“I was floating on the ocean and then something just changed. I lost the sense of me being separate from things and just became joined in this beautiful oneness with the ocean, sky and wind. There was no sense of time ... just this huge, eternal expanse. It was amazing.” I work as a psychotherapist and this was the response of a client, Derek, when I asked him how he developed his personal spiritual beliefs. Like many people today, he didn’t refer to a religious text or philosophy. Instead, he spoke of an experience that gave him an insider’s view into spirituality.

Throughout the ages, mystics and holy men and women from both Eastern and Western traditions have described such mystical experiences. We could therefore be tempted to assume that such states belong only to exalted spiritual practitioners, however this is not the case. Researchers into mystical experiences have found that about a third of people report having experienced them at least once in their life. These people aren’t mystics. They’re not necessarily religious. They’re ordinary people from all walks of life.

Experiencing mystical states is therefore much more prevalent than we might think, which leads to an obvious question: why are such experiences kept so hidden? Why don’t people speak about such things? When clients talk to me about these experiences, they either wait until they’ve checked out where I stand on spiritual ideas, or they preface their stories with “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but...” or “I know this is silly, but...”. It seems it’s not comfortable or safe for people to talk about such things.

Researchers have discovered that people tend not to speak about these experiences to anyone — not to friends or even partners. You’d think that such amazing stories would be shared, but people are very reluctant to speak about them for fear of embarrassment or shame. They also fear being misunderstood, ridiculed or considered a freak. However, if a third of the population has had such experiences, it would be difficult to consider them freakish!