From: litewave99@gmail.com   
      
   A Rationalist's Mystical Moment   
      
   "But something happened when I was 17 that shook my safely rationalist   
   worldview and left me with a lifelong puzzle. Years later, I learned that this   
   sort of event is usually called a mystical experience, and I can see in   
   retrospect that the    
   circumstances had been propitious: Thanks to a severely underfunded and poorly   
   planned skiing trip, I was sleep-deprived and probably hypoglycemic that   
   morning in 1959 when I stepped out alone, walked into the streets of Lone   
   Pine, Calif., and saw the    
   world — the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings — suddenly   
   flame into life.   
      
   There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just   
   this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it.   
   This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by   
   the Eastern mystics. It    
   was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through   
   all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly   
   beautiful to let go of.  It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a   
   gorgeous tapestry,    
   you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest   
   of the blaze. I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered."   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/opinion/sunday/a-rationalists   
   mystical-moment.html   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)