Ecstatic Encounters – Jason Silva
Channel: Transition21
Date: 2016-12-23

Encountering that bliss totality we call the infinite, the numinous, the holy – religiosity, metaphysical ecstasy and aesthetic awe.

"Love is a religious problem, to love someone is to deify them, to render them holy."

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The hallmarks of a mystical experience, an encounter with the infinite:

1. A feeling of unity and interconnection. A feeling of interconnection with everything, unity with the infinite.

2. A feeling of transcendence of time and of space. You feel like you are free'd from the shackles of the ego, the ego and the identification with the self dissolves, to give way to a communion with the ultimate.

3. A feeling that you are connecting with the sacred, with something of divine origin.

4. There's a sense of the noetic, whatever it is that you're apprehending hints at a deeper veracity, at some kind of ultimate truth and ultimate meaning.

5. There's a sense of ineffability, there's a sense that you can't put it into words, that you can't quite describe it, that its indescribable, so its ineffable.

6. There's a sense of paradoxicality, a sense that all of the sudden you can hold all opposing truths in mind at the same time, all contradictions are reconciled.

7. There is a sense that the experience impermanent and fleeting. So you can have a mystical experience and it can end a few minutes later,  its fleeting, its impermanent, but you will remember it forever because there is also a quality of it that is lasting, that it signals a transformative shift in perspective and consciousness that is lasting, you are no longer the same, where as once we were blind and now we can see.

8. A sense of joy, and gratitude and ecstasy.

So these are the hallmarks with the holy, and if we could do something with that, if we could take what we learn, take what we perceive during these rare and precious moments, then share that with the world.. that is worth striving for.

Everything has been figured out except how to live, so perhaps the better question is not what are we to do with death, but what are we to do with life, for life exists in individual moments and it is up to us to make sure those moments are vital, interconnected and grand, to make a master piece out of life, one that we would willingly life again and again, for all of eternity. This is what we can strive for.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rate race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.