Have you ever tried to list the times you felt like you had touched a dimension of reality that is beyond your purely physical senses? The first experiences that came to my mind were a moment in a prayer meeting as a teen, a time I turned the the corner and viewed Yosemite Valley, a waking dream that became a series of visions, and many times in worship as we sang a song. Once I got started, these spontaneous experiences began to multiply. I began to think “When was I NOT aware?”

Maybe we’ve all been getting more aware for decades

The whole way we got sucked into the internet and now A.I., even if it is becoming one giant advertisement, might be a societal yearning for the mystery in the machine and an overwhelming need to know. The way people are loading up with myths about their coercive and fraudulent leaders all over the world may actually be them loosening the chains of rationalism and looking beyond what has passed for truth into something larger.

Those are not new theories, of course. The militaristic capitalism of the U.S. has been pushing people into a new dimension for decades. In the 1980’s, my literary mentor, Morton T. Kelsey was writing, “The Greeks have twelve different words to describe their intercourse with a nonphysical dimension of reality.” (And, no, he doesn’t think “intercourse” means they spawned The Devil’s Child). In English, on the other hand, we have “at least thirty expressions to convey psychological depression but only one moth-eaten and much abused word to describe our relationship with a spiritual dimension of reality: the word mysticism” (in Companions on the Inner Way).

Hindus have twenty to thirty words to describe various aspects of spiritual experience but relatively few words to deal with different aspects of physical matter. Eurocentric people, on the other hand, have dozens of words for matter and, of course, came up with the periodic table to describe over a hundred different elements of it.

Aldous Huxley 1946

This lack of development in his culture disturbed Aldous Huxley, who went on to experiment with some consciousness-expanding “elements” to heighten his spiritual experience. He lamented that humans are equipped to have a vast array of experiences but are preoccupied with sense perception. He said our preoccupation with processing sensory data acts as a “reducing valve.” What’s more, language itself gets in the way. The limits of our native tongues reduce our awareness of non-physical reality to the words we have to describe it, and trick us into confusing “words for actual things” (in The Doors of Perception).

We experience the spiritual dimension

Of course, Huxley is railing against being stuck in an “immanent frame” as he is repeatedly speaking from outside it. He is far from the only one seeking and finding what is beyond our materialist prison. I think most of us have some stories to tell about what we’ve discovered about the other side of life.

Kelsey noted dozens of distinguishable, non-physical experiences and classified them in five groups of different kinds:

Direct, spontaneous experiences that happen as a “surprise” and often prove life-changing.Common experiences that intimate or reveal another dimension of reality (rainbows, sunsets, childbirth).Experiences sought after by various methods, especially religious. They are often also spontaneous.Neurotic or psychotic. These are also natural, but not typical: voices, visions, dissociation. Some people hide their experiences because they will be thrown in this category.Sought-for experiences that could prove harmful to the naïve.

I have been a lifelong Christian largely because I wandered into territories that were non-physical and indescribable with the language I had to use. Unexpected, spontaneous experiences made a permanent change in how I viewed myself and reality. I understood what upended Paul’s life on the way to Damascus, and I could see why Francis of Assisi left his life of privilege behind to obey God’s call to “restore my church.”

To hear the media talk about it, we Americans are more materialistic than ever, led by Christians who equate faith with power and wealth, and by a godless president bound by his own self-determination. But I’m not sure about that. I greeted a young woman in my elevator yesterday whose cell phone screen was a picture of Buddha. Like the movie I linked above, our screens are also full of supernatural experiences — it is kind of a joke that I like Moana so much. People who use ketamine and other drugs continue to follow Huxley’s lead to seek pathways to enlightenment. Maybe we are actually becoming more spiritually aware than ever.

Characteristics of spontaneous experiences of the spiritual dimension

Leaving the other four of Kelsey’s categories for later, I would like to note the characteristics of the first, “spontaneous” group. I suspect you have been invited into the non-physical world (or just call it the other part of your life) for as long as you have been alive. You might not have told anyone about your experiences, since someone might think they aren’t normal.

We can start with the four characteristics William James offered in The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, compiled from lectures he gave as a psychologist from Harvard.

They are experiences, not ideas. They are hard to explain to someone who hasn’t had one.They convey understanding, illuminate, reveal. We know we are meeting something or someone beyond our own limitations. They carry authority.They almost never last for more than half an hour and usually just for a few seconds, Trying to stay in one can cause psychological problems.They can’t be achieved, just given. We are passive responders, like trees in the sun, not agents.We are drawn toward the reality in spite of ourselves. We are satisfied by something we did not know we wanted.The encounter is more than we can cope with. We are likely confronted by a sense of our comparative nothingness and our infinite faultiness.The experience could be dazzling darkness or the clearest of pictures. It could be seen as a sense of abstract merging or personal presence, depending on whether the focus is detachment or attachment, which are complimentary yearnings.Christians often report meeting the Lover whose awesome goodness is consummated in self-giving love. Sufi and Hasidic traditions also note this.You may have experienced this otherness in your pit of despair or been touched in your core torment. You may have been healed or comforted. If you have focused on detachment, as Buddhists or mindfulness practitioners often do, this is an unlikely experience.

I have focused on the positive-feeling spontaneous experiences we all may have had. There are other “numinous” (some say “paranormal”) experiences that also point to non-physical reality.

The dead. TV shows are full of references to meetings with or senses of the deceased (like Aunt Ada and Madame Dashkova in the Gilded Age).We also have visions and fertile imaginations. Jung called us to swim in the collective unconscious.We may be guided by someone speaking for God, or something. We may hear a voice we trust to lead us, which should be validated by others we trust.There are psychological patterns of one’s culture or of all humanity which empower or possess us.The fearsome spiritual darkness we encounter convinces us of the evils of the non-physical world.Many people have described their brief view into an “out of the body” realm when they faced death.

Why don’t you try out my suggestion for making a list? It would be interesting to see how many encounters you could name . You may have been talked out of admitting them because someone thought it might be dangerous to “open that can of worms” and convinced you to shut down that part of your capacity and “stay safe.” But we are not really in control of all the dimensions of reality, not even what’s being worked out in us, so you may have gotten a good idea of something beyond the reducing valve, anyway. Honoring the experiences we’ve had, softens our hearts and minds for receiving all the rest of our lives that may yet to be enjoyed.

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Yesterday was Alexander Solzhenitsyn Day! We decided not to have him compete with Flannery O’Connor, so we invite you to celebrate his life today at The Transhistorical Body.

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