Here’s a weird post for you. Not sure if this will mean anything to anybody, but I can assure you that it’s true. And I really don’t care if you believe it or not.
On the night of September 3rd, 2012, I had a profound experience.
I won’t bother explaining how I got there, because that’s even weirder and I don’t really understand it myself.
But I passed through a portal of some sort. (This was a very ineffable experience, so it’s pretty much impossible to find words to describe it, so a lot of these words should be understood as approximations more than anything else.) Through this portal, I saw and experienced my true self. I want to say the true self is love. But love as it is experienced in this world is like a drop of water; there it is more immense than an ocean. Still, love is the closest word. It is infinite and completely fulfilling. Somehow, existence is “pure” there. That’s the best word I can think of; it’s pure. The core of your being, of your true self, is pure.
I was able to see my connection with the universe. This is a profound thing to see. It was nothing visual; it was an innate understanding, obvious yet profound. I saw that I was an essential part of the universe, part of God Himself, as are all people. You hear the idea that “we are one” or “we are all part of each other” in many philosophies. But it’s hard to see and understand in this world because we have separate bodies and minds. There, your connection to all things is obvious, profound, and beautiful.
If you have ever been with a great group of friends or family, and you feel like you have a place among them, like you belong, and you don’t feel superior or inferior to anyone in the group; it is like that only multiplied by infinity. The feeling of being “at home”, the feeling of “belonging” is infinite. It is because you can feel and understand your connection with the universe and understand that you are an essential part; not better or worse than any other part; you are not comparing yourself to anything; but you are essential.
I remember thinking to myself, “Of course I feel at home here, I know who I am here.” But even those words hardly communicate the profoundness of it.
And this love that makes up the core of your being, your life essence, somehow flows, or vibrates; it is alive itself. You can feel it flowing through the core of your being and through all the universe. It is what connects you to all things. It is living itself and is giving you your existence; you cannot exist without it. I know, it sounds bizarre; it is pretty impossible to describe.
Negative emotions of any sort are impossible there. You cannot be embarrassed about anything. You cannot feel insecure. How your body looked, what worldly success you achieved, it’s all completely insignificant. You cannot be ashamed of anything. You cannot regret anything. You do not long for anything. You cannot be afraid. You are completely fulfilled.
One of the most surprising and profound things I realized is that you cannot be bored there. Every moment of existing is so vibrantly alive and somehow new. It is like every moment is as fresh as being newly born.
I can’t even fathom it in this world. In this world, we have to be doing something or we’ll get bored. We constantly have to find things to stimulate our brains. We have to keep moving. Even when we’re happy, it’s a fleeting happiness and we eventually grow tired and have to move on to the next thing.
There, existing in and of itself is a completely different experience. There is no boredom. You don’t have to be doing anything, and yet you cannot be bored. It doesn’t make any sense in this world. I remember experiencing it and yet I can’t rationally comprehend it. But there it is. You cannot be bored.
There are no negative emotions. So even if you had the worst life imaginable, even if you lived in prison camps your entire life and watched while your entire family was tortured to death, nothing can take even a grain of sand away from that experience; the fulfillment is infinite and pure. No negative emotions. Not that you forget bad things or forget what negative emotions are; it is simply impossible to experience them.
In a way, it felt like I was only there for a few seconds, and yet the experience seemed so large that it felt like longer. As I said, every moment felt like new, so there’s no way to describe time. (The experience may have been more profound if I had actually thought about time while I was there, but I did not.)
Anyway, in the end, I somehow “fell away” from the experience and was back in the world, or back in my body, or back to being aware that I was in a body, or whatever. I’m pretty sure I didn’t die, I don’t think I have anything to die of, but I certainly know the experience was metaphysical. It’s impossible for the brain to experience that. When you experience something like that, you just know that it’s not something the brain can do; the brain simply cannot experience that sort of infiniteness. If it could, we would all just die, because we’d be infinitely fulfilled; we’d just lie down with no reason to move and we’d all just die. Of course, one of my first thoughts after the experience was thinking, “Maybe that was just a dream.” But that immediately didn’t make any sense. It was too pure to be a dream; it was even more profoundly real than this life. I know that doesn’t make any sense from the perspective of this life, but you just know it innately when you experience it.
I don’t know why I had the experience or what it was all about. It wasn’t Heaven, though perhaps it was a glimpse of how the self is experienced in Heaven. I didn’t talk to God or angels or anything, I didn’t see the future or the past, I didn’t even really see anything visually beautiful; it was all sort of inner-self-sense stuff. In some ways, it’s frustrating, because not only do I long to experience it again, I also wish I had answers about it!
I’m not sure why I’m sharing this now, since it happened over a year ago. And I’ve always believed in God, so it’s not like the experience converted any of my religious beliefs or anything, though it certainly deepened them. I wasn’t sure whether or not I’d ever share this at all because it’s probably hard to relate to and probably makes me sound a bit crazy. But, for some reason, I want to. I mean, it was an awesome experience.
I think the most profound things I received from the experience was, firstly, the realization that we are all intimately and profoundly connected to God, and to each other through God; God Himself flows through the very core of our being and gives us life; our life source is God; our creation happens at every moment. And secondly, the revelation of what it’s like to experience no negative emotions, including even the trivial negative emotion of boredom; that all pain in this life is temporary and that we are all profoundly essential to the universe, regardless of the ways in which we think about ourselves or compare ourselves to each other in this life.
Hope this is interesting to someone out there and doesn’t make me sound too crazy. (Or, if you already think I’m crazy, now you have another clue as to why.)
