Mystical Experience Quotes

#1. It's starting to catch hold, and in large measure it's because we're starting to understand that much of what we have talked about in ancient mythology and mystical experience and so forth can pretty well be modeled within the world of quantum physics. That's a 20th century phenomenon also.

Edgar Mitchell

#2. I firmly believe that all human beings have access to extraordinary energies and powers. Judging from accounts of mystical experience, heightened creativity, or exceptional performance by athletes and artists, we harbor a greater life than we know.

Jean Houston

#3. The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.

William James

#4. The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.

Terence McKenna

#5. A version of the golden rule to do unto others as you would have them do unto you is present in every major religion for a reason. Relationships are the place where the mystical experience can become alive.

Helen LaKelly Hunt

#6. It's two things: it's totally impersonal and it's totally personal, simultaneously. That's the nature of the mystical experience of life. Everything about life is impersonal, but you have a personal experience. And the bridge between the personal and the impersonal is called prayer.

Caroline Myss

#7. I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

W. H. Auden

#8. Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Drugs: Source of the mystical experience of the ignorant.

Idries Shah

#9. There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

Bernard Malamud

#10. When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#11. The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

Tom Stoppard

#12. The first and great evidence of our walking by the Spirit or being filled with the Spirit is not some private mystical experience of our own, but our practical relationships of love with other people.

John Stott

#13. But Lord Arglay, at once in contact and detached, at once faithless and believing, beheld all these things in the light of that fastidious and ironical goodwill which, outside mystical experience, is the finest and noblest capacity man has developed in and against the universe.

Charles Williams

#14. I became a student of the history of religion. I am fascinated by how religions often center on mystical experience, and in the Old Testament tradition you find flames, the burning bush.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#15. I believe writing fiction is the mystical experience that allows me to break free of my human bonds, those so-called chains of thought, and create magic.

Tim Pompey

#16. Because if you are fragmented and uncertain it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. Survival in a desert, then, requires that you lose this fragmentation, and fast. It is not a mystical experience, or rather, it is dangerous to attach these sorts of words to it.

Robyn Davidson

#17. The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

Edward Abbey

#18. What was considered a peak mystical experience a few years ago is today the basic platform of sanity from which our exploration begins.

Arjuna Ardagh

#19. For the person who wants to get to the mystical experience directly, Tantric Buddhism is the path.

Frederick Lenz

#20. All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.

Tom Stoppard

#21. The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the West.

Erwin Schrodinger

#22. Great stories give us the grace of a mystical experience, on the level of the imagination.

Peter Kreeft

#23. Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Salman Rushdie

#24. Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time.

Bill Viola

#25. Blake said that the body was the soul's prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the 'windows of the soul.' When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience.

Jim Morrison

#26. War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

Phil Klay

#27. My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

Alan Garner

#28. I can see my reflection like that of an angel!
And I feel that I am dying, and, through the medium
Of art or of mystical experience, I want to be reborn,
Wearing my dream like a diadem, in some better land
Where beauty flourishes.

Stephane Mallarme

#29. The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.

Thomas Merton

#30. One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.

Logan Pearsall Smith

#31. I have attended a number of psychological conferences dealing with this whole problem of the difference between the mystical experience and the psychological crack-up. The difference is that the one who cracks up is drowning in the water in which the mystic swims.

Joseph Campbell

#32. I had a mystical experience when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and I spent years trying to recapture that.

John Lurie

#33. A synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity is the mythos, spoken or unspoken, or our present day and age.

Wolfgang Pauli

#34. Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

Joseph Campbell

#35. the abuse of the subjective in some circles cannot exclude the 'mystical' and emotional dimensions of Christian experience.

Timothy J. Keller

#36. If I say your voice is an amber waterfall in which I yearn to burn each day, if you eat my mouth like a mystical rose with powers of healing and damnation, If I confess that your body is the only civilization I long to experience ... would it mean that we are close to knowing something about love?

Aberjhani

#37. And I saw a light-filled man emerge from the aforesaid dawn and pour his brightness over the aforementioned darkness; it repulsed him; he turned blood-red and pallid, but struck back against the darkness with such force that the man who was lying in the darkness became visible and resplendent.

Hildegard Of Bingen

#38. I take the assumption that every religion has been rooted in some mystical or transcendent experience. From that assumption, I just look at all the different systems as metaphors or doorways to God.

Ram Dass

#39. The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity.

Julia Cameron

#40. In the new enlightenment, the reason we are driven to become one with the life-process is not merely to experience some form of mystical oneness with everything. We strive to become one with it for the biggest reason there could be - so we can ultimately take responsibility for where it's going.

Andrew Cohen

#41. The ancients had a term in the mystical tradition called the Akashic Records, which was suggestive that nature didn't lose it's experience, that the information accumulated was available forever.

Edgar Mitchell

#42. The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#43. Love is not some complex, mystical abstraction. It is something accessible and human that we learn through our everyday experience, as often at times of failure as in moments of ecstasy ...

Leo Buscaglia

#44. Nanak's encounter of God and God's court was in fact a profound hallucinatory Near-Death Experience caused by drowning that strengthened his pre-conceived notion of a rational, compassionate and unorthodox society.

Abhijit Naskar

#45. But when the sun drops closer to the earth, the cold of the earth runs to it from the water and causes all green things to dry up. And because the sun has dropped closer to the earth, the days are short, and it is winter.

Hildegard Of Bingen

#46. Sadistic brutality and mystical feeling go always hand in hand when the normal capacity for orgastic experience is lacking. This was as true of the inquisitors of the medieval church, of the cruel and mystical Philip II of Spain, as it is of any modern mass murderer.

Wilhelm Reich

#47. One of the strengths of the belief in Antinous was its appeal to the most sensitive and inward of mystical natures as well as to the exuberant, joyous and ecstatic sides of human experience.

Royston Lambert

#48. We have a tendency to think of war as this quasi-mystical thing, and that interpretation flattens the experience - by using different perspectives, I wanted to open a place for readers to compare and contrast, to make judgments, to engage.

Phil Klay

#49. Something mystical happens to every writer who goes to the Masters for the first time, some sort of emotional experience that results in a search party having to be sent out to recover his typewriter from a clump of azaleas.

Dan Jenkins

#50. Think of the mystical three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection as the time it takes for a situation to change once spirit has infused our consciousness. As we come to look at an experience differently, in time in begins to transform.

Marianne Williamson