Have you had a peak or mystical experience? Is part of your quest to reach Fundamental Wellbeing about getting back to the way it made you feel?

There are many different ways that these incredible moments can appear in people’s lives. The famous psychologist, Dr. Abraham Maslow, described them as “the moments of the highest happiness and fulfillment”, and noted that they seem to be able to happen to anyone at any time, even during the most mundane moments of life.

Often these experiences produce a sense of deep fulfillment, stillness, significance, unification, and even joy in your moment to moment experience. It can seem like time slows way down and your mind becomes focused, yet peaceful. Your inner critic shuts off and you become intensely present, deeply aware, and you might even experience a feeling of oneness with the universe itself.

If you’ve experienced them, you know that these moments can be among the most significant in your life. Unfortunately for most people, these experiences fade, making them a double-edged sword. On the one hand, these moments hint at an entirely different way that life can be experienced. One that’s well beyond the ordinary and that is highly desirable. In fact, just a moment of this type of experience often changes someone forever in remarkably positive ways.

One great thing about having such an experience is that you can be certain that your brain is wired for it. There’s no need to wonder if it’s possible for you. It’s already happened. Ironically, on the other hand, these experiences often become a source of frustration. It can almost feel like the universe is teasing you, showing you how amazing life can be, but then keeping it just out of reach. Although there are a wide variety of these experiences and they’re quite common, few people know it because of how difficult they are to talk about without sounding a little bit weird. And, frankly, that’s when you can even find the words for them at all.

People who’ve had one or more of these experiences often yearn for them to return and they spend considerable time and effort trying to make that happen. Unfortunately, the most common outcome of all of that is typically just more temporary peak experiences.

The main issue is that most are looking for exactly what was experienced during their peak experience, or at least something very close and in that direction, to become persistent. This is generally not a good idea.
There are many, many different types of peak experience. Some of them are subtle, but nonetheless life-changing and incredibly powerful. Often, these types involve a very deep and profound present moment experience and a sense of having amazing truths about life, the universe, and so on revealed. Other forms of peak experience are completely overwhelming. These typically involve high amounts of energy and arousal in your system. Frankly, it’s impossible to imagine living from moment to moment in that kind of state.

Many people who have one of the latter assume that it’s the penultimate experience, and they’re trying to get back to it. However, that’s not an accurate way of thinking about this. So let me help you to reframe it in a more helpful way. One of our research alumni put it best when after having one of these very overwhelming temporary experiences, he said, “I was like, damn! That would be really useful to have at about 30% the intensity, 100% of the time.”

The famous psychologist, Dr. Abraham Maslow, who I mentioned at the beginning of this video, was the world’s leading expert on peak experiences. Towards the end of his life, he had a shift to persistence himself. Here’s what he had to say about it.

“As these peak experiences died down in me, something else happened, which is a very precious thing. A sort of precipitation occurred of what might be called the sedimentation or the fallout from illuminations, insights and other life experiences that were very important. The result has been a kind of unit of consciousness. I can define this unit of consciousness very simply for me as having a simultaneous perception of the sacred and the ordinary, or the miraculous and the ordinary, or the miraculous and the rather constant or easy, without effort, sort of thing. There’s a paradox because it’s miraculous and yet it doesn’t produce an autonomic burst. These elements are present, but are constant rather than climactic. It’s possible to sit and look at something miraculous for an hour and enjoy every second of it. There tends to be more serenity rather than emotionality. There’s a sense of certainty. It feels very, very good to be able to see the world as miraculous and not merely in the concrete, not reduced only to the behavioral, not limited only to the here and now. These experiences are described quite well in many literatures. This is not the standard description of the acute mystical experience, but the way in which the world looks if the mystical experience really takes hold. You go about your business as the great mystics did. You can run a grocery store and pay the bills, but still carry on the sense of witnessing the world in the way you did in the great moments of mystic perception.”

This puts the difference between peak and persistent experiences very clearly. When Dr. Maslow says autonomic burst, he’s talking about high arousal or high amounts of energy in your system versus a more peaceful state that exists with the persistent ongoing form of this. We’ve also seen significant differences in the brainwaves of peak versus persistent forms of this experience. There are some very important aspects that can be totally in opposite directions while others are aligned or even similar. So you can see a relationship between these two types of experience, and yet that they’re very clearly two different things.

The reality is that although temporary peak experiences point to what’s possible, they are typically not the best guide to use when attempting to hone in on a persistent experience of this in your life. The persistent version is even more incredible and frankly, more importantly, functional.

So, it’s important to have the right target in mind. There’s often a glimpse of what the more persistent form of the experience is like while someone is on the down slope from a powerful mystical experience. However, their eyes are still generally fixed on the pinnacle of the experience, assuming it’s the target and they miss what’s actually possible to have in a sustained way. It’s like gold slipping through their fingers. If these experiences happen for you that moment is worth looking for as you’re on your way back down to Earth, so to speak.

And this leads us to the Myth #8 about the correct path to Fundamental Wellbeing.