Ram Dass and Black Elk on the Ineffability of Mystical Experience
Mystical and psychedelic experiences can’t be described because they come from a place where no words exist.
Ram Dass and Black Elk on the Ineffability of Mystical Experience
Mystical and psychedelic experiences can’t be described because they come from a place where no words exist. Here is Ram Dass reading from the book, Black Elk Speaks:
“I want to read for you a very brief example of this. It is from a book called Black Elk Speaks, the life story of a holy man of the Oglala Sioux. It describes Black Elk’s first mystic, visionary experience, which sounds like hundreds of psychedelic reports I have back in the files. This is the one he had when he was 9 years old:
‘And while I stood there, I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw, for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit and the shape of all shapes as they must live together as one being. I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight. In the center grew one mighty, flowering tree of all the children of one mother and one father and I saw that it was holy.
I am sure now that I was too…
