The body, the earth, the stars, the galaxies melted into a big unity—and I was a part of this unity. Unlimited and timeless my consciousness hovered in a pulsating eternity. —Frédéric Lionel, French philosopher11 One becomes wholly Mind, the One Mind of God, in which exists all-knowledge, all-power, and all-presence. —Walter Russell, sculptor, musician, author, philosopher, and mystic12 That light is the very essence, the heart and soul, the all- consuming consummation of ecstatic ecstasy. It is a million suns of compressed love dissolving everything unto itself, annihilating thought and cell, vaporizing humanness and history, into the one great brilliance of all that is and all that ever was and all that ever will be. You know it’s God. No one has to tell you. You know. —P.M.H. Atwater, near-death experiencer13 The experience is often and movingly described by the saints and sages of all religions. The following are but a few among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of descriptions: Oh, wonder of wonders, when I think of the union the soul has with God! He makes the enraptured soul to flee out of herself, for she is no more satisfied with anything that can be named. The spring of Divine Love flows out of the soul and draws her out of herself into the unnamed Being, into her first source, which is God alone. —Meister Eckhart, German theologian, philosopher, and mystic14 This new experience bestows new enlightenment which places the experiencer on a new plane of existence. There is an indescribable feeling of elation and indescribable joy and Bliss. He experiences a sense of universality, a Consciousness of Eternal Life. It is not a mere conviction. He actually feels it. —Swami Sivananda15 In the orison [spiritual communion] of union, the soul is fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself. —St. Teresa of Avila16 To the enlightened man whose consciousness embraces the universe, to him the universe becomes his “body,” while the physical body becomes a manifestation of the Universal Mind, his inner vision an expression of the highest reality, and his speech an expression of eternal truth. —Anagarika Govinda, German-born Tibetan Lama17 Whilst the mind is separated from itself, and whilst it is borne away into the secret place of the divine mystery and is surrounded on all sides by the fire of divine love, it is inwardly penetrated and inflamed by this fire, and utterly puts off itself and puts on a divine love: and being conformed to that Beauty which it has beheld, it passes utterly into that other glory. —Richard of St. Victor18 The higher our mind is raised to the contemplation of spiritual things the more it is abstracted from sensible things. But the final term to which contemplation can possibly arrive is the divine substance. Therefore the mind that sees the divine substance must be totally divorced from the bodily senses, either by death or by some rapture. —St. Thomas Aquinas19 Soul and mind instantly lost their physical bondage, and streamed out like a fluid piercing light from my every pore. The flesh was as though dead, yet in my intense awareness I knew that never before had I been fully alive. —Paramhansa Yogananda, yoga master20

With expanded perception comes freedom from the limitations of the body. The experience bestows a profound sense of joyous well-being, “beyond imagination of expectancy,” and undeniably clear awareness of one’s indissoluble unity with the infinite Consciousness from which all creation springs. Some of the names given to this experience are “cosmic consciousness,” “samadhi,” “oneness,” “nirvana,” “Christ consciousness,” “enlightenment,” “self-realization,” “divine ecstasy,” “rapture,” and “union.” This is the experience of God, or, just as meaningfully, the experience of our Self or soul. Because we are all Divine in our essence, all inextricably one with God, the experience is not reserved only for cloistered nuns or yogis in remote Himalayan caves. Anyone, anywhere, who achieves deep stillness and complete inner absorption, regardless of how, shares the same universal experience.
Joseph Selbie
The Physics of God

We are gods with amnesia. Near-death experiencer Jan Price says, “Born of God, we are spirit, and cannot be anything else. All is mind—one mind. We are that mind asleep—yet awakening, and God is that mind eternally aware.”8 Jesus said, “Lest ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe” (John 4:48). Miracles, though fascinating and inspiring, are only performed by saints and sages to awaken belief. The miracles of the saints and sages are strong prods to our sleeping memories of our divine nature. Their purpose is not to entice us to want to perform miracles ourselves, but to awaken us to our divine potential, to shake us out of our amnesia-induced conviction that we are merely physical bodies and that this physically manifesting cosmic movie is the only reality. Even when we realize we have amnesia, however, even when we believe in the power of our own thought, we will not be immediately able to use its power consciously. Not until we have mastered the exacting mental discipline practiced by the saints and sages will we, like these great ones, be able consciously to use our thoughts to change the hidden, nonlocal energy template and thus the physical world. Further, our existing convictions run deep into our nonlocal subconscious. Merely thinking with the conscious mind that one has blue eyes instead of brown is not going to overcome the much more powerful conviction—lying deep, and all but inaccessible, in the nonlocal subconscious mind—that one has brown eyes. We hold our convictions so deeply that even when they make us miserable we cannot easily change them. Being told that a problem is all in the mind is no help at all—as a wise man said, “That’s jolly well the worst place for it to be.” Our deeply held thoughts are like girders that hold together the structure of our being. And like steel girders, our thought girders are immensely strong. The exacting discipline undergone by the saints and sages to achieve such profound mental control begins with direct experience of one’s subtle, nonmaterial, divine nature. Intellectual belief in our higher potential, our divine nature, is a starting point, but belief is not enough to change deeply held convictions that the physical world is fixed, immutable, and separate from ourselves. Direct inner experience attained through practicing the disciplines of the science of religion, on the other hand, will transmute those deeply held convictions of materiality by enabling us directly to experience the subtler, interconnected, nonmaterial reality of energy and thought.
Joseph Selbie
The Physics of God

Almost all of us have no conscious awareness of our ability to make the cosmic movie play in three-dimensions, or to shape our bodies in accordance with our deeply held thoughts. A rare few, however, are consciously aware of these abilities and have learned how to use them deliberately. The rare few are the saints and sages, and they assure us that we, too, can do the same.
Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? —John 10:34
Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these. —John 14:12
Since everything is made out of mind, it can be controlled by mind. As you develop more and more mental strength, ultimately you will be able to do anything. —Paramhansa Yogananda, yoga master
Joseph Selbie
The Physics of God