Of course, not all doorways to or catalysts of transformation are filled with pain. Of our survey respondents, exactly equal numbers became interested in transformation after a difficult life event as due to some other process or event. And although 23 percent said the transformative experi-ence was very unpleasant, 51 percent described it as very pleasant. In fact, the emotions most commonly cited as accompanying transformative expe-riences included feeling “interested, alert, attentive, and inspired” (Vieten, Cohen, and Schlitz 2008). Moments of profound awe, wonder, or tran-scendent bliss can provide a glimpse of something that is so compelling, so completely beyond what you’ve previously realized is possible, that they can instill in you a strong intention to find out more about what happened—no matter what it takes.
What are noetic experiences? Noetic is a Greek word that refers to knowl-edge that is subjective—the things you know through your own direct experience. Thus, noetic experiences are those in which there’s a deeply sub-jective and internal experience of knowing. Noetic experiences encompass what James called mystical experiences (1902), what Maslow later referred
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41 because it focuses on the common theme shared by all these experiences:
an internal form of knowing that is based in direct experience.
In fact, some of these experiences aren’t mystical at all in the sense that the word is commonly understood. They don’t necessarily have to do with experiences of God, angels, magic, white lights, or astral beings (although these kinds of mystical experiences are all noetic). A noetic experience can also take the form of a deeply rooted, embodied sense of connection to all things, or an awareness of deep love when gazing into the eyes of another.
Noetic experiences are often sudden and profound. They include epipha-nies, “big dreams” (i.e., those that have a clear significance or emotional impact), and senses of revelation that come in an instant. As you may have noticed, these experiences actually happen quite often; they’re neither unusual nor otherworldly.
Noetic experiences can also include some kind of extraordinary human capacity, which can be difficult to interpret. Noetic experiences can take the form of psychic phenomena, including the feeling that you’re being stared at, or the knowledge that the phone will ring just before it does, or near-death experiences, or spontaneous healing, or various other abilities and phenomena that arise in non-ordinary states of consciousness (Targ, Schlitz, and Irwin 2000). Transpersonal scholar and archivist Rhea White worked with us in the early stages of our research program. She found that, even though the phenomenology of noetic experiences may differ (e.g., seeing an apparition, sensing mystical oneness with the whole of existence, having precognitive dreams), these experiences can serve as a portal to a new worldview (White 1994).
Noetic experiences—of direct knowing, intuitive insights, sudden revelations, moments of incredible synthesis, and breakthroughs of under-standing—can all serve as triggers for transformation. This is true whether the noetic experiences accompany suffering or joy. When you’re lucky—or, as many of the teachers we interviewed pointed out, when you’re paying attention—noetic experiences of awe, beauty, and wonder can create deep shifts in the way you view yourself and your place in the world.
More than a century ago, William James (1902) wrote about the transformative potential of mystical states. He noted that they had several essential qualities: The first quality of the mystical state is its ineffability.
Its quality must be directly experienced, as it isn’t easily communicated to
others. Second is what James called a noetic quality—mystical states present themselves as not just a collection of feelings and thoughts, but as actual states of knowledge.
James said of the noetic quality of mystical states:
Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority. (1902, 380)
Third, James said, mystical states are transient; and fourth, that they cannot be controlled. Indeed, in our survey of over 900 people’s transfor-mative experiences, more than one hundred years after James’s work, 61 percent similarly said that their experience was due to circumstances “out of anyone’s control” (Vieten, Cohen, and Schlitz 2008). In his classic chapter on mysticism, James muses about whether these states of mind are essen-tially windows that look out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. He also suggested that these experiences occur more often as what he called our field of consciousness—which includes every idea and perception we are aware of—expands (1902).
Hundreds of our survey respondents recounted these kinds of expe-riences. For example, Meredith, a seventy-one-year-old homemaker in California, shared the following experience with us:
Along with family members, I had been, for five days, spending four hours a day at the deathbed of my friend. He died early in the a.m. while I was staying with the family in their home.
The night of my friend’s death I was asleep in his office, on the bed where he used to nap and do guided imagery exercises. My face was to the wall and my back to the windows. I was suddenly wide awake, so I raised myself up on one arm and turned toward the window. There I saw a smoky
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43 it as my friend, but in a transcendent state. I thought, “Aha! This is what
transcendence is.” It was like looking into the entire universe. There was no duality. I saw the past, the present, and the future coexisting simultaneously.
Then it was gone. I put my head down and went back to sleep. Some time later I was awakened again by the sensation that the sheet covering me had been whipped from the bed. That hadn’t happened. (Vieten, Cohen, and Schlitz 2008)
Another survey respondent, Patrick, a sixty-one-year-old professional who lives in suburban California, shared with us an experience he had that had been brought on by transformative practice:
During a meditation I experienced my body becoming very light, so that it could almost float. I gently “lifted off” from the earth and, with vision focused on the heavens, I moved toward the sun… During most of the experience, I moved slowly through the darkness slightly illuminated by the pure white light of stars. At times, though, I moved very rapidly—even the higher speed was pleasant. I knew, at a cellular level, that I and the universe and all inhabitants thereof were one. It was a sacred experience. (Vieten, Cohen, and Schlitz 2008)
This sense of a deep knowing, at what Patrick calls “a cellular level,” is the heart of the noetic experience.
Some transformative noetic experiences are transcendent, a term that refers to an experience that either lies beyond the ordinary realm of per-ception or beyond the limits of material existence. These experiences can carry with them an extraordinary quality of numinosity, divinity, or grace, transporting us out of our ordinary worldview. Through our interviews and survey, we learned that such transcendent or non-ordinary state experiences are quite common. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg told us:
There are experiences of transcendence where quite suddenly you’re lifted out of a sense of limitation and into a whole other vista that some traditions would call the guru’s grace or God’s grace. Researchers have asked
Americans if they’ve ever had a mystical experience, or an experience of something completely out of the ordinary. And an enormous percentage of the population says yes. I think these kinds of experiences are more common than we might imagine. Sometimes it is very much about love; people feel an unconditional love permeating the universe. Or a sense of connection to others. Or sometimes a sense of the divine that’s just completely different from their ordinary concerns of the day. (2002)
To gain another perspective on the noetic dimensions of transformative experiences, our team sought the counsel of Gilbert Walking Bull, a Lakota elder and holy man of distinguished Sioux ancestry. At a young age Walking Bull was selected to help carry on the spiritual teachings of his people. He shared with us an important family story of a sudden noetic awakening:
I had a great-grandmother who was a very kind and wonderful person. She used to sit outside her teepee and make beautiful beadwork. If you walked by her, she’d call you over to sit down with her, give you a cup of coffee, and pretty soon you’d be there all day listening to her stories. One day a little bitty butterfly fluttered around her while she was working and it landed on her shoulder. Electricity shot through her body and instantly she was a holy woman. Spirit came to her in that butterfly. She automatically knew what medicines to use to heal people. She could tell their futures. That’s how quickly these powers came to her; the spirits didn’t waste any time in choosing her to serve them. (2006)
Walking Bull further pointed out that noetic experiences—like the one that transformed the life of his great-grandmother—are given to those who, according to Lakota tradition, have a lifelong daily practice and way of life that embodies the principles of becoming sacred human beings.
Some transformative experiences seemingly arrive out of the blue. At times you may be faced with a potentially worldview-shifting experience, and you don’t have an ongoing transformative practice to help you contain
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45 you when you don’t have a cosmology—a story of how to understand reality and the world—that allows for the possibility of these experiences. And like the research on inattentional blindness suggests, broadening your perspec-tive can result in seeing possibilities and realities that have been right under your nose all along.
Part of the overarching premise of this book, and the main point of this chapter, is that noetic experiences happen all the time. Moreover, they have the potential to stimulate transformation, the very changes you’ve been seeking to make, in deep and profound ways. But they do require that you pay attention to them and provide them with the fertile soil to grow into true transformations.
IS YOUR WORLDVIEW TOO SMALL?
For Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, it was his journey home from the moon that opened him to the radical and sudden epiphany that changed his life. Mitchell comes from a background of specialized training in engineering; he trusted that paradigm enough to volunteer to join the mission of Apollo 14. (For those of you who have seen the movie Apollo 13, you’ll appreciate the depth of this trust.) Mitchell’s worldview shift was in part due to his noetic understand-ing, through direct experience, that contemporary materialistic science has only part of the answer to the really big questions about human nature and the meaning of life. He explained during our interview in 2002:
As an MIT grad and an aeronautics engineer and astronaut, presumably I understood star formation and galactic formation, a little about quantum physics, a lot of classical physics, engineering, orbital mechanics—all of the things that seem to be appropriate to space exploration. And then, on the way home from the moon, looking out at the heavens, this insight—which I could now call a transcendent experience—happened.
I realized that the molecules of my body had been created or prototyped in an ancient generation of stars—along with the molecules of the spacecraft and my partners and everything else we could see including
the Earth out in front of us. Suddenly, it was all very personal. Those were my molecules.
It was an experience of connectedness. It was an experience of bliss, of ecstasy. The type of experience that brings tears to your eyes, you don’t know why. Tears of joy, not sadness. This experience continued for three days. I was working. I mean, I had duties to do, but when I was finished with them I would look out the window again and it would start all over. It was so profound. I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science—our cosmology, our religion—was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discrete things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description. (2002)
There are times when we struggle to understand the nature of our trans-formative experiences. For someone like Mitchell, who had been trained as a scientist, such a noetic experience may be very foreign, even disrup-tive. Mitchell’s noetic experience carried with it an unshakable certainty.
However, it also propelled him to try to understand what had happened to him. How could he know these things so certainly, so directly? Where did this sense of deep, unshakable peace and joy come from? He continued:
I set out to see what the literature had to say about this. There simply wasn’t anything in the scientific literature. I wasn’t satisfied with religious literature, so I started looking at mystical literature. Some colleagues steered me to the Sanskrit description of samadhi and I realized it fit with what I had experienced: seeing things as separate in the universe but experiencing them as one, accompanied by bliss. I realized my experience had a name—at least, one tradition had a name for it. The more I studied, the more I realized that this type of experience can be found in every culture. And it seems to be roughly the same in every culture.
Over the next few years I had the opportunity to study with people from different cultures—shamans and kahuna, medicine men and mystics.
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47 realize that this tendency to see beyond ourselves or to have this type of
expansive experience was probably the basis of religious experience…
Life didn’t seem the same. Suddenly everything seemed different.
Things that were important before were no longer very important. Money and economics were not very important. Satisfaction, lifestyle, making things harmonious and loving were important. Understanding what was going on was important. Nothing else really was. It took a long time to accommodate all of this experience. (2002)
Mitchell’s experience fits with what humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences. Maslow used this term to include not just religious noetic experiences but also those that occurred outside of a reli-gious context.
Maslow described the highest peak experiences as “feelings of limit-less horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being. Simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space”
(1970, 164). Like Maslow, we found that these extra-personal and ecstatic states are often associated with feelings of unity, harmony, and intercon-nectedness. People often, but not always, describe such experiences—and the revelations imparted during them—as possessing an ineffably mystical if not overtly religious essence.