On a side note, surely you would acknowledge that while there is no discernable pattern from your point of view, there very well could be as there are too many variables for you to have known.
That seems quite plausible. Although I once earnestly poured over and over a certain experience looking for what could possibly have triggered it and only ended up with endless speculations for my efforts. I think some experiences have obvious triggers -- drugs, for instance. But it seems to me that others might be as spontaneous and unpredictable as possible. You know, for instance, that folks have been looking for a sure-fire trigger since before the Buddha was born, and yet no one has seemed to have found one yet. Drugs, maybe, but that raises the question of whether such experiences are indistinguishable from natural experiences.
It is interesting that you talk about different types of mystical experiences. Do you think that in your and others experience there is a commonality?
Depends, of course, on what you mean by a "mystical experience". I follow one convention -- not necessarily the most popular one though -- in lumping all sorts of things into the category of "mystical experiences", including what I call The Mystical Experience itself. That is, the experience that involves, as you put it, a core or essential feature of "connectedness". Or as I often put it, "a sense of oneness." I agree we're talking about the same thing there.
Could you resource any experiences that you have read about that were not related to connectedness?
Yes, but only because I define "mystical experience" so loosely when compared to some definitions. To me, any experience that transcends rationality -- that the experiencer cannot explain in rational, inter-subjectively verifiable terms -- comes under the heading of a "mystical experience" of some sort. Such things as prophetic dreams and visions, for example, in which someone has a dream or a waking vision of something that later on takes place. Those do not seem to involve connectedness or oneness in the same sense that The Mystical Experience does.
I believe such accounts are generally highly suspect, but sometimes I come across an account of some such experiences that strikes me as possible of being genuine. I won't say, "genuine", because how could I know for certain? But possible of being genuine.
For instance, there are at least two instances in which a Zen master was reported to have accurately and publicly predicted the date and time of his own death. Now, there are all sorts of ways either or both accounts could be fabrications. Or perhaps they were true, but self-fulfilling prophecies of some sort. But
in a comparative sense, they seem more likely to be genuine than most other accounts I've heard of such things. If they are true -- and I'm not saying they are -- then they defy any rational, inter-subjectively verifiable explanation for the universe that I know of. That is, they are "impossible" assuming our current understanding of things will never be substantially revised even, say, in a thousand years.
In a way, it reminds me the St. Elmos fire that was seen around the Dome of Sophia on the eve of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. The people back then didn't understand what they were seeing, of course, and interpreted it as a supernatural event. That's what people almost always do when they have no natural explanation for an event. But more important, if you look at the "science" of the time, you see they could not have possibly guessed the real cause of the St Elmos fire. The science of the time was about 500 years away from having the foundation necessary for someone to put 2 and 2 together to get 4, so to speak. The science of the time didn't even have "2" yet.
In much the same way, I think it is possible that our science today might be a long way from where it will need to be before we can understand such things as when, how, and why the arrow of time can flow backwards -- assuming it can in the first place. The again, maybe we'll someday be a position to definitely say, "That really is impossible because it is inconceivable that our science will ever be revolutionized to the extent that such a thing would be possible". Some people would say we're already at that point, but I believe they are jumping the gun -- a common human tendency. Or as it was said of physics a few years before Einstein, "All the major discoveries in the field have been made and now the task is simply to add greater accuracy to our calculations".
Whatever the case, I suspect that -- if there really is anything to prophetic dreams and about a dozen or so other "mystical experiences" (and I'm not saying there necessarily is) -- they will someday be shown to be natural events explainable by some future science that is inconceivable to us today.
