Is it just a mental glitch? Or are we receiving visions?

Here's what some of the greats had to say about it

Hildegard of Bingen receiving a vision

I’d guess I was around ten years old. We were on a family holiday in Stratford-upon-Avon, my parents, my brothers, and I. We were visiting the Shakespeare sites: his birthplace, a play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and a visit to Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

And that was where it happened.

Though I couldn’t really tell you what “it” was.

I remember standing in a wood-panelled room, probably messing around with my brothers, spoiling everyone else’s experience of the cultural heritage. Then the guide said something about how the furniture was original; this was the same furniture that would have been here when Shakespeare came to visit the young Anne.

And then I dropped through time.

Forget the movie effects. There was no roar of TV static, no blurred vision, no rewind sound, no sudden appearance of men in doublet and hose.

It wasn’t a visual but a feeling—a sudden, whole-body, intense, felt presence of all the lives that had been lived here, on this very spot where I stood. Not just Shakespeare’s—Shakespeare’s!—but countless others, all the humans and animals and trees and even dinosaurs that had lived—had breathed and talked and cried and run around and died—right there where I stood.

I knew then that history wasn’t words pinned down in schoolbooks, but days and nights like the one I was living now, all of which had unfolded in the very spaces I walked through every day. Days and nights that were still, in some strange way I couldn’t fathom, unfolding in those places, just outside of my perception.

I didn’t tell anyone about this experience. I can’t really put it into words even now, and I’m supposed to be an adult and a writer, so I’d have had no chance then. But it was the first of many such moments. Time and again, I’d lurch involuntarily out of cognition and into a whole-body sense of expanded reality.

Since I couldn’t describe these moments—and since I was new to figuring out how to live in a body anyway, and there were plenty of other confusing things to worry about—I didn’t pay an awful lot of attention.

Then, much later, I started meditating and dabbling with altered consciousness. I started reading the old myths and Henry Corbin and Iain McGilchrist.

And I started to wonder… what if these moments were more than meaningless glitches in the hardware of my brain?

What if they were doorways?

What if they were someone standing in a doorway, calling to me?

But who would be calling to me?

Or what?

And why?

I still don’t know, and I still struggle to find words for all this—a conundrum I relish in all situations except when trying to tell people what the hell I write about.

What I do know is that I am far from alone in all this—that in fact, most people have experiences like this all the time, and simply pass them off as nothing.

So in the interests of encouraging us all to notice and value these moments, here’s a roundup of words from some of the women who’ve talked about this most and best, over the years. (Not necessarily an endorsement of the way all these women lived, mind…)

Let’s begin with Hildegard of Bingen, in her manuscript Scivias, describing the revelation that gifted her one of her musical compositions:

Next I saw the most lucid air, in which I heard... in a marvellous way many kinds of musicians praising the joys of the heavenly citizens... And their sound was like the voice of a multitude, making music in harmony.

And here’s the fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich on the first of her revelations, in which a humble hazelnut—ubiquitous in medieval England—appeared in her palm and revealed itself to her as the embodiment of all god’s creation:

And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

Here’s the nineteenth-century mystic and Theosophist Helena Blavatsky on the nature of the mystical understanding:

Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached "reality"; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya [illusion].

And here’s my girl Hilma af Klint, on the deep attention of the artist as a route to expanded consciousness:

Every time I succeed in finishing one of my sketches, my understanding of humanity, animals, plants, minerals, or the entire creation, becomes clearer. I feel freed and raised up above my limited consciousness.

And to end, Evelyn Underhill.

I’ll confess that since embarking on my current research into the mystics—in fact, since the moment I announced my intention to write about them—I’ve had some misgivings. I believe absolutely in mystical experience—and not just my own, but that everybody is capable of such experiences, and has probably already had some. And yet, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I also worry about spiritual bypass. There’s an awful lot of ego-driven, short-sighted experimentation with magick out there at the moment—and that stuff is dangerous.

The path of the mystic is not the path of the magician. It’s not a means of bypass. It’s a way to live more deeply and more truly and more wisely during this embodied life. It’s a mode of attunement, not of control.

Here’s Evelyn Underhill, saying all this better than I can:

It is significant that many of these [mystical] experiences are reported to us from periods of war and distress: that the stronger the forces of destruction appeared, the more intense grew the spiritual vision which opposed them. We learn from these records that the mystical consciousness has the power of lifting those who possess it to a plane of reality which no struggle, no cruelty, can disturb: of conferring a certitude which no catastrophe can wreck. Yet it does not wrap its initiates in a selfish and otherworldly calm, isolate them from the pain and effort of the common life. Rather, it gives them renewed vitality; administering to the human spirit not—as some suppose—a soothing draught, but the most powerful of stimulants.

No nation is truly defeated which retains its spiritual self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which does not emerge with soul unstained. If this be so, it becomes a part of true patriotism to keep the spiritual life, both of the individual citizen and of the social group, active and vigorous; its vision of realities unsullied by the entangled interests and passions of the time. This is a task in which all may do their part. The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realised it he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers.

And one more, for obvious reasons today:

Here the further question of the relation of spiritual life to public life and politics comes in. It must mean, for all who take it seriously, judging public issues from the angle of eternity, never from that of national self-interest or expediency.

If you’re interested in these women and these ideas, please subscribe and stay tuned as the dive deepens.

Love,

x Ellie