• Created: 3 years ago
• Category: Experiential spirituality
• Tags:
  awakening
  mystical
  peak
  religious experience
  sacred experience
  satori
  transcendent

    Feelings of limitless 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 ecstasy and wonder and awe,
    the loss of placement in time and space with, finally,
    the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened,
     so that the subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened even in his daily life by such experiences. 
                -Abraham Maslow

Maslow, the term's inventor, says that "peak experiences" are sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, possibly the awareness of an "ultimate truth" and the unity of all things ... the experience fills the individual with wonder and awe....he  feels at one with the world, and is pleased with it ...." They are moments when you feel more at one with yourself and the world, more integrated.  You feel happy, even ecstatic, interconnected and in harmony. Peak experiences are one type of mystical experiences, and perhaps one of the most interesting in that Maslow aims to talk about mystical experiences in non-supernatural terms.

Maslow thinks that peak experiences are a good thing.  He says they are "rare, mystical, exciting, deeply moving, and exhilarating". He also thinks that when you have a peak experience in this moments you become like a self-actualiser. "Any person in any of the peak experiences takes on temporarily many of the characteristics which I found in self-actualizing individuals.  There may also be longer-lasting effects. Peak experiences  can also make you more creative and less neurotic.  "The peak-experiencer becomes more loving and more accepting, and so he becomes more spontaneous and honest and innocent" A peak experience is also " visit to a personally defined heaven from which the person then returns to earth. This is like giving a naturalistic meaning to the concept of heaven." 

Colin Wilson agrees. "Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do perfectly well. The peak experience induces the recognition that your own powers are far greater than you imagined them." 

This is a group for people to share and explore their most significant personal spiritual experiences with others who have had similar experiences in life. What are your peak experiences?