Mystic In-Between State

The mystic experience of God’s presence often times occurs unintentionally in what we might call liminal space. Being in a state of liminality (from the Latin, meaning “threshold”) is the experience of being on a threshold or in a state between different existential planes. Our experience of liminality may occur when our old understanding breaks down and for a time our experience of the world may be without explanation. With most of our experiences, the understanding passed on to us by our culture and language community is sufficient to explain those experiences.

At times, however, something comes into our lives that causes that understanding to break down. It could be the death of a loved one or some other traumatic event that our understanding is unable to process or interpret. At such moments without a sufficient understanding, we are no longer in our heads but are present in a way that we seldom are when our understanding is intact.

Experience Without Interpretation

When our understanding is intact, we experience life as a routine without much consciousness of what is actually before us. Because our understanding makes life routine and predictable, we are free to be somewhere else in our minds. We are free to think about the past or the future rather than being present.

When some traumatic event enters our lives, it disrupts our understanding and all of our consciousness focuses on the here and now. One circumstance has all of our attention. and we are in the liminal space of pure experience. The traumatic nature of the experience makes it impossible for our understanding to filter out the experience, but it is an experience without interpretation because the filters that normally mold and make sense of out experience are inadequate.

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Contemplative Prayer
James Danaher