When is the last time you had, what you would call, a religious experience.?

I’d say a little more than a year ago when I finally stopped resisting my nihilistic thoughts and completely tossed theism aside.

First real swordfight in Zelda: Skyward Sword. And the final swordfight, too. That was friggin’ rad.

When I had magic cookies and went to see Avatar in 3-D.

I think I was about 13 or 14. I was on a bus, coming back from the mall. I was the last one on the bus and when I was about to get off, the bus driver asked me for a moment of his time. He said he’s seen suffering in me and saw that I was lost, and asked if I would say a prayer with him to feel the power of Jesus Christ.

I wasn’t really religious then, more just believing it just because I was taught to, so I said sure why not. So we say the prayer and he pretty much tells me that Jesus and god are watching over me and I’ll be protected.

I felt like a bad ass after that because I was kind of curious: Do I really have some powerful guy that is watching my back?! This is like a super power!

Hilarious when I think about it now.

Edit: Oh, I didn’t know it could be anything. I would say when I hiked to the top of a small mountain on St. Maarten and rested on a cliff overlooking the whole island and the ocean.

I had a dream I was climbing a mountain to meet a Sufi master. When I met him, he sang a song to me which I remembered perfectly when I woke up:

“In God’s perfect garden
It doesn’t matter if you die young
My age is just a shield against
the Devil’s rusted plow
A callous hand to show you

If you die old like me
Then be like the mountain
Not like the bombs
Or ocean waves
And let them climb and reach
Upon you
And you will cradle them
In your valleys”

After that, he died, and I wrapped him up in newspaper articles that were about him, wrote his song on the wrappings, and placed him in a cave as a tomb. I stepped outside and the sun was starting to rise over the horizon and I woke up crying and feeling really moved for some reason. This happened the night of September 25, 2010, according to my journal.

I sit on my lanai in the mornings and have my first cup of coffee watching the sunrise. It is always very quite with just the sounds of the earth waking. The birds are just starting their day and the squirrels begin scampering from my oak tree running all around, digging and barking. I meditate and say a prayer… dear God,show me a way to kill those damn squirrels without my neighbors catching on.

Every freaking day. I have to fight off the glossolalia by constantly writing song, limerick, and trite poetry. I’m one of those people who falls into trance at the bequest of a gnat flying across the table. It is a problem.

The difference between “religious” experiences and “ordinary” experience is an illusion that my religion helps me get over. Go chasing epiphanies and you overlook the real treasure.

I have them often, dancing. Less often making music. Even less often making love.

I have learned, over the years, not to expect them, but to trust the process. They do happen, so if I keep practicing, I’ll eventually experience another one. Expectation seems to keep them away. But it’s hard to not-expect. Part of the process to keep on practicing until I no longer do so with expectation. I can never make that happen. It only happens when I’ve truly given up.

I went through my “seeking” phase about 8 or 9 years ago now and it lasted for about 5 years. Some major transformations of consciousness. As always, no-thing, peak experience is sustainable, however…along with an amazing amount of serendipity during that time, the biggest and utterly amazing experience came to me one morning at about 4 a.m.

I wake up early to in-joy the solitude of early morning, read, meditate a bit.
On this particular morning I was grappling with some serious fears about my financial future and working on my surrendering to what is, while also taking the “self” empowering approach of feeling worthy for good things to keep manifesting in my life.
I used to sit on my kitchen counter with my feet on a pine table near a window that looked out over the mountains. This was my meditative “perch.” lol

I had been reading in a rather religious, but also generic inspirtational book and a feeling came over me of total peace and knowing that all would be okay.
I found myself saying out loud in that moment…” God, I am ready to claim my demonstration.”

12 hours later a far removed uncle passed away and I was beneficiary to a large estate.
Truly…it was uncanny! To this day, while part of me wants to claim I somehow manifested this fortuitious event, I really am not able to afford any explanation.
The manifestation of pure thought and sincere openess or, just “coincidence.” I do not know. :-)

I had a spiritual experience when I went to visit the country church that was the inspiration for T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” in Cambridgeshire. Two churchwomen came out from the nearby retreat house and asked if I wanted to participate in the noontime service. They and I stood outside on a beautiful early winter’s day and read from “The Book of Common Prayer.” Then they asked my husband and me to come back to the retreat house for lunch. Outdoors, serendipity, literature and food – it was a wonderful experience!

My last religious experience was last Christmas. My aunt had a whole religious themed Christmas party, and we did a lot of creative things that had to do with religion.

I’ve got two:

The first time I ever spent a real session doing meditation at my temple, alternating between half hour periods of sitting meditation and walking meditation. Being in the temple setting forced me to actually concentrate on my zazen, and center myself. After it all was done I realized I achieved a level of calmness and awareness that I never truly had before, the world felt slow, peaceful, deliberate, like every action, every gust of wind was a stroke of a brush, and I was just acutely aware of the universe and completely at peace with it. It was fleeting though, and I was back to raging as I got back on the freeway to go home.

The second happened when I went with my girlfriend to the celebration mass of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Part of the mass included an re-enactment of the story of Juan Diego and his encounter with the virgin. It wasn’t really a great performance, but as I was watching it I was hit out of nowhere with an overwhelming sense of intense unconditional love and warmth and it made me cry pretty heavily. I’m not sure what to make of it myself, and my girlfriend said that the way I describe it sounds like others accounts of people who’ve claimed to be touched by the holy spirit. Either way, I’ve been trying to incorporate that into my meditation practice ever since.

Religious? Never
Profound maybe.

@Qingu I’m still trying to slay Demise!

@zensky, My point isn’t to split hairs, but I tend to think a religious experience is derived from a religion, which I’m not really doing at this point in my life. My equivalent is achieving something of a trance state or sort of tapping into my subconscious. I don’t mean this in some overly profound sense, but more like a stronger version of daydreaming. In the last year or so, I’ve been able to really feel the web of connection among everything around me. I feel abundance rather than scarcity. I have awareness of the subconscious messages I tell myself habitually, and I’m feeling more and more able to change and influence them. Having dealt with nearly a couple decades of depressive thinking and chronic unhappiness, it’s an amazing experience to be able to tap into all of this good energy and to know that it’s just there for the asking. It’s lovely and profound but less of a super natural experience than one that is a discovery of something that is totally natural. It’s interesting now to see the contrast between that state of mind and witnessing the minds of folks who are still running on the conventional wisdom treadmill, so to speak.

@Jude, I am sure that if you have courage and hold your sword high, you will prevail

@serenade Well…once you wake up there is no going back to sleep, that’s for sure. lol

Leaving Ireland by boat after tour of some historical sites its dim blue hills appeared holy to me. This was a long time ago.

On the last day of 2011. I was metabolizing psilocybin.

This morning.