The Varieties of Spiritual Experiences

You may have heard the expression Terrible Twos, the fact that a child starts realizing her own identity after the first year and can act up a little during that time period. I remember a conversation with our pediatrician when my oldest child turned 4 and I complained that he was acting up. The doctor said that in his opinion the Terrible Twos were overrated and that in fact this time period was the hardest. I stopped him right in the tracks and reminded him that he had said exactly the same thing a year ago when our boy had turned three. He smiled, looked at my younger son and said, "Yes, there may have been a little marketing involved. I just didn't want to tell you how it really is, otherwise you may not have chosen to have the other one."

I have just published my first book, The Magnificent Experiment, which describes my spiritual wake-up process. There was magic in the air in these years and it was certainly a lot of fun sharing this spiritual renaissance with others, because they are likely to encounter similar magic. Yet, it was objectively a synchronization process with a higher force and there were also some less comfortable experiences involved that I didn't touch on in the book. For example, I remember months when I put the boys to bed at 8 pm and I had just enough energy left to take the additional 12 steps to make it to my bed and I was out by 8:01 pm, completely spent.

Why to talk about stuff like that? I am sure I hurt myself one way or another as parts of my ego minded being synchronized and acted up whenever they had a chance. A spiritual experience is not supposed to be like that. All the mistakes are mine and all the glory is Hers, that is how it goes along a spiritual path. Neale Walsch describes a conversation with God in which he complained that he wasn't connected to God over many months and God replied that it was Neale Walsch who had disconnected instead. That is what I observed as well. The Tao is always out there extending a welcoming hand, but it is up to us to cut the interferences out; no one else can do that for us.

I think if we really want to help each other grow spiritually we need to zoom into these disturbances. It is a frustrating exercise for sure. It is certainly more fun to describe the magic than the mistakes and then, all mistakes are idiosyncratic. So you need to capture the "dark side" of the spiritual awakening process from all kind of angles, which is confusing and cumbersome.

My hunch is that what exactly is kosher and consistent with your spiritual path is very much a unique psychological experience. Sri Ramakrishna, the 19th Century Mystic of India used to say that he couldn't associate with money at all. His disciple, Vivekananda wanted to test him and put a coin under his mattress after which Sri Ramakrishna complained that he couldn't sleep all night. Perhaps it would be useful to run surveys in our spiritual community to see what works for some and not others. I have never been discouraged along my path to run experiments, but in the same vein, I have always been encouraged to be vigilant once a problem statement was out in the open. After all, if you have made a mistake before and realized it, why on earth would you do it again, right?

The good news is that a spiritual path traveler doesn't really have a choice in any of this. Your energy vibration is by now way too advanced to tolerate a crash to a lower level. But you certainly can delay things by going back and forth between the different levels of spiritual consciousness. William James had a fascinating book out at the turn of the century, The Varieties of Religious Experiences, outlining the different spiritual paths and experiences he had come across in his studies of biographies and historical accounts at the turn of the 20th century. Perhaps we could revisit this effort with a special emphasis on what has held people back on their paths. Email me if you have some idiosyncratic observations at zeitgeistma@gmail.com.