While chanting along to "Om Namah Shiviya" today, I had a weird experience where, eyes closed, I felt a vivid and palpable sense of presence around me, especially behind. My boundaries felt distinctly more permeable than usual. At times I also felt as though the whole back side of my body was - how can I express this - "open" in some way, sort of as if the front part of me was a hollow facade filled up with Being - it wasn't nondual, I'm certainly not claiming that (at no time did I really lose my separate self-sense) - but there was a sense of immanence, as if things could get Really Freaky, Really Fast. I've had this kind of experience a few times before while chanting. Usually I have to open my eyes to dispel it, because it scares me too much. This time I tried to stay with it as long as I could, using a prayer I learned recently to deal with difficult emotions - "I love and accept even this." That helped me stay in it longer than usual, but finally my eyes popped open - whew! Relief! Solid, physical world, nothing to worry about here! Then closed my eyes again, went into that weirdness again a bit more, not quite as strong...and gradually it diminished and faded away completely. Then I did some Tara chants and felt happy.
I've been sick for several days, and chanting has been somewhat more intense than usual.
Any comments on this or reports of similar experiences would be welcome. What do you think this could be? I don't plan to get very hung up on it - it sounds like the kind of thing Spiritual Authorities would advise me not to get distracted by...but I'm just curious and besides, since I have an INTEGRAL framework, I'm authorized to investigate any and all phenomena - as long as I solemnly swear on a stack of Wilbers to ultimately transcend and include them. And I do so solemnly swear, so help me Ken.
arthur
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3 comments:
I find your blogsite interesting. My wife is a member of Soka Gakkai and chants daily, sometimes more than once. I, on the other hand, am an atheist with no spiritual practice of any kind. I'm also reading deeply in the cognitive sciences, and now own, Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology with the latest information.
Here's what I believe. I believe all of our experiences can be explained by understanding the electro/chemical processes of the brain machine. Nothing transcendent ever happens; our brains just have experiences which we can't explain until we realize we live in a material world and a mostly deterministic one. Since you have nerve connections in your back which feed into the brain, then the sense of openness you speak of can be explained by purely rational means, by connections in your back being combined with other synaptical firings which your brain has stored in memory. The cross-wiring between sensations from your back with sensations of openness you've had in the past create the peculiar sensation of being open in the back when the conditions are right. I just don't believe in super-natural events of any kind.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I occasionally still gravitate towards the materialistic explanation you espouse in your comment, and yet it gives me pause to ponder
-where does all this stuff come from?
-why is there something instead of nothing?
-WTF is up with the Big Bang!? I mean, you're telling me everything exploded out of nothing once upon a time? How weird is that? Quantum Fluctuation my "I"!
But who knows. Maybe it is all matter and energy in motion. Still...why then is it "like something" to exist? Why is there an inside to this?
Anyway, these days I tend to believe that the mind is the inside of the body and the body is the outside of the mind, and we're all (or at least most of us) "dreaming that we're not dreaming" as Robert Augustus Masters puts it.
I think the rational mind is great at explaining the external correlates of internal experience, but errs when it goes too far and says "th-th-th-that's all folks!"
At any rate, thanks for sharing your interesting and articulate viewpoint. :)
arthur
arthur,
Thank you for your patient and reasonable response to my insistent materialism and skepticism.
Part of my response to your response is "I no longer ask why? I always ask how."
The "whys' when I were a youth nearly drove me crazy. I like to stay within the quantifiable and measurable now.
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