One of my first experiences of transcendence, and probably my strongest, happened during my childhood, though it wasn’t until recently that I recognized it for what it was. 


Growing up in Iceland with the knowledge that otherworldly beings - elves, fairies and other ‘light beings’ - share this world with us made non-material reality accessible to me as a child. Its existence was never second-guessed. The ethereal state was part of the every day, even if it was invisible most of the time. These beliefs made it easy for me to accept transcendence and to have experiences without prejudice or bias towards the materially tangible.

We used to play a game in our garden, my sister and I, together with our childhood friends, where we purposefully spun and whirled around ourselves until we fell down. When we fell down, we fell into a kind of trance or a dream, somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. It felt as if we were in a place of endless corridors with endless doors. That’s where the game really began. Behind each door, there was a different world for us to “dream” into being. We would choose a door and we would step into a world of our own imagination, where everything was possible, from cotton candy fairy tales to science fiction and scary horrors. There was never any way of knowing what would happen.

After a little time spent exploring the world we had chosen to step into, one after another we would wake up and tell each other what door we had opened and what had happened when we passed over the threshold. Sometimes, we even met each other in the dream. Somehow, the dream could be shared and merged. Every time we spun in the garden, we whirled ourselves into a dream state. Every time, there was a corridor, and every time, there was a different world.

As I got older, this game became harder and harder to play. I found myself trying to force the dreamlike state. It did not come to me as it did before.

I suppose that, at a young age, we are much more perceptive to this kind of experiences. When we are children, we are still discovering this material world and we have yet to be schooled into restricting our perceptions and our experiences to only include that which is visible, tangible, solid. Children can create and experience anything they wish, without restrictions.

I used to understand this game as the creation of a child’s imagination. But there is more to it. We were consciously evoking a state. We were consciously confusing our bodies, or going beyond our bodies, whirling around until we lost balance, until our bodies fell down and our imagination roamed free. Whirling ourselves out of our body, whirling ourselves out of this world and into a dream. That is what separated this experience from the other imaginary childhood games.

I wonder, how did we ever come up with this whirling as a tool? Yet I also recall, that we used to spin did not feel strange at all. Maybe we can even say it was natural. The world is spinning. Counterclockwise. From atoms to the earth spinning around itself and also around the sun.

Taking this into the devout practice of mysticism, by spinning counterclockwise, Sufi whirlers consider themselves to be submitting to the universal order. They whirl counterclockwise around their heart just as the earth revolves around the sun. It is the body that revolves around the heart, not the other way around.

These games were a natural delight for us. Nobody taught us; they just happened. How interesting it is that whirling mystics return to this! They whirl as a way of uniting in love. The heart being the sun, the body the earth… and, for us, as children at play, our imagination was as vast as the universe.