Mystical interpretations

An aura so strong I thought it was a spiritual experience

"Sometimes just before a headache I see bulbous shapes in different colors, moving in lava-lamp fashion, actually rather gorgeous. Once I had an aura so strong I thought it was a spiritual experience."

(Julianne, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: Visual Disturbances, December 15, 1999)

The theory that (at least some) mystical experiences are actually migraine auras

"Another theory at the opposite end of such thinking is that reported mystical experiences are actually migraine headache auras. On the one hand, I would be inclined to laugh. But I have migraine headaches - & I can vouch that the severe ones have produced auras/hallucinations resembling raging fires or blinding bursts of light. If I had lived three hundred years ago, knowing nothing of the neurology of migraines, what *would* I have thought I was experiencing?" – "You're exactly right... as per my example of interpreting a migraine aura in a social context. And the study suggesting a biologic basis for spirituality may explain what drives us to create our mythologies. They are psychological & physical survival techniques. Which is not to say that Divinity does not exist; I believe It does."

(peregrine, beliefnet, August 15, 2000)

Migraine auras as mystical experiences

"The most interesting and complete descriptions of mystical experiences I've read so far (outside of Buddhist literature) concern migraine auras and other altered states that contain symbolic imagery. This imagery is far more profound than a typical non-discursive state and has a lasting impact on people, regardless of their beliefs prior to the aura. Even people who were and remained agnostic after such auras, still reported profound emotional impact from these experiences."

(Deborah/The_Grinch_2000, Yahoo Newsgroups intjopen@yahoogroups.com, Subject: Mystical Experience and INTJs, January 8, 2000)

"As a long-time sufferer of severe migraines, I've always found this fascinating. In his book 'Migraine,' Dr. Oliver Sacks details the visions of various saints which were almost certainly migrainous in nature. Some of the drawings that these mystics have done feature, very clearly, the symptoms of a migraine-inspired drawing. (Likewise the 'voice of God' that Joanne d'Arc heard.) That's a great book. He gave a great lecture out here a few years ago, that included illustrations from de Chirico and other migraine sufferers, but also delved into imagery seen under the influence of mescaline, anesthesia and other drugs. There are these seeming neurobiological constants (for lack of a better word) that produce similar imagery, whether it's migraine proper, trance, fasting, drugs or other anamolous experience. The visualizations we do in tibetan buddhism had to have come out of a similar neurological experience. They are replete with images of lattices of light, distortions in size, indistinct, but compelling sound. I know from reading the so called 'advanced' texts, that some of the more obscure yogic practises in the tradition deliberately try to induce these effects through ascetic practices. As a long time practitioner, migraine sufferer, and researcher of rock art and related shamanic practices, I still aver that the originators of the most compelling visualization practises had to be experiencing some kind of aura originating in what ever 'system' in the brain produces migraines. I've experienced many mystical events in the course of meditation, but nothing comparable in impact to auras, which in my case are filled with Buddhist imagery. If I had been living in a more faith driven culture in a different age, I would have felt compelled to go out and teach, to record these experiences and share them with others. As it is, the few people I have confided in within the Buddhist community were jealous, a particularly stupid reaction in my limited view. Everyone wants the imagery, but no one wants the pain. (Migraines can be unbearably painfully.) My teacher took an interesting stance. His attitude is to dismiss these experiences and say 'watch yourself', meaning don't think you have special powers, don't be full of pride, etc; just focus on the basics of conduct. However he did give me permission/access to some ancient texts and rituals, which have been a great relief and joy in that they give me something useful to do with the aura imagery. And to bring this back on topic, I think the whole aura experience has everything to do with being INTJ [the Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging personality type according to Myers Briggs' Jung Type Descriptions]. I would even go so far as to say that many of the innovative shamans around the world have been INTJs. First, because INTJs tend to be very sensitive in a biologcal sense imco. Second, because as INTJs we would most likely feel a need to explain and systematize these outrageous, terrifying experiences. Third, because we can be leaders in the community when there is a vacuum of leadership in a given area. Fourth, because much of ancient shamanism deals with what we now consider science and technology (weather control, medicine, procuring food etc) as opposed to the feeling aspect of much contemporary religion."

(Deborah/The_Grinch_2000, Yahoo Newsgroups intjopen@yahoogroups.com, Subject: Mystical Experience and INTJs, January 8, 2000; additions in square brackets by Klaus Podoll)

Higher powers trying to talk to me through my brain

"Migraine this weekend, though I guess I didn't realize it... and that's very strange. I guess after 10 years of higher powers trying to talk to me through my brain and me suffering because I don't speak that particular language, my body goes on auto-pilot and conks out. I was working at home (I was good, I even got out of bed 2 hours before I normally would have if I was going to go in to the office.

About noon I sat on the couch for a break and promptly passed out and slept til 7 in the evening. I didn't move off the couch (and I dared not move my head, the feel of my brain jiggling around in my brain-pan is a rare treat.) Steve came over for a while and we chatted and watched telly while I laid on the couch and then he left. Tex got off work after Steve left so he came over and since I hand't moved in 7 hours, I stayed put and let my noodle reattach itself to the inside of my head so it wouldn't squish around."

(fredlet, author's homepage, April 2, 2001)

Mystical Experience and the Language of Paradox - A Neuropsychological Correlation

In her essay Mystical Experience and the Language of Paradox - A Neuropsychological Correlation (2002), theologist, neuropsychiatrist and migraine sufferer Judit Gellérd took up the task of a "first-person report" of her mystical experiences. "As a neuropsychiatrist and also a sufferer from severe migraine headaches for three decades, I self-observed the epiphenomena (confirmed by EEG) of my migraines and migraine equivalents... I think that my discrete temporal anomaly is correlated with my predisposition for mystical experiences... Having two, radically different interpretative approaches of my experiences, the cognitive scientific and the theological, my dilemma arises: Do I need to choose between them in order to appreciate properly their effect upon me, namely, the numinous awakening to life's meaning? Which is the source of my mystical experiences -- God or my brain chemicals?" [more]

The beauty of having a migraine

By madhuleema chaliha

The bad part of a migraine is, without any doubt, the migraine itself. The good, and the most beautiful, part of it, however, is what happens to me after it has passed away. Unlike a medicine that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, a migraine almost always goes away leaving a strange feeling of wholeness inside my mind. It is the most destructive poison that I know of that contains within itself the seeds of regeneration.

As far as I can count, a migraine progresses through ten stages:

(1) I feel a tingling sensation "somewhere" inside my mind. And yet how can it be "somewhere": does the mind have "parts"? It is quite unlocatable: to be sure, one can pint-point the exact zone of the brain where it has started, but in another sense it is everywhere, all at once all over the mind. At this stage, it is just like a pin pricking me from the within; and in a way it is quite enjoyable.

(2) In the next stage, the pricking becomes more incessant and intense. A thousand pins pricking that would have made even Gulliver feel the pain of the Lilliputian arrows. Now I begin to feel that I have been detached from "reality". I knock the table in front of me with my knuckles, and the noise echoes and re-echoes with a loud bang through the corridors of my mind. I look out through my window at the green leaves on the trees and it seems to me that someone has painted them green just a minute ago: so bright and colourful do they appear. And the sky; I feel as if someone has just painted blue on a white screen. Every part of the sky is brimming over with the most brilliant blue. The whole world is rejoicing in a cosmic dance of joy; a riotous orgy of colour. Meanwhile the pricking goes on.

(3) I look at the wall in front of me and it seems that it is one thousand miles away from me. I stretch out my hand to touch it and my hand seems to be suspended in the air, miles away from the wall. I put on some music and it is as if someone is singing to me from the next house. I also begin to see a strange light in front of my eyes. It is one-half of every possible tone that I can recognise: half-green, half-red, half-yellow …

(4) I am surprised to realise that this conglomeration of colours is somehow 'inside' me. It is not my eyes that are seeing: it is someone else who is seeing through my eyes. I am losing my-self to myself. Some strange unknown inhabitant is taking over the controls and telling me what to do. Who is this person who is hearing through my ears, smelling through my nose and thinking through my mind? I hear a strange voice filling up the caverns of my mind; and when I go inwards into it, I realise what great unplumbed depths lie sleeping within it.

(5) I try to remember who I was/had been before the migraine started. It is as if I have jumped over a bridge to a different kind of a world that I do not know; a world where I can bend backwards to myself; where all words turn back to myself; where I try to grasp a thing outside me and realise that I have been grasping myself all the while; where I feel that I have become like a drop of water in the ocean which in searching for another drop loses itself into the heart of the unknown depths.

(6) Now a great darkness slowly spreads itself over my eyes. A great exhaustion sinks into my bones; the tiredness with which the dawn spreads her wings yet again over the heartless night. I lift up my hand and feel that I am trying to lift a thousand stones at once. It slowly moves down into my body and I feel that a thousand burning arrows have been shot through my heart. I grasp my pillow with a tightened grip and feel that it is my ever-fleeting mind itself that I am trying to catch.

(7) Slowly a strange music fills the air all around me. I feel like a man who at the end of a life's journey comes to the realisation that the treasure that he had been searching for had always remained hidden partly inside him, partly outside him; like a man who is filled with the terror that he might be so close to the mystery he thinks has always eluded him. Time has now stopped. Nobody can see me; for everybody and everything is now somehow inside me; and it is this other unknown person inside me who can see the all through me; feel the all through me; and destroy the all through my own destruction. I see a great waterfall rushing headlong into a bottomless pit and just at the place where it crashes into the rocks, a great whirlpool where the world itself is being sucked into.

(8) Now there is nobody either here or there; for 'here' and 'there' have become the same. It is the night of the final dissolution; a gentle peace has descended over the black waters. A thousand sparks fly into the crisp air every now and then lighting up the horizon; and then it becomes quiet once again. I want to sleep now. Sleep until the beginning of eternity. Sleep until the end of time. Sleep the longest sleep possible for any human being.

(9) I wake up the next morning. I feel that I have been re-born. Re-born into the most beautiful world that anyone could have created or even imagined. The trees are bursting forth with a new life; the birds are singing the most delightful of songs and the river is flowing with a fresh stream of joy. When I walk, I feel as if there are three inches of empty air between my feet and the ground that I seem to be walking on. For a long moment, there is no pain and its very sting has been taken away; death itself has been transcended; there are no tears, no worries and no anxieties. In one night's pain, the world has been perfected. Would I want to have another migraine? can only answer: Yes, yes! To be brought again and again to the very brink of the abyss, and to return from it again and again: how shall I explain what strange joy lies in the utter misery of this coming and going?

(10) So the migraine goes away; and I return to the world, but it is not quite the same world that had existed yesterday evening. It is now a world where round the edges of a piece of spotlessly white cloth I can see a gentle shade of black silently merging into the whiteness: a blackness that makes the white shine out even more beautifully. It is a world to which we die only to be born again; and what lies beyond this world can only lie within it and through it.

(Posted by madhuleema chaliha, June 28, 2003)

Miracles

By Gr3mlin

As a boy I grew up knowing my dad always had migraine headaches... I didn't think there was a connection though when he told me he saw ball lightning out the window, or that sometimes far away things seemed very close. It is just now that I have discovered many doctors feel there is a connection between experiences like these and the headache. I don't put much faith in the doctors though, when it gets right down to it. I'm sure they can help though of course. What is very strange though, growing up, is that all the adults around me would have aura like experiences as well. Not just my father. Now I even have experiences like this. Stranger still, none of us have migraines! I've read though that sometimes people have auras without migraines. My family though, and those I grew up around believed in these auras. To us the ball lightning were spirits, friendly spirits. I have experiences that might be described as auras many times, that always have positive effects in my life. For me it feels like, when an aura happens it is connected to moments of prayer that are followed by intense experiences that I cherish and will never forget, and many I have talked to feel the same. I do occasionally get headaches or other pain, but none such as intense as my father. I have found though that prayer always releases that pain... and have developed many other positive benefits from my aura. I don't know if any of you feel the same as I do about these auras, but I wouldn't ever want to discard them as neurological disorders of some kind... for me they are a blessing.

(Gr3mlin, Newsgroups: alt.support.headaches.migraine, Subject: Miracles..., May 27, 2004)

An exploration of consciousness

By Enocia Joseph

Two days ago I experienced an aura, the initial symptom of a migraine headache, when I get partial vision followed by a headache. Not again! The bus I was on was driving past the Arts Centre. I got off the bus and headed for the Poetry Library where I was going to wait for the aura to pass. In the meantime, I heard a Voice repeating the following:

"There is nothing to lose or gain from this experience."

After a few minutes, I stepped over the threshold into the space of silence. This Silence was different from the silence I consciously cultivate. This Silence was inevitable as I appeared to have lost all sense of logic. I tried to read the words from a book I had but they were meaningless words. I had also lost all sense of my world. I didn't know where I was. I was completely empty. I sat there for what seemed like hours, even though it was only about an hour, and waited for my vision to clear. I could feel pain in my stomach, signifying diarrhoea and nausea, part and parcel of the belief of having a migraine. Before I left the building I paid a visit to the ladies. I was, however, very determined not to be sick.

I needed to have some semblance of logic before catching my buses home. I got on the first bus that came along. I felt as if I was going to pass out but I kept reminding myself that "I am Energy." I figured if I didn't think I wouln't feel sick. It worked. Finally, when I got off my last bus there was still another ten minutes walk home. I was too weak to move, too weak to wait for a taxi. There was only one thing to do - let Energy take me home. I can't remember how I got home, I just knew I arrived home, dumped my jacket and bag and collapsed on the sofa, where I didn't move for a few hours. Of course by the next day I was back to my usual self.

What I found interesting about the experience was that I had connected to another part of me. Is it possible that the energy was so intense that I couldn't translate it in human terms; or do I translate the energy as heat, sickness, headache, nausea etc? When I practised energy healing, we were warned about the power of the energy that can cause sickness but I never could buy into it. How could Love do any harm? Now I think my teacher had a point. It is not that the Energy means any harm, it is how one interprets the Energy that can cause harm. During the whole experience, I was in a split state of mind. Part of me was experiencing the various symptoms as agreed by medicine which threatened to consume me. On the other hand, when I contemplated the Energy as my identity, the nausea vanished. Eventually the headache was healed.

During the experience, I tried to write down my thoughts at the time. When the words and the world meant nothing, I wrote:

"What is important to the is instantaneous it is what is there is."

Minutes later I wrote:

"You cannot lose them nor can there you gain anything."

Finally, it became a lot more lucid:

"There is nothing to lose nor is there anything to gain."

I also wrote: "I am Zerus and from kindrance."

Later I interpreted this as coming from the planet Zerus where I have a kindrance. Kindrance is not a word I have ever used. I found reference to the word "kindrance" in the poem "In God's Wood" by Tom Atterberry:

"I began to feel alone all around now there were people
in a hurry, going nowhere
but my heart was back in the country
I have a kindrance there
Someday soon I will go again
and I would live there if I could
for I feel so at peace
Out there in God's Woods"

It would seem that the migraine was an exploration of consciousness. As long as I don't judge the experience as good/bad, that "there is nothing to gain or lose," I can simply go with the ride and see what happens. Would I choose to experience another migraine? Of course not! Perhaps, I shouldn't call it "migraine" but a way of expressing self. Besides, I now know how to handle the side-effects of migraine by realising my identity as Energy.

It seems to me that Consciousness speaks and expresses in many languages and forms. It is up to me how I interpret the various expressions of consciousness.

I am Consciousness exploring Consciousness, Enocia

(Enocia Joseph, power to share – the practical spirituality of unconditional love, , October 28, 2004)

Migraine and mysticism in Darren Aronofsky's film "Pi"

"Max Cohen, the main character of π, obviously undergoes several mystical experiences through the course of the film. It could be argued that Max had his first mystical experience when he was six years old, when he stared into the sun against the advice of his mother. During this experience, Max stared into the bright light of the sun and had a moment of intense focus, of understanding. He then became temporarily blinded, engulfed in darkness. Finally, he could see light again - his vision was restored. However, as Max states, 'Something had changed inside me.' That day, he suffered his first migraine." [more]

(Jodie A. Daquilanea, Π: Aronofsky's Film and Its Signs of Mysticism, May 23, 2003)

Missing the Migraine

By Sir Fancy Reverend John Fenderson, BBC, KSC, ULC, GWHA, BotTBoPD

I've suffered from migraines for most of my life. They seemed to be random and frequent at first, but as the years went by I noticed patterns to them, that there were certain things that are likely to trigger them. I suspect that every long-term sufferer has their own such list. I keep careful track of what I was doing prior to each migraine to spot trends and avoid risky activity. It's worked very well. I’ve been able to reduce my attacks to a bare minimum — usually twice a year, once at the end of summer and once at the end of winter.

Migraines are a pure, I-beg-you-to-kill-me-now hell that I go to great pains to try not to provoke. So why do I sometimes feel such nostalgia for them?

A couple of years back, I posted a link to the image above and said:

I just came off of a 36 hour migraine trip. It's not completely gone yet, but tonight I'll sleep normally, I can tell. I call them migraine "trips" because that’s what they are. Psychedelic, consciousness-altering experiences strongly resembling the effects of peyote in important ways. Migraines, however, also include pure physical and perceptual torture in various interesting forms.

Once the storm passes, I am at peace. A calm so profound that I only very rarely experience it any other way. I enjoy this part tremendously. It almost makes up for the parts where I wish I would die.

My major triggers include drinking beer or wine (liquor is OK), waking up at a very different time than usual, my inner ear getting very cold, certain kinds of music, and orgasm (but only when a partner is involved. Masturbation isn’t risky; Eris is a cruel mistress.) Fortunately, none of these are sure-fire. A wrong wake-up time gives about a 75% chance of an attack. If I have a beer, it's only about 50%. If I come, the chance is about 15% and so most times I'll chance it.

Migraines are not headaches. For one thing, they can kill you. A severe headache usually comes with them, but not always. Everyone’s migraine experiences seem to vary. My mother, for example, can drink wine but can't eat freshly baked bread. Her migraines also sometimes happen without any headache at all. You might be tempted to call her lucky on that, and I suppose she is, but really the headache is not the worst part. If it were, then handling migraines would be as easy as popping a bunch of Vicodin. It's not.

Personally, I can never pick out which symptom I hate the most. Is it the nausea and vomiting? (Vomiting in the middle of a migraine doubles your fun!) The hot and cold flashes? The incessant sweating? The inability to tolerate even the slightest amount of sound or light? The visual effects and hallucinations? The fact that the slightest physical movement, even my own pulse, hurts? The synaesthesia? The inability to sleep? The fact that I get stupid? Not just a little stupid, but short-bus, can't-count-my-thumbs stupid. I think the thing I hate the most is that time slows to a near standstill. When I have an attack, you'll find me in a closet, under a desk, or anywhere that's small, dark, and muffled. I'll be counting the years until I am released from the clutches of the waking nightmare.

Migraines are downright psychedelic, but not in a pleasant way. Interestingly enough, psychedelic drugs can be an effective treatment for them. Even so, migraines are nothing anybody would ever want, so why do I feel nostalgic? It's all in my quote. It's the recovery period. As hellish as the actual attack is, the recovery nearly makes up for it. The peace and calm that wash over and soothe me is almost like a physical substance. It's like being in the womb. Oneness. Paradise. Euphoria. I've had mystical, sexual, and drug experiences that have approximated it, but nothing that equals it. It’s as if all the good and pleasant experiences that I had been deprived of during the attack were saved up and given to me all at once, with interest.

It's nice.

(Sir Fancy Reverend John Fenderson, Discordian Research Technology, August 1, 2006)

Are you acquainted with similar phenomena associated with your migraine attacks? Please contact Dr Klaus Podoll if you wish to share and discuss your experiences.