comes into being.
Or if ultimate reality turns out to be simply a “blowing out” with no continuance of any form of consciousness, then some might own that to be a better option than living in the physical reality in which we find ourselves.
What is it all for, we ask. Who and what am I. Perhaps we will discover that after leaving this place. Perhaps not. Either way, and end to struggle is the result.
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Anthony:
Nirvana: “(in Buddhism) a transcendent state in which there is neither suffering, desire, nor sense of self, and the subject is released from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth. It represents the final goal of Buddhism”. (Google).
I certainly never experienced “suffering” or “desire” right from the beginning of my mystical
experiences of Reality, (MER). However a diminished “sense of self” was there at the beginning. It diminished even further with each separate MER.
So far as “struggle” is concerned, I certainly struggled fiercely to stay in my MERs as I found myself coming back into humanity, but any “struggle” to deal with my human condition thereafter finally dissolved on its own.
All best regards,
Keith.
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