5
The Mystical Experience: Dawn of a New Species
I know you. You're in the prime of life, intelligent, and a seeker. Something strange is tugging at you, pulling you, calling you like a siren. Something vast and mysterious; much larger than this life and world. It's spiritual, yet in no way religious. It touches—no, almost touches—you. You reach out, but can't quite grasp it, even describe it. Yet it's somehow very important.
What you feel is the mystical impulse, the stirring within you of a potential higher form of consciousness, a consciousness by which you can know directly that larger life and world. You feel it because you're one of the best of the race, at your best, in your prime. In the scheme of evolution, you are now on center stage, a candidate to cross a remarkable threshold and become a new species of human.
That's the good news. The bad news is that only one in many millions ever makes it (many are called but few chosen), and even then just temporarily and imperfectly. These are the forerunners of the next step in Man's evolution. Many of them you've heard of, some are household names, and a few have changed the course of history. They have inspired every religion known to Man, and yet these religions have been from the start completely and utterly wrong. For not only have they distorted, both intentionally and unintentionally, their founders' teachings, they have attributed their supernatural experiences to visions granted by God, when they were not. They were brief and unexpected glimpses into a larger, extra-dimensional world by the awakening of a higher mental faculty that in its first act of knowing suddenly extracts an extra dimension of space from time.
Jesus one day “saw the heavens rent asunder,”1 and from then on spoke of a vast “kingdom not of [beyond] this world,”2 a kingdom that could not be “beheld” anywhere except “within you.”3; Mohammed likewise described “the heavens with the clouds…rent asunder”4 and from then on spoke of a much larger world, known by a higher power that was “All-Embracing, All-Knowing.”5 It could see at once “[all] that is before them and [all] that is after them”6 by comparison with which “the life of this world is but comfort of illusion.”7
In fact all those who have been so introduced to this new faculty describe having seen something like a higher plane of existence, another level of reality, or a vast, timeless realm lying beyond our space-time world, and seen in a new way, a way whereby all is infinite, alive, and One. Isn't this exactly what we should expect, by now, when an extra dimension is apprehended with its accompanying sense? For one thing, and perhaps the most telling, that which was before separated in time, the past and future, is now seen at once along that extra dimension; therefore, time, as previously known, does not exist.
Here are selected quotes from mystics and mystic texts that affirm this:
Of course the higher faculty that apprehends this extra dimension has its own form of conception, wherein both the “one after another” in our time and the “one beside another” in our space become the “one within another” in higher space (as an extra dimension connects all points of threedimensional space). This transfinite conception, that of the whole contained in each part, is the very mental process by which an extra dimension is perceived, and it is also unmistakably present in the mystical experience.
Here are more quotes in support of this:
The mystical experience is the momentary breakthrough of a higher evolutionary faculty that apprehends an extra dimension of space. But if so, how did it all get so distorted, so wrong? Why has its real nature been overlooked and instead held to be a vision of God, a gift bestowed upon a chosen few? Why do we now have so many religions with so many symbols, doctrines, rules, and regulations all claiming to be the only, true one? Three reasons.
First is that the mystical experience by its very nature lends itself to gross distortion. The person finds it impossible to grasp it intellectually even in one's thoughts. That is, there is distortion right off in transposing the higher conceptions into the lower. This is compounded when the person tries to convey the transfinite nature of the experience in normal, conceptual terms. Our concepts are only possible attempts at expressing an impossible conception. The result is absurdity and failure. The experience is ineffable. This is why the Tao Te Ching says: “The way that can be told I Is not the constant way; I The name that can be named I Is not the constant name.”29
Nevertheless, such powerful experiences cannot but be conveyed. Inevitably differences in interpretation arise over their true meaning, and further differences of opinion over these, hence further interpretations, and ever more distortion. The only way to make sense out of this worldwide mess is to look for the main elements to see if there is a pattern. There is.
The Perennial Philosophy says our world is part of a larger one, which requires a new sense to see, and our purpose is to get in touch with our larger selves within that world. Simple enough, and perfectly in tune with extra-dimensional theory. Here, our space-time world is part of a larger, extra-dimensional one, which requires a higher faculty to see; we are naturally programmed, or naturally selected, by evolution to progress towards it and our higher selves.
The second reason why the extra-dimensional nature of the phenomenon has been overlooked is that the mystical experiences that shaped world religion occurred about two thousand years ago when most people had little use for notions of space and time and no theory of evolution. Their concerns were with social behavior and religion. Remember that this new vision is as incomplete and unrefined as the first few flashes of selfconsciousness are to any child. If you remember your first thoughts of your new world, I'm sure they weren't “Hey, there are three dimensions of space plus time.” (In fact, many still don't know this! If you stopped a hundred people on the street and asked them how many dimensions of space there are, I'd bet you'd get some astounding responses.)
The most striking thing about your first perception was probably the sheer novelty of the perception itself. This is how it is with the higher faculty as well. But since almost all the workings of the world we now know as basic laws of nature were at that time attributed to acts of God or gods, it is understandable that the first interpretation, and the inevitable distortion, would be along those lines. Any later mystical experiences would likely be put into the same familiar context.
The third reason is where the intentional part comes in. It is the implication for an expanded, eternal life in the larger world. Virtually all mystical experiences (the consciousness of consciousness) include this apprehension. (Mohammed: “That is life, if they but knew.”30 Paul: “Your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ [comes] your life will appear.”31 Jesus: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”32) It is easy to see how the promise of life after death can be exploited to convert and hold people to one's cause. It is the main draw and justifies all the rules and regulations (a fair trade), and in the process it establishes a complicated hierarchy, as it were, of middlemen—brokers—between man and God.
The situation becomes: “If you want eternal life, go through me.” Yet this is exactly what the founders of these religions tried to do away with! Jesus not only rejected all external rites, he openly denounced the priests of organized religion, seeing them as obstacles to any real sampling of the Kingdom. “But woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men. For you yourselves do not go in, nor do you allow those going in to enter.”33 Compare this with what the Buddha said: “Leave then dogmatic views and their attendant strife.”34
No one who has had a mystical experience has ever taught that life after death (beyond our space-time) had to be acquired or granted; it's just the opposite, that everyone possesses it naturally. Bucke calls it “a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”35 This is what the great religious leaders wanted, for everyone to see this for themselves. But the fact is, they didn't quite know how to bring it about as their own experiences came so naturally and effortlessly. The Buddha said: “Please don't think that when I attained enlightenment, there was anything I attained.”36 Compare this with Plotinus: “We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing…a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.”37
These evolutionary prodigies assumed naively that if people did the same thing they did, lead a good, healthy, moral life, they would acquire the higher sense the same way they did, spontaneously. Jesus said: “The Kingdom of God comes unawares”38 and “watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”39 Mohammed said: “It cometh not to you save unawares…Knowledge thereof is with Allah only.”40 The Tao Te Ching: “[The Tao] arrives without being summoned.41
Toward this end, Mohammed preached only “righteous conduct” the Buddha the Middle Way, and Jesus said to “love one's neighbor as oneself.” Simple as that, but look at what we ended up with, especially in the West. Jesus preached the Kingdom of Heaven, and we got the Church. Leo Tolstoy, in The Kingdom of God Is within You, said: “But Christ could certainly not have established the church, that is, what we now understand by the word, because neither in Christ's words, nor in the conception of the men of that time, was there anything resembling the concept of a church, as we know it now, with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and above all, its assertion of infallibility.”42
Nevertheless, Bucke, seeing the situation for what it was, felt that the natural order of things would ultimately prevail and foresaw an idealistic future when the entire race had the higher faculty (the Coming of the Kingdom) and all formal religions had vanished.
In contact with the flux of cosmic consciousness all religions known and named today will be melted down. The human soul will be revolutionized. Religion will absolutely dominate the race. It will not depend on tradition. It will not be believed and disbelieved. It will not be a part of life, belonging to certain hours, times, occasions. It will not be in sacred books nor in the mouths of priests. It will not dwell in churches and meetings and forms and days. Its life will not be in prayers, hymns, nor discourses. It will not depend on special revelations, on the words of gods who come down to teach, nor on any bible or bibles. It will have no mission to save men from their sins or to secure them entrance to heaven. It will not teach a future immortality nor future glories, for immortality and all glory will exist in the here and now. The evidence of immortality will live in every heart as sight in every eye. Doubt of God and of eternal life will be as impossible as is now doubt of existence; the evidence of each will be the same. Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life. Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanently replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse.43
Bucke wrote this in 1901. But times have changed, and something's gone wrong. In the 1970s, Gopi Krishna, a mystic-philosopher from Kashmir, India, offered the same line of thought. He said that the mystical experience was a prelude to a higher evolutionary faculty (as in The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius and The Secret of Yoga) but with a drastically different outlook for the future.
He proposed that evolution is driven by one higher law of nature, which is both spiritual and biological (that which is different in our space is one in higher space, or transfinite). The spiritual part is the development of the lower into the higher; the biological part is a force called kundalini, an energy which, when activated in an individual, flows from the base of the spine to the top of the head, causing a psycho-physiological effect—the mystical experience. The significance of this is that it is a physical phenomenon, operative in a larger world, but with real physical effects in ours.
Gopi Krishna maintained that when the mind and body are in an exalted, “ready” state, they become a sort of open channel, and the higher energy, kundalini, rises up—a natural consequence of a natural, though higher law. Centuries earlier, Meister Eckhart, describing here the onset of the mystical experience, suggested the same:
God must act and pour himself into you the moment he finds you ready. Don't imagine that God can be compared to an earthly carpenter, who acts or doesn't act, as he wishes…. It is not that way with God; where and when God finds you ready, he must act and overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure, the sun must overflow into it and cannot refrain from doing that.44
So much for divine intervention. This in-pouring of energy helps explain a key feature of the mystical experience—the sensation of inner fire and light that usually kicks off the whole episode. Gopi Krishna wrote of this: “I felt a stream of liquid light entering my brain through the spinal cord…The illumination grew brighter and brighter.”45 (Remember Bucke's “flame-colored cloud”—the fire and light within.) As a physical phenomenon, the effect sometimes can actually be seen by those nearby. Jesus, for example, was often described as physically aglow when he united with the Kingdom. “And he was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his garments became white as light.”46 “As he was praying the fashion of his countenance was altered and his raiment became white and dazzling.”47
Gopi Krishna's kundalini is another name for the physical mechanism I offered earlier for the radiant light seen in mystical and neardeath experiences: tachyons, charged particles in extra-dimensional space that naturally have a “special glow” and carry information at faster-than-light speed. They are one and the same phenomenon, and it works here like this: When tachyons/kundalini enter our space via a portal of primed consciousness, the result is a blinding light within and glowing aura about the person (the oft depicted halo of saints and mystics?). As one's consciousness expands into extra-dimensional space, it sees this energy, radiating naturally in higher space, everywhere. Gopi Krishna describes his expanded consciousness at this point as “immersed in a sea of light,”48 a description in keeping with all mystical accounts.
Here are some mystical sources that support this view:
In an interesting aside to this and a hint of things to come, Mohammed says that while the righteous will be rewarded by the light and fire, those who are undeserving (disbelievers) will be overwhelmed and consumed by it. “And as for those who do evil, their retreat is the Fire…Unto them it is said: ‘Taste the torment of the Fire which ye used to deny.’”56 Compare this with Christianity's concept of the fires of Hell and the radiant bliss of Heaven. (I'll explain how this works, and why, in chapter 8.)
Gopi Krishna maintains—as Bucke did—that all the spiritual training in the world cannot bring about the higher faculty in someone; it can induce only the dimmest glimpses of it. The real thing is reserved for the best evolutionary specimens, who have from birth a rare ingredient, an innate capacity for it. Even in those cases where the faculty did arise during training, the individual probably had this capacity from the beginning, needing only a stimulus to bring it out. Gopi Krishna acknowledges this may not seem fair to those who devote their lives to such practices, and who in their despair blame the teacher, system, or even the justice of the divine being they strived toward, but calls it a “hard historical reality.”
Why there should be such a (despairing) reaction is based on the mistaken idea that all our spiritual endeavor is a means to please or propitiate the Lord and to seek His grace in order to cross over to the other shore. It is not an anomaly that while, in the intellectual sphere, out of millions who devote their lives to the various sciences and arts and make colossal sacrifices to win distinction in them, only an extremely few rise to the stature of a Shakespeare, a Kalidasa, an Omar Khayyam or a Confucius. The rest reasonably attribute the rise to exceptional natural talent, based on some still unknown biological law. In the spiritual realm the seekers after God do not often take the same reasonable view and, instead of attributing their failure to a law of nature, assign other causes for it.57
Both Krishna and Bucke recognized that, perhaps paradoxically, there is one way to accelerate and even trigger the coming of the higher faculty—by listening to or reading the words of others who have acquired it. (Bucke wrote his book, full of quotes about cosmic consciousness, with this end in mind.) Jesus' words certainly seemed to have acted as a catalyst on some of his disciples, and even on a Christian persecutor, Paul, who soon after Jesus' death, had an unmistakable taste of it.
Startled by a blinding light, “he was caught up into paradise and heard words that man may not repeat.58 He was “united” with a “new world” and a “new order”59 that “made foolish the wisdom of this world.”60 In a rare act of perspicuity, he described it as being “able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, the length, the depth, and the height.”61 In other words, a fourth, extra dimension! Paul then realized that Jesus' teachings about a vast kingdom known by a new way were the real thing and he became the great Apostle Paul.
That the words of those who have been there can actually rub off, and bring out the higher faculty in someone, has been acknowledged by others as well. The Upanishads state: “The awakening which thou hast known does not come through the intellect, but rather, in fullest measure, from the lips of the wise.”62 And the Buddha: “If an intelligent man be associated for one minute with a wise man, he will soon perceive the truth, as the tongue perceives the taste of soup.”63
Such power to elevate with the spoken word can help explain the enormous appeal that all the great religious leaders had. For if all humans have within a tendency to progress toward the higher state, they cannot help but be naturally and powerfully drawn to those who have been there. Gopi Krishna describes it as: “…the outcome of a deeply rooted urge in human beings to show respect to one naturally endowed with a lofty attribute of the human mind necessary for the evolution of the race.”64
But here Gopi Krishna's mood turns dark. While Bucke felt that flashes of the higher faculty would become more and more common, Gopi Krishna says just the opposite has happened—they have dwindled from ancient and even medieval times. How can this be?
His explanation is that Man is increasingly living under conditions that oppose and obstruct the natural blossoming of higher consciousness, in effect violating the law of evolution; he predicts this will lead to disaster. Krishna says that though all the great religious leaders and mystics have told us what to do to allow the higher faculty to come naturally (lead a balanced life and not be unduly attached to sensory and material pursuits), we have gone in the opposite direction. We're consumed by these pursuits. Hopelessly greedy and materialistic, we lust after the very things they have always told us to avoid.
For example, Paul: “Mind the things that are above, not the things that are on earth.”65 And, “be not conformed to this world, but be transformed in the newness of your mind.”66 Again: “But the sensual man does not perceive the things that are of the Spirit of God, for it is foolishness to him and he cannot understand.”67 Jesus: “Amen I say to you, with difficulty will a rich man enter the Kingdom of heaven. And further I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven:68 Mohammed: “Rivalry in worldly goods distracteth you.”69 The Buddha: “One is the road that leads to wealth, another the road that leads to Nirvana.”70
Gopi Krishna sees other global problems, such as moral and intellectual decay, constant political upheaval, and the specter of technological mass destruction, as further signs of a degenerating world society and as side effects of resisting the law. He feels that only the recognition and eventual transition to higher consciousness can change the course of events, but he does not see this happening. He maintains that even though the mystical impulse is still there in millions of people (you've felt it), it is frustrated and thwarted, denied its natural outlet; many end up seeking it in dead-ends such as occult practices, corrupted religions, and drugs.
In reference to the drug aspect of this, Andrew Weil, in his controversial 1972 book The Natural Mind, proposed that all human beings have an inherent drive to experience altered states of consciousness, a drive first expressed in children by such things as whirling about to dizziness and squeezing each other to faintness. Eventually, these activities are curtailed by adults, and the child is conditioned by society to be “normal.” But the repressed drive is still there and may later surface in alcohol and drug use, which in turn may lead to addiction.
Weil's theory, in the expanded perspective of extra-dimensional theory, makes more sense. Here, every human has an innate tendency to progress toward a higher kind of consciousness. Children instinctively sense this, and even after rigorous cultural programming the subconscious urge remains; frustrated, they seek any route, even destructive ones.
What it boils down to is this: We are all extra-dimensional, but aware of only a three-dimensional part of ourselves. Our evolutionary purpose—to unite with our larger selves by developing the higher faculty—is something we as a race have not been able or willing to do. Thus, cut off from our greater selves, we are increasingly unfulfilled, frustrated, and self-destructive. Roger Walsh, in The Spirit of Shamanism, looks at it from the viewpoint of the Perennial Philosophy:
Within our collective trance we act blindly and destructively, as might be expected of anyone whose awareness is distorted and constricted. Our behavior is said to be driven by greed and fear in ways destructive to ourselves, our fellow human beings, and our planet. For the perennial philosophy then, our global crises can be traced to our shared insanity…We do not recognize this as a trance because we all share in it and because we live, says the perennial philosophy, in the biggest cult of all: culture.71
The mystical experience, as the emergence of a new and higher mental faculty, is the highest possible aspiration of Man, the most valuable natural asset any individual, or any race, can have. On this point Jesus said: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field; he who finds it hides it, and in his joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”72
It is the most important natural phenomenon in the history of mankind and essential to our very survival. Yet what have we done with it? Either ignored its profound implications or distorted its nature beyond recognition. Each and every religion it has given rise to is further removed from its root, and more the dogmatic institution it was meant to replace. Followers obediently repeat credos, receive their faith, and kill and crusade to defend its “sanctity.” We have forgotten the cause, and worship the grossly distorted effect. It is insane. Do we even have the capacity to recognize the real thing today?
Eighteenth-century English artist and mystic William Blake tried to “open the immortal eyes of man inwards”73 to “cleanse the doors of perception of the race” so Man could see reality as it really is—”infinite.”74 Many thought him a madman, and yet no one captured the true transfinite sense as eloquently as he did:
To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.75
These lines are recognized now as pretty phrases. But they are a perfect description of the mental process required to perceive what Bucke calls “by far the larger world…equally real [as ours]”76 or what Gopi Krishna calls “the dimension just one step higher” than ours, which “is real only in the human state of consciousness.”77
Imagine a race of beings on another planet who have acquired this faculty. What would they think of us? In the discussion of the UFO abduction phenomenon later, we'll see. These aliens say that we are more than just physical beings. We have a higher side to us, one essential for our survival, but we have not realized it because of lack of interest and research. As they can see our future path laid out in extra-dimensional space, they can see our impending fate, and it's one far worse than Gopi Krishna imagined. Life on Earth as we know it will cease to exist. John Mack says:
What the abduction phenomenon has led me (I would now say inevitably) to see is that we participate in a universe or universes that are filled with intelligences from which we have cut ourselves off, having lost the senses by which we might know them. It has become clear to me also that our restricted worldview or paradigm lies behind most of the major destructive patterns that threaten the human future—mindless corporate acquisitiveness that perpetuates vast differences between rich and poor and contributes to hunger and disease; ethnonational violence resulting in mass killing which could grow into a nuclear holocaust; and ecological destruction on a scale that threatens the survival of the Earth's living systems.78
What do the abductees think about this? Mack again: “Abduction experiencers come to feel deeply that the death of human beings and countless other species will occur on a vast scale if we continue on our present course and that some sort of new life-form must evolve if the human biological and spiritual essence is to be preserved.”79
The mystical experience gives us inklings of the next—intended—step in Man's evolution. But we either don't see it or don't care.