Phase 3: Integrating the Experience

After a transcendent experience ends, it may remain present with the person and become integrated into his life. Interview data suggest three ways in which people integrate TXs into their lives:

73 The letting-go he described earlier has to do with releasing resistance to having the experience. In contrast, this is a letting-go of something as an effect of the experience.

reflecting on them; seeing long-term effects on their thoughts, emotions, and behaviour; and sharing them with other people.

4.3.1 Reflection

People may continue to reflect on a TX afterwards, sometimes for many years. They may be seeking to make sense of the experience and what it means for their lives, or they may wish to continue to experience its joys.

After returning home from a youth conference, Sadie sustained the feeling of connection for quite some time. In meditations at regular church services, she visualised connections with the youth she had met at the conference:

I would just imagine a link between me and all my friends, and just the lines arcing out between me and all of them… and because it was Sunday morning maybe they were also in church, maybe they were sending it back to me… that kind of thing.

That was in my head.

Even now, more than a decade later, Danielle continues to bring to mind the sense of God’s urging her to pray for her friend: “It never leaves me because it was so weird.”

Some participants described alterations in their thoughts or feelings about what they had

perceived. These could be based on changes such as education or spiritual development, but they always arose from reflection. The most striking example came from Sangmu: whilst at university, he heard a Christian evangelical speaker give a “very stirring talk…about the state of the world, how it needed a spiritual dimension and it needed Christianity.” Sangmu had always been concerned about the need for greater spirituality in the world, and this talk spoke to that — but it didn’t quite convince him that Christianity was the answer. So he went back to his room and prayed for proof that God exists:

And at some point I just felt this sort of peace, almost a physical feeling in the body, which I interpreted at the time as God saying “Here I am”.

This understanding led Sangmu to follow a Christian path, which lasted for five years. Now, more than 20 years later, he interprets the same experience from a Buddhist perspective:

Looking back now, I just think, well, I was meditating, and experienced what we would call Dhyāna, which is a sort of slightly elevated state of meditation. It’s just that because of the context, I interpreted that in a particular sort of way… And years later I just sort of made sense of it in a different way…

We see other examples in Barika’s and Susan’s remarks that their feelings had changed from fear to comfort. These changes, too, came about as they reflected on the experience (for Barika, the initial experience) after it had ended.

4.3.2 Sharing

Several participants said they like to share with other people aspects of a TX they’ve had. They mentioned recording and communicating parts of their experiences, interacting with others to explore those aspects, and sharing their joy in their spirituality. Sadie receives an “uplift” from something in the church service almost every Sunday, and her first inclination is to share it with her world:

Sometimes something someone says either during a sermon or in a reading or something just really strikes me and I wish I could write it down or put it out there on Facebook or something. And sometimes I do…

After Scott’s health scare he began working to communicate the fascination of resonance — “my metaphor for spirituality” — to other people, to help them “find the hidden resonances for beauty or spirituality in yourself”:

“Check this out!” I say to other people, “check this out, this is really cool.”

Louise spends much time photographing wildlife, to capture the experience so she can share her joy in it. “And I think that must be really important to me, to be able to share it.”

Sharing came out more strongly in participants’ desires for enhancement (see Chapter 5).

4.3.3 Continuing Effects

Transcendent experiences, as discussed in Chapter 2, can have a transformative effect on the lives of the people who undergo them, and participants recounted such effects. For decades Danielle had held on to hatred and anger towards a person who had hurt her deeply in childhood. One day Danielle had ranted at God, crying that her pain was not her fault and begging him to take away either her pain or her life. A few days later, whilst reading the Bible, she started praying, admitting that she needed to forgive the person and asking God to teach her how. Danielle opened the Bible at random and found herself at a passage whose very theme was forgiveness⁷⁴. God was, she felt, directly answering her need:

[And] that changed my life, because this thing I carried for how many years? And from that day, God just took it away from me; I could actually forgive that situation. …[Before,] I couldn’t talk about that person without hating them. And now I can’t talk about them without loving them; it’s weird. And I can’t explain it to you in any other way than that God did that for me, because it’s a miracle. And knowing how I was living and…how much it was ruling my life… I kind of get tearful, cause I remember the weight of that. The bondage of it. ’Cause it’s like being bound for my whole life.

74 A passage in the Epistle of Paul to Philemon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_Philemon

Although Danielle told me that the change in herself is “not a visible miracle to anyone else”, she had begun her account by describing how her hatred and anger at the injustice had affected her relationships with her sister and her husband. I cannot imagine that people close to her have failed to notice the change. This TX has become integrated into Danielle’s feelings, thoughts, and behaviour.

Susan described a transformation of thought and feeling. Two years after her chemotherapy ended, she is free of breast cancer but suffers lingering neuropathy. Especially with two children still at university, Susan worries about how long she will live. But she found the experience “very comforting” and no longer has any anxiety about dying. “I know that when my time comes,” she says, “Mom’s going to come get me.” She relayed the lift she receives from sensing her mother’s touch in nice surprises that she notices in nature:

…when you have a really bad day and out of nowhere — and it’s not conditions in which you’d normally have one — there’s like a rainbow. And it’s kind of like,

“Thanks, Mom!” Like saying hello. It’s weird. And…it’s like Mom is the conduit of the Holy Spirit.

Scott found himself changed after a brush with death. Although not a near-death experience in the classic sense (Greyson, 2007), his need for nine stents after a heart attack woke him up to the need for mindfulness and joy in everyday life:

For me, it’s all about identifying sources of resonance and tuning both sides. And enjoying the outcome.

Scott left his management consulting practice and began teaching music full time; he now has enough students to support himself. Although he earns less from teaching music, he has far more joy in his life, and he wouldn’t dream of returning to consulting.

Sometimes the effects are not easily described. David mused on why he disrobed atop hills:

I don’t know if it was seeking, or looking for something, or just trying to, sort of, you know, make sense of life and the world or what, but it seems to have had an effect.

Several participants said a TX gave them a thirst for more spiritual growth; several reported greater peace. The peace David gains from his nightly meditation helps him cope with life:

Frankly now I think if I didn’t do this…I don’t think I could deal with the world any more! [laughs] Well, I suppose I could, but I prefer to deal with it this way.

“I prefer to deal with it this way.”