Pope Francis (birth name Jorge Mario Bergoglio) is the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. He has served as pope since 2013. In an interview a few months after his election to pope he briefly discussed mystics, mysticism, and mystical experience.
There are many benefits to meditation: spiritual, religious, practical, psychological, emotional, etc. Psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman talks through some of them in this video.
Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), had a spiritual awakening that involved bright light, sometimes referred to as his “hot flash” or “white light transformation.”
I suddenly entered the heart of a reality so blindingly obvious, so total, so enlightening, so luminous, that I wondered how I had never before realized how easy this reality was to find and how easily I found myself in it.