“Mystical Experience”
Excerpt from “Remembering Eternity”: “He felt that he had been dissolved as a discrete entity but had, in an incomparably advantageous exchange, been reconstituted as the vital center of everything. Ego had nothing to do with this conception; on the contrary, the change allowed Skylar to see, in a profound way, that not only were all people and things in the universe interconnected, but that they all depended on one another. By virtue of being the terminal through which the traffic of the various macro- and microscopic energies got routed, Skylar sensed that the ocean constituted his bodily liquid; the stars, his all-seeing eyes; and the sand, the hairs on his gigantic body. No differentiation separated “him” and “it”; he could simply direct his attention to the sea and flow, or to the stars and shine, or to the beach and repose. And the ground state of everything was Love: not silly romantic love in which egos traded caressing strokes; not the mandated love for relatives (that resembled bottles of fine wine labeled to entice but empty once uncorked); not any love involving a lover and a beloved. This Love could best be described as disinterested divine affirmation, the blind but all-comprehending approbation of everything, from the smallest quark to the most immense quasar. This Love was that which made everything else possible. This Love assured the continuance of the mind-bogglingly complex movements that made up the material world; in the same way, this Love had responsibility for the spiritual evolution of all life forms: guaranteeing the constant functioning of the laws of karma and the universal forward march to realization.”