A feeling of being one and the same with everything.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in late sixties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  19

I had a series of episodes as a young child, two that I still remember distinctly, maybe perhaps pre-school through third or fourth grade; I would be lying in the summer grass, daydreaming, and would be suddenly "pulled out of myself". Not a classic out-of-body experience looking down on myself. Rather a feeling of being one and the same with everything. No difference between myself, the grass, the trees, the clouds and the sky, no sense of "I" or "self", accompanied by an ecstatic feeling of joy. The episodes lasted only a couple or a few seconds, and then I would be pulled back in and be me again.

Then I stopped having the episodes, until at age nineteen or twenty, I was on my ship in the navy on the weather deck looking out at the night sky over the Pacific Ocean. We were running "darken ship" which meant that all our exterior and running lights were off. The sky was full of the stars and the Milky Way. There were no other ships on the horizon, so there was no ambient light to spoil the show. Most brilliant night sky I have ever seen. I had just finished a long philosophical bull session with a couple of shipmates and I suddenly had the "everything is one" experience just as when I was a child. That was the last time.

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