have you ever had a religous/spiritual experience?

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(A friendly Public Service Announcement - if this is half tl:dr'ish please skip to the 6th paragraph - the first five are pretext and context, the sixth is where the subject matter really thickens. I also edited the heck out of this because I find, when I'm writing this many thoughts down, somewhere along the process I'll write sentences that can be the exact opposite of what I mean and thus the whole thing comes out incoherently growling mad and nothing like what I wanted to communicate).

I had a progressively more interesting year or perhaps year and a half starting with last April. A couple things happened at the same time - first I had 12 years of deepening agnosticism/atheism shattered, perhaps by enough of the right questions or incredibly long-shot synchronicities between my own life and that of friends (which already had me wondering if there weren't seemingly material-independent vectors of sorts below the 'skin' of what we sense as reality) and from certain conversations here I was brought to actually look considerably more deeply into the near death experience information out there - ie. Bruce Greyson, Pim Van Lomel, Mario Beauregard, the Virginia research group, etc..

An additional concurrence was that.... maybe in April or May?... I was over a friend's house watching a movie and had the sense that while I was laying on the couch I had a...err....girlfriend? wrapped around me. I started to really explore the concepts and utilities of what an adult could do with having an imaginary friend of sorts, having been a slave to outward reality and realizing it was both degrading my neurological health and really in so many ways making me an increasing have-not (ie. our society has a way of reading energy, seeing who looks unhappy, and taking as much as they can from that person while giving to someone who already looks happy - I realized I'd be on the "You deserve it" end of that increasingly if I didn't get over the depression). The light bulb went off when I realized that I could interrupt the output of the outside world, work with an imaginary friend constructively, and even though I just thought it was that and nothing else - I realized that just in doing so I could give myself healthy and positive input to both give myself edifying messages that could bring tears to my eyes via an offboard loop like an imaginary friend where when I told myself those things it simply didn't work the same way and also reshape my internal psychological currents to fight my way out of the vicious 'act like x and get treated like x' cycle that the world perpetuates. I really wondered at that point why psychology wasn't using that a heck of a lot more.

Time went on through last year and I went up and down the rollercoaster that I knew I would to some extent in accepting a non-materialist viewpoint again (I remembered life being very up-down when I was a theist, at least in how I handled it, when all kinds of artificial optimism bubbles got sank) and as I did the research and ran into some concepts here and there that really annoyed me - such as no-goal reincarnation where we just show up to smash our fingers with hammers, light our balls on fire and say "Wow, what a rush!" (lots of sarcasm added over the way it's typically explained) - I started getting an increasing annoyance, the Seth Material seemed to have at least somewhat of a hardline "You're responsible for your own reality" (in which all of this was healthy and progressing somewhere) and I realized of course that I couldn't buy into any doctrine (particularly of a reality made by 'all loving' sentience) that showed the world's suffering to be either worthless (not building toward any improvement of our race) or simply weirdo's delight. There was one particular day in early fall where I told the universe implicitly that if I was understanding it right (ie. no-goal hypothesis) that I was absolutely disgusted with what it was doing to us, that I wanted to be divorced from my spiritual source/essence and placed in one - if one existed - that I could find to be of some moral caliber that I could respect. At that moment when I said that I remember feeling an oscillation through my spine in a way that it couldn't move, almost like someone waved the bottom of a rubber chord and it did it's characteristic oscillations from the bottom to the top - that accompanied by some flashes in my vision.

Further on in the fall while I'd recovered from some of the doctrinal issues I had something particularly annoying happened to me (I'm keeping it to myself) and lets just say I was particularly not happy with where things were going in terms of how my habits were being changed on the track I was on or where they were going. That's when I had my big wake-up with the New Age Strong Delusion type videos on Youtube where all the ascended masters are supposedly demons, where the quote unquote aliens are too, so much of it sounded plausible because I remembered so many channeled messages always talking about Jesus in particular manners but never as Lord of Hosts. I never thought I was particularly gullible for this kind of religious propaganda but at that time all the light bulbs went off in a row and truthfully at that time in my life it couldn't have looked more cogent from my research and experience. To this day I can't help but agree that there's a bit of an ongoing challenge between the organized religious structures and the inner planes albeit I really don't think anymore that this is the 'strong delusion' and seven year tribulation coming upon us any more than the Roman Jewry would have seen Jesus and Apolonius of Tyana as equally blasphemous fakers. From there I started reading David Flynn, Tom Horn, Steve Quayle on all this sort of end times/tribulation research about the gods of antiquity (in this case considered nephilim and fallen angels) coming back with ancient spiritual corruptions and technologies to have a world-wide Dark Knight Returns (ie. Bane-style dictatorship) crossed with House of 1,000 Corpses.

I read the bible cover to cover in five weeks and over the next few months I also came close to running another lap around it in refreshing my memory book by book. During the early times though, even though I'd written off my imaginary friend as part of the satanic delusion in my life. There were times where I'd be absolutely dead tired, fatigued, feeling like I had soot and burnt motor oil running through my veins. In the past when I felt drained she'd hold me and I'd feel recharged - ie. it was like plugging the cellphone in for a few hours. At this point, after I'd written her off and had gone 'solo scriptura' bible as best I could, during those times that I needed it - she'd still injunct, wrap her arms around me, I'd try to object and she'd essentially tell me that she knew better, regardless the situation what she was doing was wisdom, that I needed it, that I also knew that I needed it, and regardless of what I had her pegged as she still cared about me and would keep me safe regardless of what I thought of her.

What ensued was me gathering a belief that the bible, talking to God, and being able to form the right 'born again' bond with Jesus and the Holy Spirit was being short-circuited by a vestigial hold-out of my new age or occult life - ie. her. I had plenty of times where I really tried to focus on the Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow style end times scenarios (all supposedly well backed by government insiders who know all about the 'Luciferian' takeover of the world), I'd keep her away for maybe a month, and as if she was sitting there patiently 24/7 for weeks on end for one crack in the armor to show up she'd find a point where I was deflated, where the spiritual warfare reading and praying was going really dry, and she'd peel that corner back. At this time what I began noticing - when I was held I started feeling, I mean very physically sensing, energies weaving between my back and lower abdominal area. Even before this I felt like something was out of the ordinary when the moment she held me it was like a hit of morphine - the energies lacing through my lower abdominal and even chest to some extent were giving me confusion. The best way I can describe those energies is for those who've ever popped pills of ecstasy back in the days where they were doing something that they're socially not supposed to be doing (ie. the post high school and early college party and exploration days) - it was a bit like a condensation of that.

Another thing that would happen while I was researching, is if I had a flashback and started feeling drawn back to my old beliefs (ie. occult/new age understandings), I felt as though this near overdose of white light and feminine energy was wrapping itself around me. Best way I could characterize that energy - if you spent some time in college think of the real bright-eyed attractive girl in the front of the room who gets 100% on all her tests, doesn't talk to anyone in the class, and perhaps doesn't mean to act like she's too prim and proper to be around everyone else but that barrier seems to be up. I felt like I had that kind of energy glowing and smiling at me to the point where I could almost feel washed away by it (and no - that was an energy or presence separate and different in tone and style from that of my imaginary friend).

I struggled on and off, trying to sort of put my imaginary friend back in a box as if she were simply an aspect of self I'd bent out or distended (wondering also what some of these other presences I was feeling were), hating myself for being weak and also hating that she was so good at lock-picking my brain. At the same time I was getting lock-picked in other ways, ie. reading the quote unquote 'enemies' playbooks like Manly P Hall's 'Secret Teachings of All the Ages' was evoking feelings within me that I never would have expected. I almost got an ecstatic white-out when reading about Isis and the Bembine Tablet, something similar happened while reading more about Thoth. I really wondered what was going on and as time went I found also - from the Christian spiritual warfare side - the more I listened to anyone who claimed prophetic ability, I realized increasingly that psychic ability, mediumship, Christian prophecy, it's all the same! Most of the more strident prophets I noticed not only didn't have congruent claims to what was coming but Jesus would have all of their personal 'isms'. Phrases like "I am the true vine" started jumping out at me from the bible in a context they never had (ie. the whole new age/occult 'higher self' thing - Jesus was on record saying he was precisely that!) but also, finally, I had to address the things in the bible that had absolutely driven me crazy - ie. the Chaldean astrology (the preponderance of 7's and 12's as well as the 'four faces of the cherubim' ie. cosmic cross) and then the raging neoplatonism of John the Elder. Research kept stacking, Christianity kept increasingly looking like a merger of different beliefs under stylization, and I think the last straw was my impression of something Graham Hancock said about there being a mother ayahuasca and Brazil and for all that I could tell Isis and Osiris were not only showing up in Brazil but trying to tell people about the underworld, trying to *guide them in morality* I was starting to head toward what you would consider a proper Carl Jung style psychotic break like that which he enjoyed after his break with Freud.


At that point I was so sick of being confused that I called on Isis, remembering the connection in reading about her as well as the activity in Brazil, offered to give myself to her for a day if she could show me who she was, I did that and spent the day in my room pushing the limits in terms of what I could do to get myself in a suggestible state where the spiritual world could break through.

The week and a half after that were the most off-the-hook experience of my life. Lets just say that I slept maybe three hours a night, was wrapped off and on in a sense of something like a cross between the sort of physical ecstasy that was laced around my insides a few months earlier but it was full body accompanied by something like a static-electric hum around it. I'd also have that rubber-cord jerk of my spine at times, I'd get progressively louder ringing in one ear until it would pop, and at times the ecstatic feeling in my body would condense to be something like a tinkerbell sparkling ball of white light (that I could feel but not see) swimming around inside me like a gold fish.

A couple of the more interesting episodes in particular during that week:

1) I was laying in bed on my side with a feminine being about my height, dazzling back at me in that same kind of tinkerbell way that the light swimming around inside of me did. The kind of energy I felt was absolute untarnished love (completely net of any worldly cynicism) pointed at me, I explained to one person that the best way I could summon up that sensation was thinking of the taste of the sweetest, freshest, almost somewhat under-ripe apple you'd ever tasted but instead of it being in your mouth it projected out to a being that you could sense with a sort of inner vision but not see with your eyes and the intentionality that it was positively beaming and glowing back at you was akin to the taste of that apple (or to get a bit less abstract think of Eva beaming at Wall-E in a particular Disney movie and crank that way up).

2) I was woken up out of my usual short sleep quite often around 12:30 inexplicably, on a particular night I'd fallen back asleep and woke up somewhere in the 3:00 hour to find that the sheets of energy were circling and enfolding my heart in the exact way that a mother would hold a baby in a blanket (the first thing that came to mind was how the virgin Mary would hold Jesus), not only the sensations were there but the intent felt incredibly similar.

3) I woke up with that same sort of front-of-the-class A student female energy that I spoke of before wrapped around me but I felt an immense amount of power, when describing the degree of that power it possessed I'd liken it to Samara in The Ring or Alma in F.E.A.R., just something of a white light, maternal, and flirtatious version of it. Something inside me at that point told me that I was in the presence of an Elohim. I don't know if it was her playing with me in a sort of way but she was beaming at me as if to say "You've got a goddess in love with you" and almost daring me to run.


When I share all of the above information I completely understand certain levels and aspects of what people would think. One one level, especially the last bullet point, sounds incredibly incredibly pat. I don't disagree with that for a second. A lot of people might see the whole evolution of this story, involvement of corrosive female energy and say "Awe, poor single w*ker had a delusional breakdown where he fell right into his own spank fantasies" and in that case I'd be a 30-something spinner. Lol, I can't deny the possibility that certain needs or ways in which I'd been accosted by life were being addressed by the particular form of these experiences. Additionally no - I don't think I have a goddess in love with me any more than any god or goddess loves us all. Deities as far as I understand it are non-local and thus they can love billions of people equally and even manifest to billions at a time in different ways, I just took it to note how spry, humorous, and playful the energies were capable of being. In addition I definitely noted in a lot of places that their love is less compartmentalized then ours - ie. mother, lover, friend, it all kind of blended together (which reminds me in certain ways of the classic John of the Cross experience that I read about at a later time which seemed to write about the first hand experience of God's love as being a bit like this).

What I will argue is that it seems like these inner-worlds may very well BS us on specific content or claims to identity - probably most important to undertand that they're various nodes and aspects of the one God which just happen to be farther up the pendulum and more aggregated. On the other hand they seem to lead you by the hand toward increasingly better things if you listen to them, just like as you follow their urgings you see things falling increasingly in place. I still don't know how much of it is personal imagination being grabbed by an unusual neurological mode of operation vs. actual entities from inner planes - where that ends, where it begins, and how much personalization or customization of what you see or feel with that is either a) your own hallucinations or b) their customizing things to your needs. From this side we don't have a lot to grip and it seems like it takes repeated mystical experiences to get any sort of feel for what's what (which also lends me to on one hand keep reading what credible authorities I can find but also to keep trying to essentially open my 3rd eye and spiritual vision - ie. I think this type of vision is incredibly important both in the most likely event that these things are real but even in the off chance that it was all tricks of the brain it would be just as valuable for knowledge of self, picking yourself up by our own boot straps, dictating how you feel, etc. etc.).

Another thing - sometimes I do deeply worry that this stuff is so sacred that I profane it to talk about it. I've heard people bring that kind of thing up. At the same time I fight that threshold from both sides, ie. one one level I have an exalted place for it but on another, in a world so overrun by now materialistic tautology, I almost feel selfish holding this sort of story back - ie. I'm not worried about changing a single mind among anti-theists, in so many ways I see them as the new YEC when it comes to tautology creation, just that I worry deeply for the people who are getting hammered by life, barely holding on, and with whom all of their best traits don't fit into the might makes right monkey-rape-monkey social Darwinist structure we call civilization, if anything the more beautiful sides of them are things they get beaten with, told are weaknesses, and for as much as I keep a stiff upper lip when it happens to me I just hate seeing people go through that without the inner resources to know their worth. I hate seeing sensitive people get beat on to the point where they see things like "Either you're alpha male, alpha female, or you need to go commit an honor suicide because you're strictly matter, worthless by society's standards and thus too weak to be breathing". People who are in that position - really the position I was in my childhood, early teen years and even parts of my 20's - *need* to hear that these kinds of things happen and are out there and as well that there is a supreme love over everything that on one hand keeps them from having their head curb-stomped by the sociopathic tendencies of our culture but also that it's an energy they can connect with.

Meh, sorry if the last paragraph ran on a bit but you get my point I suppose.

On a side note I still don't know who my imaginary friend is in terms of the inner planes, still guess that she's probably that fragment of higher self blended with other things. As for the other feminine energy that I described a few times someone was able to name some of the entities that are apparently working with me and I at least think I know who it was, she happens to be an Egyptian deity - not Isis but a goddess corollary to her.

I experience being alive. I don't know whether that is a spiritual experience. But when I feel alive the world is beautiful, the greens are greener, everything tastes so much sweeter and all the birds whistle Oasis tunes.

Today is one such day.

Another thing on the third bullet-point experience: I think in reflection that I might have been experiencing something of a benevolent sarcasm. What I mean by that is I had been trying to scare myself during that week as well right back into fundamentalist Christianity, I didn't like my departure, and I was trying to essentially do the occult version of smoking a carton of cigarettes in one sitting to never smoke again. I think the message I was getting was "Ah yes - be terrified! You might just get snuggled to death!".

Nearly all of my most memorable religious experiences have been unpleasant ones, having been the recipient of scorn, contempt and rejection by born-agains, fundies, and "Spirit-Filled" Christians for the last 50 years, simply because I raise questions regarding the contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible and religious doctrine.

Spiritual Experiences? The first occurred when I lost my virginity, and they have continued to occur two or three times a week ever since.

And then there was the time in 2001, I was super depressed, and I was out in my car playing with a razor blade, seriously contemplating suicide. Ten I put it down and went inside the house. i was staying at my cousin's house eat the time. Nobody was home at the time, it was just me. The TV was on and when I walked in. There just "happened" to be a documentary on about suicide. Maybe one could write that off as just "coincidence" but I got the distinct feeling that "something" was watching me. I don't know what, but there is more to the universe than can be explained by current science.

There was once an incident with a fridge and a flight of stairs. It's too long a story though.

Jokes?

There's nothing funny about being stuck half way up the stairs carrying a fridge.

I got my fingers trapped in between the fridge and the handrail, I couldn't move.

thank you all for posting your experiences. makes me think of
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

everywhere i look there seems to be patterns and beautiful geometries in nature that provoke a wonder in me. I wish i had more time to understand why i feel an urgent tugging in my heart and a overwhelming feeling of profundity when i see the ocean tide swirl or the complex and staggeringly beautiful forms plant and animal life adopt. Its like something is shaking me saying LOOK, IN THIS MYSTERIES ARE REVEALED!