Defining Moments
Teresa Frisch, RN, RMT, IARP 3.25.09
We are a marvelous species, really, and to study us demands nothing less than a holistic view of all our systems. We are only beginning to glimpse the synchronistic interplay of our physical, mental, intellectual, psychological, spiritual, emotional, electromagnetic, and psychical selves. This synchronistic dance, this interplay, becomes rhyme and reason, definition, substance and measurement of each of us, captured in what is known as our human condition. We are but transient, solidified mist.
I celebrate us, marveling at our immersion in our personal comedies and tragedies, and, smiling to myself, think that we are truly a most glorious mess of laughter, tears, sadness, hope and joy. We are driven to love and be loved. We love a challenge, any challenge. Passionately, painfully and poignantly aware of our short life spans, we look at life and say, “bring it on.” As sentient beings, we live our lives like a remote viewing session in reverse, obtaining site contact, establishing our aesthetic emotional response to it, and maintaining that contact through our emotions and senses until we die.
I contemplate us, wondering if I looked back from the silence of the void with Earth backlit against black velvet, would I find that we are each similar to tiny electric light bulbs, transducing from a larger whole? I pause, again noticing that Gaia has both Eastern and Western hemispheres with dissimilar philosophies and cultures that have an uncanny comparison to the subjective / objective halves of our human brain. I wonder if I can find philosophical ruminations about that in a book somewhere.
Sometimes I mourn us, watching, knowing that the very adventurous existence that we crave, coupled with our short life spans, creates a paradox that holds us back. Kept continually busy, our objective focus fixed on the external; the newest or shiniest captures our attention and we ignore the inner, subjective, contemplative parts of ourselves. Emerging medical subspecialties such as Neurocardiology and Cognitive Neuroscience, working with other specialties such as psychology, parapsychology, quantum physics, and philosophy, might be both impetus and stepping stone as we search for the key that gives us a better understanding of mind-body medicine.
Dean Radin presented his book, Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality, at the 2007 International Remote Viewing Conference. After watching the DVD and his explanation of the scientific taboo regarding the study of psychical phenomenon, or psi, I realized that he brings a wealth of background information to the frontier of cognitive neuroscience and mind-body medicine. His scientific presentation of psi and quantum physics shows that “something interesting is definitely going on” (“Science and the Taboo of psi”). You will find a link for a similar presentation, “Science and the Taboo of psi,” here on the Aesthetic Impact website in the Video Presentations section. When I saw the scale that he developed in this video, which defines and delineates psi experiences beginning with “gut feelings, common experiences, amenable to scientific study but highly controversial,” through “mystic union, rare experiences,” I thought, “People need to see this. Everyone has these experiences and it would help them make some sense of things that they don’t understand.”
Dean was kind and generous enough to allow me to post those slides here on Aesthetic Impact, and you will find them under the subtitle “Measuring the Mystical Experience.” He has my deepest gratitude for allowing me to give you this information, but I want to be clear that he did not give the slides this title. I did named the slides out of necessity to place them here and I will gladly change it if requested.
The scale is of great importance because people can begin to relate, recognize experiences and make associations. In “Two Boys, Five Tons of Ice, Eighty Rescuers, and a Chainsaw,” a real-life drama in the April 2009 edition of Reader’s Digest, Firefighter Terry Cushman had precious little time to decide where to begin his search for two boys buried under five tons of collapsed ice. Rescuers determined where they thought they should dig but, “Cushman had a different idea. ‘I asked myself, where would I be? And I had kind of a gut feeling – there’s no other way to describe it. I just had a feeling where they would be” (Rennicke). Cushman moved everyone forty feet upslope and eventually two very cold, but very alive boys emerged – exactly where Cushman told them to dig.
Macrae references “a strong hunch or gut feeling” in Nursing as a Spiritual Practice. She also references “‘a symbolic image’ that has a meaningful association for you” (87), as taught in the communication skills in the Science of Controlled Remote Viewing. And last, she points to Nightingale’s working insight, acquired after her studies and melding of Eastern and Western philosophies, that though she:
acknowledged the extraordinary individuals who are universally recognized as mystics, she did not feel they were specially gifted or chosen by God. In her view, every human being has the potential for mystical development. Indeed, the ultimate purpose of human life is to become one with the presence of God and to allow that presence to transform our thoughts and actions (6). |
From the opposite side of the scientific-mystic spectrum, in Seeing the Invisible: Modern Religious and Other Transcendent Experiences, Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin directly address the taboo of speaking of mystical experiences due to feelings of the experience being holy or personal, or if talking about it would take away from it’s power, or that they will be ostracized, or essentially considered crazy or hallucinating (16). This reminded me very much of how the world viewed William Blake. I can relate to that.
In The Common Experience: Signposts on the Path to Enlightenment, Cohen and Phipps state:
The mystical path is not mysterious. It is not the private path of monks and yogins. It is open to all and has been liberally signposted by writers familiar with its various stages, men and women who have used the language of their own traditions – Christian, Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu, Taoist, Platonic or Jewish – to describe experiences which are not easily reduced to words, but which are sufficiently clear for anyone to understand who has practical interest in exploring this universal path. The signposts are visible. The purpose of this book is to note the signposts by the choice of passages written by travelers, ancient or contemporary (1).
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Cohen and Phipps have done just that. They lay the foundation for a clear understanding of the philosophy-based experience, then proceed to illustrate with writings of poets, mystics, writers, saints, housewives and students, many taken from the compilation of experiences gathered by the Religious Experience Research Unit of Oxford, England (RERU) (viii). Some were in meditative states, some were cleaning their house, some were sitting in the park or train station. Some were in a state of despair; some were just sitting there, thinking their everyday thoughts when a transcendent experience just “happened.” They didn’t ask for it, it just “did.”
The Common Experience contains the following passage, “written by Richard of Saint-Victor, one of the first theorists of western mysticism:”
Thinking, slow-footed, wanders hither and thither along bypaths, caring not where they will lead. Meditation, with great mental industry, plods along the steep and laborious road keeping the end in view. Contemplation, on a free wing, circles around with great nimbleness wherever the impulse takes it. Thinking crawls along, meditation marches and sometimes runs, contemplation flies around and when it wills, it hovers upon the height. Thinking is without labour and bears no fruit. Meditation labours and has its fruit. Contemplation abides untoiling and fruitful. Thinking roams about; meditation investigates; contemplation wonders (6-7).
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What we take away from the experience is what matters. For some, like Nightingale, the transcendent experience becomes a defining moment, forever present, shaping their lives and giving it direction. For others, the impact fades and becomes a distant memory, acknowledged but placed on a shelf with the all the other memories of lives well lived. And for some, the experience is so “out-of-boundary” as to be unbelievable and dismissed as a bad case of indigestion and life goes on.
I will offer some experiences, taken from Macrae, Cohen, Phipps, RERU and myself.
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The following passage is taken from Lord Clark’s autobiography, The Other Half: “‘At seventeen I was confused and questing. Nothing made a lot of sense; the world seemed so unfair and people unreliable. However, I had not forgotten how to pray; and I prayed with unashamed sincerity that if God existed could He show me some sort of light in the jungle.
“One day, I was sweeping the stairs, down in the house in which I was working, when suddenly I was overcome, overwhelmed, saturated…. With a sense of most sublime and living love. It not only affected me, but seemed to bring everything around me to life. The brush in my hand, my dustpan, the stairs, seemed to come alive with love. I seemed no longer me, with my petty troubles and trials, but part of this infinite power of love, so utterly and overwhelmingly wonderful that one knew at once what the saints had grasped. I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was radiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before. This state of mind lasted for several months, and wonderful though it was, it posed an awkward problem in terms of action. My life was far from blameless: I would have to reform. My family would think I was going mad, and perhaps after all it was a delusion, for I was in every way unworthy of receiving such a flood of grace. Gradually the effect wore off, and I made no effort to retain it. I think I was right; I was too deeply embedded in the world to change course. But that I had ‘felt the finger of God’ I am quite sure, and although the memory of this experience has faded, it still helps me to understand the joy of the saints’” (Cohen and Phipps 5).
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In Aesthetics and History, Bernard Benson provides this anecdote: “‘gazing at the leafy scrolls carved on the door jams of S. Pietro outside Spoleto, suddenly stem, tendril and foliage became alive, and in becoming alive, made me feel as if I have emerged into the light after long groping in the darkness of an initiation. I felt as every edge, and every surface was in a living relation to me and not as hitherto, in a merely cognitive one. Since that morning, nothing visible has been indifferent or even dull’” (Cohen and Phipps 98). |
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“I was sitting at my desk reading while having a conversation with a friend online about the DaVinci Code. The topic of our conversation was the sacred love between two people. I thought, “I understand that.” I wasn’t doing anything special, I was just sitting there when I thought that thought and literally felt what I can only describe as a golden pillar leave my head with the knowing it was met by a matching golden pillar coming down from what I knew to be “infinity.” I sat there mesmerized, one eye on the computer clock, barely breathing lest this golden connection break. I didn’t know what it was, or if I should even believe it, but after six minutes my friend interrupted the focus and it ended as suddenly as it began. I was fully conscious the entire time, aware of my desk, my townhouse, my computer, everything. I didn’t go anywhere. I was one with the moment. I just ‘Was,’ period.” –Teresa Frisch, RN, “Nightingale: the art and science of being human”
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Once again, my sincere thanks to Dean Radin for permission to use his scale of mystical experiences here at Aesthetic Impact. I leave you with a timeless teaching of an Elder, don Juan Matus.
Macrae touches on a story from A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan. Carlos Castaneda apprenticed himself to the don, in an attempt to understand, learn and record the ancient wisdom of the Yaqui shamans before it was lost forever. He became upset with his lack of progress, and the don told him that essentially, he needed to “‘stop his incessant internal talk’” (Macrae 83). Effectively, he needed to stop interrupting and forming his own opinions, he needed to be still and listen. Like a hamster on a wheel, Castaneda was limiting himself and his reality.
‘Whenever we finish talking to ourselves, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we kindle it with life, and we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his talking.’ -don Juan Matus (Macrae 83).
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