Imperative Soul

I had some more of what Abraham Maslow would call ‘Peak Experiences‘ today. One while idly mediating during my lunch break which lasted about 45 minutes and one in the afternoon that lasted about 15 minutes when walking out of the building from work. Interestingly the one in the afternoon was initiated rapidly and voluntarily.

The one at lunch ended with me joting down some notes to try to describe the experience:

All action and thought becomes unconscious. The conscious is left free.
Volition is gone. I am gone. I am volition.
There is a clear separation of awareness and self.

Coming home this evening I thought back to my very first experience back in March 1993 when I was 22 years old. I scrambled through my old boxes in my shed and found my old diaries. During my very first  experience I scribed down some words to try and describe something that I had never experienced before:

It fills my soul.
It conquers my being.
I surrender to it for
it is all that I am and
ever wish to be.

There is no time in this place
only being

There is a stillness
There is no pride
There is no want
There is no knowledge
There is no time
There is a stillness

After my first experience I  spent months and years scanning through different texts trying to find other people who had experienced the same. In some ways I felt like an addict looking for some way to get another fix. Interestingly I found a lot of texts describing the experiences but I could tell that they hadn’t really experienced them because they sounded like people describing a foreign country without really being there. You could tell from the small errors and the gaps in the expression of their experiences.

I did find some texts that did convince me that the authors had experienced the same things, authors like Osho and Krishnamurti. I also found these experiences described in texts of the Kabbalistics, the Sufis and the ecstatics of the christian middle ages like Eckhart. The best descriptions over the years have been those of the austere buddhist branches like Zen.

Unfortunately nearly all the texts are cultually and superstitiously influenced. There is such a diversity of belief surrounding these experiences that they seem to almost all superficially contradict each other. It’s only when you start to strip away all the cultural and religious ‘baggage’ that you recognise the basis of experience driving the core of these faiths. I wont argue that my current interprations of my experiences are pure but I find no neccessity to attach a religious or even ’spiritual’ meaning to these experiences.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow started to investigate these experiences in more recent decades but I’m not sure he had any direct experiences of his own as his understanding seems off balance. I do hope I can find some answers to these experiences from a non religous, non ’spiritual’  perspective.