Defecating Cows and Other Signs of Unity

A Mystical Experience I Had at Age 20

May 09, 2023

As a child I was quite taken with God, church, the Bible, and prayer. I didn’t care for adult worship, but I liked Sunday School. I read the children’s Bible many times through and learned the stories. I talked to God all the time in prayer, and truly felt that I was heard. My mother had a strong Christian faith and brought me to our Episcopal church most weeks. I enjoyed many religious conversations with my aunt, who was also my Godmother. In my private secular high school, I was co-head of “Interfaith Council.” I talked about God and Jesus with friends. I did a big report in high school, where I interviewed a number of people with the question, “What is the purpose of life?” Most of the answers didn’t have anything to do with God, but some did. From the beginning, for me, the existential questions were the only ones worth asking.

At the same time, my father was a physicist and self-proclaimed atheist. A brilliant man, yet he could not believe in anything that could not be measured with the five senses. For many years during my childhood and teens I believed it was my duty to try to make him “see the light,” that God was real. He indulged me, but never budged. From his perspective, the Big Bang just happened, and life just happened, and we are just bags of meat who accidentally came to life, and one day we will die and then there will be nothingness. So I was raised with each of my parents believing in, and operating under, very different worldviews.

By the time I entered college at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1981, my views had shifted. I had a growing awareness of church hypocrisy and checkered history, such that I gave up on church and in the process threw the baby out with the bathwater. I also decided I didn’t believe in God or the transcendent.

Photo by Christian Widell on Unsplash

My experience begins at the start of winter break during my junior year of college when I hitch a ride with a friend. I soon find myself in a decrepit student car, chock full of luggage. We drive north on Route 29. I am tired from exams, so we don’t talk much. I lean back, stare out the window, and admire the rainy day. I let my vision get a bit hazy as the scenery slips by. The world is cold, farms and fields cross my sight. When suddenly, out of nowhere, my vision shifts.

I still see farms and fields and rain, but I also see through them to the truth underneath. I see the material world as I normally see it, but it is transparent somehow and so I can also simultaneously see the vibrant unity behind the veil of the material world. It is vivid and alive with movement and energy! Both realities are visible, but the material world is transparent, and less real. It is like a mask hiding what is true underneath.

This shifted vision reveals the truth that everything, all of reality, is connected in beautiful harmony! Everything is one. Material existence is made up of a Force and its energy is vibrantly visibly to me. I can see that everything: earth, sky, plants, animals, my friend, me, the car, the road, are all part of one huge, glorious whole. And it is gorgeous! In fact, that is the most amazing part: the beauty. Mere existence, as well as all movement of existence, is all flowing as if in a spectacular, celestial dance. We aren’t individual entities knocking around on earth, but we are one, and it is all GOOD, and it is flowing as part of a whole. All of reality hangs together in intricate harmony and beauty, and for that 60 seconds, I can perceive that truth.

I have a very clear memory of driving by a herd of cows, just as one of them lifts her tail to defecate. As I watch it, I think to myself that it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen! I can even see inside the cow as the excrement moves and then exits. Even the parts that I would consider unpleasant with my normal vision, in my expanded vision are so beautiful I could weep. I see with different eyes. I am the cow, and the cow is me, and everything is everything, and everything is as it should be. Nothing in reality is out of place. Harmony. It takes my breath away.

After that 60 seconds, or whatever it is, my vision settles back down into its usual view, and I don’t say a word to anyone about the experience for a long time. I don’t know how to process it. At that point I am still unwilling to believe in God exactly, but I become convinced that there is some Force out there that flows through us and around us, and of which we are composed. From that day on, I KNOW, deep in my bones, that all of reality is ONE. That all of existence is connected on a deep level, in ways that we cannot perceive in our normal state.

“I… beg you to… [bear] with one another in love… maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: there is one body and one Spirit… one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” – Ephesians 4:1-4, 6

If you read my earlier posts about the Stages of Spiritual Development, you might be tempted to think that this experience propelled me to Level 9, the Oneness of Non-dual consciousness. My guess is that is exactly what it did – temporarily. However, I did not then suddenly become enlightened. Rather, immediately after the event, I returned to my normal state of consciousness.

Having a transcendent experience doesn’t make you enlightened. Some people make this mistake. Instead, it means you’ve taken an important step on your journey. It gives you a destination to look towards, a vision to lean in to. In fact, if we pay attention, it can propel us more easily along our journey. My experience reminds me where I am going.

There are some people, however, who have such an extensive and profound experience that the experience leapfrogs them dramatically up several levels, and they are not prepared. Such events can be wildly disorienting, even unpleasant, and the information received take years to process.

We can have Spiritually Transformative Experiences at any level of spiritual development, and they will help us on our journey. But they are not the bulk of the journey, and you don’t need to have had one to be well on your way. Pray, meditate, love all - even your enemies, forgive, drop ego, release all to God, enter into the divine flow, follow Jesus. These are the sorts of practices that will open our eyes to the truth of who we are and the Unity of all.

Jesus and the Enchanted Cosmos

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