Followers in this subreddit, what brings you here?
Are you a seeker of enlightenment?
Do you seek to guide others on their path?
Are you here to observe, mock, and troll?
Something else?
There are a lot of folks asking what enlightenment feels like.
I wrote the following notes after having a mystical experience, and subsequent mental breakdown, in 2021.
I have since written multiple philosophical books in an attempt to capture what I learned from this experience and share it with others. (Check my profile if you're curious,)
I hope this helps other seekers.
>I felt connected to something greater than myself. And while the feeling of being connected was new, I felt that the connection itself was always there. It was more like I was noticing it for the first time. Like the connection had been subconscious before, and it was now in my consciousness. Or almost like a detail that’s so ubiquitous it was like background noise and you never noticed it before.
>While I was experiencing the connection, I described it to others as seeing the world through the eyes of god. This was the only way I could describe it at the time, and my attempt to describe it to people who believe in a deity.
>It was a shock to me, most of all, who had been such a raving atheist and skeptic, to feel connected to some higher mind. But calling it God doesn’t seem accurate in the sense that I didn’t feel like it was something to fear. Nor did I feel it "thought" in the human sense of the word.
>It radiated light, warmth, love, acceptance, forgiveness, confidence. While connected to it, I felt the interconnectedness of all things; the cause and effect that is constantly unfolding around us—what the Buddhists call Karma and what the Christians call God’s Plan. I could sense these connections as clearly as I can see or hear. Everything was unfolding exactly how it should and everything was alright. I was in awe of the present.
>I felt connected to my fellow man on a deeper level. I told my family that I bet I could become friends with anyone. I beamed confidence and I felt like I could cut through anyone’s defense mechanisms and talk to them at their deepest level. And I deeply desired that connection. I wanted to give others this experience, or at least help them in some way.
>My own defense mechanisms were gone. I was so true in my being, so powerful in my persona, that I didn’t need them anymore. My psyche was invincible—no one could hurt me.
>My depression, ever present on some level, was gone. I felt a childlike joy for the first time in years.
>The connection was also a spiritual Internet of sorts. Being connected to this higher mind (for the lack of a better name) gave me direct access to deep, fundamental knowledge. I felt like I could ask anything and it would give me the answer, wholly, truly. These questions and answers were not codified in words; they were mere impressions. I received answers almost before I could even ask the question.
>I felt connected to my father and his father, both long deceased. I felt their love and warmth and personalities and knowledge as well. And they also communed with me in the same way—not through words but through the same direct, compressed thought. I described it as communicating through emotion at the time, but raw thought might be better. Words were not used, but the information was conveyed regardless.
>I learned some things while connected to the higher mind. And I felt compelled to write.
>To describe the higher mind—diety, god, whatever—will be difficult. It was golden and white, like a star, but more like a galaxy in its “shape”. But it’s difficult to say it had form or shape because it is not of this plane. There are multiple dimensions to existence and we are only consciously aware of five of these—length, width, depth, time, and mind. Just as time is a dimension both inside and throughout the physical, and though we are aware of time but cannot touch it, the higher planes are woven through the lower and can indirectly impact them. The godmind sits in a dimension above our own. It is ever present and available to all things. I say it is in another dimension, but because, by existing in that dimension it is ever present, it so fills up that dimension that there is no space for anything else. You might as well say that the godhead and the dimension it resides in are one.
>Our individual minds exist in another dimension. Unlike the godhead we each take up a small space in this dimension just like we take up small space in the physical. Our minds are spherical like little bubbles floating in a vast darkness, all alone. Our only way to connect to each other, it appears to us, is through the physical world, and we desire most of all is not to be left alone in the darkness.
>Our souls—so ephemeral, so easy to deny—are on yet a higher plane. Soul is like raw life. The mind does the thinking, but it is the soul that experiences both the reality and the thought. It is who the mind is taking to. We are all part of the godhead and will return into it when we die. We originate from god, so to speak, and will return to it. It’s less an act of creation or birth or division or separation as it is a cycle of nature. Like the precipitation cycle. God is the ocean that we all come from and will eventually return to become a part of. In a way we are separated but this is only temporary, and perhaps even illusory, and we will all return back from whence we came. The Zen Buddhists use the metaphor of the dewdrop forming then flowing back into the sea. Did the dewdrop lose its nature? There are some philosophies that state that we are all god, or that god is a part of us, or that our souls belong to god; they are all right and all wrong simultaneously. Things get lost in translation.
>I could see, from that vantage point, the moon that all the fingers of the different religions were trying to point to. I felt like I could understand how they were all correct, yet got lost; like taking metaphor too far. Or perhaps they didn’t have the words to describe their experience.
>Speaking of arrogance, in case someone else comes across these notes later, the one thing I positively want to stress is that I in no way feel like I am special or somehow deserving of the experience that I‘m describing. Nor do l think having had the experience am I somehow better than other people. Even while I was in that state of mind, I knew I was undeserving of the experience and even said to others that I didn’t deserve it. If anything, the experience was about how we are all connected and are all the same. Arrogance doesn’t fit into that experience at all. Patience, yes. Kindness, yes. Arrogance, never.
>I didn’t sense that the god had a name. It certainly did not have a human styled sense of identity. There was no Jesus, no Buddha, nothing except …it. This massive well of souls, the uniform, universal consciousness. If it had a sense of identity it would be much more akin to the “I am what I am” that god said to Moses. No name is required, for who else might be mistaken for it? There’s no need to differentiate between this universal consciousness and another. There’s no need for individual identity when there is no limit to your existence in breadth or time. It is all. It is everywhere. That is enough.
>So in many ways, the quest I set myself on in my twenties—the search for a universal truth—is now over. I tried many different faiths, and spent a very long time as an atheist, having given up on religions. Now, ironically, having had my personal religious awaking I’ve surrounded myself with those who do not believe in anything. I have a belief that is all my own, a personal religion that in a practical sense is still very similar to my atheism, but has more hope and ultimately faith in a better ending.