First Numinous Experiences

(from 9/16/2018)

In his book, What the Mystics Know, Richard Rohr writes about what he calls “the first numinous experience,” when our eyes are metaphorically opened and we see/understand/experience God or the Divine. I have a feeling that for me it happened very early, when I was young enough that I don’t remember; as long as I can recall, the fact of it has been with me. The earliest memory I have of being in touch with it is from when I was about 6 or 7 years old. I remember asking my mother, “do you ever think that this is actually a dream? That we’ll wake up one day and our whole life was a dream, but now this is our real life?” I may have a couple of the words wrong, but I can still feel the feeling of it.

What brought me to that place? Had I recently been to the Vedanta temple with my dad, to one of the sannyas pujas where newly-dedicated monks burn their worldly things to show that they are “in the world but not of the world”? Was it from Sunday school or Vespers at Jameson Ranch, the camp I went to for several summers, where I first learned about God from a Christian point of view? I don’t recall… but I don’t think that’s the important thing to dwell on. When I asked my mom about whether the life I was living was actually a dream that I would one day wake up from (presumably when I die), I wasn’t quoting or commenting on something someone else had said; it had welled up in me, bubbling around, putting me in a space of awe. And being me – Shiny Thought! – I had to ask about it.  I wonder whether my mother remembers that – I’ll have to ask her. I do remember her response, or at least the feel of it. She didn’t dismiss it as a childish fancy (though I think the word “precocious” may have been used more than once), but engaged me in a conversation about it. I think she’d said I must be “an old soul”, or “a priestess in a past life”… someone born knowing. But I think we’re all born knowing… we just forget.

I can also remember a few other thoughts I had from being around that age.

My idea of who and what God is from a very early age was something like, “a force that surrounds you and is also inside you”… the energy we came from, that lives within us and that we’ll all return to when we die. (Hmm… Father, Son & Holy Spirit?…  Not far off, though less personified.)  I didn’t (and don’t) believe in a “bodily resurrection” where we corporeally stand with God, Jesus, Buddha and/or our families, friends and pets we’ve loved, per se; but I don’t entirely not believe it either. I think we become again what we were before our birth: energy, spirit, part of God (which is the energy-of-all-things or all-encompassing-Love). And then at some point it came to me to describe it using the ocean as analogy. I lived on the beach for many years when I was young, and the ocean was a living, breathing thing that I experienced as part of my daily life. So I came to see “God”, “the Divine” or whatever you feel best calling it, as like an ocean: vast and all-encompassing; and each being, each living thing is a drop that came from it. When each thing dies, it will return to that ocean, that eternal pool of energy from whence it came. While living, even though it is temporarily in its own, separate form, it never ceases being part of that sea… God-that-is-energy (God-that-is-Love) flows around, through and within all living things. When a living thing dies, the shell, the physical form, falls away (to rot, decompose, compost, return to earth) and the spirit/soul/essence of that being rejoins the larger whole (God). And lest my fellow Christians point this out as heresy, I’ll put it in other, perhaps more familiar terms: God is the One in Whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). So I do believe that when we die, we will be reunited with God and our loved ones eternally… just more in the realm of drops returning to an ocean than a large family reunion. In the words of the Ash Wednesday imposition liturgy, “we come from dust and to dust we shall return.” Dust, Water, God, Love, Light, Essence… from this we come and to this we shall return.

I can also recall pondering that babies must be the closest to God… when we’re born, we Know. Know God, know Who we Are… we know. As we learn to be people, to be in this world, we lose our grasp of this understanding; we’re trained away from it, taught “how things really are”, and what’s “really so” to the point where what was obvious and most real to us starts to seem like a dream or fantasy; unreality. I also think that as many of us grow old, we begin to regain a sense of that… perhaps people who know, such as Richard Rohr’s “mystics,” come to a sense of that (described variously in whatever terms work for them) earlier than most of the rest of us. This also makes me wonder whether people with conditions of disconnection such as severe autism or some forms of mental illness… might actually be in a perpetual state of never-disconnected-from-that… that perhaps they remain more connected, like young children, and the dissonance between that and who/what/how the world expects them to be as adults is too much to reconcile. In other words, they may be mystics or closer-to-God than the rest of us; not metaphorically but actually.