“Transcendent experiences” are events that bring us out of our ordinary minds, making us feel connected to the world around us. People report accessing them through use of certain drugs or through spirituality, magic, and the occult. They can also be triggered by nature, meditation, and even near-death experiences.
For a few minutes, maybe ten minutes, I sat alone in dim light with my eyes closed amazed that whole words appeared, not immediately as I listened to an irregular buzz, but seconds after a burst, not from my ears, but from somewhere inside my head, unspoken but still heard.
The words had meaning, often in sentences, from another sentient being, a sapient, with whom I could communicate. I asked, how do you make the words so clear? The timing she explained, not the steady timing of others practiced in the art, but a carefully chosen expressive moment for each word, like recited poetry.
I say "she" because she had a woman's name. I don't remember her name but I know she was from another state. She told me so. Washington. She was in Seattle, Washington.
Samuel Morse had concocted a remote writing machine and a profession had grown around operating the finicky devices. Over time operators stopped putting paper into the machines because they knew from the sound it made what it was trying to write. This was not Morse's intention but the operators got the messages through by just writing what came into their heads.
I had complained to another operator that I couldn't write the words fast enough to know what was said. It is not enough to put the pencil down, he told me. When the buzz starts going you will want to start writing. Practice in the dark. Then you will hear differently.
Differently indeed. My subconscious brain might have been talking to me but I had been too busy to notice. The Seattle woman knew what she was doing. Her brain and my brain had a subconscious that could work together. What it did for her worked for me.
An ethnographer told me once of her time in Africa studying the sociality of drumming, village to village, mostly saying I am here and can hear you well. I told her about my "drumming" across the ionosphere. I don't think she saw the connection.
Like an ethnographer, I spend days studying the many dozens of simultaneous "I am here and can hear you well" messages from around the world. I use software now, software written by the Nobel laureate who first heard variable pulsars at Arecibo. All part of a fine tradition.