In this phase, our spiritual sensitivity begins to unfold gradually.

In order to become aware of God’s presence, we need a kind of spiritual perception.

God is pure spirit and cannot be perceived directly through our physical senses. Instead, we become aware of His presence through our spiritual senses.

Spiritual sensitivity opens the door to our own spirit and to the realm of spirit. We begin to sense the atmosphere of a person or a room. We also become aware that we ourselves are spirit or soul, and that our spirit lives within a spiritual environment.

We begin to recognize the emotions behind our thoughts

During meditation, we first become aware of our thoughts.

As we go deeper, we also sense the emotions underlying the thoughts. We realize that recurring thoughts are often driven by deeper emotional patterns.

This is already a significant step toward inner depth.

At the same time, this can be a helpful exercise: As thoughts arise, we can ask ourselves what atmosphere they have.

We can try to feel the mood they spread. In this way, we begin to perceive the underlying emotions and their energy.

Later on, we also become aware of the spiritual atmosphere.

We experience ourselves within a spiritual environment and recognize the influence it has on our feelings. Through longer meditation and prayer, this environment gradually changes - it becomes freer, lighter, brighter, and more loving.

Spiritual sensitivity is something different from spiritual openness - and this distinction is of great importance.

While spiritual openness can be dangerous, spiritual sensitivity is healing.

Experiences with spiritual openness

When I read my first book about the spiritual world in my youth, I wanted to experience it for myself.

It had always been important to me to personally encounter things rather than just read about stories or theories. So, I decided on an experiment:

In the evening, I would sit for several hours in a dark room and try to perceive the spiritual world. I spoke to the spirits and asked them to show themselves to me. After doing this for a few weeks, strange things began to happen:

As I was falling asleep, I suddenly couldn’t move my body – an experience of sleep paralysis. I tried to scream, but it was impossible. Only after a few seconds did I regain control

Sometimes I heard a voice saying: "Now I am here." Even during the day, I often felt strange, unpleasant sensations in our apartment – so intense that I sometimes had to leave. 

My mother then suggested we visit a medium.

The lady asked us who in the spirit world we felt connected to - someone who could help me. My great-grandfather was a person we both loved and appreciated. After she called him, my mother and I simultaneously felt an overwhelming presence.

It was like sensing the atmosphere of a person - only intensified immensely. The entire room was filled with his presence.

This experience made two things absolutely clear to me:

• The spiritual world definitely exists.
• Becoming spiritually open is not a good goal - in fact, it can be very dangerous.

After some time, these phenomena faded away. I then discovered Zen meditation, which grounded me deeply. Pure mindfulness meditation leads in exactly the opposite direction: it first anchors us in the physical body.

The spiritual sensitivity that gradually develops on this path grows from the solid foundation of an improved unity of spirit and body.

This is healthy, stabilizing, and ultimately leads us to the true goal – to resonate with God's love.

I had already received a first inkling of this in the experience I previously described with self-remembering - a moment of awakening into aliveness and bliss.

In the phase of deepening, moments of enlightenments can already occur. In Zen Buddhism, these are called kenshō in Japanese. Christian mystics refer to spiritual insights of this kind as illuminations.

These insights have a different quality than purely intellectual realizations that arise arise from understanding content and connections.

They surpass intellectual understanding by far in their clarity.

Spiritual truth cannot be grasped by the intellect alone. It is revealed through spiritual illumination by God – this is the Christian understanding, and it also corresponds to my personal experience.

These illuminations are a sudden awareness of a spiritual reality. 

They often happen during meditation, but they can also occur in everyday situations. Such experiences touch us deeply at the core of our being – sometimes to the point of tears or emotional overwhelm.

For example, during my morning exercises – which for me are also a mindfulness practice - I had a kenshō experience.

In a clarity I had never known before, I became aware that I am not the thinker within me. I am something entirely different - what Buddhism refers to as the true self. In ordinary consciousness, we are completely identified with our thinking, feeling, and willing.

I have known this for 30 years - but I had never experienced the expansion of consciousness with such intensity.

I will share more about this kind of illumination and similar experiences later on.