There is one particular state of consciousness that can change your life forever.
This holy moment can only be described as “ecstatic” in that your connection to life expands significantly.
In this profound state of being, you feel that life is full of beauty and sacredness – yet this feeling is not subjective, but is instead an objective phenomenon that is outside your personal self.
Theologian Rudolf Otto called this experience “numinosum.” But in this article, we’ll refer to it as the mystical experience.
All throughout history, the mystical experience has been referred to as a “religious” or spiritual experience, where the few mystics that recorded their experiences reported it as a rapturous and undifferentiated sense of profound Unity with all of existence.
There have been many descriptions of the mystical experience throughout the ages. A few of my favorites are firstly the ancient Greek word and mystical Christian concept of Kenosis, or divine emptying. Such an intriguing word has been used for centuries to describe the state of divine receptivity that closely mimics what it’s like to have a mystical experience.
In psychology, the closest terms that capture this mysterious state of being are Abraham Maslow’s description of “Peak Experiences,” and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow.”
And in nature-orientated cultures like the Australian Aborigines, mystical experiences have been referred to as “Dadirri” – or the deep listening emerging from silent and still awareness.
But in layman’s terms, what is the mystical experience? And of what relevance does it have to the spiritual awakening journey that so many of us are undergoing?
Table of contents
What is a Mystical Experience?
What is a mystical experience? In essence, the mystical experience is a state of being in which the personal ego (or separate sense of self) merges back into the Divine Self, also known as Source, Consciousness, God, Nondual Awareness, Brahman, or Nirvana.
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A few other synonyms of the mystical experience are the Buddhist concept of Satori, the Kundalini awakening, as well as the Western notion of Self-Transcendence and the transpersonal experience.
Mystical experiences are temporary glimpses into our most sacred True Nature.
Those who undergo mystical experiences often describe feelings of bliss, ecstasy, unconditional love, interconnectedness, and Oneness with all things.
The Candle in the Dark (What a Mystical Experience Feels Like)
Perhaps the best way to elaborate the mystical experience might be with an allegory. The ancient Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta has an interesting one:
Imagine that you are in a completely dark room. You’ve been told that in this room lives a very large snake. As you sit in the room, you can see its silhouette and you feel great fear as you contemplate the potential for it to bite you at any moment. But one day there is a flash of light which illuminates the room and you see that what looked like a snake was, in reality, a rope. Although the flash of light was momentary, it gave you a glimpse of the truth. All of a sudden your long-held fear vanished entirely, and your experience of the room was never the same ever again.
This is what a mystical experience feels like: it is like a flash of truth that releases you from your limited sense of self and gives you a taste of a reality that somehow feels more real.
Ancient Greek philosopher Plato once recounted a similar allegory from his teacher Socrates, which described what the mystical experience feels like and how it impacts one’s life. Below, I’ve loosely paraphrased his intriguing thought-experiment:
Suppose that you’ve been kept chained in a cave all your life. Behind you blazes a fire, and next to you sit a row of other prisoners. All that you and the prisoners know of life is the experience of watching the shadows dancing on the opposite wall to you, and the shared interpretations of what you see. However, by chance one day, one of the prisoner’s chains breaks, and he escapes into the outside world. At first, he is confused, overwhelmed, scared, but he also feels an immense sense of expansion, awe, and bliss. He is aware that he is experiencing a larger, more complete and absorbing reality than what he could see within the cave. His natural instinct is to return to liberate his fellow men, but after struggling back into the world of darkness and shadows, his attempt to enlighten his companions is met with ridicule and incredulity as they accuse him of being crazy.
To some degree, we are all prisoners in the cave of our past experiences. Any mental worldview becomes a cave the moment it is taken for “absolute reality.”
9 Characteristics of the Mystical Experience
There are moments of oneness with the Beloved, absolutely ecstasy and bliss. That is nothingness. And this nothingness loves you, responds to you, fulfils you utterly and yet there is nothing there. You flow out like a river without diminishing. This is the great mystical experience, the great ecstasy.
– Irina Tweedie, Sufi & teacher
Every person’s mystical experience varies in length and intensity. However, there are a series of characteristics that almost all people who glimpse the Divine share.
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If you’re curious to know whether or not you’ve had a mystical experience, you can read the nine characteristics that I’ve defined below:
1. Conscious Unity
The boundaries of where you perceive your individual identity to begin and end completely vanish (otherwise known as ego death). Instead, you’re left with a boundless and infinite union with all that is around you.
2. There is No Time or Space
With a lack of a definable identity or spatial recognition, your sense of time feels infinite. You go from perceiving time from moment-to-moment as a static individual, to perceiving it as a stream of eternal present moments.
Without time, space is endless.
Because your sense of identity is gone, your ability to separate “your” (now non-existent) surroundings into individual “spatial” elements also disappears.
3. Objective Reality
Without a discernible identity comes a sense of greater “objectivity” as though you’re experiencing a much more intricate and profound reality. Everything doesn’t just feel perfect, everything is innately perfect.
4. Gratitude
Most of your ecstatic feelings stem from an immense sense of gratitude. This gratitude is an overwhelming sense of awe at “your” (now non-existent) insignificance in comparison to the vastness of existence.
5. Life is Seen as Sacred
Your sense of gratitude is so vast that you feel almost undeserving of having the opportunity to experience such a miracle. You develop a new sense of respect for the sacredness of life that allows you to be here.
6. You Understand the Nature of Paradox
Normally, our sense of egoic self creates a duality in our perception of reality (i.e., “I” am separate from “That”). However, the moment this separation disappears, you’re left with a non-dual reality in which your intellect finds paradox after paradox (e.g., something is both light/dark, here/absent, human/divine, limited/eternal, beautiful/ugly, etc.). In truly understanding the nature of paradox and how it permeates all of reality, you experience mind-blowing realizations and expansive breakthroughs.
7. The Experience is Indescribable
The overwhelming magnitude of emotions and intuitive understanding that you embody makes the attempt to even describe the mystical experience feel limited by language. To try and put words to such a reality feels insulting to the depth of the experience.
8. The Experience is Temporary
The very nature of the mystical experience (experience being the keyword here), is its transience. Eventually, you end up returning back to your habitual way of life, but the experience changes something deep inside of you.
9. The Experience is Life-Changing
After experiencing such a state of ineffable Divine Truth, suddenly death isn’t as scary as it used to be, and the beliefs or ambitions that you once held to be so important often tend to lose their meaning. In fact, the mystical experience often awakens a deep thirst to try to integrate as much of that experience back into one’s regular day-to-day life as possible. And so begins (or deepens) the spiritual awakening process.
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The Mystical Experience is Only a Taste
There’s a useful term in the Christian doctrine known as “Grace.” This word basically means that we receive mercy and love from the Divine because it wants us to have it, not because we have done anything to deserve it.
Many people confuse having a mystical or spiritual experience with cultivating a spiritual life. It’s common to think that we can somehow “earn” or “manifest” such profound glimpses into the Divine, when in reality, such experiences are brought about by grace.
Furthermore, our appreciation of such profound experiences is directly proportionate to our development of spiritual maturity.
If the grace of a mystical experience is given to a 10-year-old child, they will no doubt enjoy the experience. But the degree in which they absorb it will be much less compared to someone who has undergone maturation – or the deep exploration of their psyche and the ability to live life from the seat of their Soul.
For the child, the mystical experience will be a great experience that will eventually fade and become a distant memory. But for an adult who has dedicated their life to cultivating spiritual maturity, to “tilling the soil of the Soul,” this experience becomes the seed that is prepared to blossom.
Indeed, such an experience might be the very tipping point that leads to the ultimate spiritual awakening – also known as Enlightenment or Illumination – or the permanent shift in consciousness from the individual ego to the Infinite Higher Self.
Inner Work & Soul Work
Experiencing spiritual liberation as the goal of the spiritual path is precisely why practicing inner work (i.e., self-love, inner child, and shadow work) and soul work (i.e., surrender, disidentification with the ego, stillness) are so essential to committing to the journey of spiritual awakening.
Without removing the blockages that obscure our Inner Light, mystical experiences have no deep or long-lasting impact on us.
In other words, such experiences just become extravagant rendezvous with no real substance.
But by learning to integrate the profound realizations that we’ve been given access to, we can experience true and long-lasting transformation. Slowly and steadily, we begin to taste the essence of Eternity.
Have you ever had a mystical experience? What was it like? I’d love to hear about it below!
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I feel most deeply relaxed and can meditate better when in nature. I was sitting in my tree stand hunting as the sun was about to rise and the forest wake up in front of me, when I felt an overwhelming presence of my ancestors beside me and a visual image of a man from another time era dressed in rags was hanging from a tree. Now, as disturbing as this might sound, it did not frighten me at all! I felt more in tune with my surroundings. Since that “apparition” my game cameras will not record between certain times consistently when they worked perfectly fine prior to that experience.
That experience was life changing and I developed a deeper appreciation for everything life has to offer, from the minute to the immense! This was absolutely amazing! But I am still confused as to why my ancestors felt like I needed to see that…. it was like they were watching me see it….
In sharing this, I long for all who read this to try what I did for the sake of your own growth. Way back in the mid-90’s I had plenty of trouble, as usual. I was begging and praying for a job that paid enough to cover bills and get me an apartment, and away from my mother. I didn’t get that. This is what was given to me: I was sitting on the edge of the bed, overwhelmed, looking at a stack of bills. The stress was so intense, I could feel it become an all over body ache. Head aching, and tears rolling, I got a message. In my deep self, I was urged to look hard and long at the pile of bills, and the unfulfilled desires of my heart. Increasingly distressed, I got another urge: Put my eyes away from my worries; open the Word; I found one passage – just one sentence – that seemed to be written for me; meditate on it, think on it, intermingle with different scenarios. I was not to look at the time, answer the phone, stop and go watch tv, none of these things. I do not know how… Read more »
I would just caution people to be careful who you share your mystical experience with. Socrates describes perfectly my experience. After trying to share what happened to me with others my family had me locked in a psych ward because they thought I was crazy and couldn’t comprehend any of what I was trying to communicate to them. It didn’t help that I had no idea what was going on either or how to explain it in words. Like this article described, it’s an experience beyond what language can communicate.
Hi, I think I have had at least 3 mystical experiences in my life, one staying at a beautiful lake, having had my chakras opened and feeling connected with the trees, the lake the air, the whole nature around me. The second one happened sponateously in a chapel, admiring at an outstanding sculpture, listening to the baroque music the was filling the air in this sacred space. I suddenly felt myself beeing part of the all, I felt such a wonderful lightfulness, happiness and gratitude for everything that tears of gratitude came out of my eyes. The last occured a few days ago, watching two butterflies flying and playing with each other in a wonderful sunny morning. Suddenly the first and then the second butterfly disappeared. I could not see them any more. It was to me like they had gone behind a curtain. A freind of mine also saw them disappear but tried to find a logical explanation but I knew that I had observed something “different” . An hour later we were having lunch in a restaurant and I suddenly noticed the name of the wife of a friend who has opened my mind for spirituality. It is… Read more »
31 years ago I was an addict. But something deep inside told me there was MORE. I have been clean since that day, the intense desire for drugs left instantly. Yes, call this both mystic and grace.
I remember having this connection during December 2019, She was named “Donut Mari”, we played in this game called Moe, which is initially called Moe Girl Cafe 2, where anime people play their own cafe creations, and make foods and sell them, and to use energy drinks if the characters lose out energy, and we could use XP books to upgrade the characters. I think I have played it for 5 years for now, But back then, 2017; I was merely a 2D character loving person. I was like so against real girls, I dunno why. Maybe it was because how realistic relationships give. Or the things that love give you to make you “make-believe”. It was more like “2D for life” lmao. I was known as “Riolu” in most games or those friends who knew me. I mostly indulged myself with anime and visual novels. Recap back to April 2018, I met up this lass, who lived in Dominican Republic, but had many behaviour problems, BPD, , depression, had this self-validation for having a boyfriend. But eh, I had to deal with that and be right by her side, even though it wasn’t easy, though her friends didn’t quite… Read more »
I recently comprehended that I am a part of the Spiritual Hierarchy as an initiate who has taken the fourth initiation which means my soul body or causal body has been absorbed into my physical body. I am what is known as a custodian of the Plan. I say this to let you know that in my now experience, the mystical experience happens through me not to me. I am a mystical experience in my every day life, every day awareness. What this means in an actual, grounded reality of being in body is that I am always surrounded by sacred space. In this space I am always feeling love, appreciation, gratitude and thankfulness but I am still a persona/psyche/ego that evinces its own plan and like to take things for granted. While I live as sacred space and mystical experience, I also do the dishes, etc in a mindful state which is like a constant meditative state. I live in non-ordinary reality. You might ask, “how do I do that?” I experience it as a more expanded awareness where I just understand that my perceptions are different.
First thanks for this article and all others. I come here quite often, it helps me to make sense of so much that Ive been going through. In 2016 I walked a pilgrimage and upon meeting someone I started feeling like if layers of myself were being peeled off, giving space to my soul to come out and clarity was entering my body mind and heart. For a while I felt light and like curtains in front of me were being opened. Finally a few weeks later and still having this feeling so strong, I was out with a friend and for a moment a felt such a lightness within myself , like out of my body and when I looked around I could feel some sort of heaviness, like of this “life” and I remember telling my friend that I was tired of “all that”- her answer was , yes me too, all those politicians – but nope I was talking about “something else”. Anyways after that my life went upside down, I could not relate to anything I had been brought to believe before (like the mundane life, work, friends, career), Ive started longing for some “place”. Ever… Read more »
I had a mystical, or mini awakening, as I’ve been referring to it this past summer during morning meditation. I was shown in the most visceral and textural way that I AM the 4 elements. This is by far the most vivid experience I’ve ever had and at the very end of this meditation my inner light being levitated. This meditation has changed me on a fundamental level. I AM nature and nature is me. Following this meditation nature became comfortable with me on an intimate level; spiders would ask to visit and explore me, and in turn I was able to feel and know their consciousness, birds in particular started to come very close to observe and make requests. The mere sight of pollution in the bay brings about tears of deep sorrow. Clearly I’m meant to share this profound sensitivity and direct the message in ways that will illicit a change for good, but so far I haven’t organized any action into existence other than share my awareness with only a select few.
I’m not exactly sure that is what I experienced but it was powerful. I was at my Moms side as I didn’t want her to die alone. Her oxygen levels were getting low and I knew she would be gone soon. The icu room she was in had many lights. The kind that are in the ceiling. Then those lights starting flashing. It was like I was in a disco room. I can’t really explain how it felt other than love. Felt like the most calming and loving feeling. Then my Mom passed away. That feeling stayed with me for a couple of hours. This was the worst time of my life but at that exact moment it was unforgettable loving and unexplainable feeling.