Karin Sokel

Karin Sokel is a life coach and energy healer whose account of a mystical journey centers on an encounter with divine love. The experience changed her understanding of human nature: she came away convinced that love, rather than evil, lies at the core of every person, even figures she associated with extreme violence. Her story gives concrete form to the book’s account of mystical experience as a felt certainty that can outlast the moment itself.

Identity and Account

Sokel was in her fifties when she described an experience she said “changed everything and opened me profoundly.” At its climax, she encountered a god who called himself “I Am.” She recalled an overwhelming presence of light, love, and divinity, and said that she felt herself merging with it. The account is intimate and embodied: even while recounting it, she said her fingers were becoming electric, as if the memory remained physically charged.

The Encounter and Its Meaning

The experience’s central revelation was not simply that Sokel had encountered a divine presence, but that she understood love as the innermost nature of human beings. At the peak of the journey, she said she held the face of Osama bin Laden and looked into his eyes, feeling and giving pure love. She described the same experience with Hitler and then with someone from North Korea. These encounters reversed the expected moral division between people understood as evil and those who love them: Sokel concluded that “The core is not evil, it is love.” For her, this was not an abstract proposition but a direct knowing that people are divine.

Certainty and Recurrence

Asked whether the encounter might have been a dream or a drug-induced fantasy, Sokel rejected that interpretation. She insisted that it was as real to her as the conversation in which she described it, and said that the experience had become “hardwired in my brain” so she could connect to it again. Her account thus joins overwhelming immediacy to recurrence: although the episode itself was temporary, its meaning remained available to her afterward.

That pattern echoes William James’s description of mystical states as transient yet capable of leaving traces that return with continuing inward importance. James also characterized such experiences as involving passivity, a sense that the will has yielded to a superior power. Sokel’s account fits those features as a reported experience, while its lasting certainty belongs specifically to her own interpretation. The movement from a moment of overwhelming love to a durable conviction is what gives her story its significance in the book’s discussion of mystical experience.