Yet More "Thin Slice and Thin Place Talk"

Interesting comments re thin slices (canary's comments in "More on Thin Slices"). Yes, I'm just reading Gladwell's chapter now on the dark side of thin slicing, how we can be led astray by our own cultural conditioning or lack of experience or knowledge, or more interestingly, even if we have the knowledge that should lead us to make a different judgement, our unconscious makes a biased judgement that we had no idea was there. The latter part of the book looks at how we can consciously alter the way we thin slice.

Meandering on - or back - to "thin places" - those times/events/places/people/moments - where our everyday reality comes in contact with the "felt sacred", I was struck by the comment by "mulberry" about two of her experiences. Her experience was just exactly what Sophie Burnham (and many, many others) would call "mystical experiences." Burnham writes in The Ecstatic Journey: The Transforming Power of Mystical Experience," about asking a woman to tell her about the most important moment in her life, something she could never forget, and this is what the woman said: "She said she that once she had walked out on the deck of her house at sunset, and there before her was spread a glorious sky, all orange and purple and blue. She'd seen a thousand sunsets before, but this time, she said, eyes glowing with the memory, it was so stunning that she knew she was meeting God. She could not forget it. But what had happened? Almost nothing to the outside eye."

My husband, who thinks my meandering is generally too airy-fairy for him, just looked at this and said he actually had an experience like that one time when he was driving in the Rocky Mountains and came around the corner and saw Mt. Robson for the first time.

Perhaps in another post I will write about an experience of mine.