mystical experience...wordless and profoundly unsettling

[pscot]

something happened when I was 17 that shook my safely rationalist worldview and left me with a lifelong puzzle. Years later, I learned that this sort of event is usually called a mystical experience, and I can see in retrospect that the circumstances had been propitious: Thanks to a severely underfunded and poorly planned skiing trip, I was sleep-deprived and probably hypoglycemic that morning in 1959 when I stepped out alone, walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world — the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings — suddenly flame into life.

There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of. It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the fl

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/opinion/sunday/a-rationalists-mystical-moment.html?ref=opinion

[Warpy]

1. I've always thought the Taoists had the best handle on it

that the universe is alive but not self aware.

And it's certainly not aware of us.

I've had a couple of NDEs and I did a lot of acid in the 60s. No god has ever shown up for any of it.

Sleep deprivation is, however, a great hallucinogenic.

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Do you mean that you also think the universe is alive?

Alive in what sense, and what makes you think so?

[Warpy]

3. I'll pass since I have no way of knowing or testing it out

but of all the unlikely creation myths, theirs seems the likeliest because it can't be translated into any sort of god at one's command.

[defacto7]

4. People who have had small blood clots in particular areas

of the brain have had similar experiences. If that was the case, the guy was lucky. Also people who have undergone electrical brain stimulation have had the similar effects repeated in a laboratory environment.

I know it's a let down when someone has such experiences, so maybe it wasn't physiological in nature. Who knows?

[Manifestor_of_Light]

5. Read the Fire Sermon by Gautama the Buddha.

Interesting. Kinda related.