If you see the watery pale yellow sunlight shining behind dark gray clouds, with the pale blue of heaven shining in between some wintery morning, and you see, in that light, the original light of the universe--then, you may say, in still different terms, that sometimes, very occasionally, an artist who weaves a carpet, or who shapes a building, or who paints a tile, manages to make something which has this same light in it, where this same Self is shining out. . . he has made something as close to a picture of God or Self as it can be, and it affects us, like the light of morning does, because it seems to show us directly to the heart of this self, and connects us with it, almost to the point of pain.

  - Christopher Alexander, The Luminous Ground, p. 316

I began to realize that what I come in touch with when I go closer and closer to myself is not just "me." It is something vast, existing outside myself and inside myself, as if it were a contact with the eternal, something everlasting existing before me, in me, and around me. I recognized, too, that my most lucid moments occur when I am swept up in this void, and fully conscious of it, as if it were a blinding light.

  - Christopher Alexander, Nature of Order, Book 4, p. 7

May the long time sun shine upon you,
All love surround you,
And the pure light within you,
Guide your way on.

  - kundalini yoga farewell blessing

I can’t remember if it was Marylee or Eric who wrote to tell me, but I remember being nearly catatonic for at least a week. It was like the bottom fell out. This wasn’t just another difficult thing to overcome, this was the end. This was a death. I literally cried out to God, ‘Are you there? Show me something. Give me a sign.’ I had nothing. I was spent, I was bankrupt. It was the most sincere plea I have ever made in my life. And I got nothing. A couple weeks went by and . . . nothing. No response.

I was lying in my bunk one night listening to the radio on my headphones, and I ran across a classical station. I heard something you rarely ever hear: a harp. There was no slow buildup, no preamble to what happened next. I was just engulfed in this very warm, very comforting blinding light. I don’t know what to call it—an ecstatic experience? a revelation?—because it was indescribable. Any words I use to explain it will fall short. I had this incredible feeling of joy. There was an overwhelming sense of this unlimited compassion aimed right at me. Then I heard my alarm go off and it was over, and I sat up in bed. Outwardly, everything was still the same. But I knew that I had been in the presence of God. 

My life didn’t change right away. Everything didn’t instantly fall into place. I was in prison for another decade, so it wasn’t like God knocked open the doors for me. Becoming a believer was a slow, organic process that I had to grow into. But I was different after that. You can’t buy inner peace, but I had it.

  - Michael Morton, quoted in "The Innocent Man", by Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly, at http://www.texasmonthly.com/2012-12-01/feature2.php

I was awakened by a chirping of a bird outside my window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond.  Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all. That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on earth, as if I had just been born into this world.

For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss. After that, it diminished somewhat in intensity, or perhaps it just seemed to because it became my natural state. I could still function in the world, although I realized that nothing I ever did could possibly add anything to what I already had.

 - Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, p. 4-5, available at http://www.eckharttolle.com/books/now/

This all sounds very abstract, but 20 years ago a friend of mine here in California who teaches high school said that he takes his high school classes every spring to a Catholic monastery for three days. And that even the most jittery, 15-year-old California boy only had to be in silence for a few days and suddenly he sunk into some much deeper, more spacious and actually happier part of himself. After a couple of days there he never wanted to leave.

I went to that same place -- although I'm not a Catholic and not a hermit -- and I did find this thrumming silence all around me. But it wasn't the absence of noise. It was the presence of something else. It was something very invigorating. And I walked straight into my little room and I began writing. And I couldn't stop writing for four-and-a-half hours. Since then, I've been back to that monastery 60-70 times, sometimes for as long as three weeks.
 
  - Pico Iyer, interview, available at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2950

The conversion experience is a particular form of the classic mystic experience. Mystic experience is a phenomenon throughout the human world. According to [William] James, these experiences are described as ineffable, meaning that those who have them feel inadequate to describe the experience; they are more like feelings or sensations rather than logic or knowledge. How do you describe in words the difference between the 9th or the 7th Beethoven symphonies, or exactly what it is like to be in love?

Even though such experiences are like feelings, a second aspect is that they are "noetic," you feel there is a kind of deep knowledge imparted to you, a revelation of significance that lasts beyond the experience. Third, they are transient, lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, but remembered and often carried into life afterwards. Lastly, they are not voluntary. You yourself do not initiate them. There are techniques that various religions use to try to help induce such a state - meditation, fixed attention, prayer, dancing, the ingestion of certain substances - such actions are ways to make us more receptive to such experiences, but cannot cause them. I have most frequently heard of religious experiences occurring in a natural setting where a person seems almost to leave the body and merge with the natural world. They have a sense of being a tiny but important piece in a great, mystical, whole. I have also known a number of people who have, in an ordinary setting, felt suddenly transformed and embraced by love, and hearing the reassurance of a voice within that was, however, not their own voice. Most mystical experiences have a sense of a temporary loss of the walls that divide us, a profound sense of connection to the Holy.

 - Rev. Kate Rohde, Roots and Sources: The Mystic Path, available at http://issuu.com/firstunitarian/docs/roots_and_sources_-_sept_20_2009?mode=window&pageNumber=1

There are stages along the mystic way--stages which have been interpreted differently by various writers, but which fall into several distinct levels of personal growth. The intuitional step is first. This can best be described as an inner prompting, perhaps a sudden moment of insight, when the individual sense that there is more to life than his ordinary living currently reveals. This awakening can come either in a core-religious experience (also called a conversion experience, a moment of illumination, or a peak-experience during which the individual's mind becomes silent, still or "vanishes") or as an ongoing, increasing "knowing" that the Absolute reality is the one (and only) true and worthwhile life.

  - Marsha Sinetar, Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics, p. 79-80.

People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning of life. I think that what we are really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane have a resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

  - Joseph Campbell

Monastic life and the organization which encouraged such a life precedes Christianity. In Hinduism, for example, isolated caves, mountain tops and ashrams have been home for religious men, either singly or in groups. Here they practice their arduous yogic and meditative prayers so as to experience samahdi: that state of superconscious awareness of identity with God. A Zen Buddhist enters a monastery for the same reason: to see and experience his highest reality, the truth of his own being, within the structure of the monastery. In early Judaism, the monks of Qumran lied in devoted consciousness of Old Testament prophecy. Christianity (specifically--but not exclusively--Catholicism) has the same, centuries-old tradition: the monk's aim is to live out his faith according to the sample and Gospel of Christ, to join in mysterious union with him.

  - Marsha Sinetar, Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics, p 26.

When I was 42 years and 7 months old, the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burning but warming...and suddenly I understood of the meaning of expositions of the books...

  - Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) (scientist, writer, and composer, who suffered from migraines and saw a glow and colors around people)

I found myself on a tiny path that seemed to lead away from the temple, up into a hillside. I followed this path up steps cut in the hillside, partly stone, set into the grass. The path went on and on, a shallow staircase, up into the hill, between two hedges. It was getting narrower and narrower all the time. Toward the top, it got trapped between two low rambling hedges.

Suddenly it ended. To my surprise, I could not go further. The path just stopped. The hedges closed. There was a small place at the top of the stair. I turned around and sat down. There was nowhere to sit, except on the top step, and that is where I sat, looking down at the temple precinct, watching it, tired, happy to sit there, quiet, only the wind now instead of the sounds of temple business. As I sat there, a blue dragonfly came and landed on the step beside me. It stayed. And as it stayed I was filled with the most extraordinary sensation. I was suddenly certain that the people who had built that place had done all this deliberately. I felt certain -- no matter how peculiar or unlikely it sounds today, as I am telling it again -- that they had made that place, knowing that the blue dragonfly would come and sit by me. However it sounds now, at the time when it happened, while I sat down on that stair, there was no doubt in my mind at all that there was a level of skill in the people who had made this place that I had never experienced before. I remember shivering as I became aware of my own ignorance. I felt the existence of a level of skill and knowledge beyond anything I had ever come across before.

I sat there for two or three hours -- and then stayed in the temple all day long, filled, for the whole day, by my awe in the face of what these people had known, and by the beauty of the place. Most of all I was simply shocked by the certainty that the people who made this place had done it with a level of skill far beyond anything I had ever experienced--and that the grasses, the steps, the wind, the dragonfly, were all deliberately placed by their hands.

To this day, I have never again had such a shaft strike me. I have not seen again the possibility of such perfect human knowledge of nature...The sensation of nature waking up, and human beings helping to make it wake, was luminous, like a hum. I feel a heavy longing, remembering it, it was so vivid, so quiet, so perfect. Yet it changed my life to see it, and to walk through it.

  - Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life, p. 436-37

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

春有百花秋有月
夏有凉风冬有雪
若无闲事在心头
自是人间好时节

Wu Men

A Zen Master was asked, “What did you use to do before you became enlightened?”

He said, “I used to chop wood and carry water from the well for my Master’s house.”

The inquirer asked, “And now that you have become enlightened, what do you do?”

He said, “I chop wood and carry water.”

The inquirer was obviously puzzled. “Then what is the difference? You used to chop wood and carry water, you still chop wood and still carry water — then what is the difference?”

The Master laughed. He said, “The difference is infinite! Before I simply used to chop wood not knowing the beauties that surrounded me. Now chopping wood is not the same because I am not the same. My eyes are not the same, my heart beats in a different rhythm — my heart beats with the heart of the whole. There is a synchronicity, there is harmony.
Carrying water from the well is the same from the outside, but my interior has become totally different. I am a new man, I am born again! Now I can see in depth, I can see into the very core of things, and each pebble has become a diamond, and each song of a bird is nothing but a call from God, and whenever a flower blooms, God blooms for me. Looking into people’s eyes I am looking into God’s eyes. Yes, on the surface I am carrying on the same activity, but because I am not the same the world is not the same.”

  - Marsha Sinetar, Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow, available at http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780440501602-11

A frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.

 - William Burroughs explaining the title of his book.

Twice. First time 1971 coasting down on a fully packed touring bicycle into Ten Sleep Canyon in the Big Horn Mountain range in Wyoming at sunset. Kind of out of body experience where I discovered death does not exist (as a terminal state). Second time, 1982 in a university library where I experienced an identity Gestalt type experience--the merging of my identity with a Whitehead type process reality divinity.

   - User Bwinwnbwi, http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080811075848AAHx87o

Yes, about 17 years ago I experienced a moment which I can only describe as a realization of God's existence visible in everything around me. Trees, the sky, air everything seemed like proof of God's existence and I could feel myself smiling and then for what seemed like an instant or the shortest portion of time I felt that I knew everything there was to know. I had all knowledge but in the same instant it was all gone and only the memory of the knowing that I had known everything remained. I don't know how else to describe it. BTW, I never did drugs.

   - User Lightscribe, http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080811075848AAHx87o