When it was my turn to lead a meditation [on Zoom sangha], I often guided the group in an exercise in which we were permeated from head to toe with a golden ball of light. As it spread through our bodies, we were warmed, calmed, and filled with love. Boundaries between ourselves and the "outside world" dissolved. We were in an interconnected web of consciousness.

When the morning sangha ended, I was already at home, in my living room on our worn couch with my old calico Glessie on my lap. I had once again discovered the golden light that is always within us. Nothing had changed and everything had change.

One day in particular is etched in my memory. It was in late October, and Maureen had stayed after school for a meeting. As I walked home alone, I drank in the deep blue sky. The trees were turning, and the world was gold, bronze, and scarlet. Leaves were skittering across the yards. Just near the hospital, before I turned south toward our house, I stopped in wonder at the sight of a crimson maple. It was a tree full of wind, its leaves shimmying in a manner that reminded me of a Van Gogh tree.
The afternoon sun enflamed the tree. I was stilled by amazement, not moving and barely breathing. Perhaps I was witnessing the Kansas equivalent of the biblical burning bush. As I beheld this blazing maple, I learned a deeply spiritual lesson about how the world, uncluttered by a thought-stream, could dazzle and exhilarate. I was totally awake to the perfection of the universe and grounded in absolute reality, more beautiful and transparent than the world we call real. Over and over, I have found rescue in these burning tree moments.

    - Mary Pipher, A Life in Light, p 118-119.

Nature is a teacher who never deceives. When I grew weary with the futile struggle to imitate the canvases of the past, I went out in the fields, determined to serve nature as faithfully as I had served art. In my desire to be accurate I became lost in a maze of detail. Try as I would, my colors were not those of nature. My leaves were infinitely below the standard of a leaf, my finest strokes were coarse and crude. The old scene presented itself to me framed in a opening between two trees. It stood out like a painted canvas—the deep blue of a midday sky—a solitary tree, brilliant with the green of early summer, a foundation of brown earth and gnarled roots. There was no detail to vex the eye. Three solid masses of form and color -- sky, foliage and earth -- the whole bathed in an atmosphere of golden lumosity. I threw my brushes aside; they were too small for the work in hand. I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color and taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white and brown in great sweeping strokes. As I worked I saw that it was good and clean and strong. I saw nature springing to life upon my dead canvas. It was better than nature, for it was vibrating with thrill of a new creation. Exultantly I painted until the sun sank below the horizon, then I raced around the fields like a colt let loose, and literally bellow for joy.

              --  Albert Pinkham Ryder, in an interview with Adelaide Louise Samson, quoted by John Updike, Better Than Nature, NYRB (Nov. 8, 1990).

Richard Rohr's experiential knowledge of the Holy came one summer evening at age ten. While visiting his cousin's farm in western Kansas, he lay on a little patch of velvety grass hidden behind some chokeberry bushes. He was there alone, just looking up at the stars, when he felt the world open up. "It doesn't sound very original at all," he said and laughed, "but I knew the world was good, that I was good, and that I somehow belonged to that good world. It was what the Buddhists would call waking up, overcoming your separateness." He had no words for it as a ten-year-old boy, but he credits the experience with giving him the psychic self-confidence that would later carry him through thirteen years of formation, the training in theology and philosophy required to become a Franciscan priest.

  -- Fred Bahnson, The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere, Harpers (Jan. 2021), p. 65.

Well, a few years ago, I started meditating. It wasn’t a huge part of my life. It was just interesting to watch how my brain worked. But I didn’t feel particularly changed. And then I had an experience on a trip to Helsinki, in Finland. I was meditating on the plane. Then when I landed, I went for a long walk and sat by a lake and meditated. I’m sure the jet lag was a part of this, but I ended up having a full-on mystical experience. The only way to describe it is to say that I suddenly understood that everything was connected. I felt it in a deep and profound way. This changed everything. The next day, I had to give a lecture about my work. I stayed up all night rethinking everything about what I do.
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Photography, for me, has always been about separation and this feeling of social distance that I have. But if I know that everything is actually connected, even if I can’t experience it all the time, aren’t I just promoting or reinforcing distance with my work? So not long after this, I stopped photographing people. I stopped traveling and just stayed at home. I was completely content to give up the path I had been on for all those years. I was just so happy sitting around looking at the light. A year went by of doing this.

 -- Alex Soth, interview in New York Times Style Magazine, March 3, 2019 

I felt immersed in this incredibly detailed imagery that looked like Islamic architecture, with Arabic script, about which I knew nothing. And then I somehow became these exquisitely intricate patterns, losing my usual identity. And all I can say is that the eternal brilliance of mystical consciousness manifested itself. My awareness was flooded with love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or imagined to be possible. 'Awe,' 'glory,' and 'gratitude' were the only words that remained relevant...I have never doubted the validity of these experiences [on psilocybin]. This was the realm of mystical consciousness that Shankara was talking about, that Plotinus was writing about, that Saint John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart were writing about. It's also what Abraham Maslow was talking about with his 'peak experiences,' though Abe could get there without the drugs...You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It's not something we generate; it's something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.

  -- Bill Richards, quoted in Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, p. 53-55.

I was lying on my back underneath a ficus tree. I knew it was going to be a strong experience. And the point came where the little I still was just started slipping away. I lost all awareness of being on the floor in an apartment in Baltimore; I couldn't tell if my eyes were opened or closed. What opened up before me was, for lack of a better word, a space, but not our ordinary concept of space, just the pure awareness of a realm without from and void of content. And into that realm came a celestial entity, which was the emergence of the physical world. It was like the big bang, but without the boom or the blinding light. It was the birth of the physical universe. In one sense it was dramatic--maybe the most important thing that ever occurred in the history of the world--yet it just sort of happened...To the extent I regard the experience as veridical--and about that I'm still not sure--it tells me that consciousness is primary to the physical universe. In fact, it precedes it."

  -- Bob Jesse, quoted in Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, p. 40-41.

I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn’t need to be cooked at all). . . . For the longest time I couldn’t even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch, a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing. Finally, when I had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal, I went and sat in a patch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bite of it, with my fingers, while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian. Happiness inhabited my every molecule.

  -- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love​

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     I felt shattered and profoundly confused, but simultaneously filled with joy, love and an overwhelming sense of peace. It was like somebody had clicked their fingers and everything had just slotted into place: all the pieces of the puzzle of my life, before so messy, complicated and overwhelming, were now so obvious, so simple, so fluid, and so beautiful!
     And I knew for the first time exactly who I was, why I am here and what I was supposed to do from that point forward.

  -- Via Olivia Wood, Becoming Spiritual: A Story of Kundalini Awakening

    I made the bed into a sofa again, had a cup of tea with a generous helping of sugar as I didn't feel like any breakfast, sat looking out the window, at the shiny telephone booth, sparkling in the sunshine, the sunless grass in the park behind, the trees at the back, and then the mountain that rose steeply, with the row of brick houses above, also in shadow, then got up and put on a record, flicked through a few issues of Vinduet, all to pass the time until it was nine and I could leave. Lessons didn't start until eleven, but I had planned to walk around town first, perhaps find a cafe and read a little.
    A chimney sweep came down the street with his long brush wound into a ring over one shoulder. A cat strolled across the grass. An ambulance drove down the road along the mountainside, behind the brick houses, visible between them as it passed, it moved slowly, no siren blaring, no lights flashing.
    Right there, at that precise moment, I felt as if I would be able to meet whatever challenges came my way, as if there were no limits to what I could do. This wasn't about writing, this was something else, a boundlessness, as if I could get up and go now, this very minute, and then just walk and walk to the end of the earth.
    This feeling lasted for thirty seconds perhaps. then it was gone, and even though I tried to summon it back, it refused to return, a bit like a dream that goes, slips from your grasp as you struggle to recall it after waking.

  --  Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Five, p. 58.

I was filled with an absolutely fantastic feeling, a kind of light burnt within me, not hot and consuming but cold and clear and shining. At night I took a cup of coffee with me and sat down on the bench outside the hospital to smoke, the streets around me were quiet, and I could hardly sit still, so great was my happiness. Everything was possible, everything made sense. At two places in the novel I soared higher than I had thought possible, and those two places alone, which I could not believe I had written, and no one else has noticed or said anything about, made the preceding five years of unsuccessful, failed writing worth all the effort. They are two of the best moments in my life. By which I mean my whole life. The happiness that filled me and the feeling of invincibility they gave me I have searched for ever since, in vain.

  --  Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Two, p. 72

"Now comes my sales pitch."

"This I'd like to hear," Haida said.

"At the point when you agree to take on death, you gain an extraordinary capacity. A special power, you could call it. Perceiving the colors that people emit is merely one function of that power, but at the root of it all is an ability to expand your consciousness. You're able to push open what Aldous Huxley calls 'the doors of perception.' Your perception becomes pure and unadulterated. Everything around you becomes clear, like the fog lifting. You have an omniscient view of the world and see things you've never seen before."

"Is your performance the other day a result of that ability?"

Midorikawa gave a short shake of his head. "No, that was just what I've always been capable of. I've played like that for years. Perception is complete in and of itself; it doesn't reveal itself in an outward, concrete manifestation. There are no tangible benefits to it, either. It's not easy to explain in words. You have to experience it to understand. One thing I can say, though, is that once you see that true sight with your own eyes, the world you've lived in up till now will look flat and insipid. There's no logic or illogic in that scene. No good or evil. Everything is merged into one. And you are one part of that merging. You leave the boundary of your physical body behind to become a metaphysical being. You become intuition. It's at once a wonderful sensation and a hopeless one, because, almost at the last minute, you realize how shallow and superficial your life has been. And you shudder at the fact that up to that point you've been able to stand such a life."
"And you think it's worth experience this sensation, even if it means taking on death? And you only have it for a little while?"

Midorikawa nodded. "Absolutely. It's that valuable. I guarantee it."

  - Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, p. 97-98

Peak experiences are transient moments of self-actualization.

  - Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, p. 48

The simplest form of awakening to God is...a new, intense sense of self, accompanied with a desire...with the feeling of being a destiny. This condition...cannot be induced. It simply happens. But from time immemorial, in different cultures and religious climates, people have used a method for quieting or simplifying consciousness so that a person may be better disposed for the moment of awakening.

  - Sebastian Moore, source unknown