For many more experiences, go here – https://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/fdl/e1.html#e38 – and read the sections that follow. The experiences described get deeper and deeper in ascending order.
Enlightenment as Experienced by Edwin Carl Smith
For me, it was like a great light suddenly bursting in on my mind, my awareness, illuminating all the dark recesses. It is beyond words or concepts, yet I could think and conceptualize.
I had a euphoric feeling of knowing everything, while also knowing I knew nothing. There was a delicious sense of power. …
The feeling that I knew everything is more accurately described as the potential to know everything. …
I cannot adequately convey the sense of non-obstruction here.
Before, pursuing knowledge, understanding the relationships between facts, had always required great effort. It was like walking through knee-deep mud. I could think, learn, and know, but it was difficult.
Now, I was like a skater on ice. There was a tremendous feeling of release from the effort I had known before. It was as if knowledge was now a network of open passages. I could walk through these passages, make connections without effort, because I was guided by a higher knowledge.
It was not like plodding through unexplored territory, but more like walking through places I already knew.
I could never make a bad connection since everything related to everything else. It was all one.
No specific idea came to mind. Yet I knew I had gained the ability to perceive Truth. I did not need to know anything because I could See everything. I was emptied of knowledge and memory and filled with awareness.
I thought of the Bible: I could think of no specific passage at the moment, but I knew I could read a passage and know exactly what it meant in a way I could not have known before. What was obscure before was now obvious. I was free, powerful, and intoxicated.
What I understood was beyond reason or logic. It can be reported in a logical, reasonable fashion, but Truth has its own reason and logic unfamiliar to a linear mind. Connections in Truth appear as leaps of illogic to others.
The two-dimensional image of the infinite dark surface hardly conveys the multidimensional nature of the experience.
I was intensely aware of dimensions that even now defy description or conception.
I began noticing small but definite changes: I knew things I did not know before. From within my own depths came wisdom that taught me as it arose.
In a class, or a lecture I was giving, I would pass on information that was startlingly new to me, yet deeply true and helpful to others. I realized a basic alteration in my mind, my intelligence, my mode of thinking, my access to wisdom, had occurred, and was continuing. The experience was not a singular event, but a living, on-going process that was living me, changing me.
This experience has matured into a living reality, an ongoing experience of the Transcendental. I am never without it. I am never outside this living Presence. I may fluctuate in my awareness of it, but it is always there. I cannot lose it. For a while, that was a fundamental concern. I worried that if I did anything too much, if I was not very cautious, this fragile and wonderful gift might be destroyed. Over time I realized its indestructible nature: I could not lose it. It was me!