I should have given more context to my OP. I "discovered" this sub forum days ago and have read with interest several threads dealing with religion, spirituality and mysticism. Back in the mid-2000s I was an atheist; my agnosticism drifted over the line to a stronger unbelief in God. This was after reading many articles, books, etc. that presented a materialist explanation for the world. However I found this outlook to be rather bleak. At some point in the next couple of years I got the conviction that maybe I was wrong, that maybe there is more to existence than matter. So I seek and seek, trying to find something. So my question was along those lines. I know that we all die, but I am assuming that our existence goes beyond the barriers of physical life; I am looking for feedback from those on a path of some sort.
Consider the account of Maurice Bucke, who wrote a book called Cosmic Consciousness:
It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored
cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next, he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.
I guess what I am asking is could it be that at the bottom of it all there is eternal safety and bliss? For all of us? Could existence, despite what we see, be this good?
