“As I climbed upstairs, to the dormitory (in the German POW Camp), I became aware of an extraordinary sense of joy. It suffused mind and body...I had stepped out of time into timelessness…I remember seeing through the windows the barbed wire fence with its sentry towers, and the prisoners in the compound, all and each transfigured by a beauty that glowed through them, engulfing all as if from another place. Its intensity had a new dimension, so that never afterwards could I bring myself to speak of it, or write down the experience until now, when I know that my life nearing its end.” ~ J.H. Murray spent three years in a concentration camp during WWII. Murray wrote letters to his family, saying that he was "happy and thoroughly well." They thought he must have gone mad, but he told them that "I have not lost my reason, but all worries, anxieties and frustrations." He described experiencing "an undivided mind, inner stillness, self-realization, and a fullness that I never believed possible."
“At one point after carrying yet another severely wounded Marine to a waiting chopper something happened to me…I came out of myself. I expanded infinitely. I disappeared. It didn’t last long but it was the most powerful experience I’ve ever had. From that moment my anxiety disappeared and I knew that everything was alright, no matter if I lived or died. The Battle of Khe Sanh lasted 77 days. I felt peaceful for the remainder of the battle. I was not wounded in those 77 days although according to Ray Stubbe in Valley of Decision we had over 2,500 Marines wounded and over 800 killed. I’ve spent the last forty-seven years trying without success to replicate that experience. I even died on an operating room table. Nothing has come close to my ‘awakening experience’ at Khe Sanh.” ~ Anonymous American solider in Vietnam, 1968.
“These are powerful examples of what I call ‘post-traumatic transformation’… These experiences are paradoxical on many levels. It seems incredible that the brutality of war should be associated with such states of inner peace and harmony. And in a more general sense, it’s paradoxical that states of intense stress and turmoil should be so closely related to states of joy and liberation. It’s almost as if joy and despair aren’t opposites, but are somehow symbiotically related…” ~ Steve Taylor, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is the author of several books on psychology and spirituality, including Out of the Darkness. www.stevenmtaylor.com
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