My own experience came to a head, as it were, looking into the massive, glistening eyes of Vishnu. I saw my own reflection in those eyes and knew he saw the same.
Good to see this thread resurrected here, as I missed this post of yours first time around!
Time for us to discuss this interesting area between us again, with some new perspectives to offer.
What you describe here is familiar to me in more recent meditation experiences. Vouthon is fond of Meister Eckhart, as am I, and it is interesting to no end for me how that as new light comes through meditation to me, I randomly pick up a book of collected sermons of Meister Eckhart to read what I haven't previously, only to see leaping off the pages exactly that experience/realization I just had within the last several days. Words from the 14th century transcending time into that timeless present. Here's what I read that I had just come to, almost verbatim in my own experience, which your words above reflect as well:
"The hearing of God's Word requires complete self-surrender. He who hears and that which is heard are identical constituents of the eternal Word. What the eternal Father teaches is his own Being, Nature, and Godhead - which he is always revealing through his only begotten Son. He teaches that we are to be identical with him.
To deny one's self is to be the only begotten Son of God and one who does so has for himself all the properties of that Son. All God's acts are performed and his teachings conveyed through the Son. And when this is accomplished in God's sight, he is so fond of us and so fervent that he acts as if his divine Being might be shattered and he himself annihilated if the whole foundations of his Godhead were not revealed to us, together with his nature and being. God makes haste to do this, so that it may be ours as it is his. It is here that God finds joy and rapture in fulfillment and the person who is thus within God's knowing and love becomes just what God himself is."
The purpose of God is for us to know God and to become the Son of God. There is this duality which holds this realization to the mind, which then ultimately dissolves into a Unity Consciousness whereas Meister Eckhart elsewhere says so beautifully, "
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." That is being the Son of God, realizing ourselves as indistinguishable from God. We are God. At which point, God becomes us, and to us there is no God. Does God know a God other than Himself? 'Besides me, there is no God', says God.
There I hovered for almost 8 hours and eventually faded into unconsciousness, but was awakened by my legs screaming. I had been locked in the Lotus position the whole time.
You should be careful about this. That can lead to blood clots in the legs which could later dislodge and get trapped in the heart. My nephew had this very thing happen to him recently that was caused by cramping his legs years early in a duck-blind so badly that he couldn't walk for over 10 minutes until sensation came back to them. Blood thinner were given to help those dissolve. Years later, they had become life threatening. Just saying, be careful about that.
In the East, people say that We are all potentially divine. I have taken liberties with that and say, We are all essentially divine - even with all our warts...
I agree with this. In my first experience of this radiant energy that is in all things, and through all things, and from all things, the people I saw glowed with this Light as in everything around them; the air, the sky, the grass, and all the world within. But I could see in their eyes an unawareness of this which they were and which surrounded them. Their minds, the world of their minds they lived within in each of their own heads blinded them to this, and to themselves. Whereas to me, it was radiantly clear, obvious.
We are, they were, all divine. Everything is, and we as sentient humans have the capacity to know that in ourselves in fuller self-realization as I-I, as the eternal Son of God, as living human incarnations of that which we call God. But we deny it to ourselves through the blindness created by fear and guilt and self-loathings. We imprison ourselves through death-anxiety, that dissolution of the self we cling to as we fear release into being God.
