Spirits: the root of Spirituality

A Blog about Extraordinary Spiritual Experiences (ESEs) and Near Death Experiences (NDEs)

Terrifying Spiritual Experiences

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In my first post I described the spiritual experience of Gen Foster, an elderly psychologist. That was an entirely unexpected experience and it was life transforming for Gen. It was also the most wonderful experience of her life. But not all spiritual experiences are wonderful. Some are terrifying. I spent years studying one such experience, an experience that is common throughout the world (at least 20% of the population) but almost unheard of in modern, Western society–unheard of because those who have it are usually afraid to tell others. The following is an example recounted to me by one of my medical students. It had happened to him in his dorm room as he took an afternoon nap.

What woke me up was the door slamming.  “OK,” I thought, “It’s my roommate….”  I was laying on my back just kinda looking up.  And the door slammed, and I kinda opened my eyes.  I was awake.  Everything was light in the room.  My roommate wasn’t there and the door was still closed….

But the next thing I knew, I realized that I couldn’t move…. I kind of like gazed over to the door and there was no one there.  But the next thing I knew, from one of the areas of the room this grayish, brownish murky presence was there.  And it kind of swept down over the bed and I was terrified!… It was like nothing I had ever seen before.  And I felt–I felt this pressing down all over me.  I couldn’t breathe.  I couldn’t move.  And the whole thing was that–there was like–I could hear the stereo in the room next to me.  I was wide awake, you know…. And I couldn’t move and I was helpless and I was really–I was really scared…. And this murky pres­ence–just kind of–this was evil!  This was evil!  You know this is weird!  You must think I’m a–…. This thing was there!  I felt a pressure on me and it was like enveloping me.  It was a very, very, very strange thing.  And as I remember I struggled.  I struggled to move and get out.  And–you know, eventually, I think eventually what happened was I kind of like moved my arm.  And again the whole thing–just kind of dissipat­ed away.  The presence, everything.  But everything else just remained the same.  The same stereo was playing next door.  The same stuff was going on.  (Case #10 in Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Pp. 58‑59.)

As usual with these interviews, this student asked me not to tell anyone that he had described such an experience, and I have always kept this (and all cases in my research) anonymous; Genevieve Foster’s mystical experience is an exception because she revealed it in her published memoir and did not seek anonymity.

It is interesting to compare this student’s experience with Gen Foster’s. Both involve a mysterious presence, although Gen’s presence was invisible and my student’s was visible. But it is not rare for the presence in the paralysis attacks to be invisible. In both cases the subjects “simply knew” something about the presence and their relationship to it; in Gen’s case love, and in the student’s case evil. Both involved accurate perception of their physical environment with a bizarre perceptual addition: extraordinary light for Gen, and in the student’s case a dark presence. In both cases the subject had no prior belief in or awareness of such experiences; in fact, both were very sophisticated and highly educated individuals. But in both cases, they were certain the event was real, and they remained certain afterwards.

When I began my research on the terrifying paralysis experience in 1970 I was able to connect it with the event known to sleep researchers as “sleep paralysis,” (SP). SP is a condition in which one is actually awake, but unable to move because of a brain mechanism connected with rapid eye movement sleep (REM). In REM, the stage in which dreams occur, muscle tone is suppressed and one’s body is in a limp paralysis which functions to prevent the dreamer from acting out the motions of their dream and waking themselves up. In 1970 SP was thought to be a rare symptom of narcolepsy (a disorder of excessive sleepiness). But my research, initially carried out in Newfoundland, Canada, found a prevalence of around 20% which has been confirmed in many populations since then, and SP is now recognized as common and is not an indication of any disorder. One might think that such a mixture of dreaming and waking would explain the strange content of SP, and if these experiences contained a wide variety of dreamlike features it would. What is most challenging about SP experiences is that content of the experience is remarkably similar across cultures, and among subjects (like my medical student) who have no cultural connection remotely suggesting such an experience!

SP, with the terrifying intruder so frequently present, is a spiritual experience; that is, it is an event that is experienced as an encounter with a non-physical being, an extraordinary spiritual experience (ESE). At the same time, it is connected to a neurophysiological event that has been studied scientifically–but the results of scientific study do not explain the spiritual aspects of the event. Similarly, we can associate near-death experiences with cardiac arrest (in many, though not all, cases), but we cannot say that NDEs simply “are cardiac arrest” or that cardiac arrest explains NDEs. Sleep paralysis, NDEs and a variety of other spiritual experiences have strong associations with various physiological states, but are not explained by those states, because those states do not account for the consistent features of the experience, features perceived as external to the subject. In the same way, we would not say that ordinary experiences are explained by the physical states in which we have them. We assume that ordinary experience is a complex product of internal and external factors. The challenge of ESEs is that they also appear to be complex events that cannot be explained entirely on the basis of subjective internal factors. Perhaps some or all of these features will eventually come to be explained internally, but at present that seems very unlikely for reasons that we will explore.

We will consider all this in more detail in future posts. At present I will end with an invitation for those of you who have had such an experience to write in about it! Just go to the Contact page and fill out the Contact Form or use the the email icon on the right under “Get In Touch” to email us directly. You can also use the comments section below. Post your story, I promise it will be taken seriously!

About this Blog

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Spirits: the root of Spirituality - About this Blog

This blog is about extraordinary spiritual experiences (ESEs), meaning “events that appear to be direct perception of spiritual facts,” for example, “near-death experiences.” (Hufford. 2014. The Healing Power of Extraordinary Spiritual Experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 32(3). 137-156.) The following is an example of one such experience.

In 1984 I reviewed a manuscript for the University of Pittsburgh Press. Written by an elderly psychologist, Genevieve W. Foster, it was a memoir centered on a transformative spiritual experience she had in 1945. I recommended publication and collaborated with Gen on the final product, The World Was Flooded with Light: A Mystical Experience Remembered (1985), interviewing her at length and corresponding with her about details of her experience and its meaning to her. Gen’s memoir was 83 pages long, but the experience itself occupied only two pages. Yet the ramifications of that experience touched every part of her life: It was “so far from anything that I had thought in the realm of the possible, that it has taken me the rest of my life to come to terms with it” (p. 36). At the time of her experience Gen was in her thirties, married and in training to become a Jungian psychotherapist. Things were going well for her and she was not under any particular stress or other factor that would have expected to precipitate a life changing mystical event.

The experience occurred one March afternoon. Alone in the house, she took an afternoon nap. When she awoke, she experienced

a visitation that all my upbringing and education had told me was simply an impossibility—unless of course one was psychotic…. I saw nothing unusual with my outward eye, but nevertheless I knew that there was someone else in the room with me.  A few feet in front of me and a little to the left stood a numinous figure, and between us was an interchange, a flood, flowing both ways, of love.  There were no words, no sound.  There was light everywhere … the world was flooded with light,….  The vision lasted five days…There was no one around to whom I could tell it.  Roger (my husband) who is embarrassed at the mere mention of religious experience would have thought me utterly mad, as I surely would have thought anyone mad who told me such a story…. Yet the experience was so overwhelmingly good that I could not mistrust it. (Foster, 1985, pp. 42-43)

For five days the presence was with her constantly, as she went about her normal routines and activities. The light continued so that “indeed everything around us, our house, the flowering world outside, the college where I worked, the commuter train I rode—and all these people and things I saw now sub specie eternitas, bathed in that supernal light” (p. 46).

Over the next 35 years, Gen told only three people of the experience. The first was a psychologist mentor who considered it a grave symptom, thus ending their relationship. Then a few years later, thinking that she should seek knowledgeable guidance, she made an appointment with a clergyman. As Gen began to describe the experience to him he became alarmed, telling her that she needed to see a physician, that he suspected she was entering menopause prematurely. So she stopped speaking of her experience. But a few years later she was counseling a college student whom she thought was suicidal. She told that young woman about the experience because she thought that “she needed to know what I had learned, that the world is not what it seems.”

Gen had never been religious, did not attend church, and her experience did not lead her to become religious. As she explained, she could not find any contemporary religion that had anything substantial to say about such experiences as hers. But, as ESEs universally do, her experience caused her to become spiritual!

But what was Gen’s transformation? “The reader who asks ‘Just how did it change your life?’ must see, I think, that even though such a vision has faded, life can never return to its former pattern” (p. 46). She said that even after the vision ended

I knew that I was ‘companioned’ and that the Companion was numinous…. I have had ever since an intuitive awareness of being ‘companioned.’ That numinous presence is still there, I know, and it is the deficiency of my vision that prevents me from seeing it. As it is there for everyone, I am convinced, as it was for Arjuna, whose charioteer had been the divine Krishna all along…. So yes, surely my relation to my family was affected—it could not have been otherwise, and so was my relation to my work in the world….” (p. 48)

This was not a transformation just in attitude or feeling. A world with a constant, loving, invisible companion was a different world, not the disenchanted world of psychology and modernity that Gen had been taught to expect. As the world was transformed, so was she. But she knew that her new vision of the world was heresy.

So for almost 40 years Gen kept her own counsel, silenced by modern prejudice ironically enforced by her own field of psychology. Then facing surgery that she thought she might not survive, she decided to inform her family: Thus, her memoir. Gen and I dedicated the book to those who have had “a visionary experience without the benefit of a visionary tradition…. By deciding to break our culture’s rules about who should admit to such experiences she offers some much needed company to others who have been isolated by those rules” (1985, xi-xii).

Transformative spiritual experiences are a human universal, found in every society and every historical epoch. From the birth of a baby to the death of a loved one, from deep encounters with nature to transcendent mystical experiences, people report that living through certain kinds of events can change a person profoundly. Neither all such events nor all transformations are spiritual but many are, and the healing potential of such transformations is life changing. Gen Foster’s experience is one kind of ESE, and the lasting spiritual transformation it produced in her illustrates the power of these events.

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