The Abbey - Jakes Experience at a Benedictine Abbey

Thanks for sharing Jake...I once had a profound experience at a Benedictine monastery that may interest you. During my late teens and into my early twenties I was a full-on materialist-rationalist, fully immersed in the study of quantum physics and astrophysics while working for an engineering major in college. I had no need for some supernatural God that managed Earthly affairs from some throne in the gated-community of heaven. All religion, I thought, was a convoluted ploy to control the unthinking masses. Well, all that changed when I had my first full-blown mystical experience at a San Francisco rave in 1992. It was my first rave, and my first LSD experience. In the course of a night, I found a deep connection to the entire cosmos through the inner highways of my mind, finally melting into what felt like primordial Oneness; pure Consciousness that seemed to precede time, space, and matter. Anyhow, my major in college changed to psychology, with a minor in religious studies. I got into meditation practice and began cultivating the practice of Bare attention, or resting in what the Desert Fathers called "cloud of unknowing," the silence and stillness of deep Mind. Anyhow, while visiting my grandmother in Chile, she and I took our regular morning walk when suddenly we felt moved to enter the gates of a local Benedictine monastery, which normally was closed off to folks outside the order. We walked into the serene courtyard, no one there. My grandmother sat on a bench while I sat in the full-lotus position under a beautiful old tree. I entered what can only be described as pure formless Samadhi, absorbed into what appeared to my inner eye as radiant White Light (no psychedelics involved). We must of been there for five hours, as some monks approached us to let us know that they where closing the gates. To my astonishment, my grandmother too had entered into a deep trance, and she was no meditator; on the contrary, she was a very rational woman with no belief in a God. I never did return to the monastery, but have since done many ten-day silent meditation retreats, mostly vipassana mediation from the Buddhist tradition. My question has always been this: do we genuinely contact something like the Source, a Unified Field that is the Ground of all Being, or is it a mere electrical storm in our private neural wetware? Up until reading PIT and having subsequent exchanges with James, there was no question in my mind; only deep gnosis and cultivated experiences in that formless Ground (summed up in my new book Dimensions of Being). Now, at age forty, I am open to the dialogue, revisions in my thinking, and thirst for various data points that will reveal what and how this existence is all about. At the end of the day after thinking about all aspects of these questions, I sit quietly in front of a candle, thoughts slowing to a mere trickle, to finally awaken to the mysterious sentience underneath it all. Who or what IS this Sentience?