In response to the discussion of mergence, Raj posted the following description of the enlightenment experience of Edwin Carl Smith to the Golden Gaia forum. Many people may be having experiences like these in the times ahead.
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!