WHEN THE ORDINARY BOUNDARIES OF EXPERIENCE BEGIN TO CHANGE
There are moments in life when our ordinary understanding of ourselves and the world can suddenly be expanded.
A profound spiritual experience, an unexpected perception, an intuitive knowing, an encounter with someone who has died, a mystical experience, an awakening of spiritual energy, or an experience that seems to reach beyond the ordinary senses can change the way we understand reality and our place within it.
For some people, these experiences become profound turning points. For others, they can be confusing, frightening, disorienting, or overwhelming. Sometimes the experience itself is beautiful, but the process of understanding what happened can take years.
I share my own experiences here out of love for others.
I know what it is like to experience something that does not fit easily into ordinary explanations. I also know what it is like to become fascinated by such experiences, to want answers immediately, and eventually to discover that the experience itself is only the beginning of a much deeper process.
My intention in sharing these experiences is not to convince you of a particular interpretation. They are not presented as proof, doctrine, or an invitation to pursue extraordinary experiences. They are simply my testimony—and perhaps a reminder to someone who has experienced something unusual that you may not be alone.
WHAT IS A SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCE?
The term Spiritually Transformative Experience, or STE, was coined by Dr. Yvonne Kason in 1994 to describe a broad range of experiences that can have a profound spiritual impact on a person. Her framework includes mystical experiences, spiritual-energy or kundalini awakenings, near-death experiences, other death-related experiences, psychic or intuitive experiences, and inspired creativity.
What I find particularly valuable about the concept is that it gives people language for experiences that may otherwise be difficult to describe.
An STE does not necessarily look dramatic from the outside. It may be brief or prolonged, subtle or overwhelming. A person may experience an extraordinary sense of unity, an altered perception of time, an unexpected awareness of presence or light, unusual sensory experiences, intuitive knowing, an apparent perception beyond ordinary physical senses, or a sudden change in their understanding of life and consciousness.
What makes an experience transformative is not necessarily how extraordinary it appears to someone else. It is what happens within the person afterward.
An experience may change someone’s beliefs, priorities, relationships, sense of purpose, understanding of death, interest in spirituality, or fundamental assumptions about who they are. Sometimes the meaning is immediately apparent. Sometimes the experience only makes sense years later, after further study, reflection, or another seemingly unrelated event.
Dr. Kason’s work also recognizes that STEs can have challenging after-effects. For some people, the experience becomes part of a period of profound questioning or spiritual crisis that requires grounding, support, and time to integrate.
That distinction matters.
Not every unusual experience automatically needs to be interpreted as spiritual. At the same time, an unusual spiritual experience does not necessarily need to be dismissed simply because it falls outside our familiar framework.
There can be spiritual meaning without abandoning common sense. There can be openness without unquestioning belief. And there can be mystery without needing to explain everything immediately.
WHEN SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE BECOMES OVERWHELMING
Transformation is not always comfortable.
A profound experience can challenge a person’s understanding of identity, reality, relationships, purpose, or belief. What initially feels expansive can sometimes become difficult to integrate into ordinary life.
Dr. Kason uses the term spiritual emergency to describe situations in which the process of spiritual transformation becomes a crisis. Her work emphasizes the importance of appropriate support, grounding, time, and integration when experiences become particularly intense or disruptive.
This is one reason I believe education matters.
When someone encounters something extraordinary, the immediate temptation can be to search for an explanation, find someone who will confirm it, or pursue another experience that might provide an answer. Sometimes what is actually needed is something much simpler: to slow down, remain grounded, reflect, learn, and allow the experience to unfold in its proper context.
An extraordinary experience deserves attention—but also discernment.
THE EXPERIENCE IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
One of the most important lessons I have learned is that the experience itself is not necessarily the destination.
The deeper questions often come afterward.
What happened?
What does it mean?
What, if anything, has changed within me?
What am I being asked to understand?
What belongs to genuine insight, and what may be my own expectations, fears, desires, or interpretations?
How do I integrate what happened into ordinary life?
These questions have accompanied my own journey for more than two decades.
Some experiences opened something within me immediately. Others challenged me. Some I misunderstood. Some I did not understand until years later. And some experiences only revealed their significance when another event, another teaching, or another period of life brought them back into view.
This is why I believe integration is so important.
The goal is not to collect extraordinary experiences. The goal is to become more conscious through what we experience.
MY SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES
My own experiences span more than two decades. I present them chronologically because the chronology itself has become meaningful to me.
There are experiences that happened in one moment but continued teaching me for years afterward. There are experiences I initially forgot or struggled to understand, only to encounter a framework much later that helped me see them differently. And there are experiences that seemed to return decades later in ways I could never have anticipated.
I offer these stories as personal testimony. The interpretations are my own and have developed over time through experience, study, spiritual practice, and reflection.
2001 — SPIRIT ENCOUNTER
I had just completed a six-month certification course in spiritual healing in the United Kingdom and was eager to demonstrate a healing session for a friend. I began as I normally did—sitting quietly in prayer, followed by a short meditation to settle the mind and prepare for the work.
As I stood to begin, I suddenly became aware that I felt different. Before I could make sense of what was happening, my arms began to move on their own. They gently parted and then extended outward, my palms facing upward. For a brief moment, it felt as though my entire body was being guided or influenced by an intelligence beyond my ordinary sense of self.
I did not consciously initiate the movement. It arose spontaneously, with a quality that felt both unfamiliar and deeply peaceful. I experienced it as the loving presence of what I came to understand as my spiritual guide—a kind of “calling card,” signaling that I was ready for the healing session to begin.
WHEN SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE BECAME PERSONAL
This experience was particularly significant because, unlike many of the other students in the healing certification course, I had very little experience with meditation or psychic development at that point. Spiritual awareness was something I had primarily encountered through books and study. I had read about these things, but I had never experienced anything quite like this firsthand.
To say that the encounter was transformative is an understatement. In many ways, life truly began for me at that moment.
I immediately found myself relating the experience to the Christian phenomenon of the Holy Ghost, particularly the accounts in the Book of Acts describing ordinary people becoming vessels for spiritual inspiration and extraordinary abilities.
I began to consider whether experiences such as prophecy, spiritual healing, and other forms of spiritual perception might arise through a similar mechanism—something that could awaken within ordinary men and women regardless of their academic background or previous religious or esoteric training.
I did not yet have the language or understanding to explain what had happened. What I had was an experience.
And that experience changed the direction of my life.
2001 — PARTING OF THE VEIL
Later in 2001, I returned to the United States to visit my parents in Queens, New York. I was buzzing with the excitement of my newfound spirituality, and it was a pleasant surprise to discover that a childhood friend had also developed a similar interest around the same time. After more than ten years apart, we had plenty to catch up on, and we found ourselves comparing life experiences and spiritual insights late into the evening.
At one point, while we were sitting opposite each other talking, I happened to glance down toward my feet. To my astonishment, I noticed something floating between my knees—an object shaped like a zipper.
Before I could process what I was seeing, the object slowly moved downward and seemed to part a kind of veil between the physical and the unseen spiritual dimension.
One moment, from the knees down, I saw my own denim jeans and boots. The next, I was seeing white trousers and open-toe sandals—but they weren’t my feet. They appeared slightly larger, belonging to someone—or something—else.
The vision lasted only a few seconds before everything returned to normal.
I had no explanation for what I had experienced. I wasn’t thinking about the Universal Mind, dimensions of consciousness, or the nature of perception. I simply knew that I had witnessed something extraordinary: for a brief moment, the ordinary boundary of my physical perception seemed to open, and I saw something that was not part of the reality I had been looking at only moments before.
At the time, I could only experience it.
I could not yet understand it.
WHAT I WOULD UNDERSTAND LATER
The deeper significance of this experience did not become apparent to me until much later.
Looking back at the experience through a different lens, I began to consider the possibility that what we ordinarily experience as physical reality represents only a filtered portion of a much larger field of consciousness.
The insight that emerged was directly tied to the nature of the phenomenon itself: the parting of the veil had occurred with absolute surgical precision. From my knees up, I could clearly see my own denim jeans; from my knees down, I was looking at white trousers, sandals, and completely different feet.
That level of exactness led me to the conclusion that this was not a random occurrence, but the work of a higher intelligence—a Higher Self—deliberately regulating and filtering spiritual experience.
The experience gave me a powerful image of this dynamic.
The “veil” was not something that had been permanently removed. It was as though, for a few seconds, a boundary that ordinarily remains closed had become permeable under precise management. I was given a brief glimpse beyond my familiar field of perception before being returned to ordinary awareness.
It forced me to continually expand my understanding of what multidimensional existence actually means. It also prompted me to revisit the subject of guardian angels—re-examining the concept through the Christian framework, as well as through Spiritualism and other Eastern and Western traditions that speak of protective intelligences surrounding human beings.
2005 — REMOTE EYE PROJECTION
One early Saturday morning in 2005, I began the day by meditating. Not wishing to disturb my wife, who was sleeping beside me, I quietly sat up in bed and continued my Raj Yoga practice for approximately forty-five minutes before deciding to return to sleep.
I remember lying on my right side, eyes closed and completely relaxed, when a gentle wave of warmth suddenly swept across my face. A few seconds later, the normal black and empty canvas of my mind became illuminated. It was as though I were looking at a widescreen television, except that the screen seemed to exist entirely within my field of inner awareness.
A short sequence appeared, almost like a showreel counting down from five to one. A simple animation of a cat followed, which somehow helped me settle more deeply into the experience. Then the image changed. I found myself looking at an abandoned oil refinery and the surrounding area.
Somehow, I knew this was an opportunity to explore. I began directing my attention toward different areas of the scene, and my vision seemed to follow immediately. I could move my attention around the facility and appear to see through metallic and earthly structures that happened to be in the way. The experience continued for several minutes before gently coming to an end.
But the visual experience was only part of what happened.
I changed position and lay flat on my back, wanting to see whether I could settle back into the same state. As soon as my mind became quiet, I heard a loud, high-pitched whistling sound. At the same time, I became intensely aware of a sensation in the region between my eyebrows—almost as though a wheel, rotor, or rudder were turning there.
As I settled further into the experience, the oscillation increased in speed, and the pitch of the sound rose with it. There was a powerful sense of energy and movement concentrated around the brow region.
Then something very ordinary interrupted the process: emotion.
I became excited by what was happening. That emotional response seemed to disturb the state, and the sound and oscillation began to slow and eventually stopped. I quickly regained my composure. Then, almost as if the system were starting again, the oscillation and sound began to build once more—like an engine or propeller gradually increasing in speed.
Again, the intensity became too much. I reacted emotionally, and the experience came to a grinding halt.
I never succeeded in deliberately reproducing it.
THE ENERGETIC DIMENSION
But the visual experience was only part of what happened.
I changed position and lay flat on my back, wanting to see whether I could settle back into the same state. As I quieted my mind, I became immediately aware of something I had not experienced before: a stream of energy moving through my chest, almost like water travelling through a tube. I could distinctly feel it ascending from the chest and simultaneously moving upward along both sides and behind of my face, eventually converging in the region between my eyebrows.
The sensation was remarkably specific. It was not simply warmth or a general feeling of vibration. It felt like something was moving through an internal pathway, rising upward and converging at the brow.
It was after this that the buzzing or whistling began.
I heard a loud, high-pitched sound while simultaneously becoming intensely aware of a sensation in the region between my eyebrows—almost as though a wheel, rotor, or rudder were turning there. As I settled further into the experience, the oscillation increased in speed, and the pitch of the sound rose with it. There was a powerful sense of movement and energy concentrated around the brow region.
The fact that the energy movement from the chest toward the brow occurred twice in essentially the same way was significant for me. It reinforced something I had already begun to suspect through my spiritual studies: that there may be an underlying energetic anatomy associated with spiritual and altered-state experiences.
Years later, when I encountered the traditional yogic descriptions of ida, pingala, and sushumna, along with the association of the brow centre with ajna chakra, I was struck by the correspondence. The experience had given me a direct, bodily reference point for concepts that, until then, had existed primarily as teachings and descriptions.
I cannot say that what I experienced proves the existence or operation of these subtle-energy structures in any scientific sense. But as a matter of personal experience, the correspondence was compelling. The energy appeared to move through a defined pathway, rise toward the brow, and culminate in an area traditionally associated with inner perception and spiritual vision.
Then something very ordinary interrupted the process: emotion.
I became excited by what was happening. That emotional response seemed to disturb the state, and the sound and oscillation began to slow and eventually stopped. I quickly regained my composure. Then, almost as if the system were starting again, a second time, the ascending energy converging at the brow area, the oscillation and sound began to building once more—like an engine or propeller gradually increasing in speed.
Again, the intensity became too much. I reacted emotionally, and the experience came to a grinding halt.
I never succeeded in deliberately reproducing it.
Looking back, what stays with me is not simply the extraordinary visual experience, but the coherence of everything that surrounded it: the altered perception, the movement of energy through the body, the convergence at the brow, the sound, the rotational sensation, and the way the entire experience seemed to respond to my own emotional state.
For me, this was one of those experiences in which the distinction between spiritual teaching and direct experience became much less abstract. I had encountered descriptions of subtle-energy anatomy in books; now I had something in my own experience that gave those descriptions a completely different dimension.
2012 — MEANINGFUL COINCIDENCE: FINDING A FRAMEWORK
Years later, in 2012, I enrolled at the University of Northampton in the United Kingdom to pursue an MSc in Transpersonal Psychology and Consciousness Studies.
For my thesis, I chose to investigate astral body projection.
During my research, I encountered the work of Robert Bruce and his description of what he called remote-eye projection—a phenomenon in which a person may experience seeing a remote scene with unusual clarity while remaining aware of the physical body.
The description gave me something I had not possessed in 2005:
a framework.
It did not prove what had happened to me, nor did it answer every question surrounding the experience. But it gave me language with which to investigate and think about something I had previously been unable to describe.
That distinction became important to me.
A framework does not have to become a conclusion.
Sometimes it simply gives us a better question.