I've been a mystic pretty much all my life. My first big mystical experience happened when I was five (the standard, well-documented kind of "golden-white light that is the Presence of God" thing). I've continued to have mystical and supernatural and metaphysical type experiences ever since, and I still do.
I also had a particularly stressful childhood. Without going into details, my family was highly dysfunctional in myriad ways, and it affected me deeply and profoundly. I spent many years being extremely messed up, to put it mildly.
I've noticed that a lot of people who post here reporting mystical/metaphysical experiences have similarly stressful childhood backgrounds. Have commented on this before, actually.
I have a daughter who is now thirteen, and she is an absolute mini-me. She looks like me, she thinks like me, she's prone to stress the same way I am, her sense of humour is exactly like mine, all of it. She is a kind of manifestation of a wish (I wanted to get an idea how I might have turned out if I had not had complete f**kwits for parents). When she was young, she had a number of experiences that looked very like clairvoyance to me, and she had dreams that struck me as mystical, but as she's gotten older, she's become less and less mystical. She told me the other day she's an agnostic, in the sense that the Divine cannot be known by conventional means (though she's open to the idea that people can experience the Divine in subjective ways). She also has not, apparently, started to have precognitive dreams, which is something that happens commonly in my family when you hit puberty. She has also had a reasonably stable upbringing by parents who are imperfect but not complete f**kwits. She is prone to stress, but she doesn't have a stress disorder (which is something with which I still struggle; my limbic system is pretty fragile). She also seems to have the capacity for the mystical, but little to no experience of it (nor does she seek that, though one day she might).
I have other observations that are similar (i.e., people with abusive or otherwise messed up childhoods being more likely to develop mystical abilities), but I won't go into all of them. What I'm thinking, and possibly seeing, is that trauma is, among other things, a facilitator of mysticism. I'm not sure that all mystics come from a traumatic background (I don't have any reason to think that's true, and if we look at the stories of the Buddha, he was raised a pampered prince!), but it seems that for some, trauma causes us to retreat into ourselves in ways that open us up to the mystical, and, for some of us, the Divine. I am positive that trauma does not always lead to mysticism or divine experience (more often, it seems to lead to personal dysfunction, addiction, criminal activities, and other such self-destructive habits), but based on my very small sample and observations I've made of the mystically-inclined, I think it can be said that trauma can and does lead us to mystical experience, or, at least, it opens us up to it.
At the moment I'm just mulling this over, and I'm not proclaiming any special knowledge or epiphanies or anything. :) I'm just observing this, and I'm wondering if someone might have some input or thoughts on the matter. Could make an interesting discussion. ;)
