Lifted and snipped for discussion related to Clearing. This article can be
found at <http://www.ehe.org/display/ehe-page.cfm?ID=5>.
Exceptional Human Experiences: A Brief Overview
Rhea A. White, 1999.
pub: EHE Network, Inc.
(3rd ed., 1999)
copyright?2001 EHE Network, Inc.
?
Exceptional human experience is an umbrella term for anomalous experiences
that transform the individual who has them so that they are engaged in a
process of realizing their full human potential, which makes the
experience an exceptional human one. There are many types of experiences,
usually instances of the psychic, mystical, healing, death-related,
encounter, and desolation/nadir type, as well as those we call peak
experiences. We have been studying accounts of a broad range of over 200
types of anomalous experience to discover how many general characteristics
pertain across the whole class. See List of Potential EHEs. The reason
that we are looking at these experiences as a group is that they may be
points on a continuum, or else there may be connections between some if
not all of them, which we would not see if we only looked at them as
discrete experiences. For example, people who are not aware of ever having
had psychic experiences note that they start having them after they have
had near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, multiple personality
episodes, UFO encounters, and other forms of anomalous experience.
Anomalous experiences are customarily treated as one-time events. Those
who take an interest in them usually examine all the data they can gather
concerning the event/experience itself and any relevant circumstances that
seem to lead up to it. Very little attention is given to the
experience/event?s aftereffects or its subjective qualities. In our
approach, we start with the experience, including any predisposing factors
and triggers. Then we take a close look not only at the objectively
verifiable components and the anomalous ones, but also the physical,
physiological, feeling, psychological, and spiritual components. Because
of their importance, our main concern has become the aftereffects. If an
experience does not have any lasting effect on the experiencer, it remains
simply an anomaly, and so can be viewed objectively as a one-time
happening, now finished. However, some anomalous experiences become
personalized. They become part of the experiencer?s life. They have become
exceptional experiences (EEs). These, in turn, can initiate a process that
has ongoing transformative aftereffects. Then the experience becomes an
exceptional human experience (EHE). We are very interested in the process
by which EHEs develop and in observing how they affect the experiencer
both immediately and during the rest of his or her life. We are especially
interested in any patterns that may emerge across both individuals and
different types of experiences.
Some exceptional experiences are more likely to become transformative than
others, such as mystical experiences, near-death experiences, and
out-of-body experiences. But perhaps any anomalous experience can become
an EHE, and we are interested in discovering if this is the case. We have
drawn up the following very preliminary list of ten characteristics that
seem to hold across several types of exceptional human experience.
1. All of these experiences, including those induced by drugs or hypnosis,
occur spontaneously, at least initially. They happen to you?you can?t
make them happen.
2. Each type of experience in one way or another is an experience of
transcendence, which means ?to rise above; surpass; exceed.? In an
out-of-body experience, for example, you have the experience of literally
rising above your body, being able to look down upon it as if from outside.
In near-death and post-death experiences, you seem to transcend the
boundary between life and death. In clairvoyance and telepathy, you
transcend space (and in the latter case, also personality). In
precognition, you transcend time; and so it goes.
3. Each one represents a new experience of the self, of who or what we are.
Whereas we previously assumed we were bound by time, space, our bodies,
personalities, individualities, and certainly death, these experiences
give the lie to that view. They tell us we are more than we thought we
were.
4. They are all experiences of connection, first to different levels of
ourselves, but also to others, to other forms of life, to the planet, to
the universe, and to the sacred.
5. Each is an experience of opening to a reality we were taught could not
be true. This opening occurs directly. That is, we don?t have to think
about it or question it?during the experience we are there. They also open
us inwardly, thus predisposing us to have further experiences, unless we
shut down the process through fear or misunderstanding of what is
happening.
6. Although EHEs are experiences of opening, connecting, and transcending,
the fact that there is no sense of separation applies both within and
without the person. There is no separation felt between mind and body, so
that you respond with your whole self. This means there is often an
orgasmic element in EHEs. You are in a heightened state physiologically,
psychologically, and spiritually. Physically, you can experience tingling,
swooning, rapid heartbeat, flush, raised hairs, goosebumps, and
breathlessness. A good test of an EHE is that you can feel it in your toes.
7. Although there are scholars and scientists willing to grant that these
experiences merit investigation, they have done so using the methods of
Western science and analysis. This has led to their being treated as
static events--one-time occurrences that, once they are over, are
considered done with. For example, an investigator might look into a dream
that X had in May 1991 that corresponded in considerable detail to an
event that occurred in June 1991, thus indicating that the dream could
have been precognitive. The investigator tries to find witnesses to both
dream and event. He or she compares the details of the dream with the
details of the event, notes the person?s age, sex, occupation, education,
etc., and when finished, adds this information to other such statistics.
It will most likely molder away in a file somewhere. We haven?t learned
anything that connects to anything else. Instead, we should view such
experiences not as one-time events comparable, say to one?s first tooth or
car, but more to one?s job or one?s significant relationships--in other
words, to experiences that occur within an ongoing process. Exceptional
experiences are more like seeds. They happen to us not like events but as
initiators of a process, waiting to unfold in us even as the oak tree
unfolds from the acorn, but with a major difference--the oak tree, as far
as we know, grows spontaneously and naturally. But the process that
unfolds in a human being, at least after a certain stage is reached,
requires our conscious cooperation and participation. We need to pay
attention to these experiences, try to glimpse what they may be telling us,
discern where they may be leading us, trust the visions they reveal to us,
and incorporate them in our lives. So, although initially they occur
spontaneously, they are invitations to participate in a process of growth
that requires our cooperation. Instead, we tend to shelve these
experiences, to repress them, and not tell others about them, because
although they may be exciting, thrilling, wonderful experiences in
themselves, in the context of the consensus worldview they are weird,
strange, unreal, or even sick. In this view, it is natural not to look to
them for insight and guidance.
8. In science everyone is looking for a new paradigm (or worldview) to
account for everything. Physicists are trying to account for the
mind-matter interface. Psychologists and philosophers call it the
mind-body relationship. We call EHEs preparadigmatic experiences, because
they seem to herald a new paradigm, or at the least, they fly in the face
of the one with which we now live. So each one really offers the
experiencer (and to some extent, those who read or hear about a given
experience) a window with a new view, and they provide an opportunity to
choose between belief and doubt. (This is an opportunity of unparalleled
importance.) The experiencer must decide whether to provisionally trust
the experience or explain it away or dismiss it. Those who choose to
believe find they have opened a door leading to additional experiences
that provide entrance to a world where their lives become charged with
meaning. They have entered what we call the Experiential Paradigm. Those
who doubt continue to remain encased in the familiar inhospitable and even
abusive arms of the worldview that has been with us since the
Enlightenment, which we were taught was the only reality. Many people?s
lives are chaotic and bereft of meaning, and many turn to drugs, not to
embrace the world, but to forget it.
9. What we need is a story that will unite science and spirituality, self
and world. But first it must occur at the individual level, which brings
us to the ninth characteristic. Each of us needs a story that charges our
daily lives with meaning and puts us personally in touch with the sacred.
There are many books about writing, or better yet, living your own story,
your own myth. But the myths of old contained an element that is missing
from most stories told today, and that is a link with the sacred.
Exceptional human experiences can serve as those links; they are those
happenings in our lives that can pull us out of boredom and disconnection
and into a world of meaning and connection. We have to learn how to honor
these experiences and let them into our lives. When a sufficient number of
people do that, the larger story will emerge. Exceptional human
experiences catapult us into the new paradigm. We become a part of it and
we discover it is a part of us. When we enter the Experiential Paradigm,
we are no longer apart from it. The scientific method cannot take us there.
But once we ourselves are there, and when we are willing to take the
further leap of sharing our experiences with others, we will not only be
inside the new view that is needed to join physical and spiritual, mind
and matter, body and mind, but we will also be playing a significant part
in transforming it into consensus reality. Once more, as in ages past, the
story of each human will be the story of humankind, and vice versa. We and
our times will be in step and able to move forward as one. Science can do
nothing but follow, as it is right that it should.
10. Creating one?s story is not simply something the experiencer can do
alone. Telling it in part involves living it out in some way (i.e., acting
on it). So only does it really become real to the experiencer and to
others. One of the first ways to do this is to tell others about it, in a
context where it seems relevant, even though it may be embarrassing or
difficult. By sharing our EHEs, the other person validates the experience,
even if he or she reacts negatively. But often the response is positive,
and when it is, the other person may be moved by the first person?s story
to share his or her EHEs as well. This heightens the sense of meaning and
reality for both in ways that go beyond simply describing one?s EHEs. A
process seems to be initiated by such interchanges that operates
independently of both persons and that leads to connectedness and
interconnections. One has entered into the process of spinning the web of
the new paradigm. We don?t think it out; we live out of it and into a new
way of being in the world. Then we can conceptualize it in the same way
that we open our eyes and see.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homer Wilson Smith Clean Air, Clear Water, Art Matrix - Lightlink
(607) 277-0959 A Green Earth, and Peace, Internet, Ithaca NY
homer@lightlink.com Is that too much to ask? http://www.lightlink.com
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