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 Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research |October 2011 | Vol. 2 | Issue 7 | pp. 944-948 Nunn, C., Background Motivations for My Views on Consciousness

I was drug and alcohol free, sitting in my living room one evening after the children had gone to bed. I wasn’t drowsy. The television was turned on, but I wasn’t really paying attention to it. The only unusual thing about my mental state was that I was feeling deeply ashamed of myself for not having done something that I ought to have done.

Quite suddenly and unexpectedly, a presence was there with me, invisible for it seemed to be located behind me, but enormous and benign. Words formed in my mind (I didn’t hear them spoken) with emotional overtones like those of a schoolmaster encouraging a recalcitrant student – “Why don’t you look at it the other way, you idiot?”

At once, the room disappeared and I found myself before an enormous mountain, green and swathed with silver mists, separated from me by a fathomless black gulf. I became aware of innumerable other entities on ‘my’ side of the gulf, spreading upwards in a golden arc, also viewing the mountain and praising it. More soundless cognitions came.

“That’s the mountain of God; the gulf of infinity; the arc of created being”.

Awestruck, I started to say the words of the Lord’s Prayer and they got taken up, along with my own essence it seemed, into the ‘arc of created being’ where they formed a sort of chant that I heard as ‘ringing throughout eternity’. Then I was back in my living room, still sitting in my chair, with no idea of how much time had passed though it can’t have been more than a few minutes.