Connection 100 – An Auto-ethnography of my (Mystical) Connection Experiences

Abstract

This paper provides an autoethnographic accounting and analysis of my own mystical experiences, called connection experiences in this paper. This account, which is structured around a description of my early experiences, attempts to weave together psychological, sociological, historical, and methodological themes into a coherent contribution that advances our understanding of connection experience. The paper includes an explication of the four stages of the research project that developed as a consequence of these experiences as well as an examination of the processes, tools (i.e., MediWiki), and emotional, psychological, professional, and scholarly challenges of collecting and analyzing the autoethnographic data of mystical experiences. The denouement of the paper is the presentation of a conceptual schema aimed at overcoming nomenclature confusion and providing a basis for description, analysis, and discussion of connection and connection experiences. The utility of the schema is demonstrated when it is used to provide a clear overview of my own connection experiences, and the connection experiences of others. In order to facilitate critical discussion of the conceptual framework, a glossary of terms developed and presented in this paper is provided at the end.

It takes a village

“…3 Our shared awareness, nurtured by the critical work of scholars like Anyon (1980), Fanon (1963), Deloria (2003Deloria ( , 2006, and others that the colonial systems of socialisation and social control are geared towards erasing and suppressing full human capacity and potential in order to produce compliant cogs in the extant regime of accumulation, and that these systems are incredibly violent and damaging to everyone, Indigenous and settler alike (see for example our working draft on Toxic Socialization (Sosteric & Ratkovic, 2016)), 4 Our shared observations of needs, attachment, and psychological health and pathology in clients, kids, and feral cats (observations complicated enough to merit their own paper), 5 Michael's mystical experiences (experiences that we discovered are ubiquitous (Sosteric, 2021), psychologically and emotionally impressive (Bien, 2004;Miller, 2004), politically transformative (S osteric, 2018c)), and therefore unwise to simply ignore.…”