Mystical Experiencer: Male early twenties
Current location: U.S.A.
Age at time of experience: 16
Like many, I will say that words do it no justice, and never will there be words to describe it. Immediately I felt timeless, a sense of union with the universe (no sense of "Self" or "Other" to contrast each other).
At the time I was a misanthrope, under extreme self-hatred and general nihilistic discontent with the world and everybody within it. I was genuinely bitter to the core. My general desire was to become immortal. I knew there probably no way to do this.
I followed a train of thought that took my mind to where I thought, “even if I was immortal, eventually the universe would end one way or another, and me with it”, and at that exact moment I accepted my eventual death. It made me feel then, a complete calmness, and timelessness, and union with the whole universe. At that point, I completely changed.
My personality underwent a complete transformation in about 30 minutes, and my entire mind and body became a sort of large erogenous zone from which love for everything in the universe poured. I felt a genuine deep love for the world, I had no ill will or bitterness remaining in me, and I felt genuine compassion for the whole world. It made me giggle. It made me laugh, and I laughed myself silly, on and off for almost an hour, and then I was left with the giggles for a full year.
For almost exactly a full year, from the January 7th when it happened to January 7th the following year, I was in complete ecstasy. I was incapable of being irritable. There was nothing anybody could do to make me angry. All my melancholy washed away, I was unable to be angered.
People wondered if I had started doing drugs or something, and I kept being questioned at school about my sudden shift in behavior. I was not religious at the time, nor interested in any religions. But as I had this experience, I immediately KNEW “This is enlightenment”, and I began delving deep into Buddhist scriptures.
As I mentioned before, my ecstasy lasted one year exactly, then faded. I thought I had lost it. But I read the Lotus Sutra, where Buddha says that the road to Buddhahood is very long, and halfway along the journey he conjures a phantom city of Nirvana for practitioners to rest in before continuing the journey. That was what I felt that year was like.
I always felt like in a way, the world attained everything for you, and that there was nothing that needed to be done. I felt then like that year was a way for me to get acquainted with everything about the final state and goal to be like, and get to. And now I have to get back there on my own merit.
I felt like I was shown the end goal for free, and then put back where I was and had to work my way to it to earn it. It completely changed me and changed my world, identity, and sense of self, what it means to be, and my conceptions of limitations on anything and everything, forever.