Word sculptures from a mystical experience

The mystical experience

“The mysteries of life become lucid … and many times, not usually, the solution is more or less unspeakable in words.” – William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience”

I don’t remember who knocked on my door. I don’t remember what he said. I remember being angry.

I had just finished reading a book called “Summerhill” by an English school teacher, AS Neill. His theme was “freedom, not license.” Every student at Neill’s school was free to do whatever they wanted as long as the behavior didn’t hurt anyone else. The community Neill had created was a free, creative, loving, respectful, and responsible interaction of unique human beings.

Recently, I was involved in disciplinary battles with one of my preschoolers. The battles resulted in increasingly destructive behavior in him and increased frustration in me. I decided to try Neill’s methods, with my own children and with other people in my life.

The man at the door wasn’t hurting me. I decided to allow him to vent his anger. I didn’t do it because it was something I had to do. I did it because I chose to. I experienced acceptance of anger and no desire to retaliate. Suddenly the anger stopped.

Nothing has changed. My house, the door, the living room, the man, were still there, like five minutes before.

However, everything changed. Suddenly, I understood the meaning of the words that I had been taught as a child: “But I tell you not to resist evil; but to anyone who hits you on the right cheek, turn the other also to him.” Matthew 6:39.

Bill, my five-year-old son, started wetting the bed after the birth of his younger brother. At first, I ignored the enuresis. Maybe it would disappear. When it wasn’t, I explained to Bill why it was too big to wet the bed. He continued wetting. I reasoned with him, threatened him, yelled at him and spanked him. He continued wetting. I felt angry and frustrated.

Neill frequently dealt with behavior problems by rewarding his students. While the rewards for bad behavior were pointless, nothing else had worked. Neill’s ideas worked with the man at the door. I decided to try them with the problem of enuresis.

The next time Bill wet the bed, I gave him a penny. He looked at me confused. The next morning his bed was dry. He never got it wet again. My anger and frustration disappeared.

What a powerful tool! I began to use Neill’s ideas with the neighboring children.

One day, two children were calling names in the backyard and threatening to fight. Instead of trying to stop them, I pushed them aside and asked him if he wanted to fight.

“I don’t want to fight,” they all replied, “but he makes me do it. He’s insulting me.”

“You want to fight?” I reiterated. “If so, do it.”

The boys muttered to themselves and looked at the ground. Two minutes later, they were happily playing together.

What I was doing contradicted everything society had taught me, but it brought me the peace and harmony that I desired. Society had taught me to punish people for their “bad behavior”, but I did not punish them. Society had taught me to resist “evil,” but I no longer resisted. Society had taught me to fight for peace, but I was no longer fighting.

Instead, I simply let go of the anger and confusion that surrounded me and allowed it to happen without responding. The anger and confusion dissipated and my life and relationships worked. By allowing myself to remain in peace and harmony, everything around me became peaceful and harmonious.

I had always understood Matthew 6:39 as an unattainable moral command, which required submitting my own needs to the needs of others. It wasn’t that at all. It was an extremely effective action that I was able to take on my own, which benefited me and others. There was no self-denial in that action. There was only self-affirmation and affirmation of life. Never before have I felt so free, so strong, so powerful, so integrated, so completely in control.

Nothing outside of me changed. The only thing that changed were my own perceptions, thoughts, actions, and emotions.

What I experienced has been called a “mystical experience.”

As a child, I had been taught to doubt, question, and trust my own judgment. My upbringing did not include education about mystical experiences, but I knew that many religions included words about these experiences.

By reading “Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James, and texts from Christianity, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, Plato, and existentialist philosophers, I was able to recognize my own experience in all the different words. It was as if different people were describing the same beautiful flower garden. Some spoke of roses, some spoke of delphiniums, some noted the color patterns, some focused on the trellises and pathways. If I hadn’t seen the flower garden and only heard the words, I would have thought that people were talking about different things. Having seen the flower garden, I knew that they were all giving structure and verbal form to the same underlying experience, just as our minds give form and meaning to the fixed lines of optical illusions.

I couldn’t stop playing with these ideas. Was my life the same or different? Did you know or did you know nothing? I was not sure.

Are religious words true, or is each set of words simply a finger pointing at the moon? Is there a sense in which words are false idols? Does the meaning of each set of words depend on the human consciousness that hears and uses them? Do words have meaning only in the context of particular experiences and mindsets?

“Neither an outside observer nor the Subject undergoing the process can fully explain how particular experiences can change one’s energy center so decisively, or why they so often have to bide their time to do so. We have a thought. , or perform an act, repeatedly, but on a given day the real meaning of the thought resonates through us for the first time, … “- William James,” The Varieties of Religious Experience “

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Category: Relationship