bbbamI
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Wow, and here I was thinking "Stray Cat Strut"....
It has always been a surreal experience for me. Everything around me was so vivid and alive while I simply did not exist. Yet, I was able to see it all and feel it.
An altered state and not chemically induced -- wish I could experience that. No epiphany?
All human societies have sought mind-altering experiences through various combinations of drugs, fasting, meditation, physical activity...
I feel my heart beat, the sun on my skin, my hair touching my face, the moisture in my mouth and on my lips. When I have this experience, I feel none of that. It happens in a flash and I'm not aware of going out of or coming into existence. I simply observe everything around me. Everything I observe seems to have life...and a soul.how can you know that you "simply did not exist". the closest you might be able to describe such "an experience" would be one of coming into or going out of existing, not one of nonexistence which would be nonexperienced.
meanwhile, below on a cruise-liner, several hundred innocent souls seeing a light-aircraft plummeting down into thier summer vacation bliss, seemingly with nobody in control (or the pilot under the influence of mild-altering drugs) were frantically running for cover, sheltering thier children or down on thier knees praying for deliverance. But hey, just as long as you were in the zone! :d
I am guilty of this sterotyping . In fact Meadbh , I thought you were a guy . Your avatar used to be a guy sitting on the beach . So I guess we are all gender confused on the internet.
missionfinder-
I don't know what smudge is. I'd like to unless there is some reason you can't say...
This thread showcases a whole new aspect of the ER crowd. One that I would not have expected to find.
Ha
Spiritual or introspective or transgendered?
I've gotten the feeling often. Whether its in a crowd watching a child play, looking at the stars, alone in nature... its always the same yet different each time. I often get the feeling when I smudge (if you know what that is you'll understand).
What may be interesting to you, Khan, and others who have experienced this (I haven't very often---and when I have, it lasted all too briefly, but was still pretty wonderful) is a book I've just started to read:
Standing in the Light by Sharman Apt Russell
Amazon.com: Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist: Sharman Apt Russell: Books
It's about pantheism---a religion/way of thinking and being/philosophy that I had never heard of (amazing what you can learn when FIREd!). The book blurb notes:
Everything is connected, and the web is holy.” So wrote Marcus Aurelius, the starting point of Sharman Apt Russell’s wise and haunting new memoir about her life as a pantheist. Perhaps no other religious philosophy is as simple and inclusive as pantheism. What is, right now, is divine; there is no god apart from the universe itself. In Standing in the Light, Russell explores the history of this tradition from the Stoic philosophers to the Transcendentalists while reflecting on her own life during a year spent in the mountains and desert of southwestern New Mexico. A season of banding birds, the migration of sandhill cranes, the panicked charge of a young javelina-nature provides the inspiration for meditations on subjects ranging from Buddhist thought to the death of her father, from the Quaker tradition to the sadness of children leaving home, from global warming to the ineffable loneliness of human experience. With a humane heart, an inquisitive mind, and luminescent prose, Sharman Apt Russell invites skeptics, scientists, and seekers everywhere to join her in her exploration of the soul of pantheism.