The First Mystical Experience

It is well past three in the morning, and it is a very beautiful, rain-washed morning, leaving a reflective patina on the leaves, andsweet negative ions in the air.

You write that you would like to hear about the personal mystical experience. It is quite beyond all words, but here goes an attempt at appproximation:

It started beside the ocean. There was something about the infinity of sea and sky that early morn that seemed to magnify the ambience that made the experience possible, perhaps inevitable. Suddenly, the whole world seemed to drop away and vaporize into what can be called only a "pool of undifferentiated Mind." This mind became huge, mushrooming into a great, enormous Mind, and dropped the body-image. This Mind was bright, blissful, and so utterly detached. None of the human problems even mattered. They were all the size of a grain of sand seen from a million miles away. The whole planet was sacred, and beautiful with a luminous glory, glowing with an ultrarapturous splendor that has never been seen since. The personal mind, compared with this massive, immense Mind was like a grain of sand compared with the whole earth. The only desire was to be absorbed by this Mind, and It, joyfully, wanted to absorb the personal mind! This was all suffused and permeated with a sense of ecstasy that was not caused by anything, but was intrinsic somehow to Mind Itself. Immutability was passionately wanted; this moment must never change into the next. If only this moment, this bliss, could last forever. The experience took a million years in five minutes. The personal self disappeared into a wave of what can be called only Love. The whole thing lasted only about twenty minutes. It occurred at age twenty-two.