Are You A Mystic?

All my life I've been inundated by the kinds of experiences no one in my world ever talked about. So when I overheard someone call me a mystic, I easily accepted the label for myself. (Interestingly, that person was the spirited UU minister who agreed to baptize me.)

Yet in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Mathew Fox insists that all humans have mystical perceptions, and I agree with Fox. Maybe I have a few more strange perceptions than normal. Or maybe I'm just more ready to accept and act on mine. Still, I believe that having mystical experiences is really rather unremarkable.

Of course, some people may have spent so long denying their non-ordinary perceptions that they seem to have none. A few others may have actually been born without the ability. (Like one of my best friends, who I call a "real atheist" because he truly doesn't perceive anything beyond the physical.) But when I talk about seeing this or that, being visited by dead relatives, having prophetic dreams, remembering old lives, or meeting people and being sure our souls have a prior connection, most people say they've had an experience along those lines... They just don't talk about it.

So what about you?

What experiences have you had that go beyond the limits of the what-we-see-is-all-we-got, empirical, physical world?

And would you call yourself a mystic?