At 12 years old, home alone in Brooksville, Florida, Jason Rigby felt someone grab his sunburned shoulder hard. He turned around. No one was there, but a white handprint was fading on his skin. Years later, fresh out of the Marine Corps after Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti and no longer believing in God, he was replacing a well pump in the pump house of an old white church in Winlock, Washington, when an overwhelming presence filled the room.

This episode opens the Higher Density Living series on angels, and it starts with the hardest question: how would you ever know you'd had an angel encounter?

The Christian mystics took that question more seriously than almost anyone. Teresa of Ávila distinguished experiences that come through the physical senses from a quieter knowing of presence with no image or voice. John of the Cross warned people not to chase or cling to visions, even ones that might truly come from God. Their test wasn't "was it real?" It was "what did it produce?" Did it make you more humble, more loving, more honest, or did it make you feel spiritually superior?

Jason also takes on the skeptic's side: William James's research on mystical states, ecstatic seizures linked to the anterior insula, and why finding where an experience happens in the brain doesn't settle where it came from.

In this episode:

• The handprint experience and the Winlock pump house encounter
• Combat, PTSD, and losing faith in the God he was raised with
• Teresa of Ávila's kinds of spiritual vision
• John of the Cross on why you shouldn't worship the doorway
• The brain as instrument: what neuroscience can and can't tell us
• A simple two-column practice for working with your own unexplained experiences

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:00 The handprint at 12 years old
• 04:00 Combat, PTSD, and losing faith
• 05:15 The Winlock pump house
• 07:50 Teresa of Ávila and the kinds of vision
• 10:10 John of the Cross: don't cling
• 13:30 William James, the brain, and ecstatic seizures
• 16:50 The mystics' real test
• 20:40 The two-column practice
• 23:00 Next episode: what early Christians believed angels were

Links:

• Read the companion article on Substack: https://higherdensityliving.substack.com/p/i-felt-a-hand-on-my-shoulder-nobody