Loosening Self and Noetic Transformations

Whether you have had a transformative experience of pain or a noetic one these are experiences that shake your worldview and forever change it.  This may or may not be the same as your conversion and will usually have happened somewhere in midlife… So say the experts.  Something happens in midlife where there is enough life experience, enough ups and downs, the birth of a child or three, the death of a parent or friend; that the realities of real life have surrounded us.  Up till this time our illusions of immortality and the ambition to make our dent are drivers.  But something happens as we transcend our illusions and delusions.

Encounters with pain and noetic ah-ha’s permanently alter the way we see and view the world: we have put on different lens.

Transformational portals are for the express purpose of loosening the defining grip of our false selves, our false identities, the old man (I don’t use the Pauline term much because it is non inclusive language AND because it is a static term)

A quick quote from Edgar Mitchell Apollo 14 astronaut recounts his noetic defining shift.

Mitchell recalls sitting in the cramped cabin of the space capsule, he saw planet Earth floating freely in the vastness of space. He was engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness—an epiphany. In Mitchell’s own words: “The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. The knowledge came to me directly.” (taken from inteview quotes recorded by Marilyn Schlitz)

This is one of those times Mitchell moved from what we would call ordinary to spiritual awareness. He was having a noetic moment.

One spiritual director says transformation comes about when you are forced to reconcile your ordinary worldview with insights gained from extraordinary or non ordinary experiences.

What often happens is we have a shift in our awareness that bring us a greatly expanded world of relationships than we had previously perceived.  The world seems more connected…there seems to be a deeper glue, an implicate order holding everything together.

Pain and noetic experiences can and often are catalytic.