SPIRITUAL TRAVEL.ORG Travel in the Spiritual Worlds

A number of years ago, I was doing spiritual travel while meditating, and I entered a state of extreme knowledge and bliss. The best I can describe the experience is that I became a node of energy in a vast electrical sea of incandescent blue lightning. It was as if my consciousness were a central point where countless bolts of lightning converged superimposing their energy on the single area of space that I occupied. In the midst of these luminous electrical arcs, my consciousness stood motionless and serene, unchanging and continuously aware. The state was beyond thought, beyond imagination, beyond ecstasy, and perhaps beyond heaven. It was a static kind of knowing coupled with the dynamic movement of the surrounding powerful energy field. But the experience was not an individual's experience as we normally understand the term. I was seemingly in communion with a massive conscious entity whose primary attribute was pure awareness.

My attempt to make out some kind of imagery beyond the lightning itself showed only an occasional glimpse of a triangle. This triangle was akin to the pyramid on a one-dollar bill, which represents a human eye emanating spiritual light.

This state of consciousness seemed to put me in touch with the electromagnetic forces of the cosmos. I understood intuitively their interpenetration of the many layers of reality. I was the electricity of the nervous system in the human body, and the flash of charged particles from a sunspot pouring into the solar system. I perceived this energy as a kind of connective tissue permeating and unifying all structures, both mental and physical.

The state contained a vast knowingness, an awareness of certain relatedness, a wisdom that arises from awareness not broken up by thought or image, not sliced and demarcated by time, a monumental stillness surrounded by the continuous movement and surging of the energies. My consciousness seemed to interpenetrate all form and thereby have unrestricted awareness of its structures, not in analytic terms, but as Gnosis. Gnosis is the Greek term meaning knowledge that comes through identification with the object known. Such knowledge is inscrutable and can only be alluded to by analogy.

One analogy that comes to mind is of a chemist who studies the frozen water molecule and it crystalline variations. Such a scientist knows the geometrical shape of the molecular bonds, and understands the various angles of the water molecule's lattice structure.

After much investigation, such a scientist might come to spontaneously see how the variations of structure can generate molecule-sized crystalline shapes. These, in turn, each combine to create groups of molecules and eventually large crystals. Such a person might come to intuitively understand the minor variations of millions upon millions of snowflakes as they are created and destroyed in a snowstorm, each one unique, but each one based on a fundamental set of basic angular bonds created from the simple water molecule.

Similarly, to enter into the energy of the "ground of being" is to sense a knowledge of all the forms that the energy permeates, and all the forms to which it gives birth.

In the end, such a state is mysterious, unimaginable, indescribable, and one that cannot be remembered but one that creates mental and emotional echoes that cannot be forgotten. The experiencer feels the need to express it in some form - in poetry, or prose, or artwork. But there is also the realization that the attempt will fail. Such failure is like an artist who tries to create fine line drawings with a broad brush designed to paint houses. The outlines may be there but finished work falls far below the goal.